Native American DNA, Kim TallBear
Native American DNA, Kim TallBear
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Native American DNA
Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science

Author: Kim TallBear

Narrator: Donna Postel

Unabridged: 10 hr 9 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/27/2019


Synopsis

In Native American DNA, Kim TallBear shows how DNA testing is a powerful—and problematic—scientific process that is useful in determining close biological relatives. But tribal membership is a legal category that has developed in dependence on certain social understandings and historical contexts, a set of concepts that entangles genetic information in a web of family relations, reservation histories, tribal rules, and government regulations. At a larger level, TallBear asserts, the "markers" that are identified and applied to specific groups such as Native American tribes bear the imprints of the cultural, racial, ethnic, national, and even tribal misinterpretations of the humans who study them.

TallBear notes that ideas about racial science, which informed white definitions of tribes in the nineteenth century, are unfortunately being revived in twenty-first-century laboratories. Because today's science seems so compelling, increasing numbers of Native Americans have begun to believe their own metaphors: "in our blood" is giving way to "in our DNA." This rhetorical drift, she argues, has significant consequences, and ultimately, she shows how Native American claims to land, resources, and sovereignty that have taken generations to ratify may be seriously—and permanently—undermined.

About Kim TallBear

Kim TallBear is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Dasha on April 25, 2023

While this book's scientific jargon was occasionally confusing for me (I am a mere humanities student), I did really appreciate the historical attention paid to conceptions of blood and identity and how many modern genetic and DNA mapping technologies are shifting Indigenous identity from blood to D......more

Goodreads review by Ai on December 16, 2019

This book is frankly worth it for chapter three, "Genetic Genealogy Online," where Tall Bear breaks down the pushback of social scientists by geneticists and other scientists who don't think social science or the humanities are "real work." I would fully frame the entire paragraph on page 122, and l......more

Goodreads review by Russell on July 21, 2022

I was a student of Kim TallBear for the first class of a new "Indigenous Peoples and Technoscience" course. I also follow her on Twitter, and hear her regularly on the MEDIA INDIGENA podcast. She does anthropology of white people, and as a person of Irish, Scottish and French descent living on the la......more

Goodreads review by Bjorn on May 19, 2014

Excellent, challenging, and illuminating look at the role of bio-sciences and neoliberal agendas as relates to indigenous bodies and lands.......more

Goodreads review by Bea on June 13, 2022

This was a really interesting book--I highly recommend if you want to read about a complicated but vital topic, if you take part in DNA testing for genealogical research, or want to enter a discussion of Native American sovereignty, identity, and genetic material. One of the overarching and not subj......more