Why Indigenous-led Genomics Matters: Part I (ep 348)

TRANSCRIPT

Hey there, MEDIA INDIGENA listener, a quick, upfront technical note about this episode. There’s an issue with the original on-site recording: one of the speakers is, well, not quite like the others, in that they sound somewhat further off the mic. Happens to the best of us, it is what it is. But we regret the glitch, and hope it doesn’t diminish your appreciation of what’s to come.

Rick Harp: Hello, I’m Rick Harp, live from the main campus of the University of British Columbia, in the heart of ancestral unceded Musqueam territory, this is MEDIA INDIGENA!

[applause]

And we’re here as part of the Global Indigenous Leadership in Genomics symposium, featuring participants from the Americas, Aotearoa, and Australia, and beyond.

And just what is genomics, you ask? In what ways might Indigenous genomics differ from its mainstream counterpart? And, why is it important they be Indigenous-led? Answers to those questions and more on this special live edition of MEDIA INDIGENA!

[applause]

Alright. Sharing the stage with me here off the top are two panelists: the first, a voice familiar not just to regular listeners of the podcast, but no doubt to many of the ‘SINGers’ here in the audience. Is that what we call them, SINGers?

Kim TallBear: That’s okay: ‘SINGers,’ yeah.

Harp: Yeah, okay. Genomic karaoke’s a thing?

TallBear: Let’s hope not.

Harp: Please give a big Global Symposium round of applause to University of Alberta Native Studies professor, and SING Canada co-founder, Kim TallBear!

[applause]

And allow me to introduce the other co-panelist for the first half of today’s discussion, UBC assistant professor of forest and conservation sciences, and SING faculty member, Warren Cardinal-McTeague!

[applause]

Now, over the course of our extended conversation, we’ll meet other people here at this week’s event, to learn more about the diversity of applications and implications of Indigenous-led genomics across the globe. But first, Kim and Warren, for those people like me—and I’m sure lots of people listening right now, who are not all that well-versed in genomics—can you first firm up what it is?

I’ve heard of genetics: how does genomics differ and relate? Warren, I think you were volunteered to do this.

Warren Cardinal-McTeague: So I would describe the study of genetics and genomics as concerning the study of DNA, where you could think of genetics as individual genes, and how they change with mutations and so forth, whereas genomics is on the much broader scale concerning almost all the DNA in the cell.

Harp: Wow. Okay.

TallBear: So I have a question for Warren, then, kind of on the behalf of the audience. So, would you say that genomics is more multidisciplinary, and requires scientists and scholars trained in more areas than a genetic study.

Cardinal-McTeague: You know, off the top of my head, I would say no. I would say both could be addressed in this way. I would say, for me, the difference is a matter of scale, where genetics might be on an individual gene or multiple genes, sort of on the scale of one to five, for example, whereas genomics could be on the scale of like millions and billions of base pairs of DNA. So it’s quite larger scale.

Harp: So could we say, as a forest is to a tree, genomics are to a gene?

Cardinal-McTeague: Yeah, I think that would work.

Harp: Wanted to keep it in your wheelhouse. And could it also be the case that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts? Like, you’re looking at genomics at a systemic level, systemic considerations, broader considerations?

Cardinal-McTeague: I would say genomics, well, and this is where I probably, so I’m trained from a Western background, and so this is probably where my sort of science training is probably kicking in, into, like, far too many close details. But I say you could probably do more, say, if you have genomic data, you can do much more, let’s say one sample on a genomic scale. So there are broader implications. Whereas if you’re looking at a gene, you might be focused on, you know, a very narrow set of impacts within the body or within the cell. Genomics is much more data, has far greater implications, you know, how it’s used or potentially misused.

Harp: Okay. All right. Now, do you ever find that people—again, this is for the layperson, right? I’m the proxy here—do you ever find people confuse genomics with either epigenetics or, god forbid, eugenics?

Cardinal-McTeague: Oh, goodness.

[laughter]

Um, actually, most people kind of look back and say, ‘What is genomics?’ They just, they don’t even have the misconception. So we do try to drive back to, you know, being concerned about DNA, and then from there we can expand into these other realms.

Harp: How about you, Kim? Do you find that people are just sort of, ‘Huh?,’ and confuse all these different terms?

TallBear: No, I would say, you know, especially in Indigenous communities, people have heard the word epigenetics often. Because they seem to have a basic understanding that it’s about the interactions of genetics and the environment. And we’re really interested in that, because we know, even if we’re not highly formally educated, we tend to know in community that a lot of the health concerns that really impact our communities are really a result of colonization, not just our ‘deviant bodies,’ like scientists like to represent it.

And then eugenics, I do feel like people tend to know that’s racist science. But I agree with Warren, genomics maybe not any idea at all.

Harp: Okay.

TallBear: Yeah.

