The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Elizabeth Weiss: Indigenous Myths and Cancel Culture vs Science in Anthropology

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

Elizabeth Weiss's recent book, On the Warpath, chronicles her efforts to keep anthropology from falling prey to ideology, even as she curated a collection of ancient skeletons at San Jose State University. She and I had a chance to discuss her new book, and some of the ridiculous ways in which myth and superstition, and modern PC nonsense are intruding on the scientific study of humans and their ancestry. These included having a session the sex of skeletons being cancelled from a meeting of the American Anthropological Association because its leadership now insisted sex isn’t binary, and the fact that the American Museum of Natural History warns visitors that certain artifacts have powerful supernatural characteristics. Many of her efforts have been to fight inappropriate repatriation of ancient bones to groups whose genetic relationship to these distant hominid ancestors is tenuous at best. It was this that caused her to lose her curations position at her University and eventually to retire from academia.It was a pleasure to talk common sense, and the importance of science for our understanding of the human condition with her. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host, Lawrence Krause. On Indigenous People's Day, poetically, I recorded a conversation with anthropologist Elizabeth Weiss. Elizabeth is well known as an anthropologist who's advocated, importantly, not letting ideology, either religious or secular, get in the way of her scientific studies or science in general. She curated a large collection of ancient human remains at San Jose State University and has spoken out passionately for not letting indigenous creation myths get in the way of studying these ancient skeletons to learn about human evolution and the origins of humans here in North America and beyond.

And for that, she has been canceled both from her university, which basically removed her from, being curator of that collection, and she later on retired because she couldn't continue her studies. But also, she's spoken out in various national scientific meetings about not letting indigenous creation have a privileged position. After all, we don't let creation myths, Christian creation myths about fundamentalist creation myths about the universe being 6,000 years old, get in the way of science. And she argued we should hold the same standard for even indigenous creation myths. And as I say, it's gotten her in trouble. Her lecture on that subject was later removed from the collection of the national meeting she was speaking in. And then on a very different subject,

she and another group of scientists were talking about the importance of sex in understanding anthropology, in particular in her case, sex and skeletons. Being able to tell whether a skeleton was male or female is very important and gives useful information on the everyday lives of ancient peoples. But even that seemingly non-controversial subject was deemed too controversial for the American Anthropological Association, which in an unprecedented move after her session had been approved, decided to remove her session and not have it at the national meeting. This kind of interference of ideology in science is something that listeners this program will know,

is extremely of great concern to me and should be of great concern to all of us. And I was very pleased and privileged to have an in-depth conversation with Elizabeth White's on this important issue. You can watch the podcast, add free on our Critical Mass Substack site, and the subscription dues for that site

go to support the Origins Project Foundation, the nonprofit foundation that hosts and produce this podcast and make it possible, or you can watch it on our YouTube channel, the Origins Podcast YouTube channel, or listen to it on any podcast listening site. No matter how you watch it or listen to it,

I hope you'll be provoked to think about these serious issues and listen to this courageous scientist. And with no further ado, Elizabeth White. Well, Elizabeth Weiss, thanks for joining me, at least virtually. It's great to have you on board. I'm wanting to talk to you for a while, since we last time we were together was in New York City, it turns out, as I remember. Yes, and of course, you know, now I'm in Tucson, I retired there,

but I spend a year in New York City as a faculty fellow in Hedodox Academy Center for Academic Pluralism. Yes, yes, and we'll talk about that as we talk about your story as an anthropologist, and one of the people who's been canceled. the most different number of ways I can think about. And as you know, I've written about it and talked about it, and we've talked about it. And you've written a book about your experience, which is really the initiator of this particular podcast on the warpath. My battles with Indians, pretend Indians, and woke warriors.

And I want to talk about that, but I want to talk about it in a more general context. and the this is an origins podcast and I don't know if you've seen my podcast but I like to go into people's origins. I like to find out how you got to where you are now and you got the point of writing this book. And I know I know a little bit about your background because I, well, I do my research,

but also your book also describes a little bit about your background too. You grew up where? Where did you grow up? Well, my dad's retired Army, so we grew up a little bit everywhere. I was actually born in San Francisco, which is, you know, nobody's born in San Francisco, but I was born in San Francisco. But on my first birthday, we moved to Turkey, and then we moved pretty much every three years. But when my dad retired in 89, which was when I was like 15. my parents moved back to California with us, right?

So we all moved back to California, and we returned to San Francisco. So I spent my high school years in San Francisco, or most of my high school years in San Francisco, and my first college years in Santa Cruz. So just 75 miles south of the coast. Yeah, well, I spent a term in Santa Cruz once. I would say it's sabbatical, but it was not quite that. It's a beautiful location.

It is. Also, one of the more woke places in the world, which I think is a precursor for what you again to experience there. But you did, look, you did a, your BA in anthropology, but let's go back. I want to find out what, so your dad was in the army. Your mother was a housewife, or did she? She was actually a doctor's or physician's assistant prior to having children. but she had always wanted to not work when having children and also be able to, you know,

travel whenever my dad was stationed somewhere else. So basically she stayed home from working after my brother was born. I have two brothers and a sister. And so, you know, one of the interesting things is that although she was at home, she and I had so many similar interests that are about anatomy, animal behavior, human evolution. And I think that that's really where my interests started. So now it's always hard to know the chicken and egg case. But did she encourage you or did you just show an interest early on and she followed up on it?

Can you remember even? I honestly think that it was just similar interests. You know, I am very much like her, not only in our interests, but our patterns of behavior, the way we move, the way we talk. I've had twin researchers who study twins say that they have seen twins who are not as alike as us, identical twins are not as a like of that. So I do think part of it is genetic.

She encouraged you. Yes, she did. And even as a child, as a young child, I already was, you know, interested in putting together like the anatomical toys, had it really loved, you know,

skeletal models and things like that, even as a very young child. Now, you know, when I read, read that in your book talking about putting together skeletal models reminded me. I remember having a cherished kit, which put together a human body. It was like a clear plastic and you put together

all the people. Yeah, I don't know if it's the same kit you had, but I remember I was so excited with that. Of course, in my case, it's because my mother wanted me be a doctor. So I wanted to learn all of the anatomy to be a doctor. I was, did you ever think of being a doctor or anything like that or no? You know, I did think about becoming a pathologist, one who does autopsies, but I, you know, I just thought that it wasn't really fulfilled, wouldn't really fulfill my curiosity. And I thought, you know, what doesn't a pathologist ask? And the questions they ask us, basically, how did the person die? And so it's just like one question in a way. And of course, there are research pathologists and so forth, but I wasn't, my knowledge of the topic wasn't that

far advanced, right? And so when I got into college, I was thinking, should I go pre-med and become a pathologist, or should I do something else that marries my love of anatomy with my curiosity about human evolution and about reconstructing the past? And so that's how I ended up in anthropology. Interesting. Now, we talked about your mom, and clearly you resonated and she encouraged you, and she had some experience as a physician assistant. Did your dad, was he more distance? Did he play a role of encouraging you or that he want you to do traditional directions or anything like that? Well, my parents both were very much believers of you have to do what you love. And my dad, And he's, even though he's retired army, he's very much into literature.

And, you know, he took, I think when I was seven, he took me to my first Tennessee Williams play. You know, so. And my sister, my sister's actually a literature professor. Well, she's now an associate dean. But so she kind of went the direction of my dad's interests in that way. and I went in the interest of my mom more. So there was literature. I was going to ask that question because books are obviously always been important to me.

But, you know, reading, I think is a vital part of childhood for people who get excited about the world. In addition, did you read much when you were younger or was that a caregiver of my father? We read all the time. Everyone in my family reads a lot. And, you know, we'd have our weekly visits to the library, of course. And there wasn't a Christmas where we didn't get books as gifts still. And so we've, you know, I remember I was homeschooled for several years. All my siblings and I were homeschooled at some point, not always at the same time.

And, you know, basically whenever we were like, we don't really want to go to school. My parents were like, that's okay. You'll be homeschooled then. And their idea of homeschooling was, you know, make sure that they do a little math, make sure that they do a little bit of writing and read a lot. That was basically, you know. And so when I went back to school. Yeah. And when I went back to school, and I think this was like maybe junior high, you know, they had like reading, like reading programs, like reading Rainbow programs.

and I'd read all these materials. And, you know, book after book, and my teachers didn't believe that I was reading that much. And so my mother had to write a letter to my teacher saying, yes, she is. So reading was a big part of our growing up and still is a big part of our lives. Well, that's great. Okay.

But you never, you never, you always knew you wanted that sort of, sort of scientific direction. You never thought of doing literature or anything like that. No, I personally didn't. I love reading literature and I love, you know, some of reading a wide variety of stuff. But I always had this kind of interest in the sciences. And very much the, you know, kind of hands on. I think one of the things I love about anthropology and archaeology is that it is kind of this very hands-on.

hands-on science where the materials are really there for you to hold, to touch, to see. And that's what appealed to me. My favorite chapter in Darwin's Origin of Species is the one where he talks about anatomy and morphology. It's just so clear to me how this links to, you know, human evolution and evolution of animal, other animals. So I just, that's been always a draw for me for as long as I can remember. Hi, we're going to take a brief break from our conversation so I can talk about a product I've talked about before that I love. Brilliant. It's an online application that allows you to learn whole new areas in a way that's accessible and basically painless. I really enjoy the application

and I've used it to update my skills in Python programming, something that didn't really exist when I was in school. And what's great about it is it's not very daunting because you can learn every day in small little tidbits. So I have a number of applications, some language applications I do this with, and brilliant is a wonderful way of having a regular snippet every day, building a kind of daily learning habit,

and seeing how big a streak you can have, it records how many days in a row you've been. been studying, and it's a great way to prod yourself in a fun way to learn, and just little tidbits. Not very daunting. There's courses, new courses in mathematics and science, as well as programming and data analysis. I suggest you try it. It builds your problem solving skills, and what's great about it is because you can use it on your phone, you can learn on the go. Now, you can get a free 30-day trial, and if you want to try everything Brilliant has to offer for 30 days for free, you can visit brilliant.org slash origins podcast. That's one word, origins podcast, brilliant.org

slash origins podcast, or scan the QR code on screen, or you can click on the link in the description. You'll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription. I really suggest you try that free trial and see if you don't get as addicted to it as I am. Well, thanks. And now, back to our conversation. And aside, have you ever been to his house in England and seen? Yes. Yeah, you can see why we had that interest. I mean, it's all over the place. It's really, it's really amazing.

