DNA USA

by Bryan Sykes

  We headed east along Highway 40, which is hereabouts superimposed on the old Route 66, toward New Mexico. The tracks from Easy Rider were replaced by a collection of cowboy songs featuring, among others, “Rawhide,” “Riders in the Sky,” and “The Streets of Laredo.” I need only put them on now, and I am back on the long, dusty road. On each side the stands of ponderosa pine that surround Flagstaff thinned out then disappeared, leaving a flat semidesert of dried grass and yellow shrub stretching to the horizon under a cobalt blue sky. Tumbleweeds really did blow across the road. Other than the highway and the occasional roadside signs urging voters to back McCain and Palin, left over from the previous year’s presidential elections, there was nothing else. Gradually the grass cover thinned and was replaced by reddish brown grit dotted with stones and isolated tufts of grass. There were no cactuses or Joshua trees to alleviate the dry monotony. Eventually hills appeared on our left horizon. These were the Hopi mesas, our destination.

  After the desolate town of Winslow, flanked by boarded-up cafés, we headed north up Highway 87. As the country got even drier, the hills on the horizon began to separate and take shape as we approached. Now there were ramshackle farmsteads and small herds of black cattle on either side of the road. But what they found to eat I could not imagine. There was nothing there, even less than when Richard and I had crossed the Great Basin of Nevada on the train, some weeks back. The road ahead stretched to the ends of the earth, or so it seemed. The hills became banded cliffs of gray and delicate pink; then, a little farther on, dark buttes like the cones of small volcanoes erupted out of the desert. They were not really volcanoes but the last remnants of a great plateau of sedimentary rock that had been eaten into by the wind and left standing. In time they also would also be ground into dust and disappear. Still the road stretched out ahead, a gray ribbon laid across the desert. The buttes were left behind, and the road headed straight for a low cliff on the horizon. This was Second Mesa, home of the Hopi for at least the last two thousand years. As we got nearer we could make out white dwellings on the steep sides and along the top of the cream-colored limestone cliff. Once the Hopi had also lived on the arid plains, but they had moved all their villages up onto the mesas following the Pueblo revolt of 1680 as a defensive tactic in anticipation of Spanish reprisals.

  Warned by “Roger” not to take any photographs, Ulla put the camera away when we reached the base of the cliff, and we followed the road as it wound upward past the old village of Shongopori and onto the plateau at the top of the mesa. From here you could see how the three Hopi mesas stretched down like fingers from a much bigger and darker formation to the north—Black Mesa, one of the causes of friction on the reservation, as we shall see. We turned right along a narrow ridge that led to two more villages, Shipaulovi and Mishongnovi. A thousand feet below us the butte-studded plain stretched out into the distance, while on the ridge itself there were small patches of corn and squash. What a contrast to the endless dense green stands of corn and soybeans the Zephyr had passed through on its way across the Midwest. The houses were made of mudbricks and adobe around dirt squares. A man carried a pet ground squirrel, and three teenage boys were playing soccer.

  We had come to the Hopi mesas not on a spiritual pilgimage but just to see what they were like—to experience the atmosphere, what people we saw, and of course the all-important landscape that is such an integral part of the Hopi spirit. Without these visits, my wonderfully revealing conversations with “Will Kane” and “Roger Thornhill” would lack any narrative context, and their genetic results would mean less as a result.

