Camp Gagnon - Cancelled Civilizations Expert Goes ALL IN On Tribal Wars, Skulls, Sex, & Murders | Elizabeth Weiss

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

🏞️ Sign up to Camp for free: https://camp.beehiiv.com/Professor Elizabeth Weiss is an American Anthropologist, Archaeologist & Historian with controversial views on the repatriation of skeletal remains for reburial. She has battled universities in court and tested the boundaries of how academic culture butts heads with ethics and woke culture. I hope you enjoy this convo! Welcome to CAMP!Elizabeth's new book, On the Warpath: My Battles with Indians, Pretendians, and Woke Warriors, i...

Make no bones about it. Skeletons are binary. People may not be. One of the things that we do as anthropologists is we look at whether skeletons would belong to a male or female. We're very good at doing this. Probably about 99% accuracy. There's now a push to prevent anthropologists from undertaking this task

because there's a claim that sex is not binary, that it's on a spectrum. If you look at biological sex through the skeleton, then you're talking male-female. But gender is the expression of that. And so people may express themselves in many different ways. I've been told that that's like transphobic or not politically correct. And it's not mean or transphobic or discriminatory. It's a truth.

Hypothetically, if someone was born with like Klein-Felders syndrome, having like X, X, XY, female presenting, but they have internal testicles that are producing testosterone at a high rate. If you were to examine the bones with some with Kleinfeld or syndrome, what would you deduce? Dr. Elizabeth Weiss, how are you? I'm doing good, thank you. Thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.

I'm really excited to talk. I've been reading some of your articles, and there is an interesting thing happening at the intersection of science and academia and politics that is very, very interesting. That your work and a lot of the controversy around your work has sort of exposed. that I'm really excited to talk about. And it's brought up a lot of things and kind of like hypothetical, ethical questions that I've never considered before. So this is going to be a lot of fun.

Great. I think that anthropology is really an important field to save, which is one of the reasons why I have stepped out of the lab, so to speak, and also have written more popular pieces lately and even my last book is about really saving, the field of anthropology. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's very, very interesting. So you obviously are an anthropologist, you're a professor of anthropology. Up until May, I guess you'll be leaving San Jose. Is it University of San Jose? San Jose State University. Okay, got it. Yes. So I've been

at San Jose State University since 2004. Wow. 20 years. That's good. That's a good run. And it was a great place for my career because they had a fantastic skeletal collection from what they called the Ryan Mound site, the Ryan Mound collection, with over 300 skeletal remains from like skeletons, some of them almost complete in the sense of they even had finger and toe bones. And I made my career on studying those individuals. And when my last book came out in 2020, repatriation and erasing the past, all hell broke loose. And I've been kind of sidelined or derailed my career. And the collection is now off limits for study to everybody. Wow. Hey, what's up guys? Sorry to interrupt this amazing program, but I need a little bit of help.

If you're watching this on YouTube, you can probably see our subscriber number right down here. And if you're able to, it would mean the world if you could subscribe. That is the best way to support this show. Because when you subscribe, I'm able to show it to potential guests or to different brands and stuff like that. And it really, really helps grow the show, get us cooler guests, have cooler conversations, and it helps everything so, so much. So if you don't mind, thank you so much. Let's get back to it.

This is very interesting. So I'm just going to pose a hypothetical. Different versions of this kind of thing have happened. and you can kind of shed some more specific details. But it's something that I never thought about that I'll kind of pose to the audience and see how they feel about it. So let's say there's a construction crew

that's doing some construction. And all of a sudden they uncover some bones. And these bones, they report them to the police. The police then realizes, oh, this is not a crime scene. This is an ancient burial site. What do they do? They might call it local university. An anthropologists and archaeologists might come out.

They will uncover the bones. And they realize these bones are a thousand years old. Wow, this is a huge scientific discovery. These are now skeletal remains found in a very specific place, and they invite all these anthropologists out to go research them, and they're doing research, and they're finding out interesting things about the bones. And then all of a sudden they get a call from a Native American tribe,

and they say, hey, you've uncovered and dug up one of our ancestors. We need those bones back. That is a very, very interesting ethical question. Should the researchers honor the request, of the Native Americans and say, you're completely right. These bones are belonging to you. These are ancient bones that have been here since before colonization or anything like that. We will return these to you and you can bury them in the way that you see fit.

Or is it in the best interest of science and scientific progression for the anthropologists and the researchers at hand to have access to those remains and anything that's around the burial site in order to advance our understanding of human evolution and human biology? This is a very interesting debate and a lot of the controversy that you've been involved with has dealt with this specific issue. So they've passed a law called NAGPRA that basically requires scientists, anthropologists, specifically to return skeletal remains to the tribes in which they belong. Is this a pretty fair assessment of kind of a hypothetical that could have happened or has happened before? Yes, absolutely. Actually, it's happened multiple times.

one of the things that people don't realize about American archaeology is that most of the collections are actually what we call salvage sites. And salvage sites are sites that are discovered when construction happens or when construction is planned, like the roads, right, the highways, you know. And basically the option is bulldoze over them, right? or excavate. And since pretty much the 1940s, maybe even going back to the 1930s, we've had what we call salvage archaeology that has taken the position that, and funded by the government, by the way, that has taken the position that these remains and artifacts that are being uncovered

are too valuable to just bulldoze over. and that we are doing a service by excavating and then researching the remains. Nagpra, which is a Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, is a law that was passed in 1990 that says if those remains are into artifacts, sacred artifacts, funerary goods, belong to a modern-day tribe,

if there is a connection, what they would call an affiliation, and the holders of the collection receive federal funding, like universities, even private universities, receive federal funding or museums, then they are obligated to return those remains. One of the things that NAGPRA also allowed for was continued curation of the remains, so that some remains would not be given back

because they were not affiliated or could. not be affiliated with modern tribes. So not every tribe that is around now is very old, for example. Not every tribe that was around 1,000 years ago or 10,000 years ago, if you look at some of the Paleo-Indians, is around now. Some tribes have moved, merged, died out. There was invasions from other groups. So, for example, the Ryan Mound collection at San Jose State University where I work,

it's a large collection that spans about 2,000, 2,500 years in time. And what we find is if you look at the skull and you look at the cranial traits, that the oldest part of that collection belonged to a different people than the most recent part. And that there's a lot of violence, a lot of evidence of violence in that collection. So arrowheads us in the bones, broken noses, you know, bumps on the head, so forth. And this is evidence that one tribe was being invaded by another, most likely from the Ryan Mound is from the Bay Area, San Francisco Bay Area. And there was an invasion from probably from the southeast into that region for resources, and they wiped out the earlier tribes. So should we give the remains that we find to a tribe that is just in the region, even if they had no connection to it?

I would say not. And how Nagpar was written initially in 1990, it allowed for curation of those unaffiliated remains. Now, Nagra hasn't been rewritten, but has added regulations and fine-tuning over the years. And every time they've made a change, it has been made to chip away at these collections that are still in museums and universities. The tribal activists, a repatriation activists, they do not like the concept that some collections cannot be associated with modern-day tribes. And that's for multiple reasons that they don't like it. One is because it is ooms that they replaced people before them and therefore are no better than the Europeans who came after them.

I see. But then the other thing is that there's money involved with land grants and access to land. And they want to also be able to control the narrative. so many tribes don't like the narrative that there was a lot of violence in the past. And so if you're talking about one tribe wiping out another, that's suggesting that there was violence. I mean, is that controversial, though? My assumption was always that native tribes were fierce warriors and that they, like all other people groups all around the world, would be at war with other people groups near them.

So is that a controversial opinion? It's not necessarily controversial. in the general, but when you get to each tribe, each local community, oftentimes it's controversial. It's okay to say that there was generally violence, but if you say this tribe, you know, wiped out in genocide at this tribe, that's where they would be uncomfortable. Yeah. That makes sense.

And other factors, too, that sometimes are not controversial, but other times are, for example, many tribes own slaves. And that shouldn't be controversial to say. Slavery was a universal practice for much of human prehistory and some of history, right? But it paints a different picture on the Americas if you say,

well, you know, the Cherokees before the Europeans ever came in had slaves. And so then they'll kind of finagle it as, well, they weren't really the same type of slaves. They were war slaves. And I'm like, well, you know, I don't know if there's any good type of slave. I do wonder sometimes people bring up those arguments as a way to kind of justify the genocide of Native Americans. Right.

