DRAFT—PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR DISTRIBUTE 1 A Genetic Articulation of Indigeneity International indigenous movement has emerged in force since the 1970s and 1980s (Niezen 2003, Wilmer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 19 th 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 19 th -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 20 th 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
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DRAFT—PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR DISTRIBUTE 1
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
DRAFT—PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR DISTRIBUTE 2
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
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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,
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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
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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.”
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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
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.
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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
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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
DRAFT—PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR DISTRIBUTE 15
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.
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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,