Genealogies, Genomes, and Histories in the Pacific: Genetic Drift (Palgrave Studies in Pacific History) 3031454480, 9783031454486

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN PACIFIC HISTORY

Genealogies, Genomes, and Histories in the Pacific Genetic Drift Matt K. Matsuda

Palgrave Studies in Pacific History

Series Editors Matt Matsuda, Department of History, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA Bronwen Douglas, College of Arts & Social Sciences, Australian National University College of Arts & Social Sciences, Acton, ACT, Australia

Palgrave Studies in Pacific History emphasizes the importance of histories of connection and interaction, with titles underscoring local cases with transnational reach. In dialogue with studies of the Pacific Rim focused on North American and East Asian relations, the series invites a rethinking of a Pacific globalized over many centuries through transregional encounters, networks, and exchanges. This “Oceanic” approach engages the Pacific Islands, Australia, maritime Southeast Asia, western Latin America, and parts of the Indian Ocean.

Matt K. Matsuda

Genealogies, Genomes, and Histories in the Pacific Genetic Drift

Matt K. Matsuda Department of History Rutgers University New Brunswick, NJ, USA

ISSN 2947-924X ISSN 2947-9258 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Pacific History ISBN 978-3-031-45448-6 ISBN 978-3-031-45449-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45449-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Te Papa Museum in Wellington, New Zealand This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgments

A work like this has come into being with its own genealogies—relations, networks, and traces of connections down through generations and across oceans and experiences. My great regards first for those whose journeys I was fortunate to cross—and who have departed, among them Teresia Teaiwa, Tracey Banivanua Mar, Brij Lal, and Epeli Hau‘ofa for the worlds, art, commitments, and scholarship they made possible as personal chronicles. Their legacies are everywhere evident here. This work properly began through generous invitations by Warwick Anderson and Miranda Johnson to discuss Pacific Futures: Past and Present in Dunedin and then Southern Oceanic Topologies and Genealogies: Genetic Explorations of the Pacific and Australasia in Sydney, the latter organized by Warwick Anderson, Emma Kowal, and Joanna Radin. For keeping me connected to the vast and inspiring range of Pacific histories, I continue to be obliged to the indefatigable energy and vision of Paul D’Arcy, and to my colleagues Jane Samson, Anne Hattori, and Ryan Tucker Jones. The work at hand would have been impossible without conversations and exchanges with those who have mapped these worlds through their own work and across their own lives. I am in particular deeply indebted to N¯alani Wilson-Hokowhitu for her generosity, mo‘o k¯ u‘auhau knowledge, and voyaging experience; Lisa Matisoo-Smith for insights on the complexities of scientific trust-building and biological anthropology; Alice Te Punga Somerville for her literary entwinements with genealogies of

v

vi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

the future; Emma Kowal for her critical insights, and inspiring community and scholarly work reconceptualizing history and genetics; Keolu Fox for his energy relating his encyclopedic connections between genomics, politics, and personal commitments; Maui Hudson for his global perspectives protecting and advancing Indigenous institutional knowledge; Philip Wilcox for sharing his many materials and deep commitment to M¯aori whakapapa learning and genetic understanding; Aroha Te Pareake Mead for providing historic foundations for this kind of scholarship with her incisive observations and long vision. A work like this is, in so many ways, a weaving of the questions, expressions, materials, and experiences of the actors who have built the multiple domains of knowledge I draw from. These include colleagues and learning by way of thoughts and exchanges about genealogies, narratives, and mobile lives from K¯ehaualani Kauanui and David Chang, Lea Lani Kinikini Kauvaka, and the creative commitments of Maile Arvin. I’ve learned much from sharing insights with Susan Lindee, Joan Fujimura, Keith Wailoo, Susan Najita, Tony Ballantyne, Emily Marker, Sebastián Gil-Riaño, Soraya de Chaderevian, Ricardo Roque, Christine Manganaro, Shino Konishi, Ricardo Ventura Santos, Chris Ballard, Angela Wanhalla, Nicola Van Dijk, Christine Winter, Simon Easteal, Judy Bennett, Vicki Luker, and Projit Mukharji. Many thanks to Thomas Schwarz, Junko Takamiya, Yukio Toyoda, Jamie Dunk, Ian Conrich and the New Zealand Studies Association, and Benedict Ipgrave and his Anti-Eugenics Project, especially the dozens of participants and many more contributors to the Eugenic Legacies Across the Pacific symposium, from scholarship, activism, and the arts. Regards to my colleagues at Rutgers University, including Catherine Bliss, Johanna Schoen, Jack Bouchard. Gratitude to Elaine LaFay, Melissa Feinberg, Paul Hanebrink, Jochen Hellbeck, Seth Koven, Barbara Cooper, Norman Markowitz, Chie Ikeya, Paola Tartakoff, Jennifer Jones, and Paul Clemens, who listened, commented, and encouraged. My thanks also to publishers and artists for allowing me to draw on parts of my own previously released work, and for granting permission to engage writings and images that are featured here directly. A special note to Sam Elworthy for his many efforts, including lines from Robert Sullivan and the generous communications with Albert Wendt and Reina Whaitiri for allowing me to draw on classic works. I am very obliged also to Karlo Mila, William Nu‘utupu Giles, and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner for

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

vii

their words and meanings. Thanks to Bronwen Douglass for her tireless support and sharp scholarly views on historical research and writing, Lynnie Sharon for the patience and production, Glenys Daley for her eye for language and history, Belinda Nemec for the order of things, and Sam Stocker, for accepting and forwarding the work through publishing at Palgrave Macmillan. My appreciation also to Preetha Kuttiappan and Carly Silver. Thanks, of course, to my students, and for everything we have learned together. One early reader also asked if my own genealogy might be more present in the work. I do not make the same historic, cultural, linguistic, or personal claims of the actors and scholars who populate these recountings with their experiences of indigeneity and politics, knowledge, and historical decolonization. They are fashioning new histories and futures with their own commitments. For a work which circulates through questions of both Indigenous knowledge and scientific practice, I am something of an outsider to both, looking through a historical portal. In some cases, reaching out, I have been invited to learn more, and am deeply appreciative. In others, I have kept my place, drawing on the actors’ own work and lived chronicles. I have tried to do them justice. In this case, the speakers and their words and voices are very much upfront, and the commentary is woven around them. Here, especially, it matters who is speaking. As for myself, the currents that cross for me are also remembered lines through family, history, and ocean, acknowledging the time and place meanings of growing up between California and Hawai‘i, with parents from Lahaina, Maui and Honoka‘a, Big Island, relatives and growing familial bloodlines from across Oceania and Asia, and ancestry linking back to Japan and across the Pacific.1 They tell the stories that I have inherited, the dead and the living, constantly speaking. This is for my mother, Michiko, who remembers some it, and keeps all of it in the life she has lived, a family history of lineages and genealogies embodied. And for Lee, who knows our past and the future that can be made.

1 Matt K. Matsuda, “Papaya Archives: Tin Roofs and Marble Arches,” in Brij Lal, ed., Serendipity: Experience of Pacific Historians, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press (2024).

Contents

1

1

Introduction: Decolonizing Pasts

2

Genealogies

27

3

About Ancestors

51

4

The Ancient Mariner

77

5

Warriors

101

6

The Immortal Man

125

7

The Tree of Life

149

8

In the Blood

173

9

The Unborn Child

195

10

Theft and Gifts

219

11

Genetic Drift

243

12

Afterword: Family Lines

267

Permissions

273

Index

275

ix

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Decolonizing Pasts

In 1976, the famed Samoan poet and writer, Albert Wendt, penned one of his most famous poetic works, “Inside us the Dead,” as a family chronicle through many generations, intertwined with and marked by the multiple strands of Pacific histories that run through him, embodied and incarnated, “Inside me the dead/woven into my flesh like bone flutes,” his history is bodily visible and corporeally carried as a genealogical inheritance.1 From ancestors to colonial forebears to his own generation to his own hopes and those of his brother, he fashions alternative schema for the stories of lives with the futurity of the past he has drawn together in himself, moments of promise and also promises unfulfilled.2 Wendt traces a world of seas, plankton, and reefs, Polynesian fathers, the crosses of missionaries, a German sea-trader great-grandfather, his son with a Junker nose and Polynesian lips, a mother whose memories are spread across flowers and night skies, a brother engineering a mathematical universe, but struck down early in life. These are “emergent” 1 Albert Wendt, “Inside Us the Dead,” Poems 1961–1974, Auckland: Longman Paul (1976). 2 As detailed in Alice Te Punga Somerville, “Inside Us the Unborn: Genealogies, Futures, and the Opposite of Zombies,” in Warwick Anderson, Miranda Johnson, Barbara Brookes, eds., Pacific Futures: Past and Present, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press (2018), 69–80.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. K. Matsuda, Genealogies, Genomes, and Histories in the Pacific, Palgrave Studies in Pacific History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45449-3_1

1

2

M. K. MATSUDA

ways of telling histories, layered over genealogies and political narrations of founding events, narratives, legends, and different sets of forebears, “woven into the flesh.” They are shaped by his own extensive chronicle of family history and written in a period that framed an important generation in Samoan and Pacific history; the first politically decolonized and independent Pacific Island state (then Western Samoa) in 1962, separating from New Zealand, then admitted to the United Nations in 1976. The poem also recaptures themes and experiences that appear in his earliest plays, like Comes the Revolution, or his famed autobiographical tale Sons for the Return Home (1973), which recounts the experiences of a young Samoan man studying in New Zealand, struggling with interracial romance and building his politics from Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, and Ho Chi Minh. Other acclaimed works, like Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree, are noted for forwardly shaping characters and narratives that break from following canonical Western traditions of literary subjects, but must be told from the inside, through lived cultures, experiences, and expressions of local peoples. Wendt himself regularly wrote blunt essays, fiction, and poetry underscoring his position, “It’s important that we decolonize our histories,” he has noted, for at stake was “the vitality of our past, our cultures, our dead.”3 The same second half of the twentieth century driven by national liberation struggles and debates about decolonized expression also saw a parallel scientific development that has created upheavals in historical knowledge. As medical historian Keith Wailoo and his colleagues point out, “Genetic markers…have come to be regarded as scientific portals to the past. Analysis of these markers is increasingly employed to investigate and adjudicate issues of social membership and kinship; rewrite history and collective memory; arbitrate legal claims and human rights controversies; and open new thinking about health and wellbeing.”4 Since the end of the Pacific War in 1945, and the structural identification of the DNA double helix in 1953 by Watson, Crick, Franklin,

3 Paul Sharrad, “Albert Wendt and the Problem of History,” Journal of Pacific History, vol. 37, no. 1 (June, 2002), 109. Albert Wendt, “Towards a New Oceania,” Mana review, vol. 1, no. 1 (1976), 49–60. In his classic essay, Wendt leads with a citation from “Inside Us the Dead.” 4 Keith Wailoo, Alondra Nelson, Catherine Lee, eds., Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press (2012), 1.

1

INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIZING PASTS

3

and Wilkins, molecular biology as a field developed through recombinant technologies and the search for disease genes in the 1970s and 1980s. By 1975 rapid DNA sequencing methods were developed. The same year, a noted gathering in the history of science—the Asilomar Conference—was convened to consider and then call for a voluntary moratorium on genetic engineering research. The following year, the US National Institute for Health issued its first guidelines for recombinant DNA experimentation, and by 1979 genetic engineered organisms were recognized for patenting. Engineered mice and plants followed in 1980. Genetically engineered vaccines, drugs, and antibodies were approved for market, and on the grand scale of human genetics, billions of dollars poured into the grand ambition of human genome mapping projects throughout the 1990s and twenty-first century, particularly the Human Genome Diversity Project, launched globally in 1991. The full first draft of the human genome itself was announced in 2000, the year the first commercial DNA services launched, promising personalized ancestor tracing and even medical information to a paying public. In parallel across the same decades, Pacific peoples increasingly have constituted identities in the post-Pacific War and Cold War period premised upon the reassertion of Island and Oceanic-based histories founded in genealogies, customary practices, and cultural identifications of historical knowledge. Those genealogies and that knowledge have been constantly redefined, and recognize the incomplete nature of decolonizing political, cultural—and scientific—knowledge, and the capacity to acknowledge and enact one’s own past in the name of the future. Pacific voices from history and anthropology, politics and law, poetry, literature, and activism, cultural analysis, molecular science and biology, and healthcare have been reshaping the very meanings of science, indigeneity, sovereignty, and the boundaries of knowledge. As M¯aori quantitative genetics specialist, Phillip Wilcox, describes his work with students connecting genealogical and genetic knowledge: “All this is about making them feel that genetics is normal, that it’s a normative science in indigenous cultures, we’ve always done it, it’s not just something in a textbook coming out of a set of western scientific concepts. So we’re trying to reclaim that space.”5 5 “Wananga Brings Science to Life for 50 Wairoa Students,” The Wairoa Star (January 10, 2019), 7.

4

M. K. MATSUDA

These may seem odd parings—Pacific decolonization struggles and laboratory genetic science. Yet, examining inscriptions and writings of both Oceanian decolonization histories and genomic narratives in their scientific, political, and cultural strands underscores how they arose in parallel and became tangled together. The impacts across many registers capture a Cold War, and then a new scientific-military-and-investment complex that has shaped a continuing decolonization process into the twenty-first century of not only territories and governance, but contested regimes of cultural knowledge and historical understanding, inextricable from a global science complex deeply shaped by the currents of its own colonial past. On the uncertainties and contests arising from this entwinement, genetic science provides its own resonant and allusive language in the articulation of genetic drift, following the scientific understanding of the term as the statistical fluidity of gene frequencies in a population due to random sampling. In general terms, the discipline provides such definitions as: Genetic drift—along with natural selection, mutation, and migration—is one of the basic mechanisms of evolution. Genetic drift describes random fluctuations in the numbers of gene variants in a population. Genetic drift takes place when the occurrence of variant forms of a gene, called alleles, increases and decreases by chance over time.6

Genetic drift is widely noted in Pacific population genetics, because island populations commonly experienced movements for reasons of exploration, environmental disaster, political struggle and exile, clan expansion, or resource availability. As an articulation of historical change, genetic drift assays the profound effects that “smaller” numbers have on impacting definitions of larger group transformations, framed by contingencies and circumstances of time, place, environment, and ancestral and generational lineages. Like genetics, drift is also a descriptive and political term as well as a scientific marker for Indigenous Pacific peoples—did

6 See, http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/evo101/IIIDGeneticdrift.shtml; Daniel Nathan Harris, Characterizing Genetic Drift and Migration between Populations, Ph.D. Dissertation, Institute for Genome Sciences/University of Maryland School of Medicine (May 12, 2019), 2–9.

