All right, why don't I go ahead and we can start with some of the background information. First of all, welcome to everyone. We're going to have our seminar this afternoon on the topic of human remains of questionable providence within university museums. And we have a terrific panel of people who are going to talk about this subject from various perspectives. The panel will be moderated by Willie Lynch. So let me introduce him here. He is M. William Lynch PhD, which can imagine ever calling him William, he is Willie to all of us. Truly one of the I think best known people at Harvard University and also one of the most valued. He is currently in the role of associate provost for research, helping to oversee the enormity of all of the research that happens at Harvard University. He brings to this position an extensive background in research, education, administration, science policy, intellectual property, consulting outreach. And I think this gives him the unique skills and knowledge that he needs to oversee a variety of strategic initiatives both within and beyond Harvard. Before taking on this role, he's had a number of other leadership roles at the university. I'll just mention a couple of them. He served as strategic advisor to the dean of the Harvard Medical School, also chief of staff to the dean of the faculty of medicine. He has been the executive director or maybe still is of the Massachusetts consortium on pandemic readiness or mass CPR. And before that he served as direct executive director of the department of stem cell and research biology. We are going to turn it over to you now and, oh, not not quite yet we have to go through the logistics next slide. Okay, so, first of all, just how we are going to run the session. I see you, as we all know by now you've got both the chat box as well as the q amp a box down there. The chat box can be seen by everyone. But use that primarily for either communicating with the group as a whole if you'd like to, or for questions you have of a technical nature, which would go to our wonderful administrator Julia Lucius also on the call as you can see she'll be monitoring and and can give you any help that you might need. The q amp a box is the one I would like to ask you to use for particular comments and questions that you would like to go to the panelists. So that's the one that I'll be looking at. During the course of our seminar and and be incorporating your your comments and questions into the general discussion. And these are some of our upcoming events where near in the end of the academic year but you can see we've still got some more of our regular consortia scheduled. And if you go to our website, bioethics dot hms dot harbor dot edu, you can find our calendar and you can get the information about how to register for these events. Next slide. And so I've already introduced Willie and now I'm going to turn it over to him to introduce our other panelists and to get our discussion started. Well thank you Bob for that kind introduction is always I wish my mother had been here to hear that so thank you for those generous words and especially for inviting me to assist with organizing the session today. I really appreciate the many things you've taught me over the years that I've been fortunate to know you. I am very grateful for the opportunity to actually be a fellow this year at the Center for bioethics, and I want to thank Harvard's Vice Provost for Research John Shaw. For his generous encouragement of my interest in the program, along with the fellowships director the wonderful Millie Solomon for generously guiding the fellowship cohort each week. It is an impressive group. And I wish to acknowledge my fellow fellows, Josh Gertin and Jean Soleduke for making some important connections for me that helped me to take my inquiries further, as well as Katie Peeler and Rachel Asher for helping me to think better and more deeply. My primary research in human development and disease goes back over decades as a bench scientist before I came became an administrator, where I investigated some of the rarest of the rare of genetic blood diseases. These are conditions that are so uncommon that whenever I met anyone who had heard of one of them. They were either a blood researcher like myself, or they were a person with a pretty hard story. My involvement with bioethics formal and otherwise spans some 30 years. Much of what I've learned has been contact related with the public, including work to obtain formal consent from people seeking enrollment as research subjects. I have sat on ethics related panels committees and served in a variety of other ways. Like all of us I have listened, read, written things asked and responded to questions made so many slides, but I've also been yelled at I've been cussed a few times, and I have learned a lot. The triad of respect for persons beneficence and justice are the basic ethical principles described in the 1979 Belmont report, as I was recently reminded by my fellowship colleague Kim Serpico and they remain excellent guiding lights. Now, back while I was still working at Harvard Medical School, I was asked to help staff Harvard steering committee on human remains and University Museum collections, which was formed by President Larry back out and shared by Evelyn Hammons. Evelyn and some of the members of that committee, including Bob Trug, offered outstanding insights from their work this past February in another panel discussion here at the Center for bioethics. The request to support the committee's efforts came to me in part because the scope of their undertaking was to include the Warren anatomical museum at the Countway Library of Medicine. And I'm grateful to Gene to Dean George daily for encouraging my role in that effort, and to HMS is Scott Pidal ski Dom hall and Alan Brandt, not to mention our own Bob Trug for our many thoughtful discussions as the HMS subcommittee. I learned a lot while working alongside Evelyn's entire committee, but I also came away with many questions regarding the ethical disposition of certain categories of human remains, and a desire to investigate those questions more deeply, given that I was also poised to contribute support to each of the two follow on committees whose formation was among the recommendations of the original steering committee. These would be the human remains in the Harvard Museum collections research review committee, chaired by faculty member Terry Capolini, and the human remains in the Harvard Museum's collection returns committee chaired by Ellen brand. I am honored to support their work, alongside my esteemed colleagues Melissa lobs and Rose Garcia from here in the Provost's office, and it much appreciated and ever helpful dialogue with Jane Pickering from the Peabody Museum. Now for the former group, the steering committee's report recommended the following. And it reads the university establish a human remains research review committee to work with museum staff on assessing requests to use human skeletal remains for research by Harvard and external scholars. The latter group arose from the recommendation that read the university immediately establish a human remains returns committee and appropriate supporting administration to oversee and implement returns that fall outside of the framework of NAGPRA, which is the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. But it goes on to say, this committee should exist as long as is needed in order to complete its work and should be situated within the Provost's office. Now, importantly, there's a structural link between the two committees that arises and an additional recommendation in sorry to be so technical here but I think this framing is important for our discussion today. The university commit to the continued investigation of the acquisition and presence of the remains in the museums and further commit to repatriating, reinterring or entering or returning remains where the provenance precludes them from ethical teaching or research used by the university based on criteria determined by the returns committee. Now, there are some points for consideration arising from this last recommendation, including that it intends to set standards by which certain human remains would be deemed ineligible for ethical teaching or research use. I wanted to know more about the distinctions relating to ethical teaching and research. My own earlier work in current biomedical research that I referred to a little while ago had provided me with a decent footing on approaches to such work when it uses modern human tissues and specimens. But what about in the case of human remains that were incredibly old, indeed, and to dating any modern notion of consent at all. What were the guiding principles there? Also, what specific features of provenance were considered sufficiently problematic that they crossed such an ethical threshold. Gaining personal insights into these and other related questions was something that I hoped would stand me in good stead, as I endeavor to support the work of each of the two human remains committees. This was additionally important to me, given President Bacow's words from his January 2021 letter to the Harvard community, in which he apologized for, quote, Harvard's role in collection practices that placed the academic enterprise above respect for the dead and human decency. To quote Abraham Heschel, some are guilty, but all are responsible. I believe that none of the people working at this institution today brought the human remains in question to our campus. But President Bacow assured the community that we were responsible, nevertheless. And that included me. What better way to consider these questions than to apply for and then undertake a fellowship at HMS Center for Bioethics. It was a good idea. In fact, fellowship applications are still open for another week if you're thinking about it out there on the call. But taken as a whole, this work has allowed me to serve with and learn from some incredible people. Let me introduce you to a few of them now. So collectively they are Christina Warner, Kelly Musteller, and Asia Lans. Bob Tru will also join us as a panelist, but I'll introduce everyone individually and then invite them to take a few minutes to offer some introductory comments regarding their own work and interest in today's subject. Now I'll begin with Dr. Warner. So to introduce you, if I may, Dr. Christina Warner is an associate professor of anthropology at Harvard University and group leader of microbiome sciences at the Max Planck Institute for evolutionary anthropology. She serves on the leadership team of the Max Planck Harvard Research Center for archaeoscience of the ancient Mediterranean and she serves on the Board of Trustees of the International Society for biomolecular archaeology. She specializes in the analysis of ancient DNA