{"id":1014450,"date":"2023-03-05T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-03-05T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.propublica.org\/article\/berkeley-professor-taught-suspected-native-american-remains-repatriation"},"modified":"2023-03-05T13:00:00","modified_gmt":"2023-03-05T13:00:00","slug":"a-top-uc-berkeley-professor-taught-with-remains-that-may-include-dozens-of-native-americans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/03\/05\/a-top-uc-berkeley-professor-taught-with-remains-that-may-include-dozens-of-native-americans\/","title":{"rendered":"A Top UC Berkeley Professor Taught With Remains That May Include Dozens of Native Americans"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n Mary Hudetz<\/a>, ProPublica, and Graham Lee Brewer<\/span>, NBC News<\/a> <\/p>\n

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories<\/a> as soon as they\u2019re published.<\/p>\n

For decades, famed professor Tim White used a vast collection of human remains \u2014 bones sorted by body part and stored in wooden bins \u2014 to teach his anthropology students at the University of California, Berkeley.<\/p>\n

White, a world-renowned expert on human evolution, said the collection was passed down through generations of anthropology professors before he started teaching with it in the late 1970s. It came with no records, he said. Most were not labeled at all or said only \u201clab.\u201d <\/p>\n

But that simple description masked a dark history, UC Berkeley administrators recently acknowledged. UC Berkeley conducted an analysis of the collection after White reported its contents in response to a university systemwide order in 2020 to search for human remains. Administrators disclosed to state officials in May that the analysis found the collection includes the <\/a>remains<\/a> <\/a>of at least 95 people<\/a> excavated from gravesites \u2014 many of them likely Native Americans from California, according to previously unreported documents obtained by ProPublica and NBC News. <\/p>\n

The university\u2019s disclosure was particularly painful because it involved a professor who many Indigenous people already viewed as a primary antagonist, according to interviews with tribal members. <\/p>\n

UC Berkeley has long angered tribal nations with its handling of thousands of ancestral remains amassed during the university\u2019s centurylong campaign of excavating Indigenous burial grounds.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\tThe Repatriation Project<\/p>\n

\t\t\tA series investigating the return of Native American ancestral remains.<\/p>\n

View the Full Series<\/a><\/p>\n

More than three decades ago, Congress ordered museums, universities and government agencies<\/a> that receive federal funding to publicly report any human remains in their collections that they believed to be Native American and then return them to tribal nations.<\/p>\n

UC Berkeley has been slow to do so. The university estimates that it still holds the remains of 9,000 Indigenous people<\/a> in the campus\u2019 Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology \u2014 more than any other U.S. institution bound by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, according to a ProPublica analysis of federal data.<\/p>\n

That tally does not include the remains that White reported and relinquished in 2020. For decades, White served as an expert adviser in the university\u2019s repatriation decisions, sitting on committees that weighed whether to grant or deny tribes\u2019 requests, according to a review of hundreds of pages of federal testimony and internal university documents.<\/p>\n

White said the collection did not need to be reported under NAGPRA because there is no way to determine the origin of the bones \u2014 and therefore the law does not apply. <\/p>\n

The collection has exposed deep rifts at UC Berkeley, pitting a prominent professor who said he\u2019s done nothing wrong against university administrators who have apologized to tribes for not sharing information about the remains sooner.<\/p>\n

For tribes the episode follows a familiar pattern of UC Berkeley\u2019s delays and failures to be transparent with them.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a major moral, ethical and potentially legal violation,\u201d said Laura Miranda, a member of the Pechanga Band of Indians and chair of the California Native American Heritage Commission<\/a>. She made her comments at a July hearing held by the commission, which oversees the university system\u2019s handling of Indigenous remains.<\/p>\n

UC Berkeley officials declined interview requests, saying \u201ctribes have asked us not to.\u201d In a statement, the university said White was no longer involved in repatriation decisions. There is now a moratorium on using ancestral remains for teaching or research purposes, according to the statement. The Hearst Museum is currently closed to the public so that staff can prioritize repatriation.<\/p>\n