Harp: Alright. So, whose genes are we talking about exactly here? Like, which relatives?

TallBear: At this meeting?

Harp: Genomics, when we talk about genomics: I’m still in that container.

TallBear: Oh, it could be any organism in the world, right?

Cardinal-McTeague: Yeah, there, DNA is in most living—well, all living organisms, not ‘most.’

[laughter]

Harp: Depends who we’re talking about.

Cardinal-McTeague: It’s talking about, say, all of our extended relatives. So it’s in plants, it’s in animals, it’s in people, it’s in bacteria, it’s in fungi, it’s in most things. It also exists, not necessarily DNA, but the study of viruses also includes this type of data that we’re thinking about. So it really includes most things that we would consider alive or near alive.

Harp: If there was like a Venn diagram of all the shared DNA, like, I wonder what that would look like with all those different actors you just…

TallBear: Well, there is an infamous biological anthropologist who’s very funny named Jonathan Marks. And John has a book called What It Means To Be 98% Chimpanzee. And he says we’re also 40% daffodil, if we look at shared DNA.

Harp: Wow.

TallBear: Yeah, we’re not that interesting, right?

Harp: Wowee. Okay. So, Warren, I recently learned on no less reputable a source than Instagram that we humans and trees, as you just pointed out, share a percentage of genes. And apparently it’s a quarter.

Cardinal-McTeague: Oh, that’s pretty good.

Harp: Yeah. This is from a site called, or an account called @thesacredscience, and it’s quoting The Overstory by Richard Powers. Richard wrote:

“You and the tree in your backyard came from a common ancestor a billion and a half years ago. The two of you parted ways, but, even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes.” (So imagine flute music under there, like, really profound and stuff like that.)

But Kim and Warren, to what extent are Indigenous peoples involved in genomics because they want to be, and to what extent are they involved because they feel they have to be? Let’s start with Kim.

TallBear: I wonder if you would get really different answers to that question based on how old people are?

So I feel like in my generation and older, and I’m in my mid-fifties, as I always say, I was around back in the early to mid-nineties when Indigenous communities and activists around the world were actively resisting the Human Genome Diversity Project. And then I did my dissertation because I was resistant to what they were doing. I quickly understood through Debra Harry’s work in the Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism that this was a new form of colonial appropriation of our wealth, right, and that we were going to get screwed. We were not going to benefit from the kinds of studies they wanted to do.

So I certainly got into this because, not because I wanted to, but because I was worried about defending tribal sovereignty on this front. But now, you know, all these years later, 30 years later, and this meeting shows, that we have a lot of younger people, aspiring scientists, working in science, and it’s a good question for them. They’re really excited about the science. I meet a lot of Indigenous scientists who are really excited. They do tend to, all these years later, still understand that they’re trying to negotiate between their love and their passion for science and their genuine curiosity, and wondering, ‘What does this mean for my communities?’ They may not have quite the history of, I’m doing this because I’m resisting, I’m not sure. I’d really love to hear their answer to that question.

Harp: Okay, Warren, your take on this?

Cardinal-McTeague: I would say a bit of both. Just from my perspective, coming from an academic background, I see researchers wanting to work on the DNA of either Indigenous peoples, or from the DNA from their lands; so whether it’s plants or animals or crops or medicines. And they’re doing this often without their permission or involvement.

And so what we’re seeing now is them having to intervene and sort of protect their knowledge, or the data that’s derived from their knowledge. And so I do see them being thrust into this, often without some of the background in order to really understand the broader implications of this. But they do realize, like, it is important, and they’re worried about not necessarily access to benefit sharing, but being exploited on and on and again. And so in that regard, they are sort of thrust into this.

But through our training program, it often has come back to this idea of, like, it’s not like this far off system that we had no concept of. We knew that the health of the environment had impacts on our DNA, and the DNA of things around us. It’s not like it came out of thin air: like, we had an understanding of these concepts.

Harp: Okay. So you talked about research without Indigenous involvement or consent, but how much of it is going on without even Indigenous awareness, to your knowledge?

Cardinal-McTeague: Quite a lot, actually. And that’s been a big problem.

If there’s, say, something concerning genetic disease, say, of an animal, they will first engage with settlers or white people, and leave the Indigenous aside. So this was one of the themes of our SING Canada workshops in 2019 on chronic wasting disease. And that was a big intervention in ensuring that Indigenous people were aware of the research that was going on, because they’re often left to the sidelines for it, and it impacts them. It impacts the food that they eat, it impacts the materials that they use related to [inaudible], and so they are often forgotten.

Harp: And, Kim, do you find this, too, that there’s this frontier mentality that has extended itself into this realm?

