White filed a complaint with the university in 1997 accusing the museum, under Joyce’s leadership, of seeking an unnecessary extension of the NAGPRA reporting deadline. (Campus investigators found no improper activity, according to White.)
Joyce said he was simply trying to account for all the wreckage that should be reported under NAGPRA. “It’s really crazy to have to say that I did what the law said I had to do,” she told ProPublica and NBC News. Joyce said she found the complaints «without merit.»
White then filed an internal complaint against Joyce with the school’s Academic Senate, alleging that by asking her to relinquish the human remains, she had infringed on his «academic privileges.»
The university brokered a deal: White could keep the ancestral remains as long as museum staff and tribes could access them for inventory and reporting under NAGPRA.
Joyce said the arrangement was untenable and that she did not feel supported by the university’s leadership. White continued to teach with the remains.
A decade after NAGPRA
Myra Masiel-Zamora, now an archaeologist with the Pechanga Band of Indians, enrolled in White’s osteology class more than 20 years ago when she was an 18-year-old freshman. But she, she said, she withdrew from the course after a teaching assistant told her that the human remains belonged to Native Americans.
“That was the first time I really learned that an institution could and can, and is, using actual Native American ancestry as teaching tools,” he said. «I was really upset.»
Concern for the institutional management of indigenous remains extended beyond the classroom.
Concerned about the slow pace of repatriations under NAGPRA, California lawmakers passed their own version of the law in 2001, aimed at closing loopholes in the federal statute and allowing tribes to claim remains regardless of whether they have federal recognition. But the state did not fund an oversight committee established by the bill.
In 2007, without consulting the tribes or offering a public explanation, UC Berkeley abruptly fired museum employees responsible for NAGPRA compliance and appointed White and others to a newly formed campus repatriation committee, according to tribal leaders. .
This upset the tribesmen, who brought their concerns about the new committee to state senators. The layoffs “removed the only university staff who would stand up to Mr. Tim White and his offensive comments about Native American tribes and our ancestral remnants,” Reno Franklin, then a board member and now president of the Kashia Band of Pomo. Indians, he said during a 2008 state legislative hearing.
In emails to ProPublica and NBC News, White sought to discredit testimony from Franklin and others in the hearing by saying it had been the result of a decades-long effort by the university to use it as a scapegoat for its failings. White said he was only in an advisory role and did not make final repatriation decisions.
Meanwhile, White’s career skyrocketed after he led a team that discovered and excavated a 4.4-million-year-old hominin unearthed in Ethiopia. It was considered the scientific breakthrough of the year in 2009 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and cemented his reputation in the field. He also placed him, along with the likes of Barack Obama and Steve Jobs, on Time Magazine’s 2010 list of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Two years later, White and two other professors sued to block the repatriation two 9,000-year-old skeletons to the Kumeyaay, 12 tribes whose lands straddle the US-Mexico border near San Diego. White and the other professors wanted to study the remains, which had been unearthed in 1976 on the grounds of the Chancellor’s House on the UC San Diego campus.
They argued that there was not enough evidence to support Kumeyaay’s ancestral connection to the remains, and that the UC system had failed to prove that the remains could legally be considered «Native American.» Based on the professors’ interpretation of the law, human remains had to have a cultural or biological link to a present-day tribe to be considered Native American.
They said not allowing them to study the remains violated their rights as researchers. An appeals court ruled against the teachers, citing Kumeyaay’s sovereign immunity, meaning they could not be sued.
As tribal frustration grew over the lack of progress on repatriations, UC Berkeley convened a «tribal forum» in 2017. In the private meeting, tribal leaders and others expressed anger that university staff, including White, had resisted his requests for repatriation and that the university required an excessive amount of evidence to claim ancestry, according to an internal university report.
The following year, UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ dissolved the NAGPRA committee on the campus where White had worked, records show. The university established a new one that did not include him.
Meanwhile, Berkeley was preparing 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 ancestral remains were excavated in burial grounds along the California coast and the Channel Islands. According to the school’s NAGPRA inventory records, many of the remains had been taken by an archaeologist in 1901 whose expeditions were financed by Phoebe Apperson Hearst, wife of mining magnate George Hearst and namesake of the UC Berkeley museum of anthropology.
UC Berkeley kept the Chumash remains and lent some to White for research projects, before returning them to the tribe in the summer of 2018.
When repatriation day finally arrived, Nakia Zavalla and other members of the tribe drove 300 miles to campus and entered the back room of the anthropology building where UC Berkeley stored their ancestors.
“Walking into that facility for the first time was horrible. Literally shelves of human remains,” said Zavalla, the tribe’s cultural director. “And you take them out, and there are mixed ancestors, sometimes just all the femur bones, a tray full of skulls.”
Zavalla said tribal members had to bring their own cardboard boxes to bring their ancestors home for burial, a complaint other tribal nations have raised when dealing with the university. UC Berkeley officials said they were unaware of Zavalla’s «disturbing account» but changed their policies to ensure they provide assistance «as requested by the Tribes.»
Zavalla said the visit highlighted how the university had deprived the tribe of more than ancestral remains, he said. The university housed recordings and items that ethnographers and anthropologists had previously collected from Chumash elders.
For Zavalla, the information could have benefited his efforts and those of other tribal members to revitalize the language and traditions of the Santa Ynez Chumash, which government policies once tried to eradicate. But the information was not shared freely, he said: «Those items were stolen.»