The Woke War on the Past

By Glynn Custred

Saturday, October 05, 2024

 

A review of On the Warpath: My Battles with Indians, Pretendians, and Woke Warriors by Elizabeth Weiss.

 

On the Warpath: My Battles with Indians, Pretendians, and Woke Warriors, by Elizabeth Weiss (Academica Press, 200 pages, $35)

 

In 1996 a skull was found on the banks of the Columbia River near the town of Kennewick, Wash. Authorities were notified, and the coroner called in anthropologist James Chatters to examine the remains for further information. In nine visits to the site, Chatters found a number of bones that were parts of a nearly complete skeleton. He determined that the skeleton was decades old, or even older. He also found several artifacts from the 19th century scattered around the discovery site, as well as, embedded in the skeleton’s hip bone, a stone projectile point showing that the man had been wounded by a spear or an arrow.

 

All this, along with the Caucasoid features of the skull, led Chatters to conclude that the remains were those of a trapper or a pioneer of the 19th century. This meant that the remains were well beyond the time limit when they would be of interest to the authorities. To find out more, he sent a sample of one of the bones to a laboratory for radiocarbon dating. He was surprised to find that the skeleton was actually some 9,000 years old, one of the oldest human skeletons ever found in the Americas.

 

The skeleton, known as Kennewick Man, caused scientists to reconsider theories of the peopling of the Americas. It also became the subject of a legal dispute between scientists and a coalition of Native American tribes in the area. The tribes claimed possession of the remains under the provisions of a federal law, the Native American Graves Protection Act (NAGPRA), which states that any human remains with lineal descent from a living tribe must be turned over to that tribe. Another reason for the transfer of ownership is “shared cultural affinity,” which is broadly defined to include oral traditions and geographical location. Litigation in such cases, therefore, can drag on for years, as was the case with Kennewick Man. During that time further examinations revealed that over his lifetime Kennewick Man had suffered, besides the arrowhead lodged in his hip, multiple rib fractures, a broken arm, and a head injury, giving us a closer look of life in prehistoric times.

 

Eventually DNA analysis showed a resemblance of the bones to some South American indigenous populations, and the remains were given to the claimant tribe for burial in an undisclosed location. This ignored the fact that we are all in some degree related and that, without a broad database that includes many tribes, a living tribe cannot reasonably be determined to be related by lineal descent to remains this old. And in this case, cultural affiliation meant simply geographic location. The main thing, however, was to defer to the tribes, for Native Americans have become a favored group in today’s society.

 

All this coincided with the ever-rising tide of identity politics, whereby the interests of a preferred group are advanced at the cost of the common good. This approach, part of a Marxist-based ideology that has been spreading through the institutions, is known variously variously as “wokeism” and “cancel culture.” It is an ideology that reduces all social, cultural, and political differences to two categories, the suppressed and the suppressers. In the case of American history, the Native Americans are the victims and the majority-white population are the suppressors. Since this movement deals with the acquisition and the holding of power rather than with the advance of science, its advocates do not counter their opponents with rational arguments.

 

Instead, they use rhetorical devices — misrepresentation, distractions, irrelevant points, misleading information, guilt by association, ad hominem attacks — to put them on the defensive and force them into silence, Since such attacks might jeopardize their professional standing, even to the point of endangering the the targets’ employment, they usually work. This movement has gained willing adherents at the expense of scholarship. It has affected university administrators and departments of anthropology as well as publishers, museums, and anthropological associations, with the result that the scientific analysis of human ancient remains is blocked, thereby closing down the study of American prehistory.

 

One anthropologist, Elizabeth Weiss, has stood up to this corrosive movement, and in doing so has experienced the methods of cancel culture as seen in sometimes vicious personal attacks. She has, however, refused to remain silent and instead has confronted those who have attacked, including her colleagues. The battle ended one phase of her professional career, a story she tells in detail in her book On the Warpath.

