"A "Most Remarkable Trait

In the nineteenth century and beyond, Euro-American medical and scientific professionals tried repeatedly to describe the flattened skulls of the Chinookan-speaking people, both living and dead, as pathological. In scientific, medical, and popular presses, professionals pointed to the alleged barbarism, lack of intelligence, savagery, and primitivism of the Chinookans to justify the collection of their skulls and pathologize their cultural practices. Through settler-ableism, the flattened skulls seemed to represent not only the disablement of Native Americans as a group but also the influence of faulty heredity, harmful bodily modifications, and deformed but “normal” physiognomy responsible for the “flattening.” Scientists, craniologists, phrenologists, and doctors debated endlessly about the flattened skulls, with a fundamental pathologization authorizing, as this article argues, the transinstitutionalization of the Chinookan-speaking people across institutions for the dead as well as the living

Trait · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology · Computer Science · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Psychology · Scientific and Historical Analyses

• Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia

  Open Access•Peter Turnbull, Paul Turnbull•Science, Museums and Collecting…•2017

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