Filipino brains found in Smithsonian’s ‘Racial Brain Collection’

THE brains of 27 Filipinos, taken without consent from the families of the deceased in the early 20th century for racial studies, have been found by a team of intrepid reporters as recorded among the holdings of the Smithsonian Institution.

Reporters of the Washington Post spent a year examining the human remains collection as well as thousands of documents at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, administered by the Smithsonian.

The museum is the most-visited within the Smithsonian, and has one of the world’s largest collections of body parts, at least 30,700 of them, including bones, teeth, skulls, and mummies.

In an ongoing exclusive series, the first article of which was published Aug. 14 and shared with me by the WP, it was reported that the museum houses 255 brains, taken upon death from Black and Indigenous people, among them Filipinos “exhibited” at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (St. Louis World’s Fair).

History buffs will recall that at the time, the U.S. was less than 10 years into its occupation of the Philippines, after buying the archipelago for $20 million from Spain. The Fair showcased some 1,200 “primitive” Filipinos from at least 10 ethnic groups in a 47-acre artificial village, an anthropological exhibit where White folks gawked at the Filipinos as if the latter were animals in a zoo.

Among the people there were Igorots, considered by anthropologist Albert Jenks as the most “uncivilized” tribe in the Philippines.

Eating dog, a ceremonial activity for Igorots, was made a daily spectacle at the Fair to emphasize how “savage” Filipino customs were.

The exhibit was one of the ways the U.S. government sought to justify the occupation of the Philippines under the New Manifest Destiny, which pushed for the expansion of territory to project American dominance and culture and White superiority.

Using the Philippine village at the Fair as evidence of the “backwardness” of “their little brown brothers,” the U.S. whitewashed its colonization activities and led its citizens to believe that its interference in Philippine affairs was its responsibility and duty.

Going back to the brains, the Washington Post found that their acquisition for the Smithsonian’s ‘racial collection’ was driven by one man, Ales Hrdlicka.

An anthropologist and curator who led the Smithsonian’s physical anthropology division for over 40 years, he believed that White people were superior and collected body parts in an attempt to prove his racist theories.

However, the Post learned that while Hrdlicka offered the brains to other researchers for their use, they found no evidence that he did any substantive research himself on the brains he collected.

The summer of the Fair, Hrdlicka traveled to St. Louis, “hoping to take brains from the Filipinos who died” there. He returned to D. C. with the brain of

KHARKIV, Ukraine—Scooping up shards of metal near her toddler’s trampoline, Tatiana Filipova recalled how Russian drones pummeled her neighborhood in northeastern Ukraine after their return from a war-imposed exile in the center of the country.

Filipova’s family was among hundreds of thousands of people who fled the border region of Kharkiv as it was systematically shelled early in Russia’s invasion, leaving smashed-up residential areas eerily empty.

Residents poured back after Moscow’s forces were driven out last September, despite the threat of Russian strikes and a new push to recapture the frontline hub of Kupiansk.

“My life was paused,” Filipova told AFP in her garden patio, recalling the day she fled the encroaching war in March last year.

The 35-year-old marketing executive fled to the relative safety of central Ukraine with her three-year-old daughter Valery, three cats and as many belongings that could fit in her car. Her husband, Vladyslav, refused to leave his ailing grandfather.

After months in limbo, Filipova returned when the Russians retreated, but the illusion of safety was shattered when their neighborhood was hit in a midnight attack earlier this month.