TallBear: Oh, yeah, for sure. And I see this in multiple scientific fields, not only genomics. The literal language of new frontiers. ‘Exploration,’ right. National Geographic has a explorer in residence position, who, I’m gonna give a shout out to him, that we have a former SINGer, Keolu Fox, who’s Kanaka Maoli, who I believe has been a National Geographic explorer. Yeah, we’ll have to get Keolu on the show sometime. So they use this language, right? I have a New Frontiers grant as well. Like, this is the language of science. So, yeah, totally.

Harp: ‘Genomics: the final frontier.’ Yeah.

TallBear: Oh, I think you should make that the tagline for this whole…

Harp: But let me ask you, like, Warren. So you have these non-Indigenous, settler scientists, going into this ‘frontier’: are they doing it kind of willy-nilly, just right across the board, scooping up everything they can, almost vacuuming as much data, or are they still kind of surgical? ‘Cause I just have this picture of them just warehousing all this DNA for later use and probably, let’s face it, monetization.

Cardinal-McTeague: I’d say it depends on the field. So there are different parties interested in genetics and genomics,  and sort of biobanking.

And just sort of, in my experience, coming from sort of museums, collections, they want to have a bit of everything, just in case, you know, the world ends. So there’s that component of, like, collect everything. It also kind of acts like a time machine. So if you collect it now—because, as I should have mentioned, DNA evolves, so it’s all just constantly changing. So if you collect something today and freeze it, if you collect it, you know, in ten years, it could be a very different genomic or genetic composition.

And so, collecting things today could be really insightful to observing change through time. And so because of that, there is a broad interest in general collecting. But, in another sense—very briefly, before I came here, I worked at Agriculture Canada, and that was when I got exposed to people from the agricultural stream. And they’re very interested in what are called landraces or crop wild relatives.

Harp: Sorry: called what, sorry?

Cardinal-McTeague: Landraces.

Harp: “Land races”? Like, running on the land? Sorry.

Cardinal-McTeague: They’re not running on the land. These are, and, actually, I don’t even know the history of the term because it’s not my background, but it’s like a different strain or variety of a crop, and they’re often derived from Indigenous peoples.

Harp: Right.

Cardinal-McTeague: And so they’re very, very interested in recolonizing Indigenous crops and claiming it as their own.

Harp: By tweaking it just a wee little bit and saying, “Look what I did: I ‘improved’ it! Give me all the money.”

Cardinal-McTeague: Well, yeah, exactly. But now they’re doing it sort of in a secretive way, because now they enter into Nagoya negotiations…

Harp: The what?

Cardinal-McTeague: Nagoya.

Harp: Is that a city in Japan? And something happened there, intellectual property stuff or…?

Cardinal-McTeague: Yeah, this is, um…

Harp: So many rabbit holes we can go down with this, eh?

TallBear: Mm-hm.

Cardinal-McTeague: It’s about access and benefit sharing around genetic resources, and ensuring that people aren’t exploited, so this is an international agreement, but it’s very hard to enact.

And so, in some cases, if you find something, a huge, huge, big discovery, you want to ensure you have that paperwork in place, because, oftentimes, it exists for a reason, because they’ve already exploited people so much. And so now they’ll create this agreement, but still take over the Indigenous knowledge as their own. Just as you mentioned.

Harp: You mentioned DNA can change. Maybe I’m reading too many Marvel comic books—I mean, thinking of mutants here—but how fast can it change? Without, again, I’m going down all these rabbit holes, but for the purposes of this conversation, what’s important to know about how DNA changes, the rate of change, the precipitant of change, catalyst…

Cardinal-McTeague: Catalyst of change. I’ll start on a high level. Rates of change vary depending on organism. For instance, I studied plants, and in some cases, the change is very fast.

Harp: And there’s human intervention, obviously, in some cases.

Cardinal-McTeague: In some cases. And other parts of the cell are very slow. So there’s a lot of nuance across every domain of life. But I would say a big form of change is through sexual reproduction. And it can be where new mutations are introduced, but also you just shake up the DNA amongst, say, a mother and a father. And so there’s just lots of ways for things to change, including sun damage, say, for skin cancer and things like that.

Harp: Well, you talk about co-creation…

TallBear: Co-constitution?

Harp: ‘Co-constitution,’ right. And I guess this would obviously fall under that as well.

TallBear: I’m trying to think how…

Harp: Indigenous people changing the DNA of things, let’s say, by cross bleeding—cross-breeding of plants.

TallBear: Oh, I was still in sexual reproduction. I was still in sexual reproduction. But, yeah, Indigenous breeding of…

Cardinal-McTeague: So, like, Indigenous peoples have always been scientists. You know, the reason we have maize and other Indigenous crops around the world is because they were actively selecting and breeding plants to produce all these different varieties. And they’re very well adapted to their local climates, local environments. And that is why they might look for certain traits.

