Burying Science
An alliance between Native American tribes and woke anthropologists is hindering our ability to study the past.
Written by Elizabeth Weiss.
The study of America’s past is under attack by religious zealots who don’t want their creation myths challenged, and who blame all their social ills on archaeological collections. They are thwarting our capacity to understand the peopling of the Americas and how Paleoindians (the oldest skeletal remains found in the Americas) relate to later Amerindian peoples.
Unlike earlier attempts by Christian creationists to enter science classrooms and prevent the teaching of human evolutionary origins, scholars are largely supportive of this latest intrusion into anthropological and archaeological research. The religious movement hindering our ability to study the past is called Native American animism (the belief that a god or gods have given souls to animals, plants and other natural phenomena) and it is supported by “repatriation laws” like the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).
These laws interfere with science by allowing creation myths to be used as justification for the removal of skeletal and archaeological collections from museums and universities. The collections are handed to modern tribes, who often have only a tenuous link to them. As I wrote in Repatriation and Erasing the Past, the Hopi have used their belief that they emerged from underground to repatriate invaluable archaeological collections from the Southwest. Native Americans have even adopted the creationist catchphrase about evolution – “it’s just a theory” – to dismiss research published on migrations into the Americas.
Indeed, their creation myths also rely on bizarre claims that anthropologists long ago abandoned. Many Native American tribes believe in polygenesis – a concept that each tribe was created separately and, thus, does not share common ancestors with other tribes. This theory of polygenesis was embraced by some late 17th Century and early 18th Century explorers who viewed themselves as superior to those whom they encountered. Darwin and other evolutionary scientists of his time already knew that polygenesis was false and acknowledged that there must be a common ancestor for all humans – regardless of race.
Another way repatriation laws enable religious intrusion into archaeology and anthropology is by requiring repatriation committees to have at least two out of seven members be “traditional Indian religious leaders.” And each NAGPRA meeting must open with a prayer. For instance, at the January 5th, 2023 meeting, Armond Minthorn opened the meeting by saying: “We ask Creator today to guide our thoughts and our words as we come together.” And on January 10th, 2023, Minthorn again started the meeting with a prayer: “And today, asking Creator, give us strength to do right, give us strength to pray.”
At the January 5th meeting, extensive discussions revolved around whether animals imbued with human spirits should be defined as humans. Committee member Angela Garcia-Lewis, from the O’odham tribe, noted that certain animals like raptors are considered human because they have the same “spirit” as us.
In a follow-up to this discussion on January 10th, Reylynne Williams, the Cultural Resource Specialist for the Gila River Indian Community Tribal Historic Preservation Office, voiced support for Garcia-Lewis’s concerns regarding animals. She said that the Arizona State Museum (in agreement with the Gila River Indian Community and Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community) has accepted that animals that are imbued with the same spirit as humans “require the same treatment as human remains”. She then went on to name some of these animals, such as eagles, hawks, red-winged blackbirds and dogs. Treating these remains as human, or even sacred, makes them eligible for repatriation and prevents the scientific study of their zooarchaeological remains.
In a similarly absurd case, tribes in southern California decried scientists’ plans to study P-22, the longest living and followed urban puma, which recently died after being hit by a car. The scientists had hoped the remains would enable them to better understand how such an animal survived the urban environment, believing this knowledge could help zoologists to prevent urban pumas from going extinct. Although the zoologists were able to do some preliminary research, the Chumash tribe stopped further scientific research by contending that P-22’s body should be returned to ancestral lands for a traditional burial. What is a “traditional burial” for a puma? I guarantee that there was none, and that the Chumash’s animistic ritual is new. P-22 has now been buried.
Participants in the aforementioned January 5th meeting also argued that x-rays, casts, and all digital data should be defined as “human remains”. The issue was first raised by committee chair, Halealoha Ayau, a Native Hawaiian lawyer. It was then supported by committee members Domonique deBeaubien, who received her graduate degree in skeletal and dental bioarchaeology from the University of London, and Timothy McKeown, a legal anthropologist. Regarding anthropologists’ use of pictures and casts, Ayau worried about this “very serious problem” because “if you can create something to entice the spirit of someone to inhabit it, you can control it.”