 

She begins with personal information to show the reader her credentials and her professional status before she ran afoul of the establishment. While she was a student, she did field work in a field school in Kenya run by Harvard University. Later, she became a faculty member at San Jose State University, where she taught courses in physical anthropology and carried on her research. She was also curator of the Ryan Mound Collection of human remains and artifacts at San Jose State, overseeing material collected from the largest prehistoric site west of the Mississippi. She has also examined human remains from other collections. She performed a CT scan of Kennewick Man and wrote about in “Kennewick Man’s Funeral,” and in the journal Politics in the Life Sciences, published by Cambridge University Press. In the course of her career she has published in anthropology and medical journals and has written four books on the topics of human evolution and the methods of physical anthropology and bioarchaeology as well as on the effects of repatriation and reburial on scientific inquiry.

 

In her study of the Ryan Mound Collection, she reconstructed personal histories as revealed in bones, detecting signs of disease and abnormalities that in some cases indicate that the individual lived a life of pain. Patterns of violence are also evident in the collection. In men, wounds to the front of the head suggest hand-to-hand combat; in women, they suggest victimization. She notes that such signs of violence are not surprising when the collection is viewed as evidence of multiple peoples replacing one another through successive invasions, which is typical of history in all parts of the world. These facts, however, are not popular among those she calls virtue-signaling “indigenous groupies” who push the romantic narrative of the Noble Savage: the image of wise, environmentally friendly, and peaceful Native Americans living in harmony with one another and nature until the white “settler colonists” came to displace them.

 

In another context she discusses precontact slavery, which is seen in one form or another in all indigenous groups, a subject that is evident in the archaeological and in the post-contact historical records but is downplayed in standard histories, despite evidence that slaves were tortured, that they were slain in the Potlatch (a ceremony among the Pacific North Coast tribes) just to show off wealth, that the Achilles tendon was severed to prevent escape, and that fingers were amputated to prevent use of the bow. None of this sits well with universities and museums that have adopted the woke ideology of the dichotomy, Native Indian victim, white colonialist oppressor — another strike against her in the woke environment in which she works.

 

She tells us in her book about the point when her work began to threaten her professional standing. This was with the publication of Repatriation and Erasing the Past (University of Florida Press, 2020) a book she wrote with attorney James Springer. It coincided with the 30th anniversary of NAGPRA. The book is divided into an introduction followed by discussions of human remains and the law and of the scientific study of human remains, a critique of the reparations movement, and a conclusion. The authors define repatriation as it is practiced as “any ideology, political movement, or law that attempts to control anthropological research by giving control over that research to contemporary American Indian communities.” They tie this to the postmodern movement, which began in the 20th century and which we see today in the Marxist-inspired doctrine of critical theory, of which critical race theory is one variant. This ideology turns reality on its head by asserting that the concept of knowledge is fraudulent and that objective science and scholarship are expressions of the ideology of the dominant class or subcultures.

 

Repatriation and Erasing the Past got some good reviews and was listed among the top 75 titles recommended for community colleges by the Association of College Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association. But the opposition on the part of what Weiss calls “woke anthropologists” soon got underway, with messages on Facebook and Twitter calling for the withdrawal of the book and attacking the authors and their ideas in typical woke fashion. They called the arguments in the book “outdated, racist ideas,” and the authors “racist.” This caught the attention of the publisher, which decided not to pull the book from publication but rather to respond to the attackers with an assurance that they would double down on their commitment “to amplifying Black, Indigenous, and marginalized voices in archaeology, as well as every other field we publish in.” The publisher promised to accelerate the time frame for a “graduate diversity fellowship,” adding that “friends of the press will make a donation to the Association on American Indian Affairs as a show of support of their work.” Increasing pressure was put on Weiss in the university, in an effort to discredit and censor her by falsely stating that she had not published in a first-rate journal, banning certain messages she sent on the university internet service, and criticizing what she taught in class.

 

The attacks went so far that she viewed them as career-threatening. Photographs of her holding skulls were used as an excuse for the university to lock her out of the curation facility and remove her from curation. To save her job, she sued the university. With the help of the Pacific Legal Foundation, a settlement was eventually reached in which she retired from the university with emerita status and full benefits, freeing her to practice her profession in the traditional way, in a scientific pursuit of knowledge. The value of the book is that it describes in detail in one field the ongoing process of the top-down directed culture change that is not only erasing prehistory but is changing the culture in general. Also, in telling the story, she provides a description of physical anthropology and how it helps reveal the hidden past, a topic of interest to many people in all walks of life.