‘The Scandal of Cal’ by Tony Platt

At the American Anthropological Association’s yearly meeting in Toronto, 2023, small stickers were available with slogans including “Decolonize anthropology,” “Like a Boas,” “Channeling Zora,” and “It’s OUR responsibility.” But anthropologists’ anxious relationship to the history of our field will not be resolved with a sticker. Debates over how to reckon with anthropology’s past carry on.

Tony Platt’s book The Scandal of Cal (2023) joins scholarship dedicated to uncovering connections between higher education (including anthropology), settler colonialism, slavery and racist legacies, particularly in the US (cf. Anbert 2024; Bhambra, Gebrial, and Nisancioğlu 2018; la paperson 2017; Stein 2022; Wilder 2013). Platt is affiliated with the Center for the Study of Law and Society at Berkeley and a founder of the Berkeley Truth and Justice Project that began in 2020. The book is a polemical retelling of UC Berkeley’s history. It makes broad connections between the Manhattan project and the destruction of Indigenous lands near Los Alamos, UC Berkeley scientists’ involvement in developing the atomic bomb, the lack of memorials on campus to civilian lives in Japan and Indigenous lives in California, eugenics, and the hoarding of Indigenous artifacts and human remains. The concept of “connections” though, remains vague: which connections have been omitted? Can just about anything be understood as a connection?

Platt’s history starts before Berkeley’s foundation: “To challenge how Berkeley brands itself requires starting the region’s long history before there was a university” (12). He dedicates a chapter to the Ohlone communities who lived in the place now known as UC Berkeley. He also describes his own arrival on campus in the 1960s, his participation in the Free Speech Movement, and the repressive response faced by progressive students. Platt sees history as an ongoing argument about the past: memorials matter, and omitting facts about the settler colonial beginnings of the university causes present-day harm. The Morrill Act of 1862 which established land grant universities has been celebrated for widening access to higher education, but there has been less discussion of how the land it granted was appropriated, often with violence, from Indigenous people (see Fanshel 2021). Platt details how donors benefitted from land annexed by the US after the Mexican-American war, how Confederate generals and owners of enslaved people were hired as faculty, and how the campus has been a training ground for US military personnel since its beginning. Several chapters focus on the Department of Anthropology and the anthropological museum. Platt states that Indigenous artifacts and ancestral remains accumulated by the museum are still in its collections, in violation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). In fact, UC Berkeley is one of the slowest federal institutions to comply with NAGPRA, with one state audit from 2020 reporting that only 19% of the collection had been repatriated (Howle 2020). According to Platt, the university accepted donations of remains as late as in 1987 (139). Though he acknowledges that the repatriation process is complicated by the fact that many remains are labelled insufficiently and their provenance is difficult to document (Platt 2021, 173).

Critiques of the beginnings of anthropology are far from new (Asch 2015). Platt highlights the unethical treatment of human remains and the unwillingness among Berkeley anthropologists to speak up against the genocide of Indigenous people following the Gold Rush, or against the myth of the “disappearing Indian” (140). He documents anthropologists’ participation in the plundering of graves and hoarding of remains. Platt quotes Franz Boas himself writing in his diary in 1888, “It is the most unpleasant work to steal bones from a grave, but what is the use, someone has to do it” (96). With Alfred Kroeber, who would lead the anthropological department at UC Berkeley, Boas held a mock funeral for an Inuit man, Qisuk, who died from tuberculosis while housed at the American Museum of Natural History; Qisuk’s son, Minik, attended the funeral but was not informed that Qisuk’s skeleton and brain were sent to the Smithsonian Museum. In a story that has been retold many times, in many ways (cf. Field 2005; Kenny, Killion, and Scheper-Hughes 2002; Kroeber 2004; Scheper-Hughes 2001; Vizenor 2001), Kroeber later shipped the brains of a Yahi man, known under the name of Ishi, to the Smithsonian. Kroeber housed Ishi at the anthropological museum from 1911 to his death in 1916, where Ishi lived as a janitor, informant, living exhibit, and friend. The story of Kroeber is not without nuances: Platt recognizes that Kroeber advocated for Indigenous rights, and that his ethnographic work preserved ceremonies later revitalized. Furthermore, his linguistic work has been praised (Garrett 2023). However, his claim that the Ohlone were “extinct”, according to Platt, reinforced the idea that “cultural transformation among native peoples erases their Indigenous identity” (110, quoting Leventhal et al. 1994).

