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A Genetic Articulation of Indigeneity

International indigenous movement has emerged in force since the 1970s and

1980s (Niezen 2003, Wilmer 1993). Many international and U.S. domestic non-

governmental organizations (NGOs) and other groups have organized under the

rubric of indigenous (e.g. the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations,

the World Council of Indigenous Peoples, the International Indian Treaty

Council, the Indigenous Environmental Network, North American Indigenous

Peoples Biodiversity Project, the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, etc.). This would

have seemed against all odds at the end of the 19th century, when scholars,

policy-makers, and writers widely predicted the demise of native societies—of

the “Indian,” “Aboriginal,” or “savage.” Whatever the moral and political

perspective, whether eager for or lamenting their demise, it was generally agreed

by 19th-century European and American thinkers that such groups represented

earlier stages in human evolution. Their demise in the face of western progress

was seen as inevitable (Berkhofer 1978 [1979], Bieder 1986, Dippie 1985, Morgan

(1877) [1909]).

Fast forward a century and a half and worldwide estimates range from

250,000 to 600 million individuals belonging to over 4,000 “indigenous” groups

(de la Cadena and Starn 2007, Durning 1992, Goehring 1993, Niezen 2003, and

World Bank 1991). Within the U. S., Native Americans have resurged in number

throughout the 20th century, not only due to high birthrates, but also to changes

in how the category is defined (Thornton 1987 and 1997, Indian and Native

American Employment and Training Coalition 2004, and Ogunwole 2006).

Estimates of indigenes worldwide are, of course, contingent upon how

indigenous is defined, and that is a key line of inquiry in this chapter. Common

definitions focus on historical continuity with pre-colonial societies and ancestral

territories, cultural distinctiveness from settler societies, economic and cultural

non-dominance, and determination to persist as culturally and/or nationally

distinct entities (Anaya 2000 and Cobo 1986).

Mary Louise Pratt, in the timely volume, Indigenous Experience Today (de la

Cadena and Starn 2007), notes that the etymological roots of terms such as

indigenous, native, aboriginal, and first nations all refer to “prior-ity in time and

place,” denoting “those who were ‘here (or there) first,’ that is, before someone

else who came ‘after’” (398). A relational definition predicated upon invasion—

indeed that prioritizes the temporality of the invaders—“indigenous” is often not

the primary identity of such peoples, but rather they may be “Maori, Cree,

Hmong, Aymara, Dayak,” etc. (399). A related, but not synonymous identity for

many (potential) indigenes in the U.S. is that conditioned by citizenship in a


tribal nation, for example, in the Navajo or Cherokee Nations. In Canada many

indigenes are also citizens of First Nations and Metis communities.

James Clifford adds that while we cannot “arrive at a core list of essential

‘indigenous’ features . . . indigenous movements are positioned, and potentially

but not necessarily connected, by overlapping experiences in relation to Euro-

American, Russian, Japanese, and other imperialisms. They all contest the power

of assimilationist nation-states, making strong claims for autonomy, or for

various forms of sovereignty” (Clifford 2001, 472). This includes in the U.S. the

determination of tribal peoples to persist as distinct political entities (Deloria and

Lytle 1984). Indigenous peoples worldwide have focused on advocating for

rights and controlling resources that will ensure their survival as distinct

peoples. These ideas oppose the 19th-century expectation that the Indian and

other savage races would die out in the advance of western civilization.

As an intellectually coherent concept and organizing framework, the

category of indigenous resonates unevenly across the globe depending on local

and national histories of colonization and governing institutions (Baviskar 2007,

de la Cadena and Starn 2007, Li 2000, Niezen 2003, Nyamnhoj 2007, Schein 2007,

Tsing 2007, and Yeh 2007). In particular, the lines between indigenous and non-

indigenous fall differently in south versus north and east versus west as

indigeneity as a category intersects different regimes of race, ethnicity, and class.

Indigenous identities apply awkwardly in some locations and contexts while in

others it seems that indigeneity has “always ‘belonged’.”(de la Cadena and Starn

2007, 398).

Formations of indigeneity like formations of race (Omi and Winant 1994)

then are explicitly political, historically situated, and contingent. While it would

be intellectually fruitful to analyze indigeneity in relation to race formations, that

is a bigger project than I take on in this chapter. Here I give indigeneity

categorical primacy, although I do draw lessons from histories of racial science

that help us understand how indigeneity is conceptualized within human genetic

diversity research. Indeed, genetic indigeneity could be analyzed as a newer

formation of race that has a difficult time fully accounting for locally-specific,

land-based concepts of sovereignty and self-determination that nonetheless

undergird indigenous peoples’ own articulations. For while genetic diversity

research seeks out less “admixed” populations tied physically to a land base,

presumably biologically separate and distinct, it does not generally account for

political and cultural resistance to (not simply difference from) the assimilationist

state that many land-based peoples center in their indigenous identity. It misses

the reason “indigenous” ranks with Dakota or Dayak in self-definitions.

Given the definitional focus on indigenes’ biological and cultural

continuity with pre-colonial societies and territories, and a corresponding


distinctiveness from settler societies that also includes native peoples’ economic

non-dominance, the indigenous category gains more traction in contexts in

which the boundaries between settler and indigene seem clearly constituted.

Much of the rest of this chapter will be devoted to a discussion of especially

cultural, geographical, and biological “continuities” that are seen to legitimate

indigeneity, and how differences between dominant social concepts and genetic

concepts of indigeneity condition different possibilities for indigenous peoples.

Briefly though, a word on the economic parameters of indigeneity seems in

order.

Jessica Cattelino (2008 and 2010) writes about the Seminole Nation of

Florida, a gaming tribe, and the predicament of wealth for the category of

indigeneity. She explains the “double bind that faces indigenous peoples in the

Anglophone settler states” in which tribal nations, as other polities, “require

economic resources to exercise sovereignty, and their revenues often derive from

their governmental rights; however, once they exercise economic power, the

legitimacy of tribal sovereignty and citizenship is challenged in law, public

culture, and everyday interactions within settler society” (Cattelino 2010, 235-36).

