Biden-era rules are putting wokeness over science and shutting down museum displays

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, even a flute can now be treated as human remains, as it indicated in a peculiar notice in the Federal Register last week.The Met announced that a decorated bone flute — long identified as animal bone — had been reclassified as the remains of a Native American.Excavated near Malibu, Calif., the flute came to the Met through Nelson Rockefeller’s collection in 1979.Until 2024, the object was understood to be animal bone.Then a museum consultation with the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Mission Indians produced a startling new finding: The flute was made from human bone.The public notice cites no evidence that the Chumash, or any other California tribe, used human bones to make flutes.Nor does it identify any independent scientific test to support the claim.In fact, there is no archaeological evidence that any California tribe ever made flutes out of human remains.If this were in fact a human bone flute, it would be the only one ever discovered in California.So now a museum object once available for study will vanish from public view — not because archaeology proved it failed to qualify for exhibition, but because the Biden administration’s rewrite of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, transformed a 1990 repatriation law into a system that elevates tribal consultation over science.As I explain in a new Goldwater Institute Policy Report, NAGPRA’s interpretation and application have changed drastically because of the Biden administration’s “Final Rule.”The original law was a compromise: Archaeologists and museum curators who celebrated NAGPRA envisioned reuniting human remains, burial goods and sacred objects clearly linked through historic and scientific evidence to modern tribes, while preserving the ability of museums and universities to study and display what could not be linked to modern tribes.That compromise has failed.

The Biden administration’s regulatory changes are erasing o...