The archive of a 19th-century race scientist. Samuel George Morton (1799-1851) was a Philadelphia physician, naturalist, and central figure at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia from the 1820s until his death as its president. Morton is known today as among the most influential architects of scientific racism in the United States, both for his publications – most notably Crania Americana (1839), Crania Aegpytiaca (1844), and a Catalogue of Skulls (1849) – and for the collection of nearly one thousand human skulls from across the world, amassed and measured during his lifetime to supply the “data” for these works.

The Library Company of Philadelphia holds hundreds of letters of incoming correspondence sent to Morton, as well as many of Morton’s private notes, records, and manuscript drafts of his publications. This archive details how Morton mobilized a global network of colleagues and associates to send him skulls taken from battlefields, dissection halls, graves, and communal sites for the interment and commemoration of the dead, from Australia, Egypt, India, Liberia, Peru, and beyond, often through currents of empire and in the wake of colonial violence. These documents also contain traces of Indigenous resistance to grave-robbing, and of the inconsistencies and biases which riddle Morton’s racist project.

This project is led by historian and anthropologist Paul Wolff Mitchell and Zachariah Julian (Jicarilla Apache), who is a singer, songwriter, performer, and artistic producer for We Are the Seeds, a Philadelphia-based organization educating and celebrating contemporary Indigenous arts and cultures. In collaboration with Paul, Zachariah will produce a live performance drawing on Morton’s papers, interweaving stories of Indigenous pasts and presents, imagining how the archives of a 19th century race scientist with settler-colonial presumptions of Indigenous extinction can be read, and put to rest, in ways that support Indigenous life and futurity.