Arizona has long been a hub of archaeological discovery, helping scholars uncover the history of the ancient Southwest. But a new Goldwater Institute report warns that ideological activists are twisting a well-intentioned federal law aimed at ensuring the respectful treatment of Native American ancestral remains and using it to bury Arizona’s past, with disastrous consequences for science.
In The Reburial of the Southwest: Closing Off Native History and Archaeology, anthropologist Elizabeth Weiss, Ph.D., warns that Arizona’s history is being erased through the intentional distortion of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA. Repatriation activists are weaponizing the law to rebury (i.e. destroy) ancient materials that once formed the foundation of archaeological research and are emptying museums of modern Native American artwork under the banner of decolonization. Meanwhile, female scholars are facing increased discrimination thanks to a Biden-era NAGPRA regulation that requires universities and museums to defer to tribes about the “appropriate” handling of cultural artifacts.
“As institutions move to repatriate materials, restrict access to collections, and defer to activist interpretations of cultural affiliation, entire areas of anthropological research may be shutting down,” Weiss writes. “In effect, a significant field of scientific inquiry has been placed at risk by an overzealous activist movement using the regulatory power of the state to pressure museums and universities into compliance with its demands.”
Passed in 1990 to address legitimate concerns, NAGPRA was intended as a compromise that allowed tribes to repatriate and reclaim legitimate ancestral remains and cultural items while preserving scientific research. But activists and regulators have expanded the law far beyond its original purpose. The result: ancient remains too old to be credibly connected to modern tribes have been slated for reburial, replicas and commercial artworks have been removed from public access, and ordinary research materials—including soil, plant samples, animal bones, and even fossilized feces—are being treated as sacred objects.
Arizona shows the stakes clearly. State law designates the Arizona State Museum at the University of Arizona as the reporting authority when human remains or archaeological artifacts at least 50 years old are discovered. But the museum has moved from allowing carefully designed research proposals to broadly denying research access to ancient remains, while still allowing access for traditional religious activities.
That turns a research institution’s mission upside down. Scientific inquiry is blocked, while spiritual and political claims receive priority.
The Biden administration’s 2023 NAGPRA regulations made the problem worse by requiring museums to defer to tribal “traditional knowledge” and obtain consent before allowing exhibition, access, or research on covered materials. In practice, vague cultural claims are overriding the law’s written limits.
Beyond limiting research and access to collections, the new rules also raise civil rights concerns. By requiring museums to accommodate tribal “traditional knowledge,” the regulations have imported sex-based restrictions into public institutions. Some tribal practices bar women from handling certain artifacts, leaving female researchers excluded from work their male colleagues can perform at taxpayer-funded museums and universities.
The path forward lies not in abandoning NAGPRA but in restoring the balance Congress intended. That means challenging the sweeping regulatory changes implemented by the Biden administration and reaffirming that repatriations must adhere strictly to the law’s definitions of sacred objects, funerary objects, and objects of cultural patrimony.
An exhibit at the San Diego Museum of Us, pictured above, shows where human remains were once displayed but were removed as “part of our decolonization process.”
Museums and universities exist to preserve, study, and explain the past. The loss of archaeological research carries consequences far beyond museum collections.
“As Arizona loses archaeology, it loses its ability to train the next cultural resource managers who can save the past from destruction,” Weiss writes. “We lose our capacity to train the next generation of forensic anthropologists, whose job it is to help bring closure to families of crime victims. We also lose our ability to understand the past, which should not be tainted by creation myths or tribal activist propaganda, and instead should be framed in a way that enables us to truly understand history and pre-history in ways that unify people.”
Perhaps most importantly, Weiss writes, “it is the job of archaeologists, as scientists, to educate—not to toe the line of political correctness.”
Arizona cannot understand its own history if the evidence is buried or destroyed. Its ancient past should be preserved, studied, celebrated, and passed on to future generations, not removed from public view.
Read The Reburial of the Southwest: Closing Off Native History and Archaeology here.