Long-time director of the American Indian Law Center, Sam Deloria, illustrates

Cattelino’s concept of the “double bind” as he points out the (double) standard to

which indigenous groups—tribal nations—in the U.S. are subject as the category

of indigeneity gets legitimated according to political, cultural, and economic

criteria:

There is always going to be a Liechtenstein. Why, I don’t know. But

it’s always going to be there. Nobody visits Liechtenstein

periodically to make sure they are sufficiently poor and sufficiently

culturally distinct from their neighbors to merit continued political

existence. They’re just around. So when we’re waxing eloquent

about . . . cultural sovereignty and all other kinds of sovereignty, be

damned careful that we’re not saying to this society, “In exchange

for a continued political existence, we promise to maintain some

kind of cultural purity,” because you think it’s going to be by our

standards. Hell no . . it’s going to be by THEIR standards”

Sam Deloria 2002, 58-9.

And “THEY,” Deloria continues, “see culture as static.” Elsewhere, Deloria asks

if the “concept of indigenous peoples” engenders in us “an obligation to the rest

of the world to stay in the jungle . . . To the degree that our right to exist is based

on cultural difference, we’re making that bargain” (Genomics, Governance, and

Indigenous People 2008). He notes that concepts of cultural distinctiveness and

economic status (i.e. poverty) overlap in dominant views of indigeneity. Indeed,


Deloria calls attention to how we are testing the robustness of this category in the

U.S. as economic changes in Indian Country unbraid these multiple threads of

distinctiveness—political (i.e. jurisdictional or tribal nation status), cultural, and

economic. “If you took two of those away,” Deloria asks, “do you still have a

right to exist?” Speaking of another prominent gaming tribe, he explains that

“Indians who are not identifiable to non-Indians as being culturally [and

phenotypically] distinct, and who are rich, still asserting a right to a distinct

political existence, are on very tenuous grounds” (Genomics, Governance, and

Indigenous Peoples, 2008). Again, we can think of the tie to land: autochthony.

Deloria’s example refers to a recently recognized very small tribe with a land-

base near to multiple urban centers. Would larger, more “remote” tribes with

authority over a particular land-base for multiple generations encounter the

same skepticism?

The Articulation Framework

Herein I examine a form of indigeneity “articulated” (Clifford 2001, 2003 and

2003, Hall 1986a and 1986b) by researchers who use genetic techniques to study

human migrations and human genetic diversity across the planet. Using genetic

techniques to study traditionally anthropological questions, this body of work is

sometimes referred to as “anthropological genetics” and is populated by

researchers trained in genetics, (biological) anthropology, and (bio)statistics.

Before getting into the specifics of genetics practices, I should explain

“articulation” and how I use it, perhaps counter-intuitively, to understand the

conjunctures and distances between indigenous peoples’ and geneticists’

enunciations of the same category. James Clifford’s seminal “Indigenous

Articulations” draws on the politics of articulation laid out by Stuart Hall (1986a

and 1986b) and Hall’s “updating of Gramsci” (Clifford 2001, 477). “Articulation”

is an analytic that complicates overly dichotomous views of indigeneity as

essentially determined, primordial, or necessarily static (an ahistorical view in

light of the colonial upheaval that produces the category in the first place), or as

simply constructed or invented—“the result of a post-sixties, ‘postmodern’

identity politics” (Clifford 2001, 472) -- implying a lack of “realness.” As Clifford

explains, “In articulation theory, the whole question of authenticity is secondary,

and the process of social and cultural persistence is political all the way back. It is

assumed that cultural forms will always be made, unmade, and remade”

(Clifford 2001, 479).

Articulation implies discourse or speech; . . . “a cutting up and combining

of linguistic elements, always a selection from a vastly greater repertoire of

semiotic possibilities. So an articulated tradition is a kind of collective ‘voice,’ but


always in this constructed, contingent sense” (Clifford 2001, 477-78). Stuart Hall’s

famous example of the “articulated lorry” elucidates. A truck’s cab and trailer get

hooked or articulated together, but can then be unhooked and recombined with

other cabs and trailers anew. Likewise, previously disparate elements can be

conjoined into new cultural and social formations in ways that are not unreal or

illegitimate simply because they involve borrowing, interpretation, and

reconfiguration. “Articulation,” Clifford sums up, “offers a non-reductive way to

think about cultural transformation and the apparent coming and going of

‘traditional’ forms.” It helps us to acknowledge the legitimacy and

productiveness of dynamic practices that are responsive to indigenous lives and

priorities. Indeed, dynamism in cultural practice and identity formation is a sign

of being alive, another key claim that indigenous peoples consistently make.

They have survived. They are still here.

Articulation then is a social constructionist analytic, but one that is not

cynical—that does not seek to de-legitimate or constitute as “not real” those

things that are dynamically constituted and reconfigured over time in changing

contexts. Articulation is more nuanced and generous than the “invention of

tradition” concept, especially as put forward in the oft-cited Hobsbawm and

Ranger (1983).1 More traditional social constructionist critiques have been

important in that they have troubled the firmness or naturalness of categories

such as race, ethnicity, and gender, for example, that continue to be used to

restrict the choices and life chances of individuals and groups. On the other

hand, if taken to their logical end, they can also be seen to impose additional

intellectual authority over those who have already suffered much at the hands of

colonial knowledge production, i.e. indigenes whose rights claims, including

those related to “culture,” are simply “invented," artifacts of “politics.”

Articulation is a nuanced and not a “hard” social constructionist framework.

Clifford’s task in adapting the politics of articulation to indigenous social and

cultural formations is to highlight indigenous peoples’ dynamic identities and

evolving relationships to land and home but without undermining their

authoritative claims. Articulation theory has been generated by scholars writing

against colonialisms and their “frontier effects,” the hard lines they try to

enforce: us/them; insiders/outsiders; modern/savage; black/white, the west/third

world; men/women, etc. (Clifford 2001, 477).

