The Campaign to Thwart Paleogenetic Research Into North America's Indigenous Peoples

[wnylib]

7. Science vs culture vs human rights vs racism.

That's my take on this article.

First, I love science for its objectivity and ability to add to our knowledge of ourselves and the world and universe(s). But I am concerned when science is misused, especially in genetics.

This article is full of falsehoods about Native American tribal membership, terminology, and self perceptions. It makes me wonder why it was posted here. But I will focus on the worst and most racist falsehood.

The article falsely claims that Native Americans oppose DNA studies because they want to preserve their myth of being a "secular Eden," aka "noble savage." This is NOT a Native self perception. It is an image of idealistic fantasies projected by non Native people onto Native Americans. The opposite image of the "brutal savage " is also projected onto them by non Natives. Both stereotypes ignore the simple fact that they are just people.

The real reasons why some Native Americans oppose DNA testing is the historical use of "scientific studies" to "prove" their biologiuial inferiority to white Europeans. In the past, junk science used skull measurements and skin tone to categorize Native Americans in a racial heirarchy that put white Europeans at the top, followed by Asians, Native Americans, and Africans in that order. They used terms like Caucasian, Mongoloid, Amerindian, and Negroid.

To carry out these studies, junk scientists raided Native cemeteries. They were not ancient archaeological sites. They took bodies of living people's parents and grandparents from recent graves. This led to the passing of NAGPRA (Native American Graves and Repatriation Act) which the article complains about as an obstacle in studying Native Americans. And people wonder why Native people mistrust scientific studies?

The article mentions Kennewick Man in its complaint about not having access to Native remains. This was a skeleton exposed in a cliffside in Washington state. An anthropologist called to examine it correctly said that its features were ambiguous, neither fully Asian nor fully Caucasian (due to a biolgical history too lengthy for now). It was dated at 9000 years ago. The media sensationalized this as a pre Columbian European presence in North America.

The skelton was given to local Native people for reburial, which angered scientists who could not study it. They responded with an effort to do an end run around NAGPRA by claiming there were other people in America besides Native ancestors. They used two tactics, one based on artifacts and one on DNA.

Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institute claimed that similarities between the Native Clovis point spearhead and the Solutrean spearhead from French archaeology meant that ancient Europeans had carried the Solutrean technology to America and influenced the development of the Clovis point. I have read the anthropologists' discussions on this which ended in a consensus that the Solutrean notion was wrong. Stanford had ignored differences in manufacture that made it unlikely for one to have influenced the other. He had also ignored the time gap over 1000 years, making influence impossible. Geographically, Europe and North America were covered in glaciers and the Atlantic ice was 2 miles thick during the time that Stanford proposed.

The DNA tactic involved the X mtDNA haplogroup, found among a small number of Native Americans and a small number of Europeans. Some scientists said this supported Stanford's Solutrean idea. But further studies showed that the European and Native American X haplogroups are completely separate descendant strains of an earlier X haplogroup that originated 30,000 years ago in the Middle East. Some of tbose original X people stayed in the Middle East. Some went westward into Europe. Others went east into Asia and eventually to North America. The trail of mutations in the 3 main groups indicates that they separated thousands of years before the first X group reached America.

But today there are still racial supremacists who have a fantasy about the first people in America, who they say were white Europeans with an advanced Stone Age technology. According to this fantasy, hordes of later Asians arrived, outnumbering and slaughtering the white Europeans. Therefore, the genocides of Native Americans after Columbus were justified payback and Native American land rights and treaties should be abolished.

Native Americans have good reasons for mistrusting scientific studies of them.