and proteins, including publishing the oldest oral microbiome to date from a 100,000 year old Neanderthal. And her research focuses on the study of ancient biomolecules to better understand past human diet, health, and evolution of the human microbiome. She is passionate about public education and outreach and created the Adventures in Archaeological Science coloring book, now available in more than 50 languages, including many indigenous and underrepresented languages. Christina was a member of the original steering committee on human remains, and is currently a member of the Human Remains in the Harvard Museum Collections Research Review Committee. Thank you for joining us this morning, Christina. Please share a few of your thoughts with us. Thank you so much, Willie. It's so lovely to be here. As Willie said so my career spans. Gosh. Nearly 20 years now of working with human remains in a lot of different contexts, primarily within archaeological contexts. And I think there's a tremendous amount we can learn about our shared humanity and about the human past by working with human remains but it must be done responsibly. It's really important that in recent years more attention has been brought to how collections have entered into museums and into kind of research contexts and that's a topic that I think was neglected for too long but is really, really important. One of the things that I think is very interesting within the field of archaeology actually began my career as a field archaeologist is the practices and procedures for field archaeology have changed and evolved a great deal over the last century of archaeological research and really transitioned from what was largely colonial enterprise to one that is much more collaborative and engaged and equitable between archaeologists and local communities and really integrating also with national governments. And so the field of archaeology and archaeological field work has has transformed enormously over this period and so contemporary archaeological projects are done very much in collaboration and under permits by national governments with collaboration with local researchers and universities and increasing with a lot of public outreach and broader impacts work with local communities. And I think that's incredibly important it allows us to do much more engaged and ethical and meaningful work and there's tremendous work being done in this in this area. And I find that in general around the world, many people around the world are very eager and interested to learn about their ancestors and to better frame their history. One problem I see though is, we do need to grapple with museums because many of the materials and museums have been acquired over periods of time. Earlier periods of time when these relationships were very different. And in many cases where the relationships with current populations that are directly affected by this sort of work are no longer actively maintained and I think it's a wonderful time to revisit this and think about how we can make this, this work more ethical and engaged and and to have dialogue with the people that at most directly affects I personally work all over the world and many many different contexts because I have a technical expertise that can apply to many different areas, whereas other archaeologists will focus in one region for their whole career. So there's a wide variety of approaches but I think having worked in many different areas and and many different countries of the world has a different perspective about ways of successfully working very collaboratively that's mutually beneficial and mutual interest around the world so I'm happy to talk about that later and some of the work that I've been trying to do to think about how we manage museum collections, some of which were acquired under very different circumstances and contexts and really requires a lot of active thought about how to repair relationships with communities around the world and to do work that we agree is useful and beneficial mutually. Thank you very much. Christina and again thank you for being here today. Next I'd like to introduce Dr Kelly must tell her. She's the executive director of the Harvard University Native American Program or UNEP is we know it fondly here in the provost office. In her role, she works toward the mission of supporting programming that fosters education scholarship and that builds community, and also collaborative efforts that advanced research and the well being of indigenous communities. She was the executive director for the citizen part of what I mean national cultural heritage center from 2010 to 2022. Here she oversaw the tribes cultural services including a museum cultural classes and programming and tribal archives. She also led her team in a multi year renovation of the CHC's exhibits, resulting in the museum's recognition as a top 10 native cultural center in the US by the Association of tribal archives libraries and museums in 2020 congratulations on that Kelly. She was the tribes tribal historic preservation officer, overseeing historic preservation for thousands of acres of tribal trust lands, as well as countless sites in the citizen Potawatomi's historic homelands. She was also the tribal NAGPRA coordinator. Kelly is currently a member of the human remains in the Harvard Museum Collections Returns Committee. Thank you for coming on to the call Kelly please tell us a little bit about yourself and your interest. Thank you so much really. Yes, as Willie mentioned I had a long career back in my home community of citizen Potawatomi nation and Shawnee Oklahoma. So I'm very recent addition to the team here at Harvard I've been here around nine months. And so the work that I did back in my community. I came to that aspect of my career. Kind of by accident. I was finishing up a PhD in American history whenever my tribal leadership called and said you need to come home and take over the museum and they are not people you say no to so I picked up my life and moved home and didn't have a strong background in museum study saying you know as a trained historian, but I learned very quickly on the job and one of the first sort of trials by fire that I went through was learning the law of NAGPRA and the application of NAGPRA, and the very complicated relationships that my community and other tribal communities like those in the Great Lakes region had with various institutions. And one of the first questions that I had to grapple with was, how do I as a NAGPRA officer for my community that went through three forced removals. How do we approach this because we're not in our homelands anymore. And so when we think about repatriation. We're not even home. You know, they never would have been in Oklahoma. And so that was one of the first deep questions I had to grapple with and it was something that I was actually a point of pain for many native communities for a very long time is because of collecting practices. Modern, you know, tribal governments are having to grapple with these questions of what do we do. How do we take care of our ancestors if we remove them from a museum collection and bring them here to a space they never been are we further traumatizing the community and these ancestors. So this was a lot of the ethical questions that I had to think about in my career started very early. And I was lucky to have tribal colleagues who are part of other Potawatomi tribes and other Great Lakes tribes who were great mentors, but also we came together and thought about these questions collectively and made decisions to where even if we knew that an ancestor came directly from my tribal community, I would often take a backseat to another tribal community who had land in our ancestral homelands who could take care of them and repatriate them in a way that was respectful. So, you know, I have a lot of experience with this not only grappling with these questions, but also how various communities come together to answer these questions about ethical stewardship and and repatriation in a way that puts the ancestors first. So, it's, it's what I think of as soul work. It's very emotionally draining. It is something that you don't do because of the paycheck. There are a lot of sleepless nights. There were moments when I knew I would be coming to a place like Harvard that the night before I'm sitting in my hotel room. Emotionally and mentally preparing myself to have to go into that space the next day and be with the ancestors and that weight that you carry. So, you know, what I bring to this conversation and what I've brought into my career is being humbled regularly by the strength of the people who do this work and being grateful for the relationships. Even in my 12 year career that I've been doing this, the, the mentality of many people in museum field and at universities has shifted. And the conversations are very different than they were even, you know, when I started this work. So I am grateful for these conversations and for people thinking about how we should question and challenge how we can be good stewards of these, these ancestors that, that are with us at this time and what we need to do. First and foremost, as the right thing because they were humans and then think about everything else second. Thank you. Thank you very much for that Kelly. I've now thought of at least five or six other questions. I want to ask you when we're finished today. Thank you so much for joining. I'd like to go next to Asia. Dr Asia lands as a postdoctoral fellow with the inequality in America initiative within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences here at Harvard. She completed her PhD in anthropology at Syracuse University, where she concentrated in historical archaeology and cultural heritage preservation. Her dissertation and publications integrate black feminist and critical race theory with bioarchaeological investigations. In her work, she traces the long history of violence against black women in the United States by merging skeletal data with archival resources. Her research has been supported by the Smithsonian Institution and the Ford Foundation. Her other interests include the ethics of museum collections, the objectification of human remains and the history of race. Asia was an important contributor during the original steering committee on human remains deliberations. As she shared insights from her archival research into the identities of the individuals whose remains reside within Harvard's museums, including providing a very thoughtful essay on provenance research as part of the committee's final report. Asia, thank you for agreeing to be on the panel today. Welcome your introductory comments to everyone. Hi, thanks for inviting me, Millie. So I'm a historical bioarchaeologist, how I identify. So, bioarchaeology for anyone who's not familiar, I