But now you, okay, so you did your BA at Santa Cruz and managed to survive that experience. But during that, and still, you know, be rational, I shouldn't put it that way. But anyway, during that time, did you take a year off? You spent a year in Egypt. Is that true? I did spend a year in Egypt. It wasn't a year off. It was with the exchange program.

So I was getting college credit for it. Like junior year abroad? Yeah, it was actually my senior year. So I had finished all the requirements, but I was still a few credits short of graduating. And so I thought, why not spend that year abroad? And I actually was planning to go to Ghana and Ghana fell through because of the political situation. There was countrywide strikes and the schools were closed.

And so like just a few weeks before I was supposed to go to Ghana. They asked me, where else would you like to go? And I was like, well, is there any place else on the African continent? And they said, well, we have Egypt. And I said, I'll go to Egypt then. So that's how I ended up in Egypt. and it was a fascinating year. I really experienced a lot there.

I think I came away from there quite a lot more, a lot more realistic in the sense of what the third world is like. And Egypt's not even hardly the third world, but I did then spend two months in Kenya and field school with Kubi 4 a field school. And it just kind of opened my eyes to what the rest of the world was like. I had traveled a lot already. I lived in Germany when I was in high school, for example.

We traveled throughout Germany and throughout Europe. Excuse me. I spent three months in Argentina. But it's different when you go from, you know, France to Kenya. You know, I think that really kind of opened my mind. opened my eyes to how the third world is. Did you, so in Kenya were to field school, in Egypt, did you get to do any kind of sort of anthropology?

Or did it, you're looking at ancient, at least looking at ancient civilization. Yes. So we went to all the big sites, of course, multiple times, the pyramids and, you know, Luxor, Aswan. I spent a lot of days in the museum in Cairo, and I took a lot of Egyptology classes.

So it was quite interesting from that point of view. I also went to Fayum, which is one of the early primate fossil sites on a field trip. So I got to experience a lot of those things and see a lot of those things firsthand. hand. And, you know, I had Kent Weeks, who was one of the premier Egyptologists in the world, was one of my professors for two of my classes. So I got some really good education about ancient Egypt there. Yeah, I can imagine. It sounds like an amazing experience. Did you think,

given you went to Kenya, too, did you ever consider paleontology or supposed to, anthropology or is always humans you were interested in? You know, I had considered paleontology as well, but I think that my main interest lied in human evolution and prehistoric populations, kind of trying to understand what their lives were like, whether it's, you know, the hunter-gatherers of California or, you know, the Haida up in the British Columbia and the Northwest Coast.

One of the things that people oftentimes don't realize is that most indigenous populations come from a background that had no written language until the Europeans arrived. So there was no written language in the Americas. Well, I shouldn't say in all of the Americas because there were some in South America, but in North America. And I thought that this was a fascinating thing that we don't even, even fairly recently, we don't really know what their lives was like because they didn't have a written language. The same is not true all over the world. The Egyptians had a written language for quite some time, for example. Yeah, wow. You know, that is an interesting point. And so the language, the way we find out how they live is the language of their bones, I guess.

Yes. And that's clearly what interested you and clearly what continues to interest you and some of the tragedies of losing that language, just like the burning of the library of Alexandria, you know, repatriation of bones, which we'll get to. I was intrigued with next year, maybe it's just a title. You did your PhD not in anthropology directly, but in environmental dynamics. What's that? So environmental dynamics was a program, and it's still active, right, of anthropology and the geosciences.

So geography and geology. And one of the reasons why I, I chose this program for a couple reasons. One of the reasons was that it was fully funded. But the other reason is because a lot of the things that I was looking at in my master's program had an environmental component, whether it is the foods available or how the environment affects the bones in the sense of, you know, rules like Allen's rule and Bergman's rule that deal with proportions of bones and different climates. And so I was drawn to the possibility of kind of marrying the reconstructing of the past was also understanding how that fit into the environment.

So I had three years at University of Arkansas doing my PhD. And the other aspect of it was that University of Arkansas was also home of what we call the standards, which are the standard protocols on how to analyze ancient remains. And so I thought this was a good place for me for that purpose. And because, you know, I could not have foreseen this, of course, but what happened with Kennewickman, the Paleo-Indian dates 8,000 to 9,000 years ago from Washington State, when they chose the government team to do the research on Kennewick-Man before they allowed others to do it, Jeremy Rose, who was one of my professors, was one, was on that team,

until I got access to the CT scans of Kennewickman. And so it was kind of a happening place at the time. Wow, that's interesting. I wasn't aware of that. You know, I have to say, again, Kennewick Mann was what first alerted me many years ago to the ridiculous what was going on. And I think, I could be wrong,

but I think one of the earliest pieces I wrote in New York Times a long time ago was about the craziness that was going on there. And it alerted me to this notion that somehow myths, should take precedence over science. And we'll get to that, obviously. It's an issue that you've been fighting, fighting the good fight for for much of your life. And in fact, when I look at the, you know,

I want to go through the book in some ways. And there's some topics that go throughout. But sort of the three kind of, I guess, controversies, if you want to call it that, are sex and skeletons, the fact that sex actually exists, and it's important to know it in skeletons. Two, the conflict of religion and science,

in particular indigenous religion, being taken seriously and science. And three, I guess I kind of kind of woke anthropology, this notion of colonization and the new notion that somehow, you know, it was important to perhaps consider women warriors or trans-skeleton. you want to talk generally about those three things and then and then we'll go into details. Sure.

So one of the interesting things about anthropology is that it's really the study of the other. And so it's trying to, you know, yes, we're studying man or humans if you wish, but basically it's still trying to figure out what other people's lives were like, whether that's people in the past or a different culture. And it appears to me now that what's happened with woke anthropology is that anthropologists are entering to the field not wanting to learn about the other and understand the other, but rather putting on a lens to look at the past or other cultures through their own view. So a very ethnocentric view in a sense. And so in archaeology, that becomes like queer archaeology where you're looking at artifacts and you say, oh, well, here's a female skeleton, but seems to be buried with male artifacts. Does that mean that that skeleton identified as a man, that person identified as a man?

And my position for this would be, well, actually, you got the independent variable and the dependent variable wrong. Because what that probably means is that women were doing different things than you thought they would be doing. And the basic blanket problem is that they're trying to fit their own narrative. The woke anthropologists are trying to fit their own narrative to the data, rather than let the data lead. them to the most probable conclusions. And so that's a big fallacy that, you know, it occurs in a lot of, well, in religion too, having the answers before you ask the questions.

Right. And so with that, you have, you know, the trans issue with the, you know, you can't tell what's the male and female and the skeleton. One of the first things you do when you find bones is you try to determine the sex, right? But you can't always do it. Sometimes it's not a full skeleton. Sometimes it's a young individual,

and the differences of male and female are not visible on this bones yet. Those occur at puberty. They can still be discovered through DNA then, but with just a visual thing, you cannot tell like a baby's sex, you know, in just bones. But so basically you have now these kind of neo-tribes who are trying to decolonize anthropology and say, you know, we're not looking at, you know, we're not Westerners looking at the other. We are looking at it through all these different lenses.

And those different lenses are the tribes, the queer anthropology tribe, the trans anthropology tribe, the black trowel collect. of tribe, you know, and so forth and so forth. And one of those tribes are the Native Americans, whether they are true Native Americans or pretendians and people who say they're Native Americans, but aren't. And sometimes you can say, you know, there are people who may be mistaken and honestly mistaken, but then there are people who are using it to get ahead or tribes that aren't really tribes. But with the Native Americans, be they real or not, their lens is this kind of indigenous religion. But what is indigenous religion? And basically they've kind of, you know, thrown together this kind of religious, animistic belief that has a little bit of Catholicism dropped in there,

a lot of like new agey stuff. And then some. and woke stuff. I mean, and because anthropologists are now not looking for the accurate reconstruction and they're into their own tribes, they've basically decided that whatever narrative a tribe has, whether it's a neo-tribe or a Native American tribe, has to be accepted because they're the oppressed or the victims. We have to listen to that. And that's, I think, how anthropology has gone down, you know,

the wrong road. And what's occurring now with the repatriation, you know, we talk about, you know, the first big repatriation issue arose with Kennewickman because he was a paleo-Indian not, well, not associated or closely affiliated with any Native American tribe. And yet he was reburied. First he was put away and then he was, you know,

kept away from researchers. and after like 20 years they finally re-buried him. And what's interesting is when they decided to finally re-barry him, which was done with a congressional, with, I believe a congressional order signed by Obama, they basically said, well, the DNA shows that Kenwick Man is affiliated to one of the tribes that wanted him. But if you look at the DNA report, the actual article,

and the government's independent review, of that article, it says that Kennewick man is most closely affiliated with South American, Native Americans. And so, but it doesn't matter to the woke anthropologists because it's the narrative that is being fit to the data and not the data that is being used to tell the story. You know, that's interesting. I mean, it's always hit me that when you go back 500 generations, I'm as related. almost to anyone else as anyone else is.

I mean, that's what always breaks me up. I mean, people like, you know, Ancestry.com, but when you go back to many generations, you know, just like I'm related to Neanderthals, I mean, it's kind of amazing else. And when you said this, and you put it that way, it reminded me of when I was fighting years ago against the introduction of creationism into schools

instead to replace science. And what I've always argued is that we should force our beliefs to conform to the evidence rather than forcing the evidence to conform to our beliefs. And that's exactly what we're beginning to see here, is that people decide what the answer is, that there's a relationship, and the evidence must therefore, any genetic relationship, therefore proves a relationship. But I suspect in many ways you could probably find that I'm related to that person as much

or at least at some level genetically. Absolutely. And, you know, it's interesting. You mentioned, you know, the creation, Christian creationist debate and, you know, trying to keep it out of the universities and out of the schools. I, because I came through the university system

in the 90s and early 2000s, I got my PhD in 2001, I believe, 2001. I thought that anthropology, or kind of anti-religion. Yeah, yeah. They're fighting the good fight to keep Christian creationism out of our schools.

And I didn't realize until later that they were being very choosy and that the only religion that they were really speaking out against and even now is Christian creationists. And I'm kind of a free speech. free religion person. I don't care what people believe. And I'm not religious at all, but I do know that some people are very religious and they still hold, you know, lots of reasonable scientific beliefs. I don't know how they do it, but that's, you know, but regardless of one's, you know, personal beliefs, if you're looking at this, if you're looking at science, your scientific conclusions must be drawn by the data. And so when I, I I started to see that the acceptance of indigenous religions was being treated so very differently than Christian creationists.