I do think people sometimes will say like, oh, you know, well, they were killing each other so it's okay that we killed them. Or, you know, they had slaves so, you know, their genocide was inevitable. I sometimes think people will make bad faith arguments like that. I actually think that there was no genocide because a genocide, and I would even say intertribally, there's a genocide includes intent to exterminate a person based on their race or their genes or their ethnicity. And I don't think that that really happened in that case. And I was like Nazi Germany, that was genocide or like the Rwandan. Right.

But because it was also intent. So there's huge debates about how many Native Americans were in North America when the Europeans arrived. And if you accept some of the best evidence, it really looks like there was more like about two and a half. half million in the whole of, you know, the continental U.S. And so it's, that makes it much more, it makes it a much less outrageous argument that people thought that the most of the U.S. was empty because most of it was empty. And then, of course, there was war when they interacted. I'm not saying there wasn't, but that's very different than a, we're going to

we got to this land and we're going to wipe out everybody else who was there. I don't think that happened. And even the accusations of bio-war, right, obviously, when the Europeans came over and they brought some diseases that the Native Americans hadn't been exposed to, that caused harm. But in the same token, when the Europeans came over and they were exposed to some diseases that they hadn't been exposed to, that caused harm, right? So it goes both ways. And if you look at, for example, the argument about syphilis, whether, you know, we oftentimes hear that Columbus brought tuberculosis to, the new world or smallpox to the new world. But the other side of it is that Columbus brought back something not very nice and that was syphilis.

Oh, interesting. It goes both ways. And so in a sense, I think that when you, the data is the data. And if somebody tries to use it to justify that, that doesn't change what the data is. and the data does not support that there were 20 million Native Americans and then wiped out to about a million and a half. There was a huge drop in population likely with the onset of agriculture, not right away,

but what agriculture did was it was a good idea because basically it provided a constant food source, but it then allowed populations to get grow and settle. in and get denser and that helps spread diseases. And so then we see a dip in population size and then they recover from that and increase again. But this happened before any Europeans arrive. Right.

Yeah, like pre-colonized Native Americans were agrarian. Yeah. Well, they weren't all agrarian. Some of them were, right? So if you think about, and that's another aspect of it is that they were widespread in many areas and had very different lifestyles. So for example, there were the agriculturalists in the southeast, but the Californians never adopted agriculture, and they don't really get to be into agriculture until it's introduced to

them, because it was especially like if you consider like the Bay Area Californians, in that central California so rich of resources there was no reason to adopt agriculture. Interestingly, they were already kind of sedentary because there were so many resources. And their health profile looked quite a lot like agricultural Native Americans

because they had a staple food, which was acorns. And so their teeth had some of the same. wear patterns as some of the agriculturalists. Oh, interesting. So they found basically like a natural, like agricultural society that was just already bubbling that they just walked into and they said, okay, we'll settle here. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I do actually think that's an important distinction.

I don't think it's fair to say that all Native people or all Native Americans in the United States are a monolith. And I do that a lot. And I think a lot of people will do that. Well, they say, well, you know Native Americans did blank, which is obviously as preposterous is saying like, oh, you know Asians do blank or you know white people do blank. It is a generalization that, you know, maybe there's like some sublance of truth on like the very broad end, but it really ignores a lot of the specificity and nuance of each

individual tribe and each different people group. And I suspect that whenever you see something that is universal, that it's universal not only for Native Americans, but it's just a human trait. Yeah, exactly. Right, right. Maybe slightly different with a different spice and different people, but it's a human trait. Right, exactly. And in the way that, you know, people in America today are culturally different,

people in Florida where I grew up are very different than people in California and some of the cultural habits that we pick up. You know, there are things that are different. And I think that would probably go for, you know, pre-colonial times with native people in America that the Floridian tribes and the, you know, tribes probably eat different food and they, you know, hunt in different ways and they have different traditions and customs. And to assume that they are one singular monolith is probably a disservice. Yeah. And I also think that it's anthropologists, including myself, do this thing that we often paint a generalist picture of either at the tribal level or at the site level or at the country level. And

One of the things I enjoyed most in my career is looking at individuals, individuals in the collection. Because I actually think that when we reconstruct the past, we often talk about groups like the hunter-gatherers versus the agriculturists or the men versus the women, right? But individuals existed, and I'm sure that they had individual lives. and sometimes disagreed with their tribal members, right? Maybe had neighborhood fights, right? Family disagreements, things like that. And so one of the things I would do from the Ryan Mound is I would go through this collection often to ensure that it was being curated well.

So taken care of. So if bags were breaking, I'd rebag things. if the boxes looked like they needed to be replaced, they'd be replaced, things like that. And if I came across an interesting skeleton, I would try to tell that skeleton story, as if he or she was an individual. And I had a couple of them that I really enjoyed doing.

One, I was several years ago, and it was a male who had severe, arthritis of the jaw, so the joint from the jaw to the bottom of the skull, the temporal mandibular joint, so severe arthritis of the jaw and also had a little tiny on the cranium

a shed like a mother of pearl piece on his skull. Wow. So I suspect that that was a part of a bigger, you know, wearing something, you know, that he wore something bigger and that that was what remained. Maybe the other part was made out of hide or, you know, something that doesn't preserve. And so that preserved and dirt had caked it on. But I suspect it was something more.

Like a headdress or some way. Right. And I looked at this individual, and what I found was that he was also buried with thousands of little beads. More beads than pretty much anyone in this collection. And these beads were probably strung up as jewelry. The fact that he had such a high number suggested something special to me. And I could imagine that the arthritis on the jawbone, which is not found in any of the other individuals of that site.

And the wear pattern on his teeth, coupled with the remainder of the headdress and the thousands of shells, I suspect he might have been somebody like an artisan, somebody who vows, somebody who vows, valued those kind of things and who his people valued for his art. And that's maybe why he was buried differently. So kind of really putting some meat on the bones, so to speak, to try to tell the story. I could be wrong. And what do you account for the mandibular arthritis? Working the hide the sinew through his teeth.

Oh, interesting. You know, that would be used to then bead these shells. Oh, interesting. It's very similar to the dental pattern is very similar to that. Interesting. So, yeah. So I think that that's a very, you know, fun thing to do, but it also brings back the point that the past people were individuals as well.

That's interesting. So this is the kind of work that you're doing. I think it's a great example of the type of research that anthropologists every day are doing. They're looking at skeletal remains and they're trying to draw conclusions based off what they understand, you know, collections of skeletal remains to be, to then understand cultures better. So now if a native group or a tribe came to you and said, hey, you dug up our skeleton and our beads and all of our artifacts, we want them back. Your position pretty publicly has been, you don't believe that they should have a legal right

to repossess or that you would have to necessarily turn over those remains. Is that fair to say? It's fair to say. I would say that Nagpur was written as a... compromise. And the compromise was that the Native Americans who could show affiliation to the remains should have the remains back. And that where unaffiliated remains were that those would be retained, curated in research. And how do you prove affiliation? And so NAGPRA was written that affiliation could be proved through a preponderance of evidence, which is like a little more than

50%, right, 51%, and using pretty much everything available. DNA, metrics, like cranial metrics, artifacts, historic documents, oral tradition. So everything on the plate, geography, and see, is their affiliation. And so I, when NAGPRA first came out, I was, in 1990, I was still a high school student, was I? Yes. But I grew up, in a sense, into a scholar with Niagara being pretty much throughout my whole career.

And even though it has safeguards like that, I could see very early on that these safeguards would not protect unaffiliated remains. And part of that stems from the fact that NACPAR also violates the separation of church and state in a couple of ways. One of the ways is that it requires two traditional Indian religious leaders to be on any committee. And that's a violation of church and state because basically the First Amendment says that the government shall not establish or prefer any one religion. And by saying that those two members have to be traditional Indian religious leaders is a preference for that religion. So they're not saying, you know, to Native Americans who are religious leaders,

they want a specific religious leader. And so that's problematic. It's problematic because that allowed creation myths and origin stories that are creationists to be entered into evidence and treated like fact. And that's one of the reasons why I wrote repatriation and erasing the past is to, with an attorney, now retired attorney, James W. Springer, to try to tease out this problem and show how NAGPRA went wrong from the very beginning with that. And it's interesting that although many people,

don't realize this that Nagpah was supported by many religious groups because they saw the writing on the wall so like Baptist women of America and the men of knights

and the Amish like they all supported Nagpra because they saw it as a religious law and they were right. Interesting. And I thought that this would lead to problems down the road and then the other thing is

early on in my my career, a couple other big stories broke that made me realize, yes, my suspicion of NAGPRA and where it's going is right on. And I don't get everything right, but this time I did. And one of those things was Kennewickman. Kennewick Man is about 9,000 years old. You can, if you look up the dates on Google, you'll get everything from like 8,400 to 9,400. because of calibrations and so forth. And this is a skeletal.

