This is anti-science lunacy cloaked in 21st century Marxist rhetoric. Weren’t these tribes nomadic? How can we determine what tribes existed six thousand years ago? Will our enlightened government decipher that Aztec Mesoamerican remains should go to Mexico and while Mayan remains should be repatriated to Belize or El Salvador?
Research science and physical anthropology has taken a giant leap backward under the stewardship of the hard left, politically correct, multiculturalists running the Department of Interior. It is no surprise that the Obama Administration will now enforce radical racial and ethnic litmus tests on scientifically significant human remains up to 12,000 years old.
From the Boston Globe:
New federal protections could mean that most of the remains of an estimated 160,000 Native Americans held by universities, museums, and federal government agencies may soon be transferred to tribes.
Under the new regulations, museums and agencies are required to notify tribes whose current or ancestral lands harbored the remains that the tribe is entitled to have them back.
Prestigious institutions from Harvard to the University of California Berkeley have already begun working through storehouses of remains uncovered by archeologists, highway and building contractors, and others since the 19th century. A few are surrendering bones to Native American tribes, and others are evaluating whether to do so.
[…]
