Kim TallBear

Genomic articulations of indigeneity

Indigenous peoples’ and genome scientists’ respective definitions and practices of making ‘indigeneity’ illustrate their competing notions of identity, origins, and futures. This article explores these genomic and indigenous ‘articulations’ of indigeneity, both their similarities and profound differences. Scientists who study ancient global human migrations and human genome diversity draw on an understanding of ‘indigeneity’ that appears to overlap with, but fundamentally contradicts, the use of this concept by the global indigenous movement. Genomic articulations privilege genetic ancestry as defining indigenous ‘populations’. In contrast, indigenous articulations of indigeneity emphasize political status and biological and cultural kinship constituted in dynamic, long-standing relations with each other and with living landscapes. To demonstrate how differences in definitions matter, I draw examples from several scientific and indigenous projects that entangle DNA knowledge with judgments about indigenous identities, and I note resulting policy implications. I first examine two key narratives of indigeneity and race that underlie the genomic articulation of indigeneity: ‘indigenous peoples are vanishing’ and ‘we are all related/all African’. I then explore two cases where genomic and indigenous articulations clash and overlap – the ‘Kennewick Man’ case and the use of DNA testing for tribal enrollment. Yet genomic articulations, with their greater truth-governing power, may inadvertently reconfigure indigeneity in ways that can undermine tribal and First Nations’ self-determination and the global indigenous anticolonial movement. Indeed, some indigenous peoples have recently adopted genomic articulations of identity, perhaps to their own detriment.

Theorizing Queer Inhumanisms

My recent writing has revolved around describing an ontopoetics of race that I name the sense of the brownness in the world. Brownness is meant to be an expansive category that stretches outside the confines of any one group formation and, furthermore, outside the limits of the human and the organic. Thinking outside the regime of the human is simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting. It is a ceaseless endeavor, a continuous straining to make sense of something else that is never fully knowable. To think the inhuman is the necessary queer labor of the incommensurate. The fact that this thing we call the inhuman is never fully knowable, because of our own stuckness within humanity, makes it a kind of knowing that is incommensurable with the protocols of human knowledge production. Despite the incommensurability, this seeming impossibility, one must persist in thinking in these inhuman directions. Once one stops doing the incommensurate work of attempting to touch inhumanity, one loses traction and falls back onto the predictable coordinates of a relationality that announces itself as universal but is, in fact, only a substrata of the various potential interlays of life within which one is always inculcated. The radical attempt to think incommensurate queer inhumanity is a denaturalizing and unsettling of the settled, sedimented, and often ferocious world of recalcitrant antiinhumanity. Queer thought is, in large part, about casting a pic-

Tribal Housing, Codesign, and Cultural Sovereignty

The authors assess the collaboration between the University of California, Berkeley’s Community Assessment of Renewable Energy and Sustainability program and the Pinoleville Pomo Nation, a small Native American tribal nation in northern California. The collaboration focused on creating culturally inspired, environmentally sustainable housing for tribal citizens using a codesign methodology developed at the university. The housing design process is evaluated in terms of both its contribution to Native American “cultural sovereignty,” as elaborated by Coffey and Tsosie, and as a potential example of the democratization of scientific practice.