Ep #4: Can a DNA test make me Native American?

MATIKA WILBUR: Hi, I'm Matika! I belong to the Swinomish and Tulalip people. I'm a photographer and the creator of Project 562.

ADRIENNE KEENE: And I'm Adrienne, I'm a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, a scholar and the writer behind the blog Native Appropriations.

MATIKA: Welcome back to another episode of the All My Relations podcast, we are so grateful to have you with us today. 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. Thank you. We love you so much.

ADRIENNE: Yeah, the response to the podcast has been so incredible and overwhelming in the best ways, and 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 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. And today for our next episode, we have a really amazing and important conversation with Dr. Kim Tallbear about Native American DNA.

MATIKA: Mm hmm. Can a DNA test make me Native American? Why is this bothersome Adrienne?

ADRIENNE: I mean, 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. 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. And this is something 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, and as a result I have students who like, send me DNA ads from TV and from subways, or whatever, 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. And it's like this phenotypically older white guy. And in big red letters, it says, I am 11.7% Native American, and then underneath it it says, You're more than meets the eye. So it's this whole concept that like discovering Native DNA makes you like exotic and cool and different, and there's so many problems with that ad like we could spend an entire episode talking about that, but I also just think about the 1000s and 1000s of people who ride the New York City subway every day, and are looking at that and the messages that they take away from that. And so that's why I think having this deep important conversation about Native DNA and what that actually means and the dangers to our communities is so important.

MATIKA: I can't tell you how many times I've had people tell me that they've done DNA tests, and have found out that there are some percentage Native American, and I find it like slightly insulting when it happens because, you know, when I think of my traditional understandings of what it means to belong to an Indigenous community. I think of the kinship and the relationships, and I think of me standing with as Kim you talk about later on in this episode, standing with my community. And, though, that being from my place or belonging to these Indigenous communities cannot be defined in a test tube. And we know that there's no such thing as a Native American anyways. So what are we, what is, what are they really saying to me when they say that and. And in that way. When they say make that statement to me, I feel like, in some ways, they're just sort of like re-inserting in that moment their power over me that says that they don't have to know that they don't, because they grew up going through this system the K through 12 system. The education system the system that marginalizes and oppresses Indigenous voices. They don't have to know that what they're saying is problematic and so when they look at me and say that with a straight face, a part of me just sort of cringes on the inside. And then I have to decide whether or not in that moment, I'm going to like take a deep breath and become an auntie and educate their spiritual deficiency or whether or not I'm just going to sort of like fluff off but either way. It's a microaggression, that definitely digs at me. And I think for our children for our people coming up for our kids, they deserve the right to hear from our scholars and to have the conversation that we're going to have today to arm them with the language necessary for for this current political climate.

ADRIENNE: Yeah, definitely. And I mean I think both of us are Dr. Tim Tallbear fangirls, we, when we were thinking about this podcast she was one of the first people who popped up that we wanted to have as a guest. And so I think we're both really excited to get to share this conversation with you because her knowledge is amazing that she is so great to be around. She has fire tweets on Twitter all the time and for me is just a real inspiration, as a fellow Native woman navigating academia, in really unapologetic and amazing ways.

MATIKA: She's so vivacious. She has beautiful red hair with a big blonde streak in the middle and she has a boisterous laugh and she has just like this incredible big beautiful brain that just you know like I could sit and listen to Kim talk for hours and hours and hours and hours and never get tired of anything she had to say because it just like one after the other takes my breath away so I think y'all are in for a treat.

ADRIENNE: So with that, we have a big important episode for you today. And we're going to dive right in with Dr. Kim Tallbear to talk about this concept of Native American DNA, the problems with ancestry DNA tests and the challenges they present for communities moving forward. We'll talk about Elizabeth Warren, and then a little bit about the politics of research and Indigenous communities and potential alternatives for thinking about kinship as markers of Native belonging rather than biology.

ADRIENNE: Dr. Kimberly Tallbear is Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate and also descendant from the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma. She's an associate professor in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta, where she holds the Canadian research chair in Indigenous peoples, technoscience, and environment. In 2013 she literally wrote the book on Native American DNA entitled Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. Her Indigenous Science Technology and Society work recently turned to also address decolonial and Indigenous sexualities specifically on decolonizing the centering of monogamy that she characterizes as emblematic of settler sexualities. This builds on the work she has been doing in a blog written under an alter ego, called the Critical Polyamorist through this work she founded a University of Alberta artspace research lab, and co produces the sexy storytelling show TV confessions sparked by the popular Austin, Texas show Bedpost Confessions. She's also active on Twitter and is a role model to many of us as an Indigenous researcher public scholar and feminist scholar. Welcome, Dr. Kim Tallbear.

KIM TALLBEAR: Thank you for inviting me.

MATIKA: We're so glad you're here. Would you take a moment just to introduce yourself as you were to a large group of people.

KIM: I usually let others introduce me and then I have to correct the name of my tribe so I'm a citizen of the system in Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, in what is now South Dakota slightly North Dakota, and I grew up in Flanders, South Dakota, which is another reservation where everybody's related between Sisseton and Flander they're both on the eastern side of the State of South Dakota. And I also grew up partly in the Twin Cities, which was Dakota homelands, as well as Anishinabeg homelands and so we've always kind of migrated back and forth between the reservations in South Dakota in St. Paul and Minneapolis.

MATIKA: Wonderful. So, this podcast is called all my relations and we are really interested in uncovering our relationship based identities and our relationship with one another, our relationship with land, our relationship with water and before we dive into anything else would you relate to that subject for a moment, especially given where you're from.

KIM: Yeah i mean I I feel like i grew up hearing more you should act in a good way or you should act appropriately. And that was often getting at that everybody like if you were at a powwow or at a community meeting or something everybody knew who my grandparents and great grandparents were. And so, we would be an embarrassment to them if we didn't act appropriately right. And I think, so that was kind of more the emphasis growing up and then I think as I kind of encountered a lot of the writing of Oceti Sakowin people around this idea, it, it definitely did branch out more into this idea of being in good relation and I was able to relate that how you relate with other humans but also other than humans back to how I was told to try and reflect well upon my extended family the [Native language] but also the Oyate or the tribe or the people. Yeah, so I do relate to yes and then of course I brought this really forward into my own work and in ways that are in conversation with Indigenous and non Indigenous academic writing about being in good relation and I've written elsewhere I actually think we're in a really great time in the academy in some ways we're not in a great time in terms of the restructuring of the academy. But in terms of the kind of intellectual work that I find non Indigenous people doing to try and recover a language for talking about their relationships with what they consider inanimate objects or other non human organisms so I feel like there's a conversation that's possible now where Indigenous people can I think really infuse that with a lot of sophistication.

