The Stubborn Will to Mean: Sympathy, Relationality, and the Origins of Collecting Indigenous Bones in the Eighteenth Century

The European and North American collecting of the bones of Indigenous people was largely a nineteenth- and twentieth-century phenomenon. This article considers the origins of this practice in the context of the history of collecting and looks to British understandings of Indigenous funerary traditions and attitudes to death, their own attitudes to death as in Gray's Elegy , and the rise of scientific racism to better understand it. Using the Mi'kmaw concept of Etuaptmumk or "two-eyed seeing," the paper shows various Indigenous responses to their own objectification and their maintenance of a radical hope in the future through their funerary practices.