Reading: Jennifer Raff, Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas (Twelve, Hachette Book Group: 2022)
Raff deliberately and persistently foregrounds collaboration between archaeologists and American Indigenous communities throughout the book. There are obvious reasons for that emphasis, but I increasingly wondered what this book would look like if it included tensions and conflicts between the two groups. Not to worry! Raff has anticipated this readerly criticism, and the last chapter is all about scientific abuses of the DNA of Indigenous peoples and the results of that eroded trust. I did not actually know that Indigenous groups in the United States now routinely decline to participate in many modern genome mapping and databank projects, including commercial ancestry testing services. Makes sense!
Research that has caused harm to Indigenous communities in the Americas (and elsewhere) has poisoned efforts to understand their histories using genetics. As of this writing, there are very few publicly available genomes from contemporary Indigenous North Americans, and even fewer from ancient North Americans that have been sequenced enough to confidently do detailed population comparisons. In comparison, there are thousands of genomes from contemporary Europeans and hundreds of genomes from ancient European populations. This bias is problematic because it excludes Indigenous peoples of the Americas from potential benefits of genomics research (such as genomic medicine, the use of genomics for repatriation claims, or capacity building within communities). [265]