Why Indigenous-led Genomics Matters: Part II (ep 349)

TRANSCRIPT

Harp: Hello, I’m Rick Harp: from Winnipeg, this is MEDIA INDIGENA, episode 349.

On this week’s roundtable: the second half of our special, live-on-location look at Indigenous-led genomics. Recorded at the Global Indigenous Leadership in Genomics symposium at UBC back in May, part one brought us the basics of genomics, how it differs from genetics, and how Indigenous genomics compare to those of the mainstream. This time around, some examples from Indigenous leaders in Australia and Aotearoa.

But, just before we do, a quick moment of thanks to those who power this program, our patrons on Patreon, and that includes newer patrons like Tom, now pledging $1 to our work each and every month. And at $1.50 each, it’s Eduardo and Vincente. At $5, it’s Christina, and at $7.50, it’s Alyssa.

100% Indigenous owned and operated, 100% audience supported, our program is 100% free to all. Help keep it that way. Learn more at mediaindigena.com/support.

And just before things get underway, a quick reminder that we did have some issues with some people’s audio. We did our best to make it as audible as possible: we apologize for any inconvenience listeners may experience.

Harp: Alright, welcome back to MEDIA INDIGENA, our special extended conversation happening at the Global Indigenous Leadership in Genomics symposium, here in unceded ancestral Musqueam territory on the campus of the University of British Columbia. I’m here with Kim Tallbear. We’re also pleased to be joined by a special guest, one of the attendees here from SING Australia, Amanda Richards-Satour. Is that correct?

Richards-Satour: Correct.

Harp: Okay, so welcome, Amanda. Glad to have you here. You know, as I asked Warren earlier, and Kim, what was the inciting incident, or what was the come-to-Jesus moment, so to speak, of genomics for you?

Richards-Satour: So, I have only worked in the Indigenous genomics space for about 18 months.

Harp: Wow. Literally. Okay.

Richards-Satour: Very new. But I have a background in health research.

Harp: Okay. Public health research? Or what type of health research…

Richards-Satour: Indigenous health research, across sort of different jurisdictions, different areas, public health, health promotion, infectious disease. And genomics really was an area that I had heard about, but I didn’t know much about, and so I thought I’d really like to learn.

Harp: Okay. Were you sympathetic to me saying, ‘What is genomics?’ Was that where you started as well?

Richards-Satour: Yeah, I did. I did. And I’m still probably at that a little bit. I’m working in it every day now, but I think that the questions that I have, and the I guess weighing of the risks and benefit, a lot of my community are at that place, too.

Harp: Okay.

Richards-Satour: So I feel like I have a place to be.

Harp: Okay. And what community is that?

Richards-Satour: So I’m Adnyamathanha and Barngarla, which are two groups in what’s now called South Australia.

Harp: Okay. And so, you are primarily concerned with genomics from a health perspective, like, intertwine your two areas of interest.

Richards-Satour: Yes, from a health perspective. So the team that I work in is an Indigenous genomics research team based in Adelaide. It’s called the Black Ochre Data Labs. And we’re looking at health and genomics, a lot of our work’s around diabetes in Aboriginal people in South Australia. And that work’s been going for a few years now.

Harp: Diabetes is a very fraught topic, isn’t it?

Richards-Satour: I think it’s still very new, the science, and understanding it; in our team, anyway, it’s very new. The research is led by Professor Alex Brown, who is an amazing Indigenous researcher in Australia.

And I think how the question sort of came about was our community just asking ‘Why do we have so much diabetes?’ And not only diabetes, but the health outcomes associated with that: very high rates of kidney disease, amputations, cardiovascular disease. Is there something that we’re missing in the picture? Because we all hear the message around the food that we’re eating, but is there something else going on that we haven’t been able to really shine our light on?

Harp: Alright, and what is your role in there? What kinds of things do you get to do?

Richards-Satour: So, I’m more sort of the scientific researcher, I am a community engagement coordinator. I am really the bridge between the community and the researchers. So, our team, primarily biomathematicians, statisticians, so lots of people with very specific learning in their areas, and I’m really there to make sure that they understand our communities and also what our communities are asking of the researchers. And also, I think, genomics as a whole, like asking those questions like, What’s it going to be used for? or, Will this benefit our community? Those sort of questions that we don’t need to have any sort of university degree to understand, but our communities need to know.