ADRIENNE: So we're going to start the conversation by talking about DNA since that is something that is very big in the media right now in the conversations around. Elizabeth Warren, and the continuing conversations around these ancestry DNA tests. But before we dive into that I would really be curious to hear kind of the origin story of how you came to this work where the interest came from, and how you got involved with this in the first place because when you started this a long time ago, these conversations weren't really happening on this level.

KIM: No, um, yeah so I first encountered the politics of identity and race around the mapping of the human genome back in 2000. So I was working as an environmental policy specialist I had worked throughout the 90s for the Environmental Protection Agency for the Council of Energy resource tribes, as a contractor to tribal governments, and then I was doing a contract with Department of Energy in 2000, and I was working for an Indigenous research organization in Denver that had had a lot of grants and we had done a lot of work to do tribal involvement in the management or cleanup of the nuclear weapons complex so most of my work in the 90s was up around the intersections of nuclear weapons development, environmental contamination, and the cultural resources that Indigenous peoples had in and around those nuclear reservations. So DOE suddenly starts funding tribal involvement in conversations around mapping the human genome kind of strange but they weren't at that point, they were converting a lot of their scientific kind of resources over to this kind of hot new scientific topic. And we got a big grant to host some conversations with tribal representatives throughout Indian country and it became very clear to me, there was a whole lot of really interesting conversation going on people worried about things like, well, they might be able to manufacture biological weapons because of our unique genomes well all human beings are genetically related so that's not really very as like, anyway. But there was also a lot of talk. That was around very genetically essentialist and the way that blood talk and sometimes be blood essentialist, and I was really really fascinated and I knew I had a lot of questions that I wanted to ask and answer and I immediately knew I wanted to write the, what my dissertation became so I decided at that moment because I had a master's degree in environmental planning, I'm gonna go back to graduate school and to do a PhD just to write this book and that's what I did. And so I I didn't know the field of science and technology studies existed I knew I couldn't go to Native studies because I wasn't going to get the mentoring and the science that I needed so I ended up applying to getting into the history of consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz, which there were Jim Clifford was there who worked on the politics of indigeneity globally and I knew Jim's work but I didn't know Donna Haraway at all and and then I when I got there I realized why they had accepted me because those two work closely together and she does feminist politics of science and technology. So that's how that came about.

ADRIENNE: Wow. Yeah. I've never heard that story before that's really,

KIM: And I'm an advocate of recruiting graduate students who are coming back to school with a very particular problem they want to solve, I don't think we need to be creating a graduate school, academic lifestyle, academia is not a lifestyle choice. You should have a very particular problem you want to solve and you should bring the university resources to do that. That's not the most popular position but that's kind of the that's the attitude I have towards what academia can do for us in Indian country.

ADRIENNE: I think it would create a lot more healthy relationships to grad school toO for for Native students.

MATIKA: Yeah, well let's just start by defining what exactly is Native American DNA.

KIM: Itʻs a settler colonial idea. You know, so in human migrations research there are scientists who use a combination of ancient DNA, which they're drawing often out of human remains or other kinds of articles you can ancient DNA isn't just only DNA from 1000s of years ago, technically you use ancient DNA techniques to say get DNA, out of menstrual regs from the 19th century right it's any DNA that's hard to get out. And so, but there are people who use ancient DNA techniques to look at the DNA sequences in ancient remains and then they might also compare them to populations living in the world today and they're both interested in using DNA markers, and the frequency at which they occur in different geographies around the world to trace when they think people migrated, populations migrated through particular areas that of course they have this, the out of Africa narrative right. It's very much a in US based scientists have very much an immigration based narrative so they are thinking about the they basically divided into four racial groups. So it's not only Native American DNA you have African DNA you have your Indo-European DNA you have Asian DNA, that's what they call it and then there of course are overlaps sometimes between those things. But they so not only are they looking at human migrations historically they're looking at how different populations in the world are related to one another genetically, and so they can then tell based on mutation rates which branches branched off different lines and where people went in the world. So Native American DNA is just one of those. These sets of markers that are found in high frequency in what are now the Americas in Native American populations that have been sampled, but you. But have they done like an even net sampling across Native populations in the Americas, No. There's multiple factors first of all who gets to define who's Native in order to get samples, right. So they are looking for non admixed Natives right and so they would go into, they have done sampling actually at Sisseton Wahpeton where I'm from. And if you know anything about where I'm from, I have a Cheyenne and Arapaho grandfather. We all have multiple tribal lineages right this is both pre contact and post contact, we're not, we're tribes are not synonymous with genetic populations but scientists don't know that so they go in thinking, you know, you don't want Natives are we I'm a full blood I'm before. You're okay maybe not. There's how many different tribes in your blood. Right. But they don't know any of this stuff so like oh I got some full bloods and then they'll, they'll take out all the people who say they have a white dad or grandparents. So, this is how sampling is happening as scientists who have gone in and done sampling and who have this kind of racial standard racial framework that many Americans have on the world go in and sample according to that framework. And so they have called it Native American DNA.

MATIKA: And in your book when you talk about that you say that one of the major problems with that is the origin story right because it debunks the origin story if there is.

KIM: Oh, that that's one thing people are worried about?

MATIKA: Yeah.

KIM: That is actually a worry I think some people have. I wrote an article in gene watch, which is the magazine of the Center for society in genetics I think at Berkeley, about this because I do think we as Native people need to do a better job of articulate but it's it's hard of articulating the idea that we have a truth about how we arose in place as peoples that cannot be contained within a genetic narrative, so we don't have to reconcile our origin stories about who we are as people with genetic origin stories, but because genetics has such cultural power in a settler colonial society we are always faced with justifying our knowledges and our definitions and our histories, according to the dominant narrative that they set out and frankly most other Americans believe. So that's what I try to do in that article to say we don't have to reconcile with them. And, but neither do we have to necessarily say all migration stories around the world are false. There is somewhat of an irreconcilability in those stories and I see Indigenous genome scientists being able to hold their, spiritual, for lack of a better word understandings and traditions on one hand and then their science. On the other hand, and they just kind of move through the world, where they have both of these knowledge systems operating in their lives but not always in the same place. That's a very Indigenous thing to do, right and I and I want us to just be very confident that we can do that. And as you move through life I mean I have found ways to, to, to talk about these stories in more overlapping ways but because I spend so much time thinking about it, but we don't have to do that. I don't know if that's a complete answer to the question. So it's a worry that people have and I think it's an overblown it's it's it's overblown in terms of our own innate, I don't think we need to fear the lack of truth in our origin stories. I think more what we have to fear and I think a lot of Native people do fear this is the deployment of genetic origin stories to mediate our rights and, and people are particularly worried about maybe rights to land eventually. I'm worried about eventually the Office of Federal Acknowledgement maybe using genetic ancestry to determine whether or not somebody is authentically a tribe or not they already use cultural anthropological methods, why wouldn't they use genetic anthropological methods.

