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. 

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.