In this episode, Dr. Elizabeth Weiss joins me to talk about her controversial book, Repatriation and Erasing the Past, and the controversy surrounding it. Dr. Weiss also discusses her work as a physical anthropologist and her opposition to the removal of Native American bones from public display.
00:03:25.540And I was at San Jose State since 2004.
00:03:28.980Sure. And everybody knew my perspective on I'm against the reburial of these skeletal remains.
00:03:36.200I think studying them and other prehistoric collections is important.
00:03:41.340And I had criticized repatriation and reburial laws like the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act from the very get go.
00:03:51.140One of my earliest articles was called Kennewick Man's Funeral.
00:03:54.760And so it's not that this was any secret. But in 2020, my book Repatriation and Erasing the Past that was co-authored with James W. Springer came out and everything went haywire in a sense.
00:04:13.700Basically, there was a movement to censor the book.
00:04:18.240Of course, the woke academics who wanted to censor the book wouldn't call it censoring,
00:04:24.320but they were writing the publisher and saying that the book should be removed from libraries,
00:04:30.820shouldn't be sold to libraries, should be out of print, should be removed from print.
00:06:20.040You know, let me, that's a very good way of putting it.
00:06:23.680Now, it has spread from indigenous people to other cultures now, in part because some of the anthropologists and other academics say, we don't want to show any human remains.
00:06:37.480We want to bury all human remains so that we don't upset indigenous peoples.
00:06:42.860You know, so by proxy. So so you're being you're being respectful to the indigenous people, even though it's not indigenous remains by you engaging in that behavior with other remains.
00:06:56.400You're being disrespectful. So and the entire enterprise.0.54
00:07:00.380Exactly. And and what happened is so the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was a law that was passed in 1990.
00:07:10.220In my book, Repatriation and Erasing the Past, which came out on the 30th anniversary of it, intentionally on the 30th anniversary of it, was written as a compromise.
00:07:20.900You know, let's give back the skeletal remains and sacred objects to tribes who are clearly affiliated or associated with these artifacts and remains.
00:07:34.740It wasn't like a pan-Native American law that said, you know, all Native American things need to be removed from universities and museums.
00:07:50.980And then the things that cannot be connected to a tribe or the things that are not sacred, like everyday objects, those remain in universities.
00:07:59.380And anthropologists can continue to do their work.
00:08:02.100But that compromise fell apart. And the reason why it fell apart is twofold. One of the reasons is because the academics in anthropology and in the other social sciences started to embrace kind of this decolonization mindset where anything that the indigenous say is right and everything must be decolonized.
00:08:32.100so non-Western. And since the science is Western, that is wrong. And since the Indigenous people0.82
00:08:38.020are claiming that their creationists told them that this 10,000 or 12,000-year-old1.00
00:08:43.820skeleton is actually their ancient one, then that is right. And so we even need to rebury
00:08:50.920things like Kennewick Man is 9,000 years old. But the other aspect is, so that's the academic
00:08:58.240aspect but that's the other aspect is also that um you know the activists the Native American
00:09:08.340activists see this as kind of a gravy train and so they're not stopping at what is affiliated
00:09:14.980they're basically oh yes everything everything that is found in this location should is sacred
00:09:22.820or is a funerary object i mean they're asking for things like fossilized feces to be defined as a
00:09:31.160as a burial good you know and people say they say well what's a big deal about you know giving them0.99
00:09:38.280that that shit even their shit is holy their shit is holy wow yeah and the thing the problem is0.99
00:09:47.840once you've abandoned those you know what the real definition is then they're just taking1.00
00:09:53.880everything out of the shelves and we're losing the science and we're not only losing physical
00:09:58.780anthropology you can say goodbye to you know paleontology you can say bye to history I mean
00:10:06.260I just saw one of the notices in the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation
00:10:10.900Act notice list, NAGPRA notice list, includes historic items from like the U.S. Army from
00:10:20.940World War I is being labeled as indigenous. So they just don't want it to end, right? And since
00:10:31.880the academics are not going to disagree with them, they're just giving everything back.
