July 2026 Update from the President

Letter from President Sean Decatur to Museum Staff

07.08.26

Dear Colleagues,

Three years ago, I wrote to you about our renewed approach to stewardship of human remains and cultural collections. Since then, I have written to you with regular updates about the progress we are making in these areas. This letter is the next in that series.

Before I share some of the substantive work from this past year, I want to call your attention to an article in today’s New York Times, which touches on an aspect of our recent work and on the history of natural history museums, including ours.

The article focuses on hair clippings, from more than 2,700 Native Americans, that were gathered for the 1893 World’s Fair (World’s Columbian Exposition) in Chicago and were brought to the Museum in the mid-1890s. The Museum’s Cultural Resources Office (CRO) began reviewing and organizing the archival material associated with these clippings in 2023, and earlier this month, the CRO group began outreach to 150 federal Tribes which may be connected to these materials in order to engage in consultation and respectful return.

While critical of the Museum, the story tackles some important issues and raises awareness of the complex work required to address them. Perhaps the most important issue raised in the article–which we have discussed here at the Museum extensively–is that the Museum has much work to do to build trust and repair relationships with communities directly harmed by its past practices. To this end, the work of repatriation is deeply intertwined with the work of education and relationship building.

We remain steadfastly committed to addressing the history of our collections, as well as to prioritizing return and engagement with descendant communities, and I want to thank those who have been engaged in these efforts.

Work on ancestral remains and repatriation over the past year has included:

In December, in an important milestone in the Museum’s Ancestral Remains Stewardship Initiative, the ancestral remains collections were moved to new storage to provide more respectful stewardship as we continue to welcome guidance from communities.
The Cultural Resources Office (CRO), led by Director Nell Murphy, completed five repatriations in 2025, including one international repatriation and four repatriations to federally recognized Tribes, and three repatriations so far in 2026. On March 6, CRO and Government Relations hosted a delegation from Guam to complete the repatriation and transfer of ancestral remains. In April, the Museum completed a repatriation to the Tohono O’odham Nation of Arizona, and in May, a repatriation to the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians of the Agua Caliente Reservation in California.
In May, the Science Conservation team, working with Exhibition and the Division of Anthropology began to de-install exhibits in the Halls of Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains. In preparation, Director of Collections Programs Katie Sabella has conducted three rounds of outreach to approximately 100 groups about stewardship of collections that were previously on view in these galleries. So far, engagement is underway with about 40 groups, and this work is ongoing, as is the de-installation, which will continue through 2027.

Education programs have included:

In March, the Education Division concluded the second year of Seeds to Stories: Exploring Traditional Foods of the Haudenosaunee, a guided field trip experience for fourth-grade students that runs from October through March and supplements the New York State unit about Native New York. This year, the program served 1,558 students from 27 schools across four boroughs.
In June, we welcomed three interns from the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde for this year’s Grand Ronde Learning Exchangeand hosted a delegation from the community for the ceremony with t’əmanəwas. Earlier this spring, I had the opportunity to visit the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde for the annual Round Dance, together with Albeliza Perez, Senior Manager of Youth and Workforce Development, who manages the internship in partnership with the Chachalu Museum and Cultural Center. I was very honored to be part of the celebration in the Grand Ronde community and to meet former Learning Exchange interns, and it was a privilege to continue the Museum’s relationship with the Grand Ronde for the delegation’s visit last month.

Outreach and relationship-building efforts have included:

In September, Cheepache (Mono and Chukchansi) and Amy Igri Lowndes (Iñuipaq), joined the Museum for the Indigenous Fellowship in Conservation. This program, which offers experience working with the Museum’s Science Conservation group on collections items from Indigenous communities, with the consent of these communities, has been led for the past three years by Assistant Director in Science Conservation Samantha Alderson. Samantha also presented about this important work to the Board of Trustees in March, as part of an overview of Science Conservation. After completing her fellowship earlier this year, Amy Lowndes has joined Samantha’s team in Science Conservation.
Also in September, as part of an ongoing collaboration that began in 2024, the Museum hosted a delegation of the Comité Cívico de la Memoria Histórica de Manta (Civic Committee for the Historical Memory of Manta), their guests, and members of New York’s Ecuadorian community to mark the development of a webpage and new exhibit label that provide additional information about an iconic ceremonial stone chair from the Manteño culture on view in the Hall of South American Peoples.
In October, the Museum hosted one day of the Fifth Annual Munsee Language and History Symposium, which included a community visit with Munsee belongings, presentations by members of the Munsee-Delaware Nation, and discussions about future collaborations. This is the second year of the Museum’s participation in the Symposium, and we were honored to host the community on-site.

As I have stated before, the work of repair and repatriation is not a short-term project, but rather a long-term commitment to do painstaking work to confront both our harmful practices of the past and our imperfections of the present, while listening to the concerns and critiques of the communities that have been harmed. We aim to carry out this work with both urgency and steady intention, now and into the future.

Best,

Sean