So, one of the examples I think of is nitrogen-fixing corn that was just found, and this was a corn that they had developed—Indigenous peoples in Mexico, I believe they’re the Mixe people, or Mixe Sierra—and it was well adapted to live in  nitrogen-poor areas. And so now it can fix its own nitrogen…

Harp: This is a contemporary strain of corn that was ‘discovered.’ By whom, I wonder? [laughter]

Okay, so this next question, I struggled to formulate it here in my laptop, so you’re going to have to help me, you know, bring it out of me. So I apologize in advance.

Uh, given that we share genes, some quantity of genes, with practically every creature or plant on the planet, and beyond—which is why I self-identify as part daffodil. Right?

TallBear: You could, you could!

Harp: I could claim I’m part of the Daffodil First Nation!

TallBear: And you’d have more…

Harp: Where is my Status, huh?!

TallBear: You’d have more legitimate ancestry than what some people claim.

[laughter]

Harp: And so, with that in mind, right, we have this kind of almost, like, ‘DNA commons’? I don’t know if that’s taking a concept and intruding it in another realm, but, when and where does the study of genomics start to, if you will, ‘Indigenize’?

Like, when does it become meaningfully specific to particular Indigenous peoples, their territories, their flora, their fauna? Right? Because if we share… you know what I mean? Because if the DNA belongs to everyone and everywhere in some form or fashion, when can we say it’s Indigenous? How does it ‘Indigenize’?

TallBear: I mean, I wrote a book saying that the term ‘Native American DNA’ is nonsensical.

Harp: That’s right.

TallBear: Right.

I mean, it’s an idea constructed by scientists, that’s useful for them, right? It helps them figure out which markers they’re looking for, to trace human history and relationships between populations. But that’s the extent of its realness. So, I mean, I don’t know, Warren, if you want to take on the Indigenous….

Harp: So why do we… I’ll put it another way: why do we put Indigenous and genomics, or Indigenous and gene, in the same sentence? When is it appropriate to do that?

TallBear: I don’t know. Yeah, Warren, what do you think?

Cardinal-McTeague: Yeah, I would say something like, ‘Oh, this is an Indigenous genomics type thing,’ when it starts to pertain to a community: whether it’s individuals, or something that relates to their lands or knowledge systems, that they’re sort of claiming some sort of relation with. That’s sort of a time where I would think that would be appropriate.

Harp: So, again, the Indigeneity doesn’t inhere in the DNA. We’re getting into the realm of where it fits within this constellation of…

TallBear: Well, I hope you ask the other two panelists this question as well. I’d be really interested to hear their comment. I mean, I really don’t like attaching an ethnic or racial or Indigenous moniker to DNA, as if we can determine our belonging to our nation through a DNA marker.

Harp: You’re destroying 23andme‘s business model here, you realize!

TallBear: Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, again, and I’ve talked about this in many places, certainly, we do testing of close biological relatives, in order to invoke our existing nation’s enrolment and citizenship criteria. ‘Oh, yeah, okay, that is your biological parent.’ We can therefore plug that fact into a set of pre-existing regulations. That’s different, right?

Harp: From saying there’s ‘Irish DNA’ or ‘Spanish DNA’ or ‘Australian DNA.’

TallBear: But I’d love to hear their answer later on.

Harp: Exactly. So, looking over all the realms of genomic-related research out there, I was struck by how diverse and comprehensive it is: from the criminal (forensics), to environmental, botanical, to medical (diagnostics), from inside our bodies, to the food we eat, to the soil that it grows in, right down to the sea floor. The ‘new frontier.’ I feel like this is a commercial, but anyway…

And yet, maybe this is just me, because I feel like I’m on the outside looking in here, it feels to me like it wasn’t all that long ago that genomics wasn’t a thing. So how is it that it became so prominent so seemingly quickly—again, in the kind of, the bigger picture?

Cardinal-McTeague: For me, I feel like it became more prominent with the advancement of sequencing technology. So sequencing is sort of the act of understanding what the component of DNA is. This is going to get very technical, but DNA is composed of nucleotides, and there’s four of them: A, G, C and T.

Harp: Well, duh. Yeah. I mean, who doesn’t know that?

[laughter]

I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Cardinal-McTeague: But, you know, it’s like a book. And the order of them, and the number of A’s and G’s and C’s and T’s, you know, that codes—sometimes it codes something, sometimes it codes nonsense—but that creates proteins, and proteins sort of build up the rest of your body, of life. And so, it wasn’t until we could actually understand what that was on the molecular level, because DNA is really small.

Harp: How small?

TallBear: When I first saw the DNA double helix diagram—I was forced to take genetics in grad school ’cause I wrote that book, and my advisor said, you better take some genetics—and I first saw that diagram, I couldn’t even comprehend. It’s like infinity, but going the other way. That’s how it felt to me, that just the deep dive down, down, down to a smaller resolution. And it feels like, you know those mirrors, when a mirror’s in a mirror, and it’s infinity, that’s how it felt to me. And I literally could not wrap my mind around the resolution of it.