work with human skeletal remains from the archaeological context, but most of my research actually takes place in museums and university collections. I was originally trained in biological anthropology, and, you know, as a black woman in a largely white field realized that there was just racism everywhere I turned. And when I was first trained and human remains, I was trained with the remains of indigenous Americans who fell through NAGPRO loopholes. And these remains were supposedly too old to be affiliated with any modern day tribe and so they were basically up for grabs actually circulated through many universities. And so I realized that there was something wrong here, especially when I shifted focus and started working in museums collections and realized that pretty much all the remains we have are similarly problematic. And so my research I've come to focus on members of the African diaspora and on the bodies of people who have been raised black here in the United States. I believe none of these remains should be curated in museum and university collections. In fact, people have been subject to unpaid labor since our forced arrival here to this stolen land and the continue access to our bodies in any form dehumanizes us and perpetuates the narrative that we are continuously available for use for exploitation. I consider what historian Dana Rainey Berry refers to as the historical spectacle black death in which she argues that black lives are made not matter, but our bodies are always valued for their potential to be exploited, even in death. Also in my work, I argue that the opinions of black communities at large need to be taken into account when we're doing this research. Fellow historical archaeologist, my friend Jed Wuklu, who's actually here in the audience, she draws on hard reduction theory. When she performs her her archaeological practice and she argues that we have to take into account ethical stakeholders. And she she refers to these as people who are directly implicated in topics and categories of a research project. Whenever we are doing a research in historical context, we're always drawing links between that group in the past and present bodies and these seemingly timeless categories. And so we have to think about, you know, how historical actors are tied to present day reference. And these ethical stakeholders were talking about the means of black folks of African descended peoples. Those are black people here in in this context where we're talking to the United States, who have you know this cultural tie to the individuals held in these collections. And I also think this is really important to note when we're talking about trying to identify remains in these collections because for many of these people I encounter there's no way I'm ever going to know exactly who they were or to be able to restore their actual identity to them. But we have to consider who the larger descendant group is. And we have to find ways to lay individuals to rest while minimizing harm to all black people involved in this process. Thank you very much Asian thank you for being here today. And I have a question for you later once we get going but I'm wondering if there's anything you wanted to say in advance pop. Yeah, I had a few reflections here I don't bring the expertise that the other panel members bring to this or, or the in depth experience. I wanted to just kind of reflect on what human remains mean. And so let me share some comments I think the perspective will be a little bit different and I really offer them with humility to learn. I thought I would begin with a phrase from the burial service in the Book of Common Prayer for the Anglican church, or they say, we therefore commit this body to the ground earth to earth ashes to ashes, thus to dust, ensure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life. I think that the phrasing there reminds us that human remains, or the remains of really any living thing after it dies, do literally become dust, you know they're in inanimate lump of common chemicals. So, I guess the theme I'll explore in just a couple of minutes is, how do we think about the relationship between the physicality, if you will, if human remains, versus the meanings or the spiritual or the ethical significance that we have invested in the remains. Just reflecting historically, there have been a broad range of practices for how human remains have been treated. So, sky burial, for example, which is common among Tibetan Buddhists is a practice where the body is dismembered or simply left exposed on a mountainside, typically to be consumed by animals, especially by carrying birds like vultures. On the other end of the spectrum, we've got practices of the ancient Egyptians, who sought to meticulously preserve the human remains as perfectly as possible. However, you know, of course, even these heroic efforts were ultimately futile, dust to dust is always the inevitable result. Got me to thinking a little bit about my own experience, particularly with my, my own parents, my mom and dad they're both past they were cremated. Some of their ashes are buried in a beautiful cemetery in Los Angeles, gorgeous views looking out over the Hollywood Hills. This gives me a place to visit them and remember them. And here in my home I have a jar that contains some of their remains. And, you know, I've scattered some of these ashes at various places that have particular meaning like the grounds of the church where they got married in Youngstown, Ohio. But when I think about it, it's not the ashes themselves that really have any meaning for me. I like I watch them blow away in the wind, even before they hit the ground, whatever sacredness there is about those remains for me resides entirely in the meanings that I attribute to them as, you know, as being my parents. So, all of these different practices but it's clear that in some context, particularly the ones we're talking about here the physicality is very important. You know, so for Native Americans one of the most important parts of the NAGPRA legislation is specifically to honor the return of the physical remains to the tribes from which they came. And so, I know that those remains have have dual meaning I mean obviously they do have great symbolic importance, but more than that it is the physicality itself. That is also significant. I might even draw parallels to the reverence that is given to the remains of saints in the Catholic Church, where we know that the preservation of these relics exist in many churches and cathedrals and just like with Native American remains. I think that there is great meaning to try ascribed to, to both the physicality as well as the other aspects of what they mean. I'm not really saying anything very profound here I know that these are mostly just some sort of musings or reflections on how we might differentiate between the physicality of remains versus what those meanings are and how they're important to us. Personally, but also a reflection of our of our of our own beliefs are our current culture and the historical heritage from which they come. So, I'm going to hopefully talk a little bit later about some aspects that I think are unique to medicine but those are just kind of some of the initial thoughts that I, that I had about this really. Thank you for sharing those thoughts Bob and thank you everyone for taking the time to to frame your own position on the on the panel today for everyone. I'm going to take moderators prerogative I prepared a few questions of my own for everybody before we see what the attendees have in mind. I'd like to start with you Christina if I may. I've been fortunate to hear you touch on a particular point rather eloquently regarding why some ancient human remains should be considered permissible objects of research while others are not even in cases in which the two groups of remains were obtained from the same overall historical site. Please are you able to offer some general points or guidance as to what distinctions you feel are most relevant when determining that certain human remains should be considered off limits for use in research and education. Thank you really. I mean, I think that. I mean, first off, I think we need to think about the descendant communities in the stakeholder communities and their feelings regarding specific sets of remains and I think that's essential and all over the world people feel very differently about human remains. There's a lot of different kinds of kind of taboos or cultural associations or permissibility that they feel with both the handling of the remains the storing of the remains the disposition of the remains the analysis of the remains. It's a very variable all over the world and is tied to religion and spirituality and but also tied to histories of colonialism or abuse or so I think I think one of the guiding principles is we have to keep forefront in our mind. What the individuals who are the descendants or the stakeholders or the inheritors of that legacy feel and I think that that's that's extremely important. I think we also have to keep in mind what why are we doing the research right the research should not be done in a way that causes harm or read traumatizes a group of people. I mean hopefully the research is done for mutual benefit to answer questions that that we can agree that we care about both on the for example on the scientific side, but also on the stakeholder side. And I think there are a lot of cases where groups can come together and decide there are certain questions that are really important that they would like to know and they would like to answer. And I've had a lot of really wonderful experiences, working with communities around the world to to determine you know how we might put together our resources to answer questions that we both care about. So I think I think that is really, really important I think it's also extremely important how the remains came to be in collections and to know that history. Because they they come into collections through very different processes and I think that's an essential part of understanding what is permissible and what is not. There are a lot of cases of remains that have come into collections through deceit trickery robbery disenfranchisement, and we need to look very closely at those remains and think, you know, when they're so unethically obtained. I don't think we can make a justification for research being done on them. Yes, we have the explicit support of the group to whom they belong or can be associated with. So I think that's first off, really important. I think I want to make it really clear that I don't think that research is in opposition to ethics here. I think they need to be tightly interwoven. And I think there are there. It's absolutely possible to do ethical research and that's the kind of research we should