The Long Journey Home

Pegi Vail (New York University)

In the most recent issue of AJEC (Volume 31 Issue 2), my colleagues and I focused on ‘World Fairs, Exhibitions and Anthropology: Revisiting Contexts of Post-colonialism’ in our introduction (Ferraz de Matos et al. 2022) to this special issue. We look back to the popular live human exhibits and cultural displays at world fairs, expositions, museums and cultural institutions of previous eras, asking readers to reconsider the legacy of how such practices carry through to the present. In the mid-to-late nineteenth and early twentieth century, people on display (referred to today as ‘human zoos’) were often arranged in accordance with a racist unilineal evolutionary schema fuelled by ‘scientific’ and ‘pseudoscientific’ studies, such as those employing craniometry as evidence. At the same time, human remains from the deceased were a staple of exhibits on view in natural history museums. Covering the 1893 Expo, the Chicago Tribune declared ‘what an opportunity was here afforded to the scientific mind to descend the spiral of evolution tracing humanity in its highest phases down to almost its animalistic origins’. More than 27 million people attended during a six-month run to view 65,000 exhibits. The Irish, as colonial subjects of the British empire, and at future World Fairs in curated ‘Irish Villages’ with mythic or primitivizing stereotypes. While museums and exhibitions played an important role in the development of anthropology between 1850 and 1920, as has long been recognised (Stocking 1988), they nevertheless influence our perspectives and ways of viewing cultures today in museums and expositions, within the tourist industry, in cinema and on television, and on the internet.

Several institutions also continue to maintain the importance of holding onto human remains in the name of science and education. Hundreds of thousands of remains, especially those of Indigenous populations worldwide have yet to be returned from institutions, including universities across the Americas, Europe and Asia. This has been widely reported by press over the past decade. Indeed, we see the growing number of cases worldwide of communities who have struggled for years to have human remains repatriated, while others are merely seeking rights to control their cultural representations or that of their own ancestors in the visual archives of institutional collections (see the documentary Free Renty: Lanier vs. Harvard). It is clear we have a long way to go towards ‘decolonising’ collections, if that is even possible. Recently, New York University, where I work and of which I am an alumna, has returned the remains of 64 individuals, specifically to the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians that were held at the NYU College of Dentistry for 66 years. These remains have been traced back a former NYU professor, Theodore Kazimiroff, who received them in 1956 from the National Museum of the American Indian’s Department of Physical Anthropology. After keeping them in his laboratory for over seventeen years, they were moved to storage for two further decades. In the latter half of the 1990s, they were ‘rediscovered’ and some were finally identified for return (Keenan 2023).

In the early 1890s, photographs were taken of my own ancestors for the study The Ethnography of Inishbofin and Inishshark, County Galway (1893) by Charles R. Browne. A man who was identified as Myles Joyce, a first cousin, thrice removed, who seems to be participating reluctantly in a remarkable photograph (© Trinity College Dublin – click here to see the image on the front page of their Trinity’s Colonial Legacies website) where he is having his head measured by Browne as policemen of the Royal Irish Constabulary hover over him (to assure he complies?), while a crowd of villagers look on. In this era when anthropometry, craniology, craniometry and phrenology were used to assign racial classifications and measure intelligence during colonisation, this study incorporated photos of islanders and documentation of their measurements in detail, including my own great-great grandfather James Joyce. While I am fortunate to have a photograph of him and his fellow islanders during that period, his picture looks like a mug shot in profile – a specimen. I first encountered Browne’s study in a self-ethnography repurposing his ethnography, including select photographs in the 1993 publication, Inishbofin through Time and Tide, edited by islander Kieran Concannon.  