1

INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIZING PASTS

5

ancestors drift or did they navigate? Are cultures and communities adrift or shaping themselves? How and why genomics would particularly invest this period historically through Indigenous peoples has an incisive logic. It begins and, to a significant degree, continues with interrogations of science and local peoples, framed through the colonial era in terms of questions defined by civilization and race. Colonial empires, including in Oceania, were built on race, and the presumptive superiority of Euro-American hegemony organizing darker humans as labor, colonial subjects, primitives in need of education and advancement, or disappearing peoples soon to be replaced by settler populations. But early twentieth-century anti-colonial and nationalist movements, as well as the violence and loss of authority of two world wars, eroded that imperial assurance and dominance. As Bronwen Douglas has pointed out, the postwar Pacific was shaped by circumstances and events of global resonance, including Nazism and fascism and their military defeats, decolonization, human rights demands, civil rights upheavals, Cold War polarization, and struggles for the “hearts and minds” of the world’s peoples in a complex of propaganda, policy, diplomacy, and anti-colonial Indigenous agitation. These “authorized antiracism to the extent that the word ‘race’ itself, in its naturalized scientific sense of a broad, hereditary human grouping, became all but unsayable in public and academic discourses in both the West and the Soviet bloc.”7 Researchers in the social and life sciences began to disavow its use except as a tormented construction, perhaps to be dismissed as a historical artifact—though this did not happen—and critical scholars and activists developed identity, ethnicity, or culture-based refinements of their commitments, campaigns, and methodologies.8 In 1950 UNESCO published its “declaration by the world’s scientists,” “Fallacies of Racism 7 Bronwen Douglas, “Foreign Bodies in Oceania,” in Oceania and the Science of Race, 1750–1940, Canberra: ANU Press (2008), 3. Broadly, see Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the US between the World Wars, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1992); Jenny Reardon, Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics, Princeton: Princeton University Press (2005). 8 Yen Ji Julia Byeon, Rezarta Islamaj, Lana Yeganova, et al., “Evolving Use of Ancestry, Ethnicity, and Race in Genetics Research: A Survey Spanning Seven Decades,” The American Journal of Human Genetics, vol. 108, no. 12 (2021), 2215. https://doi.org/10. 1016/j.ajhg.2021.10.008.

6

M. K. MATSUDA

Exposed,” broadly commenting, “Such biological differences as exist between members of different ethnic groups have no relevance to problems of social and political organization, moral life and communication between human beings.”9 These promulgations were reflected in the ways which colonial authorities interested in counting “natives” and races, gave way to national authorities redefining ethnic enumeration, descent, and community affiliations with multiplicities of choices to reflect “a gradual lessening of colonial influences on demographic practices closely involved in the exercise of power.”10 The new postwar world order, as partially represented by the chartering of the United Nations, had high hopes that genetics might play a role in supplanting the problematic valences of racism and colonialism in designing a new global system. Studies of UNESCO’s communication of human genetic knowledge to popular audiences in the 1950s underscore that, according to Jenny Bangham, “for an influential group of biologists involved in the UNESCO campaign, genetics was to be the route to an enlightened race science. The study of genetics was meant to shift attention away from racial typologies and onto population dynamics.”11 This, presumably, would align much better with formalized UNESCO statements regarding unity in diversity and the foregrounding of culture over race-based statements. But of course, such ambitions were bound to be fraught, since historically, so much of genetic and heredity research had developed in tandem with the assumptions and upheavals of the world wars, and “the large-scale administration of colonized people, and modern bureaucratic technologies of public health.”12 The troubled legacies, foundations, and connections between genetics and racialized politics did not disappear, but evolved, in the new global 9 “Fallacies of Racism: UNESCO Publishes Declaration by World’s Scientists,” UNESCO Courier, vol. 3, nos. 6–7 (July–August 1950). 10 Tahu Hera Kukutai, Patrick Broman, “From Colonial Categories to Local Culture: Evolving State Practices of Ethnic Enumeration in Oceania, 1965–2014,” in Ethnicities, 0 (0) (2015), 16. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468796815603755. 11 Jenny Bangham, “What is Race? UNESCO, Mass Communication and Human Genetics in the Early 1950s,” History of the Human Sciences, vol. 28, no. 5 (2015), 83. Also, Michelle Brattain, “Race, Racism, and Antiracism: UNESCO and the Politics of Presenting Science to the Postwar Public,” American Historical Review, vol. 112, no. 5 (2007), 1386–1413. 12 Jenny Bangham, “What is Race?,” 83. Angela Saini, Superior: The Return of Race Science, Boston: Beacon Press (2019).

1

INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIZING PASTS

7

environment. From the 1950s, as a direct outcome of atomic bombings in Japan and the acceleration of nuclear testing in the Pacific, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission began to programmatically pursue and support “studies of isolated and ‘primitive’ populations as part of its efforts to understand the genetic effects of radiation.” As a function of this strategic and significant military interest, notes historian Susan Lindee, “Geneticists began to travel around the world, often with anthropologists in tow, to study groups that they expected would soon be gone.”13 Just as in the later nineteenth century, purportedly disappearing Pacific peoples, and indigenous communities everywhere, were subject to “salvage” research projects premised upon their eventual presumed extinction from civilizational fatal impacts. Notably, through the 1950s and 1960s, UNESCO’s International Social Science Bulletin continued to devote special issues to global surveys (including Oceania) of “Disappearing Cultures,” and published new research on the genetics of “primitive groups.”14 In the case of twentieth-century Cold War militarism and radiation assays, these so-defined isolated populations were precisely selected for scientific examination by those who studied them either as direct victims of radiation, or as “living outside of time, and outside of history, and presumably also outside of the reach of atomic fallout.”15 The tensions between genetic science and the politics of colonialism and decolonization had never been that far apart, dating back to the eugenics ideologies of the later nineteenth century through the global search for test subjects and valuable cellular resources continuing well through twenty-first-century genome mapping projects and extraction of unique pharmacological resources from Oceanian environments. The intertwining of genealogical questioning and obligation, historical transformation and sovereignty, and decolonization were well expressed both

13 M. Susan Lindee, “Genetics After the Bomb: Archives, Clinics, Proving Grounds and Board Rooms,” Studies in the Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, vol. 55 (2016), 49. 14 UNESCO, International Social Science Bulletin: Disappearing Cultures, vol. 9, no. 3 (1957); James Spuhler, “Research in Population Genetics of Primitive Groups,” International Social Science Journal, vol. 17, no. 1 (1965), 147–9. 15 M. Susan Lindee, “Genetics after the bomb: Archives, clinics, proving grounds and board rooms,” Studies in the Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, vol. 55 (2016), 49.

8

M. K. MATSUDA

in Albert Wendt’s literary work acknowledging ancestors, and the recent history of the Pacific—marked by a particular kind of post-Cold War, globalized “modernity,” the ascendancy of a globalized, avowedly antiracist future in tension with the colonial politics and legacies that continue to provide the foundation for its own past. This complex intertwining is recognized by scholars who have observed that Wendt’s own 1987 “Novelists and Historians and the Art of Remembering” staked out the author’s “disagreement with Western rationalism, reason and science at the same time he declared his belief in the importance of scientific discoveries.”16 In fact, Wendt himself made this manifestly clear by aligning history, memory, and the biological sciences: A society is what it remembers; we are what we remember; I am what I remember; the self is a trick of memory. Physically and genetically we are the unfolding of our DNA, the programmed memory of our genes, which, incidentally, can now be altered through biotechnology. And, as all historians know, history has everything to do with memory and remembering: history is the remembered tightrope that stretches across the abyss of all that we are forgotten.17

Indeed, polemically separating scientific and humanistic pursuits made little sense. The dangers came, often, where they were instead drawn together. The postwar anti-racist aims of the United Nations continued in global genomic enterprises, such as were clearly laid out by the grand ambitions of Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, leader of the Human Genome Diversity Project, launched in 1991, intended to fill in a map of global humanity by sampling genetic material drawn from peoples the world over, particularly indigenous communities. In an address to UNESCO reviewing his aims and reflecting UNESCO’s own statements, Cavalli-Sforza—a noted population geneticist with strong commitments to cultural anthropology—avowed that the project would be intended as a frontal attack on racism. A university student during World War II, Cavalli-Sforza denounced racism as “one of the scourges of humanity,” responsible for “the most 16 Briar Wood, “Science in the Poetry of Oceania,” in Mohit Prasad, ed., Dreadlocks: Oceans, Islands and Skies, vol. 6/7 (2010–2011), 241. 17 Albert Wendt, “Novelists and Historians and the Art of Remembering,” in A. Hooper, S. Britton, R. Crocombe, et al., Class and Culture in the South Pacific, Suva: USP and University of Auckland (1987), 79.

1

INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIZING PASTS

9

odious hatred and persecutions, even genocide, especially in the first half of the twentieth century.” This he coupled to “the erroneous conceptions that races are ‘pure’ and that a mixture of races is deleterious.” In fact, he underscored that the concept of race itself was scarcely scientific at all and the differences among human groups were minutely small. As he argued it: “When I say ‘groups,’ I am trying to replace the more common word ‘race,’ which is misleading because it is impossible to define accurately…a better word is ‘population.’”18 Cavalli-Sforza underscored that, genetically, superficial differences between peoples and populations might be highly visible for those who judged based upon appearances, but that “we should not be misled by this association into thinking that the hidden genetic differences are also as great.”19 At the molecular level he knew they were not, and he took this as his role through population genetics to make this evident. The project, however, met fierce resistance from indigenous communities around the world, concerned about the appropriation and misuse of their bodily substances. Logically, the argument then turned to the role of the researcher and the institutional knowledge and practice of science itself. Cavalli-Sforza tried to make a case: “Science per se, done in the interest of intellectual curiosity and in respect of life of humans and other species, is morally clean. Its applications must be, however, under the control of society, because they can be good or bad.”20 If the moral description was at best debatable, it was particularly the question of who speaks for “society” and what the nature of control should be, that became the central struggle for a project like the HGDP, which sought subjects for genetic material, but was unclear about where the moral and material authority and control of the project should lie.

18 Luca Cavalli-Sforza, “The Human Genome Diversity Project,” typescript, an address delivered to UNESCO, Paris (September 1994), 7–8. Report Number: DOE/ER/61463T5; CONF-9409472-Summ. ON: DE97007813; TRN: AHC29716%%79, https://www. osti.gov/servlets/purl/505327. See Lisa Gannett, “Racism and Human Genome Diversity Research: The Ethical Limits of ‘Population Thinking,’” Philosophy of Science, vol. 68, no. 3 (2001), S479-92. 19 Luca Cavalli-Sforza, “The Human Genome Diversity Project,” typescript, an address delivered to UNESCO, Paris (September 1994), 7–8. 20 Luca Cavalli-Sforza, “The Human Genome Diversity Project,” typescript, an address delivered to UNESCO, Paris (September 1994), 10.

10

M. K. MATSUDA

Cavalli-Sforza suggested that due to religious dogmas, political agendas, and intellectual ignorance, “science has come under fire,” and he offered that “we,” his scientific community, “must take care to communicate about our project to a wide variety of audiences, many of which do not understand scientific methodology.” The goal remained to develop important new knowledge, create the foundations for new biotechnologies, and generate useful medical applications to improve general welfare so that “knowledge developed in this way will help further to reduce the impact of racism.”21 The argument that science would overcome racism, while criticism of those aims was somehow anti-scientific, continued to weigh. Even as colonial racism was openly and scientifically discredited by geneticists, biologists, and anthropologists themselves, the question of the role of “science” and its discriminatory practices remained a key question. As Laurelyn Whitt has pointed out, significant scholarship has underscored the ways that “the issue is no longer science in imperial history but science as imperial history,” due to the ways that knowledge was pursued through unexamined assumptions about cultural and economic primacy. These she identifies particularly in areas of contemporary bioscience that lead in “the appropriation of indigenous knowledge and genetic resources at a prodigious and escalating rate.”22 It is the opposition to this tendency which forms the other half of the dialectic in this examination of genetics and decolonization—the sovereignty politics behind the scientific-capitalist critique. Whitt distinguishes biopiracy, as the theft and exploitation of unique resources and ownership, with biocolonialism as a direct challenge to “indigenous sovereignty and self-determination,” and evidence of continuing, thwarted recognition of political standing and voice. In the Pacific, as elsewhere, this meant the relegation of Islander and Indigenous peoples to the status of research subjects, providing materials to a broader information and capital network rather than exercising autonomy and authority over their own scientific benefits and stories. In 1993, the World Congress of Indigenous Peoples famously renamed the HGDP “the Vampire Project” for its blood extraction protocols and 21 Luca Cavalli-Sforza, “The Human Genome Diversity Project,” typescript, an address delivered to UNESCO, Paris (September 1994), 8–10. 22 Laurelyn Whitt, Science, Colonialism, and Indigenous Peoples: The Cultural Politics of Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2009), 1–5, 24.

1

INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIZING PASTS

11

lack of accountability to local needs. The National Congress of American Indians did likewise the same year, as well as the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress. Also in 1993, the Mataatua Declaration signed in Aotearoa New Zealand called for an immediate halt to the Project, citing lack of engagement with “moral, ethical, socio-economic, physical and political implications.” The M¯aori Congress also condemned the project as well as the patenting of life forms in both 1993 and 1994.23 These movements captured tensions about biocolonialism as a new form of indigenous exploitation. While focused on the extraction and ownership over DNA and other genetic and cellular materials, they were only particular examples of a larger reconfiguration of the challenges faced by Pacific Island peoples in a postwar world. That world, while presumptively disavowing racism and colonialism, nonetheless resituated the interests of former colonial powers into regimes of globalized wealth for themselves and aid and development for previously subject colonies. Tongan author, poet, essayist, anthropologist, and teacher Epeli Hau‘ofa, captured this phenomenon and forged his own reputation by writing multiple stories about the mordant absurdities and damage done by “development” and structural adjustment policies. He also framed his canonical 1994 essay “Our Sea of Islands” as an extended critique of such belittling colonial and post-colonial traditions that enforced territorial isolation, dependency, and cultural marginalization upon local peoples. He redirected Pacific Islanders to look to pre-colonial inheritances and traditions of exploration and relation, severed temporarily by empires, now reborn or continued by communications, travel, and mobility toward an ocean-spanning voyage of futurity and interconnection. Yet, despite the affirmative possibilities of Our Sea of Islands, Hau‘ofa remained a critic of the current Oceanian situation and pointed out in another important essay the regional possibilities of the contemporary Pacific that were also directly in tension with colonial imperatives. For though colonial European and American powers “attempt to present a progressive face to the United Nations decolonization committee,” they were still commanding processes presumptively under their own leadership, historically developing outcomes that “came in packages that tied

23 Indigenous Peoples Opposition to the HGDP, the Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism, timeline, http://www.ipcb.org/resolutions/htmls/summary_indig_ opp.html (accessed October 2021).

