In the Media

This page contains links to recent media coverage, public talks, podcast interviews, webinars, and other ways of sharing my work.

Article on my watershed research in Archaeology magazine. By Eric Powell, May/June 2024 edition.

“This was a cemetery,” says Beisaw, as she enters an opening in the forest where a wetland and pond stretch over several acres. Once the final resting place of dozens of residents of the hamlet of Olive, the cemetery was one of 32 that were relocated to make way for the reservoir. “The water table moved up because of the reservoir,” she says, “and water now fills all those former graves.”

Article on my watershed research in the Kingston Wire. By Maya Schubert. October 2023.

Quoted in New York Times, September 2022. Congress Told Colleges to Return Native Remains. What’s Taking So Long? By Mitch Smith and Julie Bosman.

April M. Beisaw, the chair of the anthropology department at Vassar College, said she and other academics who entered the field after NAGPRA were accustomed to taking the wishes of tribes into account.

“Those in my generation don’t know a world without NAGPRA, so we accept that this is the right thing to do,” said Dr. Beisaw, who added that the slow return of remains and artifacts could be partly blamed on the attitudes of some older archaeologists who opposed the law. “They felt entitled to those collections,” she said. “They felt they had been personally attacked.”

Quoted in New York Times, September 2021. The World’s Deadliest Bird Was Raised by People 18,000 Years Ago. By Asher Elbein.

April M. Beisaw, chair of anthropology at Vassar College, who was not involved in the study, said it was “an excellent example of how the smallest and most fragile remainders of the past can provide evidence of important cultural practices.”

“The techniques described can be used in other places to further develop our understanding of how important birds have been to humans, long before the domestication of chickens,” she added.

Just don’t try to hatch cassowaries at home, if you know what’s good for you.

Quoted in Science, April 2021. An archaeology society hosted a talk against returning Indigenous remains. Some want a new society. By Lizzie Wade.

The program committee then grouped Weiss’s and Springer’s talk into a session titled “Curation, Repatriation, and Accessibility: Vital Ethical Considerations.” April Beisaw, an archaeologist at Vassar College, presented her talk on the importance of NAGPRA compliance in that session. “I was one of the very many people on the program committee. And I was not asked to review that abstract, even though NAGPRA is an expertise of mine,” she says. “I would have flagged it.” She called Weiss’s and Springer’s argument “nonsensical. … NAGPRA is a human rights law, it’s Indian law, and it’s a property rights law. It is not a religious law.”

Quoted in The Miscellany News (Vassar College), February 2020. As College Works to Comply with NAGPRA, Community Interrogates Institutional, Academic History by Lucy Leonard, Jessica Moss, Aena Kahn, Frankie Knuckles.

In an interview with The Miscellany News, Associate Professor of Anthropology April Beisaw explained that she was the first to raise concerns related to the storage of remains in the basement of Blodgett Hall. Beisaw teaches the only undergraduate course in the country that solely focuses on repatriation and has published multiple papers on the subject. “It’s been difficult for me as my suspicions turned into assurances, and as I tried to get to the point where I had enough evidence to convince my colleagues that I knew what I was talking about and that I wasn’t wrong,” she described.