PLATTSBURGH — Between 1908 and 1939, thousands of body parts – teeth, eyes, ribs, tibiae, femurs, ulnae, humeri and skulls – were sent through the mail from the United States to Dr. Maude Abbott, physician and curator of the McGill University Medical Museum.
A tangent exploring spatial injustice is what led Abbott researcher, Dr. Annmarie Adams, Stevenson Chair in the History and Philosophy of Science and Professor at McGill University, to some hard truths she shares in her Bridgewater/McGill/SUNY Plattsburgh lecture, “Hide and Seek: Indigenous Remains and Canadian Institutional Architecture” presented by the Center for the Study of Canada at SUNY Plattsburgh today, at 2 p.m., in the Krinovitz Hall, Hawkins Hall, SUNY Plattsburgh.
At McGill, Adams has joint appointments in Architecture and Social Studies of Medicine. Her research examines the cultural landscapes of homes and hospitals.
“I’m writing a book on Maude Abbott, and then I noticed in some of the archives the stories of these specimens. There’s a new book on spatial injustice around the world. I was invited to contribute, and they asked me to write something, especially about spatial injustice against Indigenous peoples in Canada. I thought of these specimens, so I wrote this paper,” she said.
In a draft, she writes: “In architecture circles, scholars who explore these questions mostly work in the sub-field known as ‘spatial justice.’ The concept of spatial justice is both discriminatory and restorative because both space (architecture) and justice (the legal system) have the power to discriminate and to restore.”
“It’s just a form of discrimination that is worked out in architecture and spaces. I’m not an expert on this. This is the only thing I’ve ever written on it. I just got to it through studying Maude Abbott, who I’ve been working on for more than ten years. This is a much smaller project,” she said.
Adams highlights Montreal sites such as the Allan Memorial Institute, Royal Victoria Hospital, and the Maude Abbott Medical Museum.
The Royal Vic was shuttered in 2015, but the land around it is contested by the Mohawk Mothers because “the site may contain the unmarked graves of Indigenous children…” according to mohawkmothers.ca
The former hospital is across the street from the museum that received medical specimens, of Indigenous peoples, mostly in the United States.
“And I just found out that these medical specimens could be sent through the mail, and were just so mobile, in people’s luggage, really reducing them to objects in that time. Of course that would never happen today,” Adams said.
The museum has 14 logbooks, which contain entry numbers for specimens received over a 31-year period.
“I do know how each one died through the log books. Many of them were in residential schools in the United States, and one particular doctor, Zadok Daniels, collected these specimens. There is a program of repatriation at McGill University that just got started, and hopefully it will play out. Some of these specimens don’t seem to exist anymore. First, they will have to do a real inventory to see if they exist. The museums says they do not exist anymore. It isn’t just Indigenous specimens that are like this. Some of the logbooks indicate the specimens have been thrown away. And I am guessing some of them didn’t last,” she said.
RABBIT HOLE
Adams scoured thousands of entries in logbooks to extract her museum data.
“I made a note of 80 to 90 of them, and then I went to the museum and inquired about them and didn’t really get anywhere. Then, I just felt like it was really important to tell the story of these body parts moving around North America at this time. The Carlisle Residential School in Pennsylvania was like the biggest. In the U.S., they are called Indian residential schools. There is an organization that is tracing survivors and non-survivors,” she said.
Adams says the logbooks sometimes indicate gender and age. For example, it might say “boy, 11, shotgun wound.”
“If proper repatriation is done, they will try to identify some of these people. My lecture isn’t so much about this process but is on how colonial architecture can hide certain things and how non-Indigenous actors can continue to make them invisible,” she said.
Unless someone goes searching like Adams, things remain invisible, out of sight, out of mind, and cannot come to light if things are hidden away or if access is not granted to certain spaces where proper investigations can take place.
“Several universities in Canada have constructed new buildings, especially for living Indigenous students and people in general, and that has been a positive experience. So architecture can do that, too. I wrote this paper, this lecture, really for students to show them how architecture has this power to do this thing, this erasure really of people, but also to be restorative. And probably, students haven’t thought about architecture in that way before,” she said.
The Royal Vic, modeled after Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, reveals transference from the Old World to New World and imposition of colonial buildings and worldview.
“At universities as we try to decolonize the curriculum, this is just the kind of the work we need to do, I hope. When I got invited to an American university to present it, I thought I would focus on the specimens that came from the U.S. They are kind of from famous places, and anthropologists just gave this stuff to Maude Abbott. I don’t know why. Just going through the mail, and she didn’t really even comment on getting it. I’ve been using her diaries in my book, and it was just like an everyday thing for her. So, I have to grapple with what that means about her, what things were like in the early 20th century,” she said.
William McAdams, a prominent archaeologist, who curated curated university collections including Yale, excavated hilltop burial mounds and riverbeds in Illinois.
Clarence Moore, a wealthy archaeologist from Philadelphia, dug the Monroe Mound near Jacksonville, Fla. and investigated other sites in Louisiana.
“They seemed to have shipped some things they found to Maude Abbott. I haven’t looked at the archives of these anthropologists, but they both are pretty famous. One of them, all their papers are at Cornell. It just could take the rest of my life to track all of this stuff down, but it’s not really the main thing that I do but I think it’s a really important story and I think it illustrates spatial injustice in a nice way. I hope it’s going to help somebody,” she said.