Finding Ceremony is a consent-based process controlled by descendants and descendant community members.When we say, “finding ceremony,” we mean restoring the lineages of care, reverence, and spiritual memory to the work of caring for our dead.
Finding Ceremony will offer a space of transition, where our ancestors go from being defined as specimens in a scientific, museum “collection” and move toward ceremony and rest. The first, essential step in this process is to remove the crania from the Penn Museum—a spatial transfer and a spiritual shift. We will welcome the over 1,300 crania currently in the Morton Cranial Collection through the Finding Ceremony Uncollection.
Ultimately, Finding Ceremony is a reparationist project: This work must be funded by the same institutions that have perpetrated the harm over centuries and that have demonstrated an unwillingness to do the labor that we now take on. West Philadelphia is a historically Black community that has already been targeted repeatedly by the university and the museum through decades-long displacement and through two revelations in 2021 that their ancestors’ and relatives’ remains had been held in the Penn Museum.