I used this comparison. And that was one of my first cancellations at the Society for American Archaeology. I basically had a talk that said, you know, we shouldn't be letting any creation myths make determinations on our science. and I got canceled for that talk. We'll go into that in some detail. I want to start with generals, and I want to go through the various cancellations. And in deference to the way you presented,

the first cancellation I want to talk about is actually one of your last cancellations. Right. Because you talk about it, which is in my mind, because I've written about it, it's famous to me. The cancellation of a talk you gave at the American Anthropological Association, which was basically you and three other anthropologists and also a moderator talking about the importance of sex and skeletons, right?

Or sex in anthropology. And I think it was called Let's Talk About Sex Baby, why biological sex remains a necessary analytical category anthropology. And what surprised me about the reaction, and I want you to talk about this is, from a scientific perspective, as you point out in your book, and as any real sciences, to point out, sex is binary. Yes.

And it's a crucial aspect. And as you say, you can see it in skeletons. You don't have to be, it's not political. It's not based on your politics or anything else. You look at female skeletons versus male skeletons, ancient ones, and an expert like you can tell the difference and maybe not even an expert, you know, pelvic size and everything else. And, and of course, you know, sex is defined largely by what kind of gametes you produce. And, and, and, and I was surprised to see that,

not only with your talk canceled, but that the societies themselves talked about it as if you were, you were doing unscientific work by arguing that sex was binary, that somehow, how that was opposed to the ethics and mores of the American Anthropological Association. You want to talk about that a little bit? Yeah. So Kathleen Lowry, who's at the University of Alberta, was one who organized the session, and she's the one who contacted me about it. And I was like, we had written an article about this topic before, together,

a commentary, I would say. And so I was more than happy to jump in there and talk about it. Throughout my whole career, my research has touched upon differences between sexes and mainly trying to determine what is biological and what is environmental or cultural. And so, like, when you're trying to reconstruct what people are doing in the past, you have to first try to figure out what differences in the bone are just due to biology, sex differences. And once you do that, then sometimes you find out, oh, there's not really much else left, right? The sex difference is the main difference. And so I decided to do my talk on the, I think the article, my talk's title was, make no bones about it. Sex and skeletons is binary.

People may not be. And so one of the things I thought that the talk would do was highlight why, why we know that there's males and females when looking at bones. And then transition into talking about, you know, for forensic anthropologists, people doing forensic work, are there ways that we can look at to understand whether somebody has had a sex change? you know, literally what impact does the surgery have? Like, you know, of course there's a lot of soft tissue surgery, but there's also feminization surgery that looks at changes in bone,

like the softening of the brow ridge, for example, the change of the jaw. I don't know if, I don't think there's any research or any, or very much that you can do to make a woman look more like a man with bones besides giving testosterone, which would change bone growth. And then the third aspect of my talk was going to be about when we transition children, what does it do to their bones? And so, you know, I had this kind of, you know, from the archaeological to the forensic to the medical anthrow.

perspective and it got canceled. We were all called transphobes and we were told that there's no place for transphobia in anthropology and that sex is not binary. Now some people will say, well, they're not saying that sex is not binary. They're saying gender is not binary. But what anthropologists want to do is they've now used the term sex, slash gender or gender slash sex. And they want to get rid of the term sex and replace it with gender and not have the concept

of sex. And so there's active movements to do this now. And I personally don't think, you know, there's, I'm not a moralist. I don't care if an adult decides that they want to have sex change. I do worry about children because it does negatively affect their body. bone health, and these are irreversible decisions, and we don't let children do a lot of things. But if we have a skeleton that was a homicide victim, and we can tell if that's a male or female, that will help that person be identified, if we could tell whether that person had also undergone

sex change surgery, it would help even more. So far, the research has shown that sex is such a powerful variable that determines the trait that even after feminization surgery, the skull still comes up as male. It does just a change is too nuanced, too small, to make a difference for forensics. And so I thought that this was actually quite a open-minded way of looking at sex and gender. And I kind of thought, this is not that controversial, but it was completely canceled. The whole panel was canceled. And it shocked me that we have gone down the road this far, that sex is now kind of a taboo topic. The other aspect that, you know, they tried to say, well, you know, I use the term sex determination as opposed to sex estimation.

So anthropologists will use three terms, sex estimation, sex identification, and sex determination. And I think for many people, the term estimate sounds like a probability. And of course it's a probability, but we're still dealing with. you come on the side of male or female. And so I said, well, you know, if that was really the case, if they were really upset about my use of the term identification or determination, I would have changed it. That was not, you know, it was not crucial.

And they knew that. So, you know, I think that was just kind of their reason to try to make them look like, oh, no, no, we weren't targeting anybody or we weren't being woke. We were being scientific. But the other thing is, when you look at a skeleton, you're going to look at the traits to determine sex. And those traits are basically from the head to the top, right? You know, it's like throughout the whole skeleton. It's not just a pelvis or the whole skeleton.

And therefore, depending on how much of the skeleton you have, how well-preserved it is, you know, what age the individual died, then we might not be as sure as other times about what sex the person was. And so most anthropologists will give a sex on a scale of female, probable female, unknown, probable male, male. And now the woke anthropologists have saying, see, this is not. a binary. But that's not because sex is not binary. It's just because we're not 100% perfect in identifying male and female just from the bones. You know, so it's like... It's an central fact about science, which is uncertainty. And I mean, that's the great thing

about science is we're willing to acknowledge our level of uncertainty. And that makes it, you know, uncertainty is a powerful positive, not a negative. Right. And so I'm just shocked that there's kind of misusing that to try to shoehorn in this ideology of sex not being binary. The other thing that they try to do is bring in disorders of sexual development. Say, oh, that goes to show that sex is not binary. But these are pathologies that almost always result in infertility or sterility. This cannot be considered just, you know, a variant. It's a disease or a congenital pathology.

And it really doesn't have to do with whether you're male or female. It's oftentimes chromosomal abnormality. So I think that's another thing. You gave a good example, which is that there's some people who are born with more than five fingers, but we don't say humans don't have five, you know, five fingers on a hand. We don't, and I think it's a great analogy. There are variants, but the variants, but humans, and, you know, it's all, I've, heard it even more basic. I mean, we have two legs and two arms and some people are born without

that, but that doesn't mean humans don't have two legs and two arms. Exactly. And the final aspect of this is I think that there's this kind of really sexist theme going around where it's like if a woman doesn't have the absolute ideal pelvis for childbirth, then she's somehow not really a 100% of a woman. And we've known since before Darwin's period that nature doesn't work in ideals. And so a woman with not the perfect pelvis is not any less of a woman. And it's quite insulting to suggest that if, you know, maybe if somebody needed a cesarean section because they had a big baby, they're not really a woman.

And that's a level of absurdity that I just think is quite, um, insulting to women. Well, exactly. And there's so many shocking things about this. This was, I think, first of all, I mean, the first shocking thing is, the title of your talk made it quite clear. Sex is binary, people aren't. So gender may be fluid. And I think it's something we both agree on, but, but sex is, biological sex is different than gender.

And you were willing to say that in the talk. And that was why I was surprised that even in the title of the talk that, that it was taken that way. But it's also reflects some other problems, and we'll talk about problems of universities, but this is more problems of institutions, that this was the first cancellation in the American Anthropological Association in its 122-year history.

And I am correct in that this proposal was sent for a panel or a series of talks, and the organization vets it and decides, okay, it's okay to do it. So it wasn't as if it wasn't vetted, but it was canceled after it was vetted. Am I correct? That is correct. It was vetted.

It was actually vetted twice because we sent it in for like they have these like presidential sessions that are very select. So when it was vetted for that and it got rejected for that, but not, it wasn't like we're rejecting you because of ideological. It's just that that is like the, you know, very elite group. Like, you know, out of a hundred maybe one gets selected. So, yeah. So we were encouraged after that. In the response, they said that we should just submit it as a regular one, which we did. It was when you submit it, you submit the title, of course, who's in it.

the abstract of the panel and all the abstracts of the speakers. And so in a sense, it was vetted. Everything seemed fine until it wasn't, right? And it's hard to say who raised the first problems, but the first problems were raised after the program was already published, was out. So people were starting to see that the program was out. Okay, so that's when the first problems happened after it was sort of became public.

Right, right. And, you know, it's the same thing happened with my other talk with a society for American archaeology. It was vetted, no problem until it became public. And then it wasn't a problem until it was. And once it became public, suddenly one finds, and this will be a theme in your experience and more generally. but once it becomes public, then one finds that suddenly people had no problems with things before suddenly have problems. In fact, you know, at the end of that particular chapter before, and it's relevant because we're then we're going to move on to what happened to you in your university career. But you started and it really resonated because I've seen it over and over and over again.

You say the fact remains, the university was happy to support me when they benefited from it, but they threw me under the bus when the tide turned. They're support evaporated. And I think this because I've seen this happen over and over again, the spinelessness of institutions, leaders, academic leaders, who have no problems until they somehow think there's going to be a public problem. And then they move to virtue signaling instead of, instead of rationality and logic. And I want to, I want to go through your own experience of that.

And the first thing you talk about is the climate of universities and interestingly, not so much the climate necessarily among faculty, but what many of us have seen is the climate of treating students as children in academia, of suddenly deciding that they cannot accept anything, that anything that somehow might offend them is somehow going to be so traumatic that they shouldn't have to deal with it. And one of the first examples you gave, I thought was amusing because I remember, you know, I've, as a professor for many years,

I got my own series of excuses for why people couldn't attend the final class or couldn't do an exam or anything else. And you point out that one of the examples you got all the time was that people's grandmothers died. And an associate dean wrote in an email that students never lie about death. And I was going to say something bad about associate deans, but I'm not going to do anymore because your sister is an associate dean, right? It's okay. But it's, yeah, from knowing, from my sister, having an inside track for my sister, a lot of the university administrators actually know full well that this stuff is a

that the, you know, lies about grandmas dying and about the problems of the PC and the woke culture. And some of them are even against it, but they're too protective of their jobs, basically, is their careerists in a sense often. And so they don't want to stick out their neck. But it's, yeah, that, I mean, Michael Sherman does a great, had a great article or, you know, you know, piece on, you know, the increase in maternal, and grandmother deaths at around final times.

And if you better hope that your grandson or granddaughter is an A student, otherwise you might die around final time. And instead of, you know, the associate dean, you know, acknowledging this, chuckling along with it, saying, you know, how can we deal, how can we resolve these issues? He basically admonished professors for requiring or requesting any information of the death. I had one student who went so far as to create a fake obituary for his cousin.

And I was like, this doesn't look real because I had still the sample from the computer. And he had listed a church where the funeral occurred. I called that church up. And they're like, we don't do funerals. And I think of a point there, if he does spend as much energy on that, on actually doing the chorus as getting out of doing the chorus. Yeah. And I confronted him with that.

