The DNA Industry's Role in the Erosion of Native Rights
Pelle Sten/ CC BY 2.0
Amid the barrage of racist, anti-immigrant, and other attacks launched by
President Trump and his administration in recent months, a series of little
noted steps have threatened Native American land rights and sovereignty.
Such attacks have focused on tribal sovereignty, the Indian Child Welfare
Act (ICWA), and the voting rights of Native Americans, and they have come
from Washington, the courts, and a state legislature. What they share is a
single conceptual framework: the idea that the long history that has shaped
U.S.-Native American relations has no relevance to today's realities.
Meanwhile, in an apparently unrelated event, Senator Elizabeth Warren, egged
on by Donald Trump's "Pocahontas" taunts and his mocking of her claims to
native ancestry, triumphantly touted her DNA results to "prove" her Native
American heritage. In turning to the burgeoning, for-profit DNA industry,
however, she implicitly lent her progressive weight to claims about race and
identity that go hand in hand with moves to undermine Native sovereignty.
The DNA industry has, in fact, found a way to profit from reviving and
modernizing antiquated ideas about the biological origins of race and
repackaging them in a cheerful, Disneyfied wrapping. While it's true that
the it's-a-small-world-after-all multiculturalism of the new racial science
rejects nineteenth-century scientific racism and Social Darwinism, it is
offering a twenty-first-century version of pseudoscience that once again
reduces race to a matter of genetics and origins. In the process, the
corporate-promoted ancestry fad conveniently manages to erase the histories
of conquest, colonization, and exploitation that created not just racial
inequality but race itself as a crucial category in the modern world.
Today's policy attacks on Native rights reproduce the same misunderstandings
of race that the DNA industry is now so assiduously promoting. If Native
Americans are reduced to little more than another genetic variation, there
is no need for laws that acknowledge their land rights, treaty rights, and
sovereignty. Nor must any thought be given to how to compensate for past
harms, not to speak of the present ones that still structure their
realities. A genetic understanding of race distorts such policies into
unfair "privileges" offered to a racially defined group and so
"discrimination" against non-Natives. This is precisely the logic behind
recent rulings that have denied Mashpee tribal land rights in Massachusetts,
dismantled the Indian Child Welfare Act (a law aimed at preventing the
removal of Native American children from their families or communities), and
attempted to suppress Native voting rights in North Dakota.
Profiting by Recreating Race
Let's start by looking at how the ancestry industry contributes to, and
profits from, a twenty-first-century reformulation of race. Companies like
Ancestry.com and 23andMe lure customers into donating their DNA and a hefty
sum of money in exchange for detailed reports claiming to reveal the exact
geographical origins of their ancestors going back multiple generations.
"Who do you think you are?" asks Ancestry.com, typically enough. The answer,
the company promises, lies in your genes.
Such businesses eschew the actual term "race" in their literature. They
claim instead that DNA reveals "ancestry composition" and "ethnicity." In
the process, however, they turn ethnicity, a term once explicitly meant to
describe culture and identity, into something that can be measured in the
genes. They conflate ethnicity with geography, and geography with genetic
markers. Perhaps you won't be surprised to learn that the "ethnicities" they
identify bear an eerie resemblance to the "races" identified by European
scientific racist thinking a century ago. They then produce
scientific-looking "reports" that contain purportedly exact percentages
linking consumers to places as specific as "Sardinia" or as broad as "East
Asia."
At their most benign, these reports have become the equivalent of a
contemporary parlor game, especially for white Americans who make up the
vast majority of the participants. But there is a sinister undertone to it
all, reviving as it does a long-discredited pseudoscientific basis for
racism: the notion that race, ethnicity, and ancestry are revealed in the
genes and the blood, and passed down inexorably, even if invisibly, from
generation to generation. Behind this lies the assumption that those genes
(or variations) originate within clearly defined national or geographic
borders and that they reveal something meaningful about who we are -
something otherwise invisible. In this way, race and ethnicity are separated
from and elevated above experience, culture, and history.
Is There Any Science Behind It?