12

M. K. MATSUDA

us firmly to the West.”24 Hau‘ofa observed that being tied in this way to a global system of political economy, labor migration, and legally enforced knowledge transfer regimes was not the same as generating cultural exchanges based on locally shared traditions and experiences, and cited a significant contemporary Pacific challenge as the “systematic and cumulatively destructive deployment of dissociated technology on dissociated nature and society, as required by the global economy.”25 These twin currents—the imperative for, yet limitations of decolonization, and the entangling force of new technologies reshaping nature, as described by Hau‘ofa, animated the experiences of islands and communities as they challenged and were shaped by a rapidly transforming shifts in definition, from race to population, empire to sovereignty struggle, and— technologically—the very intersection of Western science and Islander histories. As the multiple Indigenous congresses and declarations of the early 1990s underscored, these tensions were particularly acute in the domains of science dedicated to the inheritance of life and the continuity of generations. The Mataatua Declaration, while calling for a halt to the HGDP, insisted that “the first beneficiaries of indigenous knowledge (cultural and intellectual property rights) must be the direct indigenous descendants of such knowledge.” Where biogenetic resources were at stake, no experimentation or commercialization should take place “without the consent of the appropriate indigenous peoples,” to ensure that “indigenous peoples are the guardians of their customary knowledge and have the right to protect and control dissemination of that knowledge.”26 As genetics and molecular biology increasingly claimed authority to tell stories about the ancestry and lineages of communities, the pursuit of knowledge for “humanity” needed redefinition.

24 Epeli Hau‘ofa, “The Ocean in Us,” We Are the Ocean: Selected Works, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press (2008), 47–8. 25 Epeli Hau‘ofa, “Pasts to Remember,” We Are the Ocean: Selected Works, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press (2008), 72–3. 26 Commission on Human Rights, Sub-Commission of Prevention of Discrimination

and Protection of Minorities, Working Group on Indigenous Populations, “Mataatua Declaration on Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights,” Whakat¯ane: First International Conference on the Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights of Indigenous Peoples (June 1993), https://www.uaf.edu/ankn/indigenous-knowledge-syst/mataatuadeclaration-on-c/.

1

INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIZING PASTS

13

To meet this question of who should tell the stories and benefit from the knowledge, fuller decolonization would require assertions of culture and practice, and not only political sovereignty, demilitarization, and competitive knowledge markets on a globalized model. In her classic work on decolonizing methodologies, Linda Tuhiwai Smith hopefully but skeptically observed that “sovereignty and self-determination still dominate the talk but there are terms like ‘negotiate,’ ‘reconcile,’ and ‘settle.’” As such, “Many indigenous communities are spaces of hope and possibilities, despite the enormous odds aligned against them,” yet as many, she laments, are still “swept up into games and machinations.” She places her commitment in the imperative to maintain alternative histories, for in doing so comes the possibility of holding alternative knowledges and alternative ways of doing, especially, “transforming our colonized views of our own history.”27 Key to this is what the Mataatua Declaration and Tuhiwai Smith note: self-recognition as Indigenous, for this is not only a lived identity question, but one deeply tied to what genetic science attempted to colonize: lineages, ancestors, traditions, of connectedness to the past—and disruptions to that past—which no settler colonial story of pioneering or modernist future promise of progress could truly engage. Native American scholars have framed many of these questions incisively. Audra Simpson has noted that to be Indigenous is to be continuously entangled in historic moments of colonial contact itself: “In those moments, people left their own spaces of self-definition and became Indigenous.”28 It was and continues to be a process that asserts claims of identity in parallel with those for justice and historical reckoning, carrying an imperative for ongoing decolonization of the past and present in the name of the future. Likewise, philosophers of race Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner and Kyle Powys Whyte have given precision to how the experience and claim upon indigeneity evolved not from traditional communities themselves— who had no historic need for such an identity—but from collisions with encroaching settler colonial patriarchies. The newcomers, by force, 27 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous People, New York and London: Zed Books (2012), 102, 36. 28 Audra Simpson, “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice,’ and Colonial Citizenship,” Junctures (December 9, 2007), 69–70; Lili Tagici Tuwai, Assaying sPacific Indigeneity through issues of race and representation, thesis, Hawkesbury, Western Sydney (April 2000), on negotiating meanings and identities.

14

M. K. MATSUDA

law, and exploitation, erased their own violence by breaking up local communities, legally naturalizing monogamous marriage, strict use of Euro-American languages, administrative codes defining inheritance, and the kidnapping and relocation of children away from families. Indigeneity as it developed did not correspond to “race” as a biological construct, but was negotiated from histories of restriction, dispossession, violence, and other “forms of social, cultural, and political identification and how those imposed categories order colonial societies.”29 As a lived experience, indigeneity is interwoven with not just status but lineage, and in these registers can be a powerful engagement with personal and collective history. This sort of claim requires not only selfidentification, but acceptance by others as a descendant of a community, and therefore, responsibilities both taken on and transferred. It also firmly requires a commitment to a connected world of specific places. M¯aori literary scholar Alice Te Punga Somerville, in accounting for her family’s attachment to the harbor Te Waha o te Ika (the mouth of the fish), traces the name according to the way Te Ika a M¯aui (the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand) was captured by the giant hook of M¯aui, the demigod. Somerville links it to a complete understanding of both heritage and Indigenous presence: This is a story of firstness: as long as there has been a fish, there have been us. When we introduce ourselves to other M¯aori people, we name the mountains, lakes, rivers, and harbors to which we are related so they know who we are. We are standing in the mouth of the fish on which our people have always lived, and on this basis, we are Indigenous.30

Her indigeneity is rooted in and defined by genealogy, her world and that of her ancestors, and the placeness of the past.31 Such future pasts are constantly challenged by what Hau‘ofa identified as the instabilities

29 Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner, Kyle Powys Whyte, “Theorizing Indigeneity, Gender, and Settler Colonialism,” The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Race, New York and London: Routledge Press (2017). 1–2. 30 Alice Te Punga Somerville, Once Were Pacific: M¯ aori Connections to Oceania, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (2012), xviii. 31 On K¯ anaka M¯aoli Cultural Space, see KL N¯alani Wilson, “View from the Mountain: Moloka‘i a Hina,” Junctures, no. 5 (December 2005), 31–46. For genealogical connections, 31–5; Wendt’s “Inside Us the Dead,” commented 42–3.

1

INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIZING PASTS

15

of decolonization as a project and the deployment of invasive technologies in a transformed natural world. Some of the effects are well known: environmental despoilation to feed extractive global economies; contamination of seas and landscapes; the Big Science of Western militarism and weapons utilizing Pacific islands as staging and testing grounds. Much is also about majorities, minorities, marginalization, and challenges to identify formation within regimes of law, nationalism, and cultural pride and prejudice. These are issues that shape communities worldwide, defining and redefining who are dominant and invisible groups, and what the revisited traditions and future of community identifications might look like. A large literature continues to examine the impact of genomic science on US society through genomic politics; some of that reconstructs the experiences and impacts of Native American DNA studies, African-American communities; other studies pursue an understanding of cultural “uniqueness” such as in Japan, whereby “Genomic knowledge will make Western culture consistent with Asian culture and sensibilities”; broad-based teams of researchers have examined “mestizo genomics” in laboratories in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico to untangle questions about national identities built around populations, elisions of racial and ethnic characterizations dating from the Spanish colonial imperium, and how “these concepts are reproduced, challenged, or reformulated in the process.”32 The impacts share certain themes in terms of redefining identities and pasts, but they also are differently shaped by historical experiences 32 Jennifer Hochschild, Genomic Politics: How the Revolution in Genomic Science Is

Shaping American Society, New York and London: Oxford University Press (2021); Kathryn Paige Harden, The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality, Princeton: Princeton University Press (2021); Jorge L. Contreras, The Genome Defense: Inside the Epic Legal Battle to Determine Who Owns Your DNA, Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill (2021); Kimberly Tall Bear, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (2013); Alondra Nelson, The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome, New York: The Beacon Press (2016); Joan Fujimura, “Scientists and Sociocultural Entrepreneurs,” Genetic Nature/Culture, Alan H. Goodman, Deborah Heath, M. Susan Lindee, eds., Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press (2003); Peter Wade, Carlos López Beltrán, Eduardo Restrepo, and Ricardo Ventura Santos, eds., Mestizo Genomics: Race Mixture: Nation, and Science in Latin America, Durham and London: Duke University Press (2014); Francesca Morgan, A Nation of Descendants: Politics and the Practice of Genealogy in U.S. History, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press (2021); Matthew Cobb, As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age, New York: Basic Books (2022).

16

M. K. MATSUDA

and cultures. Or, as Tuhiwai Smith puts it about DNA prospecting in a decolonizing context, “the unrelenting imperative of governments and corporations to promote technology as a solution to our lives is the same imperative which suppresses and destroys indigenous alternatives.”33 Manulani Aluli Meyer has taken this struggle for identity to the fundamentals of Hawaiian epistemology, drawing on mentors who weave together deep connections and spiritual forces, alignments with ancestors and “all the Hawaiians that came before us…in me I have some of that cellular, molecular structure and memory of long ago. How comforting!”34 The entangled roots are deeply complex. Broadly, libraries of medical and sociological literature have been written about the history of genetics and genomics. These range from animal husbandry and plant breeding to distorted readings of Darwinian natural selection aligned with the observational studies of species inheritance rendered by Gregor Johann Mendel (published 1866, rediscovered 1900). These intellectual foundations were employed in the violent ruse of eugenics, formulated by Darwin’s naturalist cousin Francis Galton in 1883 as a race practice of selective breeding in defense of his own European gentry standing. The attractions of declaring standards of mental and physical and reproductive fitness were institutionalized in research sites such as Charles Davenport’s New York Eugenics Records Office (1910), and promoted throughout the world by Galton’s protégé, biostatistician Karl Pearson, with his overt imperialist prejudice and anxieties about white civilization, degeneration, and “higher and lower” races. He and a growing global eugenics movement found wide audiences both popularly and with elites for political support of immigration controls against darker peoples, forced sterilization programs of minority communities, and ultimately, race hygiene for entire populations. Encoded within the growing prestige and legitimation of scientific research, precision, and the experimental method, these efforts were buttressed throughout the first half of the twentieth century in what would seem to be more disinterested settings—laboratories where model 33 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, in dialogue with Jerry Mander, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous People, 102. 34 See Ho‘oipo De Cambra (cited here) also Calvin Hoe, Kekuni Blaisdell (all 1997), in Manulani Aluli Meyer, “Our Own Liberation: Reflections on Hawaiian Epistemology,” The Contemporary Pacific, vol. 13, no. 1 (Spring 2001), 126–7.

1

INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIZING PASTS

17

organisms like Thomas Hunt Morgan’s Drosophila flies (beginning 1908) and heritable mutations in E. coli bacteria and mice were widely analyzed to determine the function of chromosomes and elaborate the evolution of the gene from concept to biological and cellular entity. This would lead to the full articulation of DNA structural chemistry by Francis Crick, James Watson, Rosalind Williams, and New Zealand-born Maurice Wilkins by mid-century. In the succeeding decades, detailed knowledge of protocols to unwind, replicate, and repair the molecule, and intentionally alter the sugar, phosphate, and nitrogen bases and intertwined strands of the double helix promised a full reading of the so-imagined structural blueprint for life, eventually employed in genetic engineering, recombinant DNA, and as the foundation of the field of personalized medicine. In effect, it was a molecular promise for a better future in combatting disease and redefining essential elements of human identity and history. The continuing promises appeared unlimited. In 2000, with the full draft mapping of human DNA base pairs and structure, the American President Bill Clinton, and the leaders of the multi-billion-dollar Human Genome Project, Craig Venter and Francis Collins, jointly announced a new era of unheralded medical advancements and, triumphantly and famously, declared that, “in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same.” In some ways, the Family of Man dream idealistically championed by UNESCO a half-century earlier would seem realized. However, as science sociologist Catherine Bliss has noted, since that moment, genomics as a science dedicated to studying the totality of genetic elements, pivoted with remarkable speed “from a science uninterested in race to one devoted to its understanding.”35 Part of this was an effort at historical correction. The abusive twentieth-century legacies of the eugenics era cast a long shadow across attempts to legitimize the social employment of genetic research. Now, research teams sought to redefine genetics away from those earlier practices justifying racial discrimination in the name of science to newer, progressive consciousness of race-genomics pairings as intentionally aware of socio-political challenges, a “hybrid of molecular science, social

35 Catherine Bliss, Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice, Stanford: Stanford University Press (2012), 2.

18

M. K. MATSUDA

epidemiology, public health, and bioethics.”36 This has continued to be a desideratum and strategy, both rhetorically and ideologically, for genomic research into the twenty-first century: the creation of better outcomes for humans and humanity. It has specific roots—as had eugenics for the European age of empire—in the heyday of the Cold War, United Nations’ support for decolonization, and sovereignty and rights redefinitions. In particular, Bliss has noted, it was a determined attempt to redefine a postwar human citizen and subject: “unprejudiced, civilized, scientifically literate and living under the banner of the United Nations.”37 Once again, the new science promised a better future by way of an educated and healthier body politic. In this way, bench research, translational medicine, and technical publications have reverberations across multiple registers of knowledge and experience, including not only contemporary social analysis, but the historical ways they have inadvertently and intentionally redefined personal and community histories. It is particularly here, where the science of heredity and intergenerational transmission meets the reasserted histories of marginalized pasts, that complicated stories—and claims—emerge. Even if the claims are not as direct as the sometimes-deadly interventions of eugenics policy and are as apparently well-intended as explorations of disease research, ancestor tracing, or studying human variation, they are entangled in a process of decolonization. In this, the institutional structuring of science only unevenly surrenders authority as gatekeepers to explain the present, define the believed and dismissed past, and propose the possibilities and potentials of a transformed future. The Harvard geneticist and science author David Reich has notably spoken against what he considers to be an “orthodoxy” silencing discussion of human population differences according to genetic distinctions. His intervention has been to request his reading public to face “whatever science will reveal without prejudging the outcome and with the confidence that we can be mature enough to handle any findings.” His perspective emphasizes that racists and ideologues misuse knowledge, but that science and the audience together as “we” can avoid this error. In addressing his colleagues—not unlike Cavalli-Sforza, whom he 36 Catherine Bliss, Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice, Stanford: Stanford University Press (2012), 9, 38. 37 Jenny Bangham, “What is Race? UNESCO, mass communication and human genetics in the early 1950s, History of the Human Sciences, vol. 28, no. 5 (2015), 100.