And I told him that. And, you know, the thing is, after that semester, he didn't pass a class because of that. And he wasn't doing well anyway, but he retook my class. He reached out to me and he said, you know, is it okay if I retake your class? Yeah. And I said, of course. I said every semester is a new semester, you know.

And he did decent because he, you know, you just put a little bit of effort into it. And I think that it is our job as professors to call students out on this and not to shy away from it. And sometimes when you say, you know, I'd like to see some proof of this, the student will provide it. And maybe they'll think, oh, wow, she's a bitch for asking about it. But it is our job. And then if you're in the work world, you have to provide evidence of these things. So I don't see why, you know, we have to basically treat the students like children as opposed to young adults, which is what they are. And of course, they're young adults who are sometimes going to not reach adult behavior.

But we have to expect it of them or they won't for sure. And I think there's that. I mean, requiring a certain level of behavior helps people chain that behavior maybe. But more than that, I think it's by being effectively afraid of hurting students' feelings, students, you know, in the normal language, people are talking about, oh, all the power resides in, you know, in professor-student relationships or university, that power resides in the professors,

but one is seeing increasingly universities that actually the power tends to now reside in students, that if students are offended, it's taken so seriously that it has an impact and faculty are afraid literally, many faculty members I know are literally afraid of saying something wrong for fear of offending students, which gives them sort of a level of power. And it also treats them at the same time, it treats them as children. And it stifles, you know, it stifles discussion. And it actually punishes those academics who have the least protection most.

So the lecturers who, if they don't have tenure, they'll just, their contract will not be renewed. And so in some ways, this inverse power relationship is doing the most harm to those that the academic unions claim to care most about the lecturers. And, I mean, you know, San Jose State, the anthropology department, for example, has like five professors, tenured track or tenured professors and maybe 20 lecturers. And so, you know, those are the people who can more easily be let go if they accidentally or, you know, say something that offends somebody. And this is greatly affecting the university's ability to give correct information. And also having us have a next generation that just can't deal with being disagreed with. Yeah, absolutely. I've said it many times this program, but I've said it, I've seen it on coffee cups now.

But yeah, you say the purpose of science, but I'd more generally, the purpose of education. education is to make us uncomfortable. Yes. Because if it isn't, we're not going outside our region and, you know, outside our comfort zone. And that's what learning is. Learning is going outside our comfort zone. And whether it's learning mathematics or new language or anything else, it's often,

it's not easy sometimes and you've got to push yourself. I was surprised your provost, two examples you gave of your provost. First, this is an example that people outside of universities may not even appreciate sometimes how absolutely ridiculous this is. But the idea that, you know, it used to be that if students, you know, had a problem, they'd go on academic probation. And your provost gave a road that we shouldn't use the word probation because it seems too much like a, you know, like somehow it's a, you know,

they're doing something criminal. And we have to change the word. And then, but more importantly, what really, and this is, we see this over and over again. You give an example of the provost, let me read this. I couldn't believe it when I read it in your book. The provost wrote, my concern comes to how concepts such as academic rigor can reinforce equity gaps,

as many students need to learn not only the core concepts, but the hidden curriculum and culture of higher education. So somehow rigor becomes the enemy. Yes. And actually, one of the things that, people don't often know about universities is that every year they go through, or every semester, they go through the course listings and they look for what they call the DFW rates, the D grade, the F failing grade, and the withdrawal grade or dropping out grade,

and contact professors who have high DFW rates to try to get them to change their curriculum And I know this because I was one of those professors that they contacted. I had high DFW rates, especially for my introduction class. And I taught a big 120 student class in part because if you taught a big class that counted us too. And the San Jose State University, it's a four-four load. So a professor teaches four classes unless they get release time. And as a physical anthropologist, as the only physical anthropologist at my university, I was teaching, if I did not have a course like that, I would have been teaching for different classes, which is quite a lot of work. And so I would get to release time for various things, you know, apply for it.

But one of the constant release times was this 120 student class. but it would have a high DFW rate. And so they took it away from me. They basically said, we're not doing 120 students in the class anymore. And so I ended up having to teach that class twice in the semester as opposed to once. And, you know, in some ways, you know, a lot of times students won't do as well in large classes because they're not coddled as much. And so this is also a part of rigor.

But rigors, you know, I would have questions that were basically like, did you do the reading type questions? Anybody who just even glanced at the reading should answer it. And they couldn't because they weren't reading it. And this is also the rigor that they want to get away with. I've been in classes, for example, cultural anthropology classes where one of the professors who was a lecturer, she was told that she had to lower her DFW rate and she had to improve her student evaluations. And basically, what she ended up doing was a lot of group work because, of course, you know, that tends to make students work less. but she would put it like half an hour aside in class for students to read.

So basically stop lecture, stop work, and like now is your 30 minutes of class time to do the reading that you should have done last night. That reminds me of elementary school. Yes. And this is a rigor that, you know, they're trying to get away from rigor. And then when every, any time you say, well, you know, the students aren't coming in prepared or they're not doing the work, then you get this kind of like, don't say that they're not coming and prepared. Don't say that they are not doing the work. It's just cultural, which is even more insulting in one way. But I mean, it is.

It's, I think that basically what you have is, is, you have universe. When I first got to San Jose State University, the acceptance rate was something like 30%. Now it's something like 70%. They're letting in more students who are not as qualified. And rigor is what is going to the wayside because of it. Yes. And universities don't, as you say, don't like to see poor grades. Interesting enough, where I first taught, which was Yale University,

It was even worse. I got called to cask, I hate to say it, an associate dean, but a college dean. They have college deans there. There's a lot of colleges. Because I gave a student a C. Wow. And I got a call saying, we don't give Yale students C. You know, but anyway, it's interesting that you frame that early in your book because

this atmosphere of concern about what students are thinking and feeling and the public's thinking you're feeling is really what ultimately led to the problems that you confronted. And they began when you published a book, your book, Repatriation and Erasing the Past in September 2020, a book whose premise was that repatriation is inappropriate in many cases. And just, or just to ask the question, is it appropriate? And of course, that was enough ultimately to lead your cancellation. But your first argument was that, well, there are two arguments that were, that are fundamentally ridiculous, which I think you go over, is that basically repatriation is based on the claims that,

or two claims, one of a relationship of a tribe, of an indigenous tribe to an ancient skeleton, which we already alluded to, is kind of, can be like, not only kind of ludicrous, but sometimes can be actually factually wrong. Right. But also it caters to a religious basis that that that relationship is often based in myths. And in fact, one of your main criticisms in this book, which you wrote with a lawyer, right? Right. Correct. And therefore, it's not too surprising that one of the first claims about why this law,

law, which is called Nagpro, which I want you to talk about it, violates as the establishment clause. So why don't you, why don't you, we begin there? So Nagra is the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. And it was passed in 1990. And the purpose of it was basically to repatriate remains and certain artifacts, not all artifacts, to affiliated or connected tribes. It did that. And in a sense, it was by 2020, pretty much everything that was supposed to be affiliated, that was clearly affiliated, like historic links, was repatriated. But because of how NACPA was written, the repatriation process is never over because the affiliation can be more and more and the artifacts can be, you know, broader and broader defined as sacred or or funerary objects.

So what Jim Springer, who is my co-author and I did, was we looked at how NACPRA violated the Establishment Clause, which means that the government cannot establish a religion. It cannot support one religion over another, and it cannot, you know, put in place. a law that is based on religion's preference. So the separation of church and state goes both ways. Not only are you free to practice your religion, but the government cannot impose a religion either or cannot support a specific religion. And so we looked at it, and, you know, I had been writing about this for many years, as has Jim. And Jim is actually, he's now a retired attorney, but he also got a PhD in anthropology

and even had worked with Don Johansson who had discovered Lucy, the 3.6 million-year-old early human from Ethiopia. And so we looked at the different ways that NARPRA violates the establishment clause. One thing is, for example, the committee, the NangPra committee that makes decisions must have two Native American traditional Indian religious leaders.

So it's one thing to say you need a religious leader in a committee. And you might say, I don't like that, but it's not establishment. But if you say you need a traditional Indian religious leader, someone who practices that specific religion, then that's an establishment. So we pointed that out. And even worse, what is traditional? Indian religion. Nobody knows. Yeah, it's not just Indian, it's traditional Indian.

What does it, what does traditional mean? What does traditional mean? Nobody knows. And then the other thing is that the artifacts that can be repatriated include sacred artifacts that are objects that are required to practice traditional Indian rituals, religious rituals. Well, how does the government determine that? And the answer is basically it accepts anything that a Native American elder or a religious leader says. But that is establishing a preference for religions.

So if you find a cross, then it's okay to keep. But if you find a medicine bag, it might not be. you're treating the one religion prefer one religion over the other. And then the other thing is there's a whole bunch of religious aspects in Nagpra, like, for example, every committee starts and ends

with a traditional Indian religious prayer. And they're kind of interesting because you can tell that they're kind of just made up. They sometimes throw in Jesus' Christ or so, you know. But the other thing is that, you know, you have to now, with the final rule, with changes that came about in 2023, you also have to engage in religious rituals like sage burning. These are enforced religious practices on others. So, and then finally, perhaps the worst,

is that NACP allows Native American creation myths in order to make decisions on repatriation. So if, you know, you have a creation myths that, you know, your people were put on this earth by the

creator and the bottom of the Grand Canyon, that is treated as legitimate evidence. And in California now, if there's any disagreement between the scientific evidence and the Native American narrative that's being given,

the Native American narrative is given preference or deference to it. That's a Cal Magpa. That's a CalNACRA. And so this... They specifically say that, right? They specifically say that. Whenever the science says one thing

and myth says another, myth wins. Exactly. And so this is the problem. And so we, Jim and I wrote this book that came out in 2020, September 19, it's September 2019. So really, right around the end of 2019, I think the first reviews started coming out in December 2019 or so. I'm not wrong. your book came out in September of 2020 and then

yeah well it's okay yeah well it's okay began to hit the fan yeah well I read your book recently so I know anyway it began hit the fan in December before we get before we yeah so you were fine the book came out in September and you know you got

positive feedback and even your share kind of thought it was okay and then and then the public feedback began to be in December. But before we get to the public feedback, you give an analogy about this idea that somehow claims of, you know, of ancestry are more important than the science. And I like it. You say basically, it's like, you know,

there was, they buried, it saddens me that spirit gave mummy, who's in Nevada, the oldest human mummy with the date of 10,600 years. They buried that because of a suspected oral history making a connection. It's like you demanding to be given the remains of Otzi, which I've seen, the 5,600-year-old iceman found in the Alps, simply because you too have European ancestors. It's just, it's laughable. But it's also so sad because a 10,600-year-old mummy is,

lost to science, so you have lost to knowledge because of catering to oral myth. And I think your point that you make, and I want to stress this before we go on to how you were then crucified for this, is that anthropologists do more honor to the memory of these deceased beings than the oral history because you really find out what happened to them. You make their lives real. So maybe you can go into that a little bit. Yeah. Actually, one of the things that, that I've enjoyed doing throughout my career is basically looking at what I would call interesting individuals in the collections. I curated the largest collection west of the Mississippi, the single site collection west of the Mississippi for years before the cancellations occurred.