Harp: Is there a moment you can think of where you realize you’re super well situated to help the out-of-community, the external researchers better understand your community…

Richards-Satour: I think, working in research for a while with non-Indigenous researchers, but also, so my health background is, I’m a medical school dropout, so I had three years of that sort of experience, so understanding a little bit of the biomedical side, but then also understanding my community and my ancestors and my responsibilities.

Harp: So when did SING Australia come into being? You said it was SING USA first, Kim? And then SING Canada…?

Kim TallBear: No, it was SING US first in 2011. I think it’s SING Aotearoa in 2016, Canada 2018, Australia 2019. And then we’ve got a couple other newer ones.

Harp: Okay. Do you have questions about Amanda’s work?

TallBear: I mean, it sounds very consistent with the kind of ethos that we have, it’s the professionalization of our ethos of working with communities. Yeah, that’s fantastic. And so, it’s an Indigenous-controlled research project. And, forgive me if you already said this, is it an Indigenous-controlled institution?

Richards-Satour: The institution is not, but the research is Indigenous controlled. We’ve got an Indigenous Governance Council overseeing the research and the data that’s coming out of it. But it is also part of a larger piece in Australia, a part of what they call the Australian Alliance for Indigenous Genomics, or ALIGN, which has Indigenous governance across Australia about any sort of research benefit for Indigenous people in Australia.

Harp: Is the intent to share the results, maybe create a larger picture of diabetes among Indigenous peoples in Australia?

Richards-Satour: Yeah, I think that’s the intent, to share and to really have those sort of questions, answers from all over the continent, from all the different communities. We are very different from each other. There’s been a recent article in Nature about the differences between Aboriginal communities in Australia. Genetically, we’re very different from each other, but there are a lot of similarities. And Indigenous people have been in Australia for at least 65,000 years, a very ancient population, as in, we’ve been deep time in Australia, so we’ve got a very specific story to tell about our genes in our place.

We’ve been in our countries for thousands of years. Even within my community, we have stories of animals that have been extinct for 40,000 years. So we’ve been there at least that long. So, our genes in our place is something that’s really specific to our communities. There are learnings for all communities, but it really needs to be led by all the different communities.

Harp: I’m reminded of the incredible linguistic diversity. Do those kind of map over each other, in a sense, the genetic and linguistic distinctiveness?

Richards-Satour: Yeah, they do. I think the recent paper really showed that there are that sort of flow of languages around Australia, links in with the genetic information that they have.

Harp: Ballpark, how many are there, not to put you on the spot, languages?

Richards-Satour: Yeah, 300.

Harp: Okay.

Richards-Satour: There were probably about 400 at the time of invasion. But a little bit less now, but still very distinct groups.

Harp: Canada, depending on how you count, you know what I mean, how specific you go, it’s around 60, sixty-plus.

TallBear: I did have a question. I’m also just so in awe of, you know, the ancient stories that you have, right. And I remember a certain National Geographic Explorer said at one point, ‘Oh, it’s 6,000 miles of open ocean: how did they get there? It’s just such a mystery.’ I’m like, dude, you need to read something about Indigenous navigation. And, you know, they can’t believe it, right? Because they had to be the first people to do things. So it’s just, you know, the disbelief and the inability of settler scientists to wrap their mind around the people in Australia.

Richards-Satour: Yeah, I think the understanding of deep time in Australia is very difficult for non-Aboriginal people. We understand it, we know it, and we know what our ancestors told us. And it’s really interesting to know that our stories—they tried to say that, you know, these were ‘myths’ made up, but as they’ve come around again, like it’s saying, you know, they were true stories. ‘The animals that your stories told you about, they did exist in this area and they were like your ancestors told you.’ So we always knew. So, the western science is not that important to our communities because we always knew that. But having that validate to protect our country and our people, that’s important.

Harp: So besides being part of this podcast, what’s been your favorite aspect of being here at the global symposium?

[laughter]

Richards-Satour: I think just meeting everyone, being in this beautiful country; like, it’s very different from where I’m from. I’ve only ever seen snow in other places, I’ve never really seen it at all in South Australia. And just meeting everyone, hearing the different stories that people have to share about their communities, that’s been really empowering.

