Editor’s Note: The following is a talk delivered by Professor Emeritus Elizabeth Weiss of San José State University at a conference titled Navigating Campus Freedom of Expression in Polarized and Turbulent Times, hosted by Haim Striks Law School, Rishon Le Zion, Israel, which took place on January 6, 2026. It has been edited prior to publication.
Anthropological research integrity is being diminished by requiring researchers to collaborate with indigenous tribes. From Native Americans in the U.S., to the Māori in New Zealand, from the various African tribes, to Australian Aborigines, and even the Saami in Northern Europe, indigenous groups, led by anti-science activists, are hijacking scientific endeavors to prevent unfavorable information about their people’s past and present from being discovered and published.
These indigenous activists are insisting that access to materials and data, such as previously-created casts, photos, and x-rays, be controlled by them in what is euphemistically called “data sovereignty.” Access will only be granted if researchers follow the guidelines:
- The tribal leaders will determine the research question or hypothesis;
- The tribal leaders will decide the methodologies used;
- The research must benefit—especially financially—the tribe; and
- The tribe decides whether the end result can be published!
These demands ruin scientific inquiry that should be based on curiosity; methods should be decided by the best way to answer the questions being asked; and, results should be published regardless of whether they are favorable or not to a specific group.
In any other situation these demands would constitute a conflict of interest. But, although scientists are often required to report conflicts of interest before publication if receiving money from a company—such as if you’re studying cancer rates and a tobacco company has funded your research—the conflict anthropologists are facing to receive access to data from tribal communities is ignored.
I think many anthropologists are allowing their research to be molded by tribal activists in order to get access to all sorts of materials and data—from ancient DNA to petroglyphs; they’re “collaborating” and getting permission to be able to continue their careers and to avoid being labeled as anti-indigenous—as I have been, for refusing to allow demands from Native Americans to control my scientific research endeavors.
It may be difficult to tell when tribal demands have affected research publications. In some cases, research is halted and publications are retracted. The U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) recently terminated a $2 million study “on how to best combine indigenous and Western approaches to understanding the natural world.”1 The study was terminated because indigenous collaborators claimed that the Western scientists were putting science ahead of indigenous knowledge; there were “disagreements over the extent to which the Native stakeholders could influence the study’s recommendations.” In other words, if the indigenous activists can’t control the research, they want no part of it, and may actively try to stop it.
Other ancient DNA (or paleogenomic) studies show manipulation by how results are reported. A collaborative study on the San Francisco Bay Area tribe the Muwekma Ohlone supposedly found that there is a long—thousands of years—biological continuity between the modern tribe and the remains held at various Bay Area universities. A quick glance at the actual data reveal that the Muwekma Ohlone tribal members are actually nearly genetically identical to Los Angeles area Mexicans. This result is conveniently overlooked in the write-up, but matches some of my own research on cranial morphology in the Bay Area precontact Amerindian collections, and that of Alfred Kroeber, the founding father of California anthropology, that by 1920 the Ohlone Bay Area tribes were—for all intents and purposes—extinct.2
The most famous ancient DNA falsehood that has been perpetuated involves the 8,000 to 9,000 year old Kennewick Man. Kennewick Man was found eroding out of a riverbed in Washington State, yet his DNA revealed he was genetically closest to populations from South America. But, how the paleogeneticist Morten Rasmussen and his colleagues reported it, one would think that the closest link was with the Colville tribe from Washington State.3 And, thus, following an executive order from Obama, the Colville tribe subsequently got to bury the remains based on this lie.4
And, recently, a study of Native Americans in New Mexico, the Picuris Pueblo, claimed a close continuous link between modern living tribe members and 1,000-year-old remains.5 But no other tribe from the Southwest U.S. was even tested, which means there can be no determination of whether this tribe is closer to the remains than any other tribe in the region. Furthermore, the ancient remains from the region were contaminated (likely with DNA from living Picuris Pueblo members); and, the researchers “masked African and European tracts” in the modern Picuris Pueblo DNA sample. The authors also state that “Tribal leadership was involved in … crafting the key findings of the work.”
If you want to try to replicate this study—don’t count on it: the ancient DNA has been buried, and the modern DNA is not to be shared. In fact, even in this study, the tribal leaders could still demand a retraction, as they “retained the right to curtail research at any point in the collaboration, and publication of results continues to be the sole decision of Picuris leadership.” Had different (i.e., contrary to the tribe’s beliefs) conclusions been offered, would the article have been published? I doubt it!