The university also acknowledged that, in the past, UC Berkeley had \u201cmishandled its repatriation responsibilities.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe campus privileged some kinds of scientific and scholarly evidence over tribal interests and evidence provided by tribes,\u201d the university said in the statement.<\/p>\n

University of California, Berkeley, anthropology professor Tim White holds a replica of a 1.7-million-year-old homo erectus skull in the National Research Centre on Human Evolution in Burgos, Spain.<\/p>\n

(Ricardo Ord\u00f3\u00f1ez\/Ediciones El Pa\u00eds, 2022)<\/p>\n

In an interview with ProPublica and NBC News, White said he\u2019s been villainized for strictly adhering to the federal law, which he said requires balancing scientific proof with other evidence.<\/p>\n

In the years immediately after Congress passed NAGPRA, UC Berkeley <\/a>relied on White\u2019s expertise<\/a> as curator of the museum\u2019s skeletal collection to challenge Indigenous people\u2019s repatriation requests, according to testimony before a federal advisory committee.<\/p>\n

Some tribal members accused him of demanding too high a burden of scientific proof for repatriations and discounting knowledge passed down through the generations. In the 1990s, he made headlines for fighting to use Native American remains as teaching tools<\/a>, arguing that students should not be deprived of the opportunity to learn from them. He later sued to block the UC system from returning two sets of remains estimated to date from 9,000 years ago, saying they were too old to be linked to any living descendants.<\/p>\n

NAGPRA does not require definitive scientific proof for repatriation, only that institutions report human remains that could potentially be Native American and consult with the affected tribal nations, said Sherry Hutt, an attorney who is a former program manager of the federal National NAGPRA Program. \u201cIt\u2019s not a scientific standard. It\u2019s a legal standard,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

White often had the backing of university administrators in disputes over remains, but not anymore. At the July hearing before the California Native American Heritage Commission, UC Berkeley administrators cited an analysis by another anthropologist at the school, Sabrina Agarwal, that determined thousands of the bones in the collection were excavated from gravesites.<\/p>\n

Given UC Berkeley\u2019s legacy of raiding Native American graves, it is likely the collection White taught with contains the remains of Native Americans from what is currently California, said Linda Rugg, associate vice chancellor for research at the university.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to apologize for the pain that we caused by holding on to this collection,\u201d Rugg said at the hearing. \u201cWhen we found out about it, we were dismayed ourselves.\u201d A university spokesperson said staff and administrators are consulting with several tribes on next steps. Federal officials confirmed UC Berkeley has contacted them requesting guidance.<\/p>\n

The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley<\/p>\n

(Justin Katigbak for ProPublica)<\/p>\n

White, who retired last spring but is still a professor emeritus, said administrators knew about the collection, which was used to teach hundreds of students over the years. \u201cIt is very disappointing to find the Berkeley employees are making false allegations and misrepresentations,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Behind UC Berkeley\u2019s reckoning is the centurylong saga about a powerful, progressive institution that is finally confronting its past. Isaac Bojorquez, chairman of the KaKoon Ta Ruk Band of Ohlone-Costanoan Indians of the Big Sur Rancheria, called for accountability for the newly reported remains, but also for UC Berkeley\u2019s decadeslong delays and denials of other tribes\u2019 repatriation requests.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want our ancestors,\u201d he said. \u201cThey should have never been disturbed in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Painful History<\/p>\n

With no documentation for the origin of his teaching collection, White surmised in a report to university officials in 2020 that it dated back to UC Berkeley\u2019s early days and the university\u2019s first anthropology professor, Alfred Louis Kroeber.<\/p>\n

Kroeber, who joined the faculty in 1901, became a world-renowned scholar<\/a> for his research on Native Americans in California, encouraging the excavations of Indigenous gravesites during his four-decade tenure.<\/p>\n