  A few miles down the road we were lucky to find the modest but atmospheric Hopi Cultural Center. I felt reluctant to ask too many questions, as I would have under normal circumstances, and walked slowly around the displays of old photographs, ceramics, and the strange kachina dolls. These are the representations of spirit beings that visit the mesas during the spring and early summer before returning to their spiritual homes among the San Francisco peaks above Flagstaff. Without soliciting inquiries, a woman busied herself in the small office. It was only when I offered to buy a small book about the Hopi that she revealed herself as Anna Silas, both the book’s author and the founder of the museum, which she had opened twenty years before.1 Then Ulla started a conversation, and although I did ask a few questions I felt slightly as though I was intruding on a secret world where I had no business to be. Having now read Anna’s book, I realize that it was not really the center’s intention to be secretive, but neither was it there as an entertainment. Rather it was providing a glimpse into a world where not everything was meant to be completely revealed to other than the Hopi themselves. We met, or rather saw, more Hopi in the small adjacent café, where the servers said all the right “American” things but were palpably gentle and restrained. They reminded me of the Polynesians I had met in the South Pacific, and like them, they were also heavier than they should have been, a harbinger of the diabetes that afflicts all Pueblo tribes in the Southwest.

  As we headed back down the sides of the mesa toward our own temporary home below the San Francisco peaks, it struck me that we had glimpsed a way of life not dissimilar to that of all our ancestors. A way of life that had been lost a very long time ago but one that nonetheless had shaped and molded, through millennia of evolution, the DNA we still carry. While the life of the Hopi on Second Mesa might seem very foreign and strange, and while very few of us would willingly return to it, even were it possible to do so, it resonated with a deep ancestral memory that we all share. Although it was easy to retain that thought as we headed back under the darkening sky, it got a lot harder when we were finally reimmersed in the chaos of modern life.

  The following day we headed north toward Kayenta and the heart of the Navajo reservation. Once again the ponderosa pines thinned and disappeared as the highway headed for the pinks and yellows of the Painted Desert. We passed through the sprawling trading post of Cameron and on toward Tuba City, the most populous on the Navajo reservation. The road was dotted with shacks advertising shawls and jewelry, none of them inviting. Tuba City itself was elegant in comparison, with the accoutrements of any small American town—that is to say a large gas station and a McDonald’s, just beyond which a modern school was decanting its neatly turned out pupils into the ubiquitous yellow school buses. Right along the route to Kayenta, fifty miles to the northeast, the buses spread out in all directions along unseen tracks in the desert, their routes traced by clouds of thrown dust. Their destinations were the scattered clusters of dwellings, mostly trailers or small bungalows, that were home to the Navajo. I had read that the Navajo find it difficult to live in close proximity to one another, and this scene confirmed it as the dust plumes moved out into the desert for miles in every direction.

  The land was certainly dry but not as utterly arid as the Painted Desert. I discovered later that an aquifer ran deep underground between Tuba City and Kayenta, and wells kept the residents well supplied with water. Or at least they did once. As Ulla and I neared Kayenta a new railway line curved in from the north and ran along the road. Where can this be going? we wondered. The answer lay a few miles ahead when we saw a giant tower. As we got closer we could see a conveyor belt running high above over the road toward the tower, under which the rail tracks fanned out into a classification yard. This was, as I was later to discover, the exit route for coal from the Black Mesa we had seen in the distance from the Hopi villages the day before. The whole hill was made of coal, and it was being systematically reduced. The presence of the mine was and still is highly controversial—one more symbol of the internal struggles within the Navajo nation. Leased to one of America’s largest energy companies, the same one that Richard and I had seen ripping into the ground on our way to Bear Lodge, the coal and other minerals, including uranium, located nearby are a valuable source of income for the Navajo, but it comes at at price. The negotiated terms of the lease were particularly advantageous to the company, and questions about its propriety
still hover. Until a few years ago, before it was shipped off by rail, the coal was pulverized, then mixed with groundwater, and the slurry sent through a pipeline more than 250 miles to the generating station at Laughlin, Nevada. If that seems a crazy thing to do in a desert, then it is. Even six years after the slurry operations were closed down, the people of Kayenta still can’t get enough water from the aquifer.

