‘ When the dead come to you, you have to pay attention’
Rick Hill spent decades repatriating the remains of his Indigenous ancestors from museums. He came out of retirement for one more case
Rick Hill opened the email and saw the evidence of another relative’s desecrated remains.
He was weary. From decades working to reclaim bones looted by colonizers and gawkers. From the indignity of having to explain to museum officials why they belong in sacred ground.
“I just couldn’t go into another museum, open up another cardboard box and ... see another dead Native relative.”
He had retired. He had also moved on from teaching history at Six Nations Polytechnic in Ohsweken, Ont. He had been harvesting corn and spending time with his kids, who are five, 10 and 15 years old. He had chosen to focus on the living.
Then he heard the story of Dr. William Osler’s trip to Berlin in 1884 to visit his former teacher Dr. Rudolf Virchow, the world’s leading pathologist. He heard how Osler, who would later be heralded as the father of modern medicine, gave Virchow “four choice skulls of North American Indians” as a gift, “knowing well how acceptable they would be.”
In 2018, two Toronto doctors sought information about the skulls from an anthropological society that held Virchow’s collection of remains in Berlin. They were initially told that a search turned up none, then a scholar in charge of the artifacts said she would take a deeper look but never followed up.
Through generations and world wars, Virchow’s curios seemed lost or forgotten.
An investigation by the Star and its German media partners — NDR, WDR and Suddeutsche Zeitung — then found what was, all along, in the society’s possession: documents from its archives that detailed the skulls’ origins. Those documents led to another key discovery 25 kilometres east of Berlin.
The details were in the email sent to Hill.
He decided to work one more case.
“When the dead come to you,” he said, “you have to pay attention.”
In anticipation of his visit with Virchow in 1884, Osler reached out to Dr. Robert Bell and solicited him for skulls.
The Toronto- born son of a minister and amateur geologist, Bell worked as a field explorer for the Geological Survey of Canada for decades. The survey aimed to help develop the country’s minerals by mapping its geology. When survey scientists reconned an area, they also collected information on its natural history and Indigenous people, said Saskatchewanbased historian Bill Waiser. The survey had its own museum in Ottawa.
The museum bought or received donations of Indigenous skulls and other artifacts, according to Waiser’s research. Bell, who started as a summer field worker and eventually rose to acting director in 1901, “would have been aware of these museum acquisitions,” Waiser said, adding that he does not know whether Bell provided Osler with the skulls, and if so where he got the remains.
Bell helped Osler send the remains far from their home. More than 130 years later, his name, handwritten in a forgotten ledger book, helped begin the process to repatriate them.
The worn ledger book detailing Virchow’s human remains inventory, found by the Star this year, proved to be a key detail that had eluded previous attempts to find the skulls.
Written under a sequence of four entries on the yellowed pages is: “Dr. R. Bell Geol. Survey Ottawa.”
The book was held in the archives of BGAEU, an anthropological society co- founded by Virchow 150 years ago.
The archives director said he was surprised by the find. He said five years earlier an American doctor visited Berlin seeking information on the skulls but struck out. He likely had focused his search of Virchow’s archives for materials that named Osler. Maybe he didn’t know the skulls’ connection to Bell.
When in 2018 Toronto doctors Nav Persaud and Philip Berger emailed BGAEU and were told no records of the skulls existed, they felt brushed off. They believe a thorough search was not done.
The ledger found this year contained a numbering system that corresponded to another set of records: index cards prepared around 1900 that revealed two of the skulls were not in fact of “British Columbia Indians,” as Osler had described his gift.
Instead, the cards read: “Skull of ancient Indian. Dug up near Caledonia on the Grand River.”
Rick Hill stepped into his house from the cornfield on his land in Ohsweken, about 10 kilometres southwest of where the Grand flows through Caledonia.
“I know it might sound a little strange,” he said, “but our ancestors who are buried in the ground helped that corn mature every year. They helped the Earth continue its cycle. To disrupt that, to remove them from that, causes a cosmic break in the way the world was intended to be. So this is why we work so hard to recover them … Because it’s not only our family obligation, but it’s important so that the natural cycles of life can continue.”
Hill is a citizen of the Beaver Clan of the Tuscarora Nation.
His line of reclamation work started in 1973 when he walked into a small museum in Buffalo, N. Y., and saw the skeleton of an Indigenous person, who lived about 1,000 years ago, as he was found in a grave in the area. It was presented as a teaching tool, he recalled.
“It just really bothered me … And as I began to explore what this means to our people and to myself, I began to realize it would be a great desecration to remove somebody from their burial place and then examine them, put numbers on the bones and to display them. I thought, we’re teaching more about the people who display it than the people they’re trying to present.”
The next year his brother died in a car accident, and Hill continued ruminating on the body after death.
“It then set me on a life to basically become like an undertaker, having to go out and ( recover) the remains of our deceased relatives, to fix them back up, to see them, take care of them, to console a grieving family, my friends and relatives, and then we turn them back to the earth where they belong.”
Rudolf Virchow collected skulls and remains from Nanaimo to Macau. Explorers and doctors brought them to him.
Museum records detail a pipeline of bones from Canada. He possessed the remains of Inuit from Labrador and the dead of Victoria, Comox, Bull Harbour and South Saanich in British Columbia.