develop and work in partnership to create. And we don't have to fall back on remains that were collected under very unethical or very problematic or very harmful circumstances. It is possible to do research without that and that might include returning remains that we acknowledge were very improperly obtained. And also working together with communities today for future excavation that can be done with consent that can be done with knowledge that can be done collaboratively. So I think I want to make that kind of distinction here that research that there are ways to do research productively that doesn't set up an opposition to these groups. Thank you very much, Christina and for everybody on the panel. If you'd like to build on any of the comments that you've heard as I go through these initial questions, please do just see if anybody wanted to follow up on Christina's comments. Okay, I'll go to my next one. It's for you Kelly. I will approach a question about the context in which human remains are kept and especially when they're displayed. I have seen myself a variety of examples ranging in approach if not purpose from onsite indigenous cultural heritage centers of a type that you receive national recognition for leading through a place like the Harvard's Peabody Museum of archeology and biology. That is primarily academic but also with a public facing educational component to those that are more public attractions, like the American Museum of Natural History War, or the Smithsonian to distillants that I would consider a sort of PT Barnum like environment. The purpose and form of display, including from whose perspective it is constructed, whose story it actually seeks to tell and why seems vitally important to consider. In other words, and this gets back to a term that Asia use. I'm pointing to the distinction between scholarship and spectacle. You shared some insightful comments with me about this and in exchange we had recently I'm hoping that you might share some of those insights here. Yes, thank you so much Willie. I really, I like this question, because I think it challenges us. I think that a lot of people think that there is that museums are necessary, because there is this inherent natural drive to collect, protect, preserve, and that the natural order of that leads to us having to have a facility that can help facilitate that so people seem to think these natural. They're not their museums are not neutral. People create museums and they make very clear distinctions about what to collect, what to display, how to display, if they're going to interpret how they're going to interpret who's going to care for these objects, who is the intended option. There is a decision being made even from the, you know, everywhere from the Smithsonian down to historical county museums to house museums that volunteers put together there are decisions being made at every turn of that. And so what the first thing I want to do is challenge that museums are not neutral. The American Association of museums loves very proudly touts a statistic that has been pulled together through public polling that museums are the most trusted institution in the United States more than universities more than newspapers more than religious organizations, museums are seen as trustworthy institutions to gather information so whenever a decision is being made about what to display that is intentional. So, you know, obviously there are many institutions who before Niagara was passed did display Native American human remains. They did not have that option after Niagara was passed, but they continue to do so with the remains of other individuals, but very rarely, I've never seen to my recollection the remains of a colonial American. We have the granary burial grounds down here in the middle of Boston, no one's really petitioning to go down and dig up Paul Revere. No, no, no one would ever, ever suggest that for the sake of science and research and that that should be the case. That's just not around the world what you're going to see. So decisions are being made and they're being made about people who are the other either being made about people who are marginalized. And, you know, I sometimes bring this up in group settings because there's this line in one of the Indiana Jones movies and I'm sure every archaeologist on this call has their own issues with the Indiana Jones movies but he, you know, gets back this cross that he's been chasing down from this individual and he holds it up and he says this belongs in a museum and no one challenges that. No one challenges that these things that are seen as important belong in museums. So I guess my sort of first question and when when those decisions were being made about what to display and what not to display I will point out that even after Niagara was passed and museums no longer had the option to display Native American human remains. They still displayed funerary and sacred objects, so they may not put that human remain on display but they would take the objects of value that were found in the in that same grave on display and still fought that for decades past when that was passed. The arguments being made for why not only should the museum continue to hold a human remains but also when they wanted to display them was a scientific argument where the argument being made for those funerary and sacred arms objects were that they had value. You know, so there were sort of two arguments being made there about the scientific. And what I just want to reiterate is not only when we're doing this we're. I'm trying to sort of synthesize a lot of feelings I have around the this question of the tangible physical human remain and what value it has, but I don't want to. This conversation because I understand that there are a lot of world religions in which the human physical remain is going to return to dust and thus you know they're there there are understandings about that but they're also native religions and other religions that when you put someone into their burial space with that you're sending them on to the next world and when we disrupt that we pull that individual spirit back from that world. But just because there are a handful of work of communities out there who have these teachings, the act of stripping that individual. It's just dehumanized, not only that ancestor, but all of those ancestors who and the individuals like myself and other people who do this work and, you know, all of the all of the people who we are going to have to be engaging with around the human remains return committee whose ancestors intentionally had their individuality stripped away from them it's going to be very hard for us to do this work of the human remains return committee. Because people who were enslaved intentionally had their name stripped away from them, they were nothing they were recorded as ages and by gender and by. And I think when you see people put on display it's almost always from those communities. It's from communities that have had their individuality and their, their dignity, continually and violently stripped away so, you know, I to get at your point of the spectacle versus, you know, what is a thoughtful exhibit that's a very fine line and and very rarely are the people who are actually impacted by this today consulted in that process. So, I will stop there. Thank you very much for that Kelly. Tina. Yeah, I just wanted to say the follow up on that I mean I think that's a particularly American museum problem. And I think that's absolutely true for a lot of American museums. I mean, you typically will find that you have more local and national collections on display and sometimes human remains on display with great intent so you will see that in Mexico for example with a lot of art that integrates human remains into an art tag or mish tag or Mayan art so there are cases where it's a little bit different but I agree I think this is a particular problem in North American collections where it's disproportionately indigenous people and disenfranchised people who end up as in some ways spectacle on display with respect to human remains. Thank you very much for that. I have a question for you next Asia but I saw you nodding quite a bit as Kelly was speaking I was wondering if there was anything you wanted to add. I just couldn't agree more with Kelly where it's like you're not asking the correct people. And I think that this has been an issue here, I mean even with my work at Harvard where it's like, okay you can ask all these brilliant people who are within this university, but you need to be asking the folks to whom these remains truly belong or their descendants. And we keep having these conversations in these little bubbles where we're only talking at each other and not thinking about the lived experiences of indigenous people, black and indigenous people of color out there who are actually view these as ancestors and not just bones in a museum. I also like I think that goes back to some of our discussions about like the use of the term human remains and stuff like I switched recently I refer to these these are ancestors when I'm in the Black Peabody and looking at you know one of these I don't know like the black man who was lynched okay like that's not that's not it's a person that is a human who to me, I feel very strongly that like their identity needs to be out of this context you know like bodies human bodies don't belong in museums in in the United States. Thank you for that. I'm go to a question from there that I have for you.  