"He sent an e-mail to Herero descendants he knew in the U.S., including Murangi, and they contacted the museum. The A.M.N.H. stores human bones in two offices and several storage cabinets on the fifth floor. “That’s our most heavily utilized collection,” David Hurst Thomas, a curator of anthropology at the museum who was present for the Namibians’ visit, told me.
Thomas is also the author of “Skull Wars,” a candid and critical history of human-skeleton collections. “We have scientists researching those materials almost on a daily basis,” he added. Many scientific papers in evolutionary biology have cited the von Luschan Collection. Nonetheless, the A.M.N.H. has gradually come to acknowledge the troubling origins of many remains in its possession. The museum does not deny that its Namibian remains, from eight individuals, may include the products of genocide; the bones of two people, collected at an unspecified date, were taken from locations where Germans killed Herero in concentration camps. At least one skull shows damage that may have resulted from violence...
Museum staff members said they are open to handing over the Namibian remains. But first, descendants will have to decide what they want to happen to them...
Suzan Harjo, an activist of Cherokee and Muscogee descent who co-wrote the law, remembers museums arguing that they owned human remains. “What we did was change the conversation from property rights to human rights,” she told me. In the inventory work that followed, one of the names that surfaced was Felix von Luschan. On the island of Lanai, Luschan personally dug up more than eighty Native Hawaiian remains, some of which ended up in the A.M.N.H."
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