ADRIENNE: And that was going to be a question that I had too is just in terms of I think the public has a very hard time, the non Native public has a hard time wrapping their head around why Indigenous communities see these tests as inherently dangerous and or as threats to sovereignty. And I don't know if you could kind of explicate on that for folks of just understanding that these are not kind of a benign fun thing to learn about your heritage.

KIM: Yeah, I mean, they're foregrounding a settler colonial definition of indigeneity right so and, and I talk about this a lot that settler colonial definition is focused on lineal genetic ancestry alone. So you often see Americans well I have a grandparent who was from Irish therefore I am Irish right, even though they tend to be able to distinguish between the right to Irish citizenship versus that but they, there's a way in which Native Americans are so racialized obviously as other racial groups are in the US but what we have in addition to those that racialization is we have Indigenous peoplehood and most Americans cannot get their wrap their minds around the fact that we are not simply racialized you canʻt opt out of that, I mean I hear tribal leaders say well we're not a race for a nation Well, yes and no right to opt out of being racialized. But in addition to that which we have to live with in which we struggle against as other racialized marginalized racialized groups do, we do have peoplehood as peoples who are original to this place. And I think our invocation of that. I'm just going to be frank, I think our invocation of that is a threat to a lot of Americans who are trying to feel comfortable in a stolen land, and they are appealing to this sort of, it Canadians do this too even more than Americans do because they're more on about the multiculturalism up there I think that Americans are wanting to appeal to that as the sort of democratic ideal as they we all want to be included into the liberal multicultural state well that's not always been true of Indigenous people we want our peoplehood respected, and that is not necessarily always compatible with being included into your liberal multicultural state.

MATIKA: I just, I just want to acknowledge this line that you wrote in the introduction of your book you said that faith in the origins gets operationalized as molecular origins. And I'm wondering if you can talk about why you were doing this reacher research. If your origin stories or if your faith was impacted in any way. Um, if it felt challenged did it…

KIM: No, no, no, I, because I, and I'm really grateful actually for how I grew up. And I think I was saying this to somebody last night. I grew up in a Dakota community that. Fortunately the missionaries that got a hold of us were these kind of more syncretic Presbyterians. So I grew up going to church and the First Presbyterian Church in South Dakota is on my reservation where I grew up and it's in Dakota language the hymns the sermons, we have Dakota ministers one of my good childhood friends is a minister, a Dakota minister our some of our ministers sun dance and they are ministers and that's the kind of world I grew up in. So it was, we were it was compatible when you kind of chose whether you wanted to go to ceremony or church, some people do both. So no, growing up in that kind of syncretic world, I had no issue when I was taught there are multiple ways to the Creator. Um, what was strengthened was not my religious faith, quote unquote, but my faith in the way the good way of being in the world of my ancestors and how much they struggle to try and accommodate newcomers, while also maintaining their, their own worldview and way of life, and they struggled really hard and you see then what happens in 1862 when Little Crow my four great grandfather's was drug reluctantly as a leader to the Dakota War against settlers at that time and what became Minnesota or what was becoming Minnesota. So I would say my faith and who we are as a people was strengthened. We have a very complicated understanding of how to live with seemingly irreconcilable knowledges and life ways and and we I feel like we we have been a very non evangelizing culture, and that is not true of settler colonial culture, they want to shove every single thing down your throat, you know, you either die or you get on board with what they're doing, there's no other choice. And our people were just smarter than that. And we're good hearted. So I just I became more of a Dakota chauvinist.

MATIKA: I'm really interested in having you talk about, and describe blood, blood politics. And also if while you're talking about that you can talk about the notion of purity.

KIM: You know, I, I want people to be careful not to conflate blood with genes. I see people going back and forth between, you know, well that's genetically essential as when they're talking about blood quantum blood quantum is not genetically essentialist. Blood quantum is about fractions on paper. It's not about the physiological substance there's no examination of blood going on we all know how does blood quantum work it's fractions on paper right that get negotiated visually or you know whatever the local politics are of people looking at people and deciding what their race or breed was or whatever and you know. So I do write about that in the book where we need to attend very carefully to what the actual histories were in particular places when blood quantum fractions were put to paper when they were assessed how they're entangled with the breakup of the collective Indigenous land base and use very much in concert with the rise of private property right so there are very particular histories, Alexander Harmon has a book on this here in the Pacific Northwest right about how blood quantum was worked out here. I also would say, I mean, and I I wish I want us to move past blood quantum and have other ways of doing tribal citizenship, but blood is a symbol is a powerful symbol across cultures and time I do not accept that it was simply imposed as an idea onto Indigenous people I think that there was some agency that we had in reckoning with that those symbolic blood ideas and I still think there's agency. So we see in tribes all across the country. This is why we have referendums This is why we're always changing our blood rules right and you seem in tribes increasingly in the last 25 years moving towards lineal descent away from blood quantum rules. You see them moving from total Indian blood to now having to have a trace to the base roll that so in my tribe, for example, they still use one quarter total Indian blood, but that's total they'll go consider all of the lineages that I have in multiple tribes, they just want to trace to the base roll it's very complicated. Right. And so, Kirsty Gover who's I think she's from New Zealand wrote a book on. She's a legal scholar who wrote a book, serving over 300 tribal constitutions and sort of shifts in enrollment policies over the 20th century, and has shown the tribes are actually I think moving away from this racialized idea towards these what she calls a tribal genealogical ideas. Now that's still inflecting dominant racial ideas but there is agency happening as tribes attempt to tweak that. So yes, we need to keep speaking against blood quantum and blood politics as they work out as they are worked out but I think we are making moves away from that. But I also think it is a little naive to think we can just quote unquote go back to traditional ways of doing inclusion. We don't live within, we do have our traditional kinship networks, but that those are overlapping now with the fed with a federally recognized tribe or whatever other forms of recognized tribes that we have. And again you don't simply get to opt out of that colonial structure we are we're kind of hemmed in and working and resisting within the edifice of that colonial structure. So, is that an adequate answer?