His name recently was stripped from Berkeley\u2019s anthropology building, in part for housing an Indigenous man found in the Sierra Foothills as a living exhibit at what would later become the Hearst Museum. Described as the last living member of his band of Yahi Indians, the man \u2014 whom Kroeber <\/a>called<\/a> \u201cIshi\u201d<\/a> \u2014 was studied and made to craft arrows and greet visitors for nearly five years, until his death in 1916.<\/p>\n

Anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber with \u201cIshi,\u201d the last known member of the Yahi tribe<\/p>\n

(Via website of University of California, San Francisco)<\/p>\n

The Hearst Museum continued for decades to voraciously collect Native American remains and funerary objects, trying to assemble a collection to rival the British Museum and Harvard University, said historian Tony Platt, a distinguished affiliated scholar at UC Berkeley\u2019s Center for the Study of Law and Society. \u201cTo be a great university you\u2019ve got to acquire stuff, you\u2019ve got to hoard massive amounts of things,\u201d Platt said.<\/p>\n

The vast majority of UC Berkeley\u2019s collection of remains came from sacred ancestral sites in California, according to ProPublica\u2019s analysis of federal data<\/a>. The collection included ancestors of the Ohlone, the tribe whose land was seized by the federal government to fund public universities, including UC Berkeley.<\/p>\n

The university eventually amassed the remains of about 11,600 Native Americans, stored in the basement beneath its gymnasium swimming pool and in other campus buildings. But Platt said that number is likely an undercount<\/a> because museum records often counted multiple remains excavated from the same gravesite as one person.<\/p>\n

A section in the 1878 University of California Register soliciting contributions to the school\u2019s collections<\/p>\n

(Highlighting by ProPublica. Register of the University of California, 1878-79.)<\/p>\n

In the early 1970s, Native American activists\u2019 long-standing resistance to the grave robbing started gaining momentum amid protests that stealing from Native Americans\u2019 burial sites in the name of science was a human rights violation.<\/p>\n

By then, the teaching collection that anthropology professors used had grown to thousands of bones and teeth that White said in his report to university administrators had been commingled with others donated by amateur gravediggers, dentists, anatomists, physicians, law enforcement and biological supply companies.<\/p>\n

The remains were unceremoniously sorted by body part so students could study them. A jumble of teeth. A drawer of clavicles. Separate bins for skulls. For decades, anthropologists added to the collection, used it in their classes and then passed it along to the professors who came after them, White said.<\/p>\n

It was this collection that White started teaching with when he joined UC Berkeley\u2019s anthropology faculty in 1977.<\/p>\n

UC Berkeley hired White, then 27, soon after he had obtained his Ph.D. in biological anthropology from the University of Michigan. He already was collaborating with a team to analyze \u201cLucy,\u201d a 3.2-million-year-old human ancestor.<\/p>\n

White published articles in prestigious journals and co-authored a textbook, \u201cHuman Osteology,\u201d<\/a> that boasted of UC Berkeley\u2019s collection of human remains and called ancient skeletons \u201cambassadors from the past.\u201d<\/p>\n

American anthropologists Donald C. Johanson, left, credited with discovering the 3.2-million-year-old skeleton \u201cLucy,\u201d and White in 1979. (Johanson is not involved in the current controversy at Berkeley.)<\/p>\n

(Bettmann\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Congress passed NAGPRA in 1990, recognizing that human remains of any ancestry \u201cmust at all times be treated with dignity and respect.\u201d As UC Berkeley prepared to comply with the new law, the campus museum appointed White curator of biological anthropology, overseeing the university\u2019s collection of human remains.<\/p>\n

Almost as soon as tribes started making claims to ancestral remains under NAGPRA, Indigenous people accused White of undermining their efforts to rebury their ancestors, according to a review of hundreds of pages of testimony<\/a> before a federal review committee tasked with mediating NAGPRA disputes.<\/p>\n

Since NAGPRA only applied to federally recognized tribal nations, many tribes in California were not entitled to seek repatriation. (Of the 183 tribes in the state, 68 still lack federal recognition, according to the Native American Heritage Commission.) UC Berkeley\u2019s collection of remains included those of thousands of people designated as unavailable for repatriation because they came from tribes lacking federal recognition.<\/p>\n