00:10:36.780And so that's one of the terrible things. But the other aspect is when NAGPRA, the passing of NAGPRA was fatally flawed from the beginning because they allowed oral history to be used as evidence.
00:10:53.080But it was still required a preponderance of evidence to make decisions, not just one thing.
00:11:00.540Now, 2023, what happened is they had new regulations and those regulations turned everything upside down in a sense.
00:11:12.700So it used to be that the scientists, the academics went into the collection, said, OK, so this part is Native American.
00:11:21.040this part is historic this part looks like funerary objects this part looks just like
00:11:26.000you know random stuff and then had the Native Americans come and say you know do they want
00:11:32.780the materials back what's happened now is they that universities and museums from the 2023
00:11:40.420regulatory changes which went into effect in 2024 the Native American repatriation activists
00:11:49.160come in first and say what should go back and then the museum or the the um you know curators
00:11:58.560and these native american repatriation activists sometimes are called knowledge keepers and
00:12:05.580their knowledge the traditional knowledge does not need to be passed down so um you know if you
00:12:13.280get a new knowledge keeper that can be completely different knowledge than the last knowledge
00:12:17.200keeper because that's the definition of their tradition is not that it needs to be passed down
00:12:24.620which then what it how is it traditional right but then the other thing is because they're
00:12:30.580knowledge keepers they can keep that knowledge and they don't need to share it with you or i0.92
00:12:35.560so they can say this shit is sacred and you can't ask you can't ask me why i've made that0.97
00:12:42.420determination i've made that determination and that's that well go ahead that is one of the big0.99
00:12:49.620problems so along those lines as you probably know uh i discussed this in one of my earlier
00:12:55.720books in the parasitic mind there was a woman who was at ubc going up for tenure uh i think it was
00:13:03.180in the law faculty and she had you know not published much or anything at all and she had
00:13:09.080not gotten tenure but then she sued and it went to some human rights tribunal because asking her
00:13:16.880to have written things you know as you would need to do in a publication would be contrary
00:13:22.320you mentioned earlier to her oral history and so you know sorry but you can't expect me to be
00:13:28.820publishing things and and it actually was heard in front of the tribunal of course the other
00:13:33.540The other examples would be the decolonization and indigenization of entire curricula in Canada, right?
00:13:42.280It doesn't matter what you teach, you have to find a way to decolonize and indigenize whatever program it is that you teach.
00:13:49.420And then, of course, a colleague of both of us, but certainly much more in line with your, Frances Whittleson, who's been on my show.
00:14:01.420in a sense she dealt with something similar to yours and that she's saying wait a minute all of
00:14:06.180these burial sites of uh you know the missing what is it called like missing missing indigenous
00:14:12.380children i actually wrote an i co-wrote an article with her about that um and it's just
00:14:18.020so it's in a sense you're both fighting a similar phenomenon which is if there is something that
00:14:27.860goes contrary to the sensibilities of indigenous people in any way. It could be epistemologically,
00:14:35.740it could be historically, it could be culturally. That is simply not a competition or a dialogue
00:14:42.280that you can have. You simply say, yes, sir, yes, knowledge keeper, I am just a stupid white person1.00
00:14:48.980sitting on your stolen land, and you move aside, racist, correct? Right. And, you know,1.00
00:14:54.440So a little bit over a month ago, I had a Goldwater Institute report on the state of anthropology in the Southwest and how these laws, not only the federal law, NAGPRA, but also state laws, are basically killing anthropology and archaeology.
00:15:15.500And one of the things is the University of Arizona, who deals with almost all of the repatriation and reburial efforts in the state, has decided to, has made some absurd decisions on this kind of decolonization aspect and on agreeing with the knowledge keepers.