And earlier this academic year, I had the honor of meeting the author chimamanda and go to add each who incidentally asked me to tell my wife that librarians are stars. And I agreed with that for multiple reasons, including that my wife is a librarian so that got me some points at home those are always useful hard to get. I am remembering a DJ's incredible 2009 Ted talk the danger of a single story. In particular, I recall her warning that quote, the consequence of the single story is this. It robs people of dignity. Throughout the work of the various human remains committees. I have found myself returning to that specific admonition. Again and again as I've confronted with somewhat monolithic terms like enslaved indigenous or even ancient. What are some of the lessons that you have learned about the restoration of identity and complex personal narratives as you as you've done your research lessons that others should be mindful of as they consider their own work involving human remains. So, like you said there's a lot of advantages to being here at Harvard, I've met amazing scholars I've had wonderful conversations I've been provided with a lot of really great resources for my work. But at the same time Harvard has a lot of disadvantages, especially for an early career scholar who happens to be a black woman. And often being isolated I feel I have to work at least twice as hard as many of my other colleagues and I'm still constantly questioned, and second guest. In particular when it comes to this work around human skulls remains and black ancestors, you know I'll be asked what I think we should be doing and get like God that's really this is a great response you know whatever. And then it's often a white person from a completely different area of study who's brought in who has a different perspective. The question will be like what business do you even have doing this and also undervalues my work and my expertise as a bioarchaeologist as someone who this is what I do. This is this is my job. I mean even my original contribution to the report was meant to convey the difficulty of my work and the amount of emotional labor that goes into my work and attempts to restore identity to these ancestors. And I still feel oftentimes largely ignored. And yet you know I'm always on panels like this where we have these great conversations. But then I feel that a lot of times nothing comes comes out of it. You know your, you know your your reference to Chimamanda you know the creative works of black people in particular, helped me get through this and also helped me to process what I'm dealing with. When I am working with these ancestors as in that Ted talk you referred to she says stories matter many stories matters stories have been used to dispossess into my line. Stories can also be used to empower and humanize stories can break the dignity of people but they can also repair broken dignity. And so I make sure to tell as much as I can about the people who I encounter in collections and I argue their story should not be hidden away. Unfortunately, it's, you know this uphill battle no matter who I'm talking to which museum which institution, where in there's still so much fear around revealing what is within museum holdings. And this fear of the backlash but you know what you're going to have to do it eventually like it's going to be difficult and the backlash is warranted. But we also have to be careful of how we are sharing these stories so how would you want to learn that a museum has the your ancestor inside like, you know, especially if we're talking about black folks in the United States. Who wants this sudden reminder, not that we're not reminded constantly of how little our lives matter but how how would you want to know that like yes we have your ancestors skull here. We have part of your ancestors body. Would you even want to know. And so we really have to think about how this work is going to be performed going forward and I don't think we're thinking about that enough. I mean also, I do not believe it's good enough to give back someone's remains. There should be reparations involved hands down like this is we've been exploited for for so long. And you know when we're trying to I try to restore identities to people when I do this research, but I also want to point out that just because I'm doing this work as a black woman doesn't mean that I still can't be exploiting these these bodies as well. I hope that my the work I do will be some of the last that's done on the source of body so that they can be laid to rest. But, you know, just because we're members of descendant communities or something doesn't mean that, you know, we're not still, you know, forcing the dead to do some sort of labor for us, which is something that I deal with constantly in my work, especially if I'm you know writing a publication I'm a, I'm a, I'm an academic bioarchaeologist and right now my entire academic identity and most of it's been on, you know, the bodies of black women who are held by the Smithsonian, right now, who I hope will now through repatriation policy will be eventually laid to rest. But we still have a really long way to go in restoring their identity and telling their stories and getting to a place where we know where they should belong, who their people are, if you will. Kelly. I just want to say how important what Asia just said is this actually happened to us last semester. We, I'm not sure if everyone in the on the call is familiar with the Woodbury collection that was discovered at the Peabody Museum in the fall of 2022. And we, we had a native visitor on campus and we, when this person was on campus, we got the call that Peabody believed they had this individual's ancestor's hair in the collection. And he was on campus already.  And these were hair clippings that are in a collection at the Peabody that were taken from children who are at Native American boarding schools. They clipped their hair without their permission and they were being used for research. And when we told him the name of the individual, he said that it was a relative of his a close relative. And I watched him just crumble. He, by the end, he was sobbing. We were all sobbing. And he said that the boarding schools took so much from us that so many of us did not come. So many of our ancestors did not come home whole. And he said the fact that the colonizer has a piece of her here. And we were able to be whole again. And that's what I think we're getting at is even if these people are gone, the fact that they are being possessed by a colonizing entity. It is still impacting these our communities. It deeply impacted this individual and we continue to be in communication. But what Asia was just saying about how would you want to learn that it. He did not get to learn this under the best of circumstances. And I don't know that there were good circumstances, but it was heartbreaking to watch him be here in this space and learn this information and have to process it. It, it will change me forever. Being there with him in that space and be, you know, it, it brings to light what we're talking about ethical stewardship. I mean, this is, this is where you, these are real lives that we are impacting. These are not hypotheticals. They're real people who are deeply, deeply impacted by the collections we have here at Harvard. Thank you Kelly. Thank you for the question. If I may, it's of a of a different stripe, given your experience in medicine ethics and with now multiple of the human remains related committees. I'm hoping you might talk a little bit about the context of medical specimens and in medical museums, and how we think about the representation of the human body in the medical context. I'm just incredibly moved by the discussion. And I almost hesitate to take it in any different direction. Other than to say, you know, so as I've been on these couple of these committees as really has. There's, there is this enormous disconnect between the kinds of conversations we're having here, and the culture that exists in medicine or at least has I don't know. I thought I would share a picture here. Are you seeing what I'm, are you seeing a picture of. Yes, yes, we are. Okay, so let me say what this is so. This is the Cushing Center at Yale University. So Harvey Cushing is the considered the partner term father of neurosurgery. He sent most of his career at Harvard Medical School and then finished his career at Yale. And this is at the Yale Medical School and what you see is the brains of several hundred of his patients. Each of those is labeled actually with the patient's name. And then you'll also notice that there's a number of photographs that are connected.  I was stunned to walk through this museum. I mean, I don't know if it's happened but it could certainly happen somebody's going to walk through there and go, you know, that was my grandmother, my great grandmother and so brain. There's been very little written about this there's one article which was actually written by a Yale medical student, the only one I could really find looking into some of this and there is some some information. about how this came to be not very much it's pretty clear that informed consent was not obtained but then that was not common back then but it's it's also some of Cushing's colleagues. We're clear that some of these brains were removed from patients who did not give their permission by grave robberies this sort of thing. And I don't think this is all that unusual. So I work at Boston Children's Hospital. And one of the famous collections in my hospital is of congenital heart disease was a collection of a couple Richard and Stella Van Prague who were very famous for their work on defining the embryology of the heart how the heart develops and the problems that create congenital heart disease is now those hearts are not on display anywhere at the hospital but thousands of people have come from around the world and can can get access to the collection to better understand congenital heart disease. And I don't have any firm information on the consent process but it. I can say that even in my tenure at Children's doing bioethics, we've had situations where I'll just give the example so you know a child dies and has an autopsy performed, and then as returned to the parents for burial. And they're invited back to meet with one of the specialists and the specialist says well you know we ran tests on your child's liver or whatever and we found the following things and parents, you know say well how did you run those tests on the liver because we buried, we buried our child and well, it's common practice to retain the organs. And this this actually led then to a change in our policies that parents need to get specific consent in order to have any of the materials from an autopsy retained. But it runs so deep in medical practice, because our hospitals and medical schools are full of human tissues. They're either either skeletons or various organs and bodies all the way to, you know, literally millions of microscope slides. And the kind of things that we're talking about here are just, they're just like two very different discussions, they seem to have almost no relationship to each other. I'm sorry I should have quit slide sharing here. My apologies. I'll be back. I'll just go on for just another moment here but I'm mentioning this because I think it's an area that really has not got any attention that it deserves. But even when we go beyond physical remains as we were talking about we have you know the representations of the body either through photographs or x-rays or plastic models that are done. And then, you know, getting even more removed we get to the kind of data that we've derived from from these bodies. Particularly genetic data, right? We have the full chromosomal information on now thousands and thousands of bodies that are now, you know, being examined and explored, you know, for very good reasons. I mean we're learning all sorts of things about human disease from this but there's, as long as there's an anonymity to it or permission to clean through informed consent, this has largely gone without scrutiny. The