When Claire Healy messaged an artist on Instagram for a potential feature story in early 2022, she had no idea the thread she would soon pull, or what she would unravel.
What began as a meeting with the artist, who was in St. Louis marking unmarked graves of Filipino people who died at the 1904 World’s Fair, became a global endeavor for answers that led to a Washington Post investigation exposing a grim secret at the Smithsonian Institution: A “racial brain collection.”
The artist shared a document that showed four people who died at the World’s Fair that year had their brains removed and sent to the Smithsonian after their deaths.
The document emboldened Healy, then a freelance journalist, to contact the Smithsonian: “How many brains do you have? Who are these people? Why do you have them, and what are you doing with them?”
“It’s so heavy,” Healy said. “People who are already being brought to the U.S. to be put on display in a human zoo … and then the extra layer that I did not expect of their brains being removed and sent to the Smithsonian. (It) was really shocking.”
That was only the beginning.
Healy spent the next year and a half traveling to multiple cities, scouring and analyzing 100-year-old documents at the Smithsonian Archives, and searching for living family members to reconcile the legacy of a grisly practice. The collection, she learned, was far more extensive than four brains.
The investigation eventually revealed that the Smithsonian’s collection of human remains is one of the largest in the world. The National Museum of Natural History has at least 30,700 human bones and body parts in storage. Many are from Black and Indigenous people, and other people of color. The secretary of the Smithsonian apologized on behalf of the institution in an op-ed published in the Post.
Healy — who began working at the Post as a copy aide in May 2022, a few months after the artist gave her the tip — spent her nights, weekends and other days off, going to the Smithsonian Archives.
Healy partnered with investigative reporter Nicole Dungca, who often reports on stories about disparities with marginalized groups. The connection to Indigenous Filipino women especially caught Dungca’s attention, as well as the history that had ties to the present.
“A lot of those remains were still with the Smithsonian Institution, and (The Smithsonian) didn’t really know how they were going to get those remains back to their communities, back to the families that were related to those people whose remains were in the collection,” Dungca said.
Her first question when she teamed up with Healy: “Can we find these families and let them know about their relatives whose remains are in these collections?”
These weren’t just body parts. These were people with families and lives full of memories.
“Connecting with these families was the most powerful part. It wasn’t just about reporting — it was about showing them that their stories matter,” Nicole said.
The team tracked down descendants to ensure the forgotten lives would at last be acknowledged. In some cases, they were the first to inform families that their ancestors’ remains had been taken and held by the Smithsonian — without their knowledge or consent.
Early on in the investigation, Healy came to Post investigative data reporter Andrew Ba Tran with a spreadsheet about the brains and questions about how to organize it for later analysis. He gave tips on organization, but also had an idea: “Why just get brains?”
He suggested they broaden the search, and later suggested other ways to expand the investigation.
“I was like, ‘What if we got these documents? What if we got these columns? We could build a map. We could do a database. There’s so much more stuff we could do,” Tran said.
The three — Healy, Tran and Dungca — would eventually go to the Smithsonian Archives together.
The team discovered that the brains weren’t collected for scientific research, but for a racial study aimed at creating a separate archive of nonwhite human remains. The goal — by the prominent anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka — was to create a “racial brain collection” at the Smithsonian Institution. Hrdlicka believed that white people were superior and collected body parts to further now-debunked theories.
By August 2023, the seed of an idea had blossomed into a newsroomwide endeavor for truth at The Washington Post.
MORE FROM POYNTER: Read more stories about our 2024 Poynter Prize winners.
Through audio, graphics, a database and written articles, Healy and Dungca’s investigation exposed not only the brutal history of the Smithsonian’s practices but also the painful, ongoing consequences for the descendants of those whose remains were taken.
Nearly 100 years after the brains were first mailed to the Institution, tagged with a reference number and stored in the museum, The Post team was connecting dots between past and present, and getting information to help families find their relatives.
The duo went to San Francisco, Alaska and Seattle to talk with descendants and meet family members. Dungca also traveled to the Philippines.
“With all the interviews we did, we wanted to make it very clear to families that this is your story,” Healy said. “This is what you’re going through.”
The series won them the 2024 Dori J. Maynard Justice Award, the Poynter Prize that honors social justice reporting. The judges called the project “exquisite, tenacious reporting” that was “impossible to put down.”
For Healy and Dungca, it was about justice for the families.
“We wanted to make sure that we centered their voices, so that the people who were within these collections weren’t just random body parts,” Dungca said. “They were actually people, and we wanted to tell their stories.”
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