“Many present-day health disparities can be traced back through epigenetics to a “colonial health deficit,” the result of colonization and its aftermath,” comments Bonnie Duran, Director for Indigenous Health Research at the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute at the University of Washington. For a growing number of Indigenous and non-indigenous scholars, epigenetics provides a biological explanation for inherited effects of colonial trauma, stretching back to the first impacts of colonization on Indigenous peoples. We see this disconnect between the perception and the reality of the science in a field where Indigenous knowledge perhaps most powerfully intersects with epigenetics: transgenerational trauma. But it doesn’t mean that applying epigenetics to Indigenous health and social issues will necessarily lead to good science or good policy. The perceived affinity between epigenetics and Indigenous knowledge is a welcome change from the mistrust and antagonism that has often featured in engagements between science and Indigenous peoples. By contrast, epigenetics seems a perfect fit.Īs Justin Mohamed, Chairman of the Australian National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation, said at the aforementioned launch, “in many ways the science backs up what’s long been known.” In a similar vein, Red Cliff Tribe of Wisconsin Ojibwe member Mary Annette Pember writes, “Folks in Indian country wonder what took science so long to catch up with traditional Native knowledge.” Within Indigenous scholarship, Isaac Warbrick and colleagues explicitly argue that epigenetics is aligned with a non-western, Maori epistemology of health. Although Hudson and colleagues have argued that genetics aligns with Indigenous knowledge, it is far more common to see genetics in opposition to Indigenous knowledge. Most prominently, epigenetics is seen to align with Indigenous world views. There are also some unique features of what we might call ‘Indigenous epigenetic hype’. The appeal of epigenetics in Indigenous circles is partly a reflection of general epigenetic hype within science and the media. Indigenous scholars, writers and leaders from Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Canada have expressed enthusiasm for epigenetics as a biological mechanism that explains, as a report on Indigenous health by the Australian Medical Association put it in 2013, both the effects of early life on disease risk and “inter-generational Indigenous disadvantage.” Compared with the fear of genetics, the embrace of epigenetics is remarkable. In the last few years, epigenetics has struck a chord within Indigenous scholarship and Indigenous media. Historically, it can be linked to earlier beliefs that the environment shapes the body and that these effects are inherited (called ‘soft inheritance’ in contrast to the ‘hard inheritance’ of Mendelian genetics (Meloni 2016). Epigenetics has been hailed as demolishing the boundaries between ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’, showing that genes are not necessarily our destiny. In animal models, these effects have been shown to be inherited through the generations, although this has not yet been proven in humans. Environmental influences in the womb, in early childhood and throughout life have effects on gene expression that can cause or prevent disease. Epigenetics describes changes to the genome that effect gene expression and regulation without changing the order of the base pairs – A’s, T’s, C’s and G’s – that make up the gene sequence. Genetics is often seen as deterministic and victim-blaming, diverting attention and resources from social and political causes of ill-health, reinforcing ideologies of Indigenous inferiority within Western science, facilitating the theft of genetic biological resources and knowledge, and as the source of inflated, unjustified hype that offers little or no benefit to Indigenous people (TallBear 2013).Īdding the prefix ‘epi’, however, makes a big difference. The U.S.-based NGO Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism was formed in response.Īlthough genetics has transformed in the ‘post-genomic’ age (a term used for the period after the human genome was sequenced), its reputation among Indigenous peoples continues to be strained. National Institutes of Health attempted to patent a virus found in the blood of a Papua New Guinean man, and the Human Genome Diversity Project attempted to collect DNA samples from indigenous peoples, who they called ‘Isolates of Historical Interest’, from around the world (Reardon 2005). Awareness of genetics as a potentially harmful science spread through Indigenous organisations in the mid 1990s after the U.S. For the last two decades, Indigenous peoples have consistently resisted genetics on local, national and international scales.
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