00:15:37.940one of the absurd decisions is they have decided to um that to redefine research as
00:15:47.720research is even opening a box to see what's in the box so you have sometimes have things
00:15:54.120being repatriated where they don't even know what's in the box they've literally said that
00:16:00.340is research. Another thing is they've decided that since some Native Americans claim that
00:16:08.120human spirits can enter into animals, that there are some animal remains that need to have the
00:16:17.820same treatment as humans. And so we have, you know, burials of animals too. In California,
00:16:26.940when um there was a famous mountain lion called p22 puma 22 that was trapped for years and when
00:16:34.980it died the scientists wanted to do like in-depth research on it and they also wanted to keep tissue
00:16:41.540samples and the bones and so forth to see how this urban um lion urban mountain lion existed
00:17:18.760ceremony i can guarantee you that in a thousand years ago nobody was burying mountain lions
00:17:25.760you know they were too busy trying to survive i mean they were they weren't doing ceremonial
00:17:32.380deaths for mountain lions there's never been one on discovered in in the record the archaeological
00:17:39.780record it would have been found um so i think that that's another aspect and you know duty of
00:17:46.580The new regulations also emphasize appropriate duty of care, and this means basically taking care of collections in a manner that the Native Americans say you should, Native American activists say you should.
00:18:03.480And so at UCLA, you know, one of our esteemed universities, they go into the collection room and they talk to the artifacts and remains to make sure that they're not lonely.
00:18:23.120They are funny, but they're destroying a field and they're doing it in a way that is very discriminatory against women.
00:18:32.180they have like menstrual taboos now and you know museums are putting things in high shelves so that
00:18:40.100women can't see them you know and yeah this is the same these are the same people who said believe
00:18:45.840all women yeah but ironically when the my university tried to get rid of me and I sued0.86
00:18:54.840um and one of the reasons you know i had the book come out but i also had this um i took a
00:19:01.880photograph of me holding a skull and i posted on on x which was twitter at the time said so happy
00:19:08.940to be back with old friends after covid right and everybody was like aghast at this and this is a
00:19:16.200photo that would have just been a normal photo pre the whole woke um hysteria you know i don't
00:19:24.280know how many times in my career people said oh can you come in and take some photo can i take
00:19:29.820some photos of you with some skeletal remains you know it was was that skeletal remain one that you
00:19:37.200knew was of an indigenous person or any skeletal okay so that's why it was at the time yeah if it
00:19:42.780was a swedish guy it wouldn't matter it wouldn't matter at least not then now it might matter0.75
00:19:48.000because if you're seeing the Native Americans seeing any skull is bothersome, you know.0.95
00:19:57.240But one of the funny things is, so they locked me out of the curation facility,1.00
00:20:03.560you know, a curation facility that I had overseen for 18 years.
00:20:07.900And I had been taking care of the remains and I've been ensuring that international researchers could come studying them.
00:20:14.960I did my own research on them. And ironically, the first thing that they did when they shut the lock change, they literally changed the locks in the middle of the night when they changed the locks is that they put a new set of protocols, how to get access to the remains.
00:20:34.620And one of the things that I think was like the second or third thing on the list was menstruating personnel are not allowed into the facility and are not allowed to talk to Native American elders.
00:20:49.160And they couldn't even bring themselves to say menstruating women because in their party, in their group, you know, men menstruate too.
00:21:00.160so they're they're discriminating against sex but yet they can't even tell you what a woman is
00:21:06.480exactly it's that kind of absurdity it's absurdity upon absurdity right and so i talk about this in
00:21:14.580that report too and in my book on the war path okay so uh i want to take a step back and sort
00:21:20.980of look at longitudinally the field of anthropology now there are many many disciplines
00:21:27.800beyond anthropology that are laden with what i would call parasitic ideas which then leads
00:21:35.180to you know all of the suicidal empathy that we see today but there is historically something
00:21:41.440unique about anthropology in that we can go back to franz boas and cultural relativism and then
00:21:49.460his students margaret mead and all the the nonsense there are no human universals who are you to judge
00:21:55.220the cultural norms of another society. And she discovered that the Samoans actually have
00:22:00.960different sexual traditions. And it turns out to be a complete nonsense. That's why the gentleman0.96
00:22:06.340wrote The Faithful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead. So then you've got the cultural anthropologists,
00:22:10.980you've got the anthropologists of peace that Steven Pinker talks about, where, you know,
00:22:17.980in their natural state, the indigenous people have zero violence. It's really white men that
00:22:23.480introduced the concept of violence. There was absolutely no evidence of any violence prior to
00:22:28.620white man. Then you've got the Napoleon, I mean, I would say Napoleon Chagnon, but I know in America
00:22:34.680you say Chagnon, you know, he went in and was committing a genocide on the Yanomamo and so on.
