DENVER — The remains of Native American ancestors showed up in boxes on the doorsteps of Colorado museums and at yard sales in Denver neighborhoods.
They sat for decades in metal sheds in the state’s national parks and in the bowels of prominent universities.
These human remains were excavated — looted — from the earth that protected them for centuries, in some cases so scientists could study their skulls to prove bogus, racist theories about the Indigenous peoples that lived here for millennia before Europeans displaced them from their ancestral homeland.