Harp: Huh.

Cardinal-McTeague: Very small. And it took a lot of effort, a lot of time, and a lot of money, to even get the smallest fragment of DNA. Well, they’ve since advanced, and that’s why we moved from genetics to genomics. We’re no longer looking—it doesn’t take weeks or months or years to get a small fragment. It can take an hour to get a whole genome, depending on how big it is. But you can get a lot of DNA on the scale of millions in a couple of hours. So because of that, it made DNA and genomics more accessible, and that’s why it’s sort of becoming more prominent. And often a lot of it’s tied to, like, the promise of health or improvement of health. And so, that’s always a big motivator in research.

Harp: And did it come to prominence in one part of the world only, or in multiple parts? ‘Cause as soon as you said that, I just thought, I’m sure there’s lots of healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies and the like, who were just, like, ‘Alright, better set up a new bank’: not a biobank, but a bank for other stuff. I’m just wondering if the profit motive was always there driving it, or if that came later.

Cardinal-McTeague: I feel like that came later. But, y’know, it was always on their mind.

Harp: Right. I’m sure it’s like the usual pattern—public/state funding develops this innovative thing because the private sector is so risk averse, and then they’re like, ‘Oh, thank you, thank you for doing all this work.’ Kind of like the Internet all over again.

So: Kim and Warren, when did genomics first capture your attention, and why? Your first a-ha moment or your first damn moment? You know what I mean? And where has that led you in terms of your interest?

TallBear: I worked for an Indigenous research organization in Denver, Colorado, back in 2000.

And, we got a grant from the—usually, we did a lot of nuclear waste policy work on behalf of tribes, that’s what I had been doing throughout the nineties, and so, I was doing a lot of grants and contract work for US Department of Energy.

But then they suddenly started moving some of their scientific funding resources; this is the era of the mapping of the human genome. And we got a grant to do a series of meetings around the U.S., talking to tribal representatives from tribes around the U.S., about their perceptions of genomics. You know, non-Native people are always interested in ‘What do Indigenous people think about genomics?’

And we were sitting at this meeting, and I remember a tribal rep asked a question. They were worried about the mapping of the human genome because they thought that maybe different tribal people, or Native people in general, were biologically distinct enough to make biological weapons against us. And I was sitting there, and I thought, ‘Hmm, I don’t know a lot about genetics, but I kind of doubt we’re that distinct genetically, that they could target a biological weapon at us.’ And I thought, whoa.

And then all of the other kinds of things that were being said were very kind of biologically essentialist. And I thought, I have so many questions about how this is going to affect us. But I was trained as a community and environmental planner, I had no background to investigate the questions I had. That’s when I decided to go back and go to graduate school, only to write the dissertation that became that book.

That’s why I got interested. It was as a tribal planner who was worried about the circulation of genetically essentialist and racial ideas among tribal people in the United States.

Harp: So that’s your origin story. Where’s that taken you?

TallBear: To here: to the Global Indigenous Leadership and Genomics Symposium. Because I spent ten years studying science I couldn’t stand, and that I wanted to fail, and as a good feminist who’s supposed to be invested in the technology you critique—this is a core value of feminist science studies—I’m not only an Indigenous science studies person, I’m a feminist science studies person, I wanted to begin working around science and technology in ways where I could support it. And as a planner, I knew that we need every tool and method available to us to build our economies, and our communities, and our knowledge, and our governance structures.

And so I thought, I want to start working with genome scientists that I can get behind, and that was Indigenous scientists. And then I brought my sort of planning background, and Indigenous studies background, to help them think critically about what they’re trying to do. Because Indigenous scientists are trained like other scientists. They may come from Indigenous communities and have a gut feeling about wanting to contribute to community, but they don’t have the language, because they haven’t been trained in this kind of language.

And so we bring those kinds of ideas together here—you know, Indigenous STEM people, Indigenous people in Indigenous studies, etcetera—we bring those ideas together, and then we figure out how to do this work together in a more critical way. So that’s how I got here.

Harp: There’s a term from another context called code switching. Does that kind of apply here for you, too?

TallBear: We talked about that, didn’t we, in a session the other day. So I think about, you know, I do think some of the Indigenous scientists, the younger ones, are, like, ‘God, I’m trying to make it in science. I need to get a grant, I need to build a lab, I need to establish myself.’ And then here we are saying, ‘You need to be critical. You need to be anti-colonial.’  You got to kind of go between both, I think I said, ‘I hate to tell you this, but you’re just going to have to do twice as much work.’

Harp: So what’s harder: for an anti-colonialist to become a genomicist, or a genomicist to become a de-colonizer?