MATIKA: That was actually really wanted you to say that out loud about about tribes and and the way that we connect to that there was some agency in the, in the blood definition. But then it's up but it's also very complicated and so how does that play into our genetic memory or the conversation where we say it's in

the blood. And, and one of the ways that we can talk about our connection to our ancestors that doesn't.

ADRIENNE: Well, I was just gonna say even. So in, in this space all. Many of the guests that we've had in here when we're talking about these cultural practices or understandings of our relationships the land, these metaphors that we use of like it's in our blood or now it's shifting and you talk about this much more to, it's in our DNA it's in our genetic memory. And when we know that there's so many challenges around using those as identifiers of identity and culture. What do you think about those conversations and that language and what are ways that we can talk about those relationships, without drawing upon these biological fallacies?

KIM: Yeah no I I do think actually some Indigenous ethnographer needs to go interview people and figure out what they mean what what they think is happening in our blood and hey I think that's an interesting ethnographic project, I'm not gonna do it but. I think people mean different things right we don't know what people mean but I do I have to say I just heard some Native person on a news clip this last week talking about something being in their DNA and I'm like, ah, stop. First of all, it's just a cliche, I don't like cliches, you should come up with a more original way to say something, but you know I don't purport to know what they mean. I think it's just a nice and easy thing to say. I don't talk like that though and that the the idea of blood memory is really interesting I wonder what people mean Scott Momaday is maybe one of the first people credited with that that term right. I don't know what he means you know I I hear it a lot now though, and. Okay.

ADRIENNE: I was gonna say and now there's this movement into the conversations around epigenetics and like, then that gets conflated in these conversations too and

KIM: Yeah and the epigenetic stuff is really interesting so we might do a summer internship for Indigenous peoples in genomics around intergenerational trauma and then we would have an epigenetics component to that I think that is a really interesting conversation to have. That might be a good use of the term blood memory. Right. But what what I want us to recognize is that there is an interplay here to get back to the relationality and this is what makes what should make our philosophizing on these issues different than settler philosophizing, in part. There are relationships between human relatives and our other than human relatives and so that comes into play in epigenetics the environment, quote unquote, actually can change your genome. Right. And, and that environment includes historical trauma from war and colonization and things like that. So, it is not a bi-, it is not a biologically essentialist thing to say in fact there are biological inputs to race now because race is something that is also shaped by physical trauma to your body and to populations and it can change it can change your genetics so I'm working with a group of Indigenous and non Indigenous scientists and thinkers who are really putting forward this biosocial notion of race biosocial notion of populations and bodies. And I think that is kind of compatible with being thinking about being in good relation, and attending to as having multiple relations where multiple relations have agency. So like micro organisms have effects on your bodies right you know if the environment has effects on your bodies the climate has an effect so according agency to those non human entities helps us kind of reconfigure the way that we're thinking about ourselves as humans, I think I'm getting off track again

MATIKA: No. It's perfect. I, I'm really interested in the ways that people can use your research. And what you've been talking about, and reform policy, and our tribal communities. You know and what does that look like how do we how do we inspire the next wave of thought. In our own communities to be more inclusive.

KIM: Yeah, I mean I don't feel like probably tribes are going to take up Native American DNA and i don't know I mean I don't know the degree to that, where my academic work has translated into the way that they use DNA testing, they're not using the kind of DNA test that I largely talk about right because they're irrelevant, you know genetic ancestry testing that find some relative some unnamed ancestor six to 10 generations ago is not relevant when you're trying to show that you are descended from somebody on the base rolls. So it's just it's not relevant that's largely what I what I talk about I do try to educate the public that there is a big difference between the DNA test the tribal governments using the DNA tests that are being sold like to people like Elizabeth Warren, because most people don't understand there. I've had a lot of blowback on Twitter oh you're being critical of Elizabeth Warren's DNA test but you guys use DNA I'm like I'm not the same DNA test you know it's not even remotely the same.

MATIKA: When I talk to different tribes around the country about this, that always comes up is that we don't have the infrastructure to deal with the backlash of DNA testing.

KIM: And its people coming with these genetic ancestry tests. Yeah, so I just got asked by a reporter Do I have data on this and I said I have gone off the record conversations and tribal enrollment conferences and people I meet out in public, because tribal enrollments confidential and you can, I can give you some context but they may not talk to you about it but when I hear word on the street is we've been being inundated since about 2003 with these with these genetic ancestry tests that have nothing to do with our particular tribe, and these are these know nothing Americans who think that to be Native American is just being a race and I can just go around and I mean I read this side reporter reporting on somebody in the Pacific Northwest who took a genetic ancestry test out he had some like low percentage of Native American ancestry so just randomly sent out applications to like five tribes in the Pacific Northwest. Yeah, what are you doing like that shows you like knows nothing right.

MATIKA: It's a thing. It's a real thing. And so I reached out to about seven different tribal enrollment offices for this segment and each one of the enrollment officers who I'm friends with said to me, obviously we can't go on record about that but we will get you some data and you can talk with our publicist okay no that works I'll take it

KIM: yeah no this is gonna be really hard because they're not they're the ones with the data and they can't be public about it.

ADRIENNE: And I think it points to the larger danger of a lot of this is on the fundamental misunderstanding of, like, I settlers of Indigenous identity is, you were saying but also when, in the last week or two when we've been talking about Elizabeth Warren on Twitter. I know other Native folks who are in roles where they are in Student Services at universities or scholarship officers or whatever it is, they started telling all those stories just like enrollment of the kids coming in with the DNA tests to look for what they get or the services that they can access. And I know I'm, I used to work in admissions at a college, and we actually would send a heritage form to students who've checked the Native American box, because it's about citizenship and it's not just the racial category, and I would get students who would send back the, the printout from their DNA test as proof of them checking that box. And I know, and it's terrifying because I know many other schools are not doing that, secondary level of asking for additional information

KIM: That's exactly the kind of strategy we need.

ADRIENNE: Yeah, and it's I think it's just I think about all of the ways that settler colonialism is successful in trying to erase Indigenous presence, and that our bodies and our families and our ancestry is like this next avenue of just complete erasure of Indigenous peoples. And so to me these DNA tests I think they're, like, On one level they're funny like we can sort of be like those poor white folks who are looking for something and sad that they don't have any connection to their people. But on the other hand I think of these actual tangible ways that it can really wreak havoc in our communities when we're already struggling so much for just some shred of visibility.

