The Campaign to Thwart Paleogenetic Research Into North America's Indigenous Peoples
"In the early 1990s, visionary Italian geneticist Luca Cavalli-Sforza (1922–2018) and colleagues began the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) at Stanford University’s Morrison Institute. The aim was to record the genetic profiles mainly of relatively small Indigenous populations, which geneticists thought were best suited for reconstructing human population movement and change over time in any given region (due to their relatively low rates of genetic exchange with neighbors through a process known as admixture). The HGDP’s strategy worked well and progress was rapid. In 1994, only three years after its formation, Cavalli-Sforza and two co-authors published The History and Geography of Human Genes, which synthesized research from a wide array of fields so as to explain how the world came to be populated.
The book, published by Princeton University Press, received global accolades. But it also attracted strong criticism from lay readers on both sides of the political spectrum. One Indigenous leader called it “unethical, invasive, and may even be criminal. It violates the group rights [of] Indigenous peoples around the world.”...
The early and mid-2010s were marked by additional new discoveries...
It was when Duggan’s group announced that they’d gained the capacity to analyze aDNA, and made known their plans to apply this technology to the male genome of their Labrador/Newfoundland skeletal sample, that a sense of apprehension seemed to spread through some quarters of the paleogenetic community.
During the summer of 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests, Duggan’s project went noticeably quiet...
“Science, after all, is about openness and transparency in communication,” I wrote. “Has your group had requests from Indigenous people that this work not be carried forward?”
In (partial) response, Duggan replied that she and her team remained “invested” in the project, but were proceeding in line with “standards and ethics of research suitable for the 21st century”—standards that specifically “include the continued support of present-day Indigenous communities as well as full institutional ethics approval.” These standards, which she described as “common to ancient DNA genomics research with Indigenous populations across North America,” require that “discussions and agreements” with Indigenous communities take place before “yet another ancient genome” could be published...
I asked whether the Indigenous permissions that Duggan’s group apparently had obtained for their earlier research on mDNA had been revoked. As of this writing, I have received no response. Duggan told me that my own concerns were “meaningless when compared to the distress caused to Indigenous communities by the historical treatment of their ancestral remains.” But she failed to provide detail on this potential “distress.” Until this discussion, a half century had passed with no complaint, to my knowledge, from any Indigenous group, in regard to this specific area of study...
Unfortunately, no further excavations have been conducted. More graves reportedly have been dug up by construction equipment. But the fate of these items is unpublished and unknown to me or to any Canadian archaeologist I have consulted. In the current political climate, the very fact of their existence is now apparently seen as awkward, even taboo—an ironic reversion to an unenlightened period when few cared about the history of Indigenous peoples.
When the Maritime Archaic tradition vanished, it was replaced, as noted earlier, by unrelated Paleoeskimos, an Arctic people who had then recently derived from Siberia. Following their own disappearance, more recently arrived inhabitants migrated from Labrador, these probably being ancestors of the historic Beothuk, who still lived in the region when Europeans arrived. The last surviving Beothuk, a woman named Shanawdithit, died of tuberculosis in 1829. And since that time, there has been no descendant Beothuk community with whom Duggan, or anyone else, could engage in the “discussions and agreements” she’d described to me.
And even if there were, moreover, Duggan’s own research has demonstrated that the Beothuk were not descended from the Maritime Archaic people of Port au Choix. The only community Duggan might be referring to is the (genealogically unrelated) Newfoundland Mi’kmaq community, whose ancestors arrived on Newfoundland from Nova Scotia in the 18th century, several hundred years after the arrival of Europeans.
In a 2017 article published in Science, Ann Gibbons wrote about the power of DNA analysis to “bust” the myths associated with Europeans’ origins: “Despite their tales of origin, most people are the mixed descendants of many migrations… As techniques for probing ethnic origins spread, nearly every week brings a new paper testing and then falsifying lore about one ancient culture after another.” Gibbons properly describes this as a positive development. But if this principle is true for the so-called old world, why is it untrue in regard to Indigenous peoples? The only way one might consider Duggan’s research to be offensive or controversial is to such extent as one might wish to preserve the idea of Indigenous peoples as staking out an unbroken genetic (and therefore moral) claim to this or that part of North America. Certainly, I can think of no other basis on which Duggan might be required to secure the permission of modern First Nations (as they are known in Canada) to conduct scientific research on populations that haven’t existed for thousands of years.
As it turned out, I had been naïve about the extent to which this kind
of politics was now interfering with paleogenetic research. The
ideologically correct approach had been articulated at a 2019 Brown
University conference
titled “State of the Field: The Ancient DNA Revolution in Archaeology.”
There, Robert Preucel of Brown’s Haffenreffer Museum presented a roster
of speakers who laid out what they regarded as state-of-the-art ethical standards in the field.