next question I would pose for the panel is, are we just having two different conversations here? Is there some connection between them? And if so, what can perhaps one side of the conversation learn from the other? So, I don't necessarily expect you to answer these questions but these are, as we were preparing this with Billy, these were the kinds of things that were on my mind. Christina. Yeah, I wanted to follow up on that Bob. I mean I think one place where medical research differs quite a lot from human remains research is the focus that medical research puts on individual rights versus community rights and also the focus that it puts on consent and privacy. And obviously those things, consent is very hard to apply to the past. It's a different context completely. And I think Asia and I have talked about this a lot. And one of the goals of understanding the past is not to suppress identity but to rediscover it. So it's, those actually work it completely cross purposes. I think that in any research that goes forward, it's so essential to have disclosure and full transparency. I think collecting information or doing tests and not being clear about that is very problematic both in contemporary context and also in the past so in that open dialogue and a full transparency of the process, a full transparency of the records in the data collection is really, really important. I think that there are ways to do this work better. I've been involved in a number of projects for example, in the Netherlands and Britain, where there are always construction projects salvage projects all the time where burial grounds have to be removed for one person or another. And what often happens is a state archaeologist or universities brought in to conduct this work. And it's often an opportunity to learn something about a group in the past depending on when or where it is. I think the projects that work best are those that actually then very actively engage the community about whether or not they want the remains to be studied what questions they might be interested in. And they co develop those those projects and so this is the experience I've had in the Netherlands and in Britain, where the community was very involved in the questions we asked what their desires were if certain things they would be interested in. And in some cases the relationships are very close in the case of the Netherlands. The cemetery was only about 100 years old people had not even in some cases I mean they had great ants I mean the tombstones were actually all there they knew their relatives were in the cemetery the tombstones had been moved. So they couldn't associate them with the specific individual burial but the community members approve the project and we're very involved in it but I think it's because it was, they were, you know, they were part of it from the beginning and helped to develop that and also it's coming. It doesn't have a context of control and disenfranchisement built into it and I think that that makes a huge huge difference so we need to think about ways. When we're doing these sorts of work that empower the people that are the communities that are actually affected that they need to be deeply involved in development of any project before it can ever be developed ethically. Thank you. Thank you Christina Asia. Yeah, going like often sort of this this discussion of the anonymity and ties to medical practice. It's actually like pretty interesting because part of the reason we have so many issues with human skeletal remains and collections here in the United States is because physical anthropology was so closely aligned with the medical school, when it was forming with the medical field when it was forming. And so they're oftentimes the samples, the people the bodies they're getting are coming from medical practitioners or the like collections I end up researching came from medical schools where they were dissected. And so these people were made anonymous through the same processes that Bob was just talking about I mean it was it was standard procedure. I think part of the, the issue is here now it recently that I've faced is that we still have a lot of these people who we do have their names, especially like these identified skeletal collections that I often encounter in museums. And the thing is there are folks who really, I would argue they don't want to repatriate or they're scared of folks learning about what they have in their holdings. They will use that language of privacy. As though like there's some sort of like a HIPAA for these people who have been dissected and curated for all of these years, and that like revealing their names as some sort of invasion of privacy as though they have not been fully like you know take an image up to this point. And so I think it's it's really interesting that there's like you know this overlap but now it's kind of sort of like we have to undo that viewpoint from that a lot of biological anthropologists still have and a lot of institutions have. Yeah, just making people anonymous is not the way to go when we're trying to do what's right by the people who are in these collections. I completely agree I think that too often privacy and anonymity is used as a kind of smokescreen to hide past wrongdoing and I think we really need to guard against this and really think very hard when those sorts of arguments are being used to obscure the contents of collections, I think we need to look at that very carefully. And just to the point though, so what do you make of the brains at Yale which have names, you know, birth dates, death dates, right there on display right next to the sample I mean that that does kind of feel to me to be a violation of privacy. It's the same word about how we how we want to hold these two things in, in, in context right on the one hand, we don't want to hide the identities of those who would probably want their names to be known and their stories to be known. From, you know, the many very good things we want about privacy and in our own lives. I'm just baffled that they're they're still on display. Yes. Oh, because I'm just confused as to like if I'm sorry I don't even know where to begin with this like to me it's bizarre that they're still on display but also if their names are there like are people aware of people like if they looked up a list they could see these people's names somewhere and decide if that might be their ancestor or something like I guess that's my question is anyone ever asked for these brains. These body parts back, because in my opinion that's what we it's like okay we know when this person died we don't like they shouldn't even be there. That just seems so archaic to me I don't know it's strange. Yeah, you know I mean the museum isn't one I think you can just like go knock on the door and walk into but it but I visited it I don't think there's any real restrictions to it if you go through the proper channels and I had the same bodies I was like, you could literally go through there and say my God I didn't know that my grandmother, you know, there's a brain. I don't know whether they should be there or not you know this gets to I mean one of the I've heard repeatedly in the in the meetings that we have the bodies don't belong in museums. I'm not pushing back on that at all like I can understand I understand the sentiment that that comes from. On the other hand we learn a lot from these brains we learn a lot from the hearts of the children that are in the children's collection. And again, how do we balance the values that go along with with each of those sentiments. Yeah, if I could follow up on Bob's comment, I mean I think I would disagree that bodies don't belong in museums, I think we need to think about museums are not cemeteries right so they shouldn't be the final resting place place of human bodies. I think there is a place for in some cases for human remains to be in museums and certainly around the world. They are, but under the care and collection of people who are the stakeholders for those collections so for example, they have work in Mongolia Mongolia has a long history of excavation by Mongolians they have museums that house these remains they're not on public display but they are available for research to understand the long pre history of Mongolia, and I think that is important and that's something they decided to create and make available for research and control the research of and I think that that that is appropriate. But for body to be in a museum, it needs to be there for the purpose of learning something about those ancient people or, or, or a value to do research for that stakeholder community, I think just to have bodies stored in a museum with no purpose serves no purpose, and that that is not a good that I don't find that justifiable. I do think that to the degree that that human remains are in museums, it should be, it should be quite an active process of research and in direct dialogue with the stakeholders about that. I also want to know like, so are those brains still being used to this day to generate new information or data because this is something I get like this was the biggest push when nag pro was passed in 1990 and it's still something that comes up when we're saying get rid of like these human skeletal remains in particular. There's this fear of losing some sort of knowledge. Most of the skeletons that I these people I encounter in these collections, no one has looked at them, some of them in over 100 years. Okay, so why are they here. Okay, so like I even when I was in the Peabody one of the individuals who may have been enslaved I was like, it was just insane. Yeah, we didn't myself and Lauren who's wonderful Lauren Grace help me and we were like, what is going on here you know we were shocked by certain things that we would find. And it's not documented in the notes it's not anywhere so no one is using these remains. I mean even the collection my entire dissertation was based on the collection isn't seen as valuable because it's commingled and there's a lot of missing parts like these people have been treated that they're just so why does this misogyny and have that that's my question there's like this idea that somehow going forward there's going to be some amazing breakthrough where in these bodies that have been ignored for 50 100 years or suddenly going to reveal something that we previously didn't know. I also point to the work of Jenny reardon and Kim tall bear, especially there are our DNA is not your history like a lot of the people who these, these bodies and these parts have been taken from. If we already know our histories and our stories, what right does you know, a Harvard scientist have was no ties to where these bodies came from have to just use these bodies to further their scientific agenda, that's the problem. You're not like