The NAGPRA committee had hoped to change the definition of human remains to include all digital data and animals “imbued with human spirit”. Fortunately, the Department of the Interior did not allow these changes. In their response, they wrote:
We have defined “human” using the commonly understood meaning of the word, i.e., a member of the species homo sapiens. For this reason, we cannot make the requested change to include animal burials as a separate and distinct category of human remains as that would be inconsistent with the Act.
They also added that they “cannot expand the definition of human remains to include casts, 3–D scans, or other digital data, documents, or records as that would be inconsistent with the Act.”
But the animistic activists needn’t worry; many institutions – both museums and universities – are moving beyond compliance with NAGPRA and similar state laws like CalNAGPRA.
At California State University, Bakersfield, there is a moratorium on “research, teaching, display, imaging, and circulation of human remains and cultural items (including archival material, notes, movies, and data) that are potentially subject to NAGPRA and CalNAGPRA.” And at Cal Poly Pomona the university president, Soraya Coley, wrote that “images, renderings, and reproductions of ancestral remains and cultural items that are or have been in a university’s collection” are prohibited for use in research, exhibition and teaching. At my own university, San José State University, local tribes in cahoots with the NAGPRA coordinator declared that x-rays are not human remains but rather “sacred objects,” and will thus be burned at the time of repatriation.
Other objects in our finest science museums are being treated as sacred. In a 2021 repatriation at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, the Tohono O’odham “ritually cleansed ceremonial pieces” that were to be repatriated. Likewise, "objects of power", such as items made with hair, animal bones, or those used by shamans from Northwest Coast tribes, are being treated as “dangerous” in the exhibits and curation facilities. To avoid “unintentional interaction” with these objects, all doors must be marked with warning signs. And tribe members have “instructed” museum curators not to display objects due to the harm they may cause. A Haida orca headdress is hidden away because tribal members consider it too “dangerous” to handle.
Even when the materials are just in print, archaeologists have surrendered to religious superstitions. For example, the Southeastern Archaeological Conference has decided to only publish line drawings of funerary objects in their journal because “many tribal members say seeing images of ancestral remains and funerary objects is a violation so profound that it can induce physical illness.”
Modern tribes claim that unburied remains, images of funerary objects and “dangerous and powerful” artifacts are harmful to their spiritual and physical well-being. We are told that problems in Native American society, such as alcoholism and missing women, can be traced to unburied bones and artifacts housed in museums. Such tribes also wish to prevent research into the past that challenges the narrative that they’ve been here “since time immemorial”.
Unfortunately, anthropologists are giving credence to these claims – to assuage their guilt for studying the past. They believe the world can be neatly divided into oppressed and oppressors, and we must always listen to the oppressed. Who tells the story is important to these anthropologists, not whether the story is true, because they don’t believe in objective truths. And to atone for past “sins” against the “oppressed” Native Americans, they have allowed repatriation activists to sideline science and push animistic beliefs into scientific institutions.
This religious interference is hindering our ability to study the past. And it certainly won’t help Native Americans – whose problems do not result from roaming spirits or dangerous artifacts. Indulging religious claims is a dereliction of duty for those who are meant to be pursuing genuine understanding of the world around us.
Elizabeth Weiss is professor emeritus of anthropology at San José State University. She sits on the board of the National Association of Scholars. Her latest book is On the Warpath: My Battles with Indians, Pretendians, and Woke Warriors.
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Is there any rock, hill or valley in North America that is not "sacred" to some Indian tribe?
It must be immensely frustrating to have your chosen field of research and scholarship bogged down in the mind games of people who - in a saner culture than ours - would not be let anywhere near any scientific discipline..... you have my sympathies. The psychology of the kind of people you are up against is an amalgum of intellectual cowardice, virtue-gamesmanship.....plus probably a good measure of simple dim-wittedness. And, in my view, it is perfectly acceptable to not be precious in confronting them but rather to attack this psychology head on.....call their bent and broken mental spade a spade.