It was wrong because Native communities have survived — their continuity is one of the signal failures of the assimilationist and eliminationist policies that characterized the federal government’s approach to Native nations through most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

And it was self-serving because it allowed institutions to acquire vast quantities of Native material without having to answer for the ethics of the acquisition.

The Army Medical Museum’s collection, which eventually transferred to the Smithsonian, was built in part through the systematic collection of Native American skulls and other remains by military personnel operating in the context of the Indian Wars.

Surgeons and other officers were instructed at various points to collect remains for study.