41. Deutsche Welle, “Anthrax Outbreak Infects Nomads in Siberia,” August 2, 2016, https://www.dw.com/en/anthrax-outbreak-infects-nomads-in-siberia/a-19444460.
42. TallBear, Native American DNA.
43. Hamilton, “Reindeer and Woolly Mammoths.”
44. Nicolas Arning and Daniel J. Wilson, “The Past, Present and Future of Ancient Bacterial DNA,” Microbial Genomics 6, no. 7 (2020): 1–19; Sebastián Duchêne et al., “The Recovery, Interpretation and Use of Ancient Pathogen Genomes,” Current Biology 30, no. 19 (2020): 1215–1231; Venla Oikkonen, “Conceptualizing Histories.”
45. Timofeev et al., “Insights from Bacillus anthracis.”
46. Timofeev et al., “Insights from Bacillus anthracis,” 16.
47. Timofeev et al., “Insights from Bacillus anthracis,” 16.
48. Timofeev et al., “Insights from Bacillus anthracis,” 7.
49. See, for example, Douglas Jordan, Terrence Tumpey, and Barbara Jester, “The Deadliest Flu: The Complete Story of the Discovery and Reconstruction of the 1918 Pandemic Virus,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, January 26, 2023, https://archive.cdc.gov/#/details?q=Deadliest%20flu&start=0&rows=10&url=https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/reconstruction-1918-virus.html.
50. For the history of research on the 1918 pandemic virus and its public reception, see, for example, George Dehner, Influenza: A Century of Science and Public Health Response (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012); Jeffery K. Taubenberger, Johan V. Hultin, and David M. Morens, “Discovery and Characterization of the 1918 Pandemic Influenza Virus in Historical Context,” Antiviral Therapy 12, no. 4 (2007): 581–591; Jordan, Tumpey, and Jester, “Deadliest Flu.”
51. David Brown, “Resurrecting 1918 Flu Virus Took Many Turns,” Washington Post, October 10, 2005, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2005/10/10/resurrecting-1918-flu-virus-took-many-turns/5de7c762-74e1-45ab-9457-a52319decf86; Jocelyn Kaiser, “Resurrecting the ‘Spanish Flu,’ ” Science Magazine, October 5, 2005, https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2005/10/resurrecting-spanish-flu.
52. Jeffery K. Taubenberger et al., “Characterization of the 1918 Influenza Virus Polymerase Genes,” Nature 437, no. 7060 (2005): 889–893.
53. See Carlo Caduff, The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015).
54. Frédéric Keck, “Stockpiling as a Technique of Preparedness: Conserving the Past for an Unpredictable Future,” in Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World, ed. Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 118.
55. For reports of some of the experiments, see Terrence M. Tumpey et al. “Pathogenicity of Influenza Viruses with Genes from the 1918 Pandemic Virus: Functional Roles of Alveolar Macrophages and Neutrophils in Limiting Virus Replication and Mortality in Mice,” Journal of Virology 79, no. 23 (2005): 14933–14944; Claudia Pappas et al., “Single Gene Reassortants Identify a Critical Role for PB1, HA, and NA in the High Virulence of the 1918 Pandemic Influenza Virus,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, no. 8 (2008): 3064–3069.
56. Caduff, Pandemic Perhaps, 104–128.
57. Caduff, Pandemic Perhaps, 104–128.
58. Taubenberger, Hultin, and Morens, “Discovery and Characterization,” 9.
59. Andrew Carroll, “An Alaskan Village Holds the Key to Understanding the 1918 Spanish Flu,” HistoryNet, March 16, 2020, https://www.historynet.com/alaskan-village-holds-key-understanding-1918-spanish-flu.htm.
60. See, for example, Brown, “Resurrecting 1918 Flu Virus,” or Jordan, Tumpey, and Jester, “Deadliest Flu.”
61. Brown, “Resurrecting 1918 Flu Virus.”
62. Radin, Life on Ice; Jenny Reardon, Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); TallBear, Native American DNA.
