Members of the press have asked me, given my critiques of @SenWarren for her Native American DNA stunt, would I vote for her for president?
My response: I emigrated to Canada in 2015. I no longer vote in US elections. And after the debacle that was DNC2016 I’m done with the Democrats, although I grew up in the party.
But I don’t tell people to vote or not. I’m not an electoral politics pundit. My knowledge lies elsewhere.
I am an Indigenous Studies & Science & Technology Studies scholar. I analyze settler-colonialism that uses science and technology to extract resources, including DNA, from Indigenous peoples.
I am also interested in how Indigenous peoples, to the contrary, use science & technology to exercise self-determination.
This is why I wrote the book “Native American DNA,” and why I have been forced to think so much since 2012 about #ElizabethWarren’s insistence on Cherokee ancestor claims.
But I also focus on telling a different story about the world I want us to live in. I foreground Indigenous narratives of “good relations,” or a place-based “web of relations” story…these are found in different Indigenous languages & practices
…instead of a linear & temporal story of multicultural progress & inclusion into a settler state. that story is predicated on Indigenous elimination, disappearing Indigenous people into the past.
This is in part why I moved to Canada. We exist there in greater percentages with more visibility. Downside: Anti-Indigenous racism is more explicit in Canada. Upside: I’ve found more space to foreground a story of Indigenous relations.
Settler narratives of democratic, scientific, & other forms of progress are based in private property and settler-colonial exceptionalism. Those stories ignore the Indigenous genocide upon which they actually depend.
Settler-colonial stories of progress are also human-centric, privileging human lives over the well-being of the planet. Liberals and conservatives largely share this same story.
[I don’t bother speaking to fascists or explicit racists….] So go vote for Warren or any other Liberal who promises you that US exceptionalism can be redeemed if it is more “inclusive” or democratic.
I do not share a commitment to reforming a US system predicated on Indigenous genocide co-constituted with genocide of nonhuman relations. You can’t “equity, diversity, and inclusion” your way out of genocide.
I insist on a different narrative: That humans should live in good relation with each other & other-than-human relatives in lands that should not be conflated with nation states. (& “good relations” are not defined according to some settler ethic masquerading as universal good.)
#ElizabethWarren claims Cherokee ancestry, but is a bad relative for refusing to meet with Cherokee people and by foregrounding DNA knowledge over Cherokee definitions of who is Cherokee & who is not.
Living in actual good relation with Indigenous peoples and these lands requires not privileging nation states over relations, nor colonial science over Indigenous sovereignty.
Good relations will never be found in tired nationalist fairytales of US exceptionalism, even liberal ones with Warren as the heroine and Trump as the villain.
American Progress Redux (2018) 