Before moving on to genetic articulations of indigeneity, a word of caution

about the articulation framework is in order. While many indigenous groups

may be open to seeing cultural, social and political practices as articulated, they

1 Clifford (2001, 480) cites Roy Wagner (1980) as a better source for understanding the “prescient

recognition of inventive cultural process.”


may not be as willing to see the land base as such. Many U.S. tribes, for instance,

rely heavily on, if not a continuous physical contact with a land base, a spiritual

or original rootedness in particular locations and landforms as wellsprings of

their identities as Peoples. The land, though remade and reshaped, inhabited

differently over time and by non-indigenous peoples remains “unarticulated,”

always indigenous space. Indeed, Clifford explains that it is difficult for an

articulation analysis to account for the land as a “material nexus of continuity,”2

as a constant ground from which indigenous peoples’ exercise their cultures and

politics (Clifford 2001, 482). So the very concept of “articulation” might seem to

be at odds with indigenous peoples’ insistence on continuous attachment to

place. Or, at the very least, the articulation analytic cannot adequately account

for enactments of sovereignty co-constituted with tangible, material relations

with land. For example, Native American tribal sovereignty and political

jurisdiction is both rooted in and sustains a people’s relations with land.

Articulation does a better job of accounting for a land-informed identity in

diaspora, yearnings for, or memories of land—for “concrete lives led in specific

circuits between the global and the local” (Clifford 2001, 482)—then it accounts for

indigenous governance (including tribal citizenship) that require indigenous

control of—more than attachment to—a particular land base.

From Indigenous Articulations to Genetic Articulations

An analytically incisive framework, I import articulation in order to analyze how

non-indigenous peoples’—that is, scientists who study human genome

diversity—and indigenous peoples’ differ in their articulations of the category

“indigeneity.” How do the enunciations of each set of speakers overlap and

differ, and with what implications for whom? Applying articulation in this way

raises interesting questions of politics. Generated as part of anti-colonial critique,

I use the framework (too generously?) to analyze knowledge practices that

indigenous critics have deemed “biocolonial.” Human genome diversity research

has been said to extract genetic resources from indigenous peoples—much as

indigenous land and cultural properties were appropriated in earlier centuries—

for the economic, intellectual, and national identity benefits they would accrue to

colonizing states (Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism 2000, Marks

2005, Mataatua Declaration 2007, Mead 1996, Mead and Ratuva 2007, Reardon

and TallBear forthcoming, Tsosie 2005). In applying articulation—a

2 It may be that the “material nexus” for a group is other than land: pastoralist societies in Africa might

count cattle as an important, unarticulated basis for their claims to indigeneity, and their related rights and

responsibilities. The Makah might suggest that whales are a material reality not subject to articulation with

different cultural practices and meanings in the formation of “Makahness.”


constructionist analytic, but one that is not fundamentally cynical—to genome

diversity research on indigenous peoples, I read those scientific practices as not

necessarily inauthentic or illegitimate, but as robustly (given the authority of

genomics in our society) and perhaps dangerously, reconfiguring the category of

indigenous. This is not the type of intellectual project to which articulation

theorists have seemed committed.

Clifford asks “how should differently positioned authorities (academic

and nonacademic, Native and non-Native) represent a living tradition’s

combined and uneven processes of continuity, rupture, transformation, and

revival?” (Clifford 2001, 480). The question of positionality is key. Even those

genome scientists who do not directly challenge as invention indigenous

articulations of their origins nonetheless actively (re)articulate indigeneity in

ways that can oppose indigenous peoples’ own articulations. Genome scientists

define subject populations in order to sample, they reject other subjects as too

highly “admixed,” they analyze data, and they “write up” in ways that implicitly

if not explicitly define what constitutes “indigenous” or “traditional” people: the

Navajo, the Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota, or the Seminole, for example. They

unhook and re-hook longer-standing categories and objects of social and natural

scientific inquiry (e.g. “tribe,” “race,” and “indigenous”) with newer “material-

semiotic objects” (Haraway 2000) (e.g. “molecules,” “sequences,”

“chromosomes,” “DNA double helix,” and “populations”) (Reardon 2005) to

make newer “articulated ensembles,” conjoining previously disparate elements

(Clifford 2001, 478). When genetic articulations conflict with indigenous

articulations of histories and identities, those differences often get defined as

“cultural” differences (e.g. McInnes 2010).3 Yet too often, indigenes alone are

seen as having “cultural” ideas while genome scientists have “facts.” Yet

disagreement between different constructions of indigenous identity as based on

different ways of reading bodies and histories does not simply come down to a

choice, nor to “culture” versus “facts.” Both genome scientists and indigenes

constitute knowledges from particular “standpoints,” asking questions,

gathering and interpreting data from very different philosophical and

experiential locales (Harding 1995). Furthermore, scientific constructions and

disciplinary knowledges are already highly valued in mediating indigenous

33 On November 3, 2010, in his presidential speech at the annual meeting of the American Society

for Human Genetics, outgoing president Roderick McInnes outlined the challenges and necessity

for genetic scientists to work collaboratively with indigenous populations rather than in the more

historically expropriative fashion. While McInnes described challenges chiefly as “cultural,” his

analysis was in reality more complex in that he outlined explicitly political, institutional, and

historical challenges to collaborative relationships between indigenous populations and genetic

scientists.


rights and resource claims, while the genome sciences wield increasing cultural

and intellectual authority in our society.

Power and Articulation

A second key thrust of articulation theory, in addition to its focus on

reconfiguration and change, is the role of power. Who has power to get others to

buy into their representations and definitions? Who has the institutional, legal,

and intellectual authorities to determine who or what counts as “indigenous”?

As Clifford notes, not every articulation will be legitimized. For example, some

groups in the U.S. are denied their requests for government recognition as tribes

because they are not successful in getting the federal government—the party

with the authority and money—to accept their articulation of themselves as

such.4 Federal authorities look for cultural and political “continuity” in groups

claiming to be Native American tribes, and they call in anthropologists, legal

specialists, historians and other disciplinarians to testify for or against that

continuity (McCulloch and Wilkins 1995). Those who exhibit practices,

organizational structures, and even phenotypes that fit with expectations of

cultural and social stasis are more likely to receive recognition, while those with

characteristics that contradict expectations are denied recognition and status

(McCulloch and Wilkins 1995, Clifford 1988).

