Rocks Are People Too?

How activists are emptying our museums in the name of “repatriation.”

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About the Author

Elizabeth Weiss is a professor emeritus of anthropology at San José State University. She is a National Association of Scholars board member. Her most recent book is On the Warpath: My Battles with Indians, Pretendians, and Woke Warriors (2024, Academica Press).

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On December 8, 2025, a webinar titled “Natural History Collections and Repatriation: Beyond NAGPRA” brought together professors, museum curators, and NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) coordinators to discuss new ways of emptying out botanical gardens and natural history museums. The event was hosted by the American Institute of Biological Sciences, the Natural Science Collections Alliance, and the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections. Given that these organizations exist, in their own words, to support and preserve scientific collections, you might expect them to oppose efforts to repatriate their holdings into the hands of modern Native American tribes. But you would be wrong.

These groups are now actively exploring how to repatriate materials even when those materials fall outside the scope of NAGPRA—a 1990 federal law allowing federally funded museums and universities to return human remains and certain artifacts (funerary items, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony) that can be clearly linked to a present-day tribe.

I’ve written extensively about how recent regulatory changes have warped the law’s original intent, producing a kind of repatriation free-for-all. Museums have been pressured to hand over everything from animal feces to spark plugs, from contemporary art to replicas. Even ancient human remains with no identifiable connection to any modern tribe are being reburied.

During the webinar, Jan Bernstein—founder of Bernstein & Associates NAGPRA Consultants—explained that institutions are now expected to rely primarily on Native American “traditional knowledge” to determine which materials should be repatriated or reburied. That’s a radical departure from the law’s original evidentiary standards, which centered on historic records, genetics, and archaeological analysis. Predictably, relying exclusively on traditional knowledge has produced a cascade of absurd repatriation decisions, including many of the examples above.

Bernstein also acknowledged an awkward catch-22 built into the current process: museums and universities must create inventories of materials that might fall under NAGPRA so that tribes can review them, yet those same tribes are the ones who ultimately decide what is, or isn’t, eligible for repatriation. In other words, the consultants and the arbiters are the same.

Nevertheless, the latest push by repatriation activists, showcased at the webinar, goes well beyond human remains or cultural artifacts. It now targets natural history collections that contain no associated materials at all. Many of the items under discussion aren’t even archaeological and include objects collected from the natural environment, far outside the legal reach of NAGPRA. And yet museums and universities are being encouraged to “voluntarily repatriate” everything from seeds to fossils.

This activist campaign began in anthropology and archaeology, fields long vulnerable to ideological capture. It has since spread into botany, geology, and biology—disciplines once thought insulated from this kind of pressure.

At its core, this movement is driven by a postmodern worldview that treats scientific evidence as just one “way of knowing” among any. Repatriation activists insist that claims made by Native American “elders” or “knowledge keepers” must be accepted at face value, no matter how absurd their claims are and regardless of whether they conflict with established facts. Museums and universities are viewed as instruments of Western oppression that must be “decolonized,” and scientific collections as moral liabilities to be offloaded rather than repositories of knowledge.

Let me share with you some of the absurdities that I heard at the webinar.