Philadelphia museums hold strands of hair from Indigenous people. That may soon change.

In the 19th century, Philadelphia lawyer and naturalist Peter Browne was a major collector of human hair: strands from George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, and hundreds of others, famous and unknown. He amassed enough to fill more than a dozen books of hair, including animal fur, in his pursuit of understanding humanity.

Browne’s ignorant theories on race — for instance, that different races were actually different species — have not stood the test of time, but his large collection of human hair has only grown in the public’s interest; it was the subject of a 2018 book and a 2008 exhibit at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University on the hair of American presidents.

Earlier this year, his name resurfaced in the halls of the Mütter Museum and the Academy of Natural Sciences, where his books are held, after new federal regulations were announced regarding the repatriation of human remains and objects of cultural significance to Native American tribes. As museums in New York and Chicago removed or covered up displays to comply, the update impacted several Philadelphia-area institutions, largely behind the scenes.

Among the changes they needed to make: taking a closer look at Browne’s books of hair.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was passed in 1990 to compel museums, universities, and other institutions to return human remains and important objects to federally recognized tribes. It created a registry where institutions must report their inventories to allow tribes to potentially claim those remains and objects.

The act’s updates this year followed decades of slow-moving progress at museums nationwide. In January 2023, a ProPublica investigation exposed more than 600 institutions who still had Native American human remains in their collections and had not yet returned — or in some cases, even resisted efforts to return — them to tribes. It included the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, the Mütter, and a dozen others in the Philadelphia and South Jersey region who reported housing the remains of 2,368 Native American people.

As of late 2023, the remains of more than 96,000 Native American individuals were still in museum and university collections, including 90,803 that are considered “culturally unidentifiable,” meaning that the institution has not determined to which present-day tribe the remains belong.

President Joe Biden’s administration has prioritized accelerating the repatriation efforts in recent years, working with Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary. Institutions must report human remains, funerary objects, and other objects of cultural significance in their holdings, and conduct outreach to connect and consult with Native American tribes.

Effective this year, the Department of the Interior has implemented a five-year deadline for institutions to take inventory and return the remains and objects to tribes, expediting the process and granting tribes greater authority in the decision-making. They’ve also expanded the types of items that need to be added to the registry.

“The definition of human remains has been expanded, and now includes human hair,” said Kate Quinn, executive director of the Mütter, which holds one of Browne’s books and is in the middle of auditing its entire collection. “Within the collections here, we do have human hair that was Native American, so we’re putting that on the [federal] registry.”

In total, the Mütter has reported holding the remains of 60 Native American people. Quinn says since ProPublica’s investigation, the museum has finalized two repatriations and has seven more pending. During that time, the Mütter has been embroiled in debates about the ethics of keeping and displaying its vast collection of human remains from around the world.

The Academy of Natural Sciences also plans to report some of Browne’s collection to comply with the updates to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. A spokesperson for Drexel, which owns the academy, said the museum houses about 300 locks of human hair, including 20 locks from Native American people whose tribal affiliations were noted by Browne. The academy will communicate with those tribes, whose names they did not disclose, “to determine their wishes on how best to care for and/or restitute these hair locks,” said the spokesperson.

The updated regulations now also require that museums get consent from tribes before displaying or researching cultural objects. At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, one artifact may require consent to continue displaying: a Kaskasian Beaver Bowl that a judge took from present-day Illinois in 1795. It is on loan from the Penn Museum; a spokesperson says they are consulting the tribe about the display.

The Penn Museum holds the largest collection of Native American human remains in Philadelphia, with a total of 632 remains reported. So far, Penn says it has transferred 274 sets of human remains and 752 associated funerary objects back to tribes. Director of collections Laura Hortz Stanton says they are continuing to make progress and are prepared to meet the new deadline with a team of new staffers.

Earlier this year, the museum came under fire for its handling of human remains that were part of white supremacist and scientist Samuel G. Morton’s crania collection. After the skulls of 19 Black Philadelphians were identified in 2019, the museum moved forward with a burial service that experts said was rushed and unethical.

The museum initially planned to bury 20 skulls, but a group of volunteer researchers who have been critical of Penn’s repatriation efforts uncovered archival evidence showing that one of the individuals had Native American ancestry — a porter from Chester County named John Voorhees. Days before the burial, Penn decided to withhold Voorhees’ skull with the plan of making it available for tribes to claim. Though he would have been considered “culturally unidentifiable,” the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act has now expanded the criteria for tribes that are eligible to make claims.

“One of the really wonderful things within the new [regulations] is that they allow for geographic affiliation. We don’t necessarily have to have an exact cultural affiliation, but we can move forward based on geography,” said Stanton. “Knowing that John Voorhees was in Philadelphia and Chester County, we can then move forward by consulting with geographically affiliated tribes.”

Those tribes should include the Delaware Tribe, among others, but the museum did not disclose who they will contact.

As area museums continue to make progress, these updates should make the process easier for them to return remains to descendants, so that the remains may be respectfully put to rest. The remaining question is whether these institutions will deliver.

Staff writer Peter Dobrin contributed to this article.