by Bryan Sykes
Another feature of the Diversity Project was the health benefits it promised, in the sense that greater understanding of human genetic variation might get to the causes of diseases in general and those that were endemic to some groups in particular—like diabetes among American Indians, for example. This was a realistic ambition at the time, but critics of the project pointed out how often in the past indigenous people had been recruited to medical research projects that held out the prospect of future health benefits that never materialized. There were problems with the commercial patenting of genes, very popular in those days, and there was a danger that others might benefit financially from discoveries made through indigenous people. Some of the wording used by the Diversity Project was certainly clumsy. Describing indigenous people as “isolates of historic interest” was patronizing to say the least. Intentionally setting out to “develop a panel (of DNA markers) for forensic identification of individuals” raised fears that this would be used to develop methods of forensic investigation based on ethnic origins. Against a historic background of suspicion, this was asking for trouble.
The taint of scientific racism that wafted around the Diversity Project still haunts the collective memory, especially, but not exclusively, among Native Americans. Critics of the project were concerned about a direct effect: that if DNA were used to define racial groups, then some governments might use genetic data to discriminate against them. As the Jews had realized some time before, it was a theoretical possibility, even though the correspondence between the two is very loose indeed. Fears were even voiced that biological weapons could be developed that targeted particular groups based on their DNA. For all these reasons, which were never adequately countered by the organizers, the funding dried up and the project never got off the ground. In my view it was on shaky foundations from the start, not so much because it was such a bad idea but because of the intoxicating menace of hubris that surrounded the whole enterprise.
But in one sense the Human Diversity Project lives on. In April 2005 a consortium of the charitable Waitt Foundation, National Geographic, and IBM launched the Genographic Project. This was certainly a project on a grand scale, backed by the considerable resources of the organizations behind it. Its aim was to collect DNA from indigenous people all over the world to trace the history of human migration. I had heard about the project before it launched and eagerly sent away for my copy of the introductory DVD, which ironically for a worldwide enterprise was in a format that restricted it to U.S. audiences. The Genographic Project had learned from the failure of the earlier Diversity Project and sensibly avoided the most contentious issues. There was to be no medical data collected and the genetic analysis was restricted to the two genetic lines with which we are already familiar, mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA.
Yet there were undeniable similarities between the two projects, particularly in the composition of the organizing committee, whose chairman was the same distinguished Stanford geneticist, Luca Cavalli-Sforza, who had inspired the original project. The work of the Genographic Project was divided up among several international academic centers with long experience of population-genetics research, in other words many of the same people who were hoping to run the Diversity Project. According to the publicity the results of the Genographic Project, after peer-reviewed publication, were to be be put into the public domain.
By now aware of the enormous public interest in individual results, the project also offered a public participation kit by which, for a modest fee, interested members of the public could submit their own DNA for analysis. The proceeds from the sale of these kits were used to create a Legacy Fund, which aimed to put something back into participating communities by way of grants designed to increase awareness of the threat to indigenous cultures.
All this sounds very positive and a far cry from the original Diversity Project. Judging by the number of fee-paying public participants, well over three hundred thousand to date, the Legacy Fund will be well provisioned. The Genographic Project is very well resourced and attractively presented, as you would expect from National Geographic, and it should be forgiven for the rather disingenuous original claims that it was something entirely new. It certainly is from the point of view of public awareness, but from a scientific standpoint it is really only replicating a decade or more of genetics research that had already been done, and published, much of it by the contributing laboratories. Though I look forward to reading the conclusions and the peer-reviewed publications when they appear, I don’t expect them to alter the pretty good picture we already have about how our ancestors moved around the world. But the presentation will, I’m sure, be absolutely stunning.
For all its good points, the Genographic Project still has its critics, which is the feature I want to examine in greater detail as they get to the heart of the difficult situation in which Native Americans find themselves. We have already touched on the historical reasons for the suspicion of the motives of genetic researchers—the clumsiness of some projects and the way they are perceived as attempting to invalidate Native American traditions. To explore this further I contacted Kimberly TallBear from the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. TallBear has been a vociferous critic of the Genographic Project, genetic testing of Native Americans, and—I think it is fair to say—genetic testing in general. It was her remarks that DNA testing is intrinsically racist that I wanted to explore.
She kindly sent me her publications. I had already read one opinion piece in Science, published in 2007, with Dr. TallBear among the contributors.2 In it she and her coauthors warned against the hidden dangers of commercial genetic ancestry testing and concluded by recommending its close regulation. Unsurprisingly I disagreed, and I did submit a response to Science that, also unsurprisingly, was not published. But that is hardly relevant here. In another article Dr. TallBear examines the claim that I and others have made in the past—that modern genetic analysis refutes any biological basis to racism.3 In this context I have been asked to undertake comparisons of Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, Jews and Arabs in Palestine, and Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda, all with the intention of reducing the tensions between them by demonstrating that they are closely related genetically. Naïve intentions, perhaps, and I did not carry out any of them, but I imagined that the results would come to that conclusion—and in the case of Palestine, studied by others, they did. But as we are all aware, the appreciation of a shared ancestry has not led to any easing of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. So although this use of genetics may have been ineffective in terms of its influence on conflict, and may eventually change attitudes ever so slightly for the better, I never thought of it as harmful. It came as an unpleasant surprise to read that it was seen by some to be just that.