MATIKA: Which kind of brings me to my next question, which is, if you can talk about the ways your tribe or your community or yourself perhaps has been DNA profiled. And how has that reconfigure your concept of a tribe?

KIM: Um, Well, my, so the tribe that I'm presently enrolled in I used to enroll in Cheyenne Arapaho but I switched because I never Oklahoma's kind of strange to me. But But I really, but yeah but no I look like Tallbears and when I go down there it's kind of like being an adoptee because I'm like oh my god I look just like you all but culturally so different from Sioux people like it's really it's, it's cool. Anyway so up insistent now, we have about 10,000 tribal members I think half are on reservation half off, and we of course will use on a case by case basis of DNA parentage test as I think probably all tribes now do, and that's usually say you've got a child who you need to get on the rolls and it's usually paternity that's in question and you need the fathers, the bio dads tribal enrollment documents to enroll the child to go do a paternity test, but we will also do a signed affidavit by three relatives from his family if they claim their child and there are other tribes that do that as well that's a great alternative to DNA testing. It's, um, it's invoking a more traditional form of kinship. So we don't have and but also we are a very rural reservation. We're not really close to any major urban area so our casinos are profitable enough we've got three, where the profits feed back into tribal programming I think the elderly get a lot of benefits but we don't do per caps per se, so we don't have per caps you do that, you're going to have all kinds of enrollment problems and DNA is going to play a part in that right, is this across the board DNA testing that some tribes have done. They that that is one problem if you take through the DNA parentage test, and you go in and you test all tribal members you if you go into any room and you parentage test people you could come up to 10% misattributed paternity. You don't want to be doing that in your in your community because you're going to disenfranchise people you're going to open up old families stories that people didn't know about so that I think that is a really really inappropriate thing to do but, but people do it where there's economic benefits to be had.

MATIKA: Thank you for saying that out loud I think it's really useful for our communities. And, and it's up to our communities to decide the alternative.

KIM: Right. And there but there are quite there are quite a few that will do these affidavits but but again I you know if when there's economic incentives it's really hard, you know, and I, I've never been on tribal council and I never would be I'm sure it's really hard to hold off the people who want to do get really really strict about the rolls right when there's money at stake.

MATIKA: Well in fact tomorrow we're doing a segment, talking with the attorney who has represented several tribes, and people who have been disenrolled Yeah, based off of blood quantum and rolls and so it there are very. It is really happening about our communities, and this is one way that it's happening. Yeah, so it's really powerful, and really meaningful to have you have done this research in this work in our communities and I'm grateful for it.

KIM: Oh, thank you. I was gonna say something else too I one of the things I think that will really help us is not necessarily me as a social scientist writing a book that's critical with DNA testing but the training that we're doing of Indigenous genome scientists now so I work with Indigenous genome scientists and non Indigenous genome scientists who get it. And we've got the Summer Institute for Indigenous peoples in genomics that has expanded from the US to New Zealand and is now in Canada, Australia is probably going to come on board, but we've got these young Indigenous genome scientists who are I think we need to train scientific advisors in our own communities. We cannot rely on non Indigenous people to be giving us the science because they don't understand how to apply it they don't understand federal Indian policy they don't understand tribal ways of doing kinship. Those are really important forms of knowledge that you have to understand if you're going to apply DNA in a way that is helping support tribal sovereignty rather than violating it. So, that's for me what's most exciting about my work and the collaborative work I've done with others and in doing that research I met all of these young genome scientists that have now graduated and are taking faculty and postdoc positions, and they're taking leadership globally and reconfiguring genomics to be more ethical, as it's kind of intersecting with tribal populations.

MATIKA: Funding for this season of the All My Relations podcast comes from the emergent fund and then women's donor network. Weʻd like to thank the Tacoma Art Museum for their support as well as our new patrons on Patreon.

ADRIENNE: If you'd like to support the editing costs for our future episodes, you can send us a donation on PayPal or become a monthly contributor on Patreon, both links are on our web page which is allmyrelationspodcast.com. I want to talk a little bit about the Elizabeth Warren shitstorm. I got this like mental thought of going through a fart storm. So the Elizabeth Warren fart storm. But in terms of Native folks have been talking about Elizabeth Warren's heritage and conversations around it since her first campaign in 2012. I was at Harvard during the time I got interviewed on the news, I was like a first year grad student I got introduced on the news about it and the conversations have been ongoing. And as soon as she released her DNA results with that video that has all kinds of problems in terms of the content and the response was immediate from Native peoples that this was not something she should have done, and that this was harmful. And I think a lot of democrats or people who consider themselves liberal were very surprised by that kind of really intense response from Native people. And then in the meantime, I know you got inundated with questions from the media on, and from other folks on Twitter and everything and this is a conversation you've been having since like 2005 around these genetics, so I would just love to hear your kind of quick take on this because I know we've belaboured it a lot, and then also how you responded to all of this media attention.

KIM: Well I woke up was a Tuesday. Was it a Tuesday morning. Tuesday. Yeah, I woke up and I get to my computer about 6:45 and I think I had an email from a reporter from Indian Country Today, and I went oh more Elizabeth Warren I didn't stop thinking about it, all these years, and I wrote him a big long email, and then when I got done writing that and sent it off I had about 15 more reporter emails and then by noon I had 15 more, you know, I probably had 50, 60 emails by the end of a couple days. So I turned what I had written to him into a press release after he got his story up, which really then I was able to just post and deal with because I couldn't respond to all of those reporters so I hadn't watched the video I guess the initial news that morning was in response to the video she had released, and I hadn't watched it so I was basing my response just off my engagement with this issue around her since 2012, and then my engagement around DNA since 2005 so to me this is an old story, right. I don't know why how they for non-Natives its a new news blip right. So, my, my response was what it has been all along which is that first of all I was asked by reporters in the last few months should she do a DNA test and I said no, I don't see what the point would be it's not going to change anybody's mind you're still gonna have Trump calling Pocahontas you know hater minions Indigenous people are still gonna say that's got nothing to do with being Native in our by our definition, and all the non Native Warren supporters are gonna say see she wasn't lying I mean nobody's position is going to change. And meanwhile, it's, it's not really good for Native people in that it reinforces this racialized idea of what it is to be Native and seems very lacking in understanding of tribal citizenship now the response is always well she made, she makes a distinction between tribal citizenship and Native American ancestry Well, not really. First of all, she didn't do that until she was called on it. She didn't really have an understanding of that in and of herself. Secondly, it doesn't matter if she says it's not the same as being a tribal citizen the vast majority of Americans don't care or know anything about tribal citizenship what what sticks in their mind is Native American ancestry is proof that you have some right to claim to be Native American in some way. Yep. And it doesn't matter how much we clarify how problematic it is and I have clarified this with an incredible amount of detail in multiple media interviews and still I get this like automaton response from Warren Twitter, that should be hashtag Warren Twitter. But she said she wasn't a tribal citizen she's only claiming ancestry that's her right. And my responses gee I did 10 media interviews today where I said in individually you don't have an individual right here, you know there's a difference between these kinds of individual claims and our definitions that are forged in collectivity there's a fundamental difference in definition here, and and what you're doing by asserting with all of your cultural power, her right to claim this is basically saying that that definition in fact does matter more than our definition, you know and there is no real engagement with our definitions and our critiques there has been pretty much nothing but defensiveness. So, I have had I actually I have had some emails from a few people who heard my NPR interview last week, who said okay, I learned something I've gotten a few of those. All right, that is hard. Yeah, it's been good and I've gotten a few tweets, but I would say, I've mostly gotten trolled on Twitter on this issue.