Genetic articulations of indigeneity, like federal government articulations

of tribalness, to the extent that they are taken up and structure the allocation of

rights and resources, have power over peoples’ lives. A key question is will

genomic practices and articulations grow in their conceptual influence? Will they

come to influence legal and institutional decisions about recognition of Native

American rights and resources? Who will benefit and who will suffer? We live in

a time and place, as Sheila Jasanoff explains, in which “knowledge has become

the primary wealth of nations, displacing natural resources, and knowledgeable

4 I often refer to “recognized” or “federally recognized” tribes. These are recognized by the U.S.

government as being political entities with whom the U.S. has a government-to-government

relationship. Historically, such tribes have signed treaties with the U.S. government and/or went

through recognition processes in which they proved to the satisfaction of the U.S. Department of

Interior and the U.S. Congress their cultural and political continuity. For some, federal

recognition is a controversial designation. Some groups identifying as American Indian or Native

American have not proved to the satisfaction of the U.S. government their legitimacy as “tribes”

with “cultural continuity” from some point in the past. These do not receive federal recognition,

funding or benefits, or have not yet undertaken the arduous, lengthy, and costly recognition

process. In addition, there are approximately 30-60 state recognized tribes in the United States

depending on the source. See Wikipedia, “State Recognized Tribes,”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_recognized_tribes (last visited December 26, 2010).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_recognized_tribes


individuals constitute possibly the most important form of capital” (Jasanoff

2005, 4). The social and legal sciences in particular already hold sway in federal

articulations of tribalness. Will the genetic articulation of indigeneity come to be

taken up in such processes? Furthermore, can the genetic articulation become

also an indigenous articulation of indigeneity as some U.S. tribes and Canadian

First Nations take up DNA testing within a discourse of sovereignty (TallBear

2008, Bardill 2010, and DCI America Tribal Enrollment Workshop 2010)?

Genetics and Indigeneity

As I have noted elsewhere (cite here), indigeneity becomes a genetic category in

the service of particular research questions and in relation to key narratives of

race and origins that are always ultimately narratives of purity. Who in the

world today is related to whom? How far back in human history do they share

ancestors? Where did those ancestors “originate”? Who were the founding

populations, both genetically and culturally? Certain methods solidify the notion

of indigeneity as a genetic category and as critical for this type of inquiry. But

while the laboratory and biostatistical techniques that support a genetic

articulation of indigeneity developed in the last half of the 20th century,

longstanding and overlapping narratives condition its emergence.

The transition from the 19th-century expectation of the Indian’s death to a

21st-century acknowledgement of the indigene’s will to survive has not played

out for everyone. A genetic definition of indigeneity forms around precisely the

expectation of an inevitable disappearance. This expectation has clear

antecedents in earlier ideas of racial hierarchy and human evolution. But it is

also a problem for anthropological geneticists because indigenous bodies and

blood are seen as key to understanding the origins and movements of human

beings around the world, and into the Americas. Before drawing blood, one must

define who is indigenous, who is genetically distinct enough to sample, whose

genome will serve as a benchmark of population purity and object of statistical

analysis. When indigeneity is reconceptualized as genetic, the building blocks of

social discourse remain: autochthony, continuity from past to present, and

cultural-biological distinctiveness. Genetic indigeneity shares with indigenous

movement narratives about purity and origins.

But indigenous articulations of indigenous history and identity are also

fundamentally different. They wield autochthony and continuity to contest the

power of the assimilative state. They assert self-governance and political,

cultural, and biological survival in the face of colonization. The concept of

indigeneity also enables mutual recognition and collaboration by indigenous


peoples across disparate histories and geographies. In its social mode,

indigeneity is a generative discourse (Pratt in de la Cadena and Starn, 2007, 399).

On the other hand, genetic articulations assume—and science has been

supported by—the continuation of dominant societies’ assimilative power.

Uneven power relations between scientists and indigenous peoples have

historically facilitated research on those peoples. And dominance is the condition

for the urgency to sample “vanishing” indigenous populations. The genetic

articulation operates in a field of scarcity. It interprets indigenous characteristics

as valuable precisely because the indigene is seen as disappearing. Indigeneity

recast as genetic becomes a discourse of scarcity and death, rather than what it is

in indigenous social movement, a discourse of survival.

How does indigeneity become a genetic category in the service of

particular research questions, and in relation to key narratives? Human genome

diversity research questions—who in the world is related to whom? How far

back in human history do they share ancestors? Where did those ancestors come

from? In which directions did they travel? Who were the founding

populations?—are obviously not only questions about genetics. Contemporary

genetic populations and genetic forebears are named with reference to modern

national, ethnic, and racial labels, suggesting other things at play besides the

presence or absence, order and frequency of molecules. It seems impossible to

even name a group to study, whether living or dead, without reference to

modern social formations or geopolitical boundaries. In addition to research

questions and our conceptual limitations, sampling methods and techniques for

analyzing markers also help constitute indigeneity as a genetic category. Genetic

research methods are strung through with history, politics, and cultural practice.

Genetic definitions of indigeneity then embed longstanding social and cultural

notions of race that loop back to reconfigure social understandings as genetic—

giving them added or a renewed legitimacy and power to affect peoples’ lives.

Several narratives feature in the articulation of genetic indigeneity,

helping to conjoin late 20th-century social movement terminology (i.e.

indigenousness) and technoscientific knowledge and practices (e.g. matrilines,

patrilines, breeding populations, marker frequencies, sampling techniques, and

techniques and technologies for DNA analysis,) with centuries old race ideas.

Narrative 1: The Vanishing Indigene

Our genes allow us to chart the ancient human migrations

from Africa across the continents. Through one path, we can

see living evidence of an ancient African trek, through India,

to populate even isolated Australia. But to fully complete


the picture we must greatly expand the pool of genetic

samples . . . . In a shrinking world, mixing populations are

scrambling genetic signals. The key to this puzzle is

acquiring genetic samples from the world's remaining

indigenous and traditional peoples whose ethnic and genetic

identities are isolated. But such distinct peoples, languages,

and cultures are quickly vanishing into a 21st century global

melting pot.