In the past the methodology of population genetics did, inadvertently, create false boundaries between groups of people. It originated from a time when the only genetic data that were available came in the form of frequencies—typically of blood groups or similar genetically controlled features. To make any sense of the data, there was no alternative to dividing the subjects into “populations.” After all, individuals don’t have blood-group frequencies. The “populations” were often defined by such factors as geographic location or language and, lo and behold, there were frequency differences between them. I never liked this kind of analysis, because I thought it created artificial biological divisions on the basis of genetic data. Happily, it wouldn’t have been any use for designing biological weapons, or even for placing an individual in his or her right “population.”
One of the refreshing changes introduced by the individually precise genetic data now available, largely through mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA, is that this type of group analysis is no longer necessary. And yet, I am afraid, it persists in many scientific publications. So, insofar as any segmenting of humans into groups on genetic grounds could be interpreted as a precursor to supporting a genetic basis for racism, then I think it might. Once again i
t is entirely unintentional, but as we have already seen, that does not make it harmless.
Whether DNA can ever be used to define a person, or his or her affiliations, has become, and will continue to be, a contentious issue for Native Americans because it touches on the very current issue of tribal enrollment. Rather like the forced adoption of surnames in England in the thirteenth century, the initial reason for trying to sort out who belonged to which tribe was purely administrative. It followed the Allotment Act of 1887. This piece of legislation is usually regarded by historians as an attempt to undermine the traditional way of life of the American Indians and their system of communal landholdings. Briefly, tribal lands held in common were to be broken up into 160-acre plots held by individuals, and any unassigned plots could then be sold by the government. Not only was this a misguided attempt to turn Plains Indians into yeoman farmers, it also played into the hands of speculators after cheap land, who then bought up vast areas from the Indians at the going rate of fifteen dollars cash for the whole plot. The Allotment Act had a devastating effect on Indian life. Close families were given plots a long way apart. The land, intended for agriculture, was often barren and useless. Land sharks, like James W. Denver (after whom the city was named), moved in to snap up bargains, and by 1920 two-thirds of the land previously under Native American title—that is, nearly 100 million acres or the area of North and South Dakota combined—had been transferred to European Americans.
Whatever the original intentions or the ultimate effect of the Allotment Act, its administration did call for a register of tribal membership. This was the origin of the Dawes Rolls, named after Massachusetts senator Henry L. Dawes, who sponsored the Allotment Act of 1887, and now widely known as the Dawes Act. The provisions of the act were first applied to the “Five Civilized Tribes,” the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole, who had been resettled in Oklahoma after being forced from their lands in the Carolinas and Florida during the 1830s. The Dawes Commission that organized the rolls was soon flooded with applications, even though the act itself was extremely unpopular among tribal members. Many refused to apply, some were forced to do so, some left for the rugged Cookson Hills in the east rather than enroll. Nonetheless the Dawes Commission received a quarter of a million applications between 1898 and 1907, when it closed. It accepted a hundred thousand of these on the basis of genealogical relationships, by birth or marriage. Even so, there were many whites with no Indian ancestry who tried to pass themselves off as Indians in order to get an allotment of land. Despite this and other irregularities, the rolls are still relevant today, as it is often a requirement for new applicants for tribal membership to prove descent from someone on the Dawes Rolls.
Although, of course, genetic tests were not available at the time, there is an inference of some biological ingredient with the insistence of genealogical descent as a criterion for acceptance onto the rolls. This was made more explicit in the troublesome concept of “blood quantum” to determine eligibility for tribal membership that followed the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. This was a much more benign piece of legislation that was championed by one of the more enlightened commissioners of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, John Collier, serving from 1933 to 1945 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The act reversed the Dawes privatization of commonly held land and by so doing returned two million acres to Indian custody. It also began the process of transferring legal powers to tribal councils—which are still in force today. Though far from perfect, it was a step in the right direction. Although succeeding administrations have tried periodically to dismantle tribal structures in order to assimilate American Indians as fully integrated U.S. citizens, these efforts have routinely failed.