Harp: What did you hope to bring, and what will you most take away from, here at the Global Indigenous Leadership in Genomics symposium?

Richards-Satour: I guess to bring, I think, that all Indigenous people who are interested in this, have a space at these sort of forums, and that we don’t necessarily have to be ashamed of not having any sort of degree or having that sort of validation from the colonial institutions. But what I like to sort of take away is having an understanding of what’s happening for Indigenous people across the world, and how we are asserting our rights and our sovereignty across these colonial spaces.

Harp: You know, the word Indigenous can be very useful as a contrast with Western science or the mainstream, but can also be quite flattening; ’cause you just made the point, right, Indigeneity within what is currently called Australia, there’s a great deal of diversity. Even though we’re all very different, Aotearoa, Australia, and Canada all share something in common, right—colonization from a certain part of the world. So it’s difficult, but at the same time, it gives us these touch points, too, of commonality, which is my favorite word of yours, is that’s the colonial predicament.

TallBear: Yeah, no, and we had a visioning session a couple days ago, and we saw that we have, even though our cultures are really different in our landscapes and languages, we do have, I think, a lot of similarities that probably are the result of having these place-based peoplehoods, or ethical similarities, right. Again, very different languages and relationships with place and all of that. And those are the good things we have in common.

The other things we have in common are the experience with the colonizer: so we can relate to each other’s residential school stories, stories of having children scooped, stories of having unethical medical research. I mean, we’ve all experienced those things. And so, those commonalities also drive our engagement with this field, as well as our commonalities in terms of our place-based values and commitments. So it’s been very positive conversations, even when we have the difficult conversations and share the stories of colonialism.

Richards-Satour: Yeah, I agree. The difficult conversations that are similar are easier to have with Indigenous people from other places, rather than white researchers in Australia. Trying to have those conversations can be really difficult and really traumatising. I know for my own family, my great-grandfather, there’s a card with all his data held in the museum, and it’s got all his measurements. They measured the length of his ears, the breadth of his nose, all these measurements. And so, that was data taken from him, and that is still in a colonial institution. And being able to share those sort of understandings with Indigenous people in Canada, across the world, is much easier than trying to talk about it to non-Indigenous people in Australia.

Harp: And I assume part of your work right now, data sovereignty is baked into the relationship with the researchers.

Richards-Satour: Yes. And bringing them on that journey of understanding of, this is not a new space for us to be in— having our data collected—but how can we do it in a new way that is controlled by our people?

Harp: Amanda Richards-Satour, thank you so much for making time for us today.

TallBear: Thank you.

Harp: Let’s give her a hand here.

[applause]

Harp: Alright, Phil Wilcox, come onnn downnnn! You’re the next…. no. [laughs] Which one was that? That was The Price is Right?

TallBear: Yeah, that was The Price is Right.

Harp: Okay. Alright. Well, Kim, I asked you to recruit different folks to come and appear on the show.

TallBear: Phil has been a part of our Global SING consortium organizing team for this meeting, and from, probably, SING Aotearoa since the beginning.

Harp: Okay.

TallBear: Yeah. He’s a well known figure in our consortium.

Harp: Alright. Well, Philip, welcome to MEDIA INDIGENA, thanks for making time. So when did genomics cross your path in the way that has now led you here? Like, when did you pivot into genomics?

Phillip Wilcox: Going back to the 1980s now, late 1980s, I was working in a forestry research institution, doing work essentially evaluating the impacts of a breeding program for one of our plantation tree species. I got interested in how breeding actually worked in a modern context, and the paper came out in a journal called Science. Basically, it was using genomic technologies to dissect the variation, that continuous variation, that you observe in populations into the specific components in the genome. I was interested in how those technologies could actually be used in an applied [inaudible] context.

From there, I went off to Carolina State University, did a PhD. I worked on an Indigenous species to the United States—or what is now the United States—a disease called fusiform rust, which, at that stage, was considered the most commercially important pathogen or disease of implantation.

Harp: So I hesitate to use the word ‘fire’ when talking about forestation, but what lit the fire under you in terms of the utility of genomics? The world it opened up for you in terms of your involvement?

Wilcox: This new technology had offered new paths, and new ways of doing things that was not possible previous to that. So, in that particular context, we could predict, based off on my work, my PhD work, we could predict at a seedling stage, what level of resistance to this pathogen that particular seedling would have. And that could be used, if it had the high levels of resistance, it could be used in the breeding program, or out in the forest.

