Here are some of the Native American-related stories making headlines this week:
California academic may have used Native American remains as teaching tools
ProPublica reports that retired University of California Berkeley Professor Tim White routinely used “a vast collection of human remains” to teach anthropology and osteology.
According to investigators, White supervised “a vast collection of human remains — bones sorted by body part and stored in wooden bins” after he joined the faculty in 1977.
ProPublica has found that the vast majority of remains in UC-Berkeley’s collection came from ancestral sites in California.
Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990, calling on federally funded institutions to report and repatriate human remains and funerary artifacts.
White, now retired, advised the university’s repatriation decisions and argued that because there was no way to identify the origin of the bones, NAGPRA did not apply.
ProPublica and NBC earlier this year launched an investigation into why the remains of 110,000 Native American, Native Hawaiian and Alaska Native ancestors are still held by museums, universities and federal agencies more than two decades after NAGPRA was passed. They report that UC-Berkeley holds the largest collection of unrepatriated Native American remains in the US.
Read more:
Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Harvard official says university poised to speed up repatriation of remains
In a related story, Native News Online spoke with Kelli Mosteller, a citizen of the Potawatomi Nation in Oklahoma who directs Harvard University’s Native American Program.
ProPublica found that Harvard University still holds the remains of at least 6,165 Native American ancestors, the fourth largest collection in the U.S.
Mosteller said Harvard had previously lacked the staff to manage repatriation but has now doubled its staff to help with NAGPRA compliance.
“I know Harvard has a terrible history, and they know they have a terrible legacy. But I have faith that we're moving in the right direction, because I'm on the ground watching us do the work every day, trying to right that history,” Mosteller said.
Harvard in November apologized for holding and pledged to return hundreds of hair samples taken from Native American children in the federal boarding school system. /a/native-american-news-roundup-november-13-19-2022-/6839172.html
Read more:
The Department of Health and Human Services building is seen in Washington, April 5, 2009.
Patrice Kunesh to lead HHS Native American Program
The U.S. Senate Wednesday confirmed Patrice H. Kunesh as commissioner of the Health and Human Service Department’s Administration for Native Americans (ANA).
Kunesh, who is of Standing Rock Lakota descent, is a nationally recognized attorney and policy advocate. She was nominated by President Joe Biden nine months ago.
“I am deeply honored to be confirmed for this opportunity to serve Native peoples in this role,” said Kunesh. “I am so inspired by this administration’s abiding respect for Native governance and cultural integrity.
The ANA was established in 1974 to promote self-sufficiency for Native Americans, Alaska Natives and Hawaiian Native tribes and to reduce dependency on public funds and social services. It also works to improve access to services and programs safeguarding the health and well-being of Native children and families, and boost youth and intergenerational activities in tribal communities.
See how lawmakers voted here:
Native American journalist and educator defends controversial tweet
Oglala Lakota Chicano journalist and University of Denver lecturer Simon Moya-Smith drew anger on Twitter and at least two media outlets this week after suggesting that prisons and laws banning homosexuality and abortion were exports from Europe.
“Simon Moya-Smith, a left-wing Native-American writer, envisions a primordial progressive utopia in North America — before the arrival of the colonists, Indian tribes held hands, sang kumbaya, passed the Green New Deal, doled out abortions and sex-change surgeries like candy,” an editorial in the conservative National Review reads. It references a folk song/religious spiritual adopted as an expression of racial unity during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
The Review noted that the Navajo Nation banned abortion in 2005 and stated that only a handful of tribes have legalized same-sex marriage.
As of mid-week, Moya-Smith’s tweet had earned more than 7 million views and thousands of comments, many of them derogatory.
“Yea they just scalped people and burned them alive,” read one response. Others posted graphics depicting human sacrifice among the Aztecs.
“As soon as you say anything about no prisons or no abortion, they're going to bring up the Navajo and the Aztecs, lumping us all into the same category,” Moya-Smith told VOA. “They like to push the narrative that when white Christians came here, they built this country, and it worked out well for everyone. But not for Indigenous people. And that’s my point.”
And he added, “I feel like I have to put out tweets like this every now and then so people can understand how much racism is really out there.”