When the “tribes” -- which were a concept introduced by Euros -- were mapped (as they were at first contact), given names, assigned territories, engaged in treaties (some of them never signed by both parties), organized and reorganized, they ended up becoming corporations. That was the metaphor for self-governance: that each “member” was defined as owning shares in a “company” which had the object of doing business, i.e. making a profit. The best reaction to the way things turned out is probably sustained laughter. Nevertheless, in this monetized world, the idea keeps its grip on “tribal business councils.”
So do the ideas of tribes, reservations, treaties and -- come right down to it -- money, which basically a system of standardized IOU’s backed up by bureaucratic record-keeping that hasn’t changed all that much since it was invented in Egypt to keep track of crops along the Nile. The whole notion of unitizing value in some standard way (dollars) and then writing the amounts into ledgers dominated the army -- which was in charge of all Indians at first. Not only did they deal in dollar values (which might not really represent the true value of the food and blankets, esp. after some of them were siphoned off during transport or from warehouses) but also they had to figure out a way to quantify the Indians themselves.
Since most officers were from Britain where domestic animal breeding had been very successful at producing defined kinds of dogs, cows, pigs and so on, all of them susceptible to the idea of prestige eliteness (“King Charles Spaniels”?) and since they could not wrap their heads around the humanness of indigenous people, they went to the idea of pedigree. These would be people with “papers” -- sound familiar? “Tribes” equals “breeds.” So they lined them all up and asked everyone who their parents were, thinking of parents as the two exclusively defined and limited mater and pater they knew from their own lives and had many many laws and moral prohibitions to define for sure. Of course this hardly fit the reality of tribal life where all aunts and uncles were defined as auxiliary parents and people freely adopted children, entirely forgetting who the biological parents were.
Still -- illogically calling these pedigree papers records of “blood quantum” -- access to food and other commodities, assignment of lands, and the fact of being a shareholder in the corporation that was the tribe all hinged on “blood quantum.” It was not until WWII that “blood types” (A, AB, B, and O) were widely known because every soldier had his blood type on his dog tags in case he needed a blood transfusion in the field. Now, of course, we can quickly look at genome snippets and learn far more. Part of the secret of successful organ and bone marrow transplants is getting a very close genetic match in the gene sections that seem most crucial. Celebrities go on TV shows to explore their genome, believing that it can reveal their “racial” heritage, unconscious that humans everywhere share almost all the code. Snippets might be more common in one place than another, but very few are unique unless they’re recent mutations. Anyway, it’s unlikely that their entire genome will be de-coded. We’ve only recently discovered the “epigene,” which influences the genes tremendously.
Indians are hoping they will be descended from famous chiefs, but they are just as likely to have inherited the genome of a mother kidnapped or seduced from some entirely different tribe. But since adjacent tribes are often derivatives or break-offs from other nearby tribes, their genomes will be very similar, indistinguishable. Most shocking of all, since American Indian genetics derive from Asian “rootstock” (quite apart from the controversy of how they got over here) they are possibly related to some ancient Chinese emperor! And then there are those troublesome very ancient “Caucasian type” bones that turn up now and then.
All this nineteenth century thinking has been coming into increasingly urgent collisions with modern monetization of everything and the interests of the corporate tribe versus some other corporation, esp. the big Pharma corporations. First it was the Pima, whose systems had adapted so exquisitely to their ancient foods that they reacted to modern Wonder Bread, soy mayonnaise and Twinkies by blowing up like balloons and then dying of diabetes, the Isles of Langerhans in their pancreases devastated beyond salvation. Exactly how this happened interested the scientists very much. The next tribe to be studied was the Havasupai at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, who were having so many deaths from diabetes that they could hardly refuse “help,” esp. when there was a little money involved. So they all gave blood samples.
Then the unthinkable happened: some of the tribal members went to college, learned how to use search engines, how to interpret medical studies, and so on. The white scientists in the ivory tower were still 19th century, thinking of people unlike them as never being able to understand what they did. And anyway, that old agreement made at the time of the blood drawing never to use the blood for any other studies, was forgotten, molding in the bottom of a drawer somewhere.) Those Havasupai college students realized that the blood was being used in studies of things like psychosis and in-breeding. Hot button topics when you’re trying to convince the world that you’re as good as anyone else.
Since tribes are corporations, they had lawyers. They knew how to go to court. The agreement they reached with the researchers included money, return of all blood samples, and an apology. By this time some tribal members had also returned to the 19th century and were “remembering” all sorts of rules and beliefs, all of them religious, about blood. By the time they brought the blood samples “home” any onlooker could see the ghosts of many bygone people whose blood represented them. That much, at least, had escaped the corporation context.
Can’t a people own their own genome? Is declaring a blood draw sacred the right thing to do? In what way is owning one’s blood formula the same as owning the right to depict the people as mascots? Spirituality becomes monetization, control becomes self-defeating. It is very hard to find a genetic database for organ and bone marrow donors that includes enough American Indian people to get a good match. They don’t want even the cheek scrape that will give the docs the code for fear of betraying ancestors. And yet, one of the common consequences of the rampant diabetes is the need for a kidney transplant.
Indian people are mostly poor unless they’ve found something to monetize like gambling or minerals. But the thing they are most short of is trust. You can’t buy it. It cannot be monetized.
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