A few years prior to Brown’s study, renowned British anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon worked with Browne to set up the Anthropometry Laboratory at Trinity College Dublin in 1891 with a grant from the Royal Irish Academy. Haddon brazenly admitted in his journal that he stole thirteen skulls from St Colman’s cemetery in 1890 with the help of Andrew Francis Dixon, a student at Trinity who would later become Professor of Anatomy at the College in 1903. To this day, the crania remain at Trinity College, formerly in its Old Anatomy Museum. In 2020, I joined Marie Coyne, director of the Inishbofin Heritage Museum, who long ago initiated the quest to return the skulls (and a distant cousin of mine herself!), and Irish anthropologist Ciarán Walsh, whose scholarly work on Haddon (Walsh 2022) and curatorial work on the photographic archives of Browne, led to an exhibition in 2012 (‘Irish Headhunter Project’, by Ciarán Walsh and Dáithí de Mórdha) that brought this material further into the public sphere. Together, we wrote to the former provost, Paddy Prendergast, in December 2020 requesting the repatriation of these crania and received a positive response. This was followed up by a detailed letter and another formal request in February 2021 for the return of the Inishbofin skulls that included the larger Haddon-Dixon collection of remains taken from communities around the west of Ireland. Walsh argued these remains were likely acquired unethically, as well, but were not documented as such by Haddon as he had done in his diary regarding the theft of the Inishbofin remains. 

That summer, my cousin Aoife and I were able to visit the skulls, long held hostage. It was a jarring experience. Since then, there have been many hoops to jump through, including more letters in 2021, meetings with provost Doyle’s office in September 2022 with community representatives from Inishbofin ‘Zooming’ in, and in November on Inishbofin at the community centre with Trinity’s Colonial Legacies Review Working Group. The Islanders and the public were then asked to submit ‘evidence-based’ material regarding the case to be submitted by early December 2022. Letters of support for the return of the remains were sent by the American Anthropological Association (AAA), the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA) and Notre Dame University, among many others.

We mounted two petitions, one on the island signed by hand by almost every resident that demanded the return with no further evidence needed (since they were stolen to begin with!), and a public petition echoing that of the former on change.org that remains active until we know when the remains will be returned. I have been following this process over these past few years for a documentary-in-progress, They Measured Our Heads (clips from which will be shown at the RAI film festival on 24 March 2023). We thought the end was in sight when Trinity’s board met on 14 December 2022 to decide the fate of the stolen skulls, but it was only a step forward. The ambiguous message as stated in the press release runs as follows: ‘The Board of Trinity College Dublin decided to work with the people of Inishbofin and the statutory authorities to find a solution to the question of what to do with the crania that respects the wishes of the islanders’. Since then, the statutory authorities, including the National Museum of Ireland, have acknowledged they have no role to play in the fate of the skulls. It’s back in Trinity’s hands. The board will once again meet on 22 February 2023. We hope this will be the final decision to choose to return the remains. It is a unique opportunity to set a precedent in this first-ever case within the nation, and to begin the healing process. 

It’s time they returned home.

About the author

Pegi Vail is an anthropologist (PhD 2004, NYU), filmmaker and curator. She is the co-director at New York University’s Center for Media, Culture and History, teaches documentary filmmaking in NYU’s Culture & Media Programme, as well as anthropology courses at NYU NYC and NYU Prague. Her award-winning documentary Gringo Trails explored the long-term effects of global tourism. As a curator, she has collaborated with colleagues at Margaret Mead Film Festival, American Museum of Natural History; National Geographic National Museum of the American Indian; the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and through organizations such as the The Moth, the storytelling collective she was a founding member of and curator for. Her current projects include acting as a producer on Shadow of Nanook, a Ford JustFilms grant 2022 recipient. Her website is at pegivail.com

References

Browne Charles R. (1894), The Ethnography of Inishbofin and Inishshark County Galway. Dublin: Printed at the University Press by Ponsonby and Weldrick. Reprinted from Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (1889-1901), no. 3: 317–370, https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/20490464.pdf

Concannon, Kieran (ed.) (1993), Inishbofin through Time and Tide (Inishbofin: Inishbofin Development Association).

Ferraz de Matos, P., H. Birkalan-Gedik, A. Barrera-González, & P. Vail (2022),  ‘Introduction: World Fairs, Exhibitions and Anthropology’, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, no. 31(2): 1-14.

Gruben, David (dir.) (2021), Free Renty: Lanier vs. Harvard (David Grubin Productions).

Keenan, A. (2023), ‘Acquired, Stolen, Forgotten. NYU Dentistry’s Collection of Indigenous Remains’, Washington Square News: NYU’s Independent Student Newspaper, https://nyunews.com/features/2023/02/06/nyu-dentistry-indigenous-remains/

Stocking, G. W. (ed) (1988), Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press). Walsh, Ciarán (2022), “Artist, Philosopher, Ethnologist and Activist: The Life and Work of Alfred Cort Haddon”, in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology (Paris), https://www.berose.fr/article2641.html?lang=fr