28 contexts.org

In her bid as a 2020

Democratic candidate

for President, U.S. Senator

Elizabeth Warren found

herself on the defensive

when President Donald J. Trump

repeatedly called her “Pocahontas.”

For years, Warren had claimed indigenous

ancestry. In an attempt to address the nagging

controversy about her claim, Warren took a

DNA ancestry test. The results showed a small

but detectable amount of Native American

DNA, possibly an indigenous ancestor six to ten

generations removed. Warren had long claimed

that she was part Tsalagi (Cherokee) and Lenape

(Delaware) based on family stories she heard

growing up.

by an

gela a. g

on

zales and

jud

y kertész

indigenous identity,

being, and belonging

29SUMMER 2020 contextsContexts, Vol. 19, Issue 3, p. 28-33. ISSN 1536-5042. © American Sociological Association. http://contexts.sagepub.com. 10.1177/1536504220950398.

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By 2019, more than 26 million Americans had taken an at-home DNA-ancestry test. Should interest in identity, family history, and genealogy continue, by 2021, the most prolific purveyors of such testing will have collected and stored the genetic data of more than 100 million people—according to DNA test kit vendors and market analysts.

A screenshot from an AncestryDNA commercial featuring “Kim” who “discovered” her Native American ancestry.

However, in turning to DNA testing to silence her critics, she

reinforced one of the most insidious ways Americans think about

race as an innate and immutable biological fact.

In the past ten years, DNA-ancestry test kits have become

all the rage. Coinciding with the adoption of direct to consumer

genetic testing is the budding popularization of family history

and identity politics—a curious collision of interests, to be

sure. The two phenomena—increasing technological advance-

ments vis-a-vis genetic testing and the dynamics of determining

identity—are indeed linked. By spitting into a plastic tube or

swabbing the inside of a cheek, companies such as Ancestry

and 23andMe promise their consumers insight into the deepest

reaches of their ancestry. Simultaneously, the strongest appeal

by these producers of consumer genetic testing is their promise

to tell consumers who and what they are. The power to identify

merged with various technologies of identification serve mul-

tiple, often self-serving purposes. Unfortunately, the implications

of their coincidence are often lost on consumers of such tests

seeking answers to questions of identity.

By 2019, more than 26 million Americans had taken an

at-home DNA-ancestry test. Should interest in identity, family

history, and genealogy continue, by 2021, the most prolific pur-

veyors of such testing will have collected and stored the genetic

data of more than 100 million people—according to DNA test

kit vendors and market analysts.

For many, ancestry is synonymous

with identity but there are important

qualitative distinctions between what you

are and who you are. To the extent that

DNA ancestry tests might tell you what

you are based on an algorithm of reference

datasets, it cannot tell you who you are.

While identity, or who you are matters, for

many, so does what you are. Without an

identifiable ancestry, one’s very existence is

cast into doubt. Nevertheless, identity and

ancestry are not the same, nor should they

be confused with one another.

Ancestry refers to infinite lines of

descent as well as socio-political, religious,

and cultural origins. Identity, however, con-

notes in total the beliefs, values, and expressions that encompass

the memories, experiences, and relations that enable individuals

as well as groups to construct themselves in the present. For

those seeking to establish or confirm claims to a Native Ameri-

can identity, this latest technology makes tangible the necessary

evidence to do so. By unlocking timeless sequences of DNA,

genetic testing vendors purport to determine what you are.

Scientists interpret clues within genetic sequences embedded

in blood, saliva, bones and other bodily traces that have been

passed down through successive generations.

Genealogy companies such as Ancestry and 23andMe

render the genetic material that they test into decipherable,

easy-to-read pie charts that neatly divide percentages and

probabilities derived from algorithms obtained through data

accumulation. In so doing, for myriad consumers, the interpre-

tive work of science translates hereditary genetic material into

present-day constructs of identity, thereby determining not only

what you are, but also, who you are. Moreover, while testing

companies refrain from using the terms “race” or “ethnicity,”

their interpretations of genetic material invariably translate into

contemporary categories of race. The ramifications of market-

ing identity through genetic testing are significant. Consumers

are encouraged to embrace or distance themselves from DNA

test-kit ascriptions of racialized identities while confirming their

belief in racial difference. By examining the means by which DNA

tests assess genetic material such as blood and bones, we seek

to both interrogate their myth-making power, while subverting

them with indigenous constructs of belonging.