They advised audience members to pursue a “commonly agreed set of best
practices” with “descendant communities”—especially when paleogenomic
conclusions challenge, or conflict with, community knowledge about the
past. Folklore and myths must be taken into account, and we must
discourage the idea of science “controlling the narrative.”
Moreover—and here is where I began to understand why Duggan’s lab had suddenly gone dark on this issue—“Even if we can’t seek consent from the study subjects themselves for inclusion in our ancient DNA studies, descendant-affiliated or geographically proximate communities should be consulted and engaged prior to the start of research because they may wish to speak for the ancestors” (my emphasis).
This anti-paleogenetic movement, as I would describe it, has roots dating back to the American Indian Movement (AIM) of the 1960s. AIM emerged among urban-dwelling Indigenous neighborhoods, not on Indian reservations... AIM became more radicalized thanks to the influence of activists who sought to block scientific research in the name of cultural sensitivity. Eventually, this movement led to the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990, a US law requiring federally funded entities to return “cultural items” (as broadly defined) to the ancestors or cultural affiliates of the communities from which those items originated.When NAGPRA was passed, it was presented as a balanced means to accommodate both scientific inquiry and the rights of Indigenous communities seeking to protect the remains of their ancestors. But the application of the law became more expansive over time—as the demands of Indigenous communities typically are seen as more morally compelling (especially to academics) than those of the researchers who populate this field of scientific inquiry. This is especially true now that the scientific work of researchers has been lumped in with the (apparently ongoing) ideological and historical sins broadly described under the rubric of “settler colonialism.”
At the aforementioned Brown session, for instance, genetic analysis was denigrated because it serves to deny “the humanity of the individuals we study [and to not] regard them as human relatives who deserve respect.” This disrespect is said to extend even beyond skeletal individuals, to DNA found in “coprolites, dental calculus, cultural materials, or soil.” It is preferable, we are told, to put away our scientific instruments, and instead consider the oral histories of local community members. As a result, established academics in this field are not only backing away from future projects, but even apologizing for their invaluable discoveries of the past. Geneticist Christiana Scheib of the University of Tartu in Estonia, for example, reports that she feels “disappointed that I hadn’t known better to do it a different way in the first place.”
Moreover, it proved but a short jump from the denunciation of Western science to the insistence that traditional folklore and origin stories be protected from scientific scrutiny. In some academic quarters, it is now seen as insulting to bring up the fact that humans arrived in the Americas from Asia via Beringia during the Last Glacial Maximum about 16,000 years ago, as this fact conflicts with spiritual notions that, in many cases, roughly correspond to Christian creationist myths...
Our real concern, subsequently borne out, was that stakeholders would use the law to expand their own authority—including non-Indigenous consultants and activists who inserted themselves as advisors to tribal leadership.
Much of this comes down to faddish ideological trends (including the “oikophobia,” or Western self-hatred, identified by Roger Scruton)...
Indigenous groups typically have membership requirements that depend upon (or at least relate indirectly to) “blood quantum,” i.e., the degree to which a person is descended from “full-blooded” ancestors. As anthropologist Ryan W. Schmidt has explained, these rules could threaten the integrity of Indigenous groups because, for example, “over 60 percent of all American Indians are married to non-Indians [and] by the year 2080, less than 8 percent of American Indians [are expected to] have one-half or more Indian ‘blood.’” By demonstrating the degree to which today’s Indigenous communities may themselves be entirely separate from ancient precursors, paleogenetics can be seen as a further threat to the ideal of Indigenous communities as homogenous, genetically distinct populations rooted timelessly in specific geographic areas.
Indeed, paleogenetic research has demonstrated that many Indigenous groups are fairly recently arrived in what is now considered their “traditional” territories. The earliest known human discovered in Greenland’s southern region, for instance, was a male member of the Paleoeskimo Saqqaq people. In 2010, archaeologists recovered a hair ball yielding genetic material that showed his genetic ancestry lay not in Nunavut, a mere 200 miles across the Davis Strait, but rather with the Nganasan, Koryak, and Chukchi peoples, 3,000 miles away in Siberia. Thus it is possible, even likely, that the Saqqaq people arrived in the New World at a much later date than the first humans to cross from Siberia into Alaska. This finding underscores a basic point emphasized by Gibbon: Humans move around a lot.
And this penchant for moving around didn’t end when humans arrived in North America. In the north-eastern part of North America, south of the St. Lawrence River and Gulf, for example, the arrival of mainly Basques and French settlers in the late 16th century set off a scramble among Indigenous groups—not generally to escape oppressive “settler colonization,” but rather to gain access to the new arrivals for purposes of trade and the formation of military alliances against existing enemies. This competition set off a series of long and bloody wars, which in turn led to the extermination of whole Indigenous cultures—true genocides, whose human toll was exacerbated by the epidemics brought from Europe.