Recourse under the law was limited, leaving tribal nations to file formal challenges with the federal NAGPRA Review Committee<\/a>, an advisory group whose members represent tribal, scientific and museum organizations. It can only offer recommendations in response to disputes.<\/p>\n

In the first challenge following the passage of the law, in February 1993 the Hui M\u0101lama I N\u0101 K\u016bpuna O Hawai\u2019i Nei, a Native Hawaiian organization, took a dispute over repatriation of two ancestral remains before the federal committee. The remains had been donated to UC Berkeley in 1935, at which time a museum curator classified them as Polynesian. White disagreed.<\/p>\n

Addressing the committee, White introduced himself as \u201cthe individual who is responsible for the skeletal collections at Berkeley.\u201d He argued the remains might not be Native Hawaiian and could belong to victims of shipwrecks, drownings or crimes. They should be preserved for study, he added, making an analogy to UC Berkeley\u2019s library book collection, where historians access volumes for years as their understanding evolves.<\/p>\n

Edward Halealoha Ayau, then the Native Hawaiian organization\u2019s executive director, pounded his fists on the table in outrage. \u201cWe do not have cultural sensitivity to books. We did not descend from books,\u201d he said, according to a transcript of the meeting.<\/p>\n

Ancestral remains are not research material, Ayau said, they are people with whom he shares a connection \u2014 a perspective that is central to Native Hawaiian culture.<\/p>\n

White recently said that his analogy comparing human remains to books was taken out of context. \u201cBoth hold information,\u201d he said. \u201cI was obviously speaking metaphorically.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead of recommending that both ancestors\u2019 remains be repatriated directly to the Hui M\u0101lama, the committee advised UC Berkeley to return one of them and send the other to the Bishop Museum in Honolulu for analysis, Ayau said. There, researchers finally agreed that the remains were Native Hawaiian \u2014 but only after conducting a scientific analysis over Ayau\u2019s objections.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just started crying,\u201d Ayau, who now chairs the federal NAGPRA Review Committee, recalled in a recent interview. \u201cWe failed to prevent one more form of desecration.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Bishop Museum<\/a> declined to comment on its role in the 1993 repatriation, saying it happened too long ago for anyone to have knowledge of it. <\/p>\n

For Ayau, the experience left him with a sense of loss over the treatment of his ancestors.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo have someone disturb them is really bad,\u201d he said. \u201cBut then to have them steal them and then fight you to get them back is beyond horrific.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kalehua Caceres, of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, left, and Edward Halealoha Ayau, now the executive director of the Hui M\u0101lama I N\u0101 K\u016bpuna O Hawai\u2019i Nei, at a ceremony to present the human remains from the collection of Germany\u2019s Overseas Museum to a delegation from the state of Hawaii in 2022.<\/p>\n

(Sina Schuldt\/picture alliance via Getty Images)<\/p>\n

\u201cBerkeley Should Be Ashamed\u201d<\/p>\n

White\u2019s fight to use a set of Native American remains he had borrowed from the Hearst Museum for teaching purposes made headlines in the 1990s after he clashed with then-museum director Rosemary Joyce. She said when she was hired in 1994, it was common practice for White and other museum curators with keys to borrow ancestral remains and belongings without documenting what they\u2019d taken.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust leaving aside NAGPRA, as a museum anthropologist, that\u2019s an unacceptable thing,\u201d she told ProPublica and NBC News. \u201cWhen materials are not in the physical control of the staff of the museum, you need legal documentation.\u201d<\/p>\n

She changed the locks on the museum\u2019s storage space. Heeding requests from tribes, she tried to recall a museum collection of Native American remains that White kept on loan in his lab and used for teaching. White refused to return them.<\/p>\n

