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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.
I think this is a case of good intentions going horribly wrong because the people making the rules don’t understand the process and decided based on what sounds good rather than what work. A rule requiring getting permission when the owners of the material are clear, obvious and still around to ask is fair enough. But when coupled with the difficulty of finding the actual tribes (which may not exist anymore) and the definition of relics being fairly wide means that you essentially cannot dig or use any artifacts because you can’t get permission. This will definitely end up erasing a lot of Native American culture from our interpretation of history.
You know, I've had the same thought about things like renaming sports teams. Not that the previous name of the Washington Commanders wasn't offensive, but that we've established a de facto rule that mentions of Native American culture or history are offensive, but also that nobody got fired for just completely ignoring the topic. It already feels like public awareness of real native traditions and people has dropped tangibly in the culture over the last few decades of my life because attempts to bring it up are soured by (IMO bad-faith, shallow) criticism that it's "problematic" or doesn't cast enough native actors. Not that there's nothing at all to those claims, but I think they end up being overall counterproductive, and in practice are just erasing it from the culture completely.
In another, similar vein, look at the show Kim's Convenience. I recall reading that the reason the show shut down was because they had someone on the crew (a camera guy, I believe) quit, and they couldn't find an Asian person to replace him. So rather than have non-Asians on the crew, they shut it down. But as a consequence there's one less depiction of Asians and their culture in the broader culture. The perfect was allowed to be the enemy of the good.
Also, real talk - the name Washington Redskins wasn't offensive, and they should've just kept it. People would've moved on to complaining about something else eventually.
The Redskins name got changed because the owner got caught pimping out the cheerleaders amd not sharing revenue with other NFL entities and he wanted a positive news cycle.
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