TallBear: Good question!

Harp: Thank you. Thank you very much.

TallBear: It’s probably equally as difficult, huh?

Cardinal-McTeague: Actually, I think it would be easier to be an anti-colonialist and become a genomicist: ’cause that’s what I had to do, I had to switch from being Western-trained to thinking about things in a different way. Actually, it was easier for me, but to have a non-Indigenous scientist do that is very, very hard. They don’t have that…

Harp: Have you come all the way to the other side, or do you compartmentalize? Like, how do you navigate?

Cardinal-McTeague: I do have to compartmentalize to some degree, ’cause I still need to succeed by western academic metrics, to get [inaudible] there and do all that stuff…

Harp: To get resources to do what you do.

Cardinal-McTeague: Part of the reason that I’m hired is because I can still publish Western scientific papers ,while I still get to do the good work of supporting Indigenous communities. Whereas others who are doing strictly the Indigenous work, they don’t get the foot in the door because they won’t succeed, and they’re not going to make space for them.

Harp: Wow.

TallBear: And not everybody needs to be in the academy. I mean, there are many other places to be. You know, I think of this as a collective. I’m not one of those people who’s like, ‘Oh, the academy is the place to be, or it’s super extra colonial.’ Everything’s colonial, everywhere. You can work at a bar, a store, the feds, a corporation, it’s all colonial.

But I do think it’s good to have people in all of these different institutions, and our people are everywhere, right? Working in the place that best fits their personal set of characteristics. Where are you most comfortable and productive? And, you know, we do partial anti-colonial work in the positions we’re in, but, together, we’re everywhere, taking different tactics.

Harp: So there’s no compromise-free, pure space…

TallBear: No. Absolutely not.

Harp: …from which to do genomics.

TallBear: Or to do anything! To do Indigenous work, to do Indigenous work on behalf of Indigenous people.

Harp: Maybe a podcast.

[laughter]

TallBear: Oh, see, now I’m gonna think of how this is a politically compromised space, too.

[laughter]

Harp: Okay, so, Warren, your origin story, and where has that brought you—your journey.

Cardinal-McTeague: So I was trained, as I mentioned, from Western perspectives in botany.

And you’ll often see when I talk about genomics is I do anything but genomics. So I love plants, I love art, I love history. And so I was very lucky to do the things that interest me. And I ended up in a botany lab that studied the evolution of plants. And to do that, you know, in the past, you would just look at morphology, just the way things look and are shaped in their anatomy. But there was a lot of convergence on that. So you could use DNA as a sort of less biased way of figuring out how plants are related to one another.

Harp: Why do you say less biased?

Cardinal-McTeague: Because a lot of times DNA evolves sort of in a neutral sense. Not always, but they kind of call it like a molecular clock. Every few generations you’re getting a mutation, and then, the more distantly related you are from someone, the more time you’ve had to change. That’s why we’re only, you know, how much per cent daffodil?

TallBear: Forty per cent, I think.

Cardinal-McTeague: Because there’s been more time between us and daffodils, and us and chimpanzees.

Harp: Oh, wow. But still, I’m still not, like, by ‘less bias,’ you just mean we’re less distracted by the outward appearance of a plant, and the DNA doesn’t lie, or…?

Cardinal-McTeague: It’s because when you look at morphology, there’s a lot of convergence. So…

Harp: Sorry, when you’re using morphology, I’m used to it in the linguistic sense. What do you mean by that here?

Cardinal-McTeague: I mean, I’m going to talk about flowers for a minute.

Harp: Alright! That’s the daffodil part of you coming out. Okay: honouring your people. Your ancestors!

[laughter]

Cardinal-McTeague: Uh, if you’ve ever looked at a flower, they come in different shapes. Sometimes they’re symmetrical where, you know, you could draw one line down and they fold up like a butterfly. Other times, they’re radially symmetrical, sort of like a dandelion, you know, you can cut it multiple ways. And that shape is recurring because of pollination biology. And so, even though they are both symmetrical, or not, or radially symmetrical, it could be because of other factors and how they’re related. Not all things that look the same are closely related, is what I’m trying to get at.

Harp: As with daffodils…

TallBear: People, too, right? Like, when I used to live in Indonesia, and people would often mistake me—they didn’t think I was an American, because all Americans had blonde hair and blue eyes, apparently—but they would often mistake me for being a Dutch/Javanese mix, because I’m tall and I’m the color of people from Java. But I don’t know how closely related, you know, they did look kind of similar, but it doesn’t mean we’re related, right.

Cardinal-McTeague: And so, to get around that, you could look at the composition of the DNA of these different plants, and, you know, it totally shifted our understanding of how plants are related to one another. So that’s sort of what I mean.

Harp: So this blew your mind.

Cardinal-McTeague: And it blew the world’s mind.