Although all humans share 99.9% of our DNA, there are some markers that
exhibit variations. It's these markers that the testers study, relying on
the fact that certain variations are more (or less) common in different
geographical areas. As law and sociology professor Dorothy Roberts puts it,
"No sooner had the Human Genome Project determined that human beings are
99.9% alike than many scientists shifted their focus from human genetic
commonality to the 0.1% of human genetic difference. This difference is
increasingly seen as encompassing race."
Ancestry tests rely on a fundamental - and racialized - misunderstanding of
how ancestry works. The popular assumption is that each of us contains
discrete and measurable percentages of the "blood" and DNA of our two
biological parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen
great-great-grandparents, and so on, and that this ancestral line can be
traced back hundreds of years in a meaningful way. It can't. As science
journalist Carl Zimmer explains, "DNA is not a liquid that can be broken
down into microscopic drops. We inherit about a quarter of our DNA from each
grandparent - but only on average. If you pick one of your ancestors from 10
generations back, the odds are around 50% that you carry any DNA from him or
her. The odds get even worse beyond that."
In reality, such testing does not tell us much about our ancestors. That's
partly because of the way DNA is passed down through the generations and
partly because there exists no database of ancestral DNA. Instead, the
companies compare your DNA to that of other contemporary humans who have
paid them to take the test. Then they compare your particular variations to
patterns of geographical and ethnic distribution of such variations in
today's world - and use secret algorithms to assign purportedly precise
ancestral percentages to them.
So is there really a Sardinian or East Asian gene or genetic variation? Of
course not. If there is one fact that we know about human history, it's that
ours is a history of migrations. We all originated in East Africa and
populated the planet through ongoing migrations and interactions. None of
this has ended (and, in fact, thanks to climate change, it will only
increase). Cultures, ethnicities, and settlements can't be frozen in time.
The only thing that is constant is change. The peoples who reside in today's
Sardinia or East Asia are a snapshot that captures only a moment in a
history of motion. The DNA industry's claims about ancestry award that
moment a false sense of permanence.
While whites of European ancestry seem enthralled with the implications of
this new racial science, few Native Americans have chosen to donate to such
databases. Centuries of abuse at the hands of colonial researchers who made
their careers on Native ancestral remains, cultural artifacts, and languages
have generated a widespread skepticism toward the notion of offering genetic
material for the good of "science." In fact, when it comes to one DNA
testing outfit, 23andMe, all of the countries included in its lists of the
geographical origins of those who have contributed to its "Native American"
database are in Latin America and the Caribbean. "In North America," the
company blandly explains, "Native American ancestry tends to be five or more
generations back, so that little DNA evidence of this heritage remains." In
other words, 23andMe claims DNA as conclusive proof of Native American
identity, then uses it to write Native North Americans off the map
altogether.
The Ancestry Industry and the Disappearing Indian
The ancestry industry, even while celebrating diverse origins and
multiculturalism, has revived long-held ideas about purity and authenticity.
For much of U.S. history, white colonizers argued that Native Americans
would "vanish," at least in part through biological dilution. New England's
native peoples were, for instance, systematically denied land rights and
tribal status in the nineteenth century on the grounds that they were too
racially mixed to be "authentic" Indians.
As historian Jean O'Brien has explained, "Insistence on 'blood purity' as a
central criterion of 'authentic' Indianness reflected the scientific racism
that prevailed in the nineteenth century. New England Indians had
intermarried, including with African Americans, for many decades, and their
failure to comply with non-Indian ideas about Indian phenotype strained the
credence for their Indianness in New England minds." The supposed
"disappearance" of such Indians then justified the elimination of any rights
that they might have had to land or sovereignty, the elimination of which,
in a form of circular reasoning, only confirmed their nonexistence as a
people.
However, it was never phenotype or distant ancestry but, as O'Brien points
out, "complex regional kinship networks that remained at the core of Indian
identity in New England, despite the nearly complete Indian dispossession
that English colonists accomplished. Even as Indians continued to reckon
membership in their communities through the time-honored system of kinship,
New Englanders invoked the myth of blood purity as identity in denying
Indian persistence."
