Rick W. A. Smith, PhD

Non-Indigenous people are increasingly turning to genome technologies to claim Indigenous heritage and belonging without other meaningful ties to Indigenous peoples. These kinds of claims often work against Indigenous sovereignties by attempting to reduce Indigenous belonging to a question of biology while obscuring the broader and more complex familial, social, cultural, historical, political, and material relations through which Indigenous peoples may define their citizenship. Misappropriations of Indigenous belonging via genome science have been targets of longstanding critiques, as have the underlying taxonomies through which biologists and anthropologists have sought to make sense of Indigenous peoples past and present. Merging genetic methods with critical approaches from queer, feminist, and Indigenous Science and Technology Studies (STS), my work seeks to understand how genetic claims to Indigenous belonging became possible and unsettle the scientific processes through which Indigeneity is made to seem molecular.

The NSS lecture series is made possible by generous contributions from Con Edison.