The lioness who fought back against decolonization

They tried to cancel Elizabeth Weiss for believing Native superstitions shouldn't trump academic inquiry. They failed

Of all the sins white Europeans are charged with by progressives, colonialism ranks highest. Expiation for their forebears’ crimes, through the process known as “decolonization,” has consequently emerged as a reigning passion in knowledge-producing institutions like universities and museums.

The word itself doesn’t convey its revolutionary essence: a pivot from an objective, evidence-based model of academic inquiry to one based in subjectivity and social justice. In the new paradigm, acceptance of theses and conclusions rests on their usefulness in advancing the interests of “oppressed” groups or, conversely, in further incriminating “oppressor” groups.

Decolonization’s calamitous effects in Canada were demonstrated in the moral panic sparked by allegations of “unmarked graves” in Kamloops, B.C., which is, after three years of divisive contention, only now winding down. Honest researchers who disputed some of the claims being made endured an unrelenting campaign of vilification, including the charge of genocide “denialism.”

During this turbulent saga, Canadians were made aware of decolonization’s rules of discourse. Commentators were to assume that Indigenous people had inhabited their lands since time immemorial (i.e., they did not arrive here via a land bridge). Indigenous culture endowed their elders with unique “ways of knowing” that were the equal of, or better than, Eurocentric knowledge.

Forbidden assertions, amongst others, included reference to pre-contact inter-tribal warfare and slavery, or any positive aspect of colonialism. Any challenge to oral “survivor” testimony is proscribed.

In the United States, between 2019 and 2022, a decolonization crusade similar in spirit to ours crystallized around the work of anthropologists and archeologists. Instead of their residential schools (called Indian Boarding Schools), the contested academic terrain centred on the repatriation of ancient human remains.

The targeted villain at the centre of this moral panic was Elizabeth Weiss: a feisty, much-laureled star in her field of physical anthropology, specializing in osteology, the analysis of human skeletal remains, at San José State University (SJSU).

In Weiss’s just-published autobiography, “On the Warpath: My battles with Indians, Pretendians, and Woke Warriors” — a title considered controversial by Weiss’s Native American detractors — Weiss portrays her beloved and formerly robust discipline of anthropology as a demoralized victim of the decolonization movement.

At an American Anthropological Association meeting in Seattle in 2022, for example, decolonization was the principal theme. One speaker, an expert on pre-contact violence in the Americas, apologized for conducting research that Native American tribes disapproved of. He ended by conceding that although he probably wouldn’t be able to publish any new work, “I feel less guilty.” (All that was lacking was a dunce cap, a stool and a jeering Maoist crowd.)

After many years of service as the admired curator of SJSU’s collection of remains, Weiss’s troubles began with the publication of her 2020 book, co-authored with attorney James W. Springer, “Repatriation and Erasing the Past.” In it, she criticizes the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), a law that assigns virtually all control over the disposition of human remains to Native Americans, resulting in their reburial, and includes protocols that impede free academic inquiry.

Weiss is against reburial. She argues that the bones in the possession of museums and laboratories are needed to train the next generation of forensic anthropologists — experts “who have played key roles in helping identify victims of 9/11 … and those who have died in natural disasters.”

She does not believe that the superstitions and oral histories of present-day Native Americans, with no proven kinship ties to the centuries-old bones in SJSU’s collection, should have greater standing in the disposition of human remains than researchers’ claims for access to evidence that helps them study the past.

The SJSU collection is known to be a mixture of Native American and Spanish bones. But, Weiss writes, “When it becomes impossible to determine what bones are Native American and which aren’t, the reburial activists will just claim the entire collection.”

Weiss explains repatriation ideology as a postmodern attack on the concept of objective knowledge. Its salient point is the belief that who is telling the story is more important than whether the story is true.

Weiss and Springer also assert that laws like the NAGPRA violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, because Native Americans’ traditional religions are privileged over other religions. They argue that since the views of creationist Christians who reject evolution have no standing in secular academia, neither should unfounded Native American beliefs be accorded “retroactive sacredness.”

Following the book’s publication, Weiss was labelled a “white supremacist,” amongst other calumnies, and, capitulating to the ideologues, SJSU locked her out of her collection. “I lost my ability to study spines,” Weiss writes, because “my university lost its backbone.”

The school mounted a series of “anti-racism” workshops where participants called for censoring Weiss’s views, and her request to defend herself was not only refused, she was threatened with disciplinary action if she continued to express her opinions to students.

Weiss’s Native American opponents imposed absurd new protocols, such as masking and gloving when handling remains, and even decreed that “menstruating personnel will not be permitted to handle ancestors,” a taboo that was lifted upon Weiss’s threat of a Title IX complaint.

What saved Weiss from being fired was a lawsuit she launched against SJSU in 2022, with pro bono support from the Pacific Legal Foundation. In the end, she agreed to a satisfactory retirement settlement, fortuitously followed by a year’s fellowship at the Heterodox Academy’s new Center for Academic Pluralism in New York.

As an emeritus professor, Weiss is now a board member of the National Association of Scholars. Newly based in Arizona, she will continue to conduct research and write on her subject. Weiss defended her freedom of academic inquiry like a lioness, and landed on her feet. She has never apologized.