Larry Bradley, Ph.D., is an adjunct professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and a busy guy these days.
Daily, calls and emails beg his time as a speaker and consultant on paleontology topics, specifically those at the intersection of culture and science. As a leading authority on past controversies and current best practices for digs on Native American land, Bradley’s message of cultural sensitivity and rightful credit is finding eager audiences in college classrooms and museums.
“I’ve done Zoom lectures at University Cal-Davis, the Seattle Earth Museum, Brown University, other Ivy League schools. Researchers want me in consultation and for joint authorship on papers,” Bradley said. “Yeah, it’s been taking off.”
Demand gained further adrenaline from the PBS series Prehistoric Road Trip last summer. The series host was Emily Graslie, a science communicator, media producer, and former chief curiosity correspondent for the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Graslie said Bradley’s appearance was integral to the discussion of ethics in paleontology.
“I knew from the beginning I wanted to talk about this history of the land where a lot of these fossils came from, and the overlap of the sordid history of colonization,” Graslie said. “When I started the primary research, I was looking in particular for voices to speak to that. The first person that came up was Dr. Bradley.”
Graslie discovered Bradley via his dissertation, Dinosaurs and Indians: Paleontology Resource Dispossession From Sioux Lands, which he wrote and then self-published in book form. It cemented her commitment to get him on the broadcast.
“I was fascinated by it,” she said. “At that point, I reached out to Dr. Bradley and said I’d become familiar with his work and he would be an invaluable resource to the show.”
“I was tickled pink,” Bradley said. “To a certain extent, it felt like somebody pulled my book off the shelf, blew the dust off of it and said, ‘What’s this?’ Everything took off from there.”
It wasn’t always this way. For years, the paleontology community didn’t want to discuss the ethically questionable, if not outright illegal, tactics being employed to prospect and excavate fossils on Native American lands, or how Native communities were routinely uncredited for what was found and whisked away to archives and museum displays.
Given this, it’s probably of little surprise that, as one who deigned to be a truth-teller about scientific and Native American communities, Bradley’s career was nearly over before it started.
“I double-majored in biology and geology at UNO with the whole driving force to be a vertebrate paleontologist,” said Bradley, who earned a B.S. and M.A. from UNO and a Ph.D. in geography from UNL. A vertebrate paleontologist is one who studies ancient animals with a vertebral column, such as fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.
Further driving this desire is that Bradley is part White Mountain Apache and was raised by a stepfather of Oglala Lakota descent, although he is not enrolled in a tribe. “I was trying to get into the vertebrate paleontologist program at Lincoln, as I thought I could be an ambassador between the tribes and science. I guess I was somewhat naïve, because the University of Nebraska paleo program kept denying me entrance into the program.”
Bradley did catch the eye of the head of the geology department and was accepted into that program. Around this time, in the late 1990s, multiple controversies were raging, including disputes over ownership of Sue the T-Rex—found on South Dakota tribal lands—and closer to home, UNL’s mishandling of some Native remains in its archives and its reluctance to return others. Then, in 2002, Bradley had an experience that brought him nose-to-nose with similar ethical issues.
“I was doing a paleontology survey on the Santee Sioux Reservation. I’d humbled myself before that tribe in Knox County, Nebraska, gaining permission and keeping them up-to-date on everything I was doing,” he said. “It happened I found out at a conference that Fort Hays State was doing a dig on a plesiosaur on the Santee Sioux Reservation. That project was taken over by the University of Nebraska and as I made inquiries about that, they said I could be included in everything. That was in the fall of 2002.”
“In the spring of 2003, I see the front page of the Omaha World-Herald and it shows Nebraska Department of Roads and University of Nebraska State Museum employees digging up a plesiosaur in Knox County. In no way, shape, or form did they say, ‘found on Santee Sioux Reservation,’” Bradley said.
It was later determined that the fossil was found on private land within the boundaries of the reservation. Proper credit of finds matters for several reasons. There’s a possible financial benefit that can help Native American tribes provide opportunity and services to their people. It’s also an acknowledgement of the legitimacy of these communities, Bradley said, to say nothing of an educational benefit too often denied, as with the plesiosaur incident.
“I made noise and I asked that the Santee school students be involved in the dig,” Bradley recalled. “They said no, it was too close to the state highway, which was a safety issue. At the time that made sense, but a couple months later on the museum website, the University of Nebraska depicted non-Native American students with plaster all over their hands, participating in the dig.”
According to a university spokesperson, there were more than 1,000 people who visited the site during the two-week dig. Their records indicate that visitors included students from the communities of Creighton and Newman Grove, along with a teacher and student from the Santee school. They also stated that Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park and Morrill Hall have plaques acknowledging the role of the Santee Sioux tribe.
Recent wider attention to race and discrimination have been timely for bringing notice to Bradley’s career-long crusade. He hopes the growing acceptance of his message signals things are changing, however slowly.
“For years, I compared it to being a sailor sitting in a boat in dead-calm water. Then all of a sudden, the trade winds start to blow, the sails pop open and you start to sail,” he said. “A lot of this was collected from Native American historic lands without their knowledge or understanding of the valuable material. I hope I’m creating some reflection and understanding about that.”
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This article originally appeared in the March/April 2022 issue of Omaha Magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