00:22:41.500So, and of course, in 2023, one of the sessions you were at was canceled because, you know,
00:22:48.760how dare you say biological sex and so on. So there seems to be in all of the ecosystems of
00:22:55.920disciplines laden with nonsense, you guys get possibly a gold medal. Number one, do you agree
00:23:03.480with that? And why is it uniquely orgiastic with the anthropologists? I think you are right. And I
00:23:12.100think that many bad ideas have stemmed from that and seeped out of anthropology. Why is it so bad
00:23:20.340in anthropology? I think that there's kind of this over-the-top white guilt as a result of
00:23:29.640studying skeletal remains, and specifically skulls, and trying to link this all with eugenics,
00:23:37.060nazis um and you know i think that that's one of the things and you know like the nazis had a huge0.53
00:23:45.940huge slew of ridiculous superstitions they didn't need anthropology to become uh genocidal
00:23:53.140you know that was just you know sometimes you know there might be links with all sorts of stuff0.90
00:24:00.140you know vegetarianism it was one of those things that came up with the nazis so but we don't
00:24:07.040start calling all vegetarians hitler you know um but i think that that that's one of the things
00:24:14.700and the other thing is um because anthropology is this kind of three or four field discipline
00:24:23.320what you have is you have many people who entered into anthropology maybe thinking that they're
00:24:30.500going to become physical anthropologists but then realizing that it's difficult and they don't
00:24:36.980really want to study all the things like um you know anatomy dna doing statistics and so then
00:24:47.560they go into cultural anthropology and cultural anthropology i believe in the beginning at least
00:24:53.600was much more toxic and so i think that that's another aspect and i think that um
00:24:59.740anthropology is a study of others and we sometimes have the tendency to romanticize the others
00:25:06.960there's this whole thing like oh the in the past people always talked so bad about the native
00:25:11.960americans it's not true at all you read really ancient texts and they're already romanticizing
00:25:17.840um you know indigenous america but there's kind of so there's kind of this uh underdog
00:25:25.000you know oh we want to stick up for the underdog kind of mentality when studying the others and
00:25:30.780also the going native you know the the cultural anthropology students who come back from um from
00:25:37.960africa with their uh ears elongated type of thing so i think that those kind of things play into it
00:25:45.360um but it's it's really a shame because at its heart anthropology is one of these really
00:25:52.540important fields that people don't think of as important when you talk to outsiders that are
00:25:57.800fascinating but they kind of think oh well what's a big deal if some Native American materials get
00:26:03.620reburied you know and and the thing is that at its heart what anthropology teaches us is that we're
00:26:10.700all flawed every culture has some flaws some more than others but every culture has its flaws and so
00:26:16.960don't villainize any the everybody but also don't you know put people on a pedestal either kind of
00:26:24.560deal with it as you know human there's a human nature aspect that all cultures will have and
00:26:32.540that therefore you know you'll see universals I don't know why anthropology has turned so against
00:26:40.820universals but whenever I ask a question about universals I it wasn't that long ago I was in a
00:26:47.200uh webinar on indigenous medicine and i thought i was being very helpful i said um
00:26:55.020you know i noticed that you mentioned the use of comfort and menthol and these you know as
00:27:02.300an ancient tradition this is also done and has also been found in asia and in europe and you
00:27:09.160know it's this seems to be a universal can you talk about that and they were like no
00:27:14.100you know we found it first i can i can explain in part why that is because this is a tension that
00:27:23.060arises in my own work right so i i my whole career has been attempting to incorporate
00:27:30.440evolutionary thinking in the behavioral sciences in general and in consumer behavior and economic
00:27:36.620behavior in particular and in doing so i do study things that are human universals but even
00:27:43.540cross-cultural differences are oftentimes due to evolutionary reasons, right? So the field of
00:27:50.100behavioral ecology is the study of cross-cultural differences that are cultural adaptive responses
00:27:57.300to their unique ecosystems. So, for example, Darwinian anthropology or evolutionary anthropology,
00:28:04.080to your point earlier when you said anthropology is important, is an incredibly rigorous and
00:28:08.680important field. Anthropology is the study of man in the Homo sapiens sense. What could be more
00:28:15.920important than studying the ways in which all cultures are similar and the ways in which
00:28:21.660cultures are different and why they are different? But yet, I think what's happened is that
00:28:26.900anthropology has been hijacked by what I talk about in Suicidal Empathy, by an epistemology
00:28:32.940of care rather than an epistemology of truth. So seeking the truth is a lot less important
00:28:40.920than creating an epistemologically empathetic narrative. So therefore, if the truth has to
00:28:49.320be murdered at the altar of Kumbaya, then so be it. And if your graduate students are trained in
00:28:57.620that epistemology of care rather than the epistemology of truth then they become the
00:29:02.940professors and then the system self-perpetuates yes and you know i you know ironically they may
00:29:10.720be thinking that they're being the kind ones but they're not the kind ones um for a couple reasons
00:29:16.960one thing is i think a lot of this uh care is so that they can feel better themselves not necessarily
00:29:25.820to improve others, other people's lives.