30 contexts.org

A chart from the 1984 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Enrollment Manual.

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A chart from the 1984 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Enrollment Manual. A chart from the 1984 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Enrollment Manual.

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myth Prior to her Presidential bid, questions concerning Elizabeth

Warren’s ancestry fi rst surfaced during her run for the U.S. Sen-

ate in 2012. The Boston Herald reported that she registered as a

minority in law school directories in the 1980s. Warren defended

herself by claiming that she was told of her Native American

ancestry in family stories passed down over generations and

claims that she never furthered her career by using her heritage

to gain an advantage.

In 2018, Warren joined the thousands of Americans turning

to DNA ancestry testing to discover or recover the truth of their

identity. She consulted Carlos D. Bustamante, a Biomedical Data

Science professor at Stanford University’s School of Medicine

whose lab focuses on Population Genomics and Global Health,

Clinical and Medical Genomics, and Ancient DNA. Notably,

Bustamante had already gained popularity—unusual for a

“hard” scientist—on PBS’s Finding Your Roots, with Professor

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. In turning to Bustamante’s testing lab to

silence her critics, Warren unwittingly reinforced two myths of

the American imagination: fi rst, the veracity of biologically-based

notions of race and identity, and second, the long-held belief

that many white Americans have indigenous ancestry.

One source of evidence of this myth-making can be found

in Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924. White fears of tainted

“Negro” blood seeping into white lineages informed the Act and

similar race laws throughout the American South. To maintain

white racial purity, Virginia’s legislature made it unlawful for a

white person to marry outside of their race. In so doing, the state

racialized all non-whites, whether “negro, Mongolian, American

Indian, Asiatic Indian, Malay, or any mixture thereof, or any other

non-Caucasic strains” as “colored,” with one notable exception.

Known as the “Pocahontas Exception,” the Act ensured that

those members of Virginia’s elite families who claimed descent

from Mataoka, better known as Pocahontas, were irrefutably

and legally white.

Among citizens and descendants of contemporary tribal

nations, Warren’s situation underscores the abiding interest that

many people have in confi rming claims to indigenous ancestry.

When individuals who most consistently identify as white assume

another racialized identity, the behavior advances the under-

standing that historically, politically, and culturally-constructed

identities can be assumed and consumed without consequence,

without cost, without understanding.

What makes Warren’s experience of laying claim to indig-

enous ancestry unusual, and indeed, laudably exceptional, is that

in her apologia to contemporary Native Americans, and spe-

cifi cally, the Cherokee Nation, Warren owned her own actions,

“having listened and learned.” In light of the controversy, Warren

removed a video of her family’s ancestral history and released

a 9,000-word plan on tribal rights that ran twice the length of

her other campaign proposals. Nevertheless, for the Cherokee

Nation, as well as a number of indigenous scholars, Warren’s

planned policy and her apology rang hollow, was dismissed, and

failed to receive serious consideration.

bloodThe popularity and proliferation of genetic ancestry tests

aimed at would-be Native American clients is only the latest

iteration of an ideological legacy of race and racial superior-

ity rooted in the body, and specifi cally, the blood. The use of

31SUMMER 2020 contexts

“blood” to trace ancestry, has multiple historical roots. In the

English historical context, “blood” made material the mechanism

whereby ancestry, lineage, and descent justifi ed or delegitimized

claims to property and status. Blood was infused with proper-

ties that confi rmed or denied the tell-tale traces of authenticity.

Authenticity, or its lack, was irretrievably embedded in either

pure, or suspect admixtures of illicit blood.