It's a skeleton that was found eroding out of a riverbank in Kennewick, Washington, first thought to be a homicide victim. They called in Jim Chatters, the police called in Jim Chatters to investigate it. Jim Chatters is a forensic anthropologist. And he, this doesn't look like a Native American remains. and he then took an x-ray of the remains. They x-rayed the bones, and they found an obsidian flake embedded. So a obsidian arrow had embedded into his hip bone.

Wow. And he was like, the last time this happened to somebody wasn't just a few years ago, right? Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, it was a homicide. So, yeah. Well, he didn't actually die from that, right? Oh, really? He died.

They don't really know there's a, he, had a lot of injuries. But we know he didn't die from that because it was bone grown over it. So it was healed. But he was shot in the hip or buttocks, you know. And as soon as that discovery was made and turned out to be old, 8,000 to 9,000 years old, the Native Americans around that region said, this is our ancient one.

He belongs to us. We want him back. And the government stepped in. They took Kennewick man away from access to anthropologists. They buried the site with tons and tons of gravel to make sure

nobody else was excavating there. And then a group of anthropologists bravely sued. to get access to Kennewickman. And a lawsuit that took about it, took years. I don't know, maybe by the time they got access to him, maybe it was eight years or so.

Finally, the judge did rule in the favor of the anthropologists granting them access. There's an excellent book on Kennewick Man about all the research that was done on him. And when I was doing my PhD at the University of Arkansas, the government had hired a group of scientists to study Kennewickman to determine whether Kennewick Man should be given to the Native Americans or not. And one of the scientists who was on that group was Jeremy Rose, who was a professor of archaeology at University of Arkansas where I was doing my PhD. at the time. This was like 97, maybe. And, no, 98.

And basically, I got to look at the CT scans of Kennew McMahon's leg bones and his measurements, the metrics of his leg bones. And he was really robust. Like the type of robusticity that you saw only in preemptive. pre-ice age populations. Oh, wow. So he was very robust. And he didn't look like Native Americans later on.

Now, some of you say, you know, he looked Caucasian or Caucasoid. He doesn't really look that way either. It's he's kind of a mix. But he definitely does not look like the Native Americans from, let's say, 3,000 years old, right? And so what happened, was the tribes who were eager to bury Kennewickman, the Umatillas, for example, in the Colvilles, they had initially said we're not for DNA research. But then I believe that they, because the scientists had won the right to study Kennewickman, they did do DNA research on him. And the first tests

didn't, they just didn't work, right? But as DNA research got better and methods improved, they did figure out his DNA. And when his DNA was published, which was, I think, the results, I think, came out, like maybe in, like 2015.

So something like that. I might have the date a little wrong. The lead author was Russ Musen. and published in nature or science. And what they found was that Kennewickman was most like the South American Indians, not the North American Indians genetically, which suggests that maybe he didn't come over, his people didn't come over the Landridge. Maybe his people didn't come over the Landridge,

but came from the South and came up. Instead of came over and down, right? And my position on the peopling of the Americas as there were probably lots of migrations over. I think that the bearing straight over from Alaska did occur, but I don't think it was the only passage. So I think that there's good evidence that they might have come along the coast on boats that would not preserve, like, reed boats and dipping into the coast because that area was never frozen over.

And that would have been rich resources. I just think that in all likelihood, there were probably multiple migrations. Interesting. So for Kennewickman, do you think that that migration was people groups going to South America on boat from Africa? Could be. Could be from... or he could have come over from like Japan area, Asia, but not going over west but going east.

Interesting. Is there like some type of plausible evidence that they would have access to that type of sea-faring at that time? Well, I think perhaps the best plausible evidence is that, people got to Australia about 50, 60,000 years ago and Australia was not landlocked. Interesting. Yeah, that's a good point. I never think about that. But, you know, what happened after the DNA was published was the report was written up and it said, there's a connection between Kenwick Mann and the Colville tribe, and therefore it should go into the ground. Therefore, Kenwick Man should go into the ground. There's a connection. But we're all connected.

So to say that, oh, there's a connection should not be good enough. It should be the closest connection. And Kennewick's man's closest connection was South America, not the Northwest. And so I think that it's very problematic to make these decisions based on a political interpretation of the data. I would say. And another part of that is, once that DNA was found to have any connection with the Colville tribe, they buried him. That was the end of the story. And DNA research is quite interesting.

And I'm not a molecular anthropologist, but I've taught these kinds of topics in my field, so I read a lot about them. one of the things is that you can get false they're not false positives but they're exaggerated connections if your database is shallow so if you don't have enough data points not enough tribes for example that gave data

then the tribe that did will look very much closer than if a hundred tribes did and you're comparing them right so it's just not enough data and the only way to get more data is more time and more collection of data and that modern people have to donate their DNA. So I think it's very interesting.

And that, Kenilwick Man did in large part shape my hardening against Nagra. But there were other things. For example, and this is not Nagpra, but when I was doing my data collection up in Canada at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, excuse me. And this was during my PhD data collection, and while I was there, the Haida,

which are a group of Native Americans on the northwest coast, they were doing a repatriation of collections from the museum. And once they had done all the repatriation and then taken all the skeletal remains, everything done and dusted, and they did their ceremony, they're out of the museum. A few days later,

the curator got a phone call from the tribal representatives and said, we want you to give us the casts and destroy, because we're going to destroy those as well. So when people say, why don't you just scan the bones,

3D print them, and then study those? there's problems with that, but even if there weren't problems with that, it doesn't matter, because once the bones are collected, they will then come for the casts. Because it's not only about burying remains, it's about an ideology that says it's our story to tell, and we don't want you to have any data to use to tell that story. And we're going to tell that story in a way where we look good, we were here first, or and we never came over from anywhere.

We evolved here. We not evolved, but we were created here by the Supreme Being. And all of this is why Nagpar doesn't work. And now, throughout the time, this has been creeping in. And now the latest regulations, which are in sync with Biden's indigenous knowledge push,

say that when there's a difference of opinion, then you must defer to Native American traditional Indian knowledge, traditional knowledge. So if there's a disagreement, you can't say which is a better evidence. You can't say, well, let's get a third opinion. It's like, then you have to defer to the Native American expert witness. Interesting.

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Can't you just let them have that one skeleton? Can you, what would you say to that? I would say that with paleo-indians and paleo-indians are native remains that date anything, 7,500 years or older. there are so few of them that each one of them adds to the knowledge of these earliest Americans

so in some cases where there are thousands of the skeletons you could say well yeah that might be true but in the case of paleo-Indians where we only have about a dozen then everyone counts but the other reason why not to say well okay you know You can have that one, but I'm keeping this one, is because you know that's not where they're going to stop. And one of the interesting things about NAGPRA is that one of the interesting things

is that NAGPRA actually has done its job. 91.5% of affiliated remains have been repatriated that left many unaffiliated collections. and if I had stopped there, you know, sure we lost a lot, but we had still much, and it would have been a compromise. I think it's sad for every skeleton to be varied, but I would understand that and I would say, okay, this compromise worked. But that's not what happened. Almost everything is repatriated, that is closely affiliated. And in the last set of regulations, what they've decided was that they were going to get rid of the term unidentified affiliation. And what does that mean?

Culturally unidentified. That means you can't say that there are remains that don't belong to modern tribes, that everything is affiliated to some modern tribe. And that's just not true. It's just a lie in order to increase repatriation and reburial. And so I think that that's a problem. Now, you could look at things where you have a clear affiliation or clear family relationships. I'm curious about that. Let's say they uncover a very traditional ceremonial burial grave of the Navajo.

