Tony Platt started writing his book during the COVID-19 lockdown. He was spending the long days in the UC Berkeley archives looking at letters, department budgets, photographs and bones.
As an affiliate scholar in UC Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Law and Society, he was working on a project to investigate the history of the university’s accumulation of Native ancestral remains and artifacts. In particular, he was looking for reasons the university was reluctant to comply with a 1990 law that required all federally funded institutions to repatriate those collections to their rightful owners.
In its holdings, Berkeley had thousands of human remains, and tens of thousands of artifacts, taken from tribes in California throughout its history.
Artifacts were regularly unearthed from the 1870s onwards. A gravesite was discovered in the 1900s during construction, and the remains were mistreated. They stored them in a campus museum, where they were handled like specimens. The skeletons were dismantled, the bones separated into boxes and used for teaching anthropology classes. Platt found that for a time in the 1940s, ancestral remains were kept in the basement of the Hearst gym for decades.
Expanding his scope, Platt studied the university’s land holdings, faculty research and political activities.
“I had plenty of free time during the lockdown, as all of us did, so I bicycled around the campus and started looking at all the plaques,” he said.
He also examined cornerstones, keystones, monuments and architecture.
He began to piece together the story of Berkeley, beginning with its founding in 1868. The Ohlone had already been nearly erased by Spanish missionaries, who used them as forced labor. By the 1890s, Phoebe Hearst was financing its expansion, starting new programs and funding the construction of neoclassical buildings within a European-style master plan.
“The founders had very much in mind that they wanted to keep up with the East Coast universities and European universities and museums,” Platt said. “Phoebe Hearst was bankrolling expeditions to Egypt, Peru and Mexico in the 1890s before there was even an anthropology department.”
The university was grabbing land from Indigenous people, setting up atomic weapon manufacturing on native lands in New Mexico, promoting eugenics on campus, inviting supporters of the Confederacy to become faculty and chancellors of the university.
Tony platt, author and scholar
Platt’s book, “The Scandal of Cal: Land Grabs, White Supremacy, and Miseducation at UC Berkeley,” chronicles the university’s 150-year history and brings the narrative forward into a call for a reckoning.
Cal’s failure to return the native remains, he said, is evidence of the institution’s internal sense of aristocratic privilege. With an endowment of $6.95 billion, he feels that attitude continues today.
“The university was grabbing land from Indigenous people, setting up atomic weapon manufacturing on native lands in New Mexico, promoting eugenics on campus, inviting supporters of the Confederacy to become faculty and chancellors of the university,” he said.
Dealing with the ‘most recalcitrant’
On Tuesday, Platt appeared at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club in conversation with UC Berkeley School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. They discussed the behavior of the university and the 1990 Native Graves Protection Repatriation Act.
According to the law, any organization that received federal money must go through all its collections and do an inventory. Inventories must be placed in the public record through the U.S. Department of Interior, where tribes can access it and make claims to get their artifacts back.
Chemerinsky asked Platt why he thinks Berkeley has not complied with the law.
“Berkeley was the most recalcitrant,” Platt said. “It was threatened with fines and didn’t bring people in to do the inventory until they were forced to do that. Then when they did the inventory, it didn’t comply with the legislation.”
Most of the tribes that are in the Bay Area are not federally recognized, he said. They don’t have land and they don’t have a lot of resources in which to rebury people and to maintain artifacts.
“So, it’s an extraordinarily expensive operation to do that,” said Platt. “That’s without Berkeley making gestures of repatriating human remains and without offering land back, which would be the appropriate thing to do.”
The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology has been closed since May.
“It’s just sort of desolate and abandoned. All the human remains, there were probably 10,000 to 12,000, maybe more, are all there. I mean, I don’t want to go into that museum. I don’t want to go into the corridor beside it,” he said.
Platt was a Berkeley professor in the 1960s in a department that was later closed. He is incensed by the way Cal indexes its public relations on the radical social movements of that era.
“The university thinks it invented free speech,” he said, pointing to accounts in his book. “They have been suppressing it since the 1930s.”
The university thinks it invented free speech. They have been suppressing it since the 1930s.
Tony platt, author and scholar
Chemerinsky defended Cal, pointing to the social benefits of having a major research center in Berkeley, that it was an engine for social mobility. He mentioned the law school’s establishment of an Indigenous Law and Justice Center, an education and outreach program.
“I think the key with any university is to have faculty working in the area,” Chemerinsky said.
Platt disagreed that administration is acting in good faith, but he said some of them had reached out to him. There is a current search for a new chancellor, and they wanted his perspective on the way forward.
“I’m realistic that having a few meetings with people about it is not going to make that kind of change,” he said, still suspicious of the university’s corporate approach to damage control. “But you look for what little openings you can find and then you try to keep the door open.”
The book was published on Aug. 29. One week later, on Sept. 5, the book and author were the subject of a Berkeley public event. It was held at The American Cultures Center, a multi-discipline multi-cultural program that began in 1989 at the arc of the rise of post-colonial theory.
“Please join us as Tony Platt gives the first-ever public talk about his latest publication” the event page read. “Discover untold stories behind UC Berkeley’s past. Light refreshments will be served.”
Correction: This story has been updated to accurately reflect Tony Platt’s affiliation as a scholar of the UC Berkeley Center for the Study of Law and Society, not the Ph.D. program. Additionally, the investment in the university was solely made by Phoebe Hearst, using her inheritance from George Hearst. We appreciate your understanding.