1

INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIZING PASTS

19

recognizes as his “academic grandparent” through mentorship—Reich suggests, “This is why knowledgeable scientists must speak out. If we abstain from laying out a rational framework for discussing differences among populations, we risk losing the trust of the public and we actively contribute to the distrust of expertise.”38 Science itself is the expert and reasoned domain of scholars and researchers whose role is to share knowledge with others in the name of a general good and their own authority. Still, the distrust that Reich mentions remains well earned, and he himself acknowledges that scientific arguments of given eras about race, civilization, and human hierarchy “were used in the past to try to justify the slave trade, the eugenics movement and the Nazi’s murder of six million Jews.”39 But was this just “in the past?” Reclassifying the leading science of the time as “pseudoscience” today does not obviate the true participation of leading research, medical, and intellectual figures across generations in these projects, nor excise the persisting legacies of harms done. The radiation and genetic impacts of American atomic bombings in Hiroshima are a highly visible case in point. Susan Lindee has argued, “I want to suggest that American studies of the survivors were a form of science comparable to colonial indirect rule, in which existing systems of administration…were maintained, but overlaid with a level of colonial control.” In effect, evocations of science as authoritative in matters of technical knowledge are often self-referential to laboratory networks of scholars and research institutions, primarily focused on data collection, longitudinal studies, and often, bromides that continuously point out that more study and more information will continue to help future medicine; less interest is focused on the expression of what Lindee has searched out as “suffering made real.”40 In this way, questionable practices—where irretrievably generated from political, military, and financial interests—are not all of them relegated to past eras, but constantly renewed. If not through direct violence, then by running against the postwar promises of a decolonized world, 38 David Reich, “How Genetics is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’,” The New York Times (March 23, 2018). 39 David Reich, “How Genetics is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’.” 40 Susan Lindee, Suffering Made Real: American Science and the Survivors at

Hiroshima, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1994).

20

M. K. MATSUDA

whether through “testing” assays, biological property appropriation, or global extraction and intellectual property regimes, in ways that are profoundly experienced by Indigenous communities as colonial in nature. As decolonization continues as, at best, partial—and inextricable from discrimination and dispossession—what happens when chronicles of the genomic and colonial are read as dialectically intertwined and constitutive of one another, a dynamic generating their own resistances not by aligning history with science, but interrogating the very assumptions and practices of both? Maile Arvin’s work on the historical scientific production of Polynesians by anthropologists and biologists traces the changes in acceptable knowledge that take place over generations, and that most current higher education humanistic and social scientific teaching underscores “that race is not a scientific truth, but a social construction.” However, far less visible is what occurs when the laboratory practices of genetic analysis are themselves employed to confirm this assertion—“have we forgotten to remain critical of how science itself is socially constructed and retains an enormous power for legitimizing truth?”41 Paralleling scientific narratives from the nineteenth through the twentieth centuries, scholars of global imperialism have spent generations parsing out the causes, impacts, and legacies of colonial empires—their practices, forms of rules, knowledge regimes, settler states, extractive economies, and military oppressions. Beyond chronicles of administrative rule, settler colonies in particular have attracted attention to the ways they generated and imposed societies of racial, class, and cultural discrimination and privilege, as well as their formal decline yet persisting hegemony and influence. It is this continuing authority to legitimize truth that remains in contention, whether the climate- or cranial-based imputations of colonial sciences upon indigenous people, or knowledge regimes and control of biological materials through metropolitan research and investment. As the historian Tracey Banivanua Mar has noted, decolonization in the Pacific has for generations already had a number of well-formulated conventions in place that shape the way its chronicles unfold. Prewar scholarship was largely dedicated to “metropolitan causes and followed a metropolitan agenda,” that is, it was based on studies of international 41 Maile Arvin, Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai‘i and Oceania, Durham and London: Duke University Press (2019), 13.

1

INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIZING PASTS

21

diplomacy, the decline of overreaching global powers, and the gradual separation of former colonies into new nation-states.42 What such histories elided were two salient factors: that the nation-state would be only one goal of Pacific Island political identity and purpose, and that, in fact, “Indigenous peoples’ mobilization of imperial networks of information, knowledge and social or economic capital” generated “subversive webs that reshaped empire from within.” It also meant common cause and alliance and shared experience and history across islands, not only particular adherence to national territories. She further notes that while the United Nations declared decolonization a global imperative in 1960, most Pacific peoples were still at that time under colonial rule, a situation only somewhat ameliorated twenty years later. Even by 2010 a meeting of delegates to an Eradication of Colonialism discussion heard “the ongoing grievances of Indigenous peoples from American Samoa, Guam, Hawai‘i, Kanaky-New Caledonia, Bougainville and Buka, West Papua, Australia, Aotearoa-New Zealand, Tokelau, and Rapanui-Easter Island.”43 Some participants gathered from non-self-governing territories, and others had no recognized status as colonized peoples, being incorporated into other nation-states as minority populations. As such, Pacific decolonization is not a specific, historically delimited phenomenon, nor simply incomplete because Indigenous peoples have not achieved sovereignty as defined by self-governing nation-states. As Banivanua Mar puts it, the story of decolonization is ongoing and recurring, a “mobile story of insistence and persistence in the face of imposed invisibility.” In this way, it is not only about territories and banners, but has manifested as an “internalized identity-building process of un-colonizing the mind, speech, knowledge and space.”44 Decolonization is an embodied enactment of recognizing pasts and claiming futures. These histories are not only lived, but incarnated, invested in, and carried forward in bodies bound by the politics of culture and

42 Tracey Banivanua Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific: Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2016), 6. 43 Tracey Banivanua Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific, 14; for details, see United Nations, “International Decades for the Eradication of Colonialism,” https://www.un. org/dppa/decolonization/en/history/international-decades. 44 Tracey Banivanua Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific, 225.

22

M. K. MATSUDA

sovereignty, shaping personal identities and life stories. They are defined by the presence of lineage and genealogy and inscriptions of heritability. In the chapters that follow, these histories compose a range of stories: an ancestor’s blood; an ancient mariner; a warrior’s claim; an immortal man; a tree of life; a stolen generation; an unborn child; a chronicle of things stolen and suspicious gifts, as well as promises of alternative futures. All examine shifting experiences and knowledge of heredity, generation, procreation, reproduction, kinship, transmission, development, and evolution as histories entwined and struggling with ancestral layering and earth-rootedness. These are particularly, though not uniquely, expressed in voices of those who share M¯aori or Hawaiian genealogical knowledge, including complex and challenging engagements with whakapapa and mo‘ok¯u‘auhau understanding and learning that can only be properly experienced by those within a community and tradition. The work here examines instances where this knowledge intersects with and remakes scholarly traditions and debates to have wide cultural, social, and political resonance. As such, many histories here are drawn from Hawai‘i and Aotearoa New Zealand where much complex and committed work has been done by Indigenous communities, researchers, scholars, scientists, activists, and poets for decades. As will be noted, genealogical-genomic experiences vary widely and are culturally and historically specific across Oceania. In Aotearoa New Zealand, for example, a report of the 2001 Royal Commission on Genetic Modification begins by advancing a shared framework of values, including te ao M¯aori: the M¯aori world view, alongside perspectives from Judeo-Christian traditions, environmental and health issues, applications and issues in medicine and intellectual property, and the legal and historical duties inherent in Te Tiriti o Waitangi—the Treaty of Waitangi. The Report directly builds around the 1840 Treaty, signed in the Bay of Islands, whereby “M¯aori agreed to give the Crown rights to govern and promote British settlement, and the Crown guaranteed M¯aori protection of their interest, and full citizenship rights,” underscoring, in this framing, “the Crown’s responsibilities under the Treaty of Waitangi mean

1

INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIZING PASTS

23

relating issues about GM [genetic modification] to the principles of partnership, protection and participation.”45 The promises, fulfillment, and non-attainments historically of the Treaty continue to mark the specificities of place and peoples. “Full rights” struggles over land, education, culture, social welfare, economic opportunity, and political power from the nineteenth century carry over into how genomic debates will be framed two centuries later. In other parts of the Pacific, questions and contentions emerge from likewise specific histories, whether biopiracy and medical-anthropological contact debates in the forests of Papua New Guinea and Samoan villages, nuclear testing and resettlement in the atolls of the Marshall Islands, sovereignty struggles in Hawai ‘i or eugenic legacies in Australia. Yet the debates and struggles also share significant overlapping claims inextricable from parallel elements of those histories. This means that the issues at stake are tied in cross-cutting ways to land, placeness, cultural destruction, and connections or separation of individuals and communities from local environments and resources. At the same time, these colonial—and decolonization—histories linking multiple Islander societies mean shared concerns and cooperative movements—as evidenced by joint declarations, gatherings, and locally responsive research. These moments resonate in the chapters here through actors and actions in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, the Marshall Islands, Australia, Vanuatu, Tahiti and Mo ‘orea, Samoa, Tonga, and the Cook Islands. It is fair to recognize the debates here as histories of the present—that is, assembled as questions and challenges about genealogies and genomics and indigeneity as they unfolded in the early twenty-first century. For this, much foundational work was done by Aroha Te Pareake Mead and Steven Ratuva, calling together multiple Islander perspectives for their edited Pacific Genes and Life Patents in 2007, the same year as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.46 Drawing partly upon the incisive and expansive approach established there, the

45 Thomas Eichelbaum, chair, Jean Fleming, Jacqueline Allen, Richard Randerson, commissioners, Report, the Royal Commission on Genetic Modification in New Zealand (2001), 301. 46 Aroha Te Pareake Mead and Steven Ratuva, eds., Pacific Genes & Life Patents, Wellington: Llamado de la Tierra (2007). See Mead’s own participation in the UNDRIP history, Aroha Te Pareake Mead, “Speech for UNDRIP Conference at Te Papa, Wellington,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1aEEZH9fGA (September 26, 2017).

24

M. K. MATSUDA

following chapters underscore the ways those voices have opened up scholarship, political, legal, and cultural activism, and begun to shape newer histories. The first story here concerns the search for origins, and particularly pairs global genome projects like those of research university consortia and institutional science, and critics like Le‘a Malia Kanehe on the value of genetic genealogy for Pacific cultures. Another explores the meanings of kinship, blood, and familial relations based upon pairing dualities rather than binaries, and traces ancestral descent and DNA sequences, raising questions of dispersions and challenge to the true identity of ancestors, and disputes between those who themselves tell the stories. Some stories are about restored and articulated connections to the past—as with ancestor tracing—but many concern disputes about the control and management of the molecular tools for that access and the information purposefully held about the literal life blood of peoples. Still more are about pasts that cannot be shed, reflecting not proud lineages but ascriptions of violence, criminality, and intellectual capacity persisting from nineteenth-century assumptions about the inherent tendencies of savage peoples. Also reviewed is the noted tale of Carol Jenkins and Yoketan Ibeji, the anthropologist and the Hagahai man whose cell line became the pivot of an international dispute about life form capitalism and patents. Such cases in turn attracted the attention of Pacific leaders like Lopeti Senituli, who linked bioprospecting issues—both for medicinal plants and human cellular materials—to struggles over political sovereignty, selfdetermination, and the conflict between engineered life forms, ownership of biological and historical heritage. Within these are the tensions between blackbirding—forced labor— histories and lives taken away and the application of eugenic race-fitness ideals as practiced upon Aboriginal children separated from their families to become putatively useful servants to a politically dominant population in Australia in the imagined twilight of a vanishing Indigenous people and culture. The question of interrupted futures and lost children in the Pacific also connects directly to nuclear issues as a historical arc. Following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the scientific teams that searched for mutations to archive generations of blood and tissue samples, data, and administrative knowledge, the impact of nuclear physics as continued colonial warfare haunts the Pacific. The atomic colonialism of the Cold War in Micronesia finds legacies in the

1

INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIZING PASTS

25

body of the late Lijon Eknilang, who spoke about the damage to her own body from nuclear fallout as a testament to a fractured Marshallese heritage and a poisoned congenital future. These experiences uneasily resolve to bones and strands of hair and the elemental materiality of ancestors and kin, their places in retaining the past in dialogue with institutions of memory and those of science, and how all are being transformed by generations claiming new practices of knowledge for themselves with different languages, voices, proposals for research, education, and articulations of sovereignty. Since the middle twentieth century, these personal chronicles writ large have all been part of an evolving Pacific narrative of genetic histories with genomic science rewriting the evidence of the past within the unresolved tensions of decolonization, the continuously interwoven strands connecting the living and the dead.

CHAPTER 2

Genealogies

Understanding historical identity primarily through embodied genealogy was self-evident to Melanesian leaders like the Kanak statesman JeanMarie Tjibaou, from Kanaky-New Caledonia, born in Hienghène on the Grand Terre, a Sorbonne student of ethnology and ordained priest who became a global activist figure for Kanak independence from France. Organizing the major Melanesia 2000 regional cultural festival 25 years before the millennium and investing himself in ethnic cultural politics, Tjibaou built toward heading the Kanak and Socialist Liberation Front against French colonial rule in the 1980s but was assassinated by a disaffected rival. Tjibaou understood his own customs and histories woven through himself in both spiritual and material dimensions. As he wrote on the occasion of the festival, “We want to revive the dialogue on the construction of our country. We want to proclaim our cultural existence. We want to tell the world that we are not refugees from prehistory, any more than we are archaeological remnants, but men of flesh and blood.”1 Tjibaou praised the orator Emmanuel Naouna, a farmer, for speaking to the festival, drawing on the language of the central part of the main island, “He is heir to a clan whose precise function in paicî society is to 1 Jean-Marie Tjibaou, “Our Place in the Sun,” Jean-Marie Tjibaou: Kanaky, (Collected Essays and Interviews), Perth: Pandanus Books (2005), 20.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. K. Matsuda, Genealogies, Genomes, and Histories in the Pacific, Palgrave Studies in Pacific History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45449-3_2

27

28

M. K. MATSUDA

maintain forever the genealogies of the paicî-language clans…the Word is sacred.”2 As Tjibaou also reformulated it, drawing on his own theological training, “The Kanak discourse is not conceived in terms of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. It consists in repeating in order to convince, with a view to permeating the guts of the Word, for the Word to invest the entire body.”3 The force of bearing witness to the experience of a people was not only the transmitted record or chronicle of their lives, generations, and struggles to the page or a depository, but a bodily incarnation in the self, declaring history and culture and carrying responsibility. This inextricability of genealogy, bodily incorporation, and ancestral responsibilities conveyed to continuing generations invests many Oceanian traditions. They are widely disparate and specific to islands and communities.4 They are also, seen through an attempted history of genealogies and genomics, linked together by worldviews expressed through languages organically generating stores, responsibilities, corporeality, and ties to ancestors directly. In the Hawaiian Islands, N¯alani Wilson-Hokowhitu has observed with clarity the ways that K¯anaka Maoli defines the particularities of shared genealogical understanding and practice. The word for genealogy in Hawaiian is mo‘ok¯ u‘auhau. Mo‘o in this context can be defined as a succession, series, story, tradition, or lineage. K¯ u means to stand, stop, halt, anchor, or moor, as well as signifying the God of War. ‘Auhau refers to the femur and humerus bones of the human skeleton. When strung together the words refer to “genealogy,” as it is known or translated in English; yet, the kaona and deep significance in ¯ ‘Olelo Hawai‘i refers to the bones of our ancestors that connect us, as K¯anaka Maoli, to our islands. The succession of our ancestors, and mana ¯ within their bones buried in the ‘Aina (land), establish our place to stand tall, our place to protect and defend.5

