Reading Reflection: The Social Uses of DNA

Two of today’s readings discussed the use of DNA testing to determine Native American ancestry and the impacts that such technology can have on culture. In Tallbear’s DNA and American Ancestry, she discussed the issues in using dna technology to determine Native American ancestry, specifically what tribe you may be from, and how the development of such technologies may impact Native American Culture. Currently the typical methods used to allow membership within Native American tribes includes looking at one’s blood quantum. Blood quantum is an indicator of how much of your “blood” is of Native American ancestry based on how many of your relatives are of Native American descent. Tallbear argues that blood quantum is a better way to determine membership of a tribe because blood quantum is a way to quantify one’s social ties to the Native American community. DNA technology on the other hand is unable to piece together the social ties that one may have.

In Bardill’s Native American DNA: Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of an Evolving Concept, she discusses some issues surrounding the use of dna testing. For example, the lack of trust between Native American communities and researchers because of past wrongdoings such as in the Havasupai case. She also discusses Tallbear’s article and agrees with Tallbear’s perspective that DNA testing cannot accurately represent the ties within a tribe because tribe membership is not based soley on biological descent. As tribes determine their own membership, the communities that are formed are the result of a mixture of shared biological descent and also cultural connections and claims to heritage. Furthermore, the science is not perfect as there can be false negatives and false positives. Incorrect results could have big impacts on people’s lives and isolate them from the people they had thought they were closest to. Bardill closes by saying that genes evolve differently than culture does. I think this is a very important point because stereotypically each ethnicity is associated with one culture. However in reality and with how interconnected the modern world is, culture is complex and always changing, which ultimately makes culture more relevant to what communities we choose to align ourselves with than our genes are.