In a much-discussed controversial decision, in 2021 UC Berkeley denamed the anthropology department’s building, formerly known as Kroeber Hall. Platt notes however that the building’s room named after Kroeber’s apprentice Edward Gifford, an advocate of eugenics, remains undisturbed. Similarly, despite the denaming of a building previously honoring the LeConte brothers, who were avid supporters of white supremacy, a campus memorial to the Lecontes still stands. Platt suggests that simply removing memorials to figures whose ideals can no longer be supported is only the starting point. Acknowledgement of past atrocities cannot stand alone in recognizing the very violent foundations of many US universities (See also Anbert 2024; Robinson 2019; Stewart-Ambo and Yang 2021). 

In his eagerness to illustrate the carelessness surrounding excavations of graves, Platt extensively quotes letters, research, and reports, which makes at times for a repetitive and difficult read. Yet the book establishes clear connections between settler colonialism and current practices at UC Berkeley and fits neatly into current interest in “reckoning” with the colonial, racist, and imperialistic legacy that the United States is built on (cf. Glaude Jr. 2020; Gonzalez and Meyerhoff 2021; Hannah-Jones et. al.. 2021; Seidule 2020). Beyond suggesting that new initiatives are needed, and that acknowledgement of past atrocities and complicities is not enough, it leaves the reader to ask what form this reckoning should take.  

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Works Cited

Anbert, Lærke Cecilie. 2024. “‘How do we name the air that we breathe?’ The haunting presence of white supremacy and settler colonialism at UC Berkeley.” Globalisation, Societies and Education,  1–14.

Asch, Michael. 2015. “Anthropology, Colonialism and the Reflexive Turn: Finding a Place to Stand.” Anthropologica 57 (2): 481–89.

Bhambra, Gurminder K, Dalia Gebrial, and Kerem Nisancioğlu, eds. 2018. Decolonising the University. Pluto Press.

Fanshel, Rosalie Z. 2021. “The Morrill Act as Racial Contract: Settler Colonialism and U.S. Higher Education.” CRNAI Project Reports and Working Papers. Berkeley, CA: UC Berkeley: Center for Research on Native American Issues.

Field, Les W. 2005. “Who Is This Really about Anyway? Ishi, Kroeber, and the Intertwining of California Indian and Anthropological Histories.” Journal of Anthropological Research 61 (1): 81–93.

Garrett, Andrew. 2023. The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall. MIT Press.

Glaude Jr., Eddie S. 2020. Begin Again. James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own. Random House.

Gonzalez, Jaime Acosta, and Eli Meyerhoff. 2021. “Stained University: Reckoning with Duke’s Nexus of Higher Education and Tobacco Capitalism.” Social Text 39 (1): 93–123.

Hannah-Jones, Nikole, Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman, and Jake Silverstein. 2021. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. One World.

Howle, Elaine M. 2020. “Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. The University of California Is Not Adequately Overseeing Its Return of Native American Remains and Artifacts.” California State Auditor Report 2019-0477. Auditor of the State of California.

Kenny, Alexandra K., Thomas Killion, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes. 2002. “‘Ishi’s Brain, Ishi’s Ashes’: The Complex Issues of Repatriation: A Response to N. Scheper-Hughes, 17(1).” Anthropology Today 18 (2): 25–27.

Kroeber, Theodora. 2004. Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America. University of California Press.

la paperson. 2017. A Third University Is Possible. University of Minnesota Press.

Leventhal, Alan, Les Field, Hank Alvarez, and Rosemary Cambra. 1994. “The Ohlone: Back from Extinction” In The Ohlone Past and Present: Native Americans of the San Francisco Bay Region, edited by Lowell John Bean. Ballena Press.

Platt, Tony. 2021. Grave Matters: The Controversy Over Excavating California’s Buried Indigenous Past. 2nd edition, First published 2011. Heyday.

Robinson, Dylan. 2019. “Rethinking the Practice and Performance of Indigenous Land Acknowledgement.” Canadian Theatre Review 177 (1): 20–30.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2001. “Ishi’s Brain, Ishi’s Ashes: Anthropology and Genocide.” Anthropology Today 17 (1): 12–18.

Seidule, Ty. 2020. Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause. St. Martin’s Press.

Stein, Sharon. 2022. Unsettling the University: Confronting the Colonial Foundations of US Higher Education. Critical University Studies. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Stewart-Ambo, Theresa, and K. Wayne Yang. 2021. “Beyond Land Acknowledgment in Settler Institutions.” Social Text 39 (1): 21–46.

Vizenor, Gerald. 2001. “Ishi Obscura.” Hastings West-Northwest Journal of Environmental Law and Policy 7 (3): 299–306.

Wilder, Craig Steven. 2013. Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. Bloomsbury Press.