Such antiquated understandings of race as a biological or scientific
category allowed whites to deny Indian existence - and now allow them to
make biological claims about "Indian" identity. Until recently, such claims,
as in Senator Warren's case, rested on the murkiness of family tales. Today,
the supposed ability of DNA companies to find genetic "proof" of such a
background reinforces the idea that Indian identity is something measurable
in the blood and sidesteps the historical basis for the legal recognition or
protection of Indian rights.
The ancestry industry assumes that there is something meaningful about the
supposed racial identity of one of hundreds or even thousands of an
individual's ancestors. It's an idea that plays directly into the hands of
right-wingers who are intent on attacking what they call "identity politics"
- and the notion that "minorities" are becoming unduly privileged.
Indeed, white resentment flared at the suggestion that Senator Warren might
have received some professional benefit from her claim to Native status.
Despite an exhaustive investigation by the Boston Globe showing conclusively
that she did not, the myth persists and has become an implicit part of
Donald Trump's mockery of her. In fact, any quick scan of statistics will
confirm the ludicrousness of such a position. It should be obvious that
being Native American (or Black, or Latino) in the United States confers far
more risks than benefits. Native Americans suffer from higher rates of
poverty, unemployment, infant mortality, and low birth weight, as well as
lower educational levels and shorter life spans than do whites. These
statistics are the result of hundreds of years of genocide, exclusion, and
discrimination - not the presence or absence of specific genetic variations.
Reviving Race to Undermine Native Rights
Native rights, from sovereignty to acknowledgment of the conditions created
by 500 years of colonial misrule, rest on an acceptance that race and
identity are, in fact, the products of history. "Native Americans" came into
being not through genes but through the historical processes of conquest and
colonial rule, along with grudging and fragile acknowledgement of Native
sovereignty. Native American nations are political and cultural entities,
the products of history, not genes, and white people's assertions about
Native American ancestry and the DNA industry's claim to be able to reveal
such ancestry tend to run roughshod over this history.
Let's look at three developments that have, over the past year, undermined
the rights of Native Americans: the reversal of reservation status for
Mashpee tribal lands in Massachusetts, the striking down of the Indian Child
Welfare Act, and Republican attempts to suppress Native American votes in
North Dakota. Each of these acts came from a different part of the
government: the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior,
the courts, and North Dakota's Republican-dominated state legislature. But
all three rely on notions of identity that place race firmly in our genes
rather than in our history. In the process, they deny the histories that
turned the sovereign and autonomous peoples of North America before European
colonists arrived in "the New World" into "Native Americans," and imply that
Native American historical rights are meaningless.
The Mashpee of Massachusetts finally achieved federal recognition and a
grant of reservation land only in 2007, based on the fact that they "had
existed as a distinct community since the 1620s." In other words, federal
recognition was based on a historical, not a racialized, understanding of
ethnicity and identity. However, the tribe's drive to build a casino on its
newly acquired reservation in Taunton, Massachusetts, would promptly be
challenged by local property-owners. Their lawsuit relied on a technicality:
that, as they argued in court, reservation land could only be granted to
tribes that had been federally recognized as of 1934. In fact, the Mashpee
struggle for recognition had been repeatedly stymied by long-held notions
that the Indians of Massachusetts were not "real" or "authentic" because of
centuries of racial mixing. There was nothing new in this. The state's
nineteenth-century legislature prefigured just such a twenty-first-century
backlash against recognition when it boasted that real Indians no longer
existed in Massachusetts and that the state was poised to wipe out all such
"distinctions of race and caste."
In September 2018, the Department of the Interior (to which the court
assigned the ultimate decision) ruled against the Mashpees. Recently
appointed Assistant Director of Indian Affairs Tara Sweeney, the first
Native American to hold that position, "paved the way for a reservation to
be taken out of trust for the first time since the termination era," a
20-year period from the 1940s to the 1960s when the federal government
attempted to "terminate" Native sovereignty entirely by dismantling
reservations and removing Indians to urban areas to "assimilate" them. The
new ruling could affect far more than the Mashpees. Some fear that, in the
Trump years, the decision portends "a new termination era," or even a
possible "extermination era," for the country's Native Americans.
