Fine; but is the Indian's skeleton still in the basement?

Missing

Greenwich Free Press has an article today about the reopening of The Bruce Museum after a huge redesign, expansion, and renovation. The place looks great, and I definitely want to visit, but there’s no mention of what happened to the old Indian skeleton that used to greet us schoolchildren when we made field trips to see the minerals and fossils that were the museum’s main drawing card back in the early 60s.

The old fellow disappeared at some point, and I asked my friend and the then-director of the museum, Jack Clark, where he’d gotten to. He answered that it was no longer acceptable to publicly display a human being’s bones, so they’d moved the wired-together skeleton to the basement while they worked out a way to return him into the ground with a properly dignified burial. Mind you, he admitted, the poor guy had been moldering away down there for some years because the disposal question had been, first, put on the back burner, and then forgotten.

I never did hear the final denouement, because Jack was fired soon thereafter, and that’s a story in itself: a wealthy patron’s wife had an art collection that she wanted to donate to her alma mater, or some such place, but for tax purposes, the value of the paintings, and thus the amount of the charitable deduction, could be (claimed to be) much greater if they had been exhibited in a museum first. Naturally, they thought of the Bruce, else what had their contributions been for? I don’t remember now whether the paintings were the wife’s own execrable creations, or an assemblage of dreadful artists she had “discovered”, but they were truly awful, according to Jack, and on principle, he refused to accommodate the patrons’ “request”. Money being money, and directors being replaceable, Jack was soon sent packing to the midwest, and, I presume, the paintings got hung on the walls just long enough to establish their pedigree.

But what happened to Injun Joe? Did Jack drop him piecemeal into a suitcase and take him with him to Peoria? Is he still in a basement closet? Or perhaps slumbering peacefully in the non-consecrated ground of one of the more tolerant congregations in town, such as the Unitarians —“One God, if any” — or the Episcopalians — “Maybe one God, maybe many, maybe none: make up your own mind, because we no longer know, or care” — at Christ Church?

Inquiring minds want to know.