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ELIZABETH WEISS AND JAMES W. SPRINGER, 2020. Repatriation and Erasing 

the Past, Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 278 pp., ISBN: 9781683401575. 

Keywords: NAGPRA, repatriation, reburial, human remains, heritage law. 

Repatriation and Erasing the Past is a forthright condemnation of the ideology behind, and 

the enforcement of, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act 

(NAGPRA). NAGPRA is the U.S. Federal law that was passed in 1990 to execute the return 

of Native American heritage and human remains from museums, universities, and research 

centers to their culturally-affiliated tribal communities. In this monograph, Elizabeth Weiss 

and James Springer combine bioarchaeological and legal perspectives to examine the 

scientific and cultural loss behind the repatriation of Native American artifacts and remains. 

Therefore, from the beginning and in an explicit way, Weiss and Springer position 

themselves in the debate surrounding the appropriateness of repatriating culturally, 

historically, and scientifically valuable human remains and artifacts as anti-repatriationists.  

The book is divided into three sections, preceded by a brief introduction and followed by a 

conclusion. The first section adopts a scientific approach to debunk the rationale behind 

NAGPRA’s repatriation and reburial mandates. Chapters 1 and 2 present the central 

argument that is often raised to halt repatriationist movements: the loss of valuable 

information for scientific purposes. Chapters 3 and 4 dive into the historical, archaeological, 

and bioanthropological data that can be obtained from studying human remains. These 

chapters give an overview of the scientific methods of research used (1) to learn about 

different aspects of Paleoindian lifestyles, such as diet, health, migration patterns, and 

culture, and (2) to discredit false narratives and misconceptions, including the original 

peopling of the Americas, the pre-contact population size, and the violent behavioral trends 

among and between Native American communities.  



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The second part of the book focuses on the legal side of repatriationist initiatives. Chapter 5 

summarizes the history of American Indian Law and reviews the outcomes of major 

repatriation court cases, including La Jolla Skeletons and the Kennewick Man cases. Chapter 

6 explores the legal issues surrounding genetic research on Native American populations, 

which are illustrated by the Havasupai lawsuit. 

The third and final section dissects the social, cultural, and legal problems caused by the 

imposition of repatriation. Chapter 7 argues that NAGPRA gives Native Americans 

preferential treatment due to their race and religion. Chapter 8 criticizes the validity, 

reliability, and admissibility of oral tradition as evidence in court. Chapter 9 analyzes the 

traditional treatment of Native American human remains to disprove the popular claim that 

immediate and undisturbed burial is necessary. Chapter 10 shows the negative impact of the 

repatriationist ideology on anthropological research, which is materialized in the loss of 

collections, the inhibition of freedom of inquiry, and scholarly censorship.  

Weiss and Springer set two main goals for this book. Their first objective is to place value 

on the scientific study of archaeological remains as the only systematic and factual way to 

understand the history of humanity and to reconstruct the past. The authors claim that it is 

important to study human remains scientifically in order to give voice to those who can no 

longer speak (p.57) and tell their stories in an accurate manner, so as to do justice to their 

lives and individualities (p.36, p.97).  

The second goal of this book is to openly criticize the postmodernist ideology that NAGPRA 

is built upon. They label NAGPRA as an anti-constitutional, racist, prejudiced, and anti-

scientific program and present arguments to prove their claims. 

Firstly, Weiss and Springer argue that NAGPRA is anti-constitutional because it violates the 

First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (pp.166-169), which dictates that laws cannot be 

based on religion. They claim that said policy attempts to incorporate traditional animistic 

beliefs into an established religion and Native American views into political and judicial 

policies (p.192). For instance, they contend that the acceptance of oral tradition as judicial 

evidence proves that the legal system exerts religious and racial discrimination to favor 

Native American communities over non-Native American individuals (p.183).  



