Che Jim: In 1897, some 20,000 people paid a quarter each to gawk at six living breathing Inuit who had just arrived in New York Harbor. They had been brought from Greenland by explorer Robert E. Peary. 

Anthropologist Franz Boas had suggested inviting a single Inuit back to New York for the winter to collect information "of the greatest scientific importance."

For reasons known only to Peary, he brought back six, plus barrels full of bones stolen from Inuit graves.

Among the living was a young boy named Minik, whose life along with others highlights the fraught relationship between native peoples and western anthropologists. 

Hi, I'm Che Jim, and welcome to Crash Course: Native American History. 

[Theme music]

Anthropology is the study of what it means to be human, which involves a lot. Everything from how people use language, to what they eat, to their genetics. 

Archaeology, a subfield of anthropology, has to do with understanding past humans by studying what they left behind. Old buildings, tools, even human remains. 

Those are pretty impressive goals. Understand humanity, past and present. But anthropology and archaeology grew from twisted colonial roots.

At first, from Europeans trying to understand the indigenous peoples, in the places they taken over, often positioning themselves as objective observers, and the native folks as inhuman specimens. And often, taking native land went hand-in-hand with taking native bodies. 

And I want you to know now, we're about to talk about some dark and heavy history.

It's difficult to note the exact numbers, but between the 1780s and the 1970s, it's estimated that people in the U.S. dug up anywhere from 600,000 to over 1 million native graves.

Even some of America's founding fathers got in on it.

Sometime around 1780, Thomas Jefferson unearthed a native burial mound near his home in Virginia. He was curious about who built it, but not curious enough to ask the native folks he'd seen paying respects. 

Jefferson estimated there might have been a thousand skeletons buried in there. That's great, Tom. 

By the 19th century, sleuthing out native graves in the name of science was big business. The going rate for a skull was estimated to be about $3-5, or about $99-165 in today's money. 

American museums were vying to grow their collections of bones and their reputations as serious places of science.

Many generally believe that by taking artefacts, including human remains. From native communities, they were helping preserve the history of the people who’d soon be gone forever. Early museums had even set up displays of native bodies alongside dinosaur fossils and those of other extinct species. 

[Record scratch]

Hello, not extinct, still here. 

Often, digging native graves wasn’t even about research or furthering the study of humanity. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Americans of all ages were into collecting native artefacts and remains for fun. Country doctors, philanthropic society ladies, and wealthy collectors. Even the Boy Svouts joined in.

I didn’t know that there was a merit badge for grave robbing. 

Some early anthropologists and other scientists wanted to get their hands on native remains to measure skulls, looking to prove bogus claims of white superiority. 

Insecure much?

Czech anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička was among them. He dug up and stole the remains of 800 Caughnawaga people, among others. By the time he died in 1943, he had almost 20,000 skulls in his possession. 

And William McGee, the first president of the American Anthropological Association, wrote in 1901 that Native Americans were, "strikingly close to sub-human species in every aspect." 

He also dropped out of school at 14. So let that be a lesson. Stay in school, kids. 

Even anthropologist Franz Boas, who argued that no culture or group of people is better than another, felt digging up native remains was necessary to uncover what humans had in common. 

In 1888, he wrote in his diary, "It is most unpleasant work to steal bones from a grave but... someone has to do it."

I'd argue, in fact, someone does not have to do it, Franz.

Which brings us back to Minik, because all these biases about Native Americans didn't just affect how anthropologists treated native ancestors, it also affected how they treated living people. 

Minik and the other Inuit were brought to live in the basement of New York's Museum of Natural History, where they were studied and ogled by curious crowds. 

But four of them soon contracted tuberculosis and passed away, including Minik's father, Kisuk. The last remaining adult was returned to the Arctic, leaving only Minik in New York. 

A funeral for Kisuk was held in the museum's garden, but the body on display was a fake. In reality, all the bodies had been dissected and kept at the museum, where Aleš Hrdlička—the terrifying one from earlier— studied and wrote articles about them. 

Minik spent the rest of his life petitioning the museum to return the remains of his father and the other Inuit whose bones had been secretly stolen. He even sought the help of President Theodore Roosevelt. 

But it didn't work. The museum denied him again and again. And when Minik died during the 1918 flu pandemic, his father's remains were still in the museum's collection. 

And what's especially haunting is that Minik's story wasn't an anomaly. The Smithsonian alone still holds 18,500 ancestral remains, many of them collected by Hrdlička.

So for almost 190 years, native people were treated as objects to be displayed and studied. Many anthropologists felt they needed to salvage knowledge of native cultures before colonisation destroyed them altogether. 