00:32:27.240you know at the level of science and nature and i've communicated with him in the past
00:32:33.640about papers that i wanted to send to that journal which he kind of desk rejected and i'm like i guess
00:32:40.020i now know why they were desk rejected so it is grotesque people don't have an appreciation of
00:32:45.640the extent of the rot in academia this doesn't mean that all academics are like this it doesn't
00:32:50.980mean that we don't love academia but there certainly is a lot of rot i wanted to move to
00:32:55.660the next topic, which because it's a personal one, I made sure to clear it with you off air.
00:33:01.880Since we're talking about forbidden knowledge and things that you shouldn't say, you were once
00:33:08.020married to arguably, at least in psychology, to the guy who was the most despised well before there
00:33:16.600was the word cancel culture. I'm talking about Philip Rushton. Before I cede the floor to you,
00:33:21.860I want to set up my own personal story with Philip Rushdie. For those of you who don't know,
00:33:27.260Philip Rushdie has done a lot of work looking at racial differences in IQ, in cranial capacity,
00:33:35.620and so on. And, you know, I mean, you could say, oh, why is he doing this research? Or you could
00:33:41.740say, listen, if he follows assiduously the scientific method, nothing is off limits.
00:33:47.560There is no forbidden knowledge, which, by the way, that's exactly the position I would support.
00:33:52.400But back in 1996, I was a young assistant professor.
00:33:56.800I was speaking at the International Congress of Psychology, a big, big audience.
00:34:02.320It was actually in Montreal, my hometown, at the Congress Hall, probably 1,500 people in that room.0.93
00:34:09.040I was idiotic enough to not check who the other speakers in my session were.0.90
00:34:14.460And I'm sitting there waiting to be called up next.0.99
00:34:17.220I'm thinking, why is there such animosity in the air, such venom? And then here comes Philip
00:34:24.800Rushton, to whom you were married, who then puts up the stuff on racial differences and so on.
00:34:30.820And that was the only time in my life where I actually felt great dread at going up next,
00:34:37.640because I said, I think I'm going to be lynched by proxy just because I'm coming after this guy.
00:34:42.920Now, the good news for me as a young assistant professor back then was that if the room was filled with about 1,500 people, once he finished his talk, 1,425 of the 1,500 rushed out of the room to sort of badger him.
00:34:59.400And I said, thank God that there's almost nobody left in this room.
00:35:03.240And then I went on to give my talk, which was completely non-controversial.
00:35:06.760It was about, you know, which types of decision-making strategies you use under time pressure and so on.
