President Joe Biden’s administration cannot even leave museums untouched by radical leftist policies, as they too must now adhere to his identity politics regime.
On Dec. 13 of last year, the Department of the Interior updated the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 to compel museums to shut down exhibitions about Native Americans and remove their artifacts from the public eye permanently unless the distant descendants of their original owners give them explicit permission to display them.
The addition to the law, found in Title 43, states that every museum “must determine whether it has sufficient interest in a holding or collection to constitute possession or control on a case-by-case basis given the relevant information about the holding or collection.” This means that museums must try their best to track down anyone with any possible relation to the historical artifacts in question and get their permission for display. Otherwise, no one gets to even know they exist anymore.
The purpose of this new addition is to “ensure that progress in Indian Country endures for years to come.” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland says that it is also “an important part of laying the groundwork for the healing of our people.”
The federal government essentially wants to put Native Americans on a pedestal by effectively blotting out most archaeological traces of their existence from the public eye. Not only is this paradoxical but it is also ironic, considering how much they want to prove how diverse and inclusive they are of minority cultures.
The American Museum of Natural History is preparing to close off two major Native American exhibit halls this weekend under the updated policy. Its top administrators treat this as a wonderful thing, further modernizing the institution for its millions of annual visitors by obscuring their understanding of indigenous cultures. Sean Decatur, the museum’s president, says: “The halls we are closing are artifacts of an era when museums such as ours did not respect the values, perspectives and indeed shared humanity of Indigenous peoples.”
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History does not require consent to be known. It is something that should be accessible to all people. It has no underlying agenda as an intellectual field, and its sole purpose is to inform. To require consent from a handful of selected people rather than to allow experts to analyze more efficiently and then convey that information outwardly is anti-historical.
For the sake of diversity and inclusion, the Biden administration has fundamentally handicapped our ability to understand underrepresented cultures by forcing museums to acquire consent to show their own artifacts to us.
Parker Miller is a 2024 Washington Examiner Winter Fellow.