“A 1990 law meant to protect Native American skeletons and sacred items has spiraled out of control, say anthropologists. Tribes are appropriating and burying non-indigenous items, including a Chinese vase, X-rays, and photographs. Now, the ransacking threatens medical science,” notes Michael Shellenberger.
Two years ago, “the world-renowned American Museum of Natural History in New York City closed two major halls of Native American objects covering roughly 10,000 square feet.” The museum’s president said the halls were “vestiges of an era when museums such as ours did not respect the values” of “Indigenous peoples.”
That same year, “the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Harvard’s Peabody Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and others covered or removed Native American displays. They did so to comply with legislation Congress passed in 1990, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)…..NAGPRA required museums and agencies that take federal money to identify Native remains and cultural items and return them to lineal descendants and affiliated tribes.”
The law was intended to be “a compromise. Identifiable ancestors and genuine sacred objects would go home, while ancient or unaffiliated materials would stay available for research and public education.”
“But the law has spiraled wildly beyond its purpose, says anthropologist Elizabeth Weiss.” It now “reaches objects no one would call an ancestor. Consider a fragment of a Chinese bowl. The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, catalogs a Ming dynasty porcelain bowl base fragment made in China around 1595. Its own record says the piece was presumed salvaged from the wreck of the Spanish galleon San Agustin, which sank off Point Reyes, California, in November 1595. The museum files this Chinese trade fragment under its Native California department and has hidden it away. The law has even led anthropologists and curators to treat photographs and recent books as Native American artifacts. In a notice published in January 2026, the Fowler Museum at UCLA moved to repatriate photographic negatives of petroglyphs from Black Canyon in San Bernardino County. A separate notice that same month listed 146 objects that Turtle Bay Exploration Park in Redding would repatriate, among them Jaime de Angulo’s Indian Tales, a book the City of Redding bought for a museum reference library in 1981.”
Weiss, who taught at San Jose State University, notes that “the skeletal collections now disappearing are what train the people who read bones for a living, the forensic anthropologists who identify crime victims, and the anatomists who teach in medical schools.”
“There is a real danger,” she says, “that we’re going to lose some skills that are really essential to medicine, to forensics, and who knows what else.”
The National Review describes how “decolonization ideology” — including “deference to Native American cultural norms and a leftward shift in the intellectual currents of anthropology” — are hindering scientific research into America’s past….Elizabeth Weiss, professor emeritus of anthropology at San Jose State University, argues that the field has been plagued by overbroad interpretations of the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA.) Designed in part to deter grave-robbing, the act required the repatriation of human remains and sacred objects connected to federally recognized tribes, granting some leeway to tribal practices. Many repatriated items are reburied, which essentially destroys the item.”
Museums have lost significant exhibits as a result of the decolonization ideology. The Goldwater Institute shows an “exhibit at the San Diego Museum of Us,” “where human remains were once displayed but were removed as “part of our decolonization process.”
This “decolonization” ideology comes at the expense of modern science, deferring to the “indigenous knowledge” of Indian tribes even when it is in conflict with science.
“Indigenous knowledge” includes pagan superstition and “discredited pseudoscience,” but the Biden administration ordered federal scientific and regulatory agencies to use it, as a sop to progressive Native American activists. The Biden administration hosted “indigenous knowledge” seminars that warned scientists against “disrespecting” spirits.
The Washington Free Beacon reported on this in 2024, noting that under Biden,
The White House ordered the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a federal regulatory agency, to expand its use of “Indigenous Knowledge” on Monday, as part of a last-minute push in the federal government to embrace what scientists call pseudoscience….
“Indigenous Knowledge” is a discredited belief system posting that native-born peoples possess an innate understanding of how the universe works. While scientists have referred to its ideas as “dangerous” and a rejection of the scientific method, those criticisms have not stopped the Biden administration from ordering the federal government to consider “Indigenous Knowledge” when implementing rules and regulations.
President Joe Biden issued a memo in November 2022 that directed more than two dozen federal agencies to apply “Indigenous Knowledge” to “decision making, research, and policies.” The memo called on agencies to speak with “spiritual leaders” and reject “methodological dogma.”
NOAA’s language in its announcement echoes Biden’s guidance. The agency contrasts “Indigenous Knowledge” with “western science,” although it declined to define either term….NOAA…is hardly the first agency to embrace “Indigenous Knowledge.” The FDA and CDC in February finalized revisions to their scientific integrity guidelines to include “Indigenous Knowledge.”
Similarly, under Biden, the National Science Foundation financed a $30 million effort to combine primitive superstition with science, a “federally funded effort to braid” indigenous knowledge into science.
The push to use “indigenous knowledge” is based partly on false assumptions, such as the stereotype that Indian tribes are “stewards of the environment” who share unique insight on how to preserve it. As a pro-science web site explains, that “isn’t really the case, as Native Americans engaged in several practices, among them overhunting of bison and overburning of the prairie and woodlands (the latter also was done to facilitate hunting).”
Federal health agencies have wasted millions of dollars on “indigenous knowledge.”
In December 2022, the Biden administration released guidance designed to promote the use of indigenous knowledge and beliefs in federal agencies’ decisions, but also to give tribes more control over the public release of their indigenous knowledge. After the administration illegally withheld records about its policies on “indigenous knowledge,” it was sued in court. The lawsuit triggered the release of records that reveal a desire by some insiders to restrict the free flow of information.
