What Remains: What's Past is Prologue
A 1,500 year old skeleton is diagnosed with tuberculosis. A visit to a modern-day bone library. A fight over the future of ethical science.
Featuring Olga Spekker, Nicole Dungca, Molly Zuckerman, and Aja Lans.
ADDITIONAL MATERIAL
The Smithsonian’s ‘Bone Doctor’ scavenged thousands of body parts (Washington Post)
Medical, scientific racism revealed in century-old plaque from Black man’s teeth (Science)
America’s Biggest Museums Fail to Return Native American Human Remains (ProPublica)
Read about Maria Pearson, the “Rosa Parks of NAGPRA” and how she sparked a movement. (Library of Congress Blogs)
Read Olga Spekker’s paper on SPF15, “The first probable case with tuberculous meningitis from the Hun period of the Carpathian Basin.”
Listen to our episode about so-called body farms, “Life and Death at a Human Decomposition Facility.”
CREDITS
Host: Nate Hegyi
Reported and produced by Felix Poon with help from Taylor Quimby
Mixed by Felix Poon and Taylor Quimby
Editing by Taylor Quimby, with help from Nate Hegyi, Rebecca Lavoie, Katie Colaneri, Jason Moon, Daniela Allee, Justine Paradis, Marina Henke, and Kate Dario.
Executive producer: Taylor Quimby
Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio
Music by Blue Dot Sessions, and 369
The theme music for the What Remains mini-series is by Lennon Hutton
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio
If you’ve got a question for the Outside/Inbox hotline, give us a call! We’re always looking for rabbit holes to dive down. Leave us a voicemail at: 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837). Don’t forget to leave a number so we can call you back.
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Nate Hegyi: I’m Nate.
Felix Poon: I’m Felix.
Nate Hegyi: And, Felix you pitched us this idea...I don't even know how long ago it was at this point…
Felix Poon: … it was still cold outside, so maybe winter time?
Nate Hegyi: But yeah, we're finally bringing this story to our listeners. And it is a BIG two-part episode that starts next week. But THIS WEEK, Felix and I are giving you the prologue.
Felix Poon: And this prologue…starts… in a small town in Hungary. A few years ago the town is getting ready to build part of a wastewater treatment plant. And before they break ground, they hire archaeologists to make sure they’re not going to disturb some long-lost historic site. So the archaeologists start digging…And they uncover…
[MUX IN]
…a single grave.
Nate Hegyi: Really, it’s just a pit in the ground. There’s evidence there used to be a casket in there - but it’s been sooo long, all the wood has completely decomposed. They find a bronze earring, a buckle, parts of a necklace, a ceramic vessel, and… a handful of bones.
[MUX FADE UNDER AND OUT]
Felix Poon: So all this stuff gets sent out to a lab. Researchers identify them as belonging to an adult woman… somewhere between the ages of twenty and fifty. And they determine that her grave dates back about one-thousand, five hundred years.
Nate Hegyi: [to Felix] That’s a looong time ago.
Felix Poon: [to Nate] Yeah, this is like… the Fall of Rome era, Atilla the Hun times.
Nate Hegyi: Right.
Felix Poon: The point is, these remains belong to the ancient world - they’re a window into Hungarian history.
Nate Hegyi: And we’ll never know what her name actually was. But researchers call her SPF15.
Felix Poon: Which by the way, um, is not a reference to sunblock.
Nate Hegyi: So the SPF is short for the town and archeological site where they found her, and the 15 is the geological layer under the earth where they found her grave.
Felix Poon: I mean, SPF15 just sounds so impersonal. But one very personal thing we do know about her… is how she probably died.
Olga Spekker: Hi. Can you hear me?
Nate Hegyi: Yes.
Felix Poon: Yes. Can you hear us?
Olga: Yeah, okay. Thank you. Hi.
This is Olga Spekker (SHPECK-er).
Olga Spekker: I'm a paleopathologist who examines ancient bone remains. Human bone remains, to be precise.
[MUX IN]
Felix Poon: So Olga examined SPF15. And without even using a microscope or anything, she was able to look at her skull and say… this person had TUBERCULOSIS.
Olga Spekker: She was in the later stages of her disease. And, uh, in these later stages, it can cause, like, coma, paralysis, uh, seizures, strokes, and then at the end, death.
[MUX SWELL AND OUT]
Felix Poon: When I heard this I was like… how was Olga able to know that?
