SAN JOSE — In the photo, San Jose State anthropology professor Elizabeth Weiss stands in the curation room lined with stacks of white storage boxes and holds an ancient Native American skull.
She’s smiling.
“So happy to be back with some old friends @SJSU,” Weiss wrote in a Twitter post with the picture.
She said she intended the tweet to share her enthusiasm for finally being back on campus after the pandemic. Instead, it unleashed a firestorm of criticism, including from the university provost, accusing her of disrespecting indigenous remains, and ignited a fresh debate over academic freedom and First Amendment rights versus cultural sensitivity.
“You just don’t do this. This is like from the ‘40s or ‘50s,” said UC Irvine History Professor Mark LeVine of the skull photo. “This is an attitude that went out of favor with colonialism.”
On Thursday, in a letter to university faculty, Provost Vincent Del Casino Jr., said the image “evoked shock and disgust” from many on campus and beyond and “while there are scientific issues at stake” the image doesn’t align with the values of the school or of academic inquiry.
“In what context is it ever ethically appropriate for an academic to handle remains while smiling with ungloved hands while calling these remains ‘friends?’” Del Casino wrote.
Weiss — a fully tenured professor at San Jose State since 2004 studying, cataloging and promoting its collection of mostly local Native American remains — is unapologetic.
“This really is about a woke activist mob rather than any real legitimate arguments,” Weiss said in an interview Thursday.
So happy to be back with some old friends @SJSU #anthrotwitter #archaeotwitter pic.twitter.com/l7fGrF65dh
— Elizabeth Weiss (@eweissunburied) September 18, 2021
The Twitter photo, along with her recent Op-Ed published in the Mercury News denouncing a law that returns Native American remains to their descendants, was not the first controversy Weiss has faced. Over the past year, while the university’s athletic department was making headlines for a scandal involving an athletic trainer sexually abusing female athletes, another controversy about Weiss’s newly published book — “Repatriation and Erasing the Past” — was quietly brewing in the anthropology department.
The book makes an argument against the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), claiming it favors religion over research.
In an email to faculty in January, Weiss’s boss, Anthropology Department Chair Roberto Gonzalez, criticized the book’s “Victorian-era approach to anthropological inquiry.” The book’s University Press of Florida publisher, in an extraordinary mea culpa, apologized for “the pain it caused,” while 870 professors and graduate students from Stanford and Yale to Oxford and Cambridge signed an open letter condemning its “explicitly racist ideology.”
After all that, Weiss posted the photo two weeks ago posing with the skull. The backlash was swift and intense, even dredging up her brief marriage to a firebrand academic, the late John Philippe Rushton who was accused of racism for his work comparing the brain size and IQs of different races. They divorced in 2003.
As one Twitter commenter put it, “I hope their spirits haunt you for the rest of your days.”
Weiss takes issue with each jab, calling her former marriage “irrelevant” and defending her right to her opinions.
“Science,” she said, “is more important than sensitivities.”
The skull in Weiss’s hands is part of the collection of Native American remains from the Muwekma Ohlone tribe unearthed in the East Bay between 1962 and 1968 by San Jose State anthropologists after a flood abatement project tore through the area. It came from what is known as the Ryan Shell Mound in what is now Fremont’s Coyote Hills Regional Park south of Alameda Creek — one of more than 400 indigenous burial sites surrounding the San Francisco Bay that include evidence of their diet, shellfish.
The bones date back as far as 2000 BC and as recently as the 1770s when Spanish explorers arrived. To Val Lopez, chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band whose ancestors lived from Gilroy to Santa Cruz, the unearthing of Native American remains and their storage at universities and museums is a violation of their spiritual beliefs. Weiss’s photo, he said, “is appalling and disgusting” and he called on the university to remove Weiss from working with the collection.
Many Native Americans believe that bones must remain buried and intact for their spirits to go to “the other side,” he said, and if they are disturbed they will “wander the earth without peace.” Reburying them will at least honor them, said Lopez, who serves as the tribal liaison to the UC system in its efforts to comply with federal and state repatriation laws. UC Berkeley holds one of the largest collections of Native American remains in the country.
After decades of debate and collaboration with Native American tribes, Lopez said, Weiss certainly must have known how incendiary posing with a skull would be.
“Why is she antagonizing? What is she trying to accomplish here?” Lopez asked. “She didn’t put it out thinking it’s an innocent position she was taking. She took that out knowing the controversy she would cause.”
For her part, Weiss said the photo was not an attempt to “needle” anyone. She is an avowed atheist and “I have absolutely no beliefs in the supernatural. I don’t believe anything like that. So when people make the argument we should rebury the remains because these spirits are harming living people, I think that’s religious talk and I don’t think that should supersede science.”
When her detractors ask whether she would be holding the skulls of her own ancestors, Weiss said she would have no qualms with that either.
The collection has served numerous “important needs,” Weiss said, from understanding fusion patterns on bones to helping estimate bone age for forensic crime work.
While she has many detractors, she also has a base of support. Fellow San Jose State professor Jonathan Roth, who teaches history, says that although cultural sensitivity is a good thing, “in many respects it can be inimical to academic freedom. People in the university talk about being collegial and being sensitive, but academic scholarship doesn’t work that way.”
Being too culturally sensitive, he said, “can mean you may not find out what reality is, and that can be a very dangerous thing.”
In her response to the provost’s letter, Weiss said that being photographed with a skull of a Native American is little different than showing Egyptian mummies or Otzi, the iceman.
“We have no way of telling what the individuals whose remains we curate would think about this issue,” she wrote. However, “public display celebrates these individuals, telling their stories in a respectful way that gives them a voice they never had in life.”
It is likely in the coming years, to comply with repatriation laws, that the skull and the entire collection categorized as “CA-ALA-329” will be reburied somewhere near its source in Alameda County. The Muwekma Ohlone tribe has been working with the anthropology department for years, even giving permission for research, and has a meeting later this month to discuss repatriation, said SJSU emeritus archeology lecturer Alan Leventhal who is working with the tribe.
In the meantime, Lopez, from the Amah Mutsun band, said Weiss’s disrespect needs to stop.
“It’s wrong now and it was wrong then,” Lopez said. “We have a voice now and we’re calling it out, and we’re not going to accept it anymore.”