The vice provost for research of the UC system sent Jay Stowsky, then the system\u2019s director of research policy, to mediate the dispute between White and Joyce. Stowsky agreed with Joyce, calling the lack of controls at the museum \u201cterrible.\u201d He said human remains were \u201cjust sort of thrown into boxes\u201d with a label on them. \u201cBerkeley should be ashamed of itself on so many levels,\u201d Stowsky, now a senior academic administrator at UC Berkeley, said in a recent interview.<\/p>\n

Drawers in the \u201cOsteology Teaching Collection,\u201d as depicted in a report that White wrote and sent to the director of the Hearst Museum and others.<\/p>\n

(Via letter from Tim White, Aug. 28, 2020)<\/p>\n

White filed a whistleblower complaint with the university in 1997 accusing the museum, under Joyce\u2019s leadership, of seeking an unnecessary extension to NAGPRA\u2019s reporting deadline. (Campus investigators found no improper activity, according to White.)<\/p>\n

Joyce said she was simply trying to account for all the remains that would need to be reported under NAGPRA. \u201cIt\u2019s really kind of insane to have to say, I did the thing that the law said I should do,\u201d she told ProPublica and NBC News. Joyce said the complaints were found to be \u201cmeritless.\u201d<\/p>\n

White then filed an internal grievance against Joyce with the school\u2019s Academic Senate, alleging that by asking him to relinquish the human remains she had infringed on his \u201cacademic privileges.\u201d<\/p>\n

The university brokered a deal: White could keep ancestral remains provided museum staff and tribes could access them to conduct inventory and report them under NAGPRA.<\/p>\n

Joyce said the arrangement was untenable and she felt unsupported by the university\u2019s leadership. White continued to teach with the remains.<\/p>\n

A Decade After NAGPRA<\/p>\n

Myra Masiel-Zamora, now an archaeologist for the Pechanga Band of Indians, enrolled in White\u2019s osteology class more than 20 years ago when she was 18 and a first-year student. But, she said, she withdrew from the course after a teaching assistant told her the human remains belonged to Native Americans.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was the first time I really truly learned that an institution could and can \u2014 and is \u2014 using real Native American ancestors as teaching tools,\u201d she said. \u201cI was really upset.\u201d<\/p>\n

Concern over institutions\u2019 handling of Indigenous remains extended beyond the classroom.<\/p>\n

Troubled by the slow pace of repatriations under NAGPRA, California lawmakers passed their own version of the law in 2001, aiming to close loopholes in the federal statute and allow tribes to claim remains regardless of whether they have federal recognition. But the state failed to fund an oversight committee established by the bill.<\/p>\n

In 2007, without consulting tribes or offering public explanation, UC Berkeley abruptly fired museum employees who were responsible for NAGPRA compliance, and named White and others to a newly formed campus repatriation committee, according to tribal leaders.<\/p>\n

That upset tribal members, who brought their concerns about the new committee<\/a> to state senators. The firings \u201celiminated the only staff at the university that would stand up to Mr. Tim White and his offensive remarks regarding Native American tribes and our ancestral remains,\u201d Reno Franklin, then a council member and now the chairman of the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians, said during a 2008 state legislative hearing.<\/p>\n

In emails sent to ProPublica and NBC News, White sought to discredit the testimony by Franklin and others at the hearing by saying that it had been the result of a decadeslong effort by the university to use him as a scapegoat for its failures. White said he only held an advisory role and did not make final repatriation decisions.<\/p>\n

Thousands of Native American remains were used as research materials in the Anthropology and Art Practice Building at UC Berkeley.<\/p>\n

(Justin Katigbak for ProPublica)<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, White\u2019s career was skyrocketing after he led a team that discovered and excavated a 4.4-million-year-old hominid unearthed in Ethiopia. It was deemed the scientific breakthrough of the year<\/a> in 2009 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and cemented his reputation in the field. It also landed him, along with the likes of Barack Obama and Steve Jobs, on Time magazine\u2019s 2010 list of the world\u2019s 100 most influential people.<\/p>\n

