Students and professors speak out against potential TikTok ban Community reacts to College’s announcement of recently discovered Native remains

This article was originally published on April 4, 2023.

The announcement last Tuesday that the College had discovered Native remains in its possession felt like a “slap in the face” to the Native community on campus, according to Virginia Snake-Bumann ’24, who is HoChunk from Winnebago, Nebraska. Native students on campus have come together as College administrators begin an external audit to identify Native American remains in its collections and pursue repatriation, according to Hood Museum curator of Indigenous art Jami Powell.

Powell, who became the College’s NAGPRA ofcer, said that the external reviewers are “experts in the feld” who work under the guidelines of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, which mandates that institutions return Native American cultural artifacts to the appropriate federally-recognized tribe or Native Hawaiian organization. Powell said that the College had asked the reviewers to conduct a re-inventory of its collection prior to the discovery of the remains but were unable to do so due to the COVID-19 lockdown.

When Congress initially passed NAGPRA in 1990, the law required all institutions receiving federal funds to submit an inventory of Native American osteological and funerary remains in their possession by 1995, Powell noted. She added that NAGPRA did not allocate funding or provide standards for the inventories, which led to oversights.

“Since the [1990s], there’s been more consistency in terms of the kinds of things that institutions submit to the NAGPRA program,” Powell said. “But in the [1990s] … I think people were more concerned about getting them done on time than requesting more time to make sure that they did it right.”

As Dartmouth’s NAGPRA ofcer, Powell’s efort to ensure compliance with the law precipitated Dartmouth’s most recent review of its collections, which began in fall 2020 and led to the recent discovery of the remains of 15 Native Americans.

BY

Charlotte Hampton

The Dartmouth Staff

In recent months, lawmakers in several countries, including the United States, have discussed a possible ban on the social media app TikTok, sparking debate among the Dartmouth community.

While the government has cited issues with national security, students and professors have expressed concerns that a potential ban would infringe on First Amendment rights or have limited efectiveness.

On Feb. 27, the White House gave federal agencies 30 days to remove the app from government devices, and two days later, the U.S. House Foreign Afairs Committee advanced a bill that would allow President Joe Biden to ban TikTok nationwide, The New York Times reported. Government professor Sonu Bedi said that the legislation would likely violate the constitutional rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of association.

“This is going to generate a First Amendment case,” Bedi said. “How do we conceptualize or consider these platforms that are privately run but [create a space for individuals to exercise] First Amendment liberty? That’s the novel question. We’ve never had a situation where these private platforms are ones that are facilitating most of our First Amendment freedoms.”

Bedi said Packingham v. North Carolina — a 2017 Supreme Court case that dealt with the issue of privatelyowned online platforms acting as a public forum — is relevant to the TikTok debate. According to Bedi, the case establishes that social media functions as a public sphere by facilitating the free and open exchange of ideas, and it should therefore be protected by the First Amendment.

“While in the past there may have been difculty in identifying the most important places, in a spatial sense, for the exchange of views, today the answer is clear,” the Court wrote in its opinion for Packingham v. North Carolina. “It is the cyberspace — ‘the vast democratic forums of the Internet’ in general … and social media in particular.”

While government professor Russell Muirhead recognized potential First Amendment infringements, he said he does not think the threat is dire because he doubts that a ban will be passed at all. Muirhead said the push to ban the app represents “symbolic position-taking,” or a way for legislators to show their electorate that they are worried about China. The U.S. government fears that the app — which is a subsidiary of Chinese

“A lot of the initial inventories that had been completed by institutions had errors both in terms of the number of individuals reported or listed as culturally identifable,” Powell said. “Knowing this, I wanted to work on a re-inventory to ensure that we had reported the correct number of individuals.”

Powell said that due to “discrepancies” in the Hood’s cataloging, the museum had no record of the whereabouts of some ancestors who were listed as missing or withdrawn from the collection. According to the College’s press release on March 28, when the Hood opened in 1985, artifacts from various academic departments were consolidated into its collection “with little or no documentation regarding their movements.”

Upon reaching out to anthropology department chair Jeremy DeSilva, who had been working on a similar inventory of the anthropology department’s collection, Powell and NAGPRA research assistant Emily Andrews ’22 found that bones in the anthropology collection shared catalog numbers with those missing from the Hood’s inventory.

“We were fnally able to connect the dots in mid-November,” DeSilva said.

“When that happened, we immediately went through the entire collection, bone by bone, to identify any that had … College museum accession numbers.”

The College organized a gathering for the Native community to announce the news on Native remains ahead of the

College’s ofcial announcement.

Dartmouth’s strong Native community was the reason Snake-Bumann chose to attend the College, making the news more painful, but the fallout more supportive, she added.

“With all of this happening, I feel like we’ve all kind of grown together in one way or another,” Snake-Bumann said. “I’m just really thankful for our community.”

At the gathering, president Phil Hanlon left the event early, leaving some students feeling unsettled, according to Snake-Bumann.

“[It] didn’t really come of the right way,” she said.

After its 1995 review, the College believed “with good faith” that there were no Native American remains in the collection, according to Provost David Kotz. The initial audit was complicated by a lack of information on the provenance of the remains and changing cataloging systems.

“Dartmouth has been receiving — collecting, or receiving as donations — these kinds of materials for over 200 years,” Kotz said. “Not only were attitudes diferent, perhaps, back then, but also the records of where these things may have come from … were lost. I think what’s happening now is a much more in depth, comprehensive efort to track that down.”

According to DeSilva, the remains discovered by the anthropology department had been part of a teaching collection used in ANTH 43: “Human Osteology” and ANTH 50: “Forensic Anthropology,” both of which have been removed from course oferings as a result of the fndings. He added that the anthropology department has removed all the bones in its teaching collection — including those of non-Native origin — and is working to create a new teaching collection of ethically sourced bones through the Geisel School of Medicine’s anatomical donor program.

“Although this wasn’t deliberate, it is the most recent example of a long history of our discipline causing harm to Native communities,” DeSilva said. “We are committed to making this right … and the only way to assure that this can never happen again is to never again teach with human skeletal remains unless you know exactly where they came from.”

Anthropology major Sydney Hoose ’25, who took ANTH 43 in the fall, said that DeSilva and Powell communicated the discovery to Native students in the class before speaking to the Native community at Dartmouth as a whole. Hoose is enrolled with the Cherokee Nation but also identifes as Skidi Pawnee and Chickasaw.

“They wanted to tell us more personally in a small group because … we were handling our ancestors,” Hoose said. “I’m glad they told us beforehand.”

Hoose added that the professors did not know there were Native American bones in the collection, overtly telling students in the class that there were not. She said that though she was “extremely disappointed” by the news, she appreciates the steps the College has taken to remove the bones from campus and support the Native community.

Beyond auditing the College’s collection and suspending certain osteological classes, the “next step” for Kotz is to create a working group “to coordinate the actual hard work that is ahead.” They are in the process of hiring a project manager to help handle the process of repatriation, which Kotz said may look similar to the 2018 efort to return Inuit bones found in the College’s collection to Nunavik, Canada.

While other institutions like Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley have had similar incidents in recent years, Dartmouth has a specifc obligation