1/7 With all the Warren, Eastern Metis and Chumash #pretendian stories flitting about, there isn't much opportunity to speak about the core issues of #AmerindigenousDisempowerment I hope my colleague forgives me using her video for my own purposes.
2/7 1) Amerindigenous groups are divided, as they have been since 1492. But they are united by ancestry and genomic evolution. 2) Amerindigenous groups are divided by colonial mindsets / language (Spanish & English, Puritans & Catholics, Segrationalist vs Aggregationalist Racism)
3/7 3) Divided by Affinity to whiteness and belief that we've lost the "If you can't beat them, join them mentality " (flag worship, military service, religion) 4) Divided by intra-Amerindigenous grudges over actions that were products of Colonial war and alliances.
4/7 5) Divided by loss of culture and phenotype vs retention of both 6) Divided by Settler-Colonial Definitions of Indigeneity and lastly 7) Divided by the promises of technology and reconciliation by Colonial Scientists.
5/7 This DNA isn't only a fight over identity, it's a fight over #BigTechIP. Which no Native nation will benefit from. So sorry, those tribes that are admixed with little Native DNA, you are not what these #DronesAreLookingFor. They want access to 30kya mutations that are unique.
6/7 Thank you so much Krystal Tsosie. This is a drum I've been banging since 2009 when I interned at Yale in the Mike Snyder lab. ~6:09 you make three strong points 1) Tribes in Latin America were/are being exploited
7/7 2) DTM companies made over 1 billion dollars per Christmas season for 3 years running due to non-native's romanticism over the Noble Savage stereotype of some US tribal groups (of course this is so laughable because no one ever says they have a Modoc or Catawba Grandmother,
8/7 .....just Blackfeet, Chippewa, Sioux, Apache or Cherokee) but they blanch and look nauseated when they find out their ancestry is from Mexico, Central America or the Caribbean 3) Are we fetishizing American Indian heritage at the expense of unprotected people in the South?
9/7 All of these points in the greater context and faux promise of Precision Medicine and Public Health make the concerns raised in your video all the more egregious and deserving of attention. How many researchers, Universities and ethicists attend to the wholesale pillaging
10/7 going on in Latin America from unprotected groups or the same pillaging of DNA going on in the USA where Mexicans not only make up 60-80% of all "Latinos"(~48 of 60 million) in the USA but who also average 50% Native ancestry,
11/7 which many researchers use to "Go Fishing" for Native American biomarkers, which then are proffered as something "new" they thought up out of thin air, when they approach American Indians, First Nations and Alaska Natives.
12/7 In my view, using the correct ethics and political correctness shields researchers in the most absurd and ugly way. They know Indigenous groups are needy, at odds with each other, at odds with scientific establishment and at odds with migration stories....
13/8 so they can hide behind National rhetorics, local capitulation and the severe under education of Native groups on the rise of #SurveillanceCapitalism #BigData and #Omics or where "data generated hypotheses" come from.
14/8 This "Opaque" pitting of Amerindigenous people against each other and using European "Individual" and Ayn Rand-ian social philosophies is a surreptitious and deceitful way Settler-Colonials are winning this war over the next Atomic Bomb...called DNA & CRISPR
15/7 (LOL I lost track of my numbering) It's a tragedy and travesty to have Indigenous from Anglo Speaking countries prioritizing their definitions and issues over indigeneity (definitions almost entirely shaped by D.C.) to kick down at Natives from Spanish speaking countries
16/7 When the fight should be conjoined and the issues be directed toward the core of the problem...lest we be the inheritors of the MesoAmerican infighting that allowed a European foothold in this hemisphere...repeating history until our own extinction.
