Can a DNA test make me Native American?

All My Relations Podcast

Matika Wilbur & Temryss Lane

Native, Documentary, Pop Culture, Contemporary Native American Culture, Relationships, Society, Indigenous, Native American, Society & Culture

4.9 • 3.1K Ratings

🗓️ 12 March 2019

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Can a DNA test make me Native American? As direct-to-consumer ancestry DNA tests gain popularity and narratives of “discovering” or “proving” Native American ancestry through DNA swirl through the media—what does that mean for Indigenous nations? On this episode we talk with the amazing, badass, super cool Dr. Kim Tallbear (Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate), who literally wrote the book on Native American DNA. We talk about the concept of “Native DNA,” the problems of ancestry DNA tests, challen...

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Matika. I belong to the Swinamish and Tlailit people. I'm a photographer and the creator of Project 5.6.2.
0:07.5	And I'm Adrian. I'm a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, a scholar and the writer behind the blog Native Appropriations.
0:14.0	Welcome back to another episode of the All My Relations Podcast. We are so grateful to have you with us today.
0:21.5	Thank you to all of our relations for joining us on this journey. You have made our hearts so full with your comments, sharing and liking.
0:31.5	Thank you. We love you so much.
0:34.5	Yeah, the response to the podcast has been so incredible and overwhelming in the best ways.
0:42.5	We're so grateful for all of you who have listened and let us know what it's meant to hear these conversations on a podcast.
0:54.5	So apologies to folks that we made laugh and cry in awkward public places, but we're really, really grateful you're joining us on this journey.
1:04.5	And today for our next episode, we have a really amazing and important conversation with Dr. Kim Talber about Native American DNA.
1:16.5	Can a DNA test make me Native American?
1:22.5	No. Why is this bothersome, Adrian?
1:28.5	And like Kim will talk in this episode about how she's been doing this since 2005 was the first time she wrote about Native American DNA.
1:36.5	And so this is something we've been dealing with for a long time, but right now it feels incredibly relevant, given what's going on with Elizabeth Warren and with all the conversations we're seeing online.
1:47.5	And the thing that I talk about with my students a lot, like trying to break down what it means to be a Native person outside of these kind of biological ideas around race.
1:58.5	And as a result, I have students who like send me DNA ads from TV and from subways or whatever.
2:06.5	And so I have this one that sticks out in my mind so much from one of my students that she snapped in the subway in New York.
2:14.5	And it's like this phenotypically older white guy.
2:18.5	And in big red letters, it says, I am 11.7% Native American.
2:26.5	And then underneath it, it says, you're more than meets the eye.
2:32.5	So it's this whole concept that like discovering Native DNA makes you like exotic and cool and different.
2:39.5	And there's so many problems with that ad.
2:42.5	Like we could spend an entire episode talking about that.
	...

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