00:35:12.440having set all that up you were married to him can you tell us the old perennial story
00:35:20.240did he do his research because he was an adherent of there is no forbidden knowledge but had zero
00:35:27.200racism in him or was there any nefarious cause behind his research you know i was married to
00:35:34.240him for three years but I was with him for five years and I had I never saw any race racism racist
00:35:43.060acts you know when he was interacting with people when he was watching movies his favorite actor was
00:35:49.740Denzel Washington you know like a racist is not gonna gonna act like that he was not a racist
00:35:57.500he really wanted to figure out why people were different and what you know how can this help
00:36:05.500some of the problems we have getting along um he was extremely hard working right and i don't know
00:36:13.740if if you know he passed away i believe in 2012 i'm not 100 sure but i think he was 68 when he
00:36:21.160passed away so he passed away and I think it was 2012 and um and he was incredibly hard working
00:36:28.880he'd go in even on weekends you know um so like I never I never saw him like fudge numbers or say
00:36:40.060you know let's cut this corner or you know he was really after the the truth and um I did some work
00:36:49.460with him not a lot but you know i did do some work on um with him on skeletal remains um and
00:36:56.660one of the things is that he also was an extremely curious person and so he was always kind of
00:37:03.860looking like you know what is what more can i learn and he was also really happy when people
00:37:11.520succeeded in their careers when young academics were going into their careers and they got a
00:37:18.68010-year track he was like so happy for people when that happened and um so you know people are
00:37:25.760like well if he was this great guy why didn't you divorce him and the divorce wasn't a pleasant
00:37:30.460divorce it wasn't like you know and I say you know I divorced him for the same reasons people
00:37:37.220get divorced all the time they were personal we didn't get along in some ways it was like we were
00:37:43.300just in some ways we were too similar like we once we got you know into something um even if
00:37:51.600it was something minor neither one of us ever wanted to give up given right so hold on i'm
00:37:57.860glad that you said this because i was going to ask you the next sort of chicken and egg question
00:38:01.900did you get attracted to him as a prospective spouse because i mean he is a honey badger and
00:38:09.740that he's saying, I don't care that I'm going to be ostracized by everybody. This research
00:38:15.780should be pursued and you're not going to stop me. And therefore you said, wait a minute,
00:38:19.680I recognize this in him and that attracts me or, and, or is it that seeing him being the honey
00:38:27.080badger and you being a colleague and a spouse then gave you the courage later in your career
00:38:33.600when you had to invoke your honey badger mindset? I think it's a little bit of both.
00:38:38.860I mean, when I first met him, I knew he was controversial, but I didn't know how controversial.
00:38:45.760And then when we were together, he was very supportive of my own academic career.
00:38:55.620And so, in a sense, you know, I talked about in the beginning, I talked about Kenwick Mann's funeral.
00:39:01.240He was one who who was like, you should really write an article about how paleo Indians, how the most ancient of the remains are being attacked by this, you know, by repatriation laws.
00:39:14.040And so he was, you know, academically, you know, we were we were very much in sync and and personality wise academically.
00:39:24.300So I do think that that gave me strength. I also think that, ironically, he was so much more controversial, I think, than I am. And yet, when he went onto campus, even, so I was married to him from, I was with him from like 1998 to 2003.
00:39:47.420and when he went on to campus people greeted him when he went to conferences people would talk to
00:39:54.780him um you know he was not treated like a pariah obviously there were people who would would have
00:40:02.040stayed away from him but he's he was not treated nearly as badly as i've been treated and he still
00:40:09.340was giving conference talks you know throughout the time we were together and this was after his
00:40:15.480book race evolution and behavior had been published so you know if you think about it i can't even get
00:40:21.140on a program anymore um so i do think things have gotten nastier um but but yeah so i think that in
00:40:30.640some ways i was kind of surprised how how nasty things have gotten especially given that i had
00:40:37.940already encountered some stuff like this being married to phil yeah yeah interesting now you're
00:40:45.100you're out of academia. So I think, are you with the National Association of Scholars?
00:40:49.260I am with the National Association of Scholars. I'm a board member.
00:40:52.460Okay. And so do you miss academia? Do you wish you had another position? Or are you like,
00:41:00.220hey, that was a great part of my life. It ended perhaps poorly, but thank God I'm out of that
00:41:05.160place. I am glad that I'm retired as a professor. I do think that it's sad that
00:41:13.900It's so difficult to continue research. But even if I was still working at the university, I wouldn't I would have difficult time because my area of research is skeletal remains.