63. Taubenberger, Hultin, and Morens, “Discovery and Characterization,” 9.
64. Brown, “Resurrecting 1918 Flu Virus”; Carroll, “Alaskan Village Holds the Key.”
65. See, for example, Tumpey et al. “Pathogenicity of Influenza Viruses.”
66. Jordan, Tumpey, and Jester, “Deadliest Flu.”
4 Twisting Strings: Hopi Ancestors and Ancient DNA
Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa and Chip Colwell
Loloma, a Hopi leader of the Bear Clan (Honwungwa) from the Third Mesa village of Orayvi in Arizona who lived a century ago, used to compare the collision of Hopi and European cultures to that of a weaving made from different strands of cotton or wool. Loloma would take one string and say that this represents all the good things of Hopi peoples: a rich and beautiful homeland, a reciprocity system, industriousness, respectfulness, stewardship. Above all, humility. Then, he would take another string and say that this represents all the things of European people: education, technology, science.
Loloma would then twist the two strings together and ask why we can’t see and adopt the good in both. When two strands are brought together as one, they become stronger. If the Hopi people can learn to do this—to bring the wisdom they have gained over millennia to Western ways of doing things—then they would be stronger people, twice as strong.
In this chapter, we consider two strands of knowledge about ancestry and ancestors. We explore Hopi concepts of ancestry and compare these traditions with the ways that paleogenetics constructs and makes definitive claims about Native American ancestry in ancient DNA studies.1 Notably, the paleogenetics framing of ancestry captures only a fraction of Hopi conceptions of ancestry. Given that many Indigenous peoples hold similarly complex and expansive understandings of ancestry, we must seriously consider Loloma’s question of whether these differences can be reconciled. We argue that if the field of paleogenetics is to speak meaningfully about the relations of Indigenous peoples, it needs to be woven much more tightly with Indigenous knowledge. Twisting Western scientific and Indigenous ways of knowing together will require geneticists to make a much stronger commitment to collaboration with descendant communities, to adopt more nuanced understandings of what it means to be related, and to leave behind their “molecular chauvinism”—the tendency to privilege genetic data as more trustworthy and accurate than other forms of knowledge.2 While this may be challenging to achieve, what is at stake here is whether paleogenetics can truly offer the insights it claims, and whether Native peoples come to see paleogenetics as a tool of self-empowerment or a new weapon of colonial science.
The Ancestry Concept in Paleogenetics
Over the last fifteen years, the development of new laboratory techniques and DNA sequencing technologies has stimulated rapid advancements in the field of paleogenetics. Numerous studies have sought to reconstruct and describe the ancestry and population histories of peoples around the world, and aDNA studies have helped elucidate the genetic ancestries of present-day Indigenous groups and their ancestors in the Americas. While some scientists have celebrated paleogenetics as having the power to resolve questions about Indigenous ancestries and relations, it is critical to consider what kinds of ancestries and relations paleogenomic studies actually speak to, and what they do not.3
As a science based on the study of genetic material, paleogenetics provides insights only into genetic ancestries and biological relations. Researchers can trace a person’s direct maternal ancestors and matrilineal relationships by sequencing and analyzing the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA, and they can also assess the direct paternal ancestry and patrilineal relationships of anyone with a Y-chromosome (typically males). These methods of analysis can therefore shed light on the mother’s mother’s mother’s … line and father’s father’s father’s … line, respectively, but not on any other ancestral relationships. Nor do they tell us the exact degree of relatedness between two people: two individuals might share a specific mitochondrial DNA sequence and thus a matrilineal ancestor, but this analysis cannot say if that shared ancestor lived one or many generations ago.
Paleogeneticists can gain a broader picture of genetic ancestry and relatedness by analyzing variation in nuclear DNA, which is inherited from both parents, and assessing the extent of similarity or difference with other individuals. These analyses can detect the contributions from more ancestors, not just the direct maternal and direct paternal lines. They are capable of determining the degree of biological relatedness for very closely related individuals—they can, for example, identify a parent and child, or first cousins—based on the percentage of the nuclear genome that is shared between the two individuals and as long as a substantial amount of the genome can be sequenced. However, this degree of specificity breaks down with more distant relationships; in those cases, researchers can say only that an individual is more or less genetically similar to another individual or group of people.