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, I mean we have murder cases where we don’t know how someone died just last week.
Felix Poon: Right. So how did Olga figure this one out for someone who died 1 thousand 5 hundred years ago?
Nate Hegyi: The answer to that, has to do with something called The Terry Collection.
[MUX IN]
Felix Poon: And, technically it’s called the Robert J. Terry Anatomical Skeletal Collection. It's a collection of over one thousand seven hundred skeletons. And, it’s held by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History - but it’s not open to the public.
Olga Spekker: The building is like a huge concrete building. It was not so appealing, to be honest. Not like the main building, which is awesome. But yeah, the other building was like, more like a bunker.
Felix Poon: Olga got to work with the Terry Collection a few years ago. And the way she describes it - it’s like a cross between a morgue, and a library.
Olga Spekker: Yeah, there are a lot of cabinets. And on the door of the cabinet there are the ID numbers.
Nate Hegyi: Every skeleton has labels for race, sex, age, and cause of death. Imagine flipping through them like an old-fashioned card catalog.
Olga Spekker: So first you have to find the ID And then, you know, okay, that's the individual I want to examine right now and then get it out. And then you finished with the examination. You can put it back.
Felix Poon: When Olga was there, she examined four skeletons a day.
Olga Spekker: Get it out – put it back
Felix Poon: 9 to 5.
Olga Spekker: Get it out – put it back
Felix Poon: Five days a week. For nearly 4 months.
Olga Spekker: Get it out – put it back
[MUX swell and out]
Nate Hegyi: I would imagine that feeling a little… mechanical. Like after a while, you’re just treating these bones as like…fossils… or ice cores. They’re just like, they lose all sense of personhood.
Felix Poon: I mean that’s how Olga and a lot of scientists have looked at them. They’re like records of the past, of the planet’s history.
Nate Hegyi: Right, exactly.
Felix Poon: Because these are essentially bone libraries - like sometimes they’re called osteological “reference collections.” And they helped lay the foundations of forensic science. I mean, most forensic methods for telling a person’s height, sex, cause of death, how old they were – just by looking at their skeleton? They were developed thanks to these collections.
Like there was this 1950s study that used the Terry collection to come up with a method for determining height… which scientists still use today.
[MUX IN]
Nate Hegyi: Right and the more remains we have in a collection – and the more data we have about them – the more useful it is for scientists.
And the Terry Collection…it’s considered one of the best.
Felix Poon: So when Olga was there… She was looking at two groups — One was a control group… and the other were skeletons of people who died from tuberculosis.
She told us that when someone has TB, the immune system walls the bacteria off.
Olga Spekker: Like, there are a lot of layers of immune cells covering the bacteria to contain them.
Felix Poon: … which in later stages, forms little bumps on a person’s bones.
Nate Hegyi: Olga wanted to confirm whether these bumps could be accurately used to diagnose late stage tuberculosis.
Felix Poon: By using the Terry Collection, Olga showed that they could. And that’s why – when she looked at the skull fragments of SPF-15, that skeleton that was dug up in her native Hungary, Olga was like a time traveling forensic detective – she knew exactly what she was looking at.
Olga Spekker: Because we could identify the bony changes we found on her skull.
Nate Hegyi: And by the way, this doesn’t have much of an impact on modern medicine. This is more about looking into our human history, about understanding the lives of ancient populations.
Felix Poon: Right, I mean it’s a really human desire to know where we come from, right? To know how our ancestors lived, and even how they died.
Nate Hegyi: You don't have any nicknames for her at all, do you? Or is it always SPF 15?
Olga Spekker: Yeah. I mean, I'm not sure it would be ethical to give them nicknames. I don't know. Some skeletons have names like Ötzi the Mummy, but I'm not sure it's. It's a good thing to give nicknames
Felix Poon: Why is that?
Olga Spekker: Because they are human beings. I mean, they were like us. And you cannot ask them if they would like to have nicknames or not. So I'm not sure it's it's a good thing.
[MUX IN]
Nate Hegyi: But, here’s the thing. We are not here to talk about tuberculosis or SPF15.
Felix Poon: Right, our question is who are these other skeletons.
Olga Spekker: Get it out
Felix Poon: Because if it’s unethical to give skeletons nicknames…
Olga Spekker: Put it back
Felix Poon: Why are there thousands upon thousands of them…
Olga Spekker: Get it out – get it out – get it out
Felix Poon: Sitting quietly in reference collections all over the country?