For post-Columbian indigenous peoples throughout what is

now the United States, “blood” initially operated as a metaphori-

cal translation of forms of relatedness and lineage. Over time

however, “blood” as metaphor devolved even as its literalness

increased, gradually mirroring a European biologic of identity. In

the 500 plus years since, technologies of establishing relatedness,

identifi cation, and evaluation, began to require the measure-

ment of “blood quantum.” The belief that “Indianness” can be

measured by the amount of “Indian blood” that one possessed

gave new meaning to indigenous understandings of “descent,”

“lineage” and “ancestry.” At the same time, this understanding

usurped indigenous beliefs about identity and belonging rooted

in culture, kinship, and community.

As of February 2020, there were 574 tribal nations

legally recognized by the U.S. federal government. Among

these, over 70 percent require a minimum blood quantum for

purposes of attaining tribal citizenship. Similar to the one-drop

rule once used to define someone as “Negro,” or anyone

with known or purported African ancestry,

blood quantum rules exemplify the elbow-

ing guidance of the federal authority since

the 19th century that defi ned as “Indian”

persons with some minimum percentage

of “Indian blood,” usually one-quarter or

more. Rooted in a biologic of race, these

directives were incorporated into tribal

constitutions that determine both tribal

belonging and citizenship status. To the

extent that DNA ancestry tests may provide

evidence of generic indigenous ancestry,

they fall far short of providing the proof

needed for tribal citizenship. This is why,

in response to the release of Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test result,

the Cherokee Nation released a statement that said in part that

DNA tests are inappropriate and useless in determining tribal

citizenship.

bonesMany who turn to DNA tests in search of indigenous

ancestry reinforce antiquated constructions of race and the

abilities of science to determine identity. Yet, contemporary

DNA ancestry-testing, and the marketing strategies that herald

it as an unassailable scientifi c determinant of race, misinform

people as to its ability to shed light on who or what they are. .

There are also signifi cant legal, historical, and ethical implications

upon which such claims rely as they naturalize biological notions

of relatedness apart from indigenous cultural moorings that are

rooted in people and place. A striking example of the differing

means by which many Americans determine racialized related-

ness from the ways in which indigenous peoples establish being

and belonging is the two-decade saga of The Ancient One,

better known as “Kennewick Man.”

In 2017, the 9,000 year old remains of The Ancient One

were returned to a coalition of tribal nations (the Confeder-

ated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, Confederated Tribes and

Bands of the Yakama Nation, Nez Perce Tribe, Confederated

Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation, and the Wanapum Band of

Priest Rapids). Claiming him as their ancestor, for twenty-one

years they sought to rebury him. Shortly after his discovery and

subsequent appropriation in the name of scientifi c inquiry into

his origins, anthropologist James Chatters purposed the skull to

mold a sculpture of what The Ancient One looked like. Naming

him “Kennewick Man,” Chatters described him as “Caucasoid,”

who lacked the “defi nitive characteristics of the classic Mongol-

oid stock.” Chatters further noted that he could easily “lose him

in the streets of most major cities.”

To Chatters, The Ancient One did not “look” Native Ameri-

can. Herein began a tale of multiple claimants: fi rst, The Ancient

When individuals who most consistently identify as white assume another racialized identity, the behavior advances the understanding that historically, politically, and culturally-constructed identities can be assumed and consumed without consequence, without cost, without understanding.

Elizabeth Warren’s DNA results, showing that she has Native American ancestry.

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Elizabeth Warren’s DNA results, showing that she has Native Elizabeth Warren’s DNA results, showing that she has Native

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32 contexts.org

One himself, whose post-mortem existence as the ancestor of

present-day indigenous Columbian Basin peoples was now

under threat. Second, Nordic racial paganists now claimed that,

as their ancestor, The Ancient One represented evidence of an

even earlier European indigeneity in the Americas. Lastly, a group

of scholars—represented by the Army Corps of Engineers which

oversaw the land where The Ancient One was “discovered”—

sued the Federal government in order to prevent his remains

from returning to the Columbian Basin peoples under the Native

American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).