we're not stepping back and asking why are like we need to ask, why would you do the research. Who is the research benefiting and to what purpose like what is the point if it's just knowledge for the sake of knowledge and someone is telling you to leave my ancestor alone, then leave their ancestor alone like it shouldn't. To me it's not rocket science, like, like it's not that difficult to understand what we are saying. And yet it's this constant fear of losing some sort of knowledge that no one, none of the descendants are asking for it's different if they are asking for it like what Tina saying her work in Mongolia and stuff like when there's this active community who wants to learn about their history that you can do wonderful collaborative work, but in the context of a lot of these collections and how they were acquired that's just something that's not going to happen and I think we need to be okay with that. I think if we've made it 50 hundred years without learning anything from the stolen body, then giving it back it's not going to, it's not like you're losing something that was life altering. Yeah, Bob, I know that you were monitoring the chat in the Q&A is there anything that's come up you'd like to pull in. Yeah, there's there is a bunch. Let me just turn to one here so David Rotson says thank you for the conversation I have a question about archeological ethics in certain countries bio archeological collaboration is complicated by the fact that some national governments do not represent, or even repress communities that many in the US would identify as the stakeholders. This sets up an ethical dilemma of consent and collaboration by making the stakeholders unidentifiable or subaltern, even as one secures formal consent from the government. What is our responsibility. I really like this question that follows on a nature paper that Christina as a co-author on from 2021 do you want to take this Christina. I mean, yeah, I mean some. Sometimes you just can't do the research. And that's also an outcome right. So if there's a situation where where you cannot meaningfully engage with stakeholder communities and where there is a broader political situation happening, then you don't do it and you wait until the political situation changes or I think there isn't necessarily the urgency to do it, and I think we need to accept that in some cases you can't right now do an ethical do an ethical project. And I think another thing with we're talking a lot about museums, I mean there's been a tremendous amount of building up of human remains collections over the past century or so. And really if you think about I'm an archaeologist I think in big time. So relatively short period of time over which these human remains have been assembled and put it into museums. And a lot of the practices that were used. We're not fair, and we're not ethical, and those remains should be repatriated they should be returned. A lot of people are, I find that the general public often feels like, if we do that, then there's no future of research that there are no more human remains. There are so many human remains. The fraction that is in museums is small compared to those in the world. And I think it would be better to return the remains that were taken under these very coercive circumstances and to focus on future work that can be done together collaboratively. I think that's a much better path forward. I'm going to leave time for us to close to maybe I'll turn to a comment from Katie Peeler I think about how people want their remains to be managed. She says to me it's a matter of agency we've stripped the person of their future relatives of we've stripped the person and their future relatives of agency, and how they want their bodies cared for afterdale. Some may want their bodies to become dust to be buried. Some may not care some may want to donate them for anatomy lab. Others to rest in a peaceful place near their family. So giving the person whose body it is or was agency in that decision. I'd like just before turning it over I actually had a great conversation last evening with another member of our committee and just talking about the panel that would happen today and you know as a bioethicist. And Katie's a position as well. We often think about this in terms of what would the patient have wanted. Ideally it would be their choice about how their body was managed. And, but oftentimes we don't know, people don't say. And so then we say well, what we turn to next is substituted judgment we say well what's the best guess that we can make about what that person would have wanted. And it seems that the default throughout all of this conversation has been the best surrogate decision maker are the linear of these people. I think that may be perfectly reasonable and it may be the best that we can do. I guess I'm just saying that we often take that for granted is obviously the right answer. It may not always be. I mean it. Yeah, I can't really think of a better one. And so sort of building off of Katie's comment there is that you know, many times we just don't know what that person would have wanted. And yet we still have to come to some sort of a decision about what that would be. I would just like to jump in and say I disagree that it's linear descendants, because in so many of these cases you cannot determine determine linear descendants it's it's it's communities to which they belong right or can be associated with. I think that's really important. So I think a focus on trying to trace a pedigree is not the way forward with these sorts of remains because them being removed or not having a proper burial or being removed from this is a community harm so I think the needs a community solution. And then determining the just the disposition of the remains. I want to chime in and completely agree with that. And also, when you are dealing with a lot, something that happens in magma all the time. And I think was brought up earlier that a lot of times these remains are seen as being too old to have a modern tribe that it can be associated with. Well, that is a result of the colonial project. You know that is a result that is. That was intentional and so a lot of what we are pushing for now is, if in those cases, most universities will just continue, we can't make an association. We need more research and so the ancestors just stay and stay and stay. Well, you often know where they came from. So, it is the tribal communities it is the, these communities who fought to get these laws and have been fighting for these ancestors to not be in a museum for 30 plus years. So, look at the region from which those remains were disinterred work with the tribes who are there now who want to put them back where they belong, because it is the colonial project that got us to where we are today. With not being able to make those associations and so we can't use that as now an excuse to do nothing, or an excuse to continually say we need to do more research. Sometimes ours not going to be an answer so you need to do the best answer you can and get them back into the hands of individuals who want to do right by them the best way we can. Do you have painful it is to be part of a community. You have to, you have when you get those ancestors back you have to apologize and say, I don't know the proper way to take care of you because we didn't do this to our, our relatives we didn't dig you our relatives up. You apologize to the ancestor first you apologize to the creator and you do the best you possibly can. And that's deep deep emotional work, but tribal communities are begging to do that deep deep emotional work. Same thing with descendant communities from people who are enslaved they're begging to do that work, even though it is deep deep emotional labor. There are multiple people who want to respond if I could inject one facet to this from my colleague Paul, he asked what about the cases where we actually can't identify or trace back. The remains how does that change this calculus Asia. Oh, you're on mute Asia. So, part of the issue that's been coming up a lot is the discussion of, you know, why are we in these institutions the one making the decisions, arguably, you know, if you're the curator at a museum or something it's like what right do you have to make the decisions regarding what happens to these remains and again why is it not opened up to a wider community and a lot of it will come back to some sort of property law or something which again is just something that has been imposed on us by you know, an outsider by colonizers. And that's really problematic that we have to fight and ask for our ancestors back. And I also still don't think the point is like fully coming across sometimes I feel like people's just still feel fail to recognize that when you are a black indigenous person of color, and our communities are still suffering so much our lives are still undervalued so much. That's why this matters because I can totally understand people are like oh it's a skeleton it's whatever why does this matter. It matters because you're still using our bodies for something we did not consent to you doing, and we should have a say in what happens and how what happens to those bodies, whether or not we are a lineal descent and that's my other comment is this issue of So I focus particularly on the history of black people and what's now the United States for centuries we have been prevented from keeping our families whole, and when our families are whole they are made pathological.  And so I think it's kind of insane when I've heard people in particular here in regards to the remains at the body, say that we need to only be giving back to lineal descendants, I'm like. Who, who's going to send it. I mean again it's the community it's black people as a whole and to me it's about place. We need to know where these people might have come from or where they were vocal to and letting the people in those areas make the decision so we might only know that you know a few of these people came from Richmond, Virginia. That's good enough. There's plenty of black people Richmond, Virginia. There's plenty of places that these individuals could be laid to rest, and I don't know it seems like just beating a dead horse over and over and over again was like, Oh, who's the descendant. But again, that's just a way to delay doing the right thing and to keep these people held by an institution for, for, for longer. Yeah, I also, I think the water often gets really muddy to when we talk about communities because sometimes people think, Oh, just ask anyone on the street and that you know, involving everyone in a decision is a huge burden on communities and it's traumatizing to people who have ordinary lives who've never thought about this before and they have, you know, it's overwhelming. And so I think one of the things we need to do is think hard about who are the leaders of communities who are the professionals within those communities. There are Tipo officers there are community leaders there are church organizations that we can turn to to help with this because it's an enormous financial and emotional burden to actually deal with this problem and we have to think hard about that because one of the things that we also need to do, I think Asia you mentioned this earlier is respect the leaders who have expertise in this you as a black bioarchaeologist have specifically developed training expertise in this area. I think people like you are exactly the kind of people that need to be consulted and turned to for these sorts of decisions and we need to recognize and elevate and respect those sorts of roles. I admitted this awkward position of we're out of time and this conversation is like rolling along. I, but I think we have to respect the time and, and thank all of you for, for all you've contributed to making this really especially for putting it all together organizing it. Thank you for all of you for making the time to be here as well as for everybody on the, in the audience and apologies for all of the great questions and comments that we were not able to address. Will you want to just finish, finish it up here. I want to say that I particularly appreciate the time that Kelly Asia and Christina contributed here as well as you Bob this an ongoing project for me as I work to try to support these committees and I have learned a lot and I'm not going to forget it and I appreciate what you've taught me today. Have a good weekend.


