The Promise of Indigenous Epigenetics

For the last two decades, Indigenous peoples have consistently resisted genetics on local, national and international scales. Awareness of genetics as a potentially harmful science spread through Indigenous organisations in the mid 1990s after the U.S. National Institutes of Health attempted to patent a virus found in the blood of a Papua New Guinean man, and the Human Genome Diversity Project attempted to collect DNA samples from indigenous peoples, who they called ‘Isolates of Historical Interest’, from around the world (Reardon 2005). The U.S.-based NGO Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism was formed in response.

Although genetics has transformed in the ‘post-genomic’ age (a term used for the period after the human genome was sequenced), its reputation among Indigenous peoples continues to be strained. Genetics is often seen as deterministic and victim-blaming, diverting attention and resources from social and political causes of ill-health, reinforcing ideologies of Indigenous inferiority within Western science, facilitating the theft of genetic biological resources and knowledge, and as the source of inflated, unjustified hype that offers little or no benefit to Indigenous people (TallBear 2013).

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