tribal membership and enrolment and it's very complicated.
We who grow up around these communities and have family members who are both
members or not members understand how complicated this is,
and the long difficult history of our colonial relationships with
the federal governments.
They don't have any clue about that.
In their minds, being Native American or
being First Nations is about claiming an ancestor.
It's about genetics.
It's only about ancestry.
They don't deal with it's political entities.
They view us in terms of race and ethnicity as far as I can tell,
and they think that they can realize a new racial or
ethnic identity by taking a DNA test.
And this, it's not that biological ancestry doesn't matter in our community.
Right? It's not that we don't have children
who then we then claim and raise as our own,
who are our biological offspring, and we care about our biological ancestors; but,
that's not the total definition of what it is to be a member of our community, right?
And so we care very much about being socially entangled with communities,
and about, you know, you want to be claimed by your community.
You don't just have the right as an individual to go claim to be a member of
a community that does not know you, within which you have not be socialized and
that does not claim you.
Then the question comes up by a lot of people who are trying to make the claims
to ancestry.
Well, it wasn't okay to be Native American back in the 19th century.
We passed as white in the United States.
Sometimes people say that they were forced to identify as African American.
And they couldn't identify as Native American because of the way that
race works down there.
So I get a lot of people who say, well, I didn't have a choice or
my ancestors didn't have a choice.
That's sad, that's a sad part of history.
But it doesn't mean you as an individual 850 years later have an absolute right,
to complain to be a member of a community that has not claimed you.
And so I worry about that and I worry about these DNA testing companies and
these scientists who have all of the power of gene talk on their side.
Gene talk is incredibly, culturally powerful in these two nations.
I worry that they will have too much cultural power and
say over how Indigenous identity is defined.
And so this is why I think it's really important for
Indigenous communities to get a handle on the science and
to be speaking out publicly about how we are doing membership and belonging,
in ways that are a little bit more complicated than a DNA test can reveal.
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