**Sign Up For Future Meetings of the Descendant Community group for Black Philadelphians**

**Program shared by the Black Philadelphians Descendant Community Group at Penn Museum’s service on February 3**

**New York Times: Penn buries Black Philadelphians without descendant community consent**

**Philadelphia Inquirer article about Penn’s secret burial of Black Philadelphians ahead of schedule**

**Letter and Research Report about John Voorhees**

**aAliy and Lyra explaining Finding Ceremony’s response to Penn’s plan to bury Black Philadelphians from the Morton Cranial Collection**
**(clip from UCSB event, full video below)**

**Janet Monge, curator who abused MOVE remains and Morton Cranial Collection, secretly let go from Penn Museum**

**Dr. Lyra Monteiro’s journal article, “Open access violence: Legacies of white supremacist data making at the Penn Museum, from the Morton Cranial Collection to the MOVE remains”**

**View Recording of this conversation with aAliy Muhammad and Dr. Lyra Monteiro at University of California, Santa Barbara**

**Finding Ceremony’s Statement**
**re: August 31 #ReturnDelisha Action at Penn Museum & Meeting with Director Woods**

**Philly Voice’s Coverage of #ReturnDelisha Direct Action at Penn Museum**

**Billy Penn’s Coverage of August 31 Direct Action and Press Conference**

**August 31 Press Conference: MOVE Remains at Penn Museum Update**

**SAPIENS Anthropology Magazine: Op-Ed**

**Science History Institute Podcast Episode Featuring Abdul-Aliy Muhammad’s Work to Restore Care and Reverence to Ancestors in the Penn Museum**

**Philadelphia Inquirer: Coverage of Rally and Orphans’ Court Hearing**

**Finding Ceremony’s Preliminary Proposal for Descendant-led Care of the Morton Cranial Collection**

**Daily Pennsylvanian Article About the Orphans Court Hearing**

The Guardian’s Coverage of Finding Ceremony’s Objections in Orphans’ Court

**Philadelphia Inquirer Coverage of Orphans’ Court Objections**

**New York Times: Coverage of Finding Ceremony’s Orphans Court Objections**

ABOUT

Finding Ceremony is a descendant community-controlled process, restoring the lineages of care, reverence and spiritual memory to the work of caring for our dead. The formation of Finding Ceremony stems from aAliy Muhammad’s and Dr. Lyra Monteiro’s observation and study of the Penn Museum’s negligence stretching back decades, not only with the Morton Cranial Collection, but also with regard to the MOVE remains, and the other estimated 12,000 individuals held in the basement of the museum to this day.

CORE PRINCIPLES

1. The Penn Museum and the University of Pennsylvania have no decision-making role in the process of return of the ancestors–as the perpetrators of the harm, they cannot be part of the healing (other than through funding this work).

2. There are no easy or ideal or even very good solutions to the question of how to return the ancestors in the Morton Collection; and this is because we live in the world that empire has made (with the help of Morton’s racial science)–a world that has intentionally severed the ties to family and homelands of both the living and the dead. While it may be possible to identify direct, lineal descendants for some of the people whose skulls were stolen and trafficked across the world, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to do that for everyone.

3. Given the absence of good solutions, Finding Ceremony proposes that a group of people who are deeply concerned about afterlives of ancestors serve as a stewardship body, who can care for the ancestors who have been held at the Penn Museum, until the best group of people gather to decide what to do with any part of the Morton Collection that they recognize to be their ancestors.

SUPPORT

Finding Ceremony is currently being stewarded by Dr. Lyra Monteiro and aAliy Muhammad. We both know that the work of Finding Ceremony implies a global reach and necessitates engagement with descendants of people held within colonial collections worldwide. Currently our capacity and focus centers those held captive in the Morton Cranial Collection, and more specifically on the 20 Black Philadelphians within the collection, who the Penn Museum plans to bury imminently without the knowledge or consent of their descendants.