Indigenous Opposition to Genetics Research: Views from Aboriginal Australia

Abstract

BEFORE BEGINNING THIS ESSAY, I WISH TO ACKNOWLEDGE the paradoxical nature of the position from which I speak - namely, that of a Western researcher reporting on the reasons for Indigenous opposition to Western research. Of equal importance, I think, is to recognize at the outset that the academy from which I draw status and authority has been (and too often still is) deeply implicated in the subjugation and the silencing of Indigenous peoples. While I cannot shed the cultural identity that gives me right of entry into that academy, I can and do unequivocally reject all areas of academic knowledge production in which colonial ideology continues to find comfort and support. Knowing the importance Indigenous peoples attach to speaking for themselves in their own voices, I have neither the wish nor the pretension to speak on their behalf here or anywhere else. But, as a white sexagenerian academic who has spent a lifetime studying the impact of colonization on the lives, cultures, and environments of colonized peoples, I am concerned by the rhetorical arsenal of denialism, rationalization, and trivialization that, as Ernest Hunter rightly points out, is currently being deployed in white-settler colonies like Australia to decredibilize attacks on their iniquitous colonial pasts.2Unless trials become thinkable for the Australian philosopher Raymond Gaita has argued, cannot claim fully to understand the moral dimensions of our past.3 My own conviction is that until trials become thinkable for us, we have to find other ways of testifying to the crimes against humanity that were committed worldwide during the colonial era. Aboriginal Australians have been doing that successfully in Australia for several decades now, but there are large sections of international opinion that Indigenous voices, regrettably, do not often reach. Academics in Europe, on the other hand, have access to forums from which they can inform a wider public of the criminal acts and lethal contemporary consequences of nineteenth-century colonialism. Not to make use of that privileged position to expose the inhumanity with which colonized peoples have been treated by their colonizers is, in my view, tantamount to complicity in rationalizing and trivializing the harms done.4Indigenous Australians and Genetic ResearchAlthough there has been some acknowledgement in recent years that the prejudices and a-priori assumptions underpinning earlier 'scientific' theories on race were deeply implicated in the cataclysmic damage Indigenous societies sustained during the colonial era, there remains a persistent failure to imagine how that earlier experience of scientific racism might explain the view that Indigenous peoples have of science today. Thus, Indigenous opposition to research - generally represented by its advocates as having positive outcomes for the whole of humanity - frequently meets with incomprehension, not to say exasperation, in the Western world.Mindful of Linda Tuhiwai Smith's assertion that The ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world's colonized peoples,5 mindful also of the many examples of scientific abuse of Aboriginal peoples I have encountered in the course of my own research, I argue that Western incomprehension of Indigenous hostility to prestigious scientific undertakings like the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) and the Genographic is, to say the least, disingenuous. Theorizing that Indigenous attitudes to science generally, and to biomapping in particular, are, for the most part, a direct result of the treatment to which those populations were subjected by men of science in the past, I wanted to test the validity of that hypothesis by talking with Indigenous peoples themselves. It was with the intention of gathering Aboriginal Australian opinion on the subject that I embarked on a study trip to Australia in 2009. …