It is also important to note that the Hopi people conceive of ancestry in far more radical ways, departing altogether from biological relatedness and material culture. For some Hopi, it is difficult to explain what the English word “ancestor” means, because for them it can mean everything. It can include the rock at your foot and as far as you can see on the horizon—the most distant trees. Hopis pray to everything. To clouds, animals, plants, insects. All of these are ancestors who have taken these physical forms to check on the Hopi people. When visiting ancestral places, Hopi traditionalists are keyed into the sudden gust of wind or the appearance of a rattlesnake.20 These are not chance events but the immediate and purposeful presence of the ancestors.
How can an animal such an eagle be a relative? There is no term in English that reflects Hopi traditional belief about the transformation that takes place when a Hopi person completes their life on earth. In English, we often say someone “passes away,” which implies that their being has ceased to exist or, in certain faiths, that their soul travels to another realm that can be experienced only in death. For Hopis, when someone passes, that is not the end. Their breath, spirit, and soul are still alive. And once a person enters that state, Hopis believe the breath can be transformed, to be connected both to the afterlife and to the life we live here on earth. For example, an ancestor’s soul or breath can change into a snake or eagle, or even a plant. So when Hopis approach an ancestral site and see a snake or eagle, they might say, “Oh! That’s our ancestor!” because of their ancestor’s ability to change to an animal or a plant. That is why Hopis say ancestral sites are not abandoned—souls of ancestors still inhabit the place. To humans, such a place may look run down—often described as “ruins”—but the breath sees the place at its height. It sees people still there, living and cooking and doing everything people do. The eagle is the way the breath of ancestors can be known to us still in this domain. The living animal and the ancient place are the connection between our world and the spiritual world inhabited by ancestors. Hopis consider it a gift from the ancestors when they reveal themselves in these ways.
To think of ancestors for Hopi people is to think of the unseen hardships they endured to ensure their children’s survival. They gave the Hopi people the tools to protect what little they have left in today’s world. Traditional Hopi today are combating smartphones and job security and foreign religions with a gourd of water, seeds, and planting sticks. Given this struggle for cultural survival, it is amazing to many traditionalists that the Hopi people are still able to hold onto the ceremonies inherited from their ancestors. For Hopis, these social changes amid the persistence of culture are directly related to ancestry because Hopis see themselves today in relation to where they have been. Hopi traditionalists are often pivoting between questions of how to live today and how their ancestors choose to live in the past. They see themselves as inheritors of a beautiful legacy, which requires them to see their lives in the context of their ancestors’ desires, the work their ancestors did to ensure that Hopi culture can survive.
Hopi people are always trying to appease their ancestors through good deeds. Ancestors are always present, always watching. They witness Hopi communal activities, such as ceremonies, watching to ensure that everything is done right. The Hopi people invite ancestors to come with their spiritual force, taking the form of rain and other blessings. The Hopi people are still committed to the covenant between the northern and southern clans, the agreement to cohabitate. Thus, when Hopis conduct religious ceremonies, so many of which pivot around this covenant, they are living the promises their ancestors made. These ceremonies are a key means for Hopis to link themselves to the people who created this path forward; they are reaffirming constantly their ancestry relationships, which although they are given through clan membership must constantly be affirmed through their actions (such as farming and ceremonies).
This philosophy and understanding of ancestry extend far beyond the data that can be derived from DNA. Yet, if Hopi perspectives are to be brought into conversation with paleogenetics, they are relevant. Currently, however, paleogenomic analysis is rarely able to contend with such an expansive concept of ancestry. Although Hopis may see an eagle or snake as a clan relative, this is not a genetic claim, but a spiritual and metaphysical one. “Ancestry” in Hopi culture is thereby not a simple matter of genealogy or identifying a group of distinct artifacts. It involves the profound sacrifices of generations of people who are still present.
The Hopi concept of ancestry thus differs radically from the concept as it is conceived in the English-language definition. In the sense of Euro-American Enlightenment philosophy, ancestors are those who came before—those who are past. But for Hopis, ancestors both gave birth to those who followed and continue to be a part of their lives today. For the Hopi people, ancestors are alive.