Genographic Project website5

That centuries-old narrative of the “vanishing American” or the “disappearing

Indian” is widely represented in the “the end of the trail” image often replicated

in popular art. In it a prototypical Native American male with bare torso and

breech cloth sits bareback atop a horse slumped over in front of an empty

landscape and a setting sun. On the cover of Brian Dippie’s monograph, The

Vanishing American (1982), we see another version of the Indian’s end as the

breech-cloth clad Indian in full headdress throws back his head and outstretches

his arms almost as if on a crucifix, offering himself up to a greater power

(Manifest Destiny?). Such iconic images are recast on the Genographic Web site

in genetic terms. Instead of extermination through war or federal government

policy aimed at assimilating Indians into the American population, we now face

the hastening and inevitable admixing of the world’s “populations”—

assimilation or endangerment via recombination.

The vanishing indigene presents a predicament for human genome

diversity research because those “Isolates of Historic Interest” (Human Genome

Diversity Project 1992a and 1992b in Reardon 2005, and Sleeboom-Faulkner

2006), less admixed indigenous peoples, are key to unraveling the puzzle of

human migratory history. Those who study human physical forms and their

biological underpinnings have warned since at least the 17th century that we are

nearing the time when we will be irrevocably mixed, when we will no longer be

able to glimpse that definitive time of racial (now populational) purity. Our

origins will be obscured and our collective human history will be lost to us.

While indigenous peoples—whose numbers are growing—focus on the threat to

distinct social and cultural practices of assimilation, for geneticists, this

impending loss of biological purity constitutes grounds from which to urgently

claim rights to Native American and other indigenous biological resources. Not

5 https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/about.html (last visited December 28,

2010).

https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/about.html


only the highly marketed Genographic Project, but other global research efforts

working to systematically archive human genetic diversity, and smaller scholarly

research projects in universities and field sites around the world, deploy the

vanishing indigene trope both as lamentation and as source of authority.

The vanishing indigene emerges from research questions and methods

that sort and delineate peoples into genetic populations in ways that over-simplify

entanglements of biology and peoplehood. For example, indigenous individuals

who are viewed as too highly admixed are eliminated from samples of the

population. Those same individuals are considered legitimate members when the

indigenous groups’ legal and/or social requirements (e.g. tribal or First Nation

citizenship rules) are applied.

Indigeneity then gets mapped to genetics in the following steps:

1) Scientists worry about indigenous peoples “vanishing” because they view

them as storehouses of unique genetic diversity.

2) Since the genetic signatures of “founding populations” are confounded in

those who are more highly admixed, those people are less useful for

research;

3) The admixed indigene becomes not indigenous enough. We see this in

common sampling standards wherein a good research subject should have

three or four “indigenous” grandparents, not one;6

4) If admixture is on the rise, the indigene is—by genetic definition—

vanishing.

While geneticists attempt to abstract the social in evaluating indigeneity,

indigenous peoples do not leave biogenetic concepts out of group belonging. In

the U.S., for example, indigenous political citizenship is almost always based on 6 The ideal in genetic studies of human evolution is to sample individuals with four grandparents

from the same population. World renowned population geneticist Luca Cavalli-Sforza writes that

aboriginal populations with “25% or more admixture” are excluded from his global study

(Cavalli-Sforza 1994: 24). Smaller-scale studies are even stricter, ranging from 0% alleged

admixture in individuals (four endogenous grandparents) (Lorenz and Smith 1994; Torroni et al

1993b) to populational admixture rates of ≤5% (Callegari-Jacques et al 1993;, Neel 1978; Torroni et

al 1992), 8.7% (Torroni et al 1992), and 12% (Torroni et al 1993a). “Admixture” is calculated

according to the presence in populations of haplotypes or genetic lineages that are tied to non-

American geographies. Two respectable anthropological genetics texts (Crawford 1998 and

Relethford 2003) also completely miss discussing how populations or individuals are

chosen/constituted as “American Indian” (or “Eskaleut,” “Nadene,” or “Amerind”) for sampling.

Other key articles about Native American migrations also skip discussions of criteria used to

determine who constitutes “the Pima” or “the Papago” (e.g. Wallace and Torroni 1992) or

“Native Americans” (Santos et. al. 1999) for sampling purposes. Those who rely on data sets from

older studies are especially vague in discussing their inclusion criteria for samples (e.g. Torroni et

al 1992; Torroni et al 1993a; Torroni et al 1993b). It would appear that the authors believe that

group boundaries and sampling decisions are self-evident.


specific forms of biological relatedness that change over time and from group to

group in response to changing political and economic conditions. Therefore,

those assertions and regulations that deal with belonging and peoplehood also

turn on legal enactments of indigenous sovereignty as well as on collectively

held practices and histories that get complexly entangled with biogenetic

relatedness.

Genetics-based assertions about the impending doom of the indigene

contradict key indigenous claims. A pivot-point of indigenous organizing is that

while peoples acknowledge the assaults on them and their lands, they view

themselves as working towards survival as peoples, towards greater autonomy.

Not surprisingly, they resist terms that objectify them as historical or biological

curiosities or vestiges. The very identification of indigenous peoples under the

rubric of “indigenous” is articulated precisely in order to better fight for their

survival as “Peoples” who are distinct from settler societies. And so the

disconnection with a genetic articulation of indigeneity is not easily bridged.

Narrative 2: We are all related

Paradoxically, although admixture is seen as a problem for research, it is also

often framed in a positive light, as a “we are all related” story. Within the context

of 20th-century history, this narrative resonates for a lot of people in the west. We

had eugenics in Nazi Germany, in the U.S. and Britain. Following that we had

the Civil Rights movement and the rise of multi-culturalism. The narrative that

“we are all related” is important to national cultural histories. It also has

particular resonance for the life sciences that played a controversial role in the

race politics of the early 20th century. Post World War II, geneticists decried the

race cleansing of Nazi Germany and tried to distance themselves from U.S.

complicity in eugenics. Like the vanishing indigene, this more recent but equally

powerful narrative is entangled with European and American colonial history,

again with particular resonance for geneticists.