A photo shows him standing in his collection, skeletons beside him, skulls on the floor. It is not known if those photographed remains included his skulls from Canada, or perhaps those that records show he also got from Manila, Hawaii, Odesa, Algiers, Bogota, “Babilonia,” Yucatan, Warsaw, “Benghasi,” Idaho Territory and “Maori.”
Born in the Prussian countryside in 1821, Virchow advocated for greater government involvement in health care. Elected to Berlin’s city council in 1859, he worked to improve the sewage system. He also served as a member of the Reichstag parliament from 1880 to 1893.
On his first trip back to Berlin since his student days, Osler took in Virchow’s morning lecture on thrombosis and marvelled at how in one day his former teacher not only taught at the Pathological Institute but also addressed the town council and then “made a budget speech in the House.”
Virchow gained international acclaim for his exploration of how changes in normal cells cause diseases. He was also an anthropologist, discovering ancient houses in northern Germany. He founded the German Anthropological Society in 1869.
He collected bones “to document human diversity, not to distinguish human races,” said anthropologist Barbara Tessmann, who manages the Virchow Collection for the society in a part- time role.
“If you look at people from the North Sea, for example, they have long, narrow skulls and long, narrow faces. If you look at people from the Alpine region, their heads are rather round. Black Africans, they have long, narrow skulls in contrast to, say, Chinese — they have broad, short faces,” Tessmann said.
Dr. Claus Pierach, former head of the American Osler Society and the doctor who searched but failed to find the skulls in Berlin, said Virchow “thought the race concern needed a closer look, only in the end to conclude we don’t learn much about it … that in the end race seemed rather imprecise as a scientific concept.
“I know of no evidence that Virchow or Osler felt that race should influence the treatment of patients,” Pierach said.
The society controls Virchow’s collection in Friedrichshagen, 25 kilometres east of Berlin, in a skull depot on the third floor of the bureaucratic Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation building. It is not open to visitors except for approved researchers.
There are 3,400 human and primate skulls on the third floor. “How many monkeys we have in the collection, I don’t know,” Tessmann said.
There are other skulls in the building, too, including that of Austrian doctor, anthropologist and explorer Felix von Luschan. Those belong to another collection. The building holds 11,000 human skulls.
Each of Virchow’s skulls is in a paper bag. Each paper bag is stamped with “Rudolf- VirchowSkull- Collection.” Five bagged skulls per cardboard box. If the skulls from Osler are here, the index cards in the archives say they should be numbered R. V. 979, R. V. 980, R. V. 981 and R. V. 982.
“We’ll never know the names of these people,” Hill had said a few weeks before the Star visited the skull depot on Nov. 5, adding that he believes they were likely among the original inhabitants of what is now southern Ontario and western New York. “They lived in longhouses like we did. They planted corn like we did. They spoke an Iroquoian language like we do. And they conducted their ceremonies like we do. There’s a blood tie to them.”
The attendant brings the box to a viewing table and removes the bags from the box and then the skulls from their bags, one by one. All four are ohne Unterkiefer — missing the lower jawbone. In black ink across the forehead someone had assigned the skulls a number. Along the side of two of the skulls, in the same black ink, are the same words found on the index cards: “Skull of ancient Indian. Dug up near Caledonia on the Grand River.”
“It is awful to think of these remains kept in that state and mostly forgotten,” Persaud said. “I reviewed some remains held by other museums, and I do not recall ever seeing writing on the skulls. There were sometimes tags affixed so as not to alter the remains.
“A wrong was done in the past … in digging up these remains and transporting them overseas. I would think that an institution that holds these remains today and the individuals who are in charge … would want to do everything possible to set things right … Why is it the responsibility of others to do this?”
Hill opened the email and reviewed the paper trail leading from 1884 to Friedrichshagen in 2020.
He started drafting a case statement. Though he had retired, this part was muscle memory.
Acase statement is a draft letter that includes the request for the repatriation of remains and the evidence that supports it. The statement is sent to Six Nations chiefs of the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk and Tuscarora. If they agree, the chiefs council refers the statement to its standing committee on burial rules and regulations to start a dialogue with the museum or collector.
Hill sent the statement to the chiefs for their review and awaits a response.
He thinks about the two skulls. How it was not their expectation to end up in Osler’s hands passed to Virchow’s vast collection.
“I’m sure their spirit’s a little confused, like, what the heck are we doing way over here? Sometimes the dead have the ability to mobilize people … so that we can start thinking about, what does it mean to be human? What is the nature of the relationship between the Indigenous people and Canada? … It’s not lofty. That’s the real stuff.”
How the statement from Six Nations will be received, if it is approved and sent to Berlin, is unclear. Tessmann said that with past repatriation requests, “we have done this by negotiating exclusively with governments. So that there are simply no difficulties.”
In a recent repatriation effort that made headlines, a Scottish museum’s policy that a claim must be supported by a national government frustrated attempts to return two Indigenous skulls to Newfoundland.
Hill is patient. He’s had to be. For decades, he pressed and cajoled museum officials while trying to control his sadness and anger. Since 1973, Hill has repatriated thousands of remains and other sacred objects for Six Nations, including the skeleton he saw in a Buffalo museum in 1973, which helped start his career in repatriations.
“Those two people whose skulls are ( in Germany) still have intelligence. They know what’s going on around them … It’s created an expectation between whoever that person was, whoever’s skull that is, and us. They expect us to act in a certain way to do the best we can to bring them back home.
“We’re going to do that.”