Washington, D.C.: Academica Press, 2024
228 pp., $29.95 paperback
According to an old wisecrack, the reason arguments between college professors are often so nasty is that the stakes are so small. But in Elizabeth Weiss’s case, the stakes are nothing less than the destruction of an entire science. In her new memoir, On the Warpath, she reveals how anthropology is slowly being sacrificed for the sake of that toxically irrational sludge of ideologies collectively known as “wokeness.”
Her story begins in 1990 with the enactment of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, a federal law that governs collections of objects and human remains held by museums throughout the United States. That law was adopted in response to complaints by Indian tribes that researchers in previous decades had taken bones and artifacts from Native graveyards or tribal land without legal permission, and that many museums were therefore holding items that Native Americans considered stolen property. But rather than confining it to cases of actual theft, NAGPRA’s authors mandated that even in the absence of wrongdoing, skeletons or “associated items” (typically, tokens buried along with the dead) must, if found on federally owned land, be given to officials of the tribe with whom those items are “affiliated.” NAGPRA also requires that museums receiving federal funding (which is virtually every museum in the United States) “repatriate” bones or objects that they’ve held in their collections for decades to “affiliated” tribes—again, regardless of whether any theft actually occurred.
This law, and the regulations that federal bureaucrats have written for implementing it, have emptied museum exhibits, rendered priceless scientific data off-limits to research, and granted special government privileges to the followers of Native religions, contrary to the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.
Perhaps the most infamous case involving NAGPRA started in 1996 when a nine-thousand-year-old skeleton known as Kennewick Man was unearthed on federally owned land in Washington State. At the time, it was among the oldest skeletons ever found in the western hemisphere, and it was notable for featuring a wound in the leg, apparently caused by an arrowhead. Several tribes claimed Kennewick Man as an ancestor and demanded that the federal government hand it over to be reburied—that is, effectively destroyed, and rendered inaccessible to research. But NAGPRA only lets tribes demand “repatriation” of remains with which they’re “culturally affiliated,” and the skeleton was far older than any current American Indian tribe. That meant no cultural affiliation could be proven, so the bones should not have been subject to the law’s requirements.
Years of litigation nonetheless ensued, during which the skeleton was kept locked away from scientists—although federal officials allowed tribal members to access the bones and even perform religious rituals with them, thereby contaminating them with foreign material and rendering DNA analysis more difficult. Finally, in 2004, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the bones were not subject to NAGPRA. A decade later, however, Congress passed a new law ordering that the skeleton be given to a group of tribes anyway, and they destroyed the specimen in 2017.1
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Endnotes
1. Full disclosure: I filed a friend-of-the court brief in the Ninth Circuit case on behalf of the Pacific Legal Foundation (in support of the scientists). Other Foundation attorneys later represented Elizabeth Weiss in her lawsuit against San Jose State University.
2. 2020 PRRI Census of American Religion: County-Level Data on Religious Identity and Diversity, July 8, 2020, https://www.prri.org/research/2020-census-of-american-religion/.
3. 88 Fed. Reg. 86522 (2023).