ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

“Bringing Our Ancestors Home: Reclaiming Indigenous Bodies from the Legacies of Settler-Colonial Biogeography”

• In Event: Histories of Biogeography Part 2

English Abstract

As Indigenous activist June Oscar AO notes in The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Repatriation: Return, Reconcile, Renew (2020), “Repatriation as an academic study, practice and as a global Indigenous movement for justice and truth-telling knows few bounds.” This presentation will examine the project Bringing Our Ancestors Home: Robinson-Huron Treaty–Chicago Field Museum Repatriation Project (2017–2023), which investigated how Indigenous human remains from the Robinson-Huron Treaty territory of northern Ontario, Canada, were taken for display at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. In the nineteenth century, European and North American geographers sought to categorize the natural world through meteorology, hydrography, and biogeography, extending these classifications to human populations. Within this colonial framework, geographers and ethnologists developed theories of evolution and environmental determinism, asserting that the physical environment shaped the development of societies and bioregions. Competing theories emerged—such as polygenesis versus monogenesis, or the role of migration in adaptation—but all reinforced a racial hierarchy positioning “the West” as the pinnacle of modernity and capitalism. The 1893 Exposition, marking the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival, became a key site for displaying such hierarchies. This paper argues that the theft and exhibition of Indigenous remains from northern Ontario were integral to constructing these racial biogeographies. In particular, it situates anthropologist Franz Boas's work at the Anthropological Exhibition within the broader context of settler colonial biogeography, revealing how scientific classification and display practices served to legitimize dispossession and racialized understandings of human difference.

Author

• Kirsten Greer, Departments of Geography and History, Nipissing University