Smithsonian Apologizes For Collecting 255 BRAINS Collected By White Supremacist For Warped Scientific Studies

The Smithsonian museum has apologized for “unethical” historical collections, including brains harvested by a white supremacist former curator in the 1900s — while furious families demand the return of their relatives’ remains.

Ales Hrdlicka, the DC institution’s first curator of human anthropology, led the museum in the early 1900s to collect 255 brains as he attempted to provide evidence of a now-debunked theory of anatomical differences between races.

According to the Washington Post revealing the dark story behind the collection, the majority were removed after death from non-white and indigenous people without the consent of the individuals or their families.

One of the brains belonged to Mary Sara, a native Scandinavian woman of the Sami people, who died of tuberculosis in a Seattle sanitarium in 1933 at the age of 18.

Her doctor contacted the Smithsonian by telegram in May of that year to offer her brain for Hrdlicka’s collection, and it is still preserved within the institution’s walls 90 years later.

Using Smithsonian documents, the Post tracked down Sara’s relatives – who had no idea her brain had been taken and said they would demand its return.

Her cousin, retired nurse Martha Sara Jack, 77, described the practice as “a violation of anyone’s trust or humanity.”

“It’s inhumane,” said Jack, who lives in Wasilla, Alaska. “It’s not science anymore. It’s like barbarism or creepy harvesting.”

“It’s kind of like an open wound,” her husband, Fred Jack, added.

“We want to have peace and we won’t have peace because we know this exists until it is corrected.”

The Smithsonian’s board approved giving Sara’s brain to the family, the Post said — though officials declined their request to pay for a funeral and headstone.

The brains, mostly collected in the 1940s, have long been inaccessible to the public, with officials only allowing descendants or members of related communities to see them, according to the Post.

This year, the Smithsonian announced the creation of a task force focused on addressing what will happen to the human remains in discussions with family members, and apologized for past practices.

“At the Smithsonian, we recognize that certain debt collection practices from our past were unethical,” said Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch III.

‘What was once standard in the field of museums is no longer possible.

“We recognize and apologize for the pain our historical practices have caused to people, their families and their communities.

“I look forward to the conversations this initiative will generate to help us conduct our cutting-edge research in a way that is science-ripe and meets the highest ethical standards.”

The museum added that since 1989 it has “successfully repatriated more than 5,000 individuals” under the National Museum of the American Indian Act, and that the new task force will develop “a policy targeting all human remains” found in the owned by the institution.

Including Hrdlicka’s collection, the Natural History Museum has at least 268 brains, according to the Post, and only four have been repatriated.

This is largely because the Smithsonian requires family members to make a formal request for their return – but many don’t know they were taken in the first place.

Czech-American anthropologist Hrdlicka became the first curator of human anthropology at the Smithsonian in 1903.

Around the same time, he emerged as the leading proponent of the theory that humans had not lived in the Americas for over 3,000 years—disputing tens of thousands of years of indigenous history.

He was also seen as an authoritative scholar on race, leading the plight of proving that race determined physical characteristics and intelligence.

Hrdlicka was also a member of the American Eugenics Society, an organization whose goal was to “improve” the gene pool based on racist theories that would be widely condemned after the Nazis used them to justify the Holocaust.

He often praised his white supremacist beliefs, including in a speech where he said black people were “the real problem for the American people,” according to the Post.

“There are important differences between the brains of the Negro and the European, to the general disadvantage of the former,” he wrote in a 1926 letter to a professor at the University of Vermont.

“Brains of individual Negroes may be at or near the standard of some individual Whites; but such primitive brains as those of some negroes…would be difficult to imitate in normal whites.”

Hrdlicka described his group of human brains in the Smithsonian as the “racial brain collection” — and it’s unclear if he took the brains illegally.