For my tenth birthday, my father took me and some of my friends to New York to the American Museum of Natural History. That probably tells you all you need to know about what I was like as a kid. Timmy O’Shea, Tommy Else, and a blonde boy, whose name is right on the tip of my tongue but just not coming, were the guys I invited.
I remember we saw the whale and the Hall of African Mammals. I also remember seeing a fiberglass cast of one of the huge stone heads from Easter Island.
The giant stone heads, or moai, that cover the tiny, remote island in the South Pacific figured prominently in a book that I loved called Chariots of the Gods. In it, Erik von Daniken, the author, presented evidence of his claims that the Easter Island statues and other notable monuments around the world could not have been made without help from extra-terrestrials.
There are walls in Peru built thousands of years ago using a method that, to this day, nobody can explain. They are made of huge almost immovable stone blocks, cut into multi-sided shapes that fit together so perfectly you can’t slip a piece of paper between them. All these millennia later, they are still standing. In Egypt, on the Giza plateau near the Sphinx is an almost identical wall, also thousands of years old.
I’ve been to both places on trips with my family and the walls do look remarkably similar. I would add to that, that the ancient pre-Roman Etruscan wall that surrounds the little Umbrian hill town we stay in when we go to Italy also looks much the same to me. The stones might not be as large there, but they are certainly as intricately and perfectly put together. Like the others. There is not so much as a speck of mortar between them.
My mother and I also went to Easter Island many years ago now and saw the colossal moai firsthand. They are as awe-inspiring as you might imagine. Most of them are set along the coast looking out as if protecting the tiny place. The cast of the one in the Museum of Natural History was made by using an actual statue. We saw the original while we were there. The process they used to make the copy permanently damaged the surface of the real stone. It’s pockmarked and pitted now.
Now that I am thinking about the Chariots of the Gods book, I am realizing that many of the places on my bucket list are probably there because they were mentioned in it.
During the summer between my freshman and sophomore year at Columbia, I got a job working in the gift shop at the Natural History Museum. It was great. I was assigned to the higher-end adult shop rather than to what was essentially a kids’ toy store downstairs. Looking back, it was probably because I could talk intelligently about the things we sold.
The best part about working there was that I had to show up before the museum opened and I couldn’t leave until after it was closed. My path in and out took me through the Hall of North American Mammals. With only the emergency lights on, the stuffed bison and pronghorn antelopes looked far more sinister than they did during the day. It was always so quiet without all the visitors that I could hear my breath echoing off the stone floors and glass cases. The creepiest gallery to be in by myself had to be the one with all the dark carvings made by the Pacific Northwest Coast Indians. The grotesque faces of the many dance masks and looming totem poles were almost too scary to look at. I loved working there and being able to explore.
Last week was my birthday. Michael took me out to dinner that evening to celebrate. Because I had the day to myself while he was working, I decided to go to the museum.
For several years now, they have been building a new area along Columbus Avenue. Like I.M. Pei’s pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre, they decided to make this new addition ultra-modern to contrast with the old red sandstone towers around it. It’s so modern that what they ended up with looks like something out of the Flintstones’’ stone age cartoon series from the sixties. I had watched that new section go up over the last few years, but until my birthday, I’d never been in it.
Fifty-two years after my going there as a ten-year-old, the museum is essentially the same. The new part is largely a wide-open space with some general galleries off to the side. There’s a butterfly enclosure in one section that requires a separate ticket. If their aim was to add more gallery space, I’m not sure how well they achieved that. It does look pretty cool, though.
Upstairs in the old museum, the dinosaur section has been modernized and reorganized since my early visits. The stuffed animal galleries, however, look the same. That said, somebody clearly went in and did some dusting. The elephants killed by President Teddy Roosevelt a hundred years ago still stand together in a frozen family group in the middle of the African Mammal gallery. The room with the whale hanging from the ceiling has been updated and also dusted, but I don’t know how different it really is.
During the reckoning following the murder of George Floyd, while we were all trapped at home by the pandemic, public sentiment turned against a statue that used to stand out front of the main entrance on Central Park West.