  Kayenta itself is less developed than Tuba City and had one sure sign of poverty, groups of dull yellow stray dogs, ribs protruding from their emaciated bodies. Why, I asked myself, are stray dogs always yellow? They looked exactly the same as the ones I had seen scavenging in Polynesia. There was no reason to stay long in Kayenta, and we left town heading toward Monument Valley. Buttes and mesas lined the route, glowing orange in the setting sun. It was dark by the time we reached our accommodation, a former trading post converted into a lodge. Monument Valley and its spectacular scenery, hidden from us for the moment by impenetrable darkness, came to the nation’s attention only when the owner of the trading post persuaded John Ford, the Hollywood director, to use it as a location for his Westerns. Many of these movies starred John Wayne, and the small hut that the star had used as his home on location was right next to the lodgings. Right next door to that, a small theater was showing his movies every evening.

  Once we had settled in, Ulla and I made our way over to see that evening’s screening of Wayne’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Under normal circumstances I would have sat through the film, even though Westerns are not my favorite genre. But as soon as the stereotype “Indians” appeared whooping and hollering, I thought how crassly insensitive it was to screen such a film on a reservation. Ulla, who is always one step ahead of me when it comes to summing up a situation, got up, grabbed my hand, and led me straight outside. Of course, on reflection it was just another sign of the dilemma faced by the Navajo, like the Black Mesa mine. Acting in a John Ford Western such as this, even as a caricature of yourself, was a rare opportunity to earn cash in this utterly beautiful but unforgiving land.

  I cannot pretend that our visit to Monument Valley was undertaken entirely in the cause of research. I awoke early and looked out the window. The sun was just above the horizon. Before me a wide plain of the familiar scrubby desert stretched for a few miles into the distance. On the horizon stark mesas and vertical-sided buttes glowed a soft pink in the early sunlight. This was not Monument Valley itself—that lay over a rise a couple of miles away—but even so the scenery seemed very familiar. I knew full well that whole area had once been covered by the deep and ancient sediments of the Colorado Plateau and that the sculpted monuments were all that was left of these thousand-foot accumulations of limestone and sandstone after first water and then wind had gouged and blasted the hardened rock over millions of years. But that isn’t what they looked like. Instead of being the eroded cadaver of a once-great plateau, each isolated cliff, each pinnacled mesa seemed like a high castle built up from the ground long, long ago. All that was missing were the princesses imprisoned at the top of every one.

  Like all other tourists we took the drive around Monument Valley itself, where the formations were all the more dramatic and all the more familiar from the movies. Afterwards we sat on the terrace of the newly built hotel on the valley rim. By then the sun was going down behind us and the shadows were beginning to creep up the petticoats of fallen rock that surround the base of each rose-red monolith. The hotel was built and staffed by Navajo, and the way our server quietly and courteously brought our order had the same calmness and grace that we had seen in “Will Kane” back in San Francisco. At a nearby table a group of four middle-aged women sat chatting, their floral tops and permed hair slightly ruffled by the breeze coming up from the valley floor. From the pulses of overheard conversation that wafted across to our table, the women were Mormons from Salt Lake City. A ground squirrel darted out to grab a crumb from beneath their table and sped away back to his burrow under the sagebrush. By now the shadows had climbed almost to the top of the rock in front of us, and its shadow was projected for miles across the flat desert beyond. A dust plume betrayed the car that made it. Far, far away.

  These places are made for contemplation, and my thoughts returned to the Navajo and how they had come to be here. As the murmur of conversation floated across from the other tables I became aware that, within the few square feet of the terrace, three completely different myths existed side by side. My own unashamedly rational and scientific version, based on the evidence of genetic links with Siberia and the Pacific; the women from Salt Lake City, who were sure the Navajo and other Native Americans were descended from the Lammanites of Israel; and the Navajo who worked here who believed their ancestors had left the fourth world through a rent in the sky and entered this, their fifth, through the gasping, steaming vents of Yellowstone.

  Just as the sun disappeared below the horizon, the desert was suddenly flooded with a strange purple wash. The fairy castles glowed bright terra-cotta for a moment, then were consumed by darkness.

