On the Warpath

My Battles With Indians, Pretendians, and Woke Warriors

Elizabeth Weiss

• Publisher: Academica Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9781680533323
• eBook ISBN:
  9781680533347
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

On The Warpath is an autobiographical account of controversial anthropologist Elizabeth Weiss's storied career on the front lines of the culture war in our colleges and universities. Her opposition to the reburial of Native American skeletal remains, her insistence that indigenous knowledge is not science but myth, and her fight against wokeism and political correctness in academia exposed her to numerous controversies and cancel culture campaigns, and a court case. A photograph of Weiss with a skull - as natural to anthropologists as a doctor being pictured with a stethoscope - led to her university shutting her out of the collection and changing the locks. This became an international news story, as did the American Anthropological Association canceling one of her presentations because she explained that a skeleton’s sex is binary and not gender fluid. This hard-hitting and often humorous book tells the story of Dr. Weiss’s fight for science against superstition, and her attempts to promote free speech and academic freedom. It also exposes the current rot in today’s universities, through the lens of her battles against day-to-day absurdities. These include an attempt to bar “menstruating personnel” (formerly known as women) from the curation facility, a campaign to ban research on ancient Carthaginian remains because the individuals concerned never consented to photography, and a plan to declare X-rays sacred, so that they can be repatriated to Native Americans (who may actually be Mexicans), prior to being burned or buried.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Landing My Dream Job
• Chapter 2: Scholarly Endeavors and High Praise
• Chapter 3: Fault Lines in the Bay Area
• Chapter 4: Awakening Woke Warriors
• Chapter 5: Academic Debate is Buried by Support for Creationists
• Chapter 6: Diggin’ Up Grandma: Ghoul and Graverobber
• Chapter 7: Ten Little Indians
• Chapter 8: See Something, Say Something
• Chapter 9: What to do When a Tenured Professor is Branded a Racist
• Chapter 10: Back with Old Friends and Finding New Enemies
• Chapter 11: Pretendians: Mexicans by Any Other Name
• Chapter 12: New Beginnings
• Conclusions
• Further Reading
• Index
• About the Author