In addition, the “we are all related” story also represents particular

understandings of ancestry, kinship, and race. Most commonly, anthropological

genetics privileges narrow sets of biological relationships along maternal and

paternal lines to unnamed genetic ancestors, to a relatively few founding

ancestors from which everyone alive today descends. Examining these lineages

enables scientists to trace genetic relationships between populations and

approximate dates and geographic directions of human migrations. But

matrlines and patrilines are also vested with cultural meanings about origins,

(e)migrations, settlement, continental racial formations, and are focused on

kinship lines traceable through individuals. They enable a focus on the


individual as carrier of a lineage or a “signature” of biogenetic ancestors. This is

an important form of relatedness for individuals and lineages who are concerned

with tracing their ancestry to far-off geographic locations out of which those

lineages traveled and which anchor identity, and where genealogical

documentation of family trees may be thin. For example, U.S. American

genealogists are fascinated with exploring such lineages in Europe and Africa

(Nelson 2008 and Smolenyak and Turner 2004). David Schneider’s seminal

American Kinship (1968, 1980) also documents the importance of the blood link—

that individual, linear link back through a genealogical line—for U.S. American

(that is, “white, urban, middle class informants,” 121) notions of kinship. It is a

line, according to such belief, that cannot be “truly unhinged,” despite any legal

agreements, in terms of constituting “real” or “true” kinship and identity (23-25).

While privileging the narrative that “we are all related” may seem anti-

racist and inclusive in one context, matrline and patriline knowledges are too

narrow to illuminate complex kinship practices, histories, and legal structures

that ground group belonging and identities constituted by indigenous peoples.

For example, in the U.S. lineal biological descent in tribal enrollment practice is

always coupled with other data and rules, i.e. descent from specific named

ancestors noted on tribal “base rolls” and often blood quantum requirements that

require multiple, usually very closely-related tribal ancestors (i.e. parents or

grandparents) if they are to be met (Strong and Van Winkle 1996, Thornton 1997,

Meyer 1998, Harmon 2001, Sturm 2002, Gover 2008, Kauanui 2008). In the U.S.

and internationally, indigenous identity, as already described, forms at the

intersections of complex social and political criteria.

Narrative 3: We are all African (and genetic science can end racism)

Integral to the idea that we are all related is the narrative that we are all African.

With the popularization of the theory of “Mitochondrial Eve” (MtEve)— the

single genetic mother of all living humans (Cann, Stoneking, and Wilson 1987)—

the idea that we are all really “African” has become a powerful idea within and

without scientific circles. But this narrative, like the others highlighted here, is

conditioned by European and American colonial history.

In a photograph leading a 2002 interview with Spencer Wells, a

prototypical white man (very probably Wells) stands behind a prototypical

African (Rediff.com 2002). The white man’s face is slightly out of focus and half

concealed behind the African. Appearing with the caption “We are all really

Africans under the skin,” this photo asserts a 19th-century racial science view of

connectedness where “Africans” precede the modern white man on the

evolutionary chain of humanity. The living African represents the white man’s


past and the white man represents modern humanity. We see a scientific

metaphor that conjoins old with new elements to help build a new genetic

articulation of indigeneity and race.

On one hand, it is nonsensical to say we are all African. “Africa,” as it has

been named and conceived in human political memory did not exist 200,000

years ago. Tracing all human lineages to mtEve does not make us all “African” in

any meaningful sense. But the claim itself is meaningful because Africa is not

simply a name given by some humans to a particular landmass. Longstanding

colonial perspectives are at play. Africa has long been seen as fundamentally

different. Postcolonial philosopher V.Y. Mudimbe (1994) writes about the two

forms that African otherness takes in European colonial thought: 1) Africa has for

centuries been seen as primordial and less evolved. It has been characterized as

outside of time and history—as a place of irrationality, famine, and savagery. 2)

Or Africa has been seen as a “Rousseauian picture of [a] golden age of perfect

liberty, equality and fraternity.” Either way, “Africa” embodies more than the

notion of one particular continental landmass out of which came the ancestors of

all modern humans.

Indians were also seen as lower on that chain of human evolution, but

they were seen as closer to moderns, that is, whites. And while many scientists

viewed Africans as permanently less evolved, the Indian was seen as capable of

being biologically absorbed by whites (Bieder 1986, Morgan 1877 [1909]). But,

crucially, Indians were seen culturally antecedent to moderns, again whites. One

rarely finds in contemporary discourse the oppressive language of race hierarchy

that characterized the racial science of earlier times. Today races, or better yet,

populations, still exist, but are seen as connected. Yet the ideas that we are all one

and that we share the same ancient genetic heritage continue to rely on

representing living African bodies and living indigenous bodies as primordial, as

the source of “all of us.” But “us” cannot then include Africans and indigenes.

Genetic Articulations of “Kennewick Man”

All three narratives: the vanishing indigene, we are all related, and we are all

African as they are entangled with genetic science can work together to

undermine indigenous articulations of identity and claims to legal rights. In 1998

Deborah Harry and the late Hopi geneticist Frank Dukepoo, writing on behalf of

the organization that would become the Indigenous Peoples Council on

Biocolonialism (IPCB), raised an alarm about this particular issue in relation to

the now defunct Human Genetic Diversity Project. IPCB continues to raise

similar concerns with the ongoing Genographic Project.


Scientists expect to reconstruct the history of the world’s

populations by studying genetic variation to determine

patterns of human migration. In North America, this

research will likely result in the validation of the Bering

Strait theory. It’s possible these new “scientific findings”

concerning our origins can be used to challenge aboriginal

rights to territory, resources and self-determination. Indeed,

many governments have sanctioned the use of genomic

archetypes to help resolve land conflicts and ancestral

ownership claims among Tibetans and Chinese, Azeris and

Armenians, and Serbs and Croats, as well as those in Poland,

Russia, and the Ukraine who claim German citizenship on

the grounds that they are ethnic Germans. The secular law

in many nations including the United States has long

recognized archetypal matching as legitimate techniques for

establishing individual identity.

Deborah Harry and Frank Dukepoo

(1998)

The controversy over so-called Kennewick Man shows the potential for human

genetic diversity research to challenge indigenous identity claims and rights over

human remains. When 9,000-year-old remains were found near the Columbia

River in Washington State in 1996, the first scientist to examine them, James

Chatters, assumed they belonged to a Euro-American settler (Hurst Thomas

2000). Carbon dating analysis soon revealed them to be much older than that,

and a group of Native American tribes invoked the Native American Graves

Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), claiming the remains for reburial.

The tribes were supported by the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency with

jurisdiction over the area where the remains were found.