My name is Miguel Ángel Fernández, I'm a data scientist and I'm working as analytics specialist at Vitergia and thank you Diane for the great introduction. And well, this talk is going to be a little bit less technical than the previous talks, it's amazing to be here with all of you. And we are talking about the open shift project and the rest of cloud native ecosystem and we are talking about some projects and how they are connected. Okay, so we are talking first about a quick overview about CNCF ecosystem and we are going to see some of the numbers for some of the projects there. We are going to talk about representing this ecosystem and how we do imagine this ecosystem of projects. Oh, yes. Okay, I'm sure about that. After two years I don't get used to it. Okay, so this is kind of a shock to see my face. Okay, so next is to talk about the people acting as bridges and then we are going to discuss the growth of CNCF ecosystem. Okay, so first is I wanted to make to show you a quick overview for the CNCF ecosystem. You know that cloud native ecosystem has many different projects and they are grouped into different categories, right? So I wanted to get open shift project and then other CNCF projects, those are tagged as graduated at incubating projects. If you go to CNCF website you will see them listed, right? Those upper side are graduated ones and the ones below are incubating projects. So this whole presentation is going to show some data extracted from Git comets, right? These are code contributions to these projects from the last year. Okay, so from May 2021 to May 2022. Okay, so we have over 11k contributors active during the last year, plus 85 organizations involved, more than 55 projects and a ton of repos over 171k comets, right? So these are some impressive numbers. So the next question I want to raise is how do we imagine an ecosystem of projects like this? We are talking about these amazing tools and amazing projects and how powerful they are. But we always talk about them like this, right? They are each project, individual project and we tend to talk about projects as a set of repositories, right? And well, for a data analyst to go for the cloud native ecosystem is like kind of a playground, right? So if we represent this ecosystem as a set of repositories, we want to think something about this. These are representing projects. Its cluster is a project and the nodes linked to each project represent the repositories with activity during the last year, okay? Code activity. I'm not taking about issues. I'm not talking about pull requests or comets. We are focusing on code contributions, right? All right. So we have some isolated clusters. We don't see anything related between projects, but of course they do share a common space because they belong to the same ecosystem, right? And we can focus on some of them. We have OpenShift here with a lot of repositories active during the last year. We have Kubernetes there. We have Pufbert. We talked about that before. Operator framework. And HDO and Knative. HHCD, right? And it's nice. Okay. But I would propose to change the point of view because we are talking about open source communities. We are talking about communities and communities are made of people, right? So what if we take those projects, right? But we try to link those projects having common contributors. We are talking about people. So let's set the people at the center of our problem, which is representing an ecosystem, right? If we take these projects and we link them because they have common contributors, we will end up having something like this. Not isolated clusters, but this beautiful mess, which is all the projects connected with each other, right? Okay. So projects are linked if they have common people contributing to them. And that's why we see this highly connected network. So the reality will be quite different depending on how we represent it, right? And as I said, this is all about people. So let's get, we saw this project which are connected. And now let's represent the people contributing to these projects and link them with the projects they are contributing to. Okay. And what we get is this network. I think this is a more accurate representation of the community behind the CNC ecosystem. Okay. Because it's the people who is forming the projects, right? It's almost like a living entity. It's everything like it's a creature. It's, there are connections, there are interactions, right? Okay. And what we have this beautiful network, but it's hard to see something meaningful out of it. So let's focus on some projects. Okay. Let's reduce the scope a little bit. Okay. And we have this network here. I have selected a subset of the repositories and we have their Kubernetes and OpenShift. Well, the projects I pointed before, right? So the buckets, the blue buckets at the center, they are the projects. And the pink nodes represents contributors. So each node is a human contributor. We are excluding both accounts, automated accounts. We are excluding them from all these graphs. Okay. And these numbers. Okay. I wanted to stress these kind of clusters that are formed between projects. This is important, right? We, if we have a look, a closer look at how the net is represented, we are going to see more of these groups of nodes, sharing connections between projects. Okay. And this is no less than people acting as bridges between projects. Let's zoom in a little bit. So at the bottom we have OpenShift. This is like a zoom in. We have OpenShift. And there we have Kubernetes and on the left we will have Canadian and Istio and then we have Operator Framework and ATCD. And you see here at the center a big group of people. And identifying who these people are is crucial to understand the community and the dynamics between the projects. Right? You may find some connections that you think are expected, but also you can find unexpected connections. I think that's nice also. And if we, well, if we zoom in to another part of the network, also interesting enough, before Istio applied to become a CNCF project, right? This year back in April, right? This is for the last year. So the interesting part is that there were already common contributors with other CNCF projects, right? So this is not like that and Istio became a part of the image we saw before. It's not just another box. It's a group of people coming together and they were already collaborating with each other. Yeah, we can see also nodes contributing to not only two, but maybe three projects or more, right? And this is for the last year, again. Okay. Okay, and then we can talk now a little bit about the growth of the project. And in this case, we are showing numbers for OpenShift. So we are focusing on the number of key contributors, so people contributing code monthly for the last five years. So we see that back in 2017, there were already like 200 unique contributors there, active, and this is representing monthly for the last five years. And by the end of 2021, we end up with almost, well, I think over 700 unique contributors for OpenShift. And what we can do also is to compare this data with the other projects we saw in the network before, right? So we have OpenShift along with Kubernetes and the rest of the projects we commented before, we see that OpenShift and Kubernetes takes the greater amount of active contributors for each month. And what happens if we compare OpenShift with the rest of CNCF projects we saw at the beginning, those graduated and incubating? Okay, we have these numbers of contributors and OpenShift still a big part of the ecosystem, right? And the growth. You can see the growth basically. Okay, and well, again, the projects are those that we saw before already. Well, to finish this presentation basically, we'll like to show you this graph to compare how the network of projects, people and projects look like back in 2017, right? And then, of course, how it looks now. You can see the growth. You can see, so the question now is how this ecosystem will evolve. And the only way, of course, is to build a connected future. You can see all this about human interaction and it will be really, really exciting to see how it will happen in the future. And I think that's it from my side. Thank you all for your attention. If you have any questions, I'll be around. So what I love about this slide is, if you know me, I've thrown this variation up on the screen at a bazillion different things. But this really shows you how we're not working in isolation, you know, that it is the communication between the projects and between all the people. The people who are acting as bridges between them. That we really need to help cultivate good communication skills and trust between things so that we can align our roadmaps, our feature releases and the interdependencies. And so when you're working on your project and you think you're all alone, trust me, you're not. And we can always help you find a connection and make you feel a little bit more connected to the rest of the cloud-native ecosystem. So I really can't tell you how much I lean on and lean in on the biturgy of folks, and I hope you all will do so as well. So thanks very much, Miguel, for all of your help. Thank you so much.