And I would go in there and find, you know, look at this different remains, you know, take care of the collection. And it was fascinating to me to be able to go and see. okay well this person had for example a injury that if they had not been taken care of they would have died and how this so this shows that somebody was helping them live or you know one of the individuals I remember looking at had very severe jawbone arthritis much more severe than anybody else in this in this sample and he was also buried with thousands and thousands of beads. And does this tell us a story about,

and he had interesting wear patterns on his teeth that suggests he used his mouth to maybe make the rope to make jewelry? So it was this artisan. So these kind of stories that really bring the people to life in a way that could not be done in a, with just listening to myths. There, you know, I tell the story about some mum

from the north, from off the coast of Alaska, where the older woman, you know, she had basically had severe inflammation of the aorta, and she overcomes that. She got trichinosis probably from eating raw, you know, an undercooked polar bearer mean. She had, you know, pulmonary arthrosis of the lungs from breathing in the smoke when she was stoking it all night to keep her family warm. And she gets through all these different hardships. And then she dies because of an avalanche. And these are people's stories that are so fascinating and really, you know, tell what life was like in a way that honors them much more than any myth could do.

And that's what one of the things that attracted me to anthropology is, being able to tell these stories, these stories of people who could not tell them themselves. And it's just such a shame when those stories get lost by this kind of religious fanaticism of bearing bones. Oh, that's beautifully put. And, you know, my field, as you know, is cosmology. And I've often said, when comparing to religion, that the imagination of the universe is so much greater than the human imagination that were continually surprised.

And in microcosm, that's what you're seeing. Instead of some myth about either some supernatural being or some idyllic life that wasn't real, you tell the amazing story of this woman, which is far more interesting and imaginative than you could come up within myth. And it's a sad thing, but to lose that, because science tells us that nature is more interesting

than we might. imagine it to be, and sometimes then we'd like it to be. Right. And that was one of the reasons why we broke repatriation and erasing the past, is to basically bring this out again, you know, making people aware. And it's interesting that when NAGPRA was passed in 1990, there were some people who were concerned. But others were like, no, no, this is a compromise. It will work. We'll still have lots to study. And the compromise has failed because, you know, we basically have no way to reign in the religious tales that are being used to claim skeletal remains and to rebury the past.

And in 1996, I believe, and this was, you know, kind of with Man time with his discovery, the New York Times had a article, front page article, creationists are trying to thwart archaeological research and compared repatriation to burning books and they were talking about Native American creationists. There's no way I could get anything even remotely like that in the New York Times today. And so this is again, this kind of show how PC-ness

evolved into wokeness and has just gone far more extreme than we ever might have imagined. You know, that's fascinating. You really at home, I don't know if that was my article, but that was the rest of the piece I wrote in the New York Times in the 1990s that we're fighting creationism, and we should fight it everywhere. But you're right, it's now, that could be said then, and it can't be said now, and that's really kind of remarkable.

And it can't be said, and so, in fact, it can't be said so strongly, and I want to get to it, your book can't. came out in September of 2020. By December, the Twitter world began to respond. And you were called racist. Right. And the worst name one can be called.

And what, what began to happen, it seems as far as you can see, is virtue signaling. You're not yet cancellation, virtual signaling. Your dean and your chair and dean who had been supported before

began to say, well, you know, we don't like this. And even your publisher apologized. Is that not the case? That is true. They wanted to pull the book.

Jim had basically told them, if you do, we will sue you. So they didn't. Do write a book with the lawyer. And pretty soon an open letter had circulated with about a thousand signatures, most of them from, you know, graduate students and professors from around the world, calling for the depublication of the book. And it was kind of funny, you know, one of the things is that throughout all my cancellations,

I've had to really keep my sense of humor, otherwise you'll go mad. But it was kind of funny that people were saying, you know, they were the open letter you know there were two letters one that straight out called for the banning of the book to depublish it completely not sell any copies and whatever and then they moderated that little bit with saying yes some people want it banned but of course they didn't use word ban they wouldn't but you know but they said we don't want it in any libraries people shouldn't be able to get this for free. And ironically, on the Twitter and Twitter,

you would see these threads like, does anybody have a free copy of the book? Because they didn't want to pay for it either. So, I mean, the open letter came out so quickly, was signed by so many people so quickly. I think, you know, end of September 2020, the book came out. The open letter had already many, many signatures. in December.

And I honestly think that most of the people who signed that open letter did not read the book. Otherwise, it would have been like a bestseller right away. Best selling anthropology book of the decade or something. The thing is like they decided to say that I was racist. I could not at first. what was interesting was I couldn't really see why they would have chosen that as opposed

to, you know, anti-indigenous or or just like against re-barial insensitive or so. But the thing is that I think they knew that that was the grenade to throw and so they threw it.

They claim that it was in the letter it was claimed that it was also because we used the term race in the book. Jim explained that we used that term because that was a term in many of the laws and so that we even qualified it as we understand this is a complicated term and you know,

there's this and that, but we're going to use it sometimes because of how the laws are written, right? So I don't believe that that's why they claim, they said we were racist. and basically, you know, it really just led to a series of my chair, my dean, my provost, all basically eventually jumping on that bandwagon of cancellation. Well, first they, before they actually officially got to cancellation in different ways, the first thing they then did was virtue signal, right?

They just began to, whereas before they, thought it was interesting and provocative work. Now they decided it was bad work and evil. And it didn't, and it didn't support the university, you know, the goals of the university. So they began to speak out and get ahead of the mob. But they still said, okay, we'll give you academic freedom,

but we don't like what you're doing. Yes. And they called me Victorian and, you know, my view's Victorian. And wrote like kind of, you. You know, letters like, on the one hand, academic freedom, but, you know, but we disagree with her. I actually think that that first letter that my chair wrote, supposedly defending my academic freedom, was very spineless. If he had wanted to criticize my book, which he had every right to do, he should have, he should have read it, I think. he says he did, but he really misunderstood it if he didn't because he claims that we thought

we were arguing that science is linear. We're like, we have a whole chapter on that it's not. But the other thing is that he shouldn't have had it in the same position as his letter of support. So if you wanted to do a book review, you know, that one. Fine, or if you wanted to, you know, write a blog, fine. But it was like he had this letter of support. And then he, you know, says, but, you know, this book is trash. You have to say the but.

He didn't want to be. I mean, what happens is these people are afraid of themselves becoming attacked. Right. And so that's what virtue signaling is all about. But, you know, they have the right to do this. But I disagree with it. I hate it. In spite of the fact that beforehand, as you point out in your reviews,

it basically said, this is we're going to be. provocative and cause a lot of discussion, and it'll be really good. So the first sign before cancellation is to suddenly shift and say all that stuff doesn't matter. Now I don't like it because I want to protect myself and the university wants to protect itself before they decide whether they're actually going to get rid of you. Then you add an insult to injury, however, because that's when you decided in April of 2021 to do the Society for American Anthropology talk. And the talk was entitled, has a... creationism crept back into archaeology.

And it was online because of COVID. Is that right? That's correct. And it was aired on April 15th, tax day of 2021. Yes. And that really seemed to light the flames. Is that correct?

Yeah. So that was like my second cancellation or my second wave, I guess. And it was basically looking at the argument about the establishment clause in NAGPRA. And I actually thought it was, I really didn't think that it was that controversial of a talk. Even then, I still thought, you know, it's not that big of a deal. And I thought, you know, we're framing it in the sense of we, in that talk, we don't even actually say. And it was co-authored by Jim and I, but I gave it.

I don't actually say any that I'm against repatriation, although I am and everybody likely knew it, but my point in that talk was if you're going to repatriate, make the decisions based on science, not religion. And so, you know, you could say, well, you know, everybody knew that you were against repatriation and therefore this was kind of sneak in. But it really wasn't. It was like, well, you know, I can understand that people, not everybody's going to have my perspective. I'm always clear about my perspective. But if we're going to come to, you know, repatriate remains, let's at least do it using science and evidence and not religion. And that was how I framed it.

There were people, you know, the sidebar with the comments were just like nasty comments almost completely. nothing really of substance. And people would be, would attack some aspects of my talk about the timing of the peopleing of the Americas. There's a big debate about timing of the people of the, of the, of the timing of when people came to the Americas.

Some people say it's 10,000, some people say 13, some people are 12, some people 22, you know, like it's all over the place. And I don't, I have, I haven't made up my, mind on it. I think that there's, you know, sometimes I think it's older, sometimes younger, but I had quoted the Society for American Archaeology statement on it. And people took that as, oh, well, she thinks that, you know, Native Americans have been here only 13,000 years. And, you know,

so they even took that quote from the society itself, offense at that. It was kind of crazy. the first president of this the president who was there at that time the Society for American Archaeology president I believe it was Joe Watson if I'm not wrong and he basically stood up for the inclusion of the talk he didn't want to take it down because the talks were supposed to be

up online for three months and he stood by that decision but then as soon as the next president came in she reversed it and she took it down immediately. And the thing is, it was only shown the once they had frozen all the talks and didn't put anything up online until they resolved this issue. And so basically held it up for like two weeks or so. And ironically, this was probably the only talk that people wanted to go back and look at.

So I did post it on my website. But it was, you know, unbelievable. And following that, they basically put together a committee to make sure that people like me don't get back on onto the program and have new rules. All the rules that got set up following the cancel. It wasn't bad enough that they just basically took your. clock down, but they tried to ensure, and we'll talk about that, but it wouldn't happen again. But before we do, there was one thing here that I want you to comment on, just an example of the kind of thing that you were talking about, and it's, you know, it was new for me to learn.

It was the canyon de Chile. I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right. As an example, you want to just give that example as sort of demonstrates the lunacy of this whole thing? Is that the Navajo, the Navajo, with the Navajo, uh, with the Navajo suture, or paint 303 sets of human remains and claiming that the National Park Service didn't have lawful possession of them. And that what the appeals court are accepting their myths.

