In the late 1890s, a missionary on Haida Gwaii discovered that Haida graves had been dug open. Coffins and bones were scattered everywhere because George Dorsey, a famous curator at the Field Museum of Natural History, had sent men to rob the site. Dorsey believed that primitive cultures were vanishing and that science had a legal right to salvage their remnants.
While colonial settlers treated their own cemeteries as sacred, they viewed indigenous graves as a source of curiosity and profit. This practice was fueled by doctor Samuel Morton, who published a book in 1839 claiming white people had the largest brains and highest intelligence. To further this fake science, museums desperately needed indigenous remains. In 1868, the United States Surgeon General even ordered army doctors to collect indigenous skulls from battlefields and burial grounds.
Hundreds of thousands of indigenous people were dug up and shipped to institutions. Museums knew the immense pain they were causing. When an Inuit man died at a New York museum, anthropologists staged a fake funeral to deceive his young son, Minik, while they chopped up the body for their collection.
Destroying graves is a deliberate tool of colonization. Burial grounds tie a people to their land. When you destroy the graves, you erase the proof of ownership so history can begin with European settlement. This dehumanizing attitude continues even after death.
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