Overview

In Native American DNA, Kim TallBear shows how DNA testing is a powerful--and problematic--scientific process that is useful in determining close biological relatives. But tribal membership is a legal category that has developed in dependence on certain social understandings and historical contexts, a set of concepts that entangles genetic information in a web of family relations, reservation histories, tribal rules, and government regulations. At a larger level, TallBear asserts, the markers that are identified and applied to specific groups such as Native American tribes bear the imprints of the cultural, racial, ethnic, national, and even tribal misinterpretations of the humans who study them. TallBear notes that ideas about racial science, which informed white definitions of tribes in the nineteenth century, are unfortunately being revived in twenty-first-century laboratories. Because today's science seems so compelling, increasing numbers of Native Americans have begun to believe their own metaphors: in our blood is giving way to in our DNA. This rhetorical drift, she argues, has significant consequences, and ultimately, she shows how Native American claims to land, resources, and sovereignty that have taken generations to ratify may be seriously--and permanently--undermined.

Full Product Details

9798200323043

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Donna Postel, an Earphones Award-winning narrator, is absolutely passionate about audiobooks and has narrated close to fifty titles across multiple genres, from memoir and biography to literary fiction, romance, mystery, and suspense. She uses her innate curiosity, talent, and decades of experience on stage and in the recording studio to bring books to life. When she's not in the studio, she can be found down at the barn cleaning up after and occasionally riding horses. Kim TallBear is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available