Introduction The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was initially written to ensure that government-funded institutions, such as museums and universities, give human remains and some types of artifacts from past peoples to related modern tribes. Relatedness was to be determined through a preponderance of evidence, using data from archaeology, anthropology, history, biology […]
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Last month, California assemblyman James C. Ramos started a state legislative meeting with a prayer; it was appropriate for a meeting that would end with the funeral of anthropology in California. The California legislators met with tribal leaders and California State University (CSU) and University of California (UC) officials to review the progress California’s public universities are […]
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A new academic year is upon us. With that, new faculty and graduate students will be delving into research applications, especially through the largest higher education funder of scientific research: the National Science Foundation (NSF). This year, those applying for research funds will have to consider whether their projects “may impact tribal resources or interests,” […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the author’s book Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me: Debunking the False Narratives Defining America’s School Curricula. It is posted here with permission. Modern historians often bewail the fact that the historical understandings of Native Americans have frequently been negative and one-sided, representing them as a mass of faceless […]
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University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum recently made headlines for allegedly preventing images of Nigerian Igbo masks from being displayed in their online catalog because these masks, according to the Igbo people, should only be seen by males. The museum’s director, Laura Van Broekhoven, who was hired in 2016, denied these claims, stating that: [T]he […]
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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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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 May 27, 2021, an announcement was made that would create shockwaves around the world. This was the press release of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc (formerly the Kamloops Indian Band) in British Columbia, Canada, revealing “the confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School [KIRS].” As a […]
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Seemingly lily-white Elizabeth Warren’s supposed claim of Cherokee heritage may make for good campaign fodder–incumbent Senator Scott Brown has gone so far as to demand that Warren apologize for allowing Harvard to claim her as a minority–but the real lesson in this latest of partisan battles has more to do with university rather than electoral […]
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