MIT’s woke anthropology department has been busy. In recent years the faculty’s contributions to the sum of human knowledge included mushroom wisdom to decolonize biology, hot-brick coal stoves to fight global warming, and artisanal cheese scholarship. That last achievement won its auteur an appointment as MIT’s Associate Dean of Faculty. The search committee sure did a heck of a job finding someone with the appropriate background for the world’s leading STEM university.

Enter Professor Sonya Atalay, director and principal investigator of the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science (CBIKS), whose mission is to establish indigenous oral tradition as a coequal partner, a “braid,” with Western empirical science.

CBIKS is not a therapy retreat. It is an NSF Science and Technology Center, the first ever grounded in social science, and the National Science Foundation is funding all of it. The Center maintains a formal policy for the Burning of Material Offerings for Ceremonial, Cultural, Traditional, or Religious Observance, which its website calls, with touching modesty, a “Smudging Policy.”

Atalay’s ideological empowerment rests on NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, on whose federal review commission she served under both Bush and Obama.

The circus that NAGPRA has become is documented in devastating detail in the Beaver’s own research report, NAGPRA: From Compromise to Catastrophe: a 2024 regulatory rewrite that legally elevates oral tradition over DNA evidence, mandates mass reburial of irreplaceable prehistoric remains, and has shuttered exhibition halls at Harvard’s Peabody Museum and the American Museum of Natural History. Elizabeth Weiss, a physical anthropologist and Babbling Beaver advisor who spent seventeen years fighting to preserve these collections for actual science, paid for her dissent with her career.

Professor Atalay, for her part, is untroubled. “Relationships are the task,” she explains, recalling her extensive people experience working her way through college bartending at a nightclub.

Just like AOC.

Story suggested by Advocatus