Yeah. So I think that this is a myth with the trickster coyote and the steamboat going down. And so you have the, in Navajo's argument is that they've been. in that land forever. And they know this because this trickster coyote and this, I think it was a hair, or going down the river and naming different parts of the area in a steamboat. And this was accepted as evidence.

This is the type, this is the level of absurdity. not only were there not steamboats in this prehistoric time, but as far as I know, there are still no talking coyotes who can drive steamboats. Yeah, no, it's, you know, that idea that that kind of myth can be the way to decide that tribes have been there since, as they like to say,

since the dawn of time or time immemorial, I hear it here all the time. And I often want to speak up because no one's been here since time in memorial. I'm a cosmologist, and I know about time immemorial. But anyway, but then what surprised me was that not just that they cancel it, but how vociferously that they said that after careful review, this talk does not align with SAA's values. And then they say something which you hear over and over again,

which really amaze me. They issued a second statement about the talk in which they wrote that, quote, the board of directors collectively apologizes to those who were harmed by the inclusion of our presentation. So it's this notion of harm. Can you explain how people could be harmed by hearing something they may not like or disagree with is a notion now that's so prevalent that somehow language is a form of violence. Do you want to talk about that at all a little bit? Yeah, you know, I think it's kind of interesting. I think that in the 90s, in early 2000s, there was the PC culture.

And I think that the concern with PC culture was quite a lot of, you know, we don't want to be offensive. And this then morphed into we don't want to cause harm. And that harm is defined as anything that kind that disagrees with somebody, basically. And so they're, they're defining, you know, something that might. might contradict some people's religious beliefs, myths, and so forth as harmful. Now, ironically, this talk, of course, was recorded. People could see the program. If they didn't want to hear it, they didn't have to come.

So it's not even that much. But the flip side of it is, you know, words are harmful and silences violence. So you can't win, right? If you don't say anything, that silence is violent. So if you don't speak up for the repatriation and reburial of remains and agree with those people who are in favor of it, even if you just stay mute on the topic, that's violent. And then if you disagree, that's harm.

So in a sense, there is no way to win if you disagree. And I think that this kind of hijacks the ability to have a discussion and students, especially graduate students, they will utilize this to be able to get out of reading things. They'll utilize it to be able to leave the classroom if there's something that they don't want to see. Or quite honestly, even if there's just a text message from their boyfriend that they would rather read. We don't know how much of this is that they're basically taking advantage of. We've already talked about the advantage of, you know, grandmother's death. Do we think that students aren't going to take advantage of the harm narrative?

And now anthropology classes around the world are using trigger warnings before they show any images of skeletal remains. I mean, this is going overboard. And, you know, I'm kind of... I'm kind of of the mind that, you know, shock is good. So if you're looking at a slide and you've shown something that you weren't expecting, that's actually good. It will help you remember it. If you tell people, oh, wait, this might be harmful.

You might be upset about this. Then they're going to either leave or they're going to not remember it because they remember the trigger warning, not the actual image. And they also accept the fact that they can, and they're also. the narrative that somehow they can be harmed. If they're told they're going to be harmed, they somehow feel like victims and encourage that victimization thing. In fact, besides the narrative that's relevant for repatriation, namely when tribes and what relationships they have based on myths,

the other thing you point out that people don't like to hear is that the idyllic paradise that was indigenous culture wasn't so idyllic. And basically you're not allowed to talk about that anymore. Yeah. You can sometimes talk about it in relation to some South American tribes like the Aztec or, you know. You can like get away with that a little bit. But for the most part, the Native American narrative is the noble savage narrative of they're the first environmentalists. They never killed more than they could eat.

They engaged in intertribal trade, not intertribal warfare. They shared the land. And we know that just isn't true. There was replacements constantly in the sample that I curated, that large sample of the Ryan Mound, which contains over 300 individuals from the Bay Area, from the San Francisco Bay Area. basically there were at least two or three displacements in 2,000 years, but there were probably multiple. Those are the ones we can literally see from skeletal changes.

So you have to think that they were different enough that there are skeletal differences. But there were probably constant changes. There's also obsidian arrowheads embedded in bone, broken bones from being hit. So it wasn't idyllic. And it does a disservice to tell this narrative that they were idealic. When I was doing repatriation and erasing the past, I was looking at some of the materials from government websites that are used to teach students in K-12 classes. And one of the ones that was just so absurd was this list of accomplishments that Native Americans

pre-contact Native Americans had, and they included they never created an atomic bomb. That was listed as an accomplishment. And they didn't have lawyers. So those were on the list that is being given to K through 12 students. And when I point these things, excuse me? Well, you bet, you know, they don't talk about the fact that, as you point out here, that there was slavery, There was pre-contact slavery. It makes it seem as if it's a unique white European immigration in the United States.

And interesting, when you talk about slavery among the indigenous, especially Native Americans but also other indigenous groups, some apologists will say, be like, well, it wasn't as bad as the slavery in America. It was a different kind of slavery. And, you know, it wasn't chatel. slavery. Some of it was chattel slavery. But I mean, in some tribes, they would cut off the finger that was used to draw a bow so that the slaves couldn't defend themselves. And other tribes, they would cut the Achilles tendon, the heel, you see cut marks on there so that these people

would be hobbled for a long enough period of time that they'd then be forgotten or so. and then they'd have to stay. In some tribes, one of the reasons why they stop, why the Westerners forbid potlatches in the Northwest Coast tribes is because they would basically use slaves as trade. And sometimes to show how much wealth, they would just kill a slave just to show I can kill someone that I don't need.

So this is, I don't know how you can argue that one form of slavery is better than another. But, you know, it's obvious from both the bones and from historic documents that slavery was no picnic with the Native Americans. And, you know, one of the great accomplishments of human society, of civilization is how wiped out. And of course there are still some pockets of slavery,

but slavery used to be global, and it's like, you know, vastly wiped out now. And that's an accomplishment that we should have celebrated as opposed to try to draw this narrative of. There were no slavery, there was no slavery before the Americans, before the Europeans came to the Americas. and, you know, we just that one population is to blame when it was actually pretty much a global phenomenon until it wasn't. Until it wasn't exactly.

As the movement against you began to grow following that talk and your book, you point out, I mean, the first thing happens to get called names, brave digger, grave robber, ghouls, and, and, and then, and then, and then, and that all fits in, as you point out, into this movement to colonize anthropology, which you describe as the movement to remove Western concepts like progress, civilization, objective knowledge in the field, and fill it with indigenous fairy tales to perpetuate the noble, savage narrative. But, but, but, but, but so in addition to becoming, you know, sort of a, racist, apparently, you also have all the other aspects of the Western colonizer, a great rob or a ghoul. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

Yeah. One of the things is that, you know, many of the people who basically sent me nasty emails or nasty tweets or wrote nasty things about me, their main argument was that, I was either the equivalent of a grave robber or a ghoul. And when I point out that almost all of North American archaeology is from salvage sites, i.e. sites that were excavated because of development and would have been bulldozed over if archaeologists and anthropologists hadn't saved them, you know, that is never acknowledged by those who are for repatriation. The other thing is many individuals who have been curated, many remains were not buried. The paleo-Indians, Kenilkman wasn't at a burial.

He had died on the river edge and got covered in settlement. It wasn't a burial. So that's another aspect of it. And then the other thing that they throw at you is, you know, how would you like it if it is your grandmother. And one thing is, you know, it's nobody's grandmother, right?

Or it's everybody's grandmother. But the other thing is, like, this concept that everybody thinks that bones, that human remains should be buried and, or cremated or,

you know, not studied is not, it's just not the case. There are... You're opposing, it's, you're opposing, your own stereotypes.

You know, I love the fact that when you were asked, how would you feel for your own grandmother? You said, I'd love it. I'd love it. It would be a great honor. And my parents have, they have signed their body to be donated to the university. I hope that by the time they die that the universities are still accepting bodies. And, you know, I think that this is very ethnocentric of them.

And ironically, many tribes didn't bury their. That's the key point. I mean, we assume that we need to bury them. But I'm glad you brought that up. Go on. I'm sorry to interrupt. But that's fascinating. So, you know, they're in the north, like Alaska, far northwest.

Oftentimes, because the land was so hard, they didn't bury bodies. They either put them on pedestals. sometimes they left them out and they would just take a souvenir. Throughout the Americas, there's some places where the graves were just mass graves. Some places where bodies weren't buried. Again, most of the paleo-Indians weren't buried. We don't really know when burial as like a, single burials really took off globally.

But I can guarantee you that this concept of each individual being buried in a coffin under the ground for Native Americans, for many Native Americans, is actually something that came with the Catholics and wasn't in their culture from the get-go. And so, you know, in some ways, you know, they're basically colonizing their own. own their own history if they think that they're connected to it because it's not the concept of burial wasn't universal and in some ways why would we expect it to be I just think that that's this weird and again I do think it's a religious thing and that was brought in probably by the Catholics so it's fascinating when you think because what effectively is being done is the very thing that

that people like you were being accused of, that imposing your Western, you know, Victorian notions, where in fact by assuming that all early skeletons need to be buried as some religious thing is, in fact, as you say, it's ethnocentric. It's myopic. Yeah. Absolutely. And then, okay, well, in the context of all of that,

of what's going on. And then what happened to you sort of to get even further to the... So we've gone through two of your cancellations and we're going to go now to the last one. And... But to put it in context, once again, one goes back to the university.

And you have a whole chapter about ethnic studies and which I think is really appropriate. Let me give you... And I have to read this. To see whether it's scholarship. These, the general, in your university, there was a, there's a requirement, I think in California that there be in ethnic studies in all universities. And the general education page on ethnic studies at San Jose State University says ethnic studies courses give students the knowledge and skills necessary for comprehending continued sovereignty movements, the racial and ethnic dynamics and settler colonial histories and social justice movements in the United States. and consequences of racial construction,

racialization, and racial oppression in the city where they live. I mean, the buzzwords, in fact, learning outcomes include, and this quote is amazing. This is what they're supposed to learn. The analyze and articulate concepts such as race and racism, racialization, ethnicity, equity, ethnocentrism, Eurocentricism, white supremacy, liberation, decolonization, sovereignty, imperialism,

Settler colonialism and anti-racism. This is the notion that comes up over and over again, and you see it in the people that eventually will have something to do with canceling you, the notion of scholarship replacing scholarship with activism. Right. So, you know, since you wrote a whole chapter about it, why don't I let you go on it? Yeah, so basically in California,

now, anybody graduating from the public university systems is required to take an ethnic studies course regardless of your major. It's a requirement. And these are really courses that focus on activism. They're not courses that look at things intellectually or academically. And anthropologists have been at the first. forefront of this kind of activism scholarship or activism, you'll see people describe themselves as an activist scholar. And you'll see job applications that require you to be that. And I don't

think that you can't be an activist in a scholar. But what they've done is they've become an activist and not a scholar. So for example, I could say that I'm an activist about these specific things about repatriation and so forth because it affects our scholarship. But it's very different than basically being just an activist. And there is, I don't think that there's a lot of intellectual depth in that. And the other aspect of it is that certain ethnic cities are definitely excluded from ethnic studies. So one of the big fights was that Jewish studies was excluded from them. So, you know, if you're going to study ethnic studies, why wouldn't you include that? And it's because they're

considered part of the white supremacy a triangle or so, and therefore not included. When I went to the American- Wonderful. I don't know if your background is Jewish. And I don't know if yours is, but it's kind of amazing to see Jews suddenly being promoted to being white. My mother's German, not Jewish German, and my father's side is Jewish. So I'm not, we weren't raised, you know, religiously as Jews. But, but, you know, my grandmother, my great-grandmother on my father's side, for example, She never wanted a headstone on her burial, on her burial ground, because she was worried about vandalism of that ground. And I had a lot of relatives on my father's side who did die in the Holocaust.