ADRIENNE: And you had the day that it all hit you had tweeted out something I was getting so stressed out because I was getting an equal number of press contacts um and I don't consider myself any sort of expert in the DNA, and I don't think so I can talk about being a Cherokee person and what that means and citizenship. And so I was very, very stressed out, and you put up a tweet and you just said, having to respond to settler infighting takes up too much of Indigenous People's time. And I was like, Yes, it does. I don't have to sit here on Twitter on day, all day like these people will have no right to my time, like Kim has said this so many different ways so many different times I have 25 tweet threads about this and so I just was re posting things that we've already been saying for decades.

KIM: Or you get these appeals will educate me I want to learn. What? Since when did I become your genetics and identity 101 tutor for free, like I got all kinds of emails you know just big long diatribes from from, you know, white women Warren supporters and then and then I got called mean, I'm like yeah,

I'm supposed to sit here all day and tutor you for free and do it with a smile on my face. Okay. Yeah, I'm sorry I'm not being mean I'm just I got things to do.

ADRIENNE: Right. And, um, and so I also do a lot of like public talks where these faces matea does too and I don't know if this has been your experience but I almost every talk I do will get someone who comes up to me and says like I've taken a DNA test I found out that I'm Native American, and I would like to like connect more or like give some question of like what do I do now. Um, and I don't know if either of you have good answers for that because I am too nice of a person and I often just fudge around and say, That's nice.

MATIKA: I actually have a template email for that that my assistant has…

ADRIENNE: Really what does it say?

MATIKA: It just says thank you so much for reaching out. We do believe that we would like to strengthen our nations by having strong allies and advocates for our Indigenous communities, I recommend connecting with the local Indigenous community and finding a way to give back and be of service and so beyond that, I am not able to help you connect with your with your community in any way because I'm full to capacity but I have about four that my folder that has that it has about 4800 emails in it right now. Just one.

KIM: I saved those emails to actually under DNA emails from the public I should count them, I get big sob stories from people and long really really long.

ADRIENNE: Some of them are really heartbreaking and some of them. And so that's the hard thing that I have with these conversations is that, and I think because it's been so dominated by settler voices and not Indigenous voices, we know that there are real stories of disconnection in our communities.

KIM: I hardly get any of those emails.

ADRIENNE: Of the real ones?

KIM: Yeah, and I and if of course if I get somebody who said I was adopted by a white family and I know that I'm First Nations, of course I would. I write them a response yeah and try to give them some resources about where to go and and say well it depends on you have to know the biological parents if you don't know the biological parent, or have an idea of who the family is there's not going to be any way to get proof and connect you can't do a Native American DNA test, you have to do a parentage test or as, you know, a sibling test. But yeah, I probably I would say 1% of the emails or less that I get are that it's it's these other things it's Elizabeth Warren type people.

ADRIENNE: It's interesting. Yeah. And I know it's probably because I'm very public about my story of like reconnecting with my community I get I get those. I get a lot of college students or high school students who have grown up away and feel disconnected and then they hear these stories of people saying like well it's not just your ancestry like it needs to be who claims you it needs to be what community you're connected to and they're like, I didn't choose where I grew up, and I really want to connect and I don't know how to do that and I feel like I'm not allowed to so I have a lot of conversations with young people about how these settler conversations are not your conversations like these are different understandings of what it means to be an Indigenous person, and you're fine. You can you can start that journey and it's okay and that's different than someone who is taking a DNA test to figure it out.

KIM: And maybe has an ancestor 10 generations ago.

ADRIENNE: Right.

KIM: Where they don't know where from.

ADRIENNE: Right.

KIM: Yeah that's different. I get this question a lot and I just, I, they're not the same story, they're not even remotely the same story.

ADRIENNE: I wanted to transition a little bit and talk about research, as an Indigenous person on, and one of the things that as an early career scholar I've been in such admiration of your work and the ways that you think about the politics of actual research. And so I know, um, with Native American DNA you made specific choices about who you were going to talk to for the book and who you weren't going to talk to, and was wondering if you could tell us about those decisions and what that meant for you as a researcher in that space.

KIM: Well, you know, I it's funny that I didn't initially realize that I should do this but it was when I went home and I had had my IRB approved, and I realized I didn't want to bring out an informed consent form and push it across the table at the cafe and have some, you know, older person or anybody in my community, talk to me about their perspectives on genetics. It just was very uncomfortable and you know what people do at home if you're sitting around the cafe and somebody gets in storytelling mode. They might not be in storytelling mode in 20 minutes and they're not going to be in storytelling mode on command, you know, and it's the minute I give them that form it's going to, they're going to stop not because they don't, they want to keep things secret, but because it just changes the whole dynamic right. And I, I just never was able to do that I didn't want to interrupt my time at home and the great stories people were telling and then I went Wait a minute. I've been reading, you know Vine Deloria Jr's critiques of anthropology and Laura Nader's feminist critiques of anthropology and she wrote this article around the time Vine published Custer died for your sins. She wrote a really important article called up the anthropologist right where she talked about the need to, why are we always researching the poor exploited marginalized populations let's research those in power and this was during the Vietnam War and I'm like, Yeah. Wait a minute. Who cares what Dakota people think about genetics? We'll figure that out eventually the people giving us the problems are non-Native scientists, what did they think about genetics and I went Oh. So, this gets me out of the predicament of not wanting to interview at home and it's a really important decolonial performative move. I decided to do in the book. Yeah, and it's really great to go out to genetics meetings and have people say they assume because I'm a Native studies scholar I study Natives I'm like no I study you because youʻre a danger to Indigenous sovereignty. And they don't know what to do with it. I mean they can't say anything because they're out there trying to get Indian blood, you know in their test tubes or whatever, they don't use those anymore but to draw blood.