The statue depicted Teddy Roosevelt on horseback with an African man walking beside him on his left and a Native American man down to his right. Teddy towered above the other two figures. You couldn’t design something that encapsulated white supremacy any better. Rather than depicting real people, the two lower people were meant to represent North America and Africa. In 2020, that’s not what people saw anymore. The calls for its removal became so insistent that the mayor finally agreed to take it down.
Teddy Roosevelt did some remarkable things in his lifetime. We can, for instance, thank him for our National Parks. He was, however, a racist. He thought that African Americans were inferior. He thought that the Native Americans would eventually just die out having been vanquished by the Europeans. He wasn’t alone in thinking those things. He was a man of his time. The White men around him likely all felt the same way he did.
There are probably very few people in our history who may have made our lives better in some ways but also didn’t have a very real downside to them. At what point does one side of the scale outweigh the other?
What’s in the place at the entrance now where the offending statue used to be, is a plaque on the ground commemorating Roosevelt. In addition to murdering the herd of elephants that are now on display, he was also one of the forces behind the overall museum’s creation.
As it turns out, the American Museum of Natural History has far larger problems than merely how to pay tribute properly and respectfully to Teddy Roosevelt.
There have been some questions that have been muttered under peoples’ breath for years that are now being given voice. One is, where did all the stuff come from? Was it all freely given by the people who created it? The answer is, no, of course it wasn’t.
The animals, obviously, were killed by hunters. Nobody sat around and waited until they expired of old age. They were chosen for display because they were perfect examples of each species in their primes. Nobody gave them a second thought. They were merely specimens to be collected.
The cultural objects in the collections were usually looted either from living villages or from ruins and graves that were dug up. Not only the funerary objects from those graves found their way into the museum’s collection but often also the corpses.
Some cultures might care more about that than others. Personally, I don’t have an opinion about what happens to my body after I leave it. I think I am probably in the minority. Our elderly friend in the nursing home out in New Jersey has been discussing the details of her funeral with Michael for decades. She would be utterly horrified by the idea of her body lying on display in a case. I, on the other hand, don’t think I’d care. Arranging my funeral is somebody else’s problem and if there isn’t one, all the better. It’s all beyond my control so I am just not going to let it cause me to lose any sleep.
The film character of Indiana Jones has not helped matters one bit. As an archaeologist, the man destroys more historical evidence than he finds. He desecrates sacred sites right, left, and center. When he does find something, he just takes it and hands it over to his pal Marcus for his museum. I have yet to see a scene where any sort of discussion is had about whether the descendants of the people who created the artifact should have first dibs on it. Indiana Jones never seems to care. He has even killed some of those descendants in his quest to get his artifacts.
The non-fictional historical treasure hunters are usually less swashbuckler and not quite as Body by Jake, but they end up doing much the same thing. Our museums are filled with things with extremely sketchy provenances. I can’t fully condemn them all for it because I am absolutely enthralled by everything they find. There are probably some things, though, that should be put back where they came from.
In 1990 our government passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act which dictated that human remains and related funerary objects should be returned to the tribes from which they were taken. If the decision was made to keep them then the tribe in question had to have a say in how the objects were exhibited. The law was weak enough that institutions could resist it, so nothing much changed after it was passed. Just this month, though, the Biden administration put a new set of laws in effect to hasten the process.
All over the country, huge museums are now scrambling to comply. With the added federal guidelines. In New York at the AMNH, two of the halls devoted to the Plains Indians have already been closed in recent weeks while officials try to decide what to do with the objects inside them. I can’t imagine that the Pacific Northwest Coast Hall is going to stay open much longer, either. A giant canoe that held mannequins dressed up to look like Haida warriors used to fill the lobby just outside the Hall. It was no longer there when I went in the other day. The huge hall is now empty and echoey.
