I'm finally able to announce a book that I began work on shortly after last year's Orphans' Court hearing, when the judge authorized @Penn's/@pennmuseum's request to bury people who they claimed were Black Philadelphians in their "Morton Cranial Collection."
1/9 .@MxAbdulAliy and I realized #FindingCeremony needed to offer info about the collection to descendants of those whose heads Morton & his friends stole—among other kinds of support for the trauma of learning that your ancestors' skull is on a shelf in the basement of a museum.
2/9

🧵 Extremely concerning updates re: Penn Museum’s determination to make a triumphant DEI photo op out of burying the stolen remains of 20 Black Philadelphian ancestors:

They plan to bury them in 2 weeks—even though they now know doing so violates NAGPRA.

Yes: NAGPRA.

1/

https://twitter.com/pennmuseum/status/1737927530009575611

As in, the federal Native American Graves Protection & Repatriation Act.

Being defined as Black (or other historical terms for African descent) in the US has never meant someone had no Native American ancestry.

And archival research reveals that John Voorhees definitely did.
2/

THREAD:
@audible_com has just released a new podcast about the Morton Cranial Collection @PennMuseum, hosted by @MarcFennell.

It produced before we formed #FindingCeremony, and is a valuable account of a lot of the fuckery of the Penn Museum.

Episode by episode highlights:
1/

https://twitter.com/Audible_AU/status/1704395724245369067

Episode 1:
Interviews with @pennanthro PhD candidate @scmach & other students
How Penn Museum employees reacted to the protests at the museum for the return of the Morton Collection and the MOVE remains in April 2021.
audible.com/pd/Ep-1-The-Cl…

Things I no longer have space for, and cannot allow to take up space in this work:

White scholars' benevolent and safely distanced fascination with the historical and ongoing violence of white supremacy.

This stance is a fucking problem--and itself supports white supremacy. We don't need your benevolent neutrality.

You aren't doing us our our ancestors or our descendants any favors, as you collect a paycheck off of publicizing our pain in ways that ultimately reaffirm your own position within and ultimately shore up white supremacist systems.

CN: abuse of human remains

Here's why you shouldn't sign or share the popular petition that is going around to "save" a "quirky" medical museum in Philadelphia from "pc" corporate leadership that finds its mostly stolen collection of human remains "icky": 1. The Mütter Museum has recently removed from view or limited access to some of the images and video of human remains it previously displayed online; and the museum's leaders have expressed concern re: certain exhibits and public programming.

Looking at effectiveness of op eds about repatriation with my repatriation course. Highlights so far include,, from Hannah Ellison's thecrimson.com/article/2022/1…
"Likewise, in 2021, the..." "...Association of American Indian Affairs explicitly stated in a letter to University President Lawrence S. Bacow that “you have significantly more deceased Native people in boxes on your campus than the number of live Native students that you allow to attend your institution.”

1) Yesterday @MxAbdulAliy shared a PDF we created to serve as a kind of "explainer" of the judge's decree, following last month's Orphans' Court hearing about the Black Philadelphians from the "Morton Cranial Collection," who the Penn Museum seeks to bury: drive.google.com/file/d/19P-uTU… 2) By focusing our comments in the PDF directly on the words in the judge's decree, we ended up replicating the judge's intentional erasure of our deep involvement in the case for the previous 7 months, beginning when Abdul-Aliy & I each submitted formal objections in July.

Introducing: Finding Ceremony

A descendant-community-led stewardship body that will oversee the return of the 1000+ skulls of ancestors and relatives from around the world, that the Penn Museum has held in the "Morton Cranial Collection." 1/12 Yesterday, Black West Philadelphian Abdul-Aliy Muhammad @MxAbdulAliy and I submitted a proposal describing the future shape of work each of us began independently years ago; and that has coalesced in our joint response to recent actions of the Penn Museum, specifically: 2/12

If you were going to watch one American TV show in its entirety with your class, which one would it be? the course is "Race & Gender in American Film," and feedback from last term makes clear that the one film we watched in class they engaged with WAY more deeply; and that nobody has attention span for whole movies as homework (me either)

There's very little that most of us can "do" about this horrifying story.
But there is actually something concrete, specific, and important to do in connection with the Morton collection visible over Janet Monge's shoulder as she held Katricia's remains in the Coursera video:

https://twitter.com/intersectionist/status/1582832316467974144

The Penn Museum has treated these peoples' remains just as horrifyingly, & while they promised in April 2021 to return the whole collection, the closest they've come so far is an attempt this summer to secretly bury "at least 13" Black Philadelphians who died in the 1830s & '40s.

THREAD:
1) Today, @NYTmag published an investigative piece about the mistreatment of the remains of people murdered in the 1985 MOVE bombing.

It highlights the evidence that Penn Museum kept remains of multiple MOVE bombing victims.

(paywall free link) nytimes.com/2022/10/19/mag… 2) Student Jane Weiss and Curator Janet Monge had x-rays of the MOVE remains at the Penn Museum taken in November 2018.

These x-rays, which the museum has had all along, were first made public in the report prepared for the City of Philadelphia in June 2022.

They include:

1: There's been a LOT of press related to Penn Museum's plan to bury "at least 13" Black Philadelphians, whose skulls were stolen 200 yrs ago, & kept in the museum's "collection."
This is a complex issue, so I wanted to highlight this newer article that offers some good context:

https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1558382501600559104

2: With the major caveat that the statements Director Chris Woods in response to @MxAbdulAliy's concerns are not to be read uncritically. The top-down attitude he has towards the "responsibility" of the museum to "do the right thing" + the push for speed = disregard of community.

Earlier this week, @artstuffmatters, @WTFAnthro, & others spread news of the disturbingly hidden "public notice" which the University of Pennsylvania had posted, seeking to bury "at least 13" skulls in the Morton Cranial Collection. (thread) marketplace.inquirer.com/pa/legal/notic… 2) This "notice" hits me so incredibly hard.

But I wasn't surprised.

Not cuz Penn's past behavior has trained me not to be surprised, but because, I actually had a bit more notice, kind of.

I was told about this Orphans Court petition back on April 15.

To clarify:
This *is* the same museum that stole remains of Katricia & Delisha, children murdered in 1985 MOVE bombing.
Before we knew that curator Janet Monge had their bones in her lab, she already faced criticism for use of Morton Collection--which they're now trying to bury:

https://twitter.com/artstuffmatters/status/1551971482984763394

A couple quick resources before I gotta hop off and finish final edits on my article (about both Morton collection and MOVE remains at the Penn Museum, as it happens):
What's proposed in the Notice is based on a completely gross misreading of this article: prss.sas.upenn.edu/penn-medicines…

THREAD:
Breaking twitter silence now the City of Philadelphia's has released their investigagtion into the MOVE bombing remains.

Sending love to everyone whose lives this touches, especially those whose murdered loved ones' bodies are yet again subject to public interrogation. The report covers the remains found at the Medical Examiner's Office in May 2021; & as well as the other remains held by Alan Mann and Janet Monge at the Penn Museum, made public in April 2021. phila.gov/documents/inde…

1: There this a thing that happens where they drown the truth in details.

And that's what they did here: the highly paid partners at a fancy law firm, @llc_tucker, wrote a total POS 217 pg "independent legal report" for @Penn, claiming the Penn Museum never had Delisha's bones. 2: This claim was in response to two things:

1. The original reporting last April said @pennmuseum had the remains of 2 children murdered in the 1985 MOVE bombing.

2. Only one child's remains, Katricia/Tree's, were retrieved from the home a former curator & returned her family.