ADRIENNE: And you have this beautiful article that I quote all the time that article about standing with rather than necessarily giving back. Yeah, I think that is such a powerful reframing on in terms of I, again, work with Native high school and college students and a lot of the conversations in reasons why Native students are going to higher ed is this idea about giving back, and I feel like it puts a really undue pressure on Native students, and they think about giving back in very specific ways about like being in your community about serving your community. And so having your reframing of this idea of standing with rather than giving back I think is really powerful and was wondering if you could talk about that as well.

KIM: Well so that little article took a long time to write I think it's only five pages yeah it took me about 40 hours to draft it matters place, but you know I I was reading an article by [unintelligible name] that's around about Filipina film, big famous film star and [name] was one of our professors at UC Santa Cruz I didn't work with her and wasn't influenced by her work at all until much later when I actually just went back and for some reason read this particular article where she pulls out a Filipino concept which I'm probably, I did speak Indonesian but so maybe it's samapalataya. And that's, that's what that means and it just really resonated with me. And so it was a it was a such a concise idea that enabled me to think about how I actually am already doing that. And the kind of Indigenous planning work I had done in my more community based research. So yeah, I have to credit [name] for for opening that analytical frame up for me or helping me explain what I knew but in more theoretically nuanced language. But yeah, it was really hard to write because we don't, it's not a framework that's that's operative normally in ethnography or academic research, and there's a lot of angst that happens in the social sciences, about how do I how do i do inside ethnography Am I really an insider? You know a lot of people being angsty over their identity which I find not very, not a very good use of one's time. And so yeah that that little idea really but it's a big idea it really helped me crystallize my refusal to be too preoccupied with my own identity but because it's not identity, it's about who I'm relating with and I don't like the word identity and I want us to get away from using it whenever we can. What are we talking about when we're using that much like when we use the word sexuality, what are we talking about. I'm not talking about identity I'm talking about my relations. I'm not talking about just who I am as an individual, and that's again the difference between us and settler colonial thinking about what it is to be Native, you know it's it's it's really about how yeah I'll stop there because I think I've said what I have to say.

ADRIENNE: I wanted to bring us back to this idea that you mentioned earlier, of us as Indigenous folks needing to kind of expand the ways that we think about our conversations around our origin stories are around that. This is our land and how we expand the relationality with settlers and other folks who are on our land.

KIM: Yeah I so I have a paper that's in press called American Dreaming is Indigenous Elimination. It's the elimination of a lot of our non human relatives too, actually I may have to change that the title a bit. And in that paper I talked about the fact that the, the American dream, whether it's a right wing xenophobic version of that or whether it's a liberal quote unquote progressive form of it, it's based on Indigenous genocide, and that is not the answer for it's clearly not been the answer I mean you know look at look at what the American dream has got us it's based upon a human, non human hierarchy. So non human animals are considered lesser life forms the word animal is used to degrade other humans, animals should not be an insult. It's an insult right I it's the whole term dehumanize. That's a problematic idea to write it's very problematic because it puts the human at the pinnacle and among humans straight white men are at the pinnacle. So, so, racism used to be a race was originally about species, before it became just about humans so racism and speciesism are intimately interconnected in the history of science and of Western European thinking. So I think the American dream has all of that that hierarchy of life within it it's fundamental it cannot be recuperated. So we need another narrative to live by and I was just at a, an event at the performance space in New York where an Italian filmmaker who made a film about Donna Haraway storytelling for earthly survival I think he screened the film and then Donna Skyped in from Santa Cruz and I gave a talk about this book that we're in together making kin, no population. And we were it became very very clear to me I kind of knew Donna and I were on a similar project these days but it became very clear in that, that what I'm trying to, she has this film storytelling for earthly survival I really really believe we need to change the dominant narrative according to which we live by this the American Dream is destroying the planet. It is environmentally, economically, and emotionally unsustainable. And it's built upon a hierarchy of life that includes a hierarchy of race, and a hierarchy of men and women in a hierarchy of queer and safe straight folks and abled people want everything else. So what do we replace it with? We cannot simply do away with it without another guiding narrative and I think Indigenous peoples across cultures have this guiding narrative which is being in good relations, and one does not have to be us to be good kin. And what's happening is you're getting a lot of non Indigenous people wanting to be us instead of doing the work of being in good kinship well it's a lot easier to go take a DNA test. Yep, and do your genealogy than it is to work to be in good relation with Indigenous people, that is the challenge in front of them. And historically I've actually learned a lot from some of the Indigenous Studies academics in Canada, people like Robin, who have focused on kinship as well as nation. And by reading his book elder brother, it was an epiphany for me because then I went back and read some of the historical documents around what my ancestor Little Crow was doing, because he's kind of viewed as the sort of like he was being really pragmatic he was being too tolerant with settlers then these like hot headed young Dakota men went and killed this settler family because Dakota people were starving, the annuities were coming from Washington after they were incarcerated and you know reservation basically and they had no right to hunt and they were you know the people were starving. So this whole war breaks out and Little Crow was viewed as this somewhat politically compromised person because he had cut his hair he went to church he was he still kept his four wives he still wanted to live in his teepee but he was trying to find a way to kind of live in ways that were somewhat accommodating but while also maintaining a Dakota worldview and largely Dakota kinship structures. And because what was what it was becoming very clear to me and looking at that history after reading Rob's book was that he was attempting to make kin out of settlers. And that's the way that some of the treaties tend to get, I think interpreted by some Indigenous thinkers in Canada more and I said when I moved up there that was like a newsflash to me I don't think about our treaty history is kinship now we talk a lot about that as nation to nation now here, but there's another person in my tribe, a tribe Gabrielle [Native name] who also talks about this Gabby's in my tribal writers group, she talked about the fact that when we look at 1862 in the Dakota War. We canʻt look at as only whites versus Native she said there were actually already kinship entanglements at that time she said we need to focus on what the big capitalists in the Twin Cities were doing, what was the impetus for that war? So it's not that we don't look at these white supremacist structures that were happening in the 19th century because they were and there was real racial oppression, but there was also already these kinship entanglements and this was an Indigenous effort I think to make kin right so there were there were efforts to draw newcomers in until they stopped becoming kin because sometimes newcomers did become kid right we see this, but then you get these these increased numbers of settlers who are coming in who have no interest in being kin who just want to appropriate everything right. And so I think that that it is about learning how to be not only good relations with Indigenous people without trying to be us and you serve everything that's ours. It's also about learning to be better relations with the planet. And there's a lot within that American dream that has to go, and it's already going the US is in decline now and it's kind of it's not the reason it's a decline. He wouldn't have gotten elected if the US weren't already in decline. It's an unsustainable worldview.

