Elizabeth Weiss is a is a professor of anthropology at San José State University. She is on the board of the National Association of Scholars and is also currently a faculty fellow at Heterodox Academy. She is co-author of "Repatriation and Erasing the Past" (2020). You can contact her at Elizabeth.Weiss@sjsu.edu.
Editor’s Note: This article, originally published on Spiked on February 9, 2024, has been revised to incorporate additional insights and perspectives not previously featured in the Spiked version. The recent regulatory changes of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) have drastically deviated from the original intent of the law—to provide present-day federally […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by City Journal on December 7, 2023 and is crossposted here with permission. The American Museum of Natural History’s newest “revitalized” hall—the Northwest Coast Hall, which reopened in 2022 after five years and $19 million spent—includes a case with a warning label: CAUTION: This display case contains items used in the […]
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The origin of Christmas is often linked to Roman pagan festivals, most often either Saturnalia or Dies Natalis Solis Invicti. Both holidays fall in December. Saturnalia, which was a week-long festival that ran from December 17th until the 24th to honor the god Saturn for agricultural abundances, is said to have included decorating homes with […]
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Thanksgiving is often a time when people reflect on what they have to be thankful for—family, friends, good health, etc. For many, these are considered blessings, and there is much historical evidence to suggest that Thanksgiving developed as a religious holiday. For example, in his 1863 Proclamation of Thanksgiving, Abraham Lincoln said: “They are the […]
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On October 10, 2023, California Governor Gavin Newsom—whose Democratic party claims to be the party of science and science education—signed two anti-science education bills (AB226 and AB389) into law. These bills require the University of California and the California State University systems to bar the use of skeletal collections that cannot be affiliated with any […]
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In July, I attended the 41st Annual Meeting of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (DDP) in Tucson, Arizona. The meeting opened with the national anthem played beautifully on the trumpet and the violin by the teenage sons (Benjamin and Franklin!) of Willie Soon, the first speaker. DDP was founded in the early 1980s as a “group […]
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On the evening of April 23, 2023, a fight broke out in Los Angeles. The masked mob threw chairs, shouted swear words, stole a laptop, and landed a few punches. The cops were called, and, eventually, the chaos subsided. One person was arrested for assault, and one victim ended up with a bloody nose. This […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is a speech delivered by Professor Elizabeth Weiss of San Jose State University at a meeting of the California Association of Scholars on March 16, 2023. It has been edited prior to publication. Recent reports from Texas Tech University, Stanford University, and the University of North Carolina show promising signs that […]
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From November 10 to 13, I attended the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), which was held in Seattle, Washington. The AAA is the largest anthropological association in the world. It is a scholarly and professional organization, and three-quarters of its members are academics—either professors or students. The AAA, unlike the other major anthropological […]
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Shearing Science to Atone for Imagined Sins of the Past According to journalist Christine Chung, writing for the New York Times, Harvard’s Peabody Museum will return hundreds of Native American samples. The samples, which were collected from 1930 to 1933 by George Edward Woodbury, will be returned to the tribes to which these Native Americans […]
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Charles Darwin’s works, including The Descent of Man (1871), withstand the test of time. Darwin got a remarkable amount about the mechanics of evolution, our African origins, the links between humans and the rest of the natural world, and evolution’s impact on our current conditions right. He did this with practically no human fossil record […]
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