Harp: Okay.

Wilcox: I finished in 1995. Around that time, there were all these new gene technologies that were coming on board. Alongside of that was the genetic modification technologies beginning to roll out in the laboratory. And there were new challenges, though. There were ethical challenges, and spiritual, and, I guess, social challenges associated.

Harp: Such as?

Wilcox: So, from a Māori perspective, um—this is not a swear word—we have this term ‘whakapapa.’ And that refers to our genealogy, that refers to the stories that come from our ancestors. It’s a metaphor for creation, and it talks about the connections among people, in between people, and other animate life forms, as well as between animate and non-animate.

And so when we talk, you know, at the time I was doing a PhD, I was doing a course at Cold Spring Harbor, which is kind of the home of genetics, considered the home of Western genetics. And there were some early results coming out from a sequencing program saying, hey, there’s this high level of conservation between very, very distant species. We talked about in a previous interview, with 40% of all DNA in humans is what we find in dandelions, right? And so this was kind of, like, the scientists were going ‘Wow!’, but from our perspective, it was entirely expected. This was nothing new.

Harp: Okay.

Wilcox: We share a common whakapapa. And that understanding is a core tenet of who and what we are in terms of being able to define yourself as Māori: one of the core elements of that is having a Māori ancestor. So we have a Māori whakapapa. So that’s part of our identity. And so that’s embedded in our DNA, literally embedded in our DNA.

TallBear: Your whakapapa is embedded in your DNA, yeah.

Wilcox: And so, because it’s a core concept for us, it’s a taonga: it’s something of value, it’s something that needs to be, it’s, if you will, [inaudible], that’s restricted. It is something that needs to be treated appropriately, through an appropriate ethical framework. And our ethical framework, we call tikanga.

Harp: Have you been able to bring Pākehā scientists over to this worldview?

Wilcox: Yes. I lead work on a couple of projects. My co-leaders are not Indigenous, but they made it quite clear that tikanga is the framework that we will conduct the projects within. And that was non-negotiable. And they accepted that; there’s no problem from their perspective.

But what we do, but I go to some genetic spaces, other spaces of genetics research and application, there are places and spaces where Pākehā don’t wish to engage with tikanga, or have tikanga inform their practice. So, some do, in being a good ally, and also delivering the outcomes, many of them actually want to deliver health outcomes for our community. So now in health studies, they’re happy to have Māori tell them, ‘This is the way that we want it delivered.’ And they’re like, ‘Okay, fine, we’re good with that.’

But on the other hand, there’s probably a larger proportion—particularly in the environmental sciences, I found, where I come from—who don’t wish to engage with tikanga. Because it threatens their professional, the norms of their praxis. And so that means putting information about Indigenous species into the public domain, working with other non-Indigenous scientists around the world. And operating in a manner that’s about delivering outcomes for them personally, for their professions, and about getting in publications, and about doing things in a manner that we typically see amongst Western scientists, publishing in [inaudible] journals and things like that, without actually acknowledging that [inaudible] if it’s an Indigenous species, we typically have had a relationship with that species.

And even if we haven’t had a relationship with that species, like a bacteria or virus, we’re still a dynamic people. We still wish to have, and believe we have a right to have, a relationship with that species going forward. And that’s part and parcel of who we are. And so, as mana whenua, tangata whenua, the first people of that land, we have a treaty with the government. And the government says, well, all taonga should be in the hands of Māori. So, our taonga are our DNA sequences, and our DNA sequences, not just of our tangata Māori people, but also our Indigenous biota as well.

And the Indigenous biota one is really quite contentious. We have new technologies now: eDNA. Grab a sample of air or food or every known piece of life form that we have…

Harp: That’s environmental DNA, eDNA. Okay.

Wilcox: … and sequence the hell out of everything that’s in there. And then, those that are not yet known as well: there’s a whole bunch of new species being discovered in Antarctic trenches. My colleagues went down, took about a six-week trip down, to Antarctic and trawled deepwater species. So they found a whole bunch of new species. So that DNA information’s generated somehow and will be utilized in some manner, shape, or form, even if it’s just depositing in a database somewhere.

