Scientists and the public alike are on the hunt for “Native American DNA.”¹ Hi-tech genomics labs at universities around the world search for answers to questions about human origins and ancient global migrations. In the glossy world of made-for-television science, celebrity geneticist Spencer Wells travels in jet planes and Land Rovers to far-flung deserts and ice fields. Clad in North Face^® gear, he goes in search of indigenous DNA that will provide a clearer window into our collective human past.

Others—housewives, retirees, professionals in their spare time—search for faded faces and long-ago names, proof that their grandmothers’ stories...

The phenomenon of Native American DNA can be understood in all of its richness only if it is understood as co-constituted with U.S. race categories, which themselves are coproduced with Euro-American colonial practices, including eighteenth-through twentieth-century U.S. race laws, policy, and programs. The meanings of Native American DNA and the practices that in part produce it must also be articulated with older meanings of “blood” as the substance of inheritance in pregenomic eras. There are very particular articulations of blood and gene metaphors, politics, and materialities with respect to Native American race identity and tribal citizenship. This chapter presents “genealogies”...

In the early 1960s, researchers began applying new genetic techniques to traditional anthropological questions.¹ The new science was coined “molecular anthropology.” Today, researchers around the world use a growing arsenal of techniques to study ancient human migrations and the biological and cultural relationships between human groups in different geographic locations. Researchers draw blood and in other ways capture DNA from human bodies, both living and dead, the world over. “Native American,” or “Amerindian,” populations and bodies are popular objects of study. Researchers search in specific locations of an individual’s genome for certain molecular sequences, those “genetic signatures” of ancient peoples...

Genealogy research is perhaps the most popular U.S. American pastime.¹ This chapter explores the practice of “genetic genealogy,” or genealogical (“family tree”) research that makes use of ancestry-DNA tests to fill in documentary gaps. Often called an obsession, genealogy research had an estimated forty million practitioners in the United States alone by 2004.² Today, Rootsweb.com boasts more than thirty thousand genealogical mailing lists.³ During the first decade of the twenty-first century, the genetic-testing phenomenon grew quickly among genealogists.⁴ Between 2001 and 2006, we know that nearly five hundred thousand people purchased tests.⁵ At an estimated rate of growth of 80,000...

In April 2005, the National Geographic Society and IBM, with funding from the Waitt Family Foundation (established by a cofounder of Gateway, Inc.), launched the Genographic Project as a five-year “research partnership”¹ that aims to “trace the migratory history of the human species” and “map how the Earth was populated.”²

The Genographic Project, a “landmark study of the human journey,”³ has been frequently compared to the failed Human Genome Diversity Project (the Diversity Project) in both scope and methodological approach.⁴ In the early 1990s, a group of scientists proposed a global survey of human genome diversity. They would draw blood...

“Native American DNA” fascinated me from the first moment that I heard it uttered. Not having taken a genetics or biological anthropology class, that first utterance struck my ears at a meeting having to do with a grant that my employer had won from the U.S. Department of Energy’s program in the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of genetic research. The three-year grant would enable us to convene tribal representatives together in facilitated sessions to discuss the implications for tribes of mapping of the human genome. I had worked for nearly a decade in the field of tribal environmental...