The woke fever that has gripped the country for a decade may be starting to break in some parts of academia and the corporate world, but the Biden administration keeps spreading the disease like it’s 2020.
One of its recent rules has given American Indian tribes effective veto power over academic research and the curation of artifacts. This is leading to museums closing halls and exhibits related to Native American history, lest they fall foul of the Interior Department’s new regulations giving final say over scholarships to the leaders of the nation’s some 574 federally recognized tribes. Museums and universities that receive federal funds — practically all — will be affected if they are in possession of Indian cultural items.
As a result, the American Museum of Natural History in New York “will close two major halls exhibiting Native American objects,” according to the New York Times. Museums from Washington to Cincinnati are covering up displays or hiding them altogether.
Artifacts and displays affected will be not just human remains, burial objects, or sacred talismans but “cultural items” of any sort, according to the Interior Department rules. Curators and other researchers will have to obtain “prior, and informed consent before any exhibition of, access to, or research on human remains or cultural items.” The consent must come from “lineal descendants, Indian Tribes, or Native Hawaiian Organizations.”
The regulations will also “require museums and Federal agencies to defer to the Native American traditional knowledge of lineal descendants, Indian Tribes, and NHOs in all decision-making steps.” In other words, museum curators and academics scratching their heads about who has the “right of possession” will have to rely not just on written records but on Indian “oral tradition.”
Academics currently studying an artifact will be given a grace period before sending away any item that is deemed to be “cultural patrimony.” The Interior rules are firm that “Any need to complete a scientific study does not prevent repatriation but only delays it.”
Sean Decatur, the woke academic who a year ago became the first black president of the Natural History Museum, gushed that he was all in. “The halls we are closing are artifacts of an era when museums such as ours did not respect the values, perspectives and indeed shared humanity of Indigenous peoples. Actions that may feel sudden to some may seem long overdue to others,” he wrote to his staff.
“Some objects may never come back on display as a result of the consultation process,” Decatur — whose new job, again, is to be not just the head of a museum, but head of what used to be one of the country’s best museums — happily added in an interview.
The woke gnomes who wrote the Interior rules say they fit within the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act passed by Congress in 1990 and unwisely signed into law by President George H.W. Bush.
But one of the main problems is the unprecedented veto power given to tribal leaders who are sometimes not even elected by the members of the tribe and who can often be corrupt. The Interior rules mention the word “deference” 37 times, such as, for example, “these regulations require deference to the Native American traditional knowledge of lineal descendants, Indian Tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations.”
The 1990 law did not use the word once. It used “defer” twice, once tragically in the sentence, “On the policy goals and efficacy of this bill, we defer to the federal agencies responsible for administration of Native American programs, particularly the Department of the Interior.”
That is tragic because it is exactly this deference by legislators — a constitutional branch — to the gnomes in the administrative state — not a constitutional branch — that has given us the undemocratic panoply of red tape choking the American people.
The new rules, in fact, do not really result from legislation at all. They came after yet another executive order signed by President Joe Biden two months ago, in which the president, or whoever wrote the EO for him, railed against past federal policies promoting “assimilation” and other supposed ills. The president vowed to have “nation-to-nation” relationships with the tribes, which he called “respected and vital self-governing entities.”
As professor Bruce Gilley wrote last month, the resulting shutdown of exhibits will be a reversal of what Indian leaders once demanded.
“Until the 1970s, the main issue for Native American groups was that their culture was not displayed enough, that archaeologists did not conduct enough work on native sites and remains, that their cultures were not celebrated at mainstream American museums,” wrote Gilley.
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The impetus here, he adds, is “a kind of reparation and guilt-atonement for settler-colonial crimes.” In fact, the Interior rules themselves say that “The passage of these proposed revisions is a necessary step towards addressing the legacy of colonial injustices imposed upon Indigenous Peoples in the United States.”
As always with these things, the price comes at the expense of knowledge and wisdom — knowledge of the first Americans, from which we could all benefit.
Mike Gonzalez is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the author of BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution.
