A leaked draft report from a Harvard school committee has revealed that the college possesses, in its museum collections, the remains of practically 7,000 Native Americans and nearly 20 individuals who had been seemingly enslaved, in accordance to The Harvard Crimson.
The draft report, which has not but been finalized and was dated in April, is the work of a steering committee tasked with planning for Harvard’s assortment of human remains. It urges the college to return the remains to descendants’ households — or, if ancestry is unclear, to seek the advice of with the descendants’ communities about how to handle returning the remains.
According to the Crimson, the draft report acknowledges that the remains “were obtained under the violent and inhumane regimes of slavery and colonialism” and that they “represent the University’s engagement and complicity in these categorically immoral systems.”
“Moreover, we know that skeletal remains were utilized to promote spurious and racist ideas of difference to confirm existing social hierarchies and structures,” the draft report says.
The remains primarily reside in Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Ethnology and Archaeology, the Crimson experiences. The director of the museum and University President Lawrence S. Bacow apologized final 12 months for the practices that led to Harvard’s possession of the remains.
The formation of the Steering Committee on Human Remains in Harvard Museum Collections was only one improvement associated to a 134-page report launched April 26 by a separate group, the Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery. That report aimed to “remedy the persistent educational and social harms that human bondage caused.”
The report documented the remains of “thousands of individuals” sitting in Harvard’s museum collections and acknowledged many of the remains had been thought to belong to Indigenous folks, and at the very least 15 had been from probably enslaved folks of African descent. The college pledged $100 million to implement the suggestions within the report.
“Harvard benefited from and in some ways perpetuated practices that were profoundly immoral,” Bacow wrote in a assertion launched with the preliminary report. “Consequently, I believe we bear a moral responsibility to do what we can to address the persistent corrosive effects of those historical practices on individuals, on Harvard, and on our society.”
