[Sci-tech-public] STS Special Lecture by Kimberly Tallbear, Monday Feb 11 @ 4:00 pm

[Debbie Meinbresse]

Please join us on Monday, February 11th:

STS Special Lecture

The Genetic Articulation of Indigeneity

Kimberly Tallbear
University of California, Berkeley

4:00 pm, MIT, E51-095

Abstract:
Through the 19th century, it was generally agreed 
that the Indian represented an earlier stage of 
human evolution and that his end in the face of 
western progress was inevitable. Fast forward to 
the 1970s and 1980s and “indigenous” movement 
emerged in force, with many non-governmental 
organizations (NGOs) and other groups in the U.S. 
and abroad organizing under that rubric. Today, 
worldwide estimates range from 250 to 600 million 
individuals belonging to over 4,000 indigenous 
groups.  Estimates are based upon particular 
understandings of indigeneity that emphasize 
historical continuity, ancestral territories, 
cultural distinctiveness, economic and cultural 
non-dominance, and self-determination as peoples. 
As we usually read it, indigeneity depends upon a 
particular type of indigenous/settler dichotomy. 
Although it has libratory potential in many 
places, in others it is contested and problematic 
for describing the subjectivities of peoples, 
specific colonial histories, race regimes, and 
power relations. I have long been interested in 
the trade-offs of “indigeneity,” even for 
U.S.-based Native Americans who also operate 
within an intergovernmental framework with the 
United States.  We who identify/are classified as 
indigenous do not alone control its meaning. Yet 
precisely because indigeneity promises so much to 
so many who are disempowered, interrogating it is 
no straightforward ethical task.  What is at 
stake­what is risked in the production of that 
category and its common definitions?

The larger body of my work maps out the world of 
“Native American DNA” as a research object and 
life-organizing narrative for scientists, 
genealogists, and other consumers of “genetic 
ancestry” tracing technologies.  I have come to 
interrogate indigeneity as a genetic category, 
and do so within a very different ethical 
framework, one in which not indigenous peoples, 
but scientists and genetic genealogists (mostly 
self-identified, racially white, middle-class 
individuals) are my research subjects.  Using 
“articulation theory,” I describe how indigeneity 
is articulated in the service of anthropological 
and human genetic diversity research.  I examine 
the ways in which indigeneity as a concept can 
work both for and against indigenous claims.



Debbie Meinbresse
STS Program, MIT
617-452-2390
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