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There was a recent change to the "Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act" which has led to several of the best natural history museum museums simply shutting down their Native American exhibits last week, rather than (what I would naively expect, based on the title) removing human remains from display or something. For instance, The Field Museum papered and curtained over their displays. The American Museum of Natural History is closing two exhibit halls.
This seems like the sort of rule that looks like it might make sense initially, of not grave digging and talking to descendants, until everyone is suddenly reminded that archeology largely is grave digging, and finding descendants is often fraught, with plenty of Tribal Council politics even if a museum can figure out the right authorities to talk to.
I can't tell if this was the intention of the President's Office when they passed the rule, and how much will be left after everything settles (or if it won't settle, and everything will just sit in storage awaiting a change of zeitgeist).
Admittedly, I already mostly go to the local natural history museum for the animatronic dinosaur, and my state has lots of Pueblo Ruins museums, but they're not very good, and run in partnership with the Native American communities. It isn't clear how this will affect locally interesting museums about communities not continuously inhabited since the most archeologically interesting period, such as the Dickson Mounds museum (I recommend stopping by if you're in the area!). Their most interesting parts for non-archeologists are landscape, reproductions and dioramas anyway, so perhaps not much. The Milwaukee Natural History Museum has an unusually enjoyable Native American section (very good in general, go if you're in the area!), but iirc it was also mostly reproductions and dioramas as well.
Ultimately, I suppose it will probably not deteriorate the experience all that much for non-archeologists once the dust settles, but will be one more step of history museums in general toward irrelevance.
Reminds me about that law banning leaving trace amounts of sesame (?), even with warning on packaging. Intended to be help for people deathly allergic to it. Deliberate inclusion of sesame remained legal.
Resulting in producers starting to add sesame deliberately. Impacting people with allergy but capable of eating products that had just traces of it.
I'm dumb. Why would this rule change cause them to start adding sesame deliberately?
How much do you think it costs to prevent trace contamination from a fairly common ingredient in other products? Your options are effectively 1) extremely thorough cleaning, 2) completely separate production facilities, or 3) stop making either the products with sesame or those without. Option 3 is by far the cheapest and there's apparently more demand for products with sesame than without.
Ah, that's what I was missing. I thought they could simply say "made on equipment that may have traces of sesame".
And exactly that practice was banned causing the mess.
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That's the warning they were effectively campaigning against
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