Furthermore, it should be noted that even this single line of investigation in paleogenetics—tracing genetic relatedness—can be complicated and fraught with problems. Like genomics more generally, paleogenetics relies on comparisons with preexisting reference data (i.e., genomic data already collected from other populations) to infer and characterize the ancestry of newly studied individuals or communities. In other words, assessing the ancestry of these individuals or communities involves comparing their DNA to DNA from those who have been previously sampled, and evaluating which of the previously studied individuals or groups are most genetically similar. Researchers then infer that the newly studied individual or community belongs to, or shares ancestry with, the people(s) who are most genetically similar. Ancestry inferences therefore depend entirely on whose DNA happens to be in the comparative reference dataset. Descriptions and understandings of genetic ancestry can change when different reference groups are included in the comparison.4 Because many communities are not represented in existing genetic databases, inferring genetic ancestry and relatedness must be understood as a relational science based on incomplete datasets.
It should also be noted, as cultural geographer Catherine Nash has pointed out, that genomic science is situated within broader social contexts.5 Thus, even as genetic inferences are derived from biological evidence, they are made and interpreted within the powerful social frames of gender, nation, ethnicity, and race. These frames influence how individuals are grouped for comparative analysis and how those groups are named, which in turn influences our understanding of genetic ancestry and biological relatedness. For example, if individuals living in Paris and Berlin are to be included in a reference database for comparative genetic analyses, should they be grouped together and identified as “Europeans” or treated as separate populations? If the latter, should they be considered representative of the French and German peoples and named accordingly, or representative only of more local populations (e.g., north-central France and the North German Plain, or even just Paris and Berlin)? And if people who lived in these locations 5,000 years ago are also being included in the analysis, should they too be named according to present-day geopolitical boundaries or to the continental/racial categories that are deemed meaningful today? Should they be grouped together with the present-day inhabitants of these regions or considered separate populations by virtue of the temporal divide? These decisions will determine how genetic variation in Europe is categorized and represented in the analysis and thus how the genetic ancestry of any newly studied individual is identified and named if they share variants with any of these individuals or reference populations.
Furthermore, as Nash has argued, it is important to recognize that results from genetic tests and genetic studies don’t merely reflect historical kinship ties, they also generate genetic kinships as people reimagine themselves as related through their DNA.6 Kim TallBear, the scholar in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Society at the University of Alberta, has warned that this is a particular risk of genomic research for Native Americans, since technologies that claim to offer merely a biological map in fact have the power to rearrange and dictate social relationships in ways that may threaten tribal sovereignty. Claims of identity, belonging, and relatedness can all be altered and reconceptualized as a result of DNA testing.7
The science of genetic ancestry must therefore be understood not simply as an investigation of biological relatedness and how molecules are passed down from one generation to the next but as an endeavor that lies at the intersection of nature and culture, as it both shapes and is shaped by the social worlds in which we live.8 Indeed, it would be misguided to suggest that paleogenetics merely purports to explain biological relationships, when nearly all aDNA research on the human past is driven by larger questions of human migration, kinship, interaction, health, and more—all of which are necessarily cultural and historical questions. This is why paleogeneticists often collaborate with archaeologists, historians, and other scholars in the social and human sciences (even though they rarely choose to include Indigenous peoples in their circle of collaborators).
In the context of aDNA studies, it seems clear that paleogenetics can reveal much about the genetic composition, biological histories, and genetic relations of past populations. However, we must be cognizant that there is often an overreliance on the “truths” that emerge from this biology-based research, without sufficient consideration being given to the many relevant sociocultural contexts that influence our inferences about genetic ancestry and how we apply and make use of those inferences. We must also keep in mind that paleogenetic inferences are limited to genetic ancestry—which, as we will see below, is significant when we consider Hopi ancestors. The Hopi trace their ancestry through both biological and social relations, as well as through experiences and interactions with nonhumans and places.
Hopi Ancestor Concepts
To understand Hopi culture and Hopi conceptions of ancestry, it is important to recognize that Hopi culture emerged gradually over thousands of years across the southwest of the United States, a vast region that the Hopi consider their historic homeland. About 1100 AD, different groups of ancient people began to converge on the Hopi Mesas in northeastern Arizona. For centuries, the Hopi people lived in adobe and stone village apartments, thriving as desert farmers. After US colonization, millions of acres were taken from the Hopi and given to the Navajo Nation and surrounding non-Native communities. Today, the Hopi Reservation lies in present-day northeastern Arizona and is home to nearly 15,000 tribal members. The Hopi Tribe is sovereign and federally recognized, composed of twelve villages on three distinct mesas (First Mesa, Second Mesa, and Third Mesa).