So, but, you know, yeah, Jews have now been promoted to whites. White supremacists. And it's interesting. In some ways, you could say, you know, why isn't white a part of ethnic studies? European. You know, there are ethnicities within Europeans. But, you know, it's all about basically a victim narrative driving this kind of activism. And it really doesn't revolve around scholarship, but around activism.

When I went to the American Anthropological Association Conference, I think it was after COVID, so it might have been like 2022. And there was, I believe, 80 talks that used the term white supremacy in their abstract. And not a single one of those talks actually looked at white supremacist. There was no undercover anthropologist in a KKK group or in, you know, the Aryan nations. None of it had really to do with white supremacy groups, which would have been interesting, you know. Some undercover anthropologists looking at that, but that's not what they're talking about with white supremacy. They're basically talking about just being white or white-ish. And then the moving from ethnic studies, in your case,

in your university to Native American Studies, which of course became relevant because, you know, of the, of the skeletons

that you've eventually that you curated and eventually couldn't curate. The university was trying to create a Native American studies program.

And you point out quite clearly that there were, at San Jose State, very few Native Americans in the first place. But in particular, the university

had a symposium on this. And we're, once again, one seeing in this symposium, you talk about someone named Jolie Proud Fit, not Proudfoot, but Proud Fit, began with a call to treat

indigenous knowledge as valid. Indigenous knowledge, according to ProudFit, is distinct in being place-based, E. I.E. Tribe has individual knowledge about their religion, about their region, and sovereign, namely indisputable. You can't, you're not allowed to quote it, which is just

such an amazing statement to be made at a university. Yes. You cannot, you cannot dispute it. And ironically, and this is, in in 2023, the Biden administration passed the indigenous knowledge mandate that it covers all, you know, it's supposed to insert indigenous knowledge into all sorts of fields from environmental studies to anthropology to the CDC and so forth. And in that, they use a similar type of definition for indigenous knowledge. But ironically, what they also say is that indigenous knowledge cannot be wrong. Because basically, if one tribe disagrees with another, both tribes are, neither tribe is wrong. Both tribes are correct. So it really has nothing to do with knowledge. And traditional knowledge doesn't have to be passed down.

That's another aspect of it. So traditional Indian knowledge doesn't have to have a tradition. It can be made up right there and then and can change with every chief. So it's not only not knowledge, it's not traditional either. Well, okay. Now let's move to let it's just, yeah, I think you've stated very well there, the ridiculousness of it. But this all led ultimately to essentially, an attack on you and your scholarship and your ability to continue to be a scholar at university.

And I was shocked. I was, I was, I was, I literally was shocked, not in, I mean, in the real sense, not in a a sense of Casablanca. But that, to find that your, was it your chair or your dean decided, your chair presented a talk to the council of colleges of arts and sciences called what to do when a 10-year- professors branded a racist. And which, you know, you'd think that the answer would be, you know, you tell people to ask for evidence and let's have a discussion, but instead the answer was, our professors are

racist? Yeah. And it was a sense to you. And basically, it was my chair who gave the presentation. He was hosted by the dean, by my dean. So this council. You cannot give a presentation without being hosted by a dean if you're under the dean level. And so he was hosted by my dean.

And the talk, which I, it was on Zoom, of course, because everything was, I did attend it. I didn't actually, I logged on with my non-university email address. So I didn't really, I didn't use a fake name. I just used my non-university email address, and it wasn't, they didn't recognize. And nobody had their picture up, you know, so, or very few people did. So I didn't, you know, I'm not even, I can't remember even if you only saw the speakers, you know, it's one of those things.

But, you know, they, I thought, you know, I thought, you know, I thought maybe they're going to say, well, you know, this is, you know, you got to just let it roll. You got it, you know, it'll pass. But it was basically a lesson on how to go from being virtue signaling to cancellation. And throughout, they said that you should keep resources away from that professor. if that professor teaches certain things in the class, get ready to take her out and, you know, try to move her out of the university. You think about giving a bad review. I mean, making it quite clear that it was really you.

They did, they changed my name, but they gave the description that I was a physical anthropologist, that it was my controversy was about reburial. that but the book that I wrote so but he changed my name and he got I went from Professor Weiss to Professor Jones

I think so but anybody could have not it was so obvious it was me you know there was no way that anybody who

listened to that I couldn't have figured out it was me and within five minutes and that that this presentation made me reach out to lawyers to say, I think I'm going to get fired

if I don't do something. Yeah, no, I mean exactly. That was the moment when you decided. And I think, well, we'll get there in a second. I want to read a quote because I want to ask you about this because I'm a I'm a kind of free speech absolutist. And I'm not a kind of, I am. And so the question of the ethics of you being allowed to be in the classroom. You know, he made a big point of saying this person, you know, doesn't teach this stuff in the

class. But if they did, it might be a problem. And it said, if this person has shown themselves publicly to hold these beliefs, is it ethical to expose students to them? It's an ethical question for me as well. If this person holds deeply like held white supremacist values, what is, which is what scientific racism is, it is an expression of white supremacy. Does exposing students to that in the classroom caused an ethical barrier. I guess I'm going to ask you a question, but it seems to me that even someone who espouses white supremacy, if they're in a classroom and they've demonstrated themselves to, for whatever reason, to be experts in their field, but hold views that are abysmal and abhorrent, that still is not. That still is not.

not reason, that the students have every right to respond and say, you're wrong, and their colleagues have their right to say you're wrong for these reasons. And this is ridiculous. But the notion that their abhorrent beliefs should be kept out of the classroom because it's unethical for them to save them. I'm not sure. I mean, I don't think I even agree with that. And maybe I'm on the trail end of that. And I agree. I think that the thing is when in doubt, when in doubt, the answer should be free speech. If there's any question about whether that speech should be allowed or not,

then the answer should be that it should be allowed, right? And of course. And the answer should be, say something. If you disagree, speak up. That's your power. is to speak up and give a reasoned and comprehensive argument that demolishes the speaker and shows that they're wrong. And ironically, you know, one of the things is, of course, I taught some of my, of course I brought up these issues in class. The chair was just wrong.

I even had it on the syllabus. And of course I did. I assigned some of my writings. But I always made it clear to students. And before any of the cancellation and virtue signaling, I never had a problem with students about this. I always made it clear to them that they could hold completely different beliefs about re-barial and repatriation and that I would not count it against them. I didn't talk about it in every class. You know, sometimes I taught class monkeys, apes, and humans.

I didn't talk about it in that class because it wasn't pertinent. So I think that with a professor, if the professor is teaching a class and it's pertinent to the class, that's an easy, yes, it should be allowed in, regardless of what you feel about the topic. If a professor is bringing in something that's completely in offensive but is completely irrelevant, maybe that shouldn't be allowed in. You're wasting time, right? That's not relevant. Yeah, that's good point. I think that, you know, when he said that, I knew that this was, that he was really thinking about removing me from the class and thinking about removing me from the university. And you sought a legal aid, which is a brilliant thing to do early on. I have many colleagues who have advice. And in fact, one of the bits of advice that's in an article in a book I'm editing that you have an article in. by another colleague, his advice to faculty is get a lawyer as soon as we can.

And in your case, it really was useful because what you basically were suing the university for or being prepared to sue the university for was your academic freedom. And your freedom to basically hold ideas, do research unobstructed. And I mean, I'm looking at the letter you wrote and you're right to have access to materials. and the university was gearing up to remove you from basically being able to pursue your scholarly activities, which is what they were in principle should have been paying you to do. Yes, yes. And doing so, removing me, not because of any of my actions, not because I misused the bones or anything,

but rather because they didn't like my perspective. You know, there was no, you know, in a sense, it was. It wasn't like they found, like, in the trash can, some skeletal remains, you know, or opened up a box and found a whole bunch of, you know, candy wrappers in them. You know, they basically didn't want me in there because they disagreed with my, what I was saying, my speech. And then, of course, you always seem to provide people ammunition. And, you know, you're providing, after December, you provide an ammunition by giving that talk. at the SAA. And then after this happened, you were excited.

I mean, you didn't purposely provide ammunition, but you were excited to be back in your, in your curation room with your with your skeletons. And you took a picture to say, I'm so happy to be back with some old friends. A really lovely picture, which happens to also be the cover of the book. And that caused, again, an SHIT storm.

I don't know if I'll allow to say it, but a good storm. And gave the university ammunition to further restrict your ability to do what you want to do. Do you want to talk about that? Yes. There's a, you know, throughout my career that we have always been, and I say we, the university, the department and I have always been proponents of. promoting the university's resources and the anthropology department's resources, in part by taking photos of me with skeletal remains. This was not unusual.

This was, I was in some of the university magazines with skeletal remains with similar photos. When I got certain awards, they used photos of me with skeletal remains. For the graduate program, there's a photo of me with skeletal remains that they used. in the poster. So it wasn't, it's not like, oh, we never did this. And now she does this. This is like, you know, we do this all the time. I did not think that there was any issue with it.

And I still say there is no issue with it. And had I been a different, had I not held my repatriation views, I think that there would have been no issue with it, that they decided to make an issue. of it because of who I was and what I've written, as opposed to that there's really some kind of ethical fallout from this photo. The photo is a genuine photo of joy. I think that anybody who looks at it with, you know, with an open mind, sees that that's a genuine smile. We had been out of the university, I think 17 months if I'm not wrong. And it really could not get into

the curation facility. This was after COVID to make it clear. During the COVID times, right. You were excited. That was the purpose behind your thing. Suddenly you're allowed back, everyone's allowed back to the university, how exciting it is to be with your own. And so I just snapped this picture.