MATIKA: Thank you I powerful so do what you just said.

KIM: I stand on the shoulders of a lot of other Indigenous thinkers and some non Indigenous right.

MATIKA: I've been, I've been teaching as I've been doing this government training and part of the government training that I've been. I don't even know what to how to explain this, because it's it takes a very long time to have this conversation but basically I frame it through what Thomas King says where he tells the creation story right and he talks about the Anishinaabe creation story and sky woman and coming down and being put on a turtle's back and, and how you know it's, together with that woman and her two children and all of the animals that life in Turtle Island is created and how there's this relationship and how the animals were foundational in building the world and, and how it was created by a woman giving birth and then he goes on to like say, you know, this is the foundation for the way of life of Anishinaabe people. So our creation story shapes the entire world that we live in. And then I go on to tell like five or six different creation stories around Indian country and then how that shaped like how the great law and the story of the peacemaker shaped Haudenosaunee democracy, and I talked about it here how our creation story into transforming creation creation story in the northwest shaped our longhouse potlatching economy. Anyway, then I tell the American creation story right and I like to say it is an American creation story because the majority of our country is Judeo-Christian, and foundationally believe in that idea that I had that men have dominion. And I think that's probably what, when you boil down Christianity I think that that's the most damaging effect of Christianity is that men have dominion over land, animals, and women and power and control. And so as much as it's the American dream I also think we have to look at religion, shaping the American dream. And I've been wondering. That's why I asked you the question earlier about when you talked about science and faith.

KIM: You know, I'm actually there. The state, the church and science, have worked in tandem in the colonial project they war between themselves but they have more in common than they have different, they're all run by straight white men, and they're all about managing everybody else's life for their benefit, and within their control. So I don't you know when I see scientists, I mean sure they have to fight for keeping evolution in the public schools and all that sure that's that's a real fight, but they are coming out of the same origin story as the clergy that they're fighting against right which does put white men at the top, you know, and my daughter is writing a paper actually on propertied white men she's pulling apart some of that US history I was reading it last night and see it she's really saying you know no the US democracy was really created for white men with property that's really what it's about and once anybody else gets access that's not really what they want, we see that right. Oh, yeah, she's, she's. Yeah, she's, I would say she's read that shouldn't be radical. That shouldn't be radical but in this day and age. Yeah.

MATIKA: Yeah. In the conclusion of your book, you say the scientist who contributes her intellectual work into the processing and analysis of DNA in the lab in the US legal paradigm has the greater property claim.

KIM: Oh yeah, so it's really that is about the idea that only those who develop property have the right to it right and so this is where the Genome Sciences are inheriting from this kind of colonial pioneer mentality. So the idea that because Native people were viewed as not owning the land as not developing it in a capitalist manner they were wasting it basically and they didn't have a claim to it. This is a lot of the kind of philosophy that is guiding settler claims to territory in the 19th century. And similarly in the 20th and 21st century it's an idea that's guiding some genome scientists claim to our DNA because we're not using it it's just there in our bodies and, and they need to use it to produce knowledge for the good of all well the good of all never includes us and it's always on our backs. So, science and the state doing the same thing in 1850 and 2018 in very fundamental ways

MATIKA: The title of this episode is called Can A DNA Test Make Me Native American, Can we get an answer on that one?

KIM: Well, if you want to take Elizabeth Warren's definition of Native American sure. I hope we don't come to that, you know, I hope that our definitions which are not simply Native American I mean that puts us under an umbrella where we communicate with and have relations with one another right we can't get out of that racialized structure, but we know as Indigenous people within that structure we have all of these people-specific traditions languages territories and relations that both predate and exist after contact. So, by that definition of course not.

MATIKA: Thank you.

MATIKA: Kim has such a big brain and thinking about such diverse topics we actually split our conversation into two parts.

ADRIENNE: Our next episode we're going to talk with her about the other parts of her work that surround her blog the Critical Polyamorist, and her stage show which is called TP Confessions. So we'll have some conversations around that and the broader idea around decolonizing sex,

MATIKA: You know you all want to talk about sex with us about decolonizing sex. It's a time machine that you hop into, and you go back and have old way sex. Okay, I'm kidding. Please subscribe, rate and comment on iTunes, we'd love to try and get the pod to the new and noteworthy page and reach all the peoples.

ADRIENNE: You can follow the podcast, at Amr podcasts on Instagram. You can follow me, Adrienne at @NativeApprops on Instagram and Twitter, or check out native appropriations.com. Matika can be found at Project_562 on Instagram, or @MatikaWilbur on Twitter. Her website is Project562.com. You can follow Kim's fire tweets @KimTallbear on Twitter, and her book is Native American DNA Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science, and you should seriously buy it and read it, it is available on the internet where books are sold.

MATIKA: Huge thanks to our amazing production team audio engineer and art director Teo Shantz. Producer book signing, and production assistant Juanita Toledo, amazing episode art by cIara Sana, who is on Insta @artbyciara, we're gonna be having amazing video clips coming out too so huge shout out to our set designers, [name] and Emily Wood. Southside All Stars where they built the set, our set lighting expert Jonathan Houser, our colorist Tristan [name], and musical assistants from Max Levon and Kyle [name].

If you have any original music that you'd like to have featured on our future episodes, please email your clips to allmyrelationspodcast@gmail.com

ADRIENNE: we also set it up now on our website to have this really cool little widget where you can send us a voicemail from your computer, which is super cool. And we're really interested in hearing your thoughts and responses to the podcast or any questions that you might have. So the widget is on the Contact Us page of allmyrelationspodcast.com.

MATIKA: Leave us a message, [beep] old school.

ADRIENNE: We do have some specific things that we'd probably like people to leave us messages about right, Matika?

ADRIENNE: Some of our next topics include conversations around our Indigenous languages. You know, we want to hear your thoughts about that. Are you a language warrior Are you preserving language. What was your access like to your own Indigenous language. How do you feel about your ability to speak or not speak your own language? What are some of the teachings that are held in your language. We're also diving into blood quantum. And are you enrolled? Are you disenrolled? What is the enrollment policy like in your community? And how does that affect your life? And so if you could send us a voicemail around those topics we would love to hear your thoughts.