[chorus: get it outs – put it backs]
Felix Poon: How did they get there?
Olga Spekker: Get it out
And is that where they belong?
Olga Spekker: Put it back
[MUX HITS]
Nate Hegyi: I’m Nate Hegyi.
Felix Poon: And I’m Felix Poon.
Nate Hegyi: Months ago, Felix started working on a labyrinth of a story. One that revolves around death, dignity, human remains… and a debate. A debate that’s been completely reshaping the field of biological anthropology.
Felix Poon: This is an introduction episode to What Remains – a special mini-series from Outside/In. We’re calling it, What’s Past is Prologue.
Olga Spekker: My opinion is ethics above everything. So if anyone has a bad feeling about that. Yeah, my research cannot be that important.
[MUX SWELLS AND FADES]
Felix Poon: Nate - are you good at compartmentalizing?
Nate Hegyi: Uhhh…
Felix Poon: I mean like walling yourself off from gruesome things you need to do.
Nate Hegyi: I think as I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten better at it. As a hunter I’ve been pretty good at it.
Felix Poon: Like I’ve often thought that it’s a particular kind of job to be a surgeon, or a funeral director - like anybody who has to work with bodies or dead bodies, they’ve got to be good at compartmentalizing, right?
Nate Hegyi: Yeah.
Felix Poon: And so based off of our conversation with Olga, that’s true of researchers who study bones as well.
Nate Hegyi: When you were working with these remains, did you ever wonder about their back story or think about who they were before they became remains?
Olga Spekker: Um… I think to do my job properly. I should not do that, to be honest, because it would make it very difficult for me. I mean, they had a terrible disease. They suffered a lot because of this disease.
[MUX IN]
Olga Spekker: I mean when I examine them, I try to be as objective as I can be. I don't look at them like I'm examining a human being. Because if I would do that, I… I couldn't.
Felix Poon: I mean if you have to do this work every day, I get it. But… If you do stop and look at these bones as human beings… you might start to wonder…who ARE these people? And HOW did they end up here?
[MUX SWELL AND OUT]
Felix Poon: Uh, is your phone, let’s make sure all our phones are silent. And then we can get started.
Felix Poon: Okay, why don't we just start with an introduction? Can you tell me who you are and what you do?
Nicole Dungca: I'm Nicole Dungca. I'm an investigative reporter at the Washington Post.
Felix Poon: So like me, Nicole has gone down the human remains collection rabbit hole.
Nicole Dungca: I am Filipino, I always talk about that. I'm Filipino American. Uh, and so I was in the newsroom one day and a colleague told me about these brains, human brains that were stored at the Smithsonian.
Felix Poon: To be clear, these ARE NOT on display in a museum on the national mall. The Smithsonian Institute is a big organization with a whole bunch of collections. But, yeah - they have hundreds of human brains in storage.
Nicole Dungca: And some of them were Filipinos who had come to Saint Louis from the Philippines during the 1904 World's Fair to be part of basically a living exhibit, which some people called a human zoo. And as soon as I heard that, I was just intrigued.
[MUX IN]
Felix Poon: And disturbing as that was - it was just the tip of the iceberg.
Nicole Dungca: We find out that there are, um, over 30,000 human remains at the Smithsonian.
Nate Hegyi: Thirty thousand. That’s like an entire town worth of people.
Felix Poon: Yeah, it’s really hard to wrap your head around.
Nate Hegyi: None of this was a secret, by the way. If you’re in biological anthropology or archaeology, you know this stuff.
Felix Poon: But to the general public? This history can be pretty shocking. So, Nicole and her colleagues spent a year reporting on the Smithsonian’s collections of human remains. And a lot of them can be traced back to a man named Aleš Hrdlička.
Felix Poon: In the early 20th century Hrdlička (herd-LICH-kuh) was the curator of the Smithsonian physical anthropology department. But among Alaska’s indigenous communities, he went by a different title.
Nicole Dungca: We talked to people who said in their communities, you know, their grandparents heard them call Hrdlička “the bone doctor.”
Nate Hegyi: The “bone doctor.” In a sprawling report for the Washington Post, Nicole and her colleagues showed how he dug up the remains of about a thousand people in Kodiak, Alaska. He even reportedly offered local kids 10 cents a piece to help him find them.
Felix Poon: AND, he collected bones from the Smithsonian’s own backyard, in and around the nation’s capital.