2 Jean-Marie Tjibaou, Kanaky, 20. 3 See Eric Waddell, Jean-Marie Tjibaou: Kanak Witness to the World, Honolulu:

University of Hawai’i (2008), 97. 4 Lea Lani Kinikini Kauvaka, “Moanan Genealogies: Pacific Paradigms in Research,” (Invited Paper) Pacific History Association, Taipei, Taiwan (December 3–6, 2014). 5 Kathryn Louise N¯ alani Wilson, N¯ a Mo‘ok¯ u‘auhau Holowa‘a: Native Hawaiian Women’s Stories of the Voyaging Canoe H¯ ok¯ ule‘a, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Otago (2010), 45–6. See also her own restatement of this in N¯alani Wilson-Hokowhitu and Manulani Aluli Meyer, “Introduction: I Ka W¯a Mamua, The Past Before Us,” in N¯alani

2

GENEALOGIES

29

K¯ehaulani Kauanui rearticulates elements of the mo‘o k¯u‘auhau such that “Mo‘o can mean lineage as well as succession while k¯ u‘auhau can be used to describe one who is skilled in genealogy and traditional history.” She also notes that Mo‘o is, in addition, the word for “lizard and lizardlike supernatural being,” with visible vertebrae in connected sequences.6 Critically, this means that mo‘o k¯u‘auhau carries with it an “untranslatability,” very particular to Hawaiian culture and history, and certainly not reducible to genetic and biological elements. Kalei Nu‘uhiwa reinforces this point by noting that “Mo‘ok¯ u‘auhau also includes the inception and creation of anything tangible, intangible, animate, inanimate, built, birthed, or created.” It encompasses anything that can be said to exist and connects listeners to a story with their own experience and that which is yet indiscernible.7 What then are some of the contexts through which such Pacific genealogies of bodies, cultures, responsibilities, and contested pasts and presents are historically shaped? Primary among them are prior centuries of colonialism and empire, and the continuing fractures of decolonization. Deep-time genealogies as embodied means to experience personal, localized histories, drawing from and protecting lands and ancestors, take on an anti-colonial political logic when situated against a primary and historical attention to interactions between Islanders and outlanders. These interactions, in turn, must attend to ways they defined, across generations, the mutual constructions of empire and race. Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard have traced the centuries-long intervention of science as applied to humans through multiple manifestations in Oceania. From the eighteenth century, “the region’s inhabitants offered Enlightenment philosophers and natural historians a kaleidoscope of ‘nations,’ ‘races,’ or ‘tribes’ to think on, debate about, and contrast themselves with,” along a presumptive trajectory from primitive

Wilson-Hokowhitu, ed., The Past Before Us: Mo‘ok¯ u‘auhau as Methodology, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press (2019), 2. 6 J. K¯ ehaulani Kauanui, Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity, Durham and London: Duke University Press (2008), 37–8. 7 Kalei Nu‘uhiwa, “Papak¯ u Makawalu: A Methodology and Pedagogy for Understanding the Hawaiian Universe,” in N¯alani Wilson-Hokowhitu, ed., The Past Before Us: Mo‘ok¯ u‘auhau as Methodology, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press (2019), 40–1.

30

M. K. MATSUDA

to civilized.8 The concept of race itself acquired its modern era scientific construction of a “discrete, biologically determined major grouping with innate physical and mental characters” by the beginning of the nineteenth century, drawing naturalists and anthropologists of the time toward configuring human races as distinct species, and also uniting all in a taxonomy of the superior and inferior. Oceania then figured heavily in shaping evolutionary theory, through Charles Darwin or Alfred Wallace’s fieldwork in the Pacific, coupled in distorted ways with the pairing of predicted inevitable extinction of peoples in Australia and the Pacific Islands and their presumed need for salvation and assimilation. By the twentieth century, a global colonial order raised newer questions not only about how encounters shaped racialist ideas, but how to question and contest the means by which empire maintained its grip over generations. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds have looked to American historian, critic, activist, and scholar W. E. B. DuBois’ memorable 1900 declaration that the problem of the twentieth century was the “problem of the color line,” and “the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” It was, in DuBois’ observations, the very conscious articulation of whiteness as the animating constituent of empire as a collective civilizing project that underpinned and justified dispossession of and rule over nonwhites, including, at least, “Afghans, Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Syrians, and Pacific Islanders.” It meant controlling and commanding immigrant communities to serve as labor—“Coolies, Islanders, Asiatics and Blacks,” while constructing exclusionary and unfree societies.9 That Euro-American empires and colonies were built on such racialized distinctions is not news and was not in centuries past—it was the very logic of hierarchy and authority, inflected differently, but always structurally the same, as on sugar plantations in the Hawaiian islands, with Anglo owners, Portuguese lunas, or foremen, East Asian—often Japanese—cane workers, and Filipino and K¯anaka Maoli low-level labor. To contest such hierarchy was to understand the workings and means by which it deployed and reinforced its own assumptions. 8 Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard, Oceania and the Science of Race, 1750–1940, Canberra: ANU Press (2008), xiii–xiv. 9 Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2008), 1–2, 6–7.

2

GENEALOGIES

31

Maile Arvin has significantly developed work that aligns these elements of empire, hegemonic authority, somatic indicators—and scientific justification—into compelling arguments about nineteenth-century settler colonialism (outlanders, including Asian immigrants, displacing Indigenous communities as the new “people”) in Hawai‘i and Polynesia as driven by what she elaborates as possession through whiteness. In effect, colonial regimes rendered Islanders exotic feminized possessions of whiteness—possessions that never had the power to claim the property of whiteness for themselves.10 In a convolution of the same logic, it was instead the white settlers who claimed themselves the new indigenous as pioneers, settlers, and producers, and by determining Polynesians “almost white” in any case—not enough to be equal, but enough for settlers to claim and naturalize themselves as the more advanced inheritors of a common tradition. Further distinctions for the status of Polynesians were reinforced throughout the early twentieth century by the direct employment of physical anthropology and eugenics, anthropometry, and the application of Mendelian genetics to defining categories for inheritance traits, blood quanta, and other supposed biological markers of racial purity, degeneracy, and appropriate and pleasing hybrid racial mixtures. The latter were always generated against a Euro-American Caucasian higher standard. Such standards, while powerful in naturalizing distinctions and discrimination, are nonetheless subject to reappropriation and reclamation. In this context, Camara Jones’ formulation that “People are born with ancestry that comes from their parents, but are assigned a race,” is helpful.11 The former is an indication of genetic similarities and historical lineage; the latter is a political category. Notes historical sociologist Dorothy Roberts, every individual is “a composite of several broad anthropological groupings,” yet even this apparent acceptance of inherited diversity is seriously compromised, for it “reinforces three central myths about race: that there are pure races, that each race contains people

10 Maile Arvin, Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai‘i and Oceania, Durham and London: Duke University Press (2019), 3. 11 Camara Jones, “Unnatural Causes...Is Inequality Making Us Sick?” document, www. unnaturalcauses.org (2008), 3–4.

32

M. K. MATSUDA

who are fundamentally the same and fundamentally different from people in other races, and that races can be biologically demarcated.”12 In effect, in a colonial context, both personal and group histories became racialized, and reduced to somatic indicators or color and morphology, then attributed to cultural and behavioral traits. These become the administrative and ideological foundations for political authority and social organization. Yet the Indigenous search for origins, ancestors, and the affirmation of beginnings is not a racial, but a genealogical experience. As such, identity and origin reclamation are less about biological distinction, and very much about the ways that struggles for legitimation are fought, translated from somatic indicators to cultural adherence and into political and revolutionary or, sometimes, military power. At stake are questions of authority and rule. Not inclusion or accommodation within an existing hierarchy, but a claim on futures built on reasserted experiences, pasts, and forebears. The anti-colonial movements of the early twentieth century, led by Indigenous leaders, became the national liberation struggles of the postwar period, marked especially by insurgencies in India, China, the African states, the Middle East, and revolutionary movements in Vietnam. Independent states were also born through political or diplomatic contests in Western Samoa, Nauru, Tonga, Fiji and New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Gilbert and Ellice Islands, and Vanuatu between 1962 and 1980. The Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, the Cook Islands, and Niue also wrestled with autonomy from the United States and New Zealand in the 1980s and 1990s. Worldwide, the late 1980s also saw the decolonization of Europe with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fragmentation of the Soviet bloc, the emergence of the Czech Republic, the constituents of the former Yugoslavia, and the reunification of Germany, framed a continent away by the erosion of legal apartheid in South Africa. By the 1990s, agitation for change continued sweeping across the Pacific: the Mabo case in Australia, Waitangi protests in New Zealand, the British retrocession of Hong Kong to China, worldwide antinuclear movements, sovereignty struggles in Hawai‘i, and significantly, the Mataatua Declaration of Pacific and Indigenous peoples demarcating

12 Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, New York: The New Press (2012), 228.

2

GENEALOGIES

33

the protection of cultural properties protection against colonialism. Imperial powers left unfinished business. As such, claims for recognition were made in the name of entire peoples, indeed, heritages and cultures. This was the key change of the postwar, as the restitution scholar Elazar Barkan has noted: stolen histories became a question of how rights accrue not only to individuals but also groups. Could claims be made on deriving justice from the past collectively? How were individuals positioned to shape the future of entire communities?13 Such matters about reclaiming embodied ancestral and cultural pasts marginalized by the positive knowledge practices of colonial history and science continue to resonate. Particularly in determining boundaries for relationship, responsibility—and stewardship that have been at the heart of debates over research projects involving land, heritage, and genetic sampling in the Pacific. As the Association of Hawaiian Civic Clubs resolved in 2001, “the Hawaiian genome represents the genetic heritage of our ancestors and is the collective property of the Native Hawaiian people.” Attorney Le‘a Malia Kanehe has expressed it, “How is group consent ensured? Individual members of a tribe or other Indigenous group cannot consent for the entire population.” How, then, could such questions be engaged?14 In Kanehe’s commentary, the intertwining of genomic science and the politics of decolonization are clearly articulated. The colonial model of decolonization was built only fitfully around autonomy, and significantly around overseas territories, commonwealths, compacts of free association, and projections of sovereignty and nation-statehood. Yet, in themselves, such models are literally reliant on a sovereign principle—a leader who manifests sacred principles of the state—and subjects or citizens who are equally sovereign as possessive individuals. As such, juridical contests in

13 Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000). For reconciliation politics in particular, see Miranda Johnson, “Reconciliation, Indigeneity, and Postcolonial Nationhood in Settler States,” Postcolonial Studies, vol. 14, no. 2 (2011), especially emphases on “firstness” and the “authentically primordial.”. 14 Le‘a Malia Kanehe, “From Kumulipo: I Know Where I Come From—An Indigenous

Pacific Critique of the Genographic Project,” in Aroha Te Pareake Mead and Steven Ratuva, eds., Pacific Genes & Life Patents, Wellington: Llamado de la Tierra (2007), 117. On the global legal implications of individual and group consent, see Jason Grant Allen, “Group consent and the Nature of Group Belonging: Genomics, Race and Indigenous Rights,” Journal of Law, Information, and Science, vol. 28 (2010).

34

M. K. MATSUDA

terms of identifying and constructing genetic heritage cannot only be premised on the important, yet singular principle of informed consent. This is what Kanehe underscores: the informed consent of individuals does not transfer historical or cultural authority for heritage. “Very few samples have been taken from individuals…yet the outcomes of the research are attributed to the entire Indigenous group of which they are a part.”15 The issue is that scientific extraction does not always, or even often, account for the collectively understood genealogical dimensions of genetic tracings. Such questions were captured by this genealogical approach to the history of noted scholar-activists like Haunani-Kay Trask in Hawai‘i, for whom genealogy was understood principally a set of obligations manifesting care for the land and a present community connection. The important point is that this is in distinction to an ideal signification (progress, civilization, science). In Trask’s formulation, genealogical knowledge meant an instantiation of an active and particularistic history and, in her work, the continuing challenge of colonialism as the “exemplary” shaper of a problematic present. “How do we frame an approach that will accomplish all things genealogical we are required to accomplish…that need to be accomplished because we live in a capitalist, imperialist society. That’s a big problem for us.”16 Her interest was a structural critique of global systems—a mainstay of such readings—but more specifically, an insistent visibility is given to genealogy as a localized cultural imperative of the Hawaiian people. Though identifiable as intensely attached to K¯anaka Maoli experience and not a universal truth claim (i.e. science), the genealogical focus was one resonating also in other intellectual traditions seeking critical perspectives on Western progress, perfectibility, and histories of advancement toward civilization and away from barbarism. Critiquing truth claims is a resonant anti-colonial strategy when tied to distinguishing community experiences from grand narratives. The French philosopher Michel Foucault had a famous and oft-cited 1971 formulation of this distinction, based upon a critical understanding of genealogy. He argued, “Genealogy…requires patience and a knowledge 15 Le’a Malia Kanehe, “From Kumulipo,” 117. 16 Haunani-Kay Trask, interview by Man Chui Leung, Vancouver Writers Festival

(November 1996), https://web.archive.org/web/20030118040345/http://mypage.dir ect.ca/e/epang/InterviewHaunani.html (accessed February 23, 2021).

2

GENEALOGIES

35

of details and it depends on a vast accumulation of source materials.” Its “cyclopean monuments” are constructed from “discreet and apparently insignificant truths and according to a rigorous method.” Importantly, “it rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies. It opposes itself to the search for “origins.”17 The referencing of Foucault is not simply an exercise in the useful citation of influential thinking. ‘Umi Perkins has worked to reconstruct Hawaiian histories with everyday Indigenous experiences, moving away from narratives that replace K¯anaka Maoli pasts with purported colonial enlightenment. In this way, Perkins notes, “Commonalities emerge from a comparison of mo‘ok¯u‘auhau, Nietzschean and Foucauldian genealogies,” in that all fully underscore disparities in unexamined assumptions of histories based on lineal descent, and “all are concerned with power (mana).”18 In her own critical epistemologies, N¯alani Wilson details her own work, as well as that of Julie Kaomea and Linda Tuhiwai Smith to note, “While there are clearly distinct differences in the ways Foucault thinks about genealogy and K¯anaka Maoli women utilise mo‘ok¯u‘auhau within contemporary academic texts, the insights offered by Foucault have nevertheless informed this thesis and academic lineage.”19 In this, N¯alani Wilson draws together the mo‘ok¯ u‘auhau knowledge of Lilikal¯a Kame‘eleihiwa, Kaomea, Manulani Meyer, Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘¯opua, with Foucauldian concepts of discourse—the epistemological structures of knowledge and its constitution—to reexamine the experiences of Hawaiian women voyagers and the way “discourses contour possibilities in relation to what can be ‘said,’ ‘known,’ and done.”20

17 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Ithaca: Cornell University Press (1980), 140. 18 ‘Umi Perkins, “Mo‘ok¯ u‘auhau and Mana,” in N¯alani Wilson-Hokowhitu, ed., The Past Before Us: Mo‘ok¯ u‘auhau as Methodology, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press ¯ (2019), 75. Also, N¯alani Wilson-Hokowhitu, He Pukoa Kani ‘Aina: Kanaka Maoli approaches to mo‘ok¯u‘auhau as methodology,” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, (June 2012), 137–147. 19 Kathryn Louise N¯ alani Wilson, N¯ a Mo‘ok¯ u‘auhau Holowa‘a: Native Hawaiian Women’s Stories of the Voyaging Canoe H¯ ok¯ ule‘a, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Otago (2010), 113. On the development of cultural, historical, and genealogical consciousness, KL N¯alani Wilson, “View from the Mountain: Moloka‘i Nui a Hina,” Junctures, no. 5 (December, 2005), 31–2. 20 N¯ alani Wilson, 115. See other uses, Andrew Lattes, “Foucault, Phenomenology and Modernity in Melanesia,” Oceania, vol. 84, no. 1, (March 2914) 88–94.