I always took a camera in when I did curation work or research just in case. And snap this picture. I posted it on Twitter. We had been encouraged to have social media. media accounts at our university. So that even is not unusual. But that led to, you know, a lot of hand-wringing, virtue signaling. The provost had written a letter.

And I, every step of the way, I reached out to these people and said, look, why don't we talk about this? Why don't we talk about the real issue about why people are upset with this photo as opposed to what they're saying. And, you know, nobody was willing to meet with me about these issues. They made a big fuss about the fact that I wasn't wearing gloves, even though the National Park Service, which runs NAGPRA, suggests that you shouldn't wear gloves because you're more likely to drop things.

These are remains that were excavated in the 60s and where I've been handled by hundreds of people. There's no reason to wear gloves. If you're going to get DNA, you have to get it from inside the bone. You know, gloves only make it more likely that you're going to drop it. So in a sense, it was all, you know, kind of made up hysteria because the repatriation activists didn't want to see this photo. And they didn't want to see research being celebrated. Yeah, in fact, that basically the CalNagra basically says Native Americans could hold all access to and research on Native American remains.

And you were, and the result of this is that you were essentially kept out, you were locked out of the collection that you curated. And again, probably because of your lawsuit and freedom of information, you could read the letters that were written by the people who were controlling this, saying, I'm not comfortable being responsible for allowing her permission to study. Even non-Native Americans, another colonized population about direct support from the Senate communities. This was a population from Carthid, from what, the first century or something like that. It's the 6th century, yeah. Yeah, 6 to 7th century. So these people had decided that you were not allowed to basically do this. And also is it true?

I read this, not allowed to even, that not just the bones were not allowed to be viewed, but the x-rays of bones, that the x-rays had to be destroyed. Correct. There were x-rays taken of the leg bones. and anthropologists use x-rays for various reasons. And one thing they use x-rays of leg bones, is to look at what we call Harris lines, which are growth disruption lines,

to assess health of individuals. And so I had planned to do a research project looking at these x-rays, which have been taken already, and compare that also to certain nutritional indicators, like iron deficiency indicators, and also then compare it to medical data

of abused and neglected kids. And so it was a kind of a research project that was to reconstruct the past, yes, but also to then have a new tool to be able to identify children who have been abused and neglected. And I was very excited about this. I had written in my proposal to do this.

That proposal was approved, but then they would not grant me access to the material, so I couldn't do it. And they had to create a whole, in order to make it look like it wasn't just you, they had to create a whole bunch of new regulations that made it ridiculous. And one of them, I can't resist because it relates once again to validating religious myth.

They made it, when they talked about who can look at these things, they also said gloves and face masks must be worn at all times. But worse, menstruating personnel will not be permitted to handle ancestors. Yes. Is that, I mean. The menstrual to abu. This is, I mean, menstrual taboos are popping up in anthropology, have been for the last few years. Native American tribes are claiming that menstruating women shouldn't be in archaeological settings in the field. At UC Berkeley and both the University of Washington, for example, field schools have decided that when a student or,

or faculty is menstruating while in the field. They cannot engage in field work. They cannot eat with other people. They can't prepare their own foods because they might contaminate other people's food. And my university thought that they would jump on this bandwagon because I think because I had written about the absurdity of these menstrual taboos, but they went a step further and they couldn't even bring themselves to say women,

but personnel, because we all know that. Some men might menstruate. Yeah, exactly. And just to stay, I mean, I hate to drop what people know I do. But in a different context, if this had happened in a different place, where menstruating personnel where we're not allowed to do research, that would be viewed, you know, in the woke world, I mean, in the real world, any world would be viewed as horrendous.

It would be viewed as exit. That is, you know, like one of the best examples of sexism I can think of, right? And, you know, the thing is that they try to change the narrative. Oh, well, it's not because we think women are filthy when they're menstruating. It's because they're so powerful that they can't be around us. We know that this is not where menstrual taboos originated. And the other thing is, you know, I, when this occurred, the first thing I did was I told my lawyers, and they said, well, you know what, we're going to tell them. If they don't remove it, then there will be a Title IX suit. And so they did remove it. But just the fact that they would even think about doing, putting that in place is a level of absurdity that I can't, I can't, I still can't wrap my head around. And I asked students, I've said, you know,

So you're saying that whatever the tribe says should go, like graduate students and archaeology, that we should be, we should defer to the tribes. So when I give this example of menstrual taboo, and most students, they're like, oh yeah, yeah, that's fine because it's a tribe. I said, so how would you feel if the tribe's position was they don't want any black people touching the remains? and they're like, they don't know what to say. They're like, yeah. And of course, we would, I would certainly hope that people would be like, you know what, that's racist. And it's no different. And then, you know, try to make an excuse, well, it's because black people are so powerful.

No, it's because people have decided that menstruating women are dirty and now, progressive anthropologists who don't want to do anything to disagree with Native Americans are recalling or, you know, resurrecting these taboos. And it's just, and it's just disgusting in a way to have these taboos to require women. It was clear that it was all kind of window dressing to really, and even the exclusion of the X-rays was they didn't want you And one of the, as you say, one of the nice things about following your lawsuit and one of the useful things about doing it is you got access to the other letters. And here's an example of the kind of arguments that we're going within the university. I am very concerned that we're San Jose State University required to give Professor Weiss access to our NAGRA and CalNagra collections and allow her to do research on and photograph the human remains and cultural items.

It would have serious harmful consequences for SJSU and the culturally affiliated tribes. Those could include delays in completion of the repatriation of human remains and cultural items, damage both physical and spiritual to the human remains and cultural items, and undermining our relationships of trust with collaboration with the tribes. And it was the same person who claimed that these x-rays were spiritually damaging. So it never came up directly from the tribes, but from rather than, the from rather the people who are trying to keep you away from your work. Right.

The NAPRA coordinator, the tribal liaisons, yes. And to think, they're claiming that the x-rays are sacred, that they're spiritual. This does not sound very scientific coming from a university professor. Yeah. In fact, as you say, first they came for the remains and then they came for the x-rays. What's next book burning? And that could be. You know, I think you do make a point about the tribe in question, the reason that you were even able to curate this whole collection was the tribe wasn't recognized federally as having a relationship with this, with the remains.

and it's all again almost humorous but it's sort of tragic that ultimately to find out that that that that that when DNA was done on both the the the skeletons themselves and the tribe members that not only did they not have a relationship but in fact they had a much closer relationship to Mexican to Mexicans then so they yeah basically the the tribe the Morik Marlone genetically they're identical to Mexicans in Los Angeles, Mexican Americans in Los Angeles. They are not identical to the skeletal remains that are in the collections. And I go into this in the book. Even relatives of this tribe, aunts and uncles are saying that it's not a real, tribe. And the DNA has provided the evidence and yet the re how the report, how the reporting of that evidence, it makes it sound like, oh, this is proof that the tribe is Native American. But if you

look at the actual data, it's perfectly clear that the DNA matched up best with Mexicans in Los Angeles. Okay. So after, so in the midst of this law, which was protecting you at some level, the university was going to, you know, tried to basically negotiate a way for you to leave and resign, which you refused. Before negotiating and before deciding that, you know,

if you couldn't do your work, you were going to leave and negotiated a retirement, which is a much better situation. You did spend a year in New York, and I know that because we've communicated then. And, and I think I would be remiss not to mention that when you got to New York, discovered something even worse in a sense and something I've also alluded to and written about. But the fact that not only is this within universities, but now museums like the American

Museum and National History have now gone full bore to accepting this mythological, supernatural nonsense as if it's science. Could you at least comment on that a little bit? Right. So I spent a year in New York looking at museums to look for. collections, but also to try to assess the narratives that they're giving about the exhibits, in the exhibits about what artifacts mean and, you know, a historical narrative. And what I found at the American Museum of Natural History and in other museums, but the big one is the American Museum and Natural History, is that they've replaced real evidence, of scientific evidence, with myths. And they write up the, you.

these narratives as if the mythology is historical events. They even talk about the historical event when the chief was swallowed up by the whale and then came out and talked to the Thunderbird. Well, this is not a historical event. Of course it's not. But they use that kind of terminology. They also take seriously the objects of power and give warnings that some people may be hurt or harmed by looking at medicine masks and therefore not only

can these masks not be photographed. You might not even want to look at them. Behind the scenes in the curation facilities, it's even worse. Basically, there's a whole categories of artifacts that pregnant women should stay away from. That bird bone whistles that may be able to summon evil spirits that cause intertribal warfare. These things are being taken seriously in some of our finest, you know, natural history science museums. And again, it's the acceptance of indigenous myth and religion instead of sticking to the science. Well, look, I think you talk about this, and it's a, it's not only a global tragedy. One might have said it's a tragedy for you. Well, you did eventually negotiate

and a lawsuit to basically be able to retire, which you decided to do because the university wasn't worth being at anymore if you couldn't do with the research you want to do. And one might think that somehow it's a personal tragedy, but as you point out, it isn't. And I know that, I mean, you've moved beyond it. And you're now happily in Tucson, where I'm speaking to you. and have written this book and are speaking out for science and moved on instead of fighting, dealing with crisis mode to making new connections and being able to work in a different way among the public and elsewhere to try and alert people to this and try and maintain science. So one might say that you move from that to something that may be even more important.

And in fact, maybe I hope so. Maybe I'll hope so. And the point is you may be happier, and I'm hoping you're happier. I know that I tell a lot of people that life after university can actually be much happier. And you can do, you know, many useful things. And I guess I'll close by a quote from an old, a late colleague of mine, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, Stephen Weinberg, who was an atheist like me. And he would be saying, he would say, you're doing God's work. Thank you.

It's been a pleasure to talk to you. It's been a pleasure. The book is certainly worth reading. But the work you're doing and the effort to stand up for science, obviously it resonates with me. It's something I've tried to do my whole life. And it's nice to have a kindred spirit and be able to talk to a kindred spirit. So thanks for taking the time.

Thank you so much for having me on. Hi, it's Lawrence again. As the Origins podcast continues to reach millions of people around the world, I just wanted to say thank you. It's because of your support, whether you listen or watch, that we're able to help enrich the perspective of listeners by providing access to the people and ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world

and driving the future of our society in the 21st century. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. You can also leave us private feedback on our website if you'd like to see any parts of the podcast improved. Finally, if you'd like to access ad-free and bonus content, become a paid subscriber at originsproject.org. This podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation as a non-profit effort committed to enhancing public literacy and engagement with the world

by connecting science and culture.