Nicole Dungca: So he was creating a network with local hospitals, with local morgues –
Felix Poon: To basically pick up any bodies who were unclaimed.
Nicole Dungca: Which means families hadn't come forward to say, oh, this is our relative. We should bury them.
[MUX]
FElix Poon: And Hrdlička wasn’t just interested in bones.
Nicole Dungca: Hrdlička had written this manual that gave everybody directions on what you should do if you want to send a brain for his racial brain collection to the Smithsonian. And they said, “oh, we'll reimburse you. It's important for us to have this collection. You can send it in the post, basically.”
Nate Hegyi: And the so-called science Hrdlička wanted to do with his “racial brain collection”? He wanted to prove bogus theories of white supremacy. Hrdlička was an advisory member of the American Eugenics Society.
[MUX OUT]
Felix Poon: Hrdlička’s racial brain collection might sound especially repulsive… but his ideas and collection methods were not unique.
The Terry Collection - where Olga did her tuberculosis research - it’s mostly made up of unclaimed bodies taken from local hospitals and morgues in St. Louis, Missouri. Raiding poor houses and robbing native graves … this is the foundation of many human remains collections formed in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Nicole Dungca: This was fairly common for anthropologists and for other scientists. Um, what we found really shocking is that these museums still had them. And in a lot of ways, it seemed like there wasn't a clear plan at all with what to do with these remains.
Felix Poon: So that’s where we are today: the racist science of those times has been debunked. And now, medical ethics is based on the golden rule of “informed consent.”
Nate Hegyi: But museums haven’t just been holding on to these remains - scientists have been using them to continue doing research. Legit research. So how can we defend that work, if we KNOW they were gathered without consent?
Molly Zuckerman: My name is Molly Zuckerman… I am a broadly trained biological anthropologist and my teaching and my research primarily focuses on how we learn about people's lives in the past,
Felix Poon: So this is Molly. A few years ago, Molly set out to demonstrate a better way to study human remains collections. She wanted to treat the skeletons in reference collections as PEOPLE instead of unnamed objects. And she did this by looking at dental plaque.
Molly Zuckerman: So, you know, when you go to the dentist every six months and they use that hooked metal tool to scrape stuff off your teeth, and it hurts? What they’re scaling off is calcified human dental plaque.
Nate Hegyi: Turns out, dental plaque can tell you a lot about a person – like what they ate, what pollution is in the air that they’re breathing. You can even find evidence of certain diseases, like pneumonia, in the stuff between your teeth.
Molly Zuckerman: It's like a rock. Coating on your teeth. That's an encyclopedia of your life.
Felix Poon: So Molly and her colleagues chose someone from the Terry collection, and they chose a 23-year-old Black man from St. Louis who died in the 1930s. They knew he died of pneumonia - because that’s what his record in the collection said. But they were able to confirm it, by actually finding its bacterial DNA in the plaque.
Molly Zuckerman: So we could see actual material evidence of what killed them and what shouldn't have killed them. Um, pneumonia is highly treatable, and this person was very young.
Nate Hegyi: This work is similar to what Olga did… with the bumps and TB in the Terry collection. But what made Molly’s work different, was that she and her team also wrote up as much of this man’s life and circumstances in St. Louis.
Felix Poon: And they didn’t look away from the racism and classism underlying these collections - they tried to highlight it.
Molly Zuckerman: Because he was black and/or African American, he wasn't taken to a white hospital, he was taken to a segregated hospital. And the quality of care is poorer.
Felix Poon: The introduction to their paper for Nature says: “Dedicated to St. Louis Individual, whose partial story we hope to respectfully tell here”.
They said this approach to studying human remains collections, quote: “reaffirms biological anthropology’s commitment to social justice” unquote. And they said what’s needed moving forward is to see these people in these collections as people – to rehumanize them
Molly Zuckerman: That research is important because it says, here is a person within this collection. Here is what happened to them. We can trace their history. And keep in mind, you know, this person, like Saint Louis individual, has been included in hundreds of other studies that didn't take into consideration his life history
[MUX IN]
Nate Hegyi: When Molly’s research was published in 2022 it stirred a couple reactions. Some of her colleagues celebrated this as a new, ethical way of doing research on human remains collections…But other colleagues saw it differently.
Aja Lans: I fully believe that most of my colleagues who talk about rehumanizing and respecting by doing more research, they're just trying to put lines on their CV and make themselves stay relevant
Nate Hegyi: That’s after the break.
