Beyond Settler Genomes: Temporality, Genomic Indigeneity, and (De)Colonization

• In Event: Unsettling STS 1

Abstract

This paper explores recent attempts to “reconstruct indigenous genomes” from the DNA of so-called admixed (or “mixed race”) peoples. I challenge the linear, teleological historical narratives that shape the project and demonstrate that the scientists rely deeply on what Mark Rifkin calls “settler time” to make current conceptions of genomic indigeneity make sense. In particular, I argue that claims about extinct populations and the desirability of genomic salvage as well as assumptions about the stability of genetic populations and categories of admixture must be located in longer histories of racialization, colonization, and dispossession.

The reconstruction of indigenous genomes invokes not only particular pasts but also specific futures. Thus, we must not read genomic technologies that purport to track the “history of humanity” simply as evocations of the past but also as statements of futurity, as part of a larger project imbricated not only in (re)telling histories but also in imagining futures. The temporal point, in Western time, of 1492 becomes a point of reckoning for not only a particular past but also a possible imagining of a particular future. To excavate these narratives is a way both to critique the assumptions embedded in this scientific retelling but also to think about ways to imagine different futures, futures not embedded in extant imaginaries of race, sex, and sexuality, and indeed the limited imaginaries of what science is and what it can do.

Author

• Jennifer Hamilton, Hampshire College