Despite the antiquity of the remains, the involved scientists hoped to

disrupt tribal claims by showing that “Kennewick Man”— Umatilla tribal

members referred to him as “the Ancient One” (Howe 2001)—could not be

traced directly to contemporary Native Americans. In order to repatriate,

NAGPRA requires the “cultural affiliation” of those remains with a

contemporary Native American tribe. Specifically, the law requires that a

“relationship of shared group identity” must be able to be “reasonably traced

historically or prehistorically between members of a present-day Indian tribe or

Native Hawaiian organization and an identifiable earlier group” via a

“preponderance of the evidence—based on geographical, kinship, biological,

archeological, anthropological, linguistic, folklore, oral tradition, historical


evidence, or other information or expert opinion” (Native American Graves

Protection and Repatriation Act 1990 and National Park Service).

With relatively recent remains, burial practices and accompanying

material artifacts can be used to affiliate remains with living Native American

groups whose more recent histories, practices, and kinship ties are documented.

But these remains offered no such evidence. In addition, independent forensic

analyses had assessed the ancient human as having morphological similarities to

several other studied populations, both contemporary Native American and

Asian populations. The Department of Interior initially ruled in favor of

repatriating the remains to Native American Tribes (Babbitt 2000). In the hope of

finding more definitive evidence to determine the disposition of the remains to a

specific tribe, the Department of Interior called for genetic analysis of the type

used in human genetic diversity research (McManamon et al 2000). NAGPRA

allows for the documentation of a “lineal descent” relationship between

contemporary Native Americans and the remains or cultural patrimony claimed.

Absent conclusive cultural or other material evidence pointing to a clear cultural

relationship, it was hoped that lineal descent might be substantiated via genetic

evidence to contemporary tribal groups, i.e. through finding a Native American

mtDNA or Y haplotype in the genome of the ancient human remains. It should

be noted that all of the tribal claimants—the Umatilla, the Yakama, the Nez

Perce, and the Wanapum Band opposed destructive DNA testing as it might

establish “a precedent for the application of such examinations” (McManamon et

al 2000). In the end, researchers were unable to extract DNA due to

mineralization of the bones (Kaestle 2000, Smith et al 2000).

Morphological and genetic examinations were ultimately inconclusive as

to which specific Native American tribes the remains should be affiliated with.

Still the Department of Interior (DOI) determined that cultural affiliation was

satisfied by a “preponderance of evidence”—the location of the remains in the

aboriginal territory supported by tribal oral tradition of their long occupation of

that region. Despite lack of material evidence that would provide conclusive

evidence of cultural continuity between the remains and contemporary Indian

tribes, “the unique legal relationship between the United States and Indian

tribes” required that “any ambiguities in the language of the statute must be

resolved liberally in favor of Indian interests” (Babbitt 2000).

Subsequently, a group of scientists challenged DOI’s ruling in court. In

2004, the court confirmed the material, cultural, and historical evidence as

inadequate to “support a finding that Kennewick Man is related to any particular

identifiable group or culture” (Bonnichsen, et. al. v. United States, et. al. 2004).

American Indian law scholar Rebecca Tsosie explains that after the court found

that the remains were “not ‘Native American’ for the purposes of NAGPRA”


scientists requested further DNA testing (Tsosie 2005, 14). She notes that plaintiff

Bonnichsen (Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M

University) wanted to “do the most detailed look at a first American that has

ever been put together” (Bonnichsen in Tsosie 2005), a study that might “hold the

key to determining the identity of the ‘first Americans’” (Tsosie 2005, 14). “It

appears,” Tsosie concludes, that “the litigation over Kennewick Man has been a

way to prove . . . that the ‘first Americans’ were not the ancestors of

contemporary Native American people” (Tsosie 2005, 14). From the standpoint of

scientists such as Bonnichsen, “cultural identity” becomes “a euphemism for

racial identity” and a way, Tsosie argues, to appropriate the concept of

indigeneity away from indigenous peoples’ own definitions (Tsosie 2005, 15).

Two scientists sum up what is at stake with DNA testing and ask, albeit in

different language, would a genetic articulation of indigeneity be accepted or not

and under what terms?

What would be done with any genetic typing (or lack thereof) of

this skeleton. If haplogroup A, B, C, or D is found, and a likely

determination of American Indian biological affiliation is made,

will this set the standard for all future new finds of human skeletal

remains? Will this type of analysis never have to be done again,

and will all skeletons that predate the arrival of Europeans to the

Americas be assumed to be ancestral to American Indians? If the

results are ambiguous or if no DNA remains in the skeleton, how

will this be interpreted, and what will be the ramifications?

Tuross and Kolman (2000)

Because genetic lineal descent, oral tradition, and contemporary tribal

citizenship offer sometimes divergent definitions of “cultural affiliation” (they

may overlap but they are never pinned perfectly to one another like fabric to a

pattern), we are certain to be confronted again with conflicts over remains and

claims to historical truth. Just as morphological examination offers at best

imprecise indications of “cultural affiliation,” genetic evidence (due to

population bottlenecks rendered by colonial diseases and extermination and the

fact that most ancient humans do not have direct descendants living today) will

probably not give us conclusive determination of a direct biological relationship

of ancient remains to living, unambiguous, Native Americans in the same

geographical vicinity. Genetic evidence is likely to further complicate an already

complex legal, historical, and cultural field. The worry for indigenous peoples is

that genetic definitions of relatedness that inform decisions about “cultural

affiliation” will prevail over indigenous definitions and knowledge claims. That


was the concern expressed by IPCB back in the early years of the struggle over

who governed the remains known as Kennewick Man or the Ancient One.

Nearly 15 years later and despite a 2004 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling

awarding scientists the right to study the remains (Bonnichsen et al v. U.S. et al

2004), this case is not closed in a broader sense. Scientists, federal agencies,

Congress, and Native American tribes continue to assert, legislate, and attempt

to regulate who has rights to the remains (National Park Service).7 The

conversation over cultural affiliation and the role of biogenetics in that is no

clearer now than it was then. At present, DNA testing does not definitively

substantiate or contradict claims to the remains. However, scientists have noted

the possibility that improvements in methods and laboratory techniques will

enable successful DNA extraction even from poorly preserved remains (Smith et

al 2000). Whose definitions of indigeneity—whose articulations will prevail?