Later still, physical anthropologists at the Smithsonian

Institution completed an exhaustive inventory of The Ancient

One’s bones, from probing his cavity-free teeth, to disarticulat-

ing, exploring, measuring, and weighing every inch of what

his skeleton might reveal. Twenty years after his “discovery”

in 1997, cranial analysis combined with genetic comparisons

concluded that The Ancient One evidenced continuity with

indigenous North Americans over the course of eight millennia.

belongingMarketers of genetic ancestry testing readily exploit the

American interest in genealogy. What is at the heart of such an

abiding interest? The preoccupation with who we are and what

we are has plagued Americans since the inception of the nation.

The need to root oneself, to belong has always been a core

American anxiety.This highlights the perniciously appropriative

behavior all-too-common among non-indigenous individuals.

Indeed, persons in the present who otherwise identify as white

need never be cognizant of, or own any historical attempts of

Native erasure by assigning to themselves a shared ancestry

unencumbered by that history. More than happy to perpetuate

a narrative of the “vanishing Indian,” these formerly reviled,

historically subjugated peoples were blithely absorbed into the

body politic of the nation, as well as the bodies of its citizens.

Once made to vanish, Native Americans can now safely return in

a strand of DNA. We as observers, academics, and participants

in the varied dynamics of American identity politics should keep

in mind the histories and narrative inventions that inform what

it means to be indigenous in the 21st century.

At a 2017 event honoring the service of Navajo Code

Talkers during World War II, President Trump acknowledged

the historical presence of indigenous peoples by stating, “You

were here long before any of us were here.” Implicitly, this is the

same rhetoric that Trump wields against immigrants. This brand

of American myth-making privileges some Americans to a kind

of indigeneity that requires the erasure of their own immigrant

ancestry in order to legitimize their claims to being American

and belonging to the nation state.

Indeed, Trump has made a career of policing indigenous

identities. In 1993, while still an entrepreneur, Trump cam-

paigned to prevent New Jersey’s Ramapough Mountain Indians

from entering into the gaming industry in Atlantic City. He

invoked blood-based beliefs about indigenous identity when he

stated, “I might have more Indian blood than a lot of the so-

called Indians that are trying to open up the reservations.” In a

similar vein, Trump attempted to delegitimize the Mashantucket

Pequot, who operate one of the largest, most lucrative gaming

operations in the U.S., saying, “They don’t look like Indians

to me.” For Trump and many Americans,

beliefs about race, whether based on

blood, ancestry or phenotype, inform an

understanding of who can be indigenous

and what it means to be Native American.

In contrast to Trump’s narrative of

indigenous illegitimacy and inauthenticity,

the Cherokee Nation challenged Warren’s

claims to Cherokee heritage and racialized

constructions of identity. In a statement issued by the Chero-

kee Nation, “being a Cherokee Nation tribal citizen is rooted

in centuries of culture and laws, not through DNA tests.” The

Cherokee do not claim to base their response to Warren on

a construction of who may or may not be Native American.

Rather, their response is specifi c to the Cherokee construct of

belonging, and thus, being. Here, the Cherokee logic of being

and belonging disables a racialized construction of who is or is

not Cherokee and leaves to other tribal nations to defi ne for

themselves who and what they are. It also negates race as a

premise for the legitimization of both people and personhood.

And yet, the concept of “race,” with its politicized pathology

A 1986 registration card for the State Bar of Texas for Elizabeth Warren with her Race indicated as “American Indian.”

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Many who turn to DNA tests in search of indigenous ancestry reinforce antiquated constructions of race and ethnicity and the abilities of science to determine identity.

33SUMMER 2020 contexts

of purity and blood, continues to operate as a fundamental fac-

tor in the construction of both indigenous and non-indigenous

identities. In the 500 plus years since Columbus made landfall,

and well over a century since the abolition of slavery, biologically-

based concepts of race remain deeply embedded and infused

throughout U.S. society and the American psyche. Advances

in genetic technologies have only strengthened such thinking

about notions of individual and collective identity, and the fun-

damental basis of kinship and relatedness.