Meanwhile, on October 4th, a U.S. District Court struck down the Indian
Child Welfare Act, or ICWA. This is a potentially devastating development as
Congress passed that Act in 1978 to end the then-still-common practice of
breaking up Native families by removing Indian children for adoption into
white families. Such acts of removal date back to the earliest days of white
settlement and over the centuries included various kinds of servitude and
the founding of residential boarding schools for Indian children that were
aimed at eliminating Native languages, cultures, and identities, while
promoting "assimilation." Indian child removal continued into the late
twentieth century through a federally sponsored "Indian Adoption Project,"
as well as the sending of a remarkable number of such children into the
foster care system.
According to the ICWA, "An alarmingly high percentage of Indian families are
broken up by the removal, often unwarranted, of their children from them by
nontribal public and private agencies and that an alarmingly high percentage
of such children are placed in non-Indian foster and adoptive homes and
institutions." States, it added, "have often failed to recognize the
essential tribal relations of Indian people and the cultural and social
standards prevailing in Indian communities and families." The Act gave
tribes primary jurisdiction over all child custody issues including foster
placements and the termination of parental rights, requiring for the first
time that priority be placed on keeping Native children with their parents,
kin, or at least within the tribe.
The ICWA said nothing about race or ancestry. Instead, it recognized
"Indian" as a political status, while acknowledging semi-sovereign
collective rights. It was based on the Constitution's implicit
acknowledgement of Indian sovereignty and land rights and the assignment to
the Federal government of relations with Indian tribes. The District Court's
ICWA decision trampled on the collective political rights of Indian tribes
by maintaining that the act discriminated against non-Native families in
limiting their right to foster or adopt Native children. That rationale,
like the rationale behindthe Mashpee decision, directly attacks the cultural
and historical acknowledgement of Native sovereignty.
Superficially, the assault on Native voting rights may appear conceptually
unrelated to the Mashpee and ICWA decisions. North Dakota is one of many
primarily Republican-controlled states to take advantage of a 2013 Supreme
Court ruling eliminating key protections of the Voting Rights Act to make
registration and voting more difficult, especially for likely Democratic
voters including the poor and people of color. After numerous challenges, a
North Dakota law requiring prospective voters to provide a street address
was finally upheld by a Supreme Court ruling in October 2018. The problem is
this: thousands of rural Native Americans, on or off that state's
reservations, lack street addresses because their streets have no names,
their homes no numbers. Native Americans are also disproportionately
homeless.
In the North Dakota case, Native Americans are fighting for a right of
American citizens - the right to vote - whereas the Mashpee and ICWA cases
involve fights to defend Native sovereignty. The new voting law invoked
equality and individual rights, even as it actually focused on restricting
the rights of Native Americans. Underpinning such restrictions was a
convenient denial by those Republicans that the country's history had, in
fact, created conditions that were decidedly unequal. (Thanks to a massive
and expensive local effort to defend their right to vote, however, North
Dakota's Native Americans showed up in record numbers in the 2018 midterm
election.)
These three political developments downplay Native American identity,
sovereignty, and rights, while denying, implicitly or explicitly, that
history created today's realities of racial inequality. The use of DNA tests
to claim "Native American" genes or blood trivializes this same history.
The recognition of tribal sovereignty at least acknowledges that the
existence of the United States is predicated on its imposition of an
unwanted, foreign political entity on Native lands. The concept of tribal
sovereignty has given Native Americans a legal and collective basis for
fighting for a different way of thinking about history, rights, and
nationhood. Attempts to reduce Native American identity to a race that can
be identified by a gene (or a genetic variation) do violence to our history
and justify ongoing violations of Native rights.
Senator Elizabeth Warren had every right to set the record straight
regarding false accusations about her employment history. She should,
however, rethink the implications of letting either Donald Trump or the
ancestry industry define what it means to be Native American.
Aviva Chomsky / TomDispatch
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#23andme #ancestry #dna industry #elizabeth warren #elizabeth warren native
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