Harp: So, did I hear you correctly in referencing rights to access, control, sovereignty, fall under the treaty relationship, the Treaty of Waitangi relationship, as far as Māori are concerned, I don’t know about the other side, but…

Wilcox: That’s my interpretation. I haven’t had any specialists in treaty jurisprudence come up and say I’m wrong.

Harp: We had a fascinating discussion on the podcast about Māori rights to 5G. They felt that that was a treasure, right.

Wilcox: Totally.

Harp: And so why not this, too? It seems to logically extend.

Wilcox: We signed a treaty. So that means that things that are not yet discovered, there’s a partnership relationship. It’s just like a marriage. If either myself or my partner inherit some money, or get some resources, something that we all [inaudible] or resource. It’s something that we share. And that contractual relationship, if you like, that’s the marriage, talks about that sharing.

Harp: Ok, we talk a lot about non-monogamy.

TallBear: Take marriage seriously!

Wilcox: [inaudible] party agreements.

Harp: Oh, there you go. Okay. It’s consent based.

Wilcox: Yes, it’s consent-based. And so that’s the basis of our expectation.

Harp: And it’s just interesting how the expansive, living view of the treaty—nobody necessarily articulated it at the time—but it was a genomics treaty, among many things, at the time. That’s a living idea of what a treaty is.

Wilcox: Totally. You know, genomics, really, is whakapapa, and it doesn’t really matter—we have practices like mōteatea waiata, you know, these markings, that is, practices of how we transfer the knowledge of whakapapa from one generation to the next. So it’s just another form, it’s just another codification form—really, not fundamentally different to the markings that we put on ourselves, and on our carvings.

Harp: So why don’t we conclude with a similar question I posed to Amanda. You’ve been involved with SING for a long time: what keeps you coming back?

Wilcox: Oh, this is my passion space. I believe that gene technologies have emancipatory potential for our peoples, and our peoples have been heavily, heavily, very negatively impacted by colonisation: the loss of land, language, legal systems, education systems, lives. How do we reverse that? Gene technologies offer a path for reversing those negative outcomes. And can the tools of the Pākehā be actually used—as they have been in the past—by our people, for the benefit of our people?

When I say having used in the past, going back to Māori in 1850s, had adapted European crops, a lot of European tools,  and farm animals, to increase agricultural productivity. And before we lost that land, our tribes became richer because of that, not just economically, but also spiritually, as well as other forms of wealth. Our ancestors were exporting goods to Australia. It was Māori who established New Zealand, what we now know as New Zealand, as an agricultural nation, it wasn’t Pākehā. So, these new tools provide us with an opportunity to reclaim that space, and try and do whatever we can to contribute to that reversal of those negative outcomes. Whether or not that happens, we’ve yet to see that. But that’s my passion space.

And also, I think of our SING network around the world. There’s not just shared experience, but there’s also shared ancestries. So [SING] Micronesia starting up, Micronesians and Māori have shared ancestry. There’s shared ancestry back into this country. Now, oral histories, some of our ancestors were Native Americans. So, we interacted. How? Well, probably through Polynesians journeying over the ocean—as they did, because that’s how they got to New Zealand—all the way across the United States, or what’s now the United States, to countries in south and Central America as well. I’ve heard stories that the Haida people interacted with Polynesian navigators, but I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I see some similarities in their architectures.

So there is the shared experience, but there’s also shared ancestry. So the SING, we’re family: the SING network is family. So, being able to interact both within our country, amongst ourselves, with other [inaudible] Māori as well as [inaudible] Māori and all of our Indigenous brothers and sisters around the world is an awesome, awesome experience.

When we come into this space, we don’t have to change who we are. We don’t have to compromise who we are. We don’t have to leave our Indigeneity at the door: we don’t have to leave our science at the door, either. So that we can actually come and have the conversations as who we are, as whole individuals.

Harp: Phil Wilcox, thank you so much.

TallBear: Thanks, Phil.

[applause]

Harp: All right, Candis, pull up a chair. Candis, I was hoping you could kind of… what did you call it? Not a respondent role, or what’s the…?

Candis Callison: Respondent. Discussant.

Harp: Discussant. You kind of lurk in the background, and then you just sum it all up. I mean, I’d like to hear your closing thoughts, too, Kim, about what it’s been like to be part of this.