00:41:26.780And although, you know, Indigenous, you cannot find a newly collected data Indigenous California article in the last three years, maybe four years.
00:41:45.260They're just basically all the collections in California are off the table, many in other states.
00:41:52.400But also, even other human remains now are being put away. And so in a sense, it's very difficult to conduct this type of research in America, in the Americas, in the US and Canada. And then also in New Zealand and Australia, it's very difficult.
00:42:16.200So, you know, and most of the, you know, the big English speaking places. So that's, that's kind of sad. I'm not giving up. And I do have a few things on the table that I'm still working on.
00:42:33.140And since I've been retired, I have published actually an article on the x-rays that I have.
00:42:41.780One of the funny things is that when I was locked out of the curation facility and I was told that I wasn't going to get any access to the collections anymore, I said, well, there are all these x-rays in the collection facility and x-rays aren't considered in the repatriation laws.
00:43:03.140And the curator, the person who took over the curation and the NAGPRA coordinator, they said, well, we've been talking to the tribes and they tell us that x-rays are sacred.
00:43:18.800And I said, how can x-rays be sacred? By the definition of sacred in the laws is that these are sacred, and sacred object has to be an object that is required to practice your religion. Native Americans never had x-rays. And so how can they need it to practice their traditional religion?
00:43:42.880Oh, can I take a shot? Can I take a shot? X-rays are imbued with ancestral spirits that you as a white Western woman simply don't have the capacity to understand. So I wholeheartedly agree that by you taking those X-rays, you're violating some spirit God, no?
00:44:04.780yes that's exactly that's how it goes but what they didn't know is that I had like maybe um 400
00:44:14.080x-rays in my office from the years when I the x-rays in the curation facility were taken before
00:44:22.260I got to San Jose so they were quite old but I have like x-rays that I that were in my office
00:44:28.460that um you know I had taken over the years and and I kept them in my office instead of the curation
00:44:33.540facility um and so i took those along with me and i've used them to do some research and i have
00:44:40.780um i have a couple more plans to do research on them and we'll see if i can get them published
00:44:47.100um i was able to get the first one published so we'll see you know if i can get others published
00:44:53.780one of the things is that um medical journals tend to like to publish anthropology sometimes
00:44:59.100as a, you know, oh, this is an interesting way
00:45:51.960So I'm really trying to bring forth the problem of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, NAGPRA.
00:46:01.780I personally think it should be repealed.
00:46:04.520It has problems with separation of church and state because the committee members have to include two traditional Indian religious leaders, whatever that means.
00:46:16.520Um, and, um, so I don't, I don't think I'll be successful, but I won't, I won't stop trying to get that repealed. Um, at the very least, if I was successful in removing those 2023 regulations and reopen, which would reopen collections to researchers, I think that that would be a huge success.
00:46:39.440So I'm continuing to write about that. I'm also going this summer to the UK to the Heterodox Conference, Eric Kaufman at the Heterodox Conference, and I'll be presenting there.
00:46:53.940um and i have something like five articles and chapters that are in and in press or in
00:47:03.000uh in some part of the stage of being in press and yeah um one of them is from a conference i
00:47:10.740did in um israel another one i didn't actually get to go i just zoomed in um another one is uh
00:47:18.460from a george mason um conference i a symposium i um also zoomed in but um i really had wanted
00:47:26.780to go to that one but my my husband who just passed away um uh three three months ago um
00:47:33.980he was so sick that i couldn't you know i obviously didn't go um so but um i have those
00:47:42.000things. And, you know, I'm always writing and always looking to see what's next. And, you know,
00:47:49.800hopefully, you know, fighting back some of this, you know, woke warrior BS, basically,
00:47:59.100and getting anthropology back to, you know, people who are interested in just like reconstructing
00:48:06.960the past with all its warts and also looking at bones and not being like, well, this bone could
00:48:15.080have been a warrior or actually this looks like a non-binary trans warrior from the Native American
00:48:24.260past because they were so understanding, but reconstructing it as it really is. And so I'm
00:48:31.880I'm just constantly pecking away at that.