Memory, Death, and Journalism 

Martha Sara Jack held up to the computer a framed black-and-white photo of her cousin Mary Sara, an 18-year-old Sami-Alaskan girl on the roof of the Roosevelt Hotel in Seattle. In another photo, the same girl was a child in snowy Akiak, Alaska, peering at the camera from behind her mother.  

Mary died of tuberculosis in 1933 in a Seattle sanitarium not long after the Roosevelt Hotel photo was taken and 12 years before Martha was born. But Martha grew up hearing stories of her cousin from her mother, who had been Mary’s best friend, and from Mary’s parents.  

“She really had a big impact on [my mother’s] life, as young as she was,” Martha says. 

Yet none of her family knew what my colleague Nicole Dungca and I had discovered: that the doctor attending Mary at her death later mailed her brain to an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution who was building a “racial brain collection.”  

Mary’s was one of several families that Nicole—an investigative reporter—and I would end up meeting during our year of reporting together for The Washington Post on the Smithsonian Institution’s collection of over 280 brains and 30,000 other human remains. The brains were largely gathered by Ales Hrdlicka, a Smithsonian anthropologist with ties to eugenics who wanted to study race through physical “specimens.” We found that while the Smithsonian was obligated to offer to return remains of Native American and Native Hawaiian people to tribal communities under federal law, it had no obligation to be proactive about remains from other communities.  

Our investigation was published as a 15-part series from August to December 2023. It included the Post’s first illustrated investigation, “Searching for Maura,” which was recognized as a Pulitzer Prize finalist in May.  

This project taught me about journalism, people, grief, memory, and death. Being part of it, talking to families and sharing this story, was the greatest honor. And it all started with an Instagram post.

Searching for Maura

After graduating in 2021, I moved to Washington, D.C., with two of my closest friends from UMass. I had just begun as a freelance writer at a startup, and the plan was to write and to pay my bills by working at a restaurant. But as I passed New York City in my U-Haul, I got an email that the startup was folding. The next morning, I climbed over my boxes and took the 90 Metrobus down Florida Avenue for an interview at the restaurant Le Diplomate. 

Working night shifts did not support a productive hunt for reporting jobs. When I made it to the final round of interviews for one job, in my exhaustion I mixed up the time and showed up late. But one of the interviewing editors still invited me to freelance. I started writing for Kevin Drew at U.S. News & World Report and took a break from the restaurant, thinking I’d be gone for only a couple months. 

It was during that time, in January 2022, that I came across an activist in St. Louis working to honor the memory of someone named Maura.  

Filipino American artist and activist Janna Añonuevo Langholz was marking the unmarked graves of Filipinos who died at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, when a photo of her graveyard markers popped up on my Instagram feed. After we spoke, she sent me a document showing that the Smithsonian had acquired the brains of four Filipinos from the fair. She thought one of the brains was from a young woman named Maura, who was Kankanaey Igorot, an Indigenous group from the Philippines.  

Maura had traveled to St. Louis from her hometown of Suyoc in the Cordillera mountains of Luzon only to die of pneumonia before the fair officially began. The document Janna found said the Smithsonian acquired the cerebellum of a “Suyoc Igorot.” Janna thought it must belong to Maura—the only known person from Suyoc to die at the fair.  

How many people had this happened to? I wondered. How many human brains did the Smithsonian have? Did people consent to having their brains donated? Do their families know they are still there?  

I was offered a job at The Washington Post as a copy aide on April Fool’s Day, 2022. Aaron Wiener, then editor of the Post’s “Retropolis” section on history, accepted my story pitch about Janna’s work and the Smithsonian’s brain collection. Soon after I started, I interviewed Smithsonian staff and asked how many human brains they had. The anthropologist Hrdlicka had boasted in a 1916 article of having over 200, but contemporary staff said they didn’t think they had that many. However, they soon sent me a spreadsheet showing the Smithsonian was holding over 250 brains from around the world.

The Copy Aides

At UMass Amherst, I learned about journalism from my colleagues at the Daily Collegian, and my professors Rodrigo Zamith and Razvan Sibii, who guided me through creating a trilingual magazine called The Open for my senior thesis with Professor Paul Musgrave. Freelancing taught me to advocate for myself and put my thoughts on paper. But the Post was my first time inside a newsroom.  

Copy aides, news aides, and editorial aides are the traditional entry-level roles of the newsroom. We sort and send mail, archive papers, fix the printers, and everything in between. But we are also talented journalists, helping with reporting for a variety of departments and writing freelance on our nights and days off. I could not have asked to work with a more inspiring group of people. They covered some of my shifts as I dug through Smithsonian archives, matching each brain in the spreadsheet to the original records to identify people and their families.  

Copy aides at the Post also take shifts on different desks. I started working with editors and reporters on the investigative desk, who taught me everything I know about investigative reporting. David Fallis and Sarah Childress encouraged me to pitch the project to them as a series, and in January 2023, they officially took it on and partnered me with Nicole—with her dedication to elevating Filipino stories, she had begun working with me months earlier. My managers cleared my schedule so I could work on the story full time.  

Over 90 people joined us on the project as it snowballed over the next few months. We were all moved by Maura’s story and wanted to approach it in a respectful and intentional way. Audio, video, graphics, photo, design, data, translators, and more began to work with us on the best way to do so.  

