The Search For His Brain Reopened A Century-Old Wound

In the 1990s, Native activists in Northern California began a sustained effort to locate and repatriate Ishi’s remains.

The search was not merely historical curiosity.

For many Native people involved, the issue was spiritual, cultural, and political.

Human remains held by museums had become a national controversy.

For generations, American institutions had excavated, collected, traded, measured, and stored Native ancestors.

Skulls and skeletons entered university and federal collections in the name of science.

Funerary objects were removed from graves.

Communities often had little ability to stop the process or recover what had been taken.

By the late twentieth century, Native nations were forcing institutions to confront that history.