nativenews: Sorry, that DNA test doesn’t make you Indigenous [IMAGE: Kim TallBear, author of &
nativenews: Sorry, that DNA test doesn’t make you Indigenous [IMAGE: Kim TallBear, author of ‘Native American DNA’, is an associate professor at the University of Alberta.] So you send your DNA off to an ancestry company, and get a report back that says you’re ‘part Native’. So what? Maybe you’re excited to learn about your ancestry, but can you really consider yourself part of that culture? Not really, says Kim TallBear. “We construct belonging and citizenship in ways that do not consider these genetic ancestry tests. So it’s not just a matter of what you claim, but it’s a matter of who claims you.” TallBear is an Indigenous scholar based at the University of Alberta. She’s reacting to a particular advertisement for DNA ancestry tests, that shows a woman who learns she is “26% Native, and can’t wait to learn more about ‘her’ heritage”. It got regular play in Canada during Major League Baseball playoffs this year. But learning about one’s “Native ancestry” is not simple. For one thing, “Native” is a pretty broad term: whose culture does she learn? Inuit? Maya? Coast Salish? The tests don’t give you that much detail. And, TallBear says, even if you ‘chose’ a specific Nation, having some matching genetic markers from ages ago doesn’t mean you have the lived experience to become part of that community. “People who are not actually members of Indigenous communities, tend to define Indigeneity as a racial category. Now for us, those are umbrella categories which help us talk to one another, relate to one another, but our primary sense of belonging, and identity, is our particular Indigenous or tribal community. They don’t use the word tribe up here, but in the U.S. we do, so somebody might say ‘I’m a member of the Métis Nation,’ or ‘I’m a member of this particular Cree band,’ I would say I’m Dakota.” Keep reading -- source link