[laughter]

Harp: But we’re talking about your journey.

TallBear: Oh, yeah, back to your journey, Warren!

Harp: You blow the the world’s mind, Warren. No. [laughter]

Cardinal-McTeague: No, it didn’t blow my mind at all. I’m a reluctant geneticist. I just love flowers.

Harp: Ooh, that should be your memoir: ‘The Reluctant Geneticist.’ Sorry.

Cardinal-McTeague: [laughs] So, this is going to get long, but I, you know, I grew up in the north, where it’s very cold, Fort McMurray, if anybody knows it. And so I had the opportunity to study tropical plants. And so I was young, and I just said, I want to go and see the world. And so that was my avenue there, was to work in this lab and learn about tropical plants. But during that process, I got to travel to Madagascar, Costa Rica, Brazil, and collect plants and study their DNA.

But I was reenacting a lot of colonial harms because I worked through a museum, and that’s what their job is, to go in, extract, and leave. And I just became very uncomfortable with that, I tried to address that with my peers, and the response was, ‘How is a museum colonial?’

[laughter]

Harp: And you’re like, ‘Okay, I’m done.’

Cardinal-McTeague: I said, I don’t think I can invest my life into this, and push it uphill. I needed to do something else. And so, that’s when I met SING Canada in 2019, I was really looking for that—it’s a good origin story, but also a villain, because I’m a villain to them now, because I’m very critical of the work that they do.

Harp: Oh, really? You’re banned from the museum for life?

Cardinal-McTeague: No, they still like me and I still like them.

Harp: You know, we don’t have time to get into it, but, just, it’s interesting how a Fort Mac kid ends up interested in tropical plants.

TallBear: I can imagine how.

[laughter]

Harp: Okay, so the event is, of course, entitled Global Indigenous Leadership in Genomics Symposium: I’d love to give listeners a better idea, or at least a sense—we’ll get into it more deeply in the next episode—of what Indigenous control /leadership of genomics looks like, what makes Indigenous genomics different, and how those differences make a difference to Indigenous peoples’ wellbeing.

And so, I imagine one key to that difference might be how it works inside and outside of the lab, as it were—because, I mean, again, my impoverished imagination—I just think of you all in lab coats, looking with those really super-powered microscopes, looking at those super-tiny pieces of DNA. So how do Indigenous genomicists approach that differently from their mainstream counterparts? Could it be, for example, the inclusion of community priorities and perspectives?

TallBear: Go ahead, Warren: you’re ‘the reluctant geneticist.’

[laughter]

Harp: Yeah, that’s right!

Let’s start a conversation about how Indigenous control of genomics… what’s a vivid illustration of how that’s different from mainstream genomics? Is it where the genomic work is done, how it’s done, with whom, for whom?

Cardinal-McTeague: I think I would start out by saying that there’s multiple forms of this happening. So I think I’m most comfortable talking about the way we approach this work at SING Canada, which is where we want to co-produce work with Indigenous communities as partners.

We also want to embed our own values into the work that we do. So I just gave a talk about that partnership we’re doing. And, you know, it’s about research, but it’s also about governance, and supporting the governance of our partners, as well as providing training and capacity enhancement to the community. And I think that is fundamentally different than how Western scientists approach their work. You know, they don’t have to think about community. They have their own goals and interests in mind. Whereas we have, you know, it’s just natural for us to just think about the broader impacts of the work that we do. And in addition to that, is a huge component of being place-based in our work. So we want to take the lab out of the university, to do it in community, and we can do that now with advancements in technology, that mobile genetic sequencing technology,

Harp: The technology is allowing that to happen.

Cardinal-McTeague: Yeah.

TallBear: Yeah, I mean, I think the common pattern—and this is across academic disciplines, it’s not only in genomics—the common pattern, I think, is to be the knower. The researcher is the one that knows and produces knowledge and asks the questions and interrogates. And so, they would go out into the world and ask their questions of the world, or the people or the plants that they’re studying, or whatever. For us, it is that, it’s not, we’re not the only knowers. So that word co-constitution can come in: we co-create or co-constitute knowledge together with, we’re all knowers.

I mean, and even I think in Indigenous epistemologies, of course, the plant knows something. The way I have heard it growing up, is that—and I’ve heard this from people, other tribal people who work with plants—you don’t decide what the name of a plant is yourself. Like this, don’t they, I mean, aren’t white people always naming mountains, they’re always naming things after people, and some guy who discovered something. But the plant can give its name to you: you know, it comes to you in a vision, or it can come to you in a dream, or it comes to you in this moment of, ‘Oh my gosh, I just… ‘ You know? So they know things, you know, the beings in the world, whether they’re humans or non-humans, know things. We’re not the only knowing inquirers.