Hopi conceptions of ancestry include both social and biological components. Everything that came before an individual—all that was involved in the migration and survival of Hopi ancestors—factors into what it means to be Hopi. In other words, ancestry is not confined just to human relatives, but includes plants, animals, and landscapes. It can be traced through oral histories, places, and objects.
For paleogenetics to be better informed by Hopi knowledge and ancestry concepts, researchers must keep three key issues in mind: biology, material culture, and Hopi philosophy. Biology involves descent traced through matrilineal clan membership; here, paleogenetics can align. Material culture is understood through created items that people use to identify who they are; here, archaeology can align. Left out too often in the academic study of Hopi history, though, is the incorporation of Hopi philosophy about ancestors and ancestry.9 Critically, for many Hopi people, their connections to the past go far beyond their genes or things, to incorporate the land itself, the world of spirits, and the practices that maintain ancestral connections.
Biology: Hopi Clans
Like geneticists, Hopis rely on biological connections in enacting ancestry and relations. Clan membership, which is necessary for knowing one’s ancestry, is passed down matrilineally—meaning traced through the female line. While Hopi people recognize relations from both one’s mother and father, matrilineal relations define clan membership. Blood relations can help trace ancestry, but those that come from the mother define Hopi social obligations, such as a person’s roles in religious ceremonies. Thus, Hopi concepts in a way parallel how paleogeneticists trace biological descent through the mother’s line (using maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA), father’s line (using paternally inherited Y-chromosome DNA), and both parents (using biparentally inherited autosomal DNA). In particular, tracing biological descent through mitochondrial DNA parallels how the Hopi trace descent through matrilineal clans. While Hopi recognize the role of genetics, even if not always defined as such, not all biological relationships are equal.
Clans are groups of people who trace descent from a common original ancestor. Each Hopi clan has a wuuya, a totem or symbol derived from animals, plant, beings, or objects that played a significant role in the clan’s founding. These totems emerged on each group’s unique journey to Tuuwanasavi, the Earth Center of the Hopi Mesas, over thousands of years.10 Clans are related and grouped in different ways, with some originating in the north (Motisinom) and some in the south (Nùutungkwisinom).11 About nine hundred years ago, these clans began to coalesce on the Hopi Mesas. Each clan arrived at the Hopi Mesas bringing with it ritual knowledge or other benefits to contribute to the conglomeration of people that became the Hopisinom, the Hopi people.
It is important to distinguish this history from mere “myth,” such as in Norse folklore, which may be seen as cosmological. While Hopi oral tradition definitively includes cosmological dimensions, it purports to track real events, including the movement of people across the landscape, ancestral villages and cultural landscapes, and kin relations.12 Although some skeptics limited to Western Enlightenment philosophy and settler logics might insist that “real” history can be known only if it is written—a position that leads to the conclusion that Hopi history cannot have existed before the word “Hopi” was used by a Spanish colonial stenographer—such a viewpoint ignores the expansive research that demonstrates the truth value of traditional knowledge in general and Hopi traditional knowledge in particular.13 Scientists gain little by assuming false dichotomies between myth/history and oral/written histories when seeking to illuminate the past and pathways of Indigenous peoples.14
Today, there are thirty-four clans among the Hopi people. A clan is a relatively fixed, matrilineal category. Although the Hopi people know both their biological parents’ clans, it is the mother’s clan that is the most significant. Hence, even if a child has a biological mother who is Hopi and a biological father who is not Hopi, the child is Hopi because they are part of a clan that is traced through their mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and on. Conversely, a child whose biological father is Hopi and whose biological mother is non-Hopi is traditionally not recognized as Hopi, due to the strict matrilineal and clan responsibilities to the ceremonial calendar. A child with this lineage does not have or can never hold responsibilities of the clanship and the ceremonies that the clan holds to the overall village.
A Hopi person’s clan membership defines many social roles and religious responsibilities in his or her life. Clans do not merely care for particular sacred objects, they also control particular areas for farming and traditional activities like gathering eagles.15 One’s clan is one’s family. A mother’s brother (a matrilineal uncle) can therefore be as important a figure in a child’s life as their biological father. Clan membership brings with it a web of relations to people, places, and things, which serves as the rules and privileges of Hopi clans. While clan membership is highly important, Hopi identity and responsibilities are shaped by one’s village, mesa, and broader membership to the Hopi Tribe.16