[MUX SWELL]
MIDROLL
Nate Hegyi: Welcome back to Outside/In, I’m Nate.
Felix Poon: I’m Felix.
Nate Hegyi: Let's jump right back into our reporting on the ethics of human remains collections.
Aja Lans: Yup, so I am Aja Lans, and I am a professor of anthropology and African Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
Felix Poon: So the first human remains collection Aja worked with was at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan.
Just like Olga, Aja was examining skeletons for tuberculosis. But Aja was looking at racial disparities.
Aja Lans: And it finally kind of dawned on me, I was like, why are there so many dead Black people in this museum? And, you know, where did they come from? And that really switched my thinking from doing kind of typical bioarchaeology into questioning where these people came from in the first place and why they were so accessible in these museums to researchers like me.
Nate Hegyi: At first, Aja had the same thought Molly Zuckerman had – that the most ethical thing to do was to study the remains in these collections more.
Aja Lans: I was like, oh, we can learn more about, you know, these hidden Black histories we can rehumanize people, etc. Um, but that's because I was just indoctrinated into anthropology far too much.
[MUX IN]
Felix Poon: Aja says context matters – if you’re working in a country with a history of chattel slavery… for an institution that benefited from enslaving Black people… can you really defend those same institutions holding on to Black remains? And besides, she says none of this “rehumanizing” research is teaching us anything new.
Aja Lans: Of course, all you're going to find is Black death and suffering, and it's going to recreate this narrative and perpetuate the notion that Black people just suffer and die in the United States. And that's all there is to our existence. And so we have people still doing this work, and you're using an unconsenting body for something we already knew.
Felix Poon: I called up Molly to get her response to this by the way.
Molly Zuckerman: There is worth in recognizing that suffering.
And she essentially reiterated her stance. She says researchers are still treating these remains as scientific objects. So she wants to remind them: Hey look, these are people.
Molly Zuckerman: Working to recognize and emphasize to others their humanity is the kind of mission we're following right now, because so many researchers amongst us, and in the past, um, did not pay attention to the humanity.
Nate Hegyi: But for Aja… she firmly believes that the most ethical thing to do…is to stop all research on them, period.
[MUX SWELLS AND FADES]
Nate Hegyi: And a lot of people want to take that one step further. They want museums to repatriate human remains collections.
Felix Poon: So repatriation is a term that people might recognize from a different context - for example, when we bring back American soldiers who died in, say, the Vietnam war, whose bodies are found years, sometimes decades later.
Nate Hegyi: Right. And technically, museums and institutions have already been doing this work for decades. Because of a law that Congress passed in 1990.
October 22, 1990 House Session: Clerk will report the title of the bill. HR5237, a bill to provide for the protection of Native American Graves and for other purposes.
Felix Poon: The law was called the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Or NAGPRA for short.
October 22, 1990 House Session: Today thousands upon thousands of Native American human remains and sacred objects are housed in museum and federal agencies across this country. They are kept in boxes, crates, wooden file cabinets, and tagged and numbered.
The legislation before us today will help end this practice, and give standing to tribes that are… [fade out]
Felix Poon: This is C-span tape from the 1990 session of the House that passed NAGPRA. And so far, about 19,000 individuals have been given back to tribes, according to a Propublica investigation.
Nate Hegyi: But this is also one of those laws that people say hasn’t really worked, because the law gives museums final say over which remains they’re legally required to give back. So many of these universities still have a lot of these bones in their possession.
Felix Poon: Oh yeah, over a hundred thousand Native remains are still held by museums, federal agencies, universities. And for literally any other human remains - whether they’re Black, or Asian, or White - institutions aren’t legally obligated to do anything at all. So Aja says, it’s time to get serious and repatriate them all.
Aja Lans: What I have noticed consistently is the concern is always, how are we going to teach our students without human remains? Um, and so people will, like, disregard all the ethical issues and whatever because they're like, “well, I have to teach, I have to teach, you need human remains to teach.” Um, first off, you do not always. Most of the students who take these classes never even go on to use these skills. But also it's like, we just need to start over.
[MUX IN]
Aja Lans: If medical schools can get donations and have people will their bodies, why are we not simply following that sort of model and setting things up, wherein we start these collections over with people who actually consented to this.