And they're able to look at this and they say the artifacts buried here are very close to traditional modern Navajo. And I think that that's what they were thinking of when they passed. That's what anthropologists were thinking of when they passed an Agra. Right. So let's say they found that case. I think that if it had stayed that way, we could have saved the science. And I'll give a good example of where I think a reburial or repatriation was actually a good thing. Sitting Bull's great grandson said he wanted Sitting Bull's scalp.

And I think artifact too. And he said, yeah. You know, this is family. This is, I want this back in our family. And they made, they asked him for a DNA test. And they tested the scalp and him. And lo and behold, it was the great-grandson and they gave it back. I think that that's clearly an affiliation.

That's clearly a link. And I say, yeah, if it was my grandson, My great-grandfather, I wouldn't want it back unless I wanted it to keep as research, but I wouldn't want it back to bury. That's just not what I would want to do with skeletal remains or so. But I can see that as being legitimate. Was Sitting Bulls remains, like his scalp and the artifact? Was it in a kind of collection?

I see. I think it was in the Smithsonian. Okay. So I'm pretty sure it was Smithsonian, but I could be wrong. That seems pretty reasonable to me. If my grandfather was in a museum somewhere, and it was against my will, I would wish I had the right to say, hey, I would like to do with what I want to do with my family's remains.

And I see that, and I, yes. And when that story first broke, there was a photo of the great-grandson, and I said, to my sister, I can't even, I can't believe that I're even bothering to do a DNA test because he looks exactly like that. That's hilarious. So I do think that there are times where you can say, well, yes, this makes, this is a clear connection and, you know, but for many cases it's not. And as I said, you know, most of those cases, even less affiliation, have been repatriated. it's just never going to be enough to those people whose concern is not about the remains and artifacts, but whose concern is about not allowing science to tell the story.

One of the committee members that Bill Clinton appointed to NAGPRA committee members, for example, his response in regards to in regards to coming the people in other America's and his tribe was we didn't come across no land bridge we've always been here and maybe they didn't come across land bridge but you know

the thing was he was saying it as no one did because human Native Americans started in America and didn't come from someone else, which just is, again, it's just not true. Is that a native religious belief? It's a religious belief.

In some specific tribes that... And pretty much every tribe that I've read about. They believe that they were always in this place that their creator or God put them specifically in this land. And it's quite interesting. Every Nangpra meeting starts and ends with a prayer. Hmm. So I think that if it had been, if it was any other,

religion, anthropologists would be like up in arms. Well, maybe not any other religion, but if it was Christian fundamentalists, they would be up in arms. And rightfully so, they'd be like, you can't introduce religion into this. But because there's kind of a deference to Native American religion, and oftentimes it's not really the same. I don't see how you can argue that it's not the same. It's a religious book. belief about a supernatural beginning. It's a creation myth. Hmm. Now, do you think that, so I guess the closest capacity would be like if there was a

direct ancestor that they could be able to repatriate those remains, what if it is something where it's not necessarily a direct ancestor that they can test with DNA necessarily, but they're able to say like, oh, this is maybe a three or 400-year-old skeletal remain, would that, where would you classify your belief on that? I would say that that's, that the links would be too weak, in my opinion. Okay. But Nagpar wouldn't. Sure, sure.

So, you know, most of the remains that are now in, in museums and universities, are pre-contact. Most of them are thousands of years old, not hundreds. And the links are very weak. Now, I had read some stories that are a little bit more appalling, I guess, personally, where there was like a burial site that was uncovered, and this group was basically charging people to go see it. And there was like a fee to go see the burial site. And then they eventually closed it down.

But effectively, there was like a native burial site that then they were kind of charging a fee as like a tourist detraction. A lot of the bones were kind of like looted and things like that. Do you know that specific case that I'm speaking about? I don't. I wonder if you mean the white sands? Maybe. I have a reference on my phone. I might just pull it up really quick just for the sake of the combo. And looting is, you know, looting is very destructive to the science of anthropology. yet people kind of confound excavation with looting sometimes and looting tends to be not related to the science but it's not to say that there weren't you know grave robbers in the past

and obviously these kinds of things shouldn't happen in the future it's you know but, you know, looting has happened for thousands of years. Native Americans looted other Native American graves. They also desecrated graves of their enemies when there was tribal warfare. So this kind of thing happens. You know, looting happened in pharaonic Egypt. So I see that as distinctly different from scientific research and discovery. That's fair.

That's fair. And I think that the term looting should be sort of prescribed specifically for events where there's, you know, private individual, covertly stealing items for their own personal game. Yeah. That makes sense. So this is a example that I just found in my research in Salina, Kansas, I believe, Selena, Kansas. There was a family that excavated a 600-year-old cemetery of Native American belongings to the, or belonging to the Pawnee Nation and charged tourists to see the 146 open graves.

The tourist site operated for 50 years and until closing in 1989. And they spoke about their, I guess the Pawnee Nation spoke about their, that they desire to not have their remains be photographed and things like that. So, like, an example like that, how are you familiar with that example? You know, it sounds slightly familiar, but, again, I think that this is very different from research. Okay. So in this case, would you look at this and say that that would be egregious to try to use as a tourist attraction and make a distinction between tourism and research?

I don't think it's necessarily egregious to use skeletal remains as a tourist. attraction. Body Worlds is a tourist attraction. The Mutha Museum is a tourist attraction. The catacombs are tourist attractions. That's a good point. Right? So I don't think that that is necessarily egregious. There are lots of examples. I think the problem arises when you have, desire to curate or to protect the remains and the artifacts in a way for future generations.

And so if it is a tourist attraction that is done in a way where the remains are not protected and therefore being perhaps destroyed through time because they're out of the ground and there are being maybe some people are stealing something.

Or people are touching them repeatedly and... Touching is not that big of an issue. Oh, really? That wouldn't like erode it or... No, it's like... But like if people are, you know, spilling stuff on them or trampling on them, yeah. But I mean, the anthropologist

touched the remains all the time. Sure, sure. But I always assumed that it would be like with gloves or some sort of like protection. No, no. Actually, the National Park Service and I got into one of the big issues I had was I took a photograph of me holding a skull,

which the University never had a problem with until my 2020 book. And they're like, oh, she's holding it without gloves. And most anthropologists will not hold remains with gloves because it's slippery. And you're more likely to drop them. And even the National Park Service advises against the use of gloves. You know, we're not dealing with a forensic site where you're protecting the, the material for, you know, you don't want to get a fingerprint on it, right?

And even with DNA, you're taking the DNA either from the mastoid deep inside of the skull or from the tooth, a tooth that's cut open and scraping out the dentin. So even the DNA is not an issue. And so that's really not an issue. It's more an issue of whether people are going to be maybe stealing something or trampling on something or spilling something, things like that. Or a car driving soap or something, you know. Animal, a pet dog getting loose and taking a bone.

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we can't necessarily prove that it directly relates to you and your people, but they feel strongly about it and say, hey, look, can we do a compromise? Can we research this for X period of time? Or can it stay in your possession or not on display in a museum? But if we need to research it, we can petition and work on it that way. Is it possible to make some type of amicable compromise? There are a lot of collaborative efforts. And in a sense, for years, we had an MOU with the tribes at San Jose. What's an MOU? A memorandum of understanding that research was allowed.

However, as soon as I made, as soon as my book was known and I made the newspaper for my views, they broke their MOU. They said, you know, we don't want her in the collection anymore. They had no problem with it whatsoever beforehand. And so I think that one of the problems is that you, you know, they talk a lot about you have to trust people. Well, the anthropologists have to be able to trust as well. And almost all collaborative efforts that I have seen have required,

have required steps that I personally would not be comfortable with. So let me give you a handful of examples. Changing conclusions to fit a oral history narrative. Or if the data shows something unflattering to the tribe, not publishing it. holding field schools or or lab sessions with requirements that when women are menstruating that they don't go in and these kinds of things are just things what is the last one menstruating women are not allowed in with in labs or on fields work with many tribes many tribes many tribes have menstrual taboos

And so I'm not going to I'm not going to say You know Okay All you female students Are you on your period Because if you are You cannot

You cannot go in and collect data But not only that You cannot get close to any other Native Americans Because you may contaminate them And if we're in field school You have to eat in a separate area This is This is absurd

And I won't collaborate With those kinds of ideals. Wow. And so I think that collaboration sounds good on the surface, but when you're working with people who are basically religious fanatics, you're not going to be able to collaborate with them in real scientific ways. Interesting.