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In the same vein, Weiss and Springer argue that collectivism and racial favoritism are at the 

heart of NAGRPA (p.170). According to the authors, NAGPRA is racist as it establishes 

federal-level discrimination based on race (p.130). It constructs an independent Native 

American identity, based on “the old idea that Indians are owed a special duty because of 

their independent status” (p.94) and the persecution and victimization they have endured 

(p.171). Furthermore, they argue that identifying as Native American automatically and 

unequivocally grants legal power over other American citizens and bestows them with 

special rights and opportunities (p.131). The favoring treatment of Native Americans over 

other communities is manifested in the advantages granted to Native American groups in the 

various existing conservation and preservation laws. These include the right to be consulted 

before and during conducting research, the right to intervene in the administrative agency 

proceedings and court appeals (p.143), and the different handling that Native American 

DNA, tissues, and bones receive in comparison to other collections (p.203).  

In light of the above, the authors state that NAGPRA is an anti-scientific policy because it 

restricts academic freedom and promotes censorship (p.207). Regarding the former, Weiss 

and Springer argue that the mindset that has been built around the enforcement of NAGPRA 

denies researchers the ability to decide what, where, when, and how to conduct research. 

Since NAGPRA imposes collaboration and consultation between Native Americans and 

researchers, tribal organizations play an important role in deciding the topics that are put 

under examination and the methodology that is applied (p.160). Researchers’ fear of hurting 

sensitivities, and therefore becoming canceled and making their original work unpublishable, 

prevents them from making strong inferences that may upset Native American administrators 

and may lead to the termination of collaboration (p.206). They conclude that “[f]or research, 

interpretation, and publication to depend upon such sensitivity is to undermine the whole 

concept of objective knowledge and, indeed, of science itself” (p.218).  

Likewise, they argue that imposing collaboration between Native Americans and researchers 

not only makes research more difficult, costly, and time-consuming but can be harmful to the 

pursuit of the truth. Weiss and Springer maintain that Native American stakeholders are 

inclined to introduce subjective biases based on religious sentiments that weaken the factual, 

reliable, and impartial values of scientific data (pp.175-176, p.199, p.218).  



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Finally, the authors say that NAGPRA is anti-scientific because repatriation and reburial of 

remains leads to the loss of data and the inability to restudy collections, test new hypotheses 

and retest old ones, obtain new data through the implementation of new technology, and train 

students in scientific endeavors (p.194). All in all, the most affected parties are the pursuit of 

objective knowledge and the truthful reconstruction of not only North American history but 

the history of Humanity (p.92, p.219).  

In conclusion, Repatriation and Erasing the Past has become one of the most controversial, 

criticized, and hatred-provoking publications in recent years in the field of anthropological 

studies. It is, indeed, an incendiary publication aimed at questioning repatriationist trends and 

inviting a re-evaluation of the community archaeology research model firmly established 

since the turn of the millennium. This book adopts an extreme attitude in favor of science, 

almost achieving the degree of scientific fundamentalism, to vehemently charge against what 

is assumed to be their opposite: the softening of human sciences through the inclusion of 

non-metric, non-replicable, non-verifiable information that relies on abstraction and 

subjectivity. The field of anthropology is struggling to find a fair balance between the human 

sciences and the humanities, or this may as well be a reactive turn to processualism. Time 

will determine whether this is the beginning of a New, New Archaeology.   

 

Irene Martí Gil obtained her bachelor’s degree in Archaeology from Universitat Autònoma 

de Barcelona, having pursued an academic exchange at Université Paris-Sorbonne IV and 

graduated from Escuela de Liderazgo Universitario-Universidad Francisco de Vitoria with a 

degree in Liberal Arts. She earned her master’s degree in Cultural Heritage from University 

College London in 2017 and her Ph.D. in Anthropology, with a minor in Linguistics, from 

Louisiana State University in 2023 (sponsored by Fulbright). Currently, she is focused on 

pursuing research on the topics of archaeological looting and antiquities trafficking from an 

interdisciplinary (legal, archaeological, ethnographic, and linguistic) perspective. 

 

 

 

© 2024 Irene Martí Gil 