There are multiple avenues along which indigenous peoples resist or meet

genetic researchers with assertions of their own. Some resist research and

advocate for others to resist. Some U.S. tribes, Canadian First Nations and others

7 In 2008 the Department of Interior proposed a new rule, 43 CFR 10.11, regarding the disposition

of culturally identifiable human remains. See “Native American Graves Protection and

Repatriation Act Regulations—Disposition of Cultural Unidentifiable Human Remains,” Federal

Register 72 (199) (October 16, 2007/Proposed Rules): 58588-58589, available at

http://www.nps.gov/history/Nagpra/MANDATES/FR%20Notice%20Proposed%20Reg%20%20CF

R%2010.11%200-16-2007.pdf (last visited February 20, 2011). Also see “Native American Omnibus

Act of 2005, Sec. 108 Definition of Native American,” for a proposed amendment introduced by

Senator John McCain (R-AZ) to amend Section 2(9) of NAGPRA by adding language that would

broaden the definition of “Native American” for the purposes of expanding the conditions under

which human remains and other cultural patrimony could be repatriated to Indian tribes. The

new rule took effect in May 2010. See “At a Glance: 43 CFR 10.11 – Disposition of Culturally

Unidentifiable Native American Human Remains.” Available at

http://www.nps.gov/nagpra/DOCUMENTS/At-a-glance-43CFR10.11.pdf (last visited February

20, 2011). Under the original NAGPRA legislation, present day Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian

organization claimants of funerary objects, sacred objects or other objects of cultural patrimony

(including human remains) must document a “relationship of shared group identity which can

reasonably be traced historically or prehistorically” with “an identifiable earlier group” (National

Park Service). However, if a direct cultural link cannot be determined with a “preponderance of

the evidence,” the new rule allows a decision in favor of Indian tribes and Native Hawaiian

organizations if they have more general connections, i.e., if they own the land from which the

objects were removed at the time of removal; if the land from which objects were removed is the

aboriginal territory of the tribes or organizations in question; if the claimants have “a cultural

relationship to the region” from which objects were removed; or if the place of removal is

unknown, claimants may be awarded rights if they have a “cultural relationship to the region in

which the museum or Federal agency repository is located.” In summary, the new rule allows for

tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations on whose traditional lands remains or objects are

found to invoke NAGPRA even when a direct cultural link to objects is undetermined.


collaborate with geneticists on particular projects of mutual interest that are

responsive to community needs and ethical protocols. One tribe has invested in a

genetic research organization with potential benefits including financial return to

the tribe, growing tribal political power in the region by playing a role in luring

biotech development there, and the prospect of shaping research agendas

towards disease priorities of the tribal community (Sahota 2007). Technoscientific

projects more broadly (i.e. greenbuilding, renewable energy development,

geographic information systems) are increasingly emphasized in Native

American communities as strategies for building human resource capacity, tribal

economies, and therefore the expansion of tribal governance (Shelby et al 2010).

In addition, genetic evidence can be used to support indigenous peoples’

own articulations. In a social science study of genetic sampling methods in a

project in the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan, Margaret Sleeboom-

Faulkner (2006) shows that genetic definitions can be used to support aboriginal

rights to territory and resources. She looks at the incentives for the nation state in

doing just that. In Taiwanese nationalist discourse, Aboriginals have been seen as

the forebears of the Taiwanese nation-state and essential to the formation of a

new Taiwanese national identity. They have buffered Taiwan against Mainland

Chinese nationalism. Therefore, indigenous peoples have been supported in their

own nationalist claims by Taiwanese nation-state nationalists because the

demands of indigenes serve rather than obstruct the goals of the Taiwanese state.

Similarly, American Indian legal scholars show that tribal sovereignty and tribal

legal demands will be upheld when they reinforce rather than threaten U.S.

federal authority (McCulloch and Wilkins 1995). There is scope in the U.S. as

well to use genetic indigeneity to uphold tribal claims, especially when there is

no perceived threat to U.S. autonomy and interests.

Conclusion

The articulation framework has been applied with insight to analyze indigenous

peoples’ dynamic maneuvers as they confront colonial practices that appropriate

land and attempt to vanquish or shape their identities and cultures too narrowly

in the service of nation state interests. In this paper, I borrow “articulation” to

analyze a set of scientific practices and representations that also happen to focus

on defining indigeneity narrowly in the service of disciplinary and state interests.

Genetic scientists’ investigations of ancient human migrations and human

relatedness are imbued with yearnings for knowledge of the deep “American”

past and the bodies of the “First Americans” who inhabited those continents as

well as their “origins” back beyond the Bering Sea. Researchers articulate those

yearnings for (nationalist) historical continuity often in the service of


reconfigured racial hierarchies and stories of human evolution and with new

technologies and methods. Ironically, whereas an articulation frame has trouble

accounting for some indigenous peoples’ continuous material connection with

land, it may work better for genetic scientists themselves as diasporic subjects—

as “ordinary people sustaining relational communities and cosmologies”

(Clifford 2001, 482). Their cosmology is the articulation of one global human

history and set of migrations instead of the definitive colonial before-and-after

1492 that structures indigenous peoples’ cosmologies. The cosmology driven by

genetic data is one that scientists can place themselves inside as privileged

subjects, as the privileged keepers of the genetic origin narrative (often using that

privilege to make claims to indigenous biological resources in ways that

challenge indigenous peoples own anti-colonial, anti-assimilationist efforts to

control their biological and other resources). Articulation brings re-conjoined

formations into view helping us see better the cultural work of genetic scientists

and to consider the implications for indigenous peoples.

Articulation theory, in analyzing cultural expressions, “sees everything as

potentially realigned, cut, and mixed,” although constrained by particular

historical moments. At this particular moment in which the genome sciences

enjoy great social and economic currency, including sometimes in U.S. tribal

communities, the moment may be right for those genetic articulations to loop

back out of scientific cultures to inform all of our understandings of indigeneity

and belonging (or not belonging) to particular places, including indigenous

peoples’ own expressions of their history, identity, and citizenship.


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