I think that's an interesting nuance to your point that you don't necessarily, I guess, and I want to make that distinction just very clear, you don't personally have a, you know, like ethno supremacist view of native people or Native Americans, you have a personal issue with religious extremism. So hypothetically, let's say you were researching somewhere in Pennsylvania and you found, you know, some bones that maybe were four or five hundred years old and you were able to confirm that they were from early settlers in the area and they were Caucasoid and they were actually maybe like early Amish settlers or maybe they're Quaker or something like that. And you were able to look at them and you said, wow, this is a great, interesting piece of information.

And the Amish came to you and said, Dr. Weiss, those are our ancestors. Would any part of your, I guess, position on this issue change at all? Yeah, no. I mean, it wouldn't. Basically, if they would, if those Amish would also require me to jump through hoops to be able to collect the data and to work with them, I wouldn't. If the Amish said, look, we don't. Again, I don't know necessarily Amish rules, but they said, hey, woman can't, you know, do research on this.

You have to do your research by candlelight. Right. I don't know. But, and I just, I think that that's a, that's very much a step too far. And it's, it's discriminatory. And it's discriminatory in a way that I would think that, that anthropologists should, say, you know what, we're not going to follow these regulations. If you want to work with us, we have to treat people as equals, and that means that we're not going to ask women to, you know,

if they're on their period, and then shun them for the time, but we're also not going to say, okay, there's something really interesting down that area of the site. but that's a sacred area, and therefore we're not going to research that. And we're also not going to change our results because it conflicts with your religion. We have to be true to the science and true to our ideals, ideals of equality of treatment of people. So I guess if there was a Christian young earth creationist that, you know, they had remains on their property or something like that, and you wanted to go look at the remains and they said, no, we're not going to let you look at them. because that we understand your work to be evolutionary

and we are young earth creationists and we believe that you're going to try to paint a picture against what we believe. In, I guess, like modern, you know, civil discourse, is there any precedent for something like that that, you know, you could potentially sue to get access to those remains? Yeah, I'm not, I'm not, it depends.

Depends on what land it is. If it's private land, you know, you know, even private lands that are, if you find other things on private lands or private lands. Right, you would need a warrant, I guess, to go through that. So I think that that's one of the issues. But the other thing is anthropologists have been excellent at kind of fighting back against this young Earth creationist or creation, intelligent design and so forth. And when I became an anthropologist, I thought this was because it was, you know, against the scientific view. I thought they were against viewing data through a religious lens and that they would be as critical to any religious narrative.

And I found out that that's not the case, that they don't look at religious narratives from Native Americans with the same skepticism and that's very problematic for me and so I kind of and I grew up as an atheist I don't know you know whether that means

I'm missing the God gene and I have no problem that people are religious I have no I just don't think that they should push their religion onto our science. And I wouldn't go to a church, into a church, and say, oh, no, you can't say this, or, you know, let me correct you.

And I don't pretend to know the Bible. So I have no problem with people's religion, religious practices, you know, anything like that. I just have a problem when it comes into the, to the, research. And I even say, I have no problem, of course, if there are scientists who are religious. It's about whether their practices are impacting my life and other people who do not believe or do not believe in the same things that they believe and whether it's impacting our ability to conduct research. Interesting. So it's really a church and state argument.

at its core. So hypothetically, just another hypothetical, I don't know if this has happened. Let's say there is a native tribe and on maybe a piece of federal land, there is a burial site and it is a big tomb. And maybe it's some type of pyramid or something that they made. And they said this is the founding member of our tribe from a thousand years ago. Let's say they said, that's who this is, this is our guy. If let's say a researcher or an anthropologist like yourself thought, oh, there might be interesting

artifacts that we could uncover or interesting information or understanding about early peoples in America if we uncover this tomb. Do you think that you have a legal right or, you know, an ethical right to go into that tomb and excavate it

against the wishes of the native people that know that it's there and have a claim to it? How would you discern that? I would say that you would take the same steps as if you are doing repatriation, you determine whether it is actually there, if they are actually linked to that monument.

But in order to do that, you would have to dig up the... Not necessarily. I mean, if you're talking about a site that's visible, so the construction of it, the location, any documentation, historic documents that show the tribe was there for when first encounter, You know, so there are other ways to investigate that. I see. So let's say in this hypothetical you're able to confirm and say, okay, it looks like these people, you know,

a thousand years ago were responsible for the burial of this chief. In that case, what would be your personal belief on that example? Well, my personal belief would be that it would still be very interesting to figure out what's in that place. But this is not, I think there's a distinct difference between starting an excavation and returning something that has been excavated. So I think that most excavations, as we started off, are salvage sites. Right, which I think is an important distinction. Yeah.

And so when we have a non-salvage site, there are quite a few safeguards to protect the site. and to allow kind of a combination of archaeology and monument preservation, for example. Because even if you don't believe in the religion, like, for example, I don't have to be religious to look at the great pyramids of Giza and think that they're fantastic or the church, right? So in that sense, that's about preservation. So I do think that those are, that there's a lot of nuance in there and distinctions that need to be there for those reasons. That makes sense. That's interesting. Now, can you explain why there is so much like social pressure and kind of like tiptoeing and special, I guess, permissions that you believe are granted to Native American religions?

and not to Christianity, Islam, Judaism, things like that. Well, I think that part of it is the postmodern narrative of there is no objective truth and that the people who should be telling the story are the victims and there are oppressors and those people who were oppressed and that's postmodernism in a nutshell, right? and so in a sense I would say that it's a part of that and anthropology has embraced postmodernism and so that's part of it.

The other part is that I wouldn't, although anthropologists are most deference to Native American religions, I think that they are also sympathetic to other non-Western religions like Islam. And so you'll have anthropology department celebrating World Hizab Day with where Hizab Day events and so forth. And so that is also part of the postmodern narrative, I think,

where the Muslims are viewed upon as victims, victims of the West, victims of perhaps Judaism. And so it fits along there. It's interesting how these things, how much of what we commonly refer to as the woke agenda is really based or can be seen as part of this postmodern movement that happened in academia, where you get really really. of the concept of objective truth and objective knowledge. And if you think of science, science is basically the search for the truth.

You may never get there and your truth may be overturned. But it's like using data to try to figure out what really happened or how to really explain the natural world. That's science. And postmodernism is saying that this is, this is not the way to go about understanding things. The way to go about understanding things is to look at the world as a oppressor, oppressed dynamic with victims, and there is no truth,

and therefore we should let the victims tell the story. Yeah, I guess trying to examine power at the intersection of every interaction. And so you get the decolonization movement, and the settler, the decolonization movement, the anti-settler colonialization, and those kinds of things, too. And that explains some of this anti-binary sex movement, things like that, too. That makes sense.

Do you think that there's any claim for, I guess, Native Americans, Is there any caveat that you would put out? I guess, you know, we spoke before. I was asking, does every Native American hate you? That was kind of a broad kind of tongue-and-cheek question. But I'm genuinely curious. You know, I don't know really any Native people. Yeah, I went to Res one time and kind of like walked around and kind of said hi,

but didn't really, you know, get involved. So I'm curious, have you heard from Native Americans? Have they spoken to you of any specific tribes? Have they talked about your research? Has it been positive or negative? How do you feel like they feel about this? I get emails from individual Native Americans all the time, supportive emails. Many who are upset at the repatriation movement because they want to know what really happened

and are not for the repatriation of remains or the removal of artifacts. from museums. So I do get an email that is supportive from Native Americans. I haven't gotten a support and endorsement from any tribe. I think that the tribes are much more uniform. And when I say the tribes, I mean the tribal politics or the tribal administrator, the leadership. So obviously every tribe has lots of people in it. But I'm talking about like a tribal leadership. And when I looked at the comments from the latest NAGPRA regulations before the regulations were put in place, they allowed for a period of comments.

And I looked through the 181 comments, whatever that were given, and listen to some others that were given orally. And one of the things that was surprising was there was no disagreement between tribes except for, and maybe I'll say there was one or two. And I'll explain those. But almost every tribe that posted a comment, and of course these are being sent in by the leaders, by either the tribal historic preservation officer

or somebody in the position of power said that the rules and new regulations did not go far enough. And so they said, you know, human remains needs to be redefined and redefined to include things like the ground that human remains may have been in.

