On a winter day in Nebraska, two girls living at a boarding school about 230 miles from their home on the Rosebud Sioux Tribe reservation faced an anthropologist and a pair of scissors.
The girls, Amy and Rose Cordier, were attending a school designed to erase Native American identity, where at least 86 children died amid manual labor, physical abuse and forced religious conversions.
The anthropologist measured their bodies on Jan. 5, 1892. He recorded their ages (7 and 13), tribal affiliation (Sioux) and “racial purity” (half Indigenous). He also cut several strands of their hair, placing the specimens into envelopes that were eventually stored in the American Museum of Natural History in New York and largely forgotten until a researcher pulled them from a cabinet in the 1990s.
At that point, a federal law was already in place that required institutions to repatriate Native American remains in their collections. That included skulls and other bones. But for decades, some museums interpreted the law as excluding hair, even though Native groups and government officials insisted otherwise.
In 2022, Harvard’s Peabody Museum decided its collection of Indigenous hair clippings needed to be returned. Then in 2024, the federal government updated its regulations to remove ambiguities in the law, adding a mention of hair as an example of human remains. Hair clippings must be returned unless an institution can prove they were given freely or naturally shed.
Now the American Museum of Natural History is also planning to revise its inventory of Native American remains, adding more than 2,700 hair samples to the objects it intends to repatriate. The clippings — including those from Amy and Rose — were originally collected for an installation at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
Museum leaders, including its president, Sean M. Decatur, have made strides over the past decade to improve their compliance with the law, renovating the Northwest Coast Hall in consultation with tribes and closing two major halls devoted to Native American civilizations so the displays could be revised.
The revelation of the hair samples could be an obstacle to the reopening of those exhibits, which legally require consultation and consent from Indigenous groups.
“It is a setback,” said Shannon O’Loughlin, the chief executive and lawyer for the Association on American Indian Affairs, a nonprofit that advises tribes on repatriation issues, and a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. “The fact that there has been no transparency, even after 30 years of knowing the hair samples were part of the collection, is going to raise trust issues.”
Decatur said he learned about the hair samples when he began the job in 2023.
“In my time here, I have not had any debate or question over whether these materials should be part of our larger effort for consultation and repatriation,” he said. “The goal is to be complete.”
The museum previously said its collection had the remains of about 12,000 individuals, including 3,500 Native Americans, enslaved Black people and New Yorkers who died as recently as the 1940s.
The number of Native American remains will nearly double because of the 2,700 hair clippings taken for the World’s Fair. (The museum said it also had about 2,000 more clippings from other sources, including about 500 that may be from Native Americans.)
Museum officials have begun reaching out to the nearly 150 affected tribes, including the Choctaw, Cree, Sioux, Chippewa, Crow, Menomini, Munsee, Omaha and Oneida.
They have also been asking Congress to increase funding for national programs under the Native American Graves Repatriation Act, known as NAGPRA, spending $120,000 on lobbyists in the past year.
“As the work to accelerate compliance with NAGPRA around the country has gained an elevated importance at the Department of Interior,” Decatur said, “the investment in resources to make this work possible nationally hasn’t kept pace.”
Human Remains in the Cabinets
“Whenever possible obtain a lock of hair,” Franz Boas, known as the father of American anthropology, wrote at the turn of the 20th century. He was instructing researchers to take measurements of Indigenous people for the World’s Fair, though historians said the hair clippings never went on public display.
Boas joined the American Museum of Natural History as an assistant curator of ethnology a few years later.
In the 1990s, Richard Jantz, a biological anthropologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, was piecing together a database from Boas’s measurements when he learned about the hair samples from a museum curator.
Jantz’s doctoral student Lori Baker then investigated the hair samples for her dissertation about using novel DNA analysis to map information about demographics and kinship. She associated the hair samples with individuals like the Cordier girls based on information that Boas had collected.
Boas was an opponent of eugenics and used his database to disprove the biological underpinnings of race science. But he also engaged in unethical practices, like robbing graves and taking hair samples from children, despite many tribes believing that hair embodied kinship and one’s connection to the afterlife.
“There are tribes that describe hair as a grounding force, the thing that connects you to the earth itself,” said Joseph Pierce, director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Stony Brook University. “That spirituality isn’t just like praying in church. It is also who you are in relation to your community. To cut your hair is to damage that relationship.”
Baker was not surprised the museum had never cataloged the samples; most museums were just starting to digitize their collections. But she was troubled that children at Native American boarding schools could not ethically provide consent.
There was a possibility that some individuals in the Boas archive had the ability to decline, according to Baker’s research. Of about 1,600 Mississippi Choctaws who were included, only 329 participated in the study; of those, only 152 provided hair samples.
Erin Thompson, a professor at the John Jay College for Criminal Justice who focuses on art crime, revived interest in the museum’s hair samples after coming across them in her own research. She said she inquired about the clippings last year and was told by a spokeswoman that the museum had nothing to share.
“I understand privacy and sensitivity issues,” Thompson said. “I don’t understand keeping it hidden that you are working on a problematic collection.”
Baker, now an executive vice president at Belmont University in Tennessee, said the hair samples should have been registered under the repatriation law when they first surfaced in the late 1990s, when she handed over the results of her inventory to the museum.
“Given the fact that we can make a cultural connection to the tribes, they ought to be repatriated,” she said. “It’s hard as a scientist to imagine losing information, but there is a way to do it where you work with these nations and talk to them about how to honor them.”
Rebuilding Trust
The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians is awaiting the return of its ancestors.
“This is not the first time a museum has withheld information from us,” said Melanie Carson, the tribe’s historic preservation officer. Once the museum returns the dozens of hair samples, she will need to reunite the remains with relatives and work on reburial plans.
“It erodes trust,” she said. “Tribes are getting frustrated that these institutions are not being more forthcoming.”
The American Museum of Natural History could face up to $23 million in federal fines, not including late fees, for not disclosing its hair samples sooner, though the government has rarely charged institutions for noncompliance. The museum said it believed it was acting in accordance with federal regulations and would not be subject to fines.
After Boas joined the museum, he created its first major exhibit of Native American cultures, designing the original Northwest Coast Hall that opened in 1899.
But by the time he resigned in 1905, the anthropologist objected to the museum’s direction, including an evolutionary emphasis that sought to rank cultures from “primitive” to “civilized.” Boas, who died in 1942, preferred the idea of cultural relativism, arguing that each civilization must be understood on its own terms.
The museum’s cultural resources office has tried to learn more about Boas’s hair samples, which include some taken in Canada from First Nations groups, including the Mississauga and Ojibwe. It confirmed that some clippings were taken from Native American children at boarding schools.
The amount of hair in each envelope was limited — just a small tuft, which some researchers believe was part of Boas’s method of preserving the physical characteristics of each tribe. Outside of Baker’s initial research, there were two published studies on the samples, including one that investigated if “old hair” could be used to study the diets of Plains Indians.
Decatur said the hair samples were part of “a much larger set of systemic activities at the museum and elsewhere in which people were objectified.”
When asked if the museum would ever reach a point where it could stop apologizing to Native American groups, he shook his head.
“Part of being decent and human,” he said, “is recognizing when we have done harm to others and try to find ways to repair that.”
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