Indigenous peoples respond in diverse ways to genome science projects depending on the particular questions being asked, and the methods and histories of those fields. Increasingly, they resist scientific inquiry that they view as in conflict with their values. In the U.S. and Canada, our research sites, indigenes are regulating research, making property claims on scientific data, and requiring certain benefits in return for granting researchers access to their communities. Native American tribes show interest in initiating/funding genomic research in order to directly bolster their intellectual and governance capacities. Tribes also emphasize and fund training in science and technology fields as a capacity-building strategy that they see as necessary for self-governance and community flourishing. Accordingly, Native Americans and Canadian First Nation individuals enter technoscientific fields in order to support indigenous self governance and to diversify in terms of personnel and modes of thought fields that impact indigenous lives. This project will investigate indigenous genome scientists as agents in the democratization of genome science fields using archival and ethnographic methods. Because they facilitate or challenge indigenous genome scientists? roles as knowledge producers at the intersection of genomics and indigenous governance, tribal regulators, cultural experts, and community members will also be a focus of research, especially as they address the intersections of genomics with both indigenous ?traditional? and bureaucratized ways of knowing. Subjects will be drawn from fields to which indigenous peoples and governments are connected; they include basic human population genetics research (i.e. on human migrations and evolutionary questions) and biomedical research. Indigenous scientists are still few in number and they work with non-indigenous collaborators who also broker knowledge and opportunities for scientific inquiry between the laboratory and the tribe. Thus we will also focus on non-indigenous scientists? roles in integrating scientific practices, priorities, and values into indigenous governance. Intellectual merit This research has intellectual merit for genome science fields, for STS, and for society. The work of indigenous scientists and collaborators may suggest cross-fertilizations of values and knowledges. Diversifying the classroom, the field, and the laboratory may be only the beginning. Beyond who inquires, who samples, and who does data analysis, are new research questions, theories, methods, and governing arrangements emerging at the intersections of genomics and indigenous knowledges and practices? For STS, this research adds to its postcolonial strand of scholarship, which is undertreated in the U.S. and which is important for making STS itself more multicultural. Broader impacts This research will suggest opportunities for and highlight the barriers to making genome science norms more multi-cultural and compatible with indigenous communities? needs. Will the result be cross-fertilizations of genomics and indigenous knowledges and values as the field and laboratory are diversified? Will the result be new research questions, theories, methods, and governing arrangements when indigenous peoples act as researchers and not simply as research subjects? This project will reveal opportunities and challenges for increasing the distribution of social benefits from genome science to indigenous peoples whose needs and values are often labeled as in conflict with modern science.
," produced outcomes, both in terms of intellectual merit within several disciplines and to society more broadly. Several important intellectual findings for anthropology of science, for Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS), for science ethics, and science education are: 1) the majority of younger Native American and other indigenous bioscientists interviewed attribute their decision to embark on a research career to encouragement by a senior scientist early who also came from a cultural and/or religious backgrounds in which they could relate (and not only respect) the cross-cultural challenges young indigenous scientists face in bioscience. For example, working with cadavers or killing mice in the laboratory and notions of the sacredness of life were more easily discussed and accommodated in innovative ways when lead investigators themselves had struggled with similar predicaments. Thus, indigenous bioscientists feel more comfortable and may be more productive in more multi-cultural laboratories; 2) The majority of indigenous bioscientists interviewed hail from tribal lands—from rural areas—as opposed to diasporic urban indigenous communities. Whereas diasporic indigenous people seem to be represented in much greater numbers in the social sciences and humanities. 3) This relates to an important third finding—that indigenous bioscientists who grew up in greater contact with traditional lands and lifeways developed an interest in the functions of biology from firsthand experience working the land and from engaging with nonhuman animals, both domestic and wild. This may have implications for science education and recruitment. The separation of indigenous peoples from their traditional lands seems to have negatively influenced their potential participation in bioscience fields. 4) Further related to that, indigenous bioscientists do not suffer from a lack of funding once they commit to a research career. Rather, they have an abundance of STEM funding for training purposes. Rather, significant barriers to doing bio- and other natural sciences occur earlier in that indigenous bioscientists all agree that they did not understand until they were exposed to other diverse scientists or to scientists committed to increasing diversity in these fields the very idea of doing scientific research in the first place. Many subjects, for example, entered the university to be K-12 teachers, or to be medical doctors. Only later did they come to understand the possibilities of doing research as a career. They attribute their lack of understanding to their family class background and lack of exposure of older generations to higher education. Subjects are often the first in their extended family to obtain graduate level education, or even an undergraduate education. 5) Related to that, not a single subject in my sample noted an explicit anti-science stance in their extended families as inhibiting their participation in the natural sciences. 6) Therefore, an overarching finding is that holding specific Native American/indigenous cultural beliefs (a dozen tribes or indigenous groups are represented in my sample) is not fundamentally in conflict with doing Western science, which is a worry expressed in the public understanding of science literature. To the contrary, colonization that separates peoples from traditional lands—and the disruption then of an indigenous identity tied intimately and in daily life (not just in memory) to place—seems to adversely affect indigenous participation in bioscience. 7) Indigenous bioscientists are early on in their careers. Their effects on the fields in which they work in terms of how they shape new research areas is yet to be seen and may require following their work for the foreseeable future. BROADER SOCIETAL OUTCOMES Broader societal impacts are closely related to intellectual merits. This study generates data that can instruct us both in why and how to diversify laboratory personnel, and how and why to diversify acceptable cultural practices in laboratories. This study shows that diversifying laboratories in terms of race, culture, religion, and class can result in ethical innovations (e.g. in the treatment of nonhuman animals and dead human bodies) without lessening scientific rigor. Overall, this statement contradicts the idea that science and religion must be kept completely separate. Rather, with a healthy respect for diverse approaches to understanding life, both biological and immaterial approaches (e.g. religious approaches not knowable through science), the laboratory can become more inclusive. A key caveat however, is that indigenous religious traditions do not seek converts. Thus they are tolerant of multiple sets of approaches simultaneously. As indigenous bioscientists, who are tied more intimately to tribal and rural communities, progress in their careers, we may see them generate research questions that better serve the biomedical and ethical priorities of tribal and other class-diverse people.
