Report: Native American act's rules limit historical research

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(The Center Square) - Additional regulations around a federal law allowing Native American tribes to retrieve ancestral and cultural items are harming scientific research, according to a new report.

The Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute released a report showing how extra regulations surrounding the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act have hindered research into Native American history.

Congress passed NAGPRA in 1990, which “has provided for the protection and return of Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony,” according to the National Park Service.

Elizabeth Weiss, a retired professor of anthropology from San Jose State University and the Goldwater Institute report’s author, wrote that the interpretations of NAGPRA have changed over time.

In 2023, the Biden administration implemented regulations that expanded Native American tribes' role in research. Scientists were not allowed to do research on Native American remains and cultural items without seeking tribal approval, according to the report.  

The regulation also implemented duty-of-care rules requiring museums to consult with tribal members regarding the “storage, treatment, or handling of human remains or cultural items.”

Weiss told The Center Square that the duty-of-care regulation has caused a “widespread closing or shutting of museum exhibits.”

The report cited examples not intended to be covered by the original NAGPRA that have been claimed for repatriation by tribes, such as animal remains, soil and plant samples and fossilized feces.

In addition, the report noted that Paleoindian remains and fossils, some of which are 100,000 years old, are being reburied by tribes that were not in existence during that time period.

Weiss also noted other “strange things” are starting to creep into anthropology, such as new rules where women who are menstruating are not supposed to handle artifacts or talk about sacred topics.

Many Native American tribes claim their cultures have “taboos against menstruating women handling artifacts, seeing certain artifacts, hearing certain information and talking about certain things,” Weiss told The Center Square.

According to Weiss, the abuses of the original 1990 law made her think these new regulations “must be stopped” and that they should be returned to the law’s “original intention.”

Weiss said the “Native American repatriation activists have too much power.”

“They’re basically the academics, and the curators have been told that they must defer to what the Native Americans they’re consulting with say,” she noted.

In Arizona, Weiss said the Arizona State Museum, which oversees NAGPRA rules in the state, has changed its guidance for curators.

The museum has “redefined what research means,” the retired professor said.

The report alleged that the Arizona State Museum is repatriating items that were not included in the original NAGPRA, such as ancient remains without tribal affiliation, legally purchased eagle feathers from the 1930s, and scientific and research materials.

“The consequences are now visible across Arizona’s research institutions. Research on Arizona’s prehistoric past has largely ceased, Native American art associated with museum collections has declined in visibility, and science museums are increasingly turning away from scientific interpretation and toward spiritual or animistic creation narratives to explain the desert’s natural history,” Weiss wrote in her report.

Weiss told The Center Square that “Native Americans and non-Native Americans are not being told the real science, and the real history of [Arizona].

“They’re being misled by activists who don’t want certain unsavory facts to come up to be seen,” she said.

The Center Square reached out to the Arizona State Museum for comment, but did not hear back before press time.

If these policies continue, Weiss said, Americans will “lose the ability to study skeletal remains and artifacts through archaeological methods and forensic anthropology methods.”

The anthropology industry will lose the “ability to properly train the next generation of forensic anthropologists and archaeologists,” she said.

Weiss noted she is concerned scientists in the anthropology industry will be ideologically driven.

“Anthropology has unfortunately become the study of self," she said. "We have people who have decided that they want to study anthropology to understand their own modern identity politics better as opposed to what people’s lives were like in the past."