Hello and welcome to the Orgence Podcast.

I'm your host Lawrence Krause.

On Indigenous People's Day, poetically, I recorded a conversation with anthropologist Elizabeth Weiss.

Elizabeth is well known as an anthropologist who's advocated,

importantly not letting ideology, either religious or secular, get in the way of her scientific studies or science in general.

She curated a large collection of ancient human remains

at San Jose State University and has spoken out passionately for not letting indigenous creation myths

get in the way of studying these ancient skeletons to learn about human evolution and the origins of humans here in North America and beyond.

And for that, she has been canceled both from her university,

which basically removed her from being curator of that collection,

and she later on retired because she couldn't continue her studies.

But also she's spoken out in various national scientific meetings about not letting

indigenous creation have a privileged position. After all, we don't let creation myths,

Christian creation myths about fundamentalist creation myths about the universe being 6,000 years old,

get in the way of science. And she argued we should hold the same standard for even indigenous

creation myths. And as I say, it's gotten in trouble. Her lecture on that subject was later

removed from the collection of the national meeting she was speaking in. And then on a very different

subject, she and another group of scientists were talking about the importance of sex in understanding

anthropology, in particular in her case, sex and skeletons. Being able to tell whether a skeleton

was male or female is very important and gives useful information on the on the everyday lives

of ancient peoples but even that seemingly non-controversial subject was deemed too controversial

for the american anthropological association which in an unprecedented move after her session had been approved, decided to

...