And so, I think that’s at the, when we do these community partnerships, and we try to do this in SING Canada, it’s not, it’s not always easy, but we try to be as non hierarchical as we can. And we have a couple of lab techs right now, University of Alberta undergraduates, or recent grads, who are in the lab getting mentored by one of our faculty members, and working with the technology, giving presentations—and, I mean, other people do that with their students, but we really do try to have the voices of our participants and community people that we work with. We’re all together creating knowledge, trying to figure out the answers to questions, right. And often asking questions that the community wants asked. And, as Indigenous people, we understand where those questions are coming from, that they’re scientifically interesting, but they’re also conditioned by the world that we are forced to live in by settlers. I think that might be one of the differences.

And also having a lab in our own space: we don’t want the science faculty owning everything, because they don’t have our same ethic, they don’t have our same sets of relationships. So, physically, we are very determined to build labs, in our own spaces, that are under our administrative and financial control, right. So it’s not only a conceptual challenge, it’s not only that we have to think differently, we actually have to own this, control this; you know, this is within our control materially. And that’s really important. And that is exactly decolonization: we want wealth back.

Harp: So, OCAP definitely applies here: Ownership, Control, Access and Possession.

TallBear: Oh, yeah.

Harp: Huh. So I get the sense then that—and I don’t want to belabor the obvious—but Indigenous genomicists, they start with their location, relative to…

TallBear: If they can get into this space. I mean, Warren talked about, you know, we do have scientists coming in, Indigenous scientists, curious, because they have been trained in typical western labs. And a lot of the indigenous people that come to this workshop, they’re at that moment where Warren was, right: where they’re, like, ‘I don’t want to have to keep doing things the way I’ve been trained. I want to do science, but I’m uncomfortable with the way it’s being done. How can I do it and not feel that.’ You know?

Harp: But I could see some Western-trained scientists saying, ‘Hey, man, I want the freedom to research what I want. I wasn’t trained as a community consultant!’

TallBear: Mm-hm.

Harp: You know? And so, that, again, the location of yourself relative to your people…

TallBear: I’ve said to people, I’m like, ‘That’s fine, but we don’t want to work with you.’ You want to work with Indigenous communities, you’re coming under our governance. That’s the way it’s, you know, but, you know, you don’t want to do that, then go do something else.

Harp: And too, like, I infer there that there’s an ethos of collaboration, not only with communities, but also the organisms you’re studying. As you said, like, the plant, you’re in a relationship. There’s relationality with the plant, for example.

Cardinal-McTeague: And in some cases, that’s a very delicate relationship. You know, some trees are seen as literal relatives that need to be treated a certain way. And so it’s, you know, you have to approach sampling and, you know, analysis of that data very carefully.

Harp: And have the SINGs developed protocols, I guess, in that regard?

Cardinal-McTeague: We did with our partners, we made sure that we did sort of lay down tobacco and things like that. So we started off in a good way, and we were very careful with how much we sampled, not taking too much, ensuring that we are not wasting any of it, and that there’s a process of returning what’s safe to return back to the land.

Harp: Such as bones or other. Yeah.

Cardinal-McTeague: Whether it’s bones or soils or plants or things like that. And so you have to keep, like, a very strong reverence for this. And I think that’s where Western scientists fail, is when they start to think that they’re above these things, and that they can treat them without respect, because then they start to proceed without thinking about things carefully or ethically. And then that leads to a lot of the problems we have.

Harp: Alright.

Well, let’s press pause here on this first chunk of discussion. Warren, the DNA of this panel is going to change rapidly: we’re going to have two other voices come in the second part, one from Aotearoa and one from Australia. So we look forward to hearing from them, and Kim, you’re going to stick around and…

TallBear: Oh, I am?

Harp: We’re going to be co-interlocutors.

TallBear: Oh, okay.

Harp: So, please, a warm round of applause for our first episode’s featured guest, Warren Cardinal-McTeague!

[applause]

TallBear: Thanks, Warren.

Harp: And that’s it for MEDIA INDIGENA, episode 348, recorded live on location May 9 at the University of British Columbia, situated on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Musqueam Nation.

Thanks again to UBC’s School for Public Policy and Global Affairs, the Global Journalism Innovation Lab, as well as SING Canada, for making the event possible.

And if you found your way to us for the very first time via the ‘Browse’ section of Apple Podcasts, which just named us one of their 2024 Voices for Change, welcome! We’re happy you’re here, and invite you to dive into our deep archive dating back to 2016.

Apple Podcasts celebrates the passion, work, and dedication of creators who inspire thought, conversation, and reflection. And for us to be included on this list as an agent of change, it’s very humbling. So much gratitude to Apple Podcasts, where we encourage you to follow the show, to stay on top of every new episode.

Thanks for listening: we’ll talk with you again soon. Ekosi.

Our theme is ‘nesting‘ by Birocratic.