  17

  A Question of Blood

  The Buffalo Dancer by George Rivera, National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C.

  After a side trip to Houston to see Bennett Greenspan from Family Tree DNA, our next rendezvous was in Washington, D.C., where we were to meet up with Gina Paige, the cofounder, with Rick Kittles, of African Ancestry. With a day to spare until Paige was back in town, like so many visitors to Washington we made our way past the White House and down to the National Mall. On previous occasions I had been to most of the museums which line the wide avenue that leads from the Lincoln Memorial to Capitol Hill, but I had never been inside the most recent addition. In prime position, nearest to the Congress buildings, lies the National Museum of the American Indian, its curvilinear architecture and golden limestone outer facings deliberately recalling the weather-eroded mesas and buttes of the West. Pools and artificial wetlands surround the entrance, and the whole building reinforces the intimate connection with the land that is so important to indigenous Americans. Everything about the museum has been guided and led by Native Americans. Inside, as in nature, there are no sharp edges, and the spacious atrium rises all the way to the top of the building. A gentle ramp connects the four floors that are home to permanent exhibitions based on the original collection of Native American artifacts assembled by the avid collector Gustav Hey, while temporary rotating displays feature particular Indian communities. A sure favorite with visitors, and our immediate destination, was the Native Foods Café on the ground floor, which divided into regions each offering its own specialties. Ulla and I headed for the Northwest Coast and its delicious servings of hot-smoked wild salmon.

  As well as viewing the magnificent collections I was searching for any reference to genetics within the museum. I wanted to see how the curators were dealing with the new information about the ancestry of American Indians and whether it threw any light on the distrust and hostility toward genetics that had been ignited by, among other things, the Havasupai case. I could find nothing. I asked at the front desk in case I had missed anything, but was met by blank stares. After I returned to England I got in touch with Gabrielle Tayac, one of the NMAI curators, to ask her more about the museum’s current thinking about genetics. She confirmed that there is no mention of it within the museum but that it was something they are thinking about very hard. They are in a difficult dilemma.

  According to Dr. Tayac, one reason for the antipathy toward genetics is that it is perceived as an affront to traditional knowledge, knowledge of the kind that Serle Chapman had explained to me during our days in the Bighorn Mountains. Genetics is seen as the latest way of invalidating native traditions that had been going on in one way or another for centuries. Native traditional religions were suppressed in the United States until the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, which recognized that Indians had been denied the right to freedom of religion enshrined in the First Amendment. The act also acknowledged
past infringements by the federal government, such as restricting access to religious sites, and also, as this accompanying statement from President Jimmy Carter concedes:

  In many instances, the Federal officials responsible for the enforcement of these regulations were unaware of the nature of traditional native religious practices and, consequently, of the degree to which their agencies interfered with such practices. This legislation seeks to remedy this situation.1

  Against this background, it is easy to appreciate the potential for hostility to genetics among Native Americans. The concession that federal officials were unaware of the effects of what they were doing could just as easily be applied to scientists in the Havasupai case and others like it. Indeed some proposed genetics projects in the past are guilty of the same insensitivity, one that even I could see. None demonstrates this so well as the Human Genetic Diversity Project from the early 1990s.

  As the head of steam was building for the Human Genome Project, the massive undertaking to reveal the entire sequence of human DNA, leading population geneticists saw the opportunity of adding a satellite project to study genetic variation around the world. There was nothing particularly new in the concepts behind the project—after all that is what they had all been doing for years. But the genetic tools were new, and the scale would be vast, which appealed to a certain type of megalomania not uncommon among geneticists at the time. What made me doubtful was not the grand scale, although my personal preference has been for less ambitious research projects, but some of the reasoning behind it. In particular I was disconcerted by one stated aim, which was to take samples from isolated populations before they disappeared. I had a startling vision of a small native group standing around their campfire and looking up to see the Land Rover coming over the horizon loaded with dry ice (to freeze the samples), and knowing that their time was up.