Hannah Good and Jenna Pirog—visual editors at the Post—piloted a creative way to share the story of Janna’s work and the search for Maura. We partnered with Filipino artist Ren Galeno on the Post’s first “illustrated investigation.” Following in the rich tradition of comics journalism, we told the story through extensively researched illustrations, making it possible to flip often racist historical photos and narratives to obtain a different viewpoint.  

See the illustrated investigation “Searching for Maura,” among the finalists for the Pulitzer Prizes:

We also met Antonio S. Buangan, a relative of people who went to the fair with Maura. He had spent years researching her small cohort from Suyoc. In his daughter’s home in San Francisco, he walked us through what he knew about the fair and the relatives he met as a child. But he didn’t know who had been related to Maura.  

When Nicole and I set out to find the families of individuals whose brains were gathered for this “racial brain collection,” we met people like Tony, who were able to build a bridge to the past. 

‘Give him his peace’

By the time our first article was published, we hadn’t been able to locate any D.C. families, despite combing through death certificates at the D.C. Archives. Then, former Smithsonian employee Karen Mudar reached out to us. She had worked at the Smithsonian Repatriation Office in the 1990s, studied records on the brains, and offered to share all her notes. She was one of many current and former Smithsonian employees we spoke to who were both appalled by this collection and had found themselves responsible for its care.  

When we met up with Karen, we were amazed: Scribbled in the margins of one document was a list of the names we were missing, including more than 10 individuals from D.C.  

We began digging into D.C. Archives, family search archives, the Library of Congress, public libraries, graveyard records, ancestry.com, and even baptism records in local churches to try and find these individuals’ families. Through this research we identified relatives of two children whose brains were in the collection: Moses Boone and Frances Sullivan.  

In December 2023, Nicole and I met Michelle Farris—a distant relative of Moses Boone—at Mount Zion Cemetery in Georgetown, where Moses had been buried in an unmarked grave after he died at just 21 months old. The historically Black graveyard is decaying: gravestones fall down the sides of overrun hills and become part of trees. Any spot of grass could be his grave.  

“I just want to give him his peace,” says Michelle.

The ever-present past

After we started reporting the investigative series, the secretary of the Smithsonian, Lonnie G. Bunch III, created a task force to address the Smithsonian’s collections of remains. In February 2024, it released its recommendations: All the remains should be returned to families or descendant communities as quickly as possible. If adopted into policy, this would be a historic shift for the institution. 

Across the country and around the world, museums are increasingly reckoning with bodies they dug up or received from morgues, hospitals, battlefields, and massacres. How the Smithsonian will address all 30,000 human remains is an ongoing question.  

For the individuals from D.C. for whom we couldn’t definitively identify relatives, we listed their names in the paper and published them online. The families of Moses and Frances say they hope to see their relatives' brains buried in the D.C. graveyards where their bodies are interred. 

Six months after our first conversation with Martha Sara Jack, Nicole and I, along with photojournalist Salwan Georges and video journalist Joy Sung, joined Mary’s family as they lowered her brain into a hole near her grave in Seattle. Her resting place was an open field—her body had been buried in an unmarked grave after her death over 90 years ago. Only this spring was it marked with a headstone. 

The many stories that families shared will stay with me for a lifetime. I will pass St. Aloysius church in northeast D.C. and know Frances prayed there. When visiting museums, I will think of Mary and Maura, and wonder about the more than 250 human brains that are still in Smithsonian storage and the people we didn’t find.  

And I will continue to marvel at the power of bringing back their stories with journalism, and the many people working to reveal the ever-present past. 

Claire Healy ’21 is an Esserman Investigative Fellow at the Miami Herald. During her tenure as a newsroom copy aide at The Washington Post, she was a 2024 Pulitzer Finalist for "Searching for Maura," part of a series Healy co-authored called "The Collection." The series won the 2024 Dori J. Maynard Justice Award and received a special citation in the 2024 Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting. Healy is the founder and editor of the magazine The Open.  

Read the series of investigative articles that resulted from Healy’s journey and The Post’s account of the reporting process for the series:

Connecting the dots

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990 requires institutions to return human remains and cultural items to lineal descendants, Native American tribes, or Native Hawaiian organizations. But many (including museums like the Smithsonian) have been slow to comply.  

By contrast, UMass has taken a proactive role in this restorative practice. After repatriating 186 individuals and more than 5,000 cultural items thus far, UMass does still have a small number of unidentified human remains and “NAGPRA-sensitive” cultural items in its possession—“part of the university’s legacy of scientific racism,” notes Julie Woods ’13MA ’24PhD, director of repatriation and NAGPRA coordinator at UMass. Consultations to determine cultural affiliation are ongoing. 

New regulations and timelines for NAGPRA were introduced in January 2024, which require organizations to be more proactive about returning human remains and cultural items and to obtain consent before exhibiting them. But UMass has already been reaching out and engaging in consultations with tribes for many years. Woods views UMass as a leader in this work regionally, acting as a resource for many other institutions, and says, “If we can be a guide to others in supporting repatriation, it’s our moral obligation to do so; it’s also an extension of UMass’s commitment to service for the greater good.”