[MUX SWELL]
Felix Poon: So there are in fact a growing number of new human remains collections. They’re made up of people who donated their bodies to science. And I actually visited one in North Carolina for an Outside/In episode we did about so-called body farms. We’ll link to that episode in the show notes.
Nate Hegyi: And that's great. But there are folks who say that we can’t replace these older collections. Take Olga’s work on tuberculosis – she says those bumps you get from the disease? That doesn’t really happen these days because people take antibiotics. So you wouldn’t get those bumps in a new collection.
Felix Poon: And then the other downside that gets mentioned about willed body collections, is that they’re largely made up of white people. So if we end up in a situation where we only have these newer willed body collections, we could be in a situation where researchers end up generalizing their findings based primarily on white people.
Nate Hegyi: All this to say that, behind-the-scenes, there are scientists who disagree with Aja that we can just start over. To them, each collection is like a time capsule – from a specific time and place in history that can’t be duplicated.
Felix Poon: But this is a sensitive topic. Defending these collections isn’t a good look. And of the people who worry about the downsides to repatriation, the only one who would say so on record with us was Olga Spekker.
Nate Hegyi: What would happen to your research if all of these bodies were repatriated? If we decided that, you know what, these folks did not give consent for us to look at them now.
Olga Spekker: I couldn't do that. I mean, if it had happened before I went to the US and examined the Terry collection, I couldn't have done my PhD. I mean, I should have chosen another topic because without a reference collection like that, um, I couldn't have done that.
Nate Hegyi: Do you worry that that'll happen? That these remains will be off limit?
Olga Spekker: Actually I am, because there's still a lot of things we could learn from these, from these collections, and there's still a lot of projects we could perform on them… So yeah. We would lose a lot of information. If we cannot use these collections anymore.
Nate Hegyi: But at the same time, you've also said like that you hold ethics over your research. I guess what I'm getting at is there's like, seems there seems to be two competing issues here. On one hand –
Olga Spekker: Yeah, even in me. Yeah. So I'm not surprised that in society there, there is these two things because even in my mind there are these two different things competing with each other.
Nate Hegyi: Which one wins for you?
Olga Spekker: Right now, I really don't know.
[MUX IN]
Felix Poon: You know we’ve had all of these conversations while I’ve been working on this story that can go down like all sorts of weird, philosophical rabbit holes.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah like, the one that sticks with me is if you go far enough back, like does consent still apply? Like how do you decide consent for neanderthals? Or someone who you discovered whose 50 thousand year old remains?
[MUX OUT]
Felix Poon: But ultimately, I’ve realized none of those hypotheticals really matter when it comes to these human remains collections. Because in a way, this debate has already been decided. Professional scientific organizations are saying we need to change. The Smithsonian has pulled access to its human remains collections - including the Terry Collection that Olga worked on. So it IS off limits now.
Felix Poon: All around the country, museums are talking seriously about repatriation. And there’s this one museum in all my interviews that keeps coming up.
Aja Lans: I think we're all looking at Penn Museum and just hoping to not end up in a situation like that.
[MUX IN]
Molly Zuckerman: Burying people to eliminate discussion about what should happen with them is not a good answer.
Christopher Woods: I'm absolutely confident we did the right thing. Um, you know, again, these are the agendas of, of, of a very small group of individuals.
Lyra Monteiro: This is not the work that the museum has a right to do. Descendants get to decide.
Nate Hegyi: That’s next time on What Remains, a special series from Outside/In. And, this is also where I’m handing the reins completely over to Felix - so good luck Felix because it sounds like you’ve got your work cut out for you
Felix Poon: Alright.
CREDITS
Nate Hegyi: This episode was reported and produced by Felix Poon.
Felix Poon: It was edited by Taylor Quimby, with additional editing help from Rebecca Lavoie, Katie Colaneri, Jason Moon, Daniela Allee, Todd Bookman, Nate Hegyi, Justine Paradis, Marina Henke, and Kate Dario.
Nate Hegyi: I’m the host of Outside/In. Taylor Quimby is our executive producer. Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio.
Felix Poon: Special thanks to Carlina de la Cova, Shanna Williams, Eldon Yellowhorn, Nick Passalacqua, and Rebecca George for additional background information.
And to Buffy Gorrilla, Haleema Shah, Vladimir Radinović, and Dejan Tomka for tape syncing our guests.
Nate Hegyi: Music in this episode is from 369 and Blue Dot Sessions. The theme music for the What Remains mini-series is by Lennon Hutton.
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.