Anything that was shed naturally like hair. Photographs, x-rays, data, casts, you name it. They want that included as human remains and animal remains that were

imbued with human spirits. So that was pretty much uniform. The only difference I saw with the tribal comments was that the federally recognized tribes didn't want the non-recognized tribes to be included and the non-federegated tribes wanted to be included. And Nagprak can't, there really isn't any way to change that aspect of Nagpra because of the, because of there's complicated legal issues about

federal recognition and non-federal recognition. So if a non-federal-ledized tribe wants to rebury remains from, and even if the university wants to give those remains over, they would have to work with a federally recognized tribe if it's through NAGPRA. Wow. That's very interesting. That's very interesting. Is there anything that you've done in your early work specifically related to this topic that

you feel maybe was too hasty or that you regret in terms of, you know, how you said it or maybe the messaging of it or maybe just even like an ideology regarding this topic altogether? No. No. I mean, I can, I'm not infallible, you know. People make mistakes, obviously. And there have been times when I think, ah, I could have, I could have collected more data. I could have done this. You know, early on in my career, I thought that there was stronger evidence for environmental influence on bones than I do now.

And so there are differences. And even the Ryan Mount, for a long time, I was convinced that it was all one people's. So this is a large collection from San Jose State that spans about 2,500 years with the latest, with the earliest people being about 3,000 years ago and the most recent about 1,500 or even 1,700 maybe. And one of the things is that I was fairly convinced that the collection was one people, what

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This is a really interesting topic and just a really tricky, I guess, ethical debate. I'm really appreciative explaining it to me because I can kind of see both sides. I can obviously see the scientific side. It's like, hey, we want to get all the data on the table. We want to push science forward. We want to understand the whole story in order to do that we need to have skeletal remains to do the research to get the data to push the whole field into the future. But on the other hand, as someone that grew up quite religious, still has a lot of like fond religious ties to Catholicism. So much of a Catholicism is imbued with the idea of sacred relics where, you know, there's a saint or, you know, a religious figure historically who maybe there's a piece of their bone or a piece of, you know, their skin or their hair or something like that that's being preserved.

And I could imagine, you know, if an archaeologist, you know, said, hey, or an anthropologist, excuse me, said, hey, we need to get access to John the Baptist skull because we need to do research on it and we're going to confiscate it from this church where it's on display. and we're actually going to move it into our private archive. That would piss me off. And I would say, hey, that's not really fair. This is a historic relic that we've, you know, as Catholics, we've honored and shown reverence for. And I don't know how, you know, these scientists will treat it. Or maybe they'll look at it and say, actually, this isn't John the Baptist because they have some type of agenda to discredit the Catholic Church. I'm not sure.

So I can understand from that perspective, like, hmm, maybe I would feel. a certain type of way. So I'm curious, how would you quell my feeling about that? It's kind of interesting. I mean, the Catholics are actually very open to having their remains on display. The catacombs, for example. Right. Yeah, yeah.

There's a lot of like preserved saints that are. Yes, yeah. So it's kind of interesting nuance. Throughout Europe, cemeteries are excavated all the time to make room, you know, for others. And those collections are then studied. So one of the things that, one of the compromises I actually, I actually was always engaged in when I was throughout my years at San Jose State was we talked about DNA research and how I don't do DNA research. But one of my jobs as a curator of the collection was to ensure that other people could come and study the collection. And because DNA research is destructive, like certain other research is destructive to, like isotope research.

I always said, well, you know what, I think this is a time to ask everybody involved. Because you can't go back, right, if you make a mistake there, you know. So, like, and I would say that that's the John the Baptist DNA test, right, would be the same thing. Is there another way to do this without destroying the relic or the bones and so forth? And so I do think that when you were talking about destructive data, you might be more sensitive or might be. But most research is not destructive. And therefore, unless you don't want, unless your faith would be weakened, why would you not want? research on it, I don't think is a good enough argument.

It's interesting, you know, we talked about Canoic Man. It's interesting that when Kennewick Man was off, was not allowed to be touched by researchers, the government, the Department of Interior allowed religious folk to come and visit Kenowick Man. And I believe the remains were in storage in the Burke Museum, but I could be wrong about that. And what ended up happening was, so they allowed the Native Americans to go in and study, in that study, worship the remains. And they allowed, like, neo-pagans who thought that this was like the earliest, you know,

the European in America or whatever, to go in. both of which I think were a mistake to allow, without supervision. And one of the leg bones of Kenna Wickman was actually stolen by somebody who was religious because the scientists were always observed. Oh, really? So there's a leg bone that's missing. Yeah. Oh, wow.

And a leg bone, and they didn't find it out until the scientists went in because it had like two left, I think shin bone, but I could be wrong with that, like two left shin bones. So somebody replaced it. Yes. Wow. And that was not a scientist. That was one of the religious people who was able to gain access without supervision. The scientists were always supervised. Wow. That's interesting. That's very, very interesting. Before we move on, is there anything else on this specific topic that you think would be pertinent for the audience to think about? Well, you know, we sometimes forget that this research, when we talk a lot about the research on how to reconstruct the past, but we sometimes forget that this research also has very applicable purposes.

Forensic anthropologists first basically learn how to identify sex and age and injuries and the bones themselves in archaeological settings, in classrooms with teaching collections from archaeological sites. And so when we lose this, we're also going to lose the greatest ability to teach forensics and that will have real life consequences for the people that are the most vulnerable, those people who have died and were skeletalized and perhaps not even missed until their bodies became bone. And it's not just this kind of theoretical, you know, esoteric thing, but this is a real life consequence. Can you talk to me about the sex and gender,

debate that's happening within anthropology as well? Sure. So one of the things that we do as anthropologists is we look at whether a skeletal, skeletons would belong to a male or female. We're very good at doing this. We're much better at determining whether somebody had been a male or female than had they been, how old they were, right, for example. And one of the reasons is that there are changes throughout the skeleton that occur with the different sex hormones.

So for example, with females, you get a more grassal skeleton overall because when bone is deposited, it's deposited more on the inner part of the bone than on the outside. And with men, it's the opposite. and so you get a very much a more robust, larger diameter of like the humorous. And the other thing is that, you know, the giving birth to big-brained babies, difficult to say, right? Changes the pelvis.

And so you can tell what differences there are based on the pelvis. But this also then changes the angles of the leg bones, for example. The skull of males and females are different. So if you have the whole skeleton, we're probably about 99% accuracy, 99.5% accuracy in adults post-puberty. That makes sense. With DNA, it's even more, of course, but you don't want to have to do DNA tests on every bone, on every remains just to determine. male female is it's expensive it takes time it's also destructive and it's destructive but like if you're if you find somebody who was murdered you want to figure things out pretty quickly you know and so

that's one of the things so we're very good at determining male female there's now a push to prevent anthropologists from undertaking this task because there's a push to claim that sex is not binary that it's on a spectrum. And I think it was in October that I was going to give a conference talk and a panel about binary sex at the American Anthropological Association. And our presentations, the panel, got accepted in June or July. And then in September or October, we got an email saying that our panel was being withdrawn. It's the first time in the American Anthropological Association's history, 122 years, I believe,

that they withdrew a panel that they had formally accepted. And they said it would be harmful. But they also said that the science was settled. We know that science has never settled. The science is settled. That sex is not binary. And therefore, therefore,

we were unscientific as well. And it's interesting that I actually thought that my panel, my talk for the panel and my title was actually very open-minded

about the issue of spectrum and gender. So the title was something along the lines of make no bones about it. Skeletons are binary. Yeah, skeletons are binary. People may not be. And so what I was doing was saying, you know, if you look at sex,

biological sex through the skeleton, then you're talking male-female. But gender is the expression of that. And so people may express themselves in many different ways. And when I was growing into my academic life, right, as an anthropologist, we always were taught that gender and sex are different. And now they've combined that. And what that does is it tries to get rid of the biological concept of binary sex. Part of it is they argue that this is just Western colonialists who have put this upon everybody

that there are males and females which is again this kind of postmodern agenda that there is no there are no facts there's no truth but the other part of it is I think a misunderstanding on some people's take about differences with

intersex what was sometimes called intersex individuals or disorders of sexual development where you have individuals who have morphologies that don't match the norm or the average, right? And my position on that is that these individuals are still male or female as the DNA shows, as if they can reproduce, as their reproduction shows, but rather that they have a congenital birth defect, a congenital pathology or disease. And I've been told that that's like, you know, that that's kind of transphobic or, you know, not politically correct or however you want to say it.

