NEW YORK, NY.- The Peabody Museum at Harvard University said Thursday that it would return a collection of hair samples that were taken in the early 1930s from hundreds of Native American children who were forced to attend government-run boarding schools.

The museum apologized for its decadeslong ownership of the samples, which were taken from about 700 students spanning about 300 tribal nations, and said it would try to return the clippings to living relatives and the tribes that the students belonged to.

“The Peabody Museum apologizes to Indigenous families, communities and tribal nations for our complicity in the objectification of Native peoples and for our more than 80-year possession of hair taken from their relatives,” the museum said in a statement, adding that it acknowledged the “cultural and spiritual significance” of hair and the harm its removal had caused.

The museum, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is dedicated to cultural heritage and its collection features objects and images “from diverse people from around the world and across time,” according to its website.

Victor Lopez-Carmen, a third-year medical student at Harvard who is a member of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, said he was devastated to learn about the hair-sample collection this week in an email from the university’s Native American program.

Lopez-Carmen said he had seen a partial list of the Indigenous students whose hair was shorn. He said that scanning the list, which has not been made public, led him to wonder if any of the students were distantly related to him.

“I still feel a sense of disgust that Harvard has had these hair clippings for decades and we are just finding out about it now,” Lopez-Carmen said. “Also that they even accepted them in the first place.”

A spokesperson for the Peabody Museum said the samples had never been publicly displayed. George Edward Woodbury, an anthropologist, amassed the hair samples from 1930-33 and donated the collection to the museum in 1935, the spokesperson said. Woodbury was a lecturer and research fellow in anthropology at the university from 1935-38, she said.

According to the museum’s website, Woodbury researched “potential connections between Indigenous communities to study human variation and support early anthropological theories around the peopling of North America.” In general, hair-sample research conducted in the early-20th century was “carried out to support, directly or indirectly, scientific racism,” the museum said.

In a paper from 1932, on the differences among tribes in North America, Woodbury wrote that the study was “prompted by a desire to find out if American Indian hair is of one uniform type or whether it is not,” and what the “racial and anthropological significance” of those differences might be.

The contents of his collection are stored in envelopes, many of which are labeled with identifying information about the people from whom the clippings were taken, including name, “degree of blood” and ethnic group, according to the museum’s website.

The museum has begun contacting tribes to begin the process of returning the samples, the spokesperson said.




To facilitate this process, the museum has also set up a website listing affected tribes and locations where the samples were collected, including boarding schools in Alaska, Arizona, Oklahoma and Nevada.

Woodbury’s hair-sample collection was a “part of the history of abuse” propagated by the federal Indian boarding school system, the museum said in a statement. The spokesperson said the museum would develop a process to return the clippings in consultation with the affected tribes.

Last year, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland called for a review of the government-run boarding schools in the United States after the discovery of more than 1,000 unmarked graves of Indigenous children who attended similar schools in Canada.

A 106-page Interior Department report, issued in May, documented the brutal conditions that Native American children endured at more than 400 boarding schools they were forced to attend across 37 states and territories between 1819 and 1969. Children were subject to solitary confinement, beatings and forced hair cutting, and were stripped of their given names and forbidden to practice their cultural traditions.

Haaland’s office declined to comment on the Peabody Museum’s announcement.

The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition said in a statement that it joined “our relatives in grief over the disturbing revelation” from the museum, calling it another reminder of the “racist and colonial history that has directly benefited institutions such as Harvard University.”

“While we recognize that the Peabody Museum’s apology and commitment to returning these materials back to their relatives and tribal nations is an essential first step,” the coalition said, “we need to see meaningful, urgent and ongoing responses to the extractive and dehumanizing collections practices so commonly seen in anthropological, archaeological and museum sciences.”

On its website, the museum acknowledges that it has a “complicated and sometimes difficult history,” but says that “today we are guided by our principles of ethical stewardship.”

Shannon O’Loughlin, CEO of the Association on American Indian Affairs, said in a statement that the Peabody Museum had “placed the burden on Native nations to do the work to request repatriation” of the hair samples and emphasized that the Native children were not old enough to give their consent when they were taken.

Last year, Harvard’s president, Lawrence Bacow, announced that the Peabody Museum had in its collection the remains of more than a dozen people who might have been enslaved, the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, reported. The Crimson reported in June that it had obtained a draft report calling on the university to return the remains of 7,000 Native Americans that were in its museum collections.

Lopez-Carmen said although learning about the hair-sample collection was heartbreaking, he appreciated Harvard’s effort to atone for its past. He said he hoped that the returns would be handled “in a sensitive way.”

“Some of these people might still be out there and their hair was taken,” he said. “That haunts me a little bit.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.