In addition to addressing questions about how the objects in these collections were obtained, I think we also need to ask why these exhibits are in a museum of natural history? These displays are about people, not nature. There aren’t any dioramas of Irish or Polish people. There aren’t mannequins dressed up in kilts depicting Scottish culture in any of the rooms. I saw nothing that referenced Germans or even the Vikings. All the so-called cultural exhibits in the Museum of Natural History are devoted to people of color.
I had been reading about the controversy surrounding this, but until I walked through the rooms the other day, the reality of the situation hadn’t landed with me. Sure enough, representations of African, Polynesian, and Native American people stand in glass cases alongside rows of stuffed birds and rodents. Just by their proximity, the exhibits on Central Park West equate these people and their cultures with animal life.
Natural history and cultural history are not the same thing. Perhaps it’s time to separate them. Yes, we are all part of nature. If that’s what the museum is trying to say, then, indeed, say it about all of us or say it about none of us.
In 1906 a Mbuti tribesman from the Congo named Ota Benga was exhibited at the Bronx Zoo. He had been purchased from an African slave trader by a European explorer named Samuel Philips Verner. Once he got to New York, Benga was put on display in a cage with an orangutan.
It was only after a man named George B. McClellan, Jr. petitioned the mayor, that Benga was released into the custody of the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn. Benga’s teeth had been sharpened to points, which was something the Mbuti people did. The Orphan Asylum arranged to have his teeth capped and he was sent to Lynchburg, Virginia where he began working in a tobacco factory. (I don’t know why he was sent to Lynchburg. Weirdly, Lynchburg is where my father’s parents lived. I don’t think they were aware of Benga, though as they didn’t move there until later.)
From the beginning, all Oto Benga wanted to do was to return to his home in Africa. When World War I began that trip became impossible to make. He was trapped here. Depressed, Benga pried off the caps on his sharpened teeth and shot himself.
I was aware of the discussion of racism when the statue of Teddy Roosevelt was under fire. I didn’t think about how racism was suffused throughout the entire institution. It’s not always easy to look at something that you’ve been seeing since you were a kid with that sort of objectivity. I will say, though, once seen it becomes nigh on impossible to unsee it.
The natural history exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History are remarkable. They captivated me fifty years ago and they still do. At ten, I had never seen a living bison so seeing the stuffed one under glass gave me an appreciation for its grandeur and majesty. I don’t think we need to add any freshly killed species to them, but the ones already there have been standing there dead for decades so why move them?
The cultural exhibits do need to be rethought. Our planet’s cultural heritage is endlessly rich and varied. But it is disappearing. I have been lucky enough to have traveled to a whole range of astounding places to experience many ways of life in person. Not everyone is that fortunate. Or, frankly, that obsessed.
Sometimes, a museum exhibit is the only way to learn about how some of our neighbors live or lived. I’m not saying do away with them, instead, maybe think about how they are being presented. Then change them to give the people they represent the respect that they deserve. Throw in some kilts, wooden shoes, and a Norse boat or two, and try and create an accurate representation of the infinite varieties of ways that humankind has found to live their lives. We all wear different things. We all dance in different ways. We all make different stuff to use in our daily lives. Let’s find out about ALL of it, not just what Europeans might find exotic.
I haven’t seen any of the boys who celebrated my tenth birthday with me in over fifty flipping years. How can that even be possible? I don’t need to see them stuffed under glass to remember either them or that day. I think the blond boy’s parents had gotten divorced and he’d recently come to live with one of them after having lived with the other. The dark Kodak Instamatic shot of us all on the balcony in front of the blue whale brings it all back.
We are at a time of profound reckoning with our pasts, presents, and futures. What we change now, will affect us all for at least a generation to come. Just because we’ve always done something doesn’t mean we should keep doing it. In fact, that’s probably one of the main reasons we should change it. Even if something we have been doing doesn’t change, we should at least look at it as objectively as we can.
Is what we are looking at hurting someone?
If it is, let’s change it. We have all been hurting each other for far too long. Maybe we should try to stop.
Richard, I loooove this ❤️
That is just brilliant. I was up there the other day and was thinking about some of what you said—but not at that brilliant depth of yours. Go brother, keep tellin’ us the truths!