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  • Native American dna: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science by Kim Tallbear
  • James McKay
Kim Tallbear.Native American dna: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 252pp. Cloth, $75.00; paper, $25.00.

[Errata]

Long and complex hereditary strands of deoxyribonucleic acid molecules, formed into chromosomes that encode instructions for protein building and stored either in the nucleus of the cells that make up the human body or in the mitochondria, would seem to be an unusual locus for cultural essentialism. Yet, as Kim Tallbear traces in her rich anthropology of various dna subcultures, our still very imperfect understanding of the science of hereditary genetic material has reanimated older racial and essentialist discourses, often being described in popular/mainstream media as in a way vindicating those discourses. In an extraordinarily multidisciplinary work, which ranges from hardcore genetic science through anthropology, media studies, and cultural studies, all solidly based on an ethical framework drawn from indigenous discourse and Native American studies, Tallbear subjects the reification of an imaginary object, “Native American dna,” to a forensic analysis. Drawing in particular on Donna Haraway (though without, thank goodness, replicating Haraway’s peculiarly curdled prose), Tallbear describes Native dna as a “material-semiotic object of knowledge” (70) neither entirely culturally produced nor entirely a product of empirical science. She demonstrates that in various contexts, specific rhetorical strategies are used repeatedly to try to force Native Americans into a purist, genetically determined identity. This identity is then, as will be [End Page 175] no surprise to readers of this journal, held to be simultaneously vanishing (thus delegitimizing tribal sovereignty and political citizenship) and also spreading out (thus making the prized quality of indigenousness increasingly available to American citizens with no political ties of citizenship or cultural ties of upbringing to present-day Native nations).

Tallbear’s project begins with an outline of the decisions she has made as to what is studied, and what left out, of this project. Her first chapter draws on a wealth of material to set out the history of the racialization of indigenous Americans, drawing a strong distinction between popular (largely European American) ideas of blood, Native concepts of kinship, and the science of dna inheritance. Given that the imposed idea of blood quantum continues to structure citizenship in many tribal nations, this clear distinction is necessary. As Tallbear puts it, after having given several examples from Native thinkers (and Ward Churchill) that seem to blur the difference, “We need to keep clear the difference between bio-genetic properties and blood quantum as a semiotic and bureaucratic object constituted through other forms of science, namely, the social and policy sciences” (54–55). Having recognized this distinction, she shows that the language of blood is slowly morphing into the language of dna, with potentially disruptive effects on tribal citizenship requirements. Over the rest of the book, and working from what she calls “an explicitly ethical move and from an explicitly situated place” (9), she focuses her research on three groups of non-Natives who have a disproportionate impact on public understanding of Native American dna.

The first group consists of genetic scientists in commercial companies such as Orchid Cellmark, whose pronouncements on ancestry testing Tallbear subjects to rigorous scrutiny, finding many occasions where the rhetoric employed by these companies to sell their product has moved from the strictly accurate scientific truth to the rhetorics of race and to biological discourses of purity and determinism. Specifically, she shows that there is a lack of publicly available information as to which set of genetic markers are used to determine what is implicitly described as a racial gene-ancestry: given that tracing biogeographical history is a matter of probability rather than one-to-one certainty, this rather undercuts these companies’ claims to give definitive answers to the question “where do I come from?” (a seemingly innocent question that in turn, as Tallbear notes throughout, hides all sorts of cultural assumptions). [End Page 176] Tallbear then shows the ways in which these companies are targeting Native American tribal governments, explicitly marketing genetic testing to people in charge of tribal enrolment and creating...

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