TallBear: Well, I mean, it’s been great, you know, and this is only the second SING Global meeting. They had the first one in Aotearoa in 2020, January, right before the pandemic hit.

Harp: Wow.

TallBear: Yeah. And I didn’t, wasn’t able to go to that one, but that was the first one. And they sort of set the model for doing this. And we decided, since we sort of firmed up our funding and our faculty in SING Canada in the last couple years, that we had the capacity to host. And it’s still been a huge undertaking. But it’s been great to see everybody come up here. And of course, the weather in Vancouver has been incredible this week. Thank god.

I was really struck—I hadn’t quite heard Phil put it that way. I mean, I’m familiar with a lot of Māori terms, having been down there and working with Māori people, you know, in this kind of consortium. But I hadn’t quite understood that whakapapa is not only about human genealogy, but it’s about an origin story, and it’s about the genealogy among non-human ancestors as well, both non-human organisms and what we would call in English, spirits or celestial bodies, right.

So that’s been really fascinating to me, and it really is a very expansive notion that maps onto, I think, a lot of Indigenous peoples’ sense of we are related to everything. And I was really struck by the beauty of his description, and then thinking about how wrong European culture has got it since they started dividing the world into species and hierarchies, and how much science is inherited from religion in terms of this hierarchy of life. Of course, we’re not surprised that we’re related to daffodils.

[laughter]

But anyway, his description of whakapapa was beautiful, and I really appreciated his kind of accounts of the way that genomics intersects with their traditional way of looking at the world.

Harp: Is this global symposium going to happen every year or every two years, or is it you kind of do it as you can?

TallBear: It’s too big to do every year. And each country has its own workshop, its own summer workshop. So we each do a one-week workshop in our own country, bringing in community members and young Indigenous people. And so the global meeting, yeah, it happened in 2020, and then the pandemic happened. I mean, I think even doing it every two years would be a stretch, but it depends on the kinds of funding.

We’re going to have a meeting on Friday, a debrief from this symposium, and think about further avenues for global cooperation, and some of that being funding. So I think if we could get the funding in place, and the human resource capacity in place, and we had the staff people, we could think about maybe doing it every couple of years. But, yeah, right now, it’s a big undertaking for one host country.

Harp: Candis, your thoughts, hearing all you’ve heard today?

Callison: Yeah, I mean, out here on the west coast, coming from Hul’q’umi’num’ speaking people, like, hands up to you guys for establishing this. It’s been really remarkable.

I guess the question I had even just coming into this recording is, what does sovereignty look like in this space? Look like in communities, enact sovereignty, how does SING support that? And I think this podcast really answers that in powerful ways, right. When Warren talked about how Indigenous communities are being sidelined and impacted, right. That, to me, says it all right there about why Indigenous people need to be in this space and need to be thinking both with what is coming out of science and doing science, right. I think that’s really a big, powerful part of the intervention that SING is, and that it supports.

I also was really struck by, I think, just what Kim was saying, like, Phil was talking about whakapapa and the ways in which genomics is really about the broader health and broader connections. And then Amanda brings in deep time. And I was like, ‘Okay, wow—that feeling you get when you’re on your traditional territory, of being connected to your ancestors, we can point to places that are named for our ancestors, right. And you have this strong sense of connection, and to me, this is what we’ve been talking around and about, right, in all of these conversations.

Harp: Hence the power of restoring those names. It just seems like an administrative find-and-replace, but it’s actually pretty profound.

Callison: Yeah, really profound, right. It says so much about our deep connections to place, but also to, you know, thinking of our—what did Warren say? He said all our extended relatives, right. Like, genomics sort of captures that, and yet that’s not at all reflected in the sort of public media discourse about genomics, right. You don’t hear this kind of conversation.

Harp: Something I wanted to bring up with Phil, the ethos, the ethics, around how Indigenous genomicists approach invasive species. (And I’m not talking about settlers.) Because, here are new species that have come in and taken root, quite literally, right? And so, does a Māori genomics only concern itself with Indigenous flora, or, does it have the right to say, ‘We’re gonna deal with this tree’… however they might deal with it?

TallBear: Yeah, I mean, I would suspect, given what he said about ongoing dynamism, right, and we have the right to engage with—like, he was talking about viruses, right—and of course they were there, but, we have the right to engage. I would suspect they would say, ‘Well, they’re here, and we’re going to engage with them.’ And, you know, some ‘invasive species’ have been better relatives than others…

Harp: Yeah. There you go.