These wars, in turn, eventually forced swathes of Algonquian-speaking peoples to move westward, pursued by Iroquois enemies in many cases, into what the French called the Pays d’en Haut, a vast area west of Montreal that extends to the Great Lakes, Ohio, and Illinois. Here, whole new cultural identities formed from the refugees (much in the same way that the demographic map of Europe was massively redrawn during the late stages of the Roman empire, with Goths, Gauls, Vandals, and dozens of other groups criss-crossing the continent in a bid to survive). The result is that most federally-recognized tribes in the American east and Midwest are late-colonial-to-recent in origin, and are largely populated by the descendants of widely scattered and, in some cases, vanished communities. The development of a homogenizing Plains Indian Culture resulted from a roughly analogous process. In many cases, paleogenetics is revealing that even those “true” homelands were not as ancient as once believed.
In the American Southwest, by late prehistoric times, every population apart from the Rio Grande Pueblos was turned upside down demographically in cataclysms that featured either huge die-offs or mass migrations. Roughly 75 years before the Spaniards arrived, the Classic Period (AD 1300–1450) Hohokam of central and southern Arizona had vanished, perhaps admixed with immigrants from northern Mexico and southward-migrating Puebloans who’d abandoned their villages in the Four Corners area...
Throughout North America, certainly, the arrival of Europeans brought tremendous forces for change, often accompanied by unconscionable cruelty. But this occurrence didn’t represent the disruption of a stable, pacifistic land mass whose peoples had self-organized in their current state since the beginning of time—but rather a new challenge to a continent that, much like Europe itself, perpetually featured migrations, conquests, and tragedies wrought by competition among different groups. Ultimately, these are the stories that many people (including many non-Indigenous people) don’t want told—much less verified through ongoing paleogenetic research—as they disrupt our mythologized image of the Indigenous Americas as a sort of secular Eden.
And of course, it is their right to militate against science. But it is disheartening to see, as Francis does, that scientists themselves are falling in with these campaigns through “a widespread self-censorship among other scholars associated with work in Native American communities in anthropology and related social sciences.”...
DNA from two 11,000-year-old skeletons discovered the following year in Spirit Cave, Nevada, for instance, were found to be more closely related to living Indigenous South Americans than to living Native North Americans. A much younger skeleton (about 700 years old) from Lovelock Cave, Nevada, was found to be a close genetic match with the Spirit Cave remains, and so also contained evidence of ancestry from a Mexican-related population. Nevertheless, in 2018, all three skeletons were handed over to the local Paiute-Shoshone for reburial because they had been found on their (currently understood) aboriginal homelands. “Repatriating” human remains to groups in this way has simply become the path of least resistance.
Also instructive is the case of 4,000-year-old human skeletons from the Nevin site in Blue Hill, Maine, which are held at Harvard’s Peabody Museum. These are the only well-preserved Red Paint People skeletal remains ever found, and thus are critical to resolving such issues as the relationship between them and the Maritime Archaic of Newfoundland-Labrador. They were analyzed at Reich’s Harvard lab five years ago, but the results remain unpublished (though verbal reports indicate that they bear no close relationship to the Penobscot or any of the other federally-recognized Indian tribes in Maine).
The wonderful collection of artifacts found with the Nevin skeletons were housed at a museum named for a different Peabody, the R. S. Peabody Museum at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Absent the publication of the Nevin DNA analyses, the director of that museum decided to honor a request from the Penobscots for their repatriation—even though he was apparently fully aware of the surrounding paleogenetic facts. And so the remarkable Nevin collection was never adequately catalogued or photographed, much less fully analyzed and reported. Requests from researchers to tribal officials about their whereabouts reportedly have, to my knowledge, gone unanswered.
Of course, some might say that there is only theoretical value in knowing about early human life in North America—so why not simply accede to the requests of Indigenous peoples? By way of answer, consider that Reich’s lab at Harvard has published a staggering amount of paleogenetic data, much of it relating directly to human wellbeing. Svante Pääbo’s lab is similarly productive, as illustrated by a 2020 paper published in Nature, entitled ‘The major genetic risk factor for severe COVID-19 is inherited from Neanderthals.’ It identifies a gene cluster on chromosome 3 that is a “major genetic risk factor for severe symptoms in patients,” and shows that the risk is conferred by “a genomic segment of around 50 kilobases in size that is inherited from Neanderthals and is carried by around 50% of people in south Asia and around 16% of people in Europe.”
Such discoveries have been made regarding all manner of diseases. And we will never know how many new discoveries we may have missed now that human remains are being taken from—or freely given away by—scientists in the name of politics. It is past time for science to reassert itself for the benefit of all humanity."
Trust the Science. Unless it thwarts the left wing agenda
The left claim they hate religion and tradition getting in the way of science and progress, but really they just hate Christianity and Western tradition