My final example comes from an ancient DNA study that revolves around horses, published in Science in 2023.6 Horses arrived in North America before humans; but, they became extinct around 10,000 years ago. When Spaniards came to the Americas, they brought horses; the Native Americans learned how to ride horses from the Europeans. Yet, oral myths of the Lakota Indians tell a different story—one of horses being their spiritual relatives since the beginning of time. Thus, when researchers collaborated with the Lakota tribe to investigate horse skeletal remains from sites that were post-Spanish arrival to North America, but pre-contact for the specific site, the tribe wanted the results to match their tribal myth—that they took care of and rode horses before contact with Europeans. The authors found that the horse remains exhibited skeletal traits indicating that they had been ridden, but also the horse DNA was a match with the Spanish horses. Surprisingly, the horses had been butchered. The most parsimonious (and therefore probably correct) conclusion would be that these horses escaped from their Spanish owners and made it to “Indian country.” The Indians then hunted them, and ate the meat.
But, instead, the conclusion published was that the remains reveal that the Lakota rode horses before European contact—perhaps even as far back as 12,000 years ago. In reporting on this “successful” collaborative effort, the editor-in-chief of Science, H. Holden Thorp, wrote that one stipulation was that he should not speak independently of the Lakota. And so, he agreed to have his commentary reviewed before publication; something he’d never done before. Thorp claims that the Native American tribal reviewer “did not alter its meaning or message but ensured that the language respected Lakota traditions.”7 But, how can we know?
All my examples have come from research on Native Americans because that’s my area of expertise. However, articles on how to collaborate with indigenous people show this control of research by indigenous activists is a worldwide problem. For instance, in a chapter titled “Integrating CARE and FAIR Principles in the Digital Preservation of Indigenous Knowledge to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals,” the authors discuss Mukurtu, which is an “Indigenous knowledge content management system” used in Australia.8 In the Mukurtu system, indigenous communities can control how materials are accessed and shared; the system enables indigenous communities to restrict access by sex, age, status, and ethnicity. And, in the SAICH system, a project at Chinhoyi University of Technology in Zimbabwe and used by 6 additional African countries—Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, and Zambia—electronic data have been restricted to research that will benefit the indigenous communities; “sacred” knowledge is restricted from view; and tribes can determine who can access the data. In South Africa, the Ulwazi program makes it easy to restrict data to only certain members of the community. In Canada, researchers working with the Syilx Okanagan First Nation in British Columbia need to be clear that the purpose of their research is to give back to the community; theories developed should be supported by indigenous epistemologies; and, concepts of sacred responsibilities are to be taken seriously.9
Collaboration with indigenous communities has led scientists to embrace utterly unscientific concepts. Just a short distance from where I am sitting now, there is rock art left by Native American peoples; these Arizona petroglyphs, some of which were done quite late, were studied by Julian Steward in the 1930s. Steward was astonished that the tribal inhabitants could not explain the meaning of the petroglyphs. He said “the testimony of modern Indians concerning petroglyphs is extraordinarily disappointing … they know of them as landmarks, and sometimes believe them to have had a supernatural origin. But even where there is good evidence that the glyphs were made by the [T]ribes now inhabiting the area, the practice seems generally to have been abandoned at the advent of the white man and most knowledge of them promptly lost.” In other words, they didn’t understand the pictures any better than him. Now, 95 years later, archaeologist Aaron Wright, working in collaboration with Native Americans, accepts the explanations provided by his tribal collaborators. What those explanations are isn’t entirely clear and may never be available, because as Wright notes, the final report of the project “will be reviewed by the collaborating Tribes. It will not be formally complete and submitted until it receives their approval. Moreover, data and interpretations of findings will not be shared without their authorization.”10
And, if there are those who still believe that “Native science” is as valid a science as science, work by University of Michigan archaeologist Lindsay Montgomery should clarify the situation. Montgomery discusses that indigenous communities eschew evolution and rather embrace cyclical relationships tied to creationism and metaphysics. She provides the example that “according to Hopi oral traditions, after the Hopi emerged from the underworld, Ma’saw, a caretaker of the earth, presented the people with knowledge of agriculture, including in his gift a bag of corn seeds, a planting stick, and a gourd filled with water,” and she argues that such myths should not be “dismissed” or regarded as “metaphorical rather than factual”; rather, they should be used as a “framework for interpreting material evidence.”11
The question becomes: what happens when material evidence contradicts the myth? The Native American collaborators will cease their collaborative efforts, because to them, treating the myth as fact—more valid than evidence from artifacts, bones, and DNA—is a crucial component to collaboration!