TallBear: You know, so we don’t want to class them all as ‘non-Indigenous, therefore…’ you know.

Harp: Yes.

TallBear: And that applies to humans too.

[laughter]

Callison: I’m also really struck by just how, you know, the conversation in the nineties was about a new form of colonial appropriation of our wealth. And really, also, you clearly said, this is about wanting our wealth back. And you hear it in Phil’s conversation as well, right? That it’s about the emancipatory potential of gene technology. It’s really thinking about the ways in which Indigenous people are not only connected to our environments, but connected to these economies.

Harp: And, well, just to build on that, is it common wealth or is it proprietary wealth?

Callison: Yeah, to me, what I hear in all of these conversations is that it has to be communal wealth. We have to begin to think anew about what role communities play, and I think they must play.

TallBear: I’m sure, I mean, we have, you know, Indigenous capitalists who would talk about the role of private wealth in building up the community too; I’m sure we could get them on to have that conversation.

[laughter]

Harp: Final thoughts, Kim.

TallBear: Oh, no, just this is great. It’s been a good week. This is, I think, a bigger meeting than we’ve had before. The first two days were SING alumni. So, participants from our summer programs from around the world, many of them university students, post-docs, you know, younger scientists, they gave these five-minute, modeled on TED talks. We saw a couple dozen of them over two days, and they were so… I had to stop myself crying a couple times, you know, just to see them be so excited about their research, and having similar kinds of conversations as we were having about the role of science, both in colonialism and in resisting colonialism.

And so it’s been very affirming, and I know that they bond, they bond at these meetings. Some of the cohorts from the different years are getting together again, hanging out. This is the point of SING: you can only do so much science in a week. They are building lifelong personal and professional networks among Indigenous thinkers, scientists, people who want to do bioethics, science policy, people doing that community institution brokering, like Amanda was doing. It’s so great for them.

Harp: So a 13-year-old budding scientist, genomicist, hears this: where do they go?

TallBear: 18 years old. So you have to be at least 18, at least in our program, to join SING Canada.

You do not have to be in university. We have a lot of university students, undergrads, grad students, but we have people from community as well. So, say somebody has done a summer internship for their tribe or their nation, doing conservation or something, you know, just some internship. Maybe it was paid or not, and they’ve never been to university, but they’re interested in the science. They could apply. Or somebody who’s a sci-fi kid, you know, and who’s really interested, they could apply.

We, just, our age is eighteen, and we do in Canada, I can’t speak for all the other countries, but in Canada, we do want to know your Indigenous affiliation. You don’t have to have Indian Status, you don’t have to have band membership, but if you don’t have those things, we’ll ask, right. We want to know who you’re related to and affiliated with.

Harp: All right, I want to thank Kim, and to everyone at SING Canada, and to the symposium, the consortium, for squeezing us in. This got pulled together, this podcast, at the very last second.

Candis, thanks to you, the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, Global Journalism Innovation Lab. I want to thank Isea and Jasper at CITR, they really came through for the technical side of things.

Kim TallBear, Candis Callison, Phil, Amanda, Warren. Thanks to everyone. This has been amazing.

TallBear: Thank you.

[applause]

Harp: And that’s it for MEDIA INDIGENA, episode 349, 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 everyone who joined me this episode, including: Kim TallBear, professor in the faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta and the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience and Society; Candis Callison, associate professor in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies and the School for Public Policy and Global affairs at the University of British Columbia; Amanda Richards-Satour, community engagement coordinator with the Australian Alliance for Indigenous Genomics; and Philip Wilcox, associate professor of mathematics and statistics at the University of Otago.

And of course, renewed gratitude to UBC’s School for Public Policy and Global Affairs, the Global Journalism Innovation Lab, as well as SING Canada for making this live event possible.

And just before I sign off, a quick note to say our next episode begins our Summer Series for 2024, a collection of compilations drawn from our deep archive. Spanning some 8 hours in all, it’s a chance to experience fresh ears on classic content.

Alright, listener, time to truly start my summer. Note that I will be popping into our supporter-only Discord from time to time, so come say hello. Meantime, be well and stay cool. Ekosi.

Our theme is nesting by Birocratic.