Brains of indigenous Filipinos being housed at US museum without consent—report
The brains of 27 Filipinos, including four that were displayed on the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair which turned the Igorot people into a live spectacle, are being housed at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in the United States—without consent from their families.
The Washington Post, in its series of investigative reports that took a year to complete, found that the Natural History Museum—the world's most visited and which has the largest collections of body parts worldwide—"still holds the brains of people from at least 10 foreign countries, including the Philippines, Germany, the Czech Republic, and South Africa."
They're part of a collection of at least 30,700 body parts, including bones, skulls, teeth, and mummies representing unknown people. The collection, mostly amassed by the early 1940s, has long been hidden from view according to the Post.
The brains were removed upon the death of the individuals, including Blacks, indigenous peoples, and other persons of color.
Researchers preyed on people who were hospitalized, poor, or lacked immediate relatives to identify or bury them, the Post reported. Collectors, anthropologists, and scientists also dug up burial grounds and looted graves in other cases.
The Natural History Museum has lagged in its efforts to return the vast majority of the remains in its possession to descendants or cultural heirs, The Post reported. Officials have also repatriated only four out of at least 268 brains collected by the museum.
'Racial brain collection'
With the U.S. recently acquiring the Philippines from Spain for $20 million under the Treaty of Paris in 1898, anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka—a curator for the National Museum, the predecessor to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History—started what he referred to as the “racial brain collection.”
Hrdlicka believed that White people were superior, the Post reported, and he collected body parts to further now-debunked theories about anatomical differences between races.
In 1904, the St. Louis World's Fair took place to hold exhibits on architecture, new food items, popular music—and people.
The U.S. government brought indigenous Filipinos to the fair, and Hrdlicka saw an opportunity. He traveled to St. Louis, "hoping to take brains from the Filipinos who died” there.
About 1,200 Filipinos lived in a 47-acre artificial village alongside Arrowhead Lake in St. Louis County for seven months.
Spectators, mostly white, gawked at the “primitive" Filipinos.
Among them were the Igorot, supposedly the most "uncivilized" tribe in the Philippines. Fair officials pressured them to eat dogs several times a week for the crowds, from being a mere ceremonial activity back home.
"That fueled a stereotype about Filipinos that lingers to this day. They were called 'savages' by fair officials and newspapers," the Post reported.
Brains from the St. Louis World's Fair
Hrdlicka was able to perform autopsies on people who died in the fair, including individuals from Suyoc and Bontoc.
Smithsonian records, as cited by the Post, said Hrdlicka returned to Washington with the brain of the Bontoc man but kept only the Suyoc Igorot’s cerebellum, the part of the brain at the back of the head responsible for balance, coordination, and fine motor skills.
Months later, fair physicians sent Hrdlicka the complete brains of two other Filipinos, a Tagalog person and a Muslim Filipino, according to documents.
In spring 2021, the Post spoke with Janna Añonuevo Langholz, a 34-year-old Filipino American activist and artist, who searched for the graves of Filipinos who died at the fair.
Langholz concluded that the Suyoc Igorot brain Hrdlicka had kept belonged to a woman named Maura, the only person from the Suyoc group whose death had been reported in the local press.
Maura was a Kankanaey Igorot woman who had traveled for over a month from her hometown to St. Louis in 1904. She died of pneumonia shortly before the exhibition began on April 30, the Post reported.
When Langholz asked a Smithsonian curator to put her in touch with the Natural History Museum, officials told her that the brain had probably been cremated. They also told the Post that it was “likely incinerated” between 1908 and the 1950s, and officials had no evidence to conclusively identify the person whose cerebellum was taken.
The museum also has the brains of 23 other Filipinos, according to the Post. Some of these were taken from patients at the Philippine Medical School (now University of the Philippines Manila College of Medicine) and across the country. Officials with the medical school said human remains are accepted only with consent, the Post reported.
Remains 'must be returned'
Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, a Kankanaey Igorot Filipino and the former U.N. special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, told the Post that the remains at the Smithsonian must be returned so that Igorot communities can perform rituals for their dead.
Leonardo Padcayan Buyayao, a designated Indigenous representative from Maura’s hometown, told the Post the museum disrespected her community twice by taking the brain without permission and by cremating the remains, which is discouraged in their culture.
Buyayao and other Kankanaey leaders in Suyoc, where the relatives of those who went to the 1904 fair have been residing, are hoping to build a memorial for Maura.
The Post noted that after it began reporting, the Smithsonian contacted the Philippine Embassy in Washington D.C. with information on the human remains in the museum’s possession. Embassy officials said they've met with Smithsonian staff to discuss the remains.
Lonnie G. Bunch III, the secretary of the Smithsonian, apologized for the way the institution collected many of its human remains in the past. Bunch said it's his goal to return as many remains from the "racial brain collection" as possible.