And, across the globe, female Australian archaeologists, such as Liz Cameran, are accepting discriminatory practices when they’re wrapped in indigenous myths: she wrote that indigenous knowledge “often involve[s] aspects of the ‘secret and sacred,’ gender-based, and only accessible to initiated individuals.”12 She added that, “Under Indigenous protocols, I avoided touching objects to avoid spiritual harm.”
But, perhaps most problematic, is what indigenous activists don’t want scientists to study. For example, the Natives in Barrow Alaska are still upset that a 1979 study on alcoholism led to a New York Times media article on rates of alcohol abuse in the community, rather than ways that this problem was being combatted.13 Since then, they haven’t been open to research on alcoholism, even though it may help them! In the case of the New Mexico, Picuris Pueblo tribe, the DNA data that is already collected is not to be used for medical or Natural Selection studies.
It is my hope that by making others aware of indigenous infringement on scientific research (which started in anthropology and has now infected other fields, such as entomology, biology, neuroscience, and geology), those truly interested in discovering objective truths and driven by intellectual curiosity, will persevere, and fight back against this devastating loss of academic freedom.
Elizabeth Weiss is Professor Emeritus, San José State University and a National Association of Scholars Board Member. She last appeared in AQ with her review of the “Stanford Academic Freedom Conference” (Winter 2023).
1 H.H. Thorp, “Learning with Lakota Scientists,” Science, 385 (2024): 1025-1025. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ads7901
2 E. Weiss, “Bay Area Indians’ Questionable Claims: New DNA Evidence Concerning the Origins of San Francisco’s Muwekma Ohlone Tribe Has Been Largely Misrepresented by the Press, The American Conservative, May 3, 2022.
3 M. Rasmussen, et al. “The Ancestry and Affiliations of Kennewick Man,” Nature, 523 (2015): 455–458, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14625
4 N.K. Geranios, “Ancient Skeleton to Return to Native Americans for Reburial,” AP News, (December 19, 2016).
5 T. Pinotti, et al. “Picuris Pueblo oral history and genomics reveal continuity in US Southwest,” Nature, 642 (2025): 125–132, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08791-9
6 W.T.T. Taylor, et al. “Early Dispersal of Domestic Horses into the Great Plains and Northern Rockies. Science, 379 (2023): 1316-1323, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adc9691.
7 H.H. Thorp.
8 J. Chigwada, P. Ngulube, “Integrating CARE and FAIR Principles in the Digital Preservation of Indigenous Knowledge to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals,” in P. Ngulube (ed.), Harnessing Indigenous Epistemologies for Sustainable Progress, (IGI Global, 2025), 197-230, https://doi.org/10.4018/979-8-3693-8447-3.ch010.
9 M. Correia, S. Alexis, A. Dulic, “Indigenizing Collaborative Methods in Studying Human–Water Relations in the Syilx Okanagan Territory of British Columbia, Canada,” Qualitative Research, 25, no. 6 (2025): 1344-1369, https://doi.org/10.1177/14687941241306234 (Original work published 2025).
10 A.M. Wright, “Indigenous Archaeology, Collaborative Practice, and Rock Imagery: An Example from the North American Southwest, Arts 14, no. 3 (2025): 53, https://doi.org/10.3390/arts14030053.
11 L.M. Montgomery, “Native Science: Replacing Indigenous Worldviews in Archaeological Research on Domestication,” in B. A. Stewart et al., (eds.), “100 Years of Archaeology at the University of Michigan: Essays on the Past, Present, and Future of the Discipline,” 343 (2025), University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology.
12 L. Cameron, “‘Reclaiming their stories’: A Study of the Spiritual Content of Historical Cultural Objects Through an Indigenous Create Inquiry,” Australian Archaeology, 90, no. 2 (2024): 140–151, https://doi.org/10.1080/03122417.2024.2323244.
13 J. Bylander, “Your Data, Your Way,” Health Affairs, 38, no. 3 (2019): 509, https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2019.00134.
Photo by Alex Moliski on Unsplash