Native American DNA : tribal belonging and the false promise of genetic science

267 Pages·2013·1.046 MB·English

by  TallBear, Kimberly

native american dna
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NATIVE
AMERICAN DNA
Tribal Belonging and the
False Promise of Genetic Science
Kim TallBear
university of minnesota press
minneapolis| london
A different version of chapter 2 was published as “Native-American-
DNA.com: In Search of Native American Race and Tribe,” in Revisiting
Race in a Genomic Age,ed. Barbara Koenig, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, and Sarah S.
Richardson (Piscataway, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 235–52.
Portions of chapter 4 were previously published as “Narratives of Race and
Indigeneity in the Genographic Project,” Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics
35, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 412–24.
Copyright 2013 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
TallBear, Kimberly.
Native American DNA : tribal belonging and the false promise of genetic
science / Kim TallBear.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-6585-3 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8166-6586-0 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Indians of North America—Anthropometry. 2. Human population
genetics—North America. 3. DNA fingerprinting—North America.
4. Genetic genealogy—North America. I. Title.
E98.A55T35 2013
970.004´97—dc23
2013012526
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedicated to my late grandmother,
Arlene Heminger-Lamb, a Dakota woman,
who symbolizes for me all those who think deeply on things,
but whose choices are few.
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contents
acknowledgments ix
introduction
An Indigenous, Feminist Approach to DNA Politics 1
1. Racial Science, Blood, and DNA 31
2. The DNA Dot-com: Selling Ancestry 67
3. Genetic Genealogy Online 105
4. The Genographic Project: The Business of
Research and Representation 143
conclusion
Indigenous and Genetic Governance and Knowledge 177
notes 205
index 237
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acknowledgments
Many people helped along the path to this book. I can name but a
few important individuals here, and I name them chronologically. I
thank my mother, LeeAnn TallBear, for impressing on me from my ear-
liest memory that education could make all the difference in living a
full and productive life—that it could take me to interesting places in
the world and that it could help me give back in the places where I
have been rooted. As a single mother, she never said she could do it all,
and she taught me early the practice of making kin. I also thank the late
Vine Deloria Jr. I never met him, yet he started me thinking about the
politics of anthropology in Native America before I could read. I asked
my undergraduate student mother in 1973, “What does it mean, ‘Custer
died for your sins’?”
Thanks to community-planning gurus Marie Kennedy, Mel King,
and Louise Dunlap for their investment in my planning education at
the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and at MIT. I am grateful for
their example that there is no contradiction in entangling knowledge
building and community development.
Thanks to Mervyn Tano for employing me and introducing me to
the Human Genome Project, where I began thinking about the ethical,
legal, and social implications of genomics for indigenous peoples. I was
hooked from the start.
Thanks to David S. Edmunds, a keen editor, a generative collabo-
rator, my coparent and dear friend, for intellectual, moral, and financial
support. He gave me countless hours to fill his ears with impassioned
talk about genetics and race when he had his own work to do (or would
rather have checked Michigan State basketball scores online). Thanks
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