36

M. K. MATSUDA

Among other critical scholars, the political theorist Jens Bartelson’s investigations into “genealogies of sovereignty” similarly note: “A genealogy has not as its task to tell what actually happened in the past, but to describe how the present became logically possible… It does not aim to describe or explain past ages or past worldviews in their entirety but focuses only on those episodes of the past which are crucial to our understanding of what was singled out as problematic in the present.” As such, he argues, these are not antiquarian chronicles, for genealogical approaches “must also be exemplary. The historical argument of genealogy proceeds by means of examples.”21 In this way genealogical understanding is a powerful personal commitment, and in Oceania, it invests Indigenous academics themselves. Lily George from the Bay of Islands identifies herself not only as an anthropologist, but “Because I am an indigenous anthropologist, who I am as a cultural being has a fundamental influence on how I perceive the world and analyze it.” This embraces stories that ensure t¯upuna—ancestors— “live on in us and around us…they connect us to the physical features of our landscape, which become imbued with spiritual meaning through narratives.” Both time and space are reshaped to embody a “standing place” for reaching outward to the world.22 The Hawaiian scholar and activist Lilikal¯a Kame‘eleihiwa has noted as part of her critiques of colonial histories, the imperialist colonization of time itself, and its remedies through a standing place: “It is as if the Hawaiian stands firmly in the present, with his back to the future, and his eyes fixed upon the past, seeking historical answers for present-day dilemmas. Such an orientation is to the Hawaiian an eminently practical one, for the future is unknown, whereas the past in rich in glory and knowledge.”23 The world ahead will not be constituted by the pursuit of a gleaming future, but by proper reverence and learning inherited from the world before. In this way, the future is behind the present—and the past is ahead. In the Pacific, these relationships of past, present, and future anchor the ancestral lineages that are paramount to preserving familial and 21 Jens Bartleson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1995), 8. 22 Lily George, “The Interweaving of People, Time, and Place—Whakapapa as Context and Method,” Pacific Studies, vol. 33, nos. 2/3 (August/December, 2010), 242–4. 23 Epeli Hau‘ofa, “Pasts to Remember,” 66, Lilikal¯ a Kame‘eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires, Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press (1992), 22–3.

2

GENEALOGIES

37

community identifications across generations. Though disrupted by the colonial era, or continuing cross-generational fractures, kinship systems were also materialized in the practices of everyday life, weaving together communities of places as well as across times. Historical legitimacy and cultural definition were always key imperatives, and fashioning as well as telling are both important elements of tracing lineages. Lorimer Fison’s and Alfred William Howitt’s Kamilaroi and Kurnai (1880) both utilized and generated anthropological methods to challenge prevailing evolutionary ideas of human development, based significantly on fieldwork and Oceanian genealogical and kinship studies.24 M¯aori scholars and leaders such as Sir Apirana Ngata integrated genealogical approaches with a broader understanding of lived contexts beyond strict bloodlines, proposing that profound genealogical research connecting past and present could be done with the minute books of the Native Land Court, noting that such records, thoughtfully studied, illustrated “M¯aori customs relating not only to land tenure, but also to birth, marriage, death, war, peace-making, conquest, gifts, mana, chieftainship…”.25 Genealogies could frame an entire historical and cultural experience of both individuals and communities. As sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel explains it, genealogies are not only elucidations of natural familial phenomena nor simply historical records. “Rather than simply documenting who our ancestors were, they are the narratives we construct to actually make them our ancestors.”26 Not surprisingly, the inclusion or exclusion of kin and ancestors from family and community lineages continues to be politicized in Oceania and elsewhere, in notable cases where colonial law established blood quantum distinctions to classify the “true” indigenous, or in the adjudicating of identity claims from descendants of mixed parentage. Given these intersecting claims and traditions, it is particularly challenging to simply imagine Pacific Islander histories in terms of genealogies if defined by strict formalized notions of family descent, parentage, and 24 Helen Gardner, Patrick McConvell, Southern Anthropology: a History of Fison and

Howitt’s Kamilaroi and Kurnai, Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian (2015), esp. ch. 2,3,15. 25 Joseph Selwyn Te Rito, “Whakapapa: A framework for understanding identity,” MAI Review (2007), Article 2,2. 26 Eviatar Zerubavel, Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity, and Community, Oxford University Press (2012), 77.

38

M. K. MATSUDA

offspring and marriage across generations. The vocabulary alone maps only elusively on the relationship of living communities and ancestors, and the complexities clarify why challenges in a decolonization framework generate their own counter-narratives to colonial histories as forms of political and cultural identity. These carry with them distinctive Islanderdefined genealogical visions that are not, as often characterized, unstudied reactions to “Western” science, but a valorization of localized knowledge. In the M¯aori case, Aroha Te Pareake Mead has clarified the ways that genetics and genealogies are as intertwined and connected as a double helix. She notes, “For M¯aori, and many others, the human gene is genealogy. A physical gene is imbued with a life spirit handed down by ancestors, contributed to by each successive generation, and passed on to future generations.” More, she observes that M¯aori express Ira tangata, “which is the actual word for a gene and translates as ‘life spirit of mortals.” The other critical term is whakapapa, which embodies layers set upon layers, an understanding that “also means ‘genealogy’ and is the word most commonly used by M¯aori to conceptualize genes and DNA.”27 Setting up a Framework for Genomic Research, Maui Hudson has also elaborated the cultural logic of whakapapa as the nexus of a web that is woven through what is customary, proper, valued, and spiritual in sharing meanings of tikanga, taonga, wairua, and multiple M¯aori concepts, growing from the interrelationships between whakapapa, mana, tika, and manaakitanga, the force and power of people and things that are correct and true, shaped by respect and care for others. All of the elements are necessary, interdependent, and expressive of each other.28

27 Aroha Te Pareake Mead, “Genealogy, Sacredness, and the Commodities Market,” Cultural Survival: Genes, People and Property, vol. 20, no. 2 (Summer 1996). http://www.culturalsurvival.org/ourpublications/csq/article/genealogy-sacredness- andcommodities-market, 3–4. 28 Maui Hudson, “Key Concepts: Cultural Logic,” and “Te Mata Ira Framework for Genomic Research,” slides 9, 20, CELSI Cultural Foundation: Presentation to SING Aotearoa (January 24, 2018). See also Maui Hudson, Aroha Te Pareake Mead, David Chagné, Nick Roskruge, Sandy Morrison, Philip L. Wilcox, Andrew C. Allan, “Indigenous Perspectives and Gene Editing in Aotearoa New Zealand,” Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology, 7:70, (April 11, 2019), Fig. 1, p. 3, for survey across ten studies (2005– 2017), as “Reference to key M¯aori concepts,” Whakapapa, Mauri, Kaitiakitanga, Mana, as well as extended value enhancement and value diminishment due to gene editing across a dozen M¯aori values and concepts, 6.

2

GENEALOGIES

39

Scholars like Jonathan Te Rire have drawn distinctions between Western taxonomies and evolutionary process among living organisms, and how parallels with M¯aori whakapapa are likewise established upon taxonomic and nomenclature frameworks, yet very differently oriented. That is, “Whakapapa expounds familial links and views life as being interdependent on one another. The indigenous perspective is that all life forms emanate from the primordial parents of the living world, life both tangible and intangible.” This is premised upon the inherited and underlying connections that allow communities of kin and relation to use “our own worldview to categorise, classify and annotate each element,” a comprehension not just of categorical knowledge, but a responsibility to “having a familial link to everything around us.”29 These considerations are also taken up by Mere Roberts and Bradford Haami, et al., as the knowledge that encompasses the interdependence of the natural, human, and spiritual worlds. The logic of thinking through the “mental construct” of whakapapa—the literal “layering”—is an evocation and embodiment of both a material and spiritual plurality that is incorporated and immanent in all parts of creation. There is an understanding of whakapapa that is designated for the human realm, and as such somewhat shares commonalities with the framework of genealogy and pedigree, being the acknowledgment of human kin, descendants, and relatives who are understood to have shared blood ties—latterly understood as common genes—and derived from a common ancestor.30 This can have mapping, therefore, on genetic understandings of individual and familial ties across generations. Whakapapa, however, according to M¯aori scholars, also incorporates a much broader set of knowledge and one that does not separate the human from the non-human world. In fact,

29 Jonathan Te Rire, “Taxonomy—M¯ aori Whakapapa Versus Western Science,” International Journal of Arts & Sciences, vol. 5, no. 3 (2012), 59, 67. 30 Dame Joan Metge, “Whakapapa–New Zealand Anthropology: Beginnings,” Sites:

New Series, Vol. 10, No. 1 (2013), 1–12. Also, Joseph Selwyn Te Rito, “Whakapapa: A framework for understanding identity,” MAI Review (2007), Article 2, 1–5. For intensive detail, see N¯epia Mahuika, “A Brief History of Whakapapa: M¯aori Approaches to Genealogy,” Genealogy: Special Issue: Indigenous Perspectives on Genealogical Research, vol. 3, no. 2, (May 2019), https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy3020032.

40

M. K. MATSUDA

it encompasses the material and spiritual nature of all things and is dualistic—rather than binary and exclusive. There is no living and non-living, or nature-culture, or natural-supernatural divide.31 As such, what one considers as one’s ancestors is not uniquely a human evolutionary line that ascended from familial lineage and an ancient evolutionary hominin. Such predecessors are also enmeshed in a fabric of other vital ancestral presences such as plants like the taro, or k¯umara.32 More than simply related—that is, juxtaposed categorically—they are all also necessary as elements of completion on a kinship and family model. As the whakapapa defines a world that is not binary but dualistic, it is comprehensive and requires a matching and integration of spiritual and material principles. In this way, the principle of regard for and obligation to kinship responsibility inheres in such an integrated experience of “genealogy” that is much beyond simple lineal descent ancestor tracing. This is notably evident in many Polynesian familial and relations, where male–female, and especially sister–brother ties and pairs define the right completeness of a family network. Even here, however, a tracing through family lines of biological inheritance seems a poor way to try to convince communities of a verifiable picture of their own ancestries. Serge Tcherkezoff points out in Samoa, that village marriage is profoundly exogamous, a trait that most Westerners would attribute to a self-referential incest taboo. Yet it is kinship rather than genetics that really makes this determination, for within particular frameworks, because chiefs, whether male or female, are “father” to all members of a village, the inhabitants and community are necessarily all brother and sister to one another. As Damon Salesa has pointed out for the multi-stranded connections of Samoans, “Individuals would trace their genealogy back to different

31 Mere Roberts and John R. Fairweather, South Island M¯ aori Perceptions of Biotechnology, Research Report no. 268 (July 2004), 4. For details, Roberts R.M., Haami B., Benton R., Satterfield T., Finucane M.L and Henare M., “Whakapapa as a Mental Construct of Mäori, and its Implications for Genetic Engineering.” The Contemporary Pacific, vol. 16, no. 1 (2005), 1–28. 32 Mere Roberts, “Ways of Seeing,” Sites: New Series, vol. 10, no. 1 (2013), 94–7.

2

GENEALOGIES

41

villages and would often feel those ties in very different, practical, ordinary ways. One’s identities were plural, and this was expected.”33 In Fiji, to have no sister or brother is to be daku lala (with an empty back) or without back-up, so to speak. According to Simonne Pauwels, this is why in Fijian villages parents without a daughter or a son may take in somebody else’s child, so that their children can learn how to be crosssex siblings. After a few years, “the child will return to its parents.”34 This underscores that primacy given to shaping and maintaining the brother and sister relationship as definitive of a kinship network, rather than a more linear blood inheritance across parent and children generations. This is reflected also in comments from Aotearoa New Zealand. Noted one M¯aori woman, when asked about genetic engineering, “what is whakapapa anyhow? It tells us we are all related. We are part of the bigger picture so they are all our brothers and sisters.”35 The nature of these interrelations is varied and also consistent across the Pacific Islands in their density of kinship, and H¯ ufanga ‘Okustino M¯ahina observes that genealogy “is a form of formal, substantial (and practical) intersection” of multiple tendencies, statuses, and characteristics. Indeed, “The Tongan word for genealogy is hohoko, literally meaning ‘connecting repeatedly’…The root word is hoko, which means several things: an event, occurrence, or affair that is taking place; connecting or tying together two or more things; ascending to occupy a title, role, or position; being next in line, as in order of persons, events, or things, and a person inheriting another’s physical, emotional and social attributes.” The web of “vitalizing and revitalizing” creates connections and separations.36 M¯ahina likens these to the branches of a tree and its leaves, and the symbolism is not only metaphorical as in family tree representations. Genealogical Pacific ties are deeply embedded not only through blood and kin, but also natural world expressions.

33 Damon Salesa, “Samoa’s Half-Castes and Some Frontiers of Comparison,” in Ann Laura-Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire, Durham and London: Duke University Press (2006), 83–4. 34 Simonne Pauwels, “The Vasu Position and the Sister’s Mana,” in Christina Toren, Simonne Pauwels, eds., Living Kinship in the Pacific, Berghan Books: New York and Oxford (2015), 149. 35 Mere Roberts and John Fairweather, South Island, 70. 36 H¯ ufanga ‘Okustino M¯ahina, “T¯a, V¯a, and Moana: Temporality, Spatiality, and

Indigeneity,” Pacific Studies, vol. 33, nos. 2/3 (August/ December, 2010), 175.