But it's a truth. And it's not mean or transphobic or discriminatory to say that some people have disorders. Pathologies. It's life. in animals, other animals too. And so when you look at things like people who are born with X, X, Y, or X, Y as a 23rd, this is just a pathology. Many of these people cannot reproduce.

And so that also further shows that it's a pathology. Interesting. Yeah, just to make a distinction on that, obviously, women would be born with X, X, X, chromosomes, and men would have X, Y chromosomes. Correct. And then you could look at the, you know, DNA makeup of a person. person and you could discern whether their skeleton is male or female. Now, hypothetically, if someone was born with like Kleinfeldor syndrome like you had described,

having like X, X, X, Y, or maybe someone was born intersex and they are female presenting, but they have internal testicles that are producing testosterone at a high rate, did those things change the genetic makeup of the bones? Like, if you were to examine the bones with someone with Kleinfeldor syndrome, what would you deduce You would deduce that they have Klein filters. Oh, really? You can look at the pattern of changes throughout the skeleton and diagnose that. And this is called paleopathology, diseases of the past.

Interesting. And so, yes, we can look at skeletons and say, yes, this person had this disorder. We can also look at skeletons and see sometimes whether somebody was castrated, like the castrati. Oh really? Because it changes their bones. Interesting. It doesn't change their sex, but it changes their bone in specific ways that enable us to see

that this individual had undergone that. Interesting. So like hypothetically in Rome, there was a, there was eunuchs or maybe it's Greece? Yeah. I can't, I can't remember. Yeah. Ancient society, probably both if I had to guess. And typically these eunuchs were, they were sort of close with,

female royalty, perhaps, in a lot of these older civilizations. And as a way to preserve the king's bloodline and make sure that none of the servants to the queen were going to maybe have sex with her and have children with her and then have an illegitimate heir to the throne, they would basically castrate men that then would work as servants. And these men would be chosen at a young age and they would basically have their balls removed. and they would then be a servant to the queen and they wouldn't be able to reproduce, obviously, because they don't have testicles. And as a result, they're not producing testosterone in the same way, I'm assuming.

And then their bones, you would still be able to discern that they're male, but you would be able to tell based off of the amount of hormones, about sex hormones that were being infused with the bones. So basically what you end up is you end up with a male skeleton where the growth pattern is the growth. is the time that the individual can grow is elongated and the bones are longer and more grassal but you don't get like the changes in the pelvis

to look like a female so there are like distinct patterns that are found and they have done research on castrati oh that's interesting and I think that people think oh, you know, she's calling these people diseased, that's mean. But it's not mean. It's truthful. And for some people, it's very sad. You know, and why wouldn't we

want to be able to explain the fact as best we can? And it's not a moral judgment, you know? It's just how, it's just fact with those things. It's just like we know when you have cousin marriages, so inbreeding, you get some increase in some

skeletal defects. You get extra teeth is one thing. We call them supernumerary. Extra numbers, teeth. And extra digits. Extra fingers. And in a sense, this is not a judgment call.

Oh, that poppy had inbreeding, island populations sometimes do, and it doesn't necessarily even have to be that they understood it as inbreeding. And there's a big distinction between incest and inbreeding. Incest is immoral and considered immoral pretty much in every culture. But how you define incest differs slightly from culture to culture, even though there are some universals. But inbreeding, It throws some problems along the way too. It's not a moral judgment. It's just how, it's just what happens.

And I also, in my talk, one of the things that I looked at was when you're looking at forensic cases, can you identify if somebody did identify as a trans individual? So if you're giving, if people are taking hormones or even more obviously undergoing feminization surgery that changes this skull, that change that. If forensic anthropologists found the individual, could they say, yes, this was a male but presented as a female, that would be important to know. And so we should not be abandoning sex. We should just be trying to increase our ability to fine tune our way of understanding how people express themselves if they've undergone medical changes.

And so I think that that's not anti-trans at all. I think that's actually looking for ways to help all people. But nevertheless, I was considered a persona, non-Guarda, and kicked off even though, even in my abstract, I had mentioned that that was one of the things I was going to talk about. Interesting. Yeah, I guess just on a personal basis, and I'm not sure if anyone was asked you directly. I mean, do you have any type of personal agenda against trans ideology, or do you think trans people should not be, you know, afforded the right to, you know, participate in, you know, sports or vote or anything like that? that would infringe on their personal rights? I'm not a sports person.

I do think that there is problems with males competing with females based on what I know of the differences, biological differences between males and females that gives it an unfair advantage to the males. And I do think that there is concern of. letting children make decisions, medical decisions of all kinds. Sure. You know, a lot of times people will say, well, you know, what about it, you know, if a 16-year-old girl wanted breast implants?

I'm like, I would be against that, you know. But do I think adults, you know, should be able to make these decisions? Yeah, I think that that's for that adult and the medical, community and so forth. For me, it's not a moral decision. It's not, I don't look at people who live their lives differently and think, oh, that's immoral. It's more a matter of, are we willing to turn children into lifelong patients?

Because that's what you're doing with that. And so I do think that that's very difficult to allow. And I would say that about a whole bunch of things. We don't let children get tattoos. Right. And tattoos are more irreversible. So in a sense, you know, I do think with children, you do have to say, you know, is this really the right direction? Now, I don't have children.

I don't, you know, I don't have any children, so I don't know how I would feel if it was my child. And I'm not saying that, you know, I think most people who are. are in these kinds of dilemmas, are trying the best that they can. I think that I would say, you know, I'm not going to sign off on any medical things. You know, once you're an adult, it's out of my hands. But I would also not say, you know,

you can't dress like a girl if you're a boy. Dress however you want, present yourself however you want, but I wouldn't okay medical things. because I know what it does to bones. For children specifically. That makes sense. Yeah, I think those caveats, and there's obviously an ongoing social debate

about those things, and I think it is reasonable, you know, sports and children specifically, if a 30-year-old person said, hey, I want to take hormones and transition and present as a different gender because, you know, they believe that that's part of their gender identity,

you would have no personal issue with that. I'm from San Francisco. So, yeah. You're like, I knew, I knew people back in the late 80s and early 90s who, who represented themselves as others, who were my friends. I don't have that. It's not a moral issue. I don't have that kind of take on it. That makes sense.

Your issue is just primarily when identifying remains, you think it is important to specify if it's male or female. Yes. and work on ways to identify if people presented themselves differently. And what's interesting is in the research that I looked at on the facial feminization surgery, what they did was they took, some of the research did CT scans, but others did MRIs of people who had undergone the surgery. And the sample sizes are so small, they're like 12. Right? So it's just beginning in a sense.

And they entered the metrics of the person's face into a database called 4Disc, which is a huge forensic database of metrics that help you determine age, sex, ethnicity. And what they found was even after the facial feminization surgery, the individual still lined up the 12 individuals still lined up with male

even after you know the surgery even after years of hormones that the four disc did not catch that the individual was trans now we don't have those skeletons

of course because those individuals still living right and we have have such small sample sizes. So, you know, maybe in the future, if we're bigger data sets, more comparisons, maybe we will find that we can tell when somebody had that surgery. What is the alternative if you're doing some type of, you know, excavation and you're looking at bones and trying to understand who this person was that you're, you know, holding?

what is the alternative if you're not going to discern, you know, the age or, you know, how old the person was, the age in terms of, you know, how, how, how, when they died, exactly. Yeah, exactly. So what years did they live? How old are they? You know, what sex are they? Those types of things. What would be the alternative to that in terms of the sex question? Would they just say, oh, we don't determine the sex? Yes, that's what they would be saying. And that might not matter if you're looking. looking at, you know, skeletal remains from Rome or whatever that. It's not, but it matters in the sense that when forensic anthropologists are learning, they're learning on archaeological samples. Almost always, they're learning that the techniques on archaeological samples, and therefore, if they're not learning it in archaeology, they won't be as good at it at it when they get to be forensic anthropologists.

