[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/GettyImages-2887933.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tThe American Museum of Natural History, home to a famous model whale and gem collection as well as a gleaming planetarium on the Upper West Side of New York, has made plans to repatriate hair samples taken from Native Americans in the 19th century as part of spurious scientific studies.<\/p>\n
\n\tAs reported by the New York Times<\/em>, clippings of hair\u2014originally collected for display at the 1893 Chicago World\u2019s Fair and held in the collection of the museum ever since\u2014now count among the holdings to be sent back to their rightful homes under the auspices of the Native American Graves Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).<\/p>\n \n\tSince the hair was identified in the early 1990s by a researcher shortly after NAGPRA\u2019s passing, the federal law required institutions to repatriate Native American remains in their collections. \u201cBut for decades, some museums interpreted the law as excluding hair\u201d\u2014as opposed to skulls and bones\u2014\u201ceven though Native groups and government officials insisted otherwise,\u201d according to the Times<\/em>.<\/p>\n \n\tAfter Harvard\u2019s Peabody Museum agreed to repatriate hair in 2022, the federal government updated the law to make hair an explicit part of what constitutes remains\u2014\u201cunless an institution can prove they were given freely or naturally shed.\u201d And now the American Museum of Natural History has updated its repatriation plans to include 2,700 hair samples, in the wake of renovating its Northwest Coast Hall with tribal consultation and a pledge to revise two halls focused on Native American cultures.<\/p>\n \n\tMuseum officials have reached out to some 150 tribes associated with the samples of hair\u2014including the Choctaw, Cree, Sioux, Chippewa, Crow, Menomini, Munsee, Omaha, and Oneida\u2014and also asked Congress to increase funding for NAGPRA-affiliated programs.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cAs the work to accelerate compliance with NAGPRA around the country has gained an elevated importance at the Department of Interior,\u201d museum president Sean M. Decatur told the Times<\/em>, \u201cthe investment in resources to make this work possible nationally hasn\u2019t kept pace.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/museum-natural-history-repatriate-native-american-hair-1234791569\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/GettyImages-2887933.jpg?w=1024″] The American Museum of Natural History, home to a famous model whale and gem collection as well as a gleaming planetarium on the Upper West Side of New York, has made plans to repatriate hair samples taken from Native Americans in the 19th century as part of spurious scientific studies. As reported […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2034003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2034003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2034003"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2034003\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2034003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2034003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2034003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}