42

M. K. MATSUDA

In the Hawaiian tradition, such ties are manifest, as N¯alani Wilson comments, “The Kumulipo explains the genealogies of both commoners and ali‘i, our chiefs. From this creation chant the evolution of all life is explained. Life does not begin when we are born; instead, our lives are an extension of all life forms that have come before, including the plants, animals, elements of earth, sky, wind, and rain.”37 Through culture and narrative as well as biology, individuals and communities are connected through shared genealogies and an embodied present to not only familial forebears, but active ways of living and understanding. Historian David Chang has observed, through the study of hundreds of mele and mo‘oleo (songs and stories) that K¯anaka Maoli people in Hawai‘i understood they “were connected to global geography by genealogy, by the gods and other powerful beings, and by the movement of people, birds, and other living things.”38 Likewise, anthropologist Sandra Bamford, working with Kamea communities along the south gulf coast of New Guinea, observes that the very foundations of familial descent defined by generations of offspring born by the sexual transmission of substance between male and female is, itself, not a universal experience but a highly particular construction of Western “biological paradigms.” As she notes, for Kamea peoples the physical making of peoples is not what connects them over time as social and familial inheritors of each other: “For Kamea, human reproductive potential is directly tied to other species, rather than defined in contradistinction to them.”39 In fact, it is how non-human species and elements of the surrounding world are treated and regarded that makes the totality of human kin relationships possible. This web of relationships can have wide resonance across worlds that are often considered not only nonhuman, but non-living. Teora S. Morris has done significant studies on stones, noting, “In many Pacific epistemologies, stones are genuinely alive with their own spirits and life

37 Kathryn Louise N¯ alani Wilson, N¯ a Mo‘ok¯ u ‘auhau Holowa‘a: Native Hawaiian

Women’s Stories of the Voyaging Canoe H¯ ok¯ ule‘a, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Otago (2010), 48. 38 David A. Chang, The World and All the Things Upon It, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (2018), 8. 39 Sandra C. Bamford, Biology Unmoored: Melanesian reflections on life and biotechnology, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press (2007), 11.

2

GENEALOGIES

43

stories.”40 These stones communicate with spirits as well as living beings, mark times and places, and importantly mediate connections to the past, including the preservation of memories of navigation and shared cultural experiences. Morris reviews the “genealogy of stone” through the volcano goddess Pele in Hawai‘i, the reverence of paired, carved, or polished stones in Samoa, Tahiti, and Mo‘orea, and especially the famed megalithic trilithion in Tonga, the Ha‘amonga a Maui. In Vanuatu, modern descendants ritually enacting the memory of ancestral leader Roi Mata make full use of cave and rock art experiences to acknowledge their continuity.41 Kekuewa Kikiloi further observes how qualities of land and space are also inscribed by naming traditions of islands and archipelagic clusters such that their “genealogical relevance to our ancestral past” unifies land, sea, and transformational remembering.42 Inseparability from the natural world becomes the formally political where both human and environmental connections are deeply invested in a decolonizing polity that roots itself in building “genuine global indigenous ownership of genealogies” by establishing local governance and claims for cultural autonomy over the past, present, and future. This is the case in the admired, scorned, and always controversial Nation of Turaga, established by Chief Viraleo Boborenvanua on Pentecost Island in Vanuatu, where Viraleo and his supporters have generated an education system, a local currency based on the valuation of prized boars’ tusks, and an adoption of “kustom law and commerce.” First declared at a United Nations indigenous people’s conference in 2001, Viraleo has showcased an institute to act as a “coordinating centre for indigenous education and its relationship to all indigenous systems of living,” contested with the Reserve Bank of Vanuatu over his currency, and drawn supporters and students keen on his vision of tradition.43 40 Teora S. Morris, N¯ a P¯ ohaku Ola Kapaem¯ ah¯ u a Kapuni: Performing for Stones at Tupuna Crossings in Hawai‘i, thesis, Honolulu: Pacific Island Studies, University of Hawai‘i, Manoa (May 2019), 31. 41 Morris, N¯ a P¯ohaku Ola Kapaem¯ah¯u a Kapuni, 32–6. 42 Kekuewa Kikiloi, “Rebirth of an Archipelago: Sustaining a Hawaiian Cultural Identity

for People and Homeland,” H¯ ulili: Multidisciplinary Research on Hawaiian Well-Being, vol. 6 (2010), 74–5. 43 Edward Cavanough, “The chief fighting for an indigenous Vanuatu nation,” Aljazeera (26 August 2017). See Hilda Lini, “Appropriate Education to Meet Human Security Needs of the 21st Century,” paper, International Conference on Poverty, Prosperity and Progress, Wellington (November 2000), cited in Maria Bargh, “Romance and

44

M. K. MATSUDA

In a forum on biotechnology and globalization, Viraleo and his director of the Pacific Concerns Resource Centre, Motarilavoa Hilda Lini, shared their views that Turaga Nation was animated by “our indigenous origins, beliefs, land, language, genealogy, kinship and distinct cultures and the process of communication and relationship in its appropriate form,” all interdependent and shared within a “multi-dimensional natural world.” They underscored the interference and losses of the global colonization process and the alienation of “natural immunities and natural genealogies,” citing the reassertion of dignity, integrity, and sovereignty with the independence of Vanuatu in 1980 after “374 years of foreign influence and colonialism.”44 Turaga Nation built a development vision, governance system, and administrative headquarters based on indigenous communities and local authority and representation. Moreover, Turaga issued a 2007 Lavatmagemu Declaration from a forum organized by the Vanuatu Indigenous Peoples Bureau, “We recognize territories as defined by tribes who are spiritually connected to their indigenous place of origin and know their territorial boundaries for land governance and natural resources that sustain life from generation to generation.” In this way, referencing European Union interests in local biological resources, Turaga would be “a signatory to the petition opposing the modified genome project. This is to ensure that there is respect of the integrity to natural generational species according to the creation law, natural laws and protocols, therefore not disturbing the spirit of peace within an individual, family, tribe, community and the entire biological world.” The genealogical, genomic, familial, community, environmental, and generational were declared inextricable—and distinctly tied to resisting “colonial territorial boundaries that have limited us to reservations, bands, colonial territories or divide our tribes into many countries and separate state governments.”45

Resistance in the Pacific: Neoliberalism and Indigenous Resistance in the Pacific,” Revue Juridique Polynésienne, vol. 1 (118), 267. 44 Chief Viraleo Boborenvanua and Motarilavoa Hilda Lini, “WVEU I NAGOLUMUN RAHUANA: Safeguarding Genetic Inheritance, Turaga Experience,” Pacific Genes and Life Patents, 190–1. 45 Motarilavoa Hilda Lini, presenter on behalf of the Vanuatu Indigenous Peoples Forum, “Statement to the 6th Session, United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues,” New York: United Nations Headquarters (May 2007), 1–2; Chief Viraleo Boborenvanua and Motarilavoa Hilda Lini, “WVEU I NAGOLUMUN RAHUANA:

2

GENEALOGIES

45

This shared experience underscores how genealogies in deep traditions can then inform subsequent generations through a common heritage. These can be rooted across the Pacific through political, yet also professional and academic identities. This is evident in the work of ethnographic researcher Rona Tamiko Halualani, who regularly interviewed Hawaiians sharing their “stories of their family relations to Hawaiian royalty,” particularly to King Kamehameha and Queen Lili‘uokalani. After extensive study and analysis of oral histories, Halualani began to understand that the connections made between royal lines and current generations were “the raw material of identity resignifications.”46 Halaulani recognized this not just as a prideful claim for herself and her immediate lineage, but a critical formation of memory and identity through genealogy, a “reconnection” through bloodlines and also culture-wide shared pasts and tales. It was also a practice, according to Laurel Mei-Singh and Vernadette-Vicuña Gonzalez, to recognize and reassert a previously dispossessed history for a people. That dispossessed history is wrapped around the deposed Queen Lili‘uokalani, imprisoned in the ‘Iolani Palace, where she “recounted her mo‘ok¯u‘auhau” to affirm her right to the throne transforming not only her person, but the Palace itself into “a place where Hawaiians and their supporters continue to gather to protest the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom and demand independence from the United States.”47 David Chang has cogently summarized it, “In the face of Westerners’ colonialist ambitions in nineteenth-century Hawai‘i, the practice of mo‘ok¯u‘auhau was of the essence in defense of Kanaka Maoli sovereignty.”48 The power of genealogy as a web of connections and therefore not just linear pedigree is key here, aligning contemporary lives with Kamehameha, Kalakaua, and Lili‘uokalani. It is an awareness of the intertwining of cultural continuity and political strategy. Citing the history of Hawaiian Safeguarding Genetic Inheritance, Turaga Experience,” Pacific Genes and Life Patents, 194. 46 Rona Tamiko Halualani, In the Name of Hawaiians: Native Identities and Cultural Politics (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 244. On claiming ancestors, see Eviatar Zerubavel, Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity, Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 47 Laurel Mei-Singh, Vernadette Vicuña-Gonzalez, “DeTours: Mapping Decolonial Genealogies in Hawai‘i,” Critical Ethnic Studies, 32, vol. 3, no. 2 (Fall 2017), 182. 48 David Chang, “Transcending Settler Colonial Boundaries with Mo‘ok¯ u‘auhau: Genealogy as Transgressive Methodology,” in N¯alani Wilson-Hokowhitu, The Past Before Us: Mo‘ok¯ u‘auhau as Methodology, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press (2019).

46

M. K. MATSUDA

knowledge, Sujit Sivasundaram has noted that one of the most significant projects of King Kalakaua in the nineteenth century was to establish a board of genealogy for his kingdom and people. Kalakaua’s example is instructive however because his aim was not only to affirm Hawaiian tradition through an elaboration of bloodlines. Rather, he developed his project as a means to understand the relationship of genealogy, particularly the manifold creation elements of the sacred Kumulipo narrative, to more recently developed scientific explorations coming from outside the kingdom. As teams of surveyors and marine researchers landed on his shores, Kalakaua sought “to align the discoveries of oceanographic science with genealogical histories.” Sivasundaram notes that this “serves as a very revealing example of an explicit and self-aware comparison between tradition and science.”49 It served as the basis for connecting the entirety of the living and physical worlds with spiritual realms as well as human historical experiences. As N¯alani Wilson comments (earlier), the Kumulipo is a genealogical recounting of both past figures and living generations, linking commoners and chiefs. Moreover, it is an epic of creation through which the development and evolution of all life are explained, ordered, and given purpose.50 The historian and political scholar Noenoe K. Silva makes the connections between culture and natural history clear by noting that such engagements with surveying the natural world came from a specific Hawaiian interest to demonstrate “that what they had known all along was verified by the new findings of science, at a time when indigenous traditions were being disparaged.”51 Keepers of these changes like the noted Hawaiian historian and court genealogist David Malo undoubtedly reshaped their narratives over time, by engaging with waves of new knowledge, religion, and culture. Malo’s nineteenth-century texts are a prime indicator of the confluence of Islander cosmological traditions with cross-currents and correspondences between geology, marine exploration, and genealogy. In his 1838 Hawaiian Antiquities: Mo‘oleo Hawai‘i, he ranged over history, memory, tradition, local customs and practices, and the mo‘ok¯ u‘auhau, about 49 Sujit Sivasundaram, “Science,” in Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People, ed. David Armitage and Alison Bashford (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 241. 50 Wilson, “N¯ a Mo‘ok¯u‘auhau Holowa‘a,” 48. 51 See Noenoe K. Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American

Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

2

GENEALOGIES

47

which he wrote “The genealogies have many separate lines, each one different from the other, but running into each other.” Some of these focused on the origin of the land and whether it was begotten by ancestors, and if so, which. But he also observed “learned men” coming into the islands with their own speculations: “These scientists from other lands have advanced a theory and expressed the opinion…that the islands rose up out of the ocean as a result of volcanic action.” In tandem, he offered his own thoughts on volcanic soils and rocks.52 These dialogues between ancestors, historians, and scientists were being worked out as the Hawaiian court contended with the legendary political lineage of the kingdom as well as the scientific interpretation of the land that underpinned the entire cosmology of ancestors and generations of living things, including the K¯anaka Maoli people.53 Those cross-currents have become even more evident in recent years. Kalakaua and Malo understood the significant and, in their time, necessary connection between genealogy and history—and both as inseparable from scientific investigation. The oceanic anthropologist Stefan Helmreich has, generations later, observed in the age of molecular biology another elemental connection between ancestral environments and the articulation of personal heredity. “The gene…started its career as a metaphysical concept, gathered solidity as DNA, and now finds its borders blurred as scientists describe genetic processes as inseparable from ecological webs.” He cited researchers who compare “the marine microbial component of a liter of seawater to the complexity of the human genome.” It was—and is—the human genome in an oceanic setting that particularly attracts considerable attention from researchers and activists. As the mayor of Honolulu enthused at a 2002 biotechnology conference, “We also have in Hawai‘i a very diverse human gene pool, good for developing new pharmaceuticals.”54 Without comment, he was referring to

52 David Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities: Mo‘oleo Hawai‘i, Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press (1951, original 1903). 53 Ibid, for Silva and Malo. For historiographical context, see Science, Empire, and the European Exploration of the Pacific, ed. Tony Ballantyne (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); also Roy MacLeod and Philip Rehbock, ed. Nature in its Greatest Extent: Western Science in the Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press 1988). 54 Stefan Helmreich, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009), 8, 109.

48

M. K. MATSUDA

the biologies of indigenous Hawaiians, and immigrant Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino populations. Microassays of Asian and Oceanic genetic material, mappings, and questions about pasts and supposed futures predicted by sequencing could create unique business and scientific opportunities. Such enthusiasm did not go uncontested. These views of diverse cultures as exploitable resources, providing endlessly recombined biochemical treasures, were challenges to traditional understandings and practices of genealogies. Pacific Islanders famously knew this through their own bloodlines, along with sophisticated practices of genealogical connectedness to the non-human world of natural ancestors in the elements and environment, through animal husbandry and horticultural variation, as with taro and k¯umara plantings as familial relations. As such, these connections were inextricable from the natural environment and collective responsibility for shared bodily, oceanic, and land resources. This observation about land tenure is key, for as much as ancestral connections speak of cultural continuity, reverence for history and forebears, and intergenerational responsibility, they are also outright political and legal claims. In Aotearoa New Zealand, for example, Margaret Kawharu has unwrapped the ways that the country’s foundational document—the Treaty of Waitangi—allows for claims of redress against violation of its historic compact to provide equity for the M¯aori communities. She notes that the claim process requires evidence, negotiations, and agreements, and that “At every stage in the process, claimants are required to identify themselves in terms of their whakapapa,” and yet what counts as an identity definition is legally bounded within Crown legal strictures, and can be constantly redefined, leading to a process that is “shaped by a legal, adversarial settlement process and an iniquitous colonial past.” In effect, while the force of whakapapa is widely acknowledged, the requirement of sharing specifics as a form of legal validation can be troubling. Notes Kawharu, “It is considered by some to be knowledge that should only be handed down to and recited by specialists, tohunga (spiritual leader) and rangatira (acknowledged leader), for its own protection and for the survival of the group.”55 In a legal system which contests,

55 Margaret Kawharu, “Whakapapa and Metamorphosis,” Graeme S. MacRae and Lily George, eds., Sites: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, vol. 10, no. 1 (2013), 60–65. See, in detail, “Statement of Evidence of Margaret Anne Kawharu on Behalf of the Plaintiff,” High Court of New Zealand, Auckland Registry, I Te K¯ oti Matua o Aotearoa, T¯amaki Makaurau Rohe, CIV-2015–404-2033 (June 2, 2020).