Interesting. So it spills over in that way. And I've heard some different research that, you know, just as an example, that in some hunter-gatherer groups, it was actually the women of the tribe that would go and they would hunt and that the men might actually stay back in the tribe. This is an example that I had heard before. Yeah, I'm not sure I believe that. I've read the latest research that's come out about that and had argued that women's skeletons

are actually better for hunting. I don't think that that's true. And the reason, there are three key things why I think this falls apart. One is it doesn't take into consideration pregnancy. You're going to not be as good of a hunter or huntress if you're pregnant. Two, it does not take into consideration breastfeeding.

So once you have that child. So that's the second one. And then three, we see that there are more, there are more trauma related to hunting in many populations than in males than in females. So those are my three things. Now, I suspect that in many tribes, that if there was any chance of getting some meat, they would take it with little animals. And actually, lots of research has shown that the big game was much less common than the rabbits and so forth, rabbits and rodents. And I suspect that women and men engaged in that. And I'm not saying that no women

hunted, but I don't think that it's a flipped narrative where the men are staying, the men are staying home, taking care of the kids, and the women are hunting. And most populations in the past, if you look universally, you have patterns of injuries. And one of those patterns, is that children are injured less. And that's because they are protected. And hunting can be dangerous. They're not taking those kids on dangerous hunts with big game animal. I just don't believe that.

That makes sense. Yeah, yeah. That makes me make sense to me. And I guess looking at research like that, you know, this idea that, oh, yeah, women hunted as well would be research that I'm sure, you know, like the feminist science community would really appreciate. And they would say, this is, you know, interesting for us because it's. It doesn't show that we are just passive, you know, children birthing machines. And, you know, I think a lot of women might feel like their role historically has been. But I guess this new kind of push to not gender or not identify the sex of different bones,

you wouldn't be able to draw those types of conclusions. So you would say, oh, did women or men, did they hunt within these hunter-gatherer tribes? And anthropologists would have to throw up their hands and say, we don't know. We don't know. Yeah. because we don't necessarily know how these people were, you know, identifying or what their expression was. Yeah. Now, I'm curious, like, because the argument here just seems so absurd to me.

Like, it just seems, it seems just so clear. Like, I don't know what anthropologists would hear this and say, you know, like, yeah, of course, biological sex doesn't matter. And it's completely irrelevant. And we should be looking at these bones just on the sake of, you know, other things and not the biological sex at all. that to me seems very anti-scientific, and I kind of refuse to believe that there's a massive community of anthropologists that don't accept that that's important. Obviously, you've been in contact with more people than I have in this regard. It's incredible. It is incredible. So the American Anthropological Association is one of the biggest groups of anthropologists. and they've issued a statement that basically saying that sex is non-binary.

That sex is non-binary, not gender. They said sex. Sex, yes. Hmm. And the American Association of Biological Anthropologists have issued a very similar statement. Actually, it's almost even more inflammatory in a sense, an outrageous or absurd, whatever word you want to say, coming from them, because that includes like the genetic anthropologists, the skeletal anthropologists, the primate anthropologist,

those are all the biological ones. Now, are you the only anthropologist that takes issue with this? No, I'm not the only one. Obviously, the other people in my panel who are canceled, you know, see it as well. but it's so hard to really assess how many people believe some of these things because there is also a lot of self-censorship and fear. And when my book first came out, Repatriation and Erasing the Past in 2020, it came out to coincide with a 30-year anniversary of NAGFRA. and there was a huge backlash against it, open letter with about 900 signatures from scholars all over the world,

anthropologists, archaeologists, all over the world's calling for the book to be pulled. And yet very few people stood up against this, but people would reach out to me and tell me, you know, I agree with you, but I just don't, I don't name me, don't name me. I was thinking about should I send you this email through my university email or through my private one, and I decided to send it through my private one. Or, you know, I've always agreed with you, but I can't say it. And would these be well-known and well-published anthropologists? Some of them, yeah. Some of them, state archaeologists, some of them, chairs and departments, some of them, you know, and some of them up and coming.

So there were some people who obviously stood up and, like, the ones who wrote amicus briefs for me, the ones who, you know, wrote reviews on the book that you can see. see on Amazon the blurbs right but few and far in between and I think the same thing is happening with the gender

sex conflation and the sex is non-binary because of that yeah to me again it just seems like just such a wild position to take

but I wonder if there's from the other side of the argument if there is maybe like a miscommunication or a more nuanced point that they're trying to convey within like these larger societies or do you think it is truly just a postmodern creep into academia that's kind of poisoning the academic process? That's very hard to say. Some of them are extremely bright people with excellent communication skills.

if they haven't been able to get the nuanced pointer across, I would be surprised. I do think it's ideological and that they're pushing an ideology and it's killing the science. And why is the ideology being pushed? I do think it's this postmodern agenda and guilt, guilt for our past, or, you know, whether it's because of, oh, we dug, we dug skeletal remains or, you know, we did research on skeletal remains that shouldn't have been done or, you know, we're part of the colonial movement. And none of us are. It was so long ago, right? I don't feel guilt or shame for something that

you know if an anthropologist 200 years ago did some grave robbing that's not on me just like if a Native American and 200 years ago kidnapped a little white child

settler child which happened that's not on them I don't see it that way but I do think that that's part of it and then perhaps Perhaps some of the other part is they want to be able to work and collaborate with people who will not do it with, who will not collaborate with them if they don't agree to these concessions, both in the Native American case, but also now there's a lot of overlap with the trans issue and the Native American issue. So I think that there's a fear of being kicked out. Now, as someone like yourself that has been a tenured professor in, you know, these types of institutions,

what do you think would be a solution going forward? What is the way out of this type of thing if what you're saying is true that there's a postmodern creep that's kind of getting pushed into the schools? We just have to take back science and speak up when you know that. that what is being pushed is not science. And call out when something is being treated in a hypocritical way, like with the Native American creation myths versus the Christian creation myths. We have to speak up and hopefully at some point something will change. you know, there's going to be another generation.

You know, maybe they will see things differently. Maybe there will be a rebellion. I don't, I would love to see NAGPRA repealed on the basis of the church and state issue. I would also be very happy if the Supreme Court case that is going on now about the Chevron changes. That basically it's, the issue is that many laws are changed over years because they basically bring in experts and this has been allowed without going back to Congress to change the law. And that's what has happened with NAGPRA.

So if you look at, if you actually read the law, It's still the original one, of course, but there's all these regulations that people follow, and these have happened without going back to Congress. And so the Chevron case deals with this issue but on an environmental basis. But if it turns out that the status quo is overturned because it's considered unconstitutional, that might be. mean that Nagra has to go to its original form. Interesting. Which would be a huge victory. It would be a dream come true, but I'm not hopeful.

Interesting. I see. So what's happening, I guess, from a legal perspective is that the law is getting passed. The law has regulations A, B, and C. And then over time, there is additional regulations added by some type of government body. That's not the U.S. government. and then now universities and individuals have to follow regulations A, B, C, D, E, and F.

Yes. Even though only A, B, and C are the ones that are actually codified. Well, that were actually voted on. Yeah. I see. Interesting. And this is happening, I'm assuming, with the car, or with the, with Chevron.

It's an environmental fishing issue. Interesting. So, and I don't know the ins and outs of the case. And I have read a little bit about it, but it is, it revolves around fisheries and the environment. Interesting. That makes sense. And Chevron was a company that, I guess, was involved in the initial.

Interesting. Well, this is all very interesting. I definitely want to take some time to read more of your articles and get more of a grasp on this. I truly hope that there's some type of compromise. Obviously, the idea that an individual religion could, I guess, impinge on scientific research. to me seems obviously antithetical to the separation of church and state. While at the same time, I understand that, you know, as someone that comes from religion with relics, having protection with those relics and reverence for whatever sacred, you know, human items people are handling,

would be something that would be really important. So, yeah, it's an interesting topic, and I appreciate you explaining it in, you know, all the detail that you did. That really made a lot of sense to me. If people are interested in learning more or reading more about this, what's the best place they can go to find out? I do have a website. I don't know it off the top of my head. I am on Twitter at E. Weiss Unburied. Amazing. And that does have a link to my website too. Well, Dr. Weiss. Thank you so much. I really appreciate this. I would love to have you back.

We can talk more about just general anthropology and how we got here. And yeah, any updates on this topic as well. I would love that. Thank you. Thank you so much.