The Brooklyn Rail

In the fall of 2023, I went to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) to sit shiva for a man who died nearly 1,500 years ago. At least that’s how I explained to myself what I was doing as I settled in on a bench near the body of a man who had died when the tunnel he was digging in search of copper ore collapsed. The dry conditions and fluctuating temperatures of the high desert in what is now Chile naturally mummified his flesh, while the copper-rich soil tinted his skin blueish-green.

After some initial confusion about his sex caused by his delicately braided hair after his discovery in 1899, the body was rather unimaginatively dubbed “Copper Man” and was put on display as a travelling curiosity in Chile and then the United States. In 1905, J.P. Morgan purchased the remains and donated them to the AMNH.

In addition to Copper Man, the AMNH holds the remains of thousands of other Indigenous people from around the globe. The ancestral bones in this and many other museums were collected by scientists who thought they could measure the physical basis of white superiority. Meanwhile, many of the cultural artifacts in our museums were first put on display in an effort to demonstrate the way their “primitive” makers supposedly lagged behind the white civilizations who were destined to be the rulers and exploiters of the rest of the world.

The concept of race built our museums. Now that we have realized that race is a social construct, we are left with the question of what museums could and should look like when we operate them without this once-crucial ideology.

The answer most frequently arrived at in museums that have already tried to change is to modify their displays. After criticism of its treatment of human remains, the AMNH removed Copper Man from the case where he had illustrated ancient mining technologies. Such changes are all too often merely on the surface. Thus, Copper Man remains in New York, although representatives of both the Chilean government and the Atacameños, the Indigenous people who inhabit the area where he was found, have been asking for his return since at least 1991.

The current political climate might make us think that we should slow down our demands for change in museums. After all, we are seeing another way of attempting to take race out of the museum in operation as the current administration tries to remove what it deems to be “divisive narratives” from federal museums. This effort began after President Trump posted a rant in August 2025 about how the Smithsonian Institution focuses on “how bad slavery was.” The path toward achieving the desired “uplifting” portrayal of American history seems to be by simply removing information and artifacts that reveal the existence of systematic racism or even erase the lives of minority people from the historical record.

The attempt to turn museums into propaganda machines that deny that the United States had or has a problem with racism (whose effects are still very much with us, regardless of the explosion of the concept of race) is frightening. Yet I don’t think we can resist it by keeping museums the same or by the strangely analogous strategy of dropping “problematic” displays like Copper Man down the memory hole of long-term storage. Instead, museums need to show us their work. Museums can display the history of the idea of race and its harms as they change to free themselves from these harms. This might give us the open-casket funerals we apparently need so that we can be shocked into reform.

Horror is not the only result of such change. There is a joy to be found in this process of dealing with the afterlife of race, since it allows us to discover new forms of connection. Measured by genetics or geography, I am far from one of Copper Man’s principal mourners. But as I sat by him, I felt myself in community with others far away—an elective affinity based on the hope that museums can transcend their histories. We are coming together to mourn, to witness, and to celebrate the process of change.