As part of its series exposing how the Smithsonian Institution collected hundreds of brains from indigenous peoples, the Washington Post has highlighted the sad experience of a Filipino woman named Maura. Maura was brought from the Philippines to the United States in 1904 to take part in one of the public displays of indigenous people at the St. Louis World’s Fair. These public displays (now called “human zoos” by scholars) were designed to highlight non-white races thought to be lower on the evolutionary ladder. They were embodiments of Darwinian racism. I exposed what happened at the St. Louis World’s Fair in my award-winning documentary Human Zoos. 

As I explain in Human Zoos, the Smithsonian sent its Darwinist curator Aleš Hrdlička to St. Louis to gather brains from indigenous people who happened to die while on display at the fair. According to the Washington Post, Maura is apparently one of the people whose brains were harvested by Hrdlička. He sent her brain back to Washington, DC, as part of his racist brain collection, which he used to document the superiority of whites on the evolutionary ladder. 

After I produced Human Zoos, I visited St. Louis in an effort to track down the locations of where the human displays were located during the fair. I also located the building on the campus of Washington University where experiments were conducted on indigenous people during the exposition. You can watch all of these videos for free on YouTube.

Editor’s note: See also Dr. West’s article from yesterday, “Smithsonian’s Racist Brain Collection Exposed by Washington Post.”