2

GENEALOGIES

49

questions, and attempts to decline claims, such knowledge is at risk. By the middle twentieth century, legal interrogations of indigenous knowledge also paralleled newer questions that scientific investigators had long asked about origins, cultures, and the civilizational state of cultures and peoples around the world, from the anthropology and phrenology of “primitive” peoples to the displacement of local resistance to colonial knowledge projects into narratives of “anti-scientism.” This is a point underscored by N¯epia Mahuika, that in the M¯aori experience, while whakapapa is the framework for the world and chronicles the intertwining of the natural and spiritual worlds, and the social organization of human interactions and history, it is also itself transformed over generations. Far from an antiquarian collection of lineages, it is a living practice, responsive to its times. Maintained traditionally by revered experts in the tribes, it was appropriated for detailed ethnographic pedigrees by P¯akeh¯a (white) researchers as analogous to Western genealogies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The 1970s onward, however, with political and indigenous culture agitation Pacific-wide, saw M¯aori voices again came to the fore, and “a desire by M¯aori to take back ownership of the way whakapapa might be used and thought of as a methodology. It Is not surprising that this coincided with the Land Marches in 1975, the Bastion Point occupation in 1977 and Springbok Tour protests, in 1981.” These were all signal moments in M¯aori political experience to reassert historic land and rights claims, and denounce international racism as represented by a traveling rugby team from apartheid South Africa. These assertions meant a “focus less on anthropological and ethnographical questions about kinship, and more on land claims and historic grievances.” In the twenty-first century, emphasis has “moved toward a decolonizing politics, in which the reclaiming of our knowledge also meant repossessing methods and definitions of whakapapa,” outside the frameworks of Western history and colonial assimilation.56 Within these current frameworks, there have always been new questions, such as the relationship of whakapapa, genealogies, and genetic science, along “the narrow sense of whakapapa as denoting biological ancestry,” or how “to utilize whakapapa (genealogical information) to 56 See N¯ epia Mahuika, “A Brief History of Whakapapa: M¯aori Approaches to Genealogy,” Genealogy: Special Issue: Indigenous Perspectives on Genealogical Research, 32, vol. 3, no. 2 (May 2019), 8–11, https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy3020032.

50

M. K. MATSUDA

explore patterns of genetic variation unique to the iwi,” to explore health and disease histories through tests and screening.57 The new genomic science has both tried to move beyond, while remaining entwined with the older lived and practiced narratives. Since the “molecular turn,” the politics of decolonization came to bear on actors whose generational and genealogical knowledge was being transformed, not internally through culture and practice, but from without, by protocols and power. And, likewise, those institutions were themselves being interrogated. That is, not only an assertion of continuity and lived experience, but that experience, and its obligations, transformed into critique of histories, presents, and futures as previously and currently carried forth. What could Pacific peoples—and research scientists dealing with their disciplines’ own racist and at times eugenicist legacies—shape or claim as creators and inheritors of their own pasts?

57 Donald Evans, “Whakapapa, Genealogy, and Genetics,” Bioethics 26, vol. 24, no. 4 (2012) 43–9; Maui L. Hudson, Annabel L.M. Ahuiri-Driscoll, et al., “Whakapapa—A Foundation for Genetic Research?” Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, no. 4 (March 2007), 43.

CHAPTER 3

About Ancestors

In 2006, Samoan-New Zealander writer and actor Oscar Kightley and M¯aori media personality Nathan Rarere sent cell samples taken from their own cheek swabs to a commercial DNA ancestry firm, framing a documentary film sojourn from New Zealand to the Cook Islands to Vanuatu to Taiwan in search of family forebears suggested by the test results. Speaking with parents, relatives, friends, and then strangers, the two made their way around the islands to a final stop in Taipei, where Rarere commented: “Taiwan was incredible. All the connections came together—language, culture, people. It was strange to realize that after this whole journey we didn’t even need the DNA. We felt at home. In every cell in our body we carried the same DNA.”1 The film won honors at an international festival in Tahiti.2 Rarere’s comment about finding and carrying the lineage of a people in his cells across generations of familial and cultural lines is the personal 1 Made in Taiwan: Nathan and Oscar’s Excellent Adventure, directed by Dan Salmon (George Andrews Productions, Auckland, 2006). This chapter developed from “About Ancestors,” by Matt Matsuda, The Journal of Pacific History, vol. 56. no.3, copyright © The Journal of Pacific History, Inc. By permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www. tandfonline.com on behalf of The Journal of Pacific History, Inc. 2 Grand Prix du Jury and Prix du Public at the 2007 Festival international du film documentaire océanien (or FIFO).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. K. Matsuda, Genealogies, Genomes, and Histories in the Pacific, Palgrave Studies in Pacific History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45449-3_3

51

52

M. K. MATSUDA

quest of many ancestry seekers, particularly those with interests in finding connections between—as in this case—Oceania and Asia. Commercial DNA kits attract Islanders like Rimuu Williams from Palau, who video blogs: “I’m like, Southeast Asian, Polynesian 40% and Melanesian 30%…. I knew I had Polynesian, but not that much Melanesian … it goes back like a thousand years, so I guess that’s like where my ancestors came from.”3 J. Smooove, identifying himself as Filipino, reads his test on camera to learn, “I’m literally for the most part Asian and Polynesian, you know what I mean … I guess there’s some culture I need to brush up on…. I think it’s important to know where your roots are, where you come from, but this isn’t necessarily going to define me.”4 In its deepest history, the Asian, Melanesian, and Polynesian story is so compelling and contested because it is not only a narrative of coeval, interconnected, adjacent, or interacting cultures and civilizations, but one of ancestry. Because the human settlement of the Pacific Islands is so strikingly dispersed across land and sea, yet joined by linguistic and cultural similitudes, the pursuit of forebears, ancestors, and reverse teleologies is pronounced. Historically, the complexity of ancestry is framed by not only knowledge exploration, but Western colonial presence and trade, often or always materially focused on—and interested in—links between islands and Asia, often with European mediation. Histories of origins and voyages, migrations, and the parsing out of “isolates” and those mixed together draw from long heritages of global movements of peoples. Sandalwood enslavement and harvesting from Fiji, the New Hebrides and New Caledonia, and Melanesian connections to Australia—under American and European captains—were ultimately connected to the Canton commodity trade. Labor migrations across the nineteenth century, with Japan and China exporting plantation workers to Hawai‘i, were also another indicator of these connections. All involved European or American colonial and trading agents, from labor recruiters to merchants, slavers, and contract negotiators played key roles. Likewise South Asian villagers becoming Indo-Fijians under colonial officials like Arthur Gordon, and Filipinos 3 Rimuu Williams, ‘Pacific Islander Ancestry DNA results from a Palauan’ (YouTube video), May 8, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnHAYx5XOFo (accessed February 12, 2021). 4 Smooove, ‘Ancestry DNA —I’m What!?!?!?!?’ (YouTube video), October 6, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIhBHp9uGnk (accessed February 12, 2021).

3

ABOUT ANCESTORS

53

marking island groups across the Pacific and tracing out major migration patterns linking Asian and the Pacific Islands with intercession from the Spanish and later the Americans. The Pacific War also meant movement in the 1940s, as did later decolonization struggles and global anti-imperial and pro-environmental engagements.5 Deep ancestry is therefore particularly resonant to claim. This is particularly true of the peoples of Melanesia and Polynesia, and the “where did they come from?” question has remained salient across generations of Islanders and investigators. This has not been a question reserved to academic historians, but—as commercial DNA testing has demonstrated—widely pursued by the general public, as well as researchers and scholars from many disciplines, who also ask, how all these are related and shaped across time? Though regularly studied as different academic domains, Asian and Oceanian studies are deeply intertwined not only through longstanding political, economic, immigrant—and colonial—ties, but also by questions about common ancestry. From popular commercial DNA testing to historical studies in linguistics, folklore, archaeology, biological anthropology, and sophisticated genome sequencing, deep histories of Oceanian Islander peoples have long been tied to “origin” traditions and reconstructions of lineages from the Asian mainland, notably through the Austronesian diaspora and its strong or weak interactions, much debated, with Melanesian cultures. From nineteenth-century linguistic theories and Lapita sites to twentieth-century ABO blood groupings and contemporary mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA assays, scholars have proposed at times conflicting interpretations of Oceania’s possible human heritage. Biological anthropologist Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith has offered a general chronology of Western scientific methodologies from physical anthropologyand skeletal studies to anthropological genetics and blood typing in the early twentieth century, to archaeological and linguistic redefinitions of populations from the 1960s to 1980s, to molecular

5 See Paul D’Arcy, ‘The Philippines as a Pacific Nation: A Brief History of Interaction between Filipinos and Pacific Islanders’; Judith A. Bennett, ‘Fluid Frontiers and Uncertain Geographies: US Controls on Immigration from the Pacific, c. 1880–1950’; Lewis Mayo, ‘Outermost Oceania? Taiwan and the Modalities of Pacific History’, Journal of Pacific History, vol. 56, no. 3 (2021).

54

M. K. MATSUDA

studies in the 1980s focused on gene mutations, up through mitochondrial DNA studies in the late 1980s. By the 1990s, Y-chromosome analyses became important in tracing paternal lines of population origins, evolving toward genome-wide studies in the first decades of the twentyfirst century.6 Studies in the academic register regularly combine knowledge drawn from multiple fields, ranging from history and anthropology to genomics, linguistics, and archaeology. Most are associated with the Lapita Cultural Complex—a reference to the famed dentate-stamped pottery sites from the Bismarck Archipelago to Tonga that archaeologists have reconstructed as evidence of Islander movements and settlements from Near to Far Oceania.7 Field research teams regularly survey archaeological sites for Neolithic ceramic, obsidian, and stone platform traces, linguistic continuities between island groups, and biological evidence of animal and plant translocations pointing to foraging communities, “whom we assume to have lived at low densities, possibly focused on resource concentrations along the coast but also venturing far into the interior of the large islands…these peoples were of necessity mobile, and their crossing numerous water gaps indicates considerable marine-transport capability, developed over thousands of years.”8 Researchers in Northern Island Melanesia have done detailed work to try to understand the “extraordinarily diverse” and deep histories in that region. Archaeology provides the material evidence of artifacts, traces of animals and plants and building, settlement, and culture patterns; language distributions can indicate associations with population expansions, and interactions and marriages between previously separated

6 Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith, “Biological Anthropology and Genetics in Pacific History,” The Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean, vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2023), esp. 227–38. 7 Stuart Bedford and Matthew Spriggs, eds., Debating Lapita: Distribution, Chronology, Society and Subsistence, Canberra: Australian National University Press (2019). For an overview, Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith, “Biological Anthropology and Genetics in Pacific History,” The Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean, vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2023), esp. 225–45. “Anthropological Genetics: The Early Years” and “Archaeological and Linguistic Evidence for Pacific Settlement and Implications for Biological Anthropology,” 228–32. 8 Peter J. Sheppard, “Lapita Colonization across the Near / Remote Oceania Boundary,” Current Anthropology, vol. 52, no. 6 (December 2011), https://doi.org/ 10.1086/662201.

3

ABOUT ANCESTORS

55

populations; genomics provides molecular evidence of key ancient mutations and the separation of lineages and haplotype distributions; anthropology can model population histories through geographic proximities and martial exchanges, while evaluating frameworks such as “population fissions” to note splitting of communities over wide geographies, or “isolation by distance” which favors interactions with neighbors.9 By the late twentieth and first decade of the twenty-first centuries, these patterns were further detailed and elaborated by biological anthropology and forensic biological research studies. Surveys of early Pacific Island settlement studies assess the field by noting, “Study of the genetic structure of Pacific populations has exploded in recent years, with considerable literature on the evidence produced by mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), nonrecombining Y-chromosome markers, and more recently, study of autosomal microsatellite variation.” Based on extrapolations from precise sampling, “Geneticists have tended to test their patterns against simple models”—using admixture as a standard to determine likely interactions between different sequences of historical migrations and theories about marriage and the genetic makeup of descendants.10 In 1999, one team under Rotterdam University’s Manfred Kayser ably summarized a growing field of investigations about Pacific Islanders, describing them as “descendants of Neolithic agriculturalists who expanded from island South-east Asia several thousand years ago.”11 Their work studied DNA samples from China and Taiwan to Java, the New Guinea highlands, New Guinea coast, Trobriand Islands, New Britain, and out to Samoa. Contemporary population geneticists have added new chapters, arguing for, in one version, a story that describes “a rapid expansion of

9 Keith Hunley, Michael Dunn, Eva Lindström, et al., “Inferring Prehistory from Genetic, Linguistic, and Geographic Variation,” Jonathan S. Friedlander, Genes, Language, and Culture in the Southwest Pacific, New York: Oxford University Press (2007), 141–56; Lisa Matisoo-Smith and J.H. Robins, ‘Origins and Dispersals of Pacific Peoples: Evidence from mtDNA Phylogenies of the Pacific Rat’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences vol. 101, no. 24 (2004), 9167. 10 Peter J. Sheppard, “Lapita Colonization across the Near / Remote Oceania Boundary,” Current Anthropology, vol. 52, no. 6 (December 2011), https://doi.org/ 10.1086/662201. 11 E. Hagelberg et al., ‘Molecular Genetic Evidence for the Human Settlement of the Pacific: Analysis of Mitochondrial DNA, Y Chromosome and HLA Markers’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences, vol. 354, no. 1379 (1999), 141.

56

M. K. MATSUDA

proto-Polynesian peoples from southern China/Taiwan, through eastern Indonesia, and into the Oceanic world during the mid-Holocene.”12 This narrative formulated generations earlier through linguistic and anthropological evidence as an “Austronesian diaspora,” has a particularly strong resonance because of the environmental context; the populations were, historically speaking, fast-moving and widely mobile due to water transport across large regions. Moving into territories previously unsettled by humans, they were likely partially “nomadic” in disseminating biology and culture in multiple, linked locales.13 The narrative also has a racial dimension that had been evoked already in the early twentieth century—in that it suggests Oceanian settlement from Asia to Polynesia without substantial influence from the Melanesian Pacific. The famed M¯aori-Irish scholar Te Rangi H¯ıroa (Sir Peter Buck), is a strong example of why debates over origins and settlement routes can matter. Noted for his extensive studies of Polynesian origins in the 1930s, and his popular Vikings of the Sunrise, H¯ıroa postulated a “Micronesian route” from Southeast Asia to the settlement of the Pacific Islands.14 During his research, H¯ıroa, then Director of M¯aori Hygiene in Auckland, was in correspondence with Henry D. Skinner of the Otago Museum in Dunedin, New Zealand, and Ronald B. Dixon of Harvard, who utilized craniological analysis to theorize racial typologies and therefore trace ancient migrations, and H¯ıroa was influenced by the work which concluded, