Keynote Presentation – Friday May 17th 11:00 to 12:30pm
Presenters: Jessica Kolopenuk1,2,3 & Rick W.A. Smith3,4,5,
1 Department of Family Medicine, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, University of Alberta
2 Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
3 Indigenous Science, Technology and Society Research and Training Program, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
4 Department of Sociology and Anthropology, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, United States.
5 Women and Gender Studies, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, United States
Title: Strange Bedfellows?: Kinking the Colonial Relationship between Critical Indigenous Studies and Biological Anthropology
Abstract: To a critical Indigenous studies scholar, the expression “decolonizing anthropology” will sound like an obvious oxymoron. As the only academic discipline that has emerged in relationship to and support of Indigenous sovereignties, critical Indigenous studies (as the name implies) has long been critical of anthropology’s past and present while staking a claim to shaping the discipline’s future. More recently, scholars of Indigenous science, technology, and society studies (Indigenous STS) have been engaging with newer trajectories in biological anthropology whereby the development of high-throughput sequencing platforms and ancient DNA enrichment strategies are enabling scientists to study the DNA of ancient peoples and other biological organisms: often, the ancestors and relatives of modern Indigenous peoples. There is a prevailing discourse among scholars of biological anthropology and especially among genetics/genomics research about Indigenous peoples, that technological advances in their field have outpaced commensurate discussions about the ethics of newer scientific methods. This talk will explore how this narrative erases Indigenous peoples’ long and ongoing resistance to anthropology through, but not limited to, the creation of the discipline – Indigenous studies. Drawing on our experiences working with and against biological anthropologists, and more recently being called to embark on the work of reconnecting communities and families with the remains of children in unmarked residential school graves, we argue that institutional research ethics operate as a technology of colonial power in the production of knowledge about Indigenous peoples, lands, and relations through the appearance of goodness. We argue this is particularly the case among biological anthropologists keen to distance themselves from colonial legacies of their discipline and bad science. Here we unpack a colonial technique of governance whereby the moral right to rule has been replanted as the moral right to know. Finally, we present a kinky research and training approach that centers Indigenous expertise, leadership, and governance.
Bios:
Jessica Kolopenuk, Ph.D.
Dr. Jessica Kolopenuk (Cree, Peguis First Nation) is an Assistant Professor and Alberta Health Services Research Chair in Indigenous Health in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Alberta. Dr. Kolopenuk completed her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Victoria in 2020 and was an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Native Studies (UofA) from 2018 to 2022. She co-created SING Canada in 2018 and before that, the Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society Research and Training Program (Indigenous STS). Expanding Indigenous STS, Dr. Kolopenuk is currently building the Indigenous STS – Health Research Core from her satellite dry lab in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry. In 2018 she won the Canadian Science Policy Centre Youth Category Award of Excellence and in 2021 she was the recipient of the Governor General’s Gold Medal.
The promotion of Indigenous governance in science and technology fields requires the critical study of scientific knowledge production and its institutionalization. It also requires the training of Indigenous researchers and clinical practitioners. These are the spaces that Dr. Kolopenuk’s work moves in. She researches what genomics mean for indigeneity and, also, what Indigenous knowledges can mean for genome sciences. In particular, she analyzes the power dynamics involved in genomics research, ethics, and policy in Canada to consider how genomic knowledge of populations is affecting policy-based governance amidst a backdrop of colonialism. Crucially, she seeks to identify ways that Indigenous peoples might intervene and govern the scientific knowledge and policies affecting them.
Rick W. A. Smith, Ph.D.
Rick W. A. Smith is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and Women and Gender Studies at George Mason University. He is PI of the Critical Molecular Anthropology Lab and director of the Science and Society Research Hub. He is also a research affiliate with the Indigenous STS Lab in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta and a founding core faculty member of SING Canada.
Dr. Smith is a biocultural anthropologist working at the intersections of genomics and feminist, queer, and Indigenous Science and Technology Studies (STS). His work traces how shifting conditions of power become molecular. As both a geneticist and a critical scholar of science, he uses the concept of “molecular” not only to account for the conjoined histories of social, political, ecological, and genetic change over millennia – but also to analyze the ways in which normative genome science, as a technology of colonialism, has attempted to naturalize colonial orders and their epistemes.