Two years later, White and two other professors sued to block the repatriation<\/a> of two 9,000-year-old skeletons to the Kumeyaay, 12 tribes whose homelands straddle the U.S.-Mexico border near San Diego. White and the other professors wanted to study the remains, which had been unearthed in 1976 from the grounds of the chancellor\u2019s house on the University of California, San Diego, campus.<\/p>\n

They argued that there wasn\u2019t enough evidence to support the Kumeyaay\u2019s ancestral connection to the remains, and that the UC system had failed to prove that the remains could legally be considered \u201cNative American.\u201d Based on the professors\u2019 interpretation of the law, human remains had to have a cultural or biological link to a present-day tribe to be considered Native American.<\/p>\n

They said that not allowing them to study the remains violated their rights as researchers. An appeals court ruled against the professors, citing the Kumeyaay\u2019s sovereign immunity, meaning they couldn\u2019t be sued.<\/p>\n

As tribes\u2019 frustration with the lack of progress on repatriations grew, UC Berkeley convened a \u201ctribal forum\u201d in 2017. In the private gathering, tribal leaders and others expressed anger that university staff, including White, had resisted their requests to repatriate and that the university was requiring an excessive amount of proof to reclaim ancestors, according to an internal university report.<\/p>\n

The following year, UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ disbanded the campus\u2019 NAGPRA committee that White had served on, records show. The university established a new one that did not include him.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Berkeley prepared for its biggest repatriation to date: the return of more than 1,400 ancestors to the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, a small tribe whose ancestors\u2019 remains were excavated from burial grounds along California\u2019s coast and Channel Islands. According to the school\u2019s NAGPRA inventory records, many of the remains had been taken by an archaeologist in 1901 whose expeditions were funded by Phoebe Apperson Hearst, wife of mining magnate George Hearst and namesake of UC Berkeley\u2019s anthropology museum.<\/p>\n

UC Berkeley held on to the Chumash remains and loaned some to White for research projects, before returning them to the tribe in the summer of 2018.<\/p>\n

When the repatriation day finally came, Nakia Zavalla and other tribal members drove 300 miles to campus and entered a backroom of the anthropology building where UC Berkeley stored their ancestors.<\/p>\n

\u201cGoing into that facility for the first time was horrifying. Literally shelves of human remains,\u201d said Zavalla, the tribe\u2019s cultural director. \u201cAnd you pull them out, and there\u2019s ancestors mixed all together, sometimes just all femur bones, a tray full of skulls.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nakia Zavalla, cultural director of the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, said the tribe had to bring its own cardboard boxes when retrieving repatriated remains.<\/p>\n

(Alejandra Rubio for NBC and ProPublica)<\/p>\n

Zavalla said tribal members had to bring their own cardboard boxes to carry their ancestors home for burial \u2014 a complaint other tribal nations have made in dealing with the university. UC Berkeley officials said they were unaware of Zavalla\u2019s \u201cdisturbing account\u201d but have changed their policies to ensure they provide assistance \u201cas requested by Tribes.\u201d <\/p>\n

Zavalla said the visit highlighted how the university had deprived the tribe of more than ancestral remains, she said. The university housed recordings and items that ethnographers and anthropologists had previously collected from Chumash elders.<\/p>\n

For Zavalla, the information could have benefited her and other tribal members\u2019 efforts to revitalize the Santa Ynez Chumash\u2019s language and traditions \u2014 which government policies once sought to eradicate. But the information was not freely shared, she said: \u201cThey stole those items.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Chumash reservation is in California\u2019s Santa Ynez Valley.<\/p>\n

(Alejandra Rubio for NBC and ProPublica)<\/p>\n

\u201cThey Need to Go Home\u201d<\/p>\n

California state lawmakers passed a bill in 2018 to expand the Native American Heritage Commission\u2019s oversight of repatriation policies and compliance committees within the UC system. The legislation called for an audit of all UC campuses\u2019 compliance with NAGPRA.<\/p>\n

The following year, UC Berkeley finally barred the use of Native American remains for teaching or research, according to the university.<\/p>\n