The Risks of Ancient DNA
As we have shown, ancestry concepts in paleogenetics and Hopi tradition are often distinct, but at times they overlap. Inspired by Loloma’s description of two worlds coming together, we therefore want to ask whether Hopis may see paleogenetics as a tool of self-empowerment or a new weapon of colonial science. The point here is to explore whether, with these varying concepts of ancestry, settler paleogenetics and Hopi culture hold irreconcilable viewpoints or whether there is an opportunity still for connections to be made. This exploration is necessary, as the Hopi Tribe has made clear that it is not antiscience. Rather, it wants scientific work—including genetics—to be done, but in a way that is respectful and does not replicate past harms. Many geneticists are also interested in working with Indigenous peoples—including Hopis—but may be uncertain how to bring together different worldviews and values. Understanding these different conceptions of ancestors is critical if researchers and Indigenous people are to braid Indigenous culture and paleogenetics together in a way that is meaningful and useful.
In recent years, some researchers have come to the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office—the tribe’s central office related to cultural matters—to propose collaborative aDNA projects. When the advisory committee of tribal elders—the Hopi cultural resources advisory task team, a representative group of Hopi elders and experts who advise the tribal government on cultural matters—evaluated these proposals, it tended to be split about 50/50, though in some cases it allowed projects to go forward. For example, the committee recently issued a permit to a PhD student to study coprolites. People are interested in knowing more about what their ancestors ate, what their health was like, and whether lifespans have changed through the years.
However, one project that proposed studying DNA drawn from women’s menstrual aprons was intensely debated. Some were interested to know what could be learned, but other members of the task team thought such a study would go against tradition and worried that any diseases in the aprons might resurface if studied. Also, given the history of scientists using genetic data for their own purposes, there was a strong mistrust of what might happen with that information. Could it be used somehow to harm Hopi people or question Hopi land claims? Could any information that challenges Hopi traditional history trickle up to the US government and be used to fight Hopi histories about being the first tribes in their homeland?
As noted above, the Hopi people are not antiscience. Rather, they are realistic about how science can be used to violate the rights and dignity of Native Americans. Hence, they are often struggling to balance a genuine interest in preserving and understanding their heritage while protecting their small reservation, modest political capital, and precarious way of life.
Since at least the late nineteenth century, Hopi leaders have faced constant encroachment on their homeland and a loss of control over their heritage sites. This encroachment does not impact only the general sense of wellbeing and concrete practices, such as the ability to gather plants, minerals, and animals needed for ceremonies, but also access to shrines that are located outside the Hopi reservation. The Hopi Tribe is small with minimal resources, and the surrounding American society is constantly looking to extract resources from the land. While the encroachment has often been led by Euro-American colonizers and settlers, conflicts with other tribes also pose challenges for the Hopis’ ancestral claims. When other tribes claim ancestry—and thus rights—to particular ancient people, such as those at Chaco Canyon,21 it becomes an existential crisis for the Hopi people. As a result, Hopis are put in the position of having to not only carefully manage their ancestral claims to people and sites, but also to concern themselves with the possible encroachments of the ancestral claims of other Indigenous groups.
This situation is metaphorically embodied in a Third Mesa rattle. This instrument is made from a hollowed gourd, with its large head painted. In the center is a green migration symbol with white clouds around it. Red color engulfs these symbols. The migration symbol represents the ancestral migration and the settling of the Earth Center. The clouds are the ancestors protecting this place. The red is all the dangerous ideas, harmful projects, and chaos that the US government has caused. The homeland is surrounded by turmoil, with the “footprints” of Hopi history constantly under threat. With each development project, with each ancestral archaeological site that is destroyed, Hopis lose a part of the track that they use to trace and affirm their clan ancestry—the evidence that the Hopi ancestors were the first people to dwell in this place. With each erased footprint, Euro-American colonizers and settlers come closer to their goal of assimilating the Hopi people and supplanting Hopi ideas with European ones.
While geneticists in a lab in Cambridge (Massachusetts or England) may feel that these issues are unrelated and distant to their work, for the Hopi there is an intimate connection. The goal for Hopi traditionalists is to cohabit with the natural environment and their ancestors who have passed on and come back in the form of rain, animals, insects, and wind. If paleogenetics operates as an extractive industry, it threatens to create disorder and risks erasing ancestral footprints more than restoring them.
From a Hopi perspective, science is too often all data and numbers. It is not human. It does not address or capture how real people—the Hopi people and their ancestors—interact to build intricate relations across time and space. Without a more relations-oriented science, paleogeneticists are just extracting DNA. Indeed, most genetic and archaeological work on Hopi ancestors has been conducted without Hopi participation or input and published in academic journals and books that are not accessible to nonacademics, including most members of the Hopi Tribe. More collaboration and engagement are clearly needed. If paleogeneticists wish to avoid perpetuating harm to Indigenous communities and produce science that reflects the realities of those who have a stake in their work, they must first recognize the damage of failing to include descendant communities and their ancestry concepts in this work. Like Loloma, scientists interested in Hopi ancestry would do well to twist the two strands of Hopi culture and settler science together.