Today membership of a recognized tribe is a highly sought-after privilege. American Indian nations now make their own rules for tribal membership, and almost all contain a reference to “blood quantum.” This refers to the proportion of an applicant’s ancestry that is considered to be tribal. So, if one of your parents is a “full-blooded” member of the tribe and the other is not, your blood quantum is one-half. The minimum requirements vary among tribes, from one-half in the case of the White Mountain Apache of Arizona, to one-sixteenth for the Mashantucket Pequot of Connecticut and one thirty-second for the Cherokee Nation. Just as the original Allotment Act encouraged fraudulent applicants after land, so has tribal membership attracted a deluge of new applicants eager to enjoy the financial and other benefits it confers. There are the reparation payments for illegally acquired land, educational grants, subsidized health care, income from the lease of mining rights, and, most prominent of all, revenues from gaming. The most famous example of the last, Foxwoods Resort Casino, is owned and operated by the Mashantucket Pequot and has the largest turnover of any gambling resort in the world, dwarfing both Atlantic City and Las Vegas, a remarkable achievement for a tribe that numbered only fifteen members in 1900 and whose landholdings had shrunk to less than an acre.
Since a landmark legal case of 1905, tribal authorities have been able to define their own membership criteria, and most do use a version of the blood-quantum estimation. They are not obliged to do this, but it really only reiterates the requirement for a genealogical link to other tribal members, past or present. Of course, the use of the term “blood” is emotive, but other nonbiological epithets would do just as well, even if lacking the same immediate psychological impact. Nonetheless, though the complete autonomy of tribal-membership decisions substantially dilutes the charge of a racist element imposed from outside, it does leave open the possibility that genetics could be used to back up an application for tribal membership in the absence of sufficient genealogical proof. However, some critics of blood-quantum estimates see them as dictated by outside forces, even if operated by the tribes themselves. “All tribal enrollment efforts obliged the descendants of Native people to think about where they fit in a white-dominated, racialized world.”4
DNA has certainly already been used to establish an applicant’s paternity, if only to reinforce a genealogical claim. But that has nothing to say about defining a tribe through DNA. I know from my own experience that DNA-testing companies are regularly approached by aspiring applicants for tribal membership for genetic “proof” with which to back up their claims. This is technically not possible, as tribes cannot be defined by DNA, nor should they be. Not that this fact will stop unscrupulous commercial outfits from pretending that they can.
Attempts have been made, though, by groups of people to use genetics to apply for federal recognition. The Western Mohegan tribe in Vermont used rather old-fashioned methods of tissue-type frequency in an attempt to demonstrate a link to federally recognized tribes, and found one in Wisconsin. This failed to pass the state legislature, but not until after the organizers had been accused by some other tribes of “enabling” genocide.5 More recently, in 2005, the Seaconke Wampanoag from Rhode Island approached the Genographic Project looking for genetic evidence to fill in gaps in the knowledge of their ancestry where written records are in short supply and oral histories have been largely lost.6 It was a brave step by the tribal chair and genealogist, Michael Markley, who told me that much thought, prayer, and counseling by the elders was required to allay the anxieties of those tribal citizens who found it hard to accept genetic testing. But, as he added, “bravery is in our genes.” The Seaconke are one of several groups within the Wampanoag people, only two of which, the Aquinnah from Martha’s Vineyard, and the Mashpee from Cape Cod, are recognized by the Department of the Interior and thereby entitled to benefit from federal assistance programs. However, as Michael Markley emphasized to me, the Seaconke have never asked for federal recognition, and this was not the motivation of their participation in the Genographic Project.
The name Wampanoag means “People of the First Light” in their Algonquian dialect. They once inhabited much of the eastern seaboard of New England and were the first Native Americans to be encountered by the Mayflower settlers in 1620. By then their nu
mbers had already been severely reduced by an epidemic, probably smallpox, said to have been introduced by French fur trappers. They famously helped the English settlers through their first winter and participated in the first Thanksgiving celebration in the fall of 1621. However, in 1675 they had tried unsuccessfully to eliminate the Puritan settlement at the Plimouth Plantation. After this defeat and the retributions that followed, tribal numbers dwindled to less than four hundred.
The results of the Genographic Project study were published in July 2010 and make very interesting reading.7 On the matrilineal side, all of the mDNA lineages are of either European or African origin, while the patrilineal Y chromosomes show a range of Native American, European, and African lineages plus one surprise from New Guinea. However, genealogical reconstruction showed that the single Native American
Y chromosome was most likely introduced into the tribe by a Cherokee incomer several generations back. This mixture of origins for the Y chromosomes is a reflection of the extensive admixture experienced by the Seaconke since the seventeenth century, and in this part of America with such a long history of contact, probably unremarkable in its composition. In contrast, the complete absence of Native American mDNA among the Seaconke Wampanoag came as a great surprise to me, given the usual direction of intermarriage between African and European American incomers and Native American women. I should point out that an analysis of the autosomes by chromosome painting might well reveal very substantial Native American ancestry among the Seaconke Wampanoag that was missed by mitochondrial DNA, but somehow I doubt it.