The state auditor\u2019s office announced the results of its review<\/a> in 2020, singling out UC Berkeley for making onerous demands of tribes claiming remains. <\/p>\n

The auditor also noted that UC Berkeley had identified 180 missing artifacts or human remains. In a statement, UC Berkeley said staff had searched for the missing remains and artifacts, some of which had been lost for more than a century.<\/p>\n

Soon after the audit, the UC president\u2019s office called for all campuses to search departments that historically studied human remains for any that had not been previously reported.<\/p>\n

In August 2020, White reported the contents of the collection he taught with to university administrators.<\/p>\n

White told ProPublica and NBC News that given the lack of documentation, it would be impossible to determine if they were Native American, much less say which tribe they should be returned to.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s nobody on this planet who can sit down and tell you what the cultural affiliation of this lower jaw is, or that lower jaw is. Nobody can do that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The Native American Heritage Commission is continuing to press<\/a> UC Berkeley for answers and accountability for its handling of the collection White reported.<\/p>\n

Bojorquez, the tribal chairman and an NAHC commissioner, said it was \u201cmind-blowing\u201d that Berkeley still has not provided any documentation on the origins of the collection.<\/p>\n

The university should have consulted tribes sooner, he said, to ensure the remains were handled respectfully and to help speed the repatriation process. \u201cSo much happened to these ancestors,\u201d he said \u2014 they should not be in a box or on a shelf.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey need to go home,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

More Missing<\/p>\n

Separate from the teaching collection that White reported in 2020, he also notified administrators that he\u2019d discovered remains with museum labels stashed in gray bins in a teaching laboratory. They later were identified as the partial remains of six ancestors of the Santa Ynez Chumash that were supposed to have been repatriated in 2018.<\/p>\n

When UC Berkeley finally informed the Chumash six months later, it felt like a \u201cblow to the chest,\u201d said Zavalla, the tribe\u2019s cultural director. Zavalla and other tribal staff members drove to Berkeley to retrieve the remains.<\/p>\n

\u201cI felt lied to,\u201d she said. \u201cThey did not give us all of the ancestors, and they didn\u2019t do their due diligence.\u201d<\/p>\n

The discovery of the missing remains outraged Sam Cohen, an attorney for the tribe, who called for probes into whether UC Berkeley or White had violated policies or laws.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe is considered untouchable, I think, by Berkeley because he\u2019s so famous in human evolution,\u201d Cohen said of White. \u201cHe basically wasn\u2019t going to voluntarily comply with anything until he was forced.\u201d<\/p>\n

White said he was unsure how the remains ended up in the teaching laboratory. He suggested they may have been mistakenly placed in his lab during a move years ago while he was overseas. He provided ProPublica and NBC News with a copy of an email from an investigator with UC Berkeley’s Office of Risk and Compliance Services, which said the office found no violation on his part regarding the Chumash remains. UC Berkeley declined to comment on the outcome of the investigation, calling it a personnel matter. <\/p>\n

\u201cI have accounted for everything that happened in granular detail,\u201d White said in an interview.<\/p>\n

Chancellor Christ apologized<\/a> to the tribe in December in a letter and acknowledged: \u201cWe do understand that, given our history, it is difficult for tribes to have confidence in our university and Professor White.\u201d<\/p>\n

The apology was little consolation, Cohen said, especially since it came with yet another painful acknowledgement. University records show there are still more unreturned Chumash ancestors. So far, they have yet to be found.<\/p>\n

Christ assured the Chumash that the university was committed to returning all Native American ancestors to all tribes. UC Berkeley officials estimate it will be at least a decade before that happens.<\/p>\n

Alex Mierjeski<\/a> contributed research. Ash Ngu<\/a> contributed data analysis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mary Hudetz, ProPublica, and Graham Lee Brewer, NBC News <\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26786,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1014450"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26786"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1014450"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1014450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1015809,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1014450\/revisions\/1015809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1014450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1014450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1014450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}