This is how the Smithsonian will reckon with our dark inheritance; The Washington Post, August 20, 2023

Lonnie G. Bunch III, The Washington Post;  This is how the Smithsonian will reckon with our dark inheritance

"As a historian, I have always felt that a full, unvarnished, honest telling of history is the only way for us to move forward as a people, as a nation and as institutions. All of us are profoundly shaped by the past, for good and for ill, and the Smithsonian — like so many other museums and universities — is grappling with a legacy once deemed acceptable but that is so clearly ethically wrong today.

The Post’s recent coverage regarding the human remains still housed in our collections is certainly illustrative of the Smithsonian’s darkest history. This is our inheritance, and we accept the responsibility to address these wrongs to the fullest extent possible."

A museum’s historic human remains are now the center of an ethics clash; The Washington Post, July 27, 2023

 Maura Judkis, The Washington Post; A museum’s historic human remains are now the center of an ethics clash

"The Mütter is a place for people who don’t fit in. And now, Eisenstein fears he can’t fit in here, either.

“People who have always felt othered” — for their physical abilities, their sexuality, their neurodivergence, their interest in death — “find their home in the museum,” says Polasky, the petitioner, who is now a curator for the British Online Archives.

Whether they can continue to do so depends on the answer to one question: What happens when the ethics of the 19th century meet those of the 21st?"