For many Americans, Native Identity

is understood as something that resides

in bodily traces, from blood and bones to

DNA. The idea of genetics as an objective

science continues to uncritically inform

consumers, courts of law, legislators, and

policy makers. How extraordinary that

the past can be reduced to the flawless

minimalism of DNA. Yet, this approach

operates in accordance with an increasingly

fragmented, socially-isolating approach to constructs of family,

ancestry, and descent. All too vulnerable, are meanings of kin-

ship across multiple historical and socio-cultural perspectives,

as well as how such meanings reflect, refract, and conflict with

larger social forces.

The possibilities offered by genetics perpetuate and pro-

mote ideas of identity premised on a cultural logic rooted in

biologically based notions of ancestry and descent. In turn,

this cultural logic stimulated the development of technologies

that rely on the collection and analysis of both bodily traces

and resulting data upon which science relies. In lieu of a larger

knowledge of history and individual family histories, contempo-

rary non-indigenous consumers have taken to purchasing DNA

kits to better determine their ancestry, and thus, their identity.

Moreover, Americans, in particular, seek confirmation of family

histories that purport to include a distant, illusory indigenous

ancestor upon which they can firmly assert a Native American

identity. The simplistic construction of Native American identity

defined solely by DNA is not only naïve, but also self-serving and

ultimately, misinformed. In this sense, you are never entirely, and

certainly never exclusively, your genes.

For many Americans, the idiom of “DNA” like that of

“blood” conjures up powerful notions of ancestry and identity,

being and belonging. For Elizabeth Warren and the thousands

of Americans seeking proof of their “Indianness,” genetic

ancestry testing provides a point of leverage upon which they

can assert claims to indigeneity based on a “percentage” of

DNA shared with indigenous peoples. In a New York Times arti-

cle, Kim TallBear, an indigenous scholar at the University of

Alberta argued that such testing privileges whiteness and relies

on “settler-colonial definitions” of indigenous identity. It is in

this abstract world of ideas as well as a lived reality that colo-

nialism creates and reinforces the identities of the colonized

in opposition to the colonizer.

The view of race as social rather than biological has been an

enduring feature of sociological studies of race. The orthodoxy

in the social sciences is that race is socially constructed, not an

innate and immutable biological fact. In the United States, the

social construction of race is underpinned by an ideology that

has long-served the interests of certain groups in referential

and strategic ways. In a nation consumed with enumeration,

classification and categorization, family stories of being “part

Indian” or algorithms of DNA are bound up in long histories of

colonialism and racism that once usurped indigenous peoples of

their lands, languages and lifeways. Today, DNA ancestry test-

ing continues this process and further undermines indigenous

defined ways of being and belonging.

recommended readingsBliss, C. (2013). The Marketization of Identity Politics. Sociol-ogy, 47(5), 1011–1025.

Garroutte, E. (2003). Real Indians: Identity and the survival of Native America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Roth, W. D.& Ivemark, B. (2018). Genetic Options: The Impact of Genetic Ancestry Testing on Consumers’ Racial and Ethnic Identi-ties, American Journal of Sociology 124(1): 150-184.

TallBear, K. (2013). Native American DNA: Tribal belonging and the false promise of genetic science. Minneapolis, MN: Univer-sity of Minnesota Press.

Wailoo, K., Nelson, A., & Lee, C. (2012). Genetics and the unset-tled past the collision of DNA, race, and history. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Angela A. Gonzales is in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State

University and Judy Kertész is in the History Department at North Carolina State

University. Gonzales’s research focuses on the interconnection between science, public

policy, and the racialization of Native American identity. Kertész research examines

the emergence of a “nativist” American nationalism during the early American

Republic, as well as the intersections of Indigenous studies, critical race studies, and

museum studies. In 2009, Gonzales and Kertész co-curated the Smithsonian exhibit,

InDivisible: African Native American Lives in the Americas, a collaboration between

the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and National Museum

of African American History and Culture.

We as observers, academics, and participants in the varied dynamics of American identity politics should keep in mind the histories and narrative inventions that inform what it means to be indigenous in the 21st century.