And for those of you who don't speak coloniser, salvage roughly means to steal. 

[Door to Che Jim's dressing room opens to reveal Colonial Carl, rifling through his things]

Colonial Carl: Great piece for the museum. Oh, look at this. Oh, how exotic. Yes —

Che Jim: Not today, Carl!

[Colonial Carl runs for it]

Grave robbing. What a legacy. 

But Native communities were already keepers of their own cultures.

And even when anthropologists were collecting stories, not bones, they didn’t always treat this as a partnership with Native people.

Vernon Finley, director of the Kootenai Culture Committee, recalls his grandfather describing how anthropologists rarely interpreted elders' stories correctly or let elders know what they do with those stories. 

Back then, anthropologists loved to work on a "just trust us" basis that they maybe hadn't earned.

And of course, there were all those thousands of ancestors remains. But that started to change in the late 1960s with the arrival of groups like the American Indian Movement, or AIM, a native-led civil rights coalition which expressed widespread feelings of anger at the exploitation of native people. 

Members of AIM staged protests at excavation sites and roadside attractions where ancestral remains were still on display. 

And believe me, back then those were everywhere. This country is so haunted. 

Thanks in part to pressure from indigenous activists like these, the law slowly began to change, starting with the National Historic Preservation Act in 1966, and the Archaeological Resources and Protection Act in 1979.

Both laws helped establish more protections for native archaeological sites, and began to shift the control of those sites back to native peoples. 

Then 1990 came a super significant piece of legislation, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA. 

NAGPRA aimed to help the return of both artefacts and ancestral remains to the rightful tribe upon request. The museums that held those materials had to consult with tribes about them, and the law created a process for federal agencies should handle any remains or materials found in the future. 

Finally, no more rogue scientists on the loose. 

But more than 30 years since NAGPRA was passed, between 300,000 and 600,000 remains are still held in museums across the country.

And in part, that's because this system is far from perfect. 

For one, it only applies to institutions that have accepted federal funding. 

Also, sometimes it's hard to determine exactly which tribe human remains or artefacts came from, which can and has been used as an excuse for holding on to these objects. 

But when it comes to more just, respectful anthropology, NAGPRA isn't the end of the line. 

In the 1970s, a collaboration between archaeologists and the Makah tribe in the Pacific Northwest proved that respectful excavations could be successful.

After a storm exposed an ancient whaling village, the Makah brought in archaeologists, who worked for 11 years to excavate thousands of wooden artefacts, baskets, animal bones, and longhouses. 

By combining the tribe's oral histories of a great mudslide, with the scientists' findings that the artefacts were about 500 years old, they were able to create a more complete picture of the area's history. 

The Makah retained all 55,000 unearthed artefacts as a condition of the dig, which the tribe now curates at the Makah Cultural and Research Centre. 

Which completely unrelated, is super close to where the Twilight movie takes place. #TeamJacob. We Natives got to stick together. 

And today, more and more indigenous people are changing how research gets done, through decolonised archaeology and anthropology, which are described as with, for, and by indigenous people. 

This research values native sovereignty, knowledge, and perspectives, and involves collaborating using tribal members' own interpretations.

And above all, it keeps native peoples in charge of managing their own heritage. 

And if all of this sounds like the opposite of early archaeology and anthropology, that's because it is. 

In fact, when indigenous archaeology first began in the 1990s, some Native Americans saw it as an oxymoron. How could an indigenous person participate in a field that has caused so much harm to their people?

But some saw it as a way to truly control our cultural resources and make it much more difficult for prejudiced ideas about Native Americans to spread  

Linda Tuhiwai Smith, author of a book on how to decolonise research, explained it like this: "When indigenous peoples become the researchers and not merely the researched, the activity of research is transformed."

I'll leave you with this. In 2021, the American Anthropological Association issued an apology for all the harm its done historically. And though it didn't happen in Minik's lifetime, thanks to the tireless work of others like him, his father's body was eventually returned to his ancestral homelands in 1993.

Archaeology and archaeology started as fields that both accidentally and purposefully harmed indigenous peoples even after they were dead. 

And while strides have been made in recent years, largely as a result of dedicated indigenous activists, there's still a long way to go.

But indigenous anthropologists are working to make the field more just, not only for the people of the past, but for the future as well. 

In our next episode, we'll continue our discussion about indigenous science when we talk about ways of knowing the world. And I will see you then. 

Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course: Native American History, which was filmed at our studio in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was made with the help of all these nice people. If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever, you can join our community on Patreon.