Many Hopi people ask: “Why destroy ancestors’ bones to extract DNA?” or: “What is the benefit to the Hopi people?” Currently, many aDNA studies are little more than a new form of describing cultural history—tracking migrations, mapping how populations interacted or not, constructing regional population profiles. For a tribe like the Hopi, who know their migration history—indeed whose migration history is at the center of their lived identities—there is perhaps little that genomics can add regarding those topics. If geneticists and archaeologists proceed with aDNA research simply because they want answers to their questions without regard for what Hopi already know, they engage in a form of biocolonialism in which Native biological heritage is extracted for the researchers’ own benefit (e.g., grants, tenure, high-profile publications in Nature and Science). Such work is not about seeking benefits for the Hopi people from their own history but an externally imposed science for the benefit of non-Hopi people.
Some Hopi are also skeptical of what paleogenetics may suggest regarding the relationships between ancient people and people today, especially since Hopis have long been shaped by marriages and other interactions with people from other tribes and, later, Europeans. Navajos, Utes, and Apaches were infamous among Hopis as raiders, stealing Pueblo women for many centuries. Spanish, Mexican, and American soldiers often took women, too. Because of this history, there is, sadly, a tension in Hopi villages about the degree to which these non-Hopi genetic influences are present. Some are concerned that genetic research that identifies individuals with non-Hopi ancestors could be stigmatizing. These Hopi suggest that if scientists want to trace Hopi ancestors, they would do better to focus on communal systems and material culture, which may have clearer continuities.
To date, Hopis have largely seen genetics cause only harm to Native communities. They can point to a number of controversies, such as the Havasupai battle over misused blood samples—an example of the exploitation of Native genomes for medical research.22 US museums and federal agencies still hold the remains of more than 100,000 Native American ancestors, including massacre victims and many others taken without the consent of descendant communities.23 There is also the twenty-year battle over the Ancient One, in which archaeologists fought tooth and nail over—and conducted an extensive research project on—the remains of a 9,300-year-old man.24 “They’re going to use our blood” is a thought and fear echoing in many Hopi heads. It is therefore often thought safest to refuse proposed scientific projects.
In the metaphor of the rattle, paleogenetics lies, for now, mostly within the red. DNA cannot illuminate Hopi ancestry and history as much as paleogeneticists hope it will.
Conclusion
Paleogenetics has positioned itself as a powerful apparatus for elucidating and characterizing the ancestry of Indigenous peoples like the Hopi. However, the disconnects between settler scientific and Indigenous concepts of ancestry are often substantial. For example, where paleogeneticists think solely about genetic relationships and characterize ancestry and descent in strictly biological terms, the Hopi trace ancestry through both social and biological relations—with matrilineal relationships mattering most—as well as through their experiences and interactions with plants, animals, and landscapes. As we have shown, the Hopi concept of ancestry encompasses much more than genealogy, and ancestors are not simply those who lived in the past.
Many Indigenous peoples hold similar expansive views of ancestry, and have quite extensive knowledge of their ancestors. Such knowledge does not rely on paleogenetics. In many cases, paleogenomic research has only “confirmed” what Indigenous peoples already knew. For example, in several cases across the United States and Canada, where aDNA research has served to support the repatriation of ancestors and to advance tribal recognition by establishing genetic links between descendant communities and the ancestors, the concerned tribes had already known these links before any genetic testing.25 In such cases, aDNA research simply upholds already known relations. It is perhaps telling that while paleogenetics has proved critical to the successful repatriation of ancestors, it is because DNA has played an important role in convincing outsiders of an ancestor-descendant relationship. For the Indigenous communities themselves, however, aDNA has not provided any new information about their ancestry. In one recent case where geneticists revealed a matrilineal linage between individuals buried at Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, this knowledge was already held by the Hopi Tribe, who, as noted above, maintain an ancestral connection with Chaco Canyon.26 The authors of the paper themselves cited ethnographic evidence of matrilineal descent, demonstrating that tribes held knowledge prior to the study. This provides yet further evidence that ancestry knowledge produced by paleogenetics is often redundant.
The current landscape of paleogenetics is one in which many researchers do not engage in any significant way with descendant communities and their ways of knowing ancestry. This lack of engagement has hindered paleogenomic studies to offer meaningful contributions in the eyes of Indigenous people. If scientists are to provide more valuable insights about Indigenous ancestry and ancestors, they must be better informed by the concepts of ancestry and knowledge of ancestors held by Indigenous peoples in the area being studied. More broadly, for aDNA studies to accurately describe and interpret the relations of Indigenous peoples, researchers in the field need to make a much more serious commitment to collaboration with Indigenous communities and to building a much more nuanced understanding of what it means to be related. Given that paleogenetics is a historical science and cares deeply about history and the lived past experiences of people, it should seriously seek ways to consider the full range of historical experience rather than reduce history merely to biology.
A call for collaboration between scientists and Indigenous communities is one possible way forward for paleogenetics, especially when descendant communities desire a collaborative project. But we must also confront the reality that many paleogeneticists are not trained in anthropology, know little to nothing of Indigenous cultures or political rights, and may in fact care little about the Indigenous peoples they study. As one reviewer of this chapter made plain: to some, Indigenous peoples are little more than fascinating pieces of a biological puzzle they are trying to put together. When scholars are so indifferent or even antagonistic to Native worldviews and traditions, these perspectives will be irreconcilable. Such scientists should not study Native American history or culture.
Additionally, there may be cases in which paleogenomic research is unnecessary and in fact detrimental to Indigenous sovereignties. When undertaking a study, paleogeneticists must ask themselves if their projects concerning Indigenous ancestors have any meaningful input and direction for descendant communities. If not, paleogenetics runs the risk of undermining Indigenous peoples’ self-determination and ability to make definitive claims about their ancestors, especially when settler science continues to occupy the authoritative role in knowledge production. In such cases, collaboration is not enough; it would not even be genuinely possible.
When Loloma spoke of the metaphor of twisted strings, he was trying to convince his council to accept all the good things of Hopi ways as well as the new intrusions of technology and Euro-American ways of thinking. Importantly, he hoped that his people could put together these different ways into one, for the benefit of the Hopi people, so they could move forward. He was likely referencing introduced foods like peaches and possibly new farming techniques like the plow. Loloma was a visionary who thought that if Hopi children learned the ways of Euro-Americans, they could be the tribe’s eyes and voice and not being duped by the invaders. Loloma and other Hopi leaders of the time knew the military might of the US government. They knew they were surrounded and outnumbered. They knew about the massacres and other violence wrecked upon Native peoples. Loloma was trying to lessen these threats by accepting the good that was brought to the Hopi, to embrace new ideas to see if they worked. If they did, the Hopi people would be twice as strong.
Loloma’s wisdom speaks to two key conditions that guide decisions about the tribe’s willingness to work in collaboration with scientists such as paleogeneticists. The first is that Hopis are willing to collaborate, but only if there are benefits to their community. When scientists are out for only their own interests, there is no basis for collaboration. Hopis feel that such work should not be done at all on their ancestors. Hopi cultural advisers repeatedly emphasize that they are not willing to allow their ancestors to serve as some geneticist’s sample or as the playthings of scientists who know little or care little about Hopi people. There has already been enough damage done to Hopi ancestors in the name of science. Work can proceed on their ancestors only on the basis of genuine mutual respect and benefit sharing.
The second condition is related to the fact that Loloma understood the gulf of power that existed between his small tribe and the surrounding Euro-American culture. He perceived that he could not stop the invaders, just as Hopis today know they have no true legal or other means to stop the most powerful genetics labs and museums in the world. Their only option for survival is to find ways to partner with those who are willing to be sincere friends, and publicly object to the work of those who are not.
What Loloma knew was that the strings of knowledge can be twisted together, but they can also be pulled apart. It remains to be seen how well the strands of Indigenous knowledge and paleogenetics can be twisted together.
Notes
1. In this chapter, we use “paleogenetics” or “paleogenomics” to describe the disciplinary field of ancient DNA (aDNA) studies.
2. K. Ann Horsburgh, “Molecular Anthropology: The Judicial Use of Genetic Data in Archaeology,” Journal of Archaeological Science 56 (2015): 141–145.
3. David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
4. Kim TallBear, “Genomic Articulations of Indigeneity,” Social Studies of Science 43, no. 4 (2013): 509–533.
5. Catherine Nash, “Genetic Kinship,” Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (2004): 1–33.
6. Catherine Nash, Genetic Geographies: The Trouble with Ancestry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
7. Kim TallBear, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
8. Marianne Sommer, History Within: The Science, Culture, and Politics of Bones, Organisms, and Molecules (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
9. Leigh J. Kuwanwisiwma, T. J. Ferguson, and Chip Colwell, eds., Footprints of Hopi History: Hopihiniwtiput Kukveni’at (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018).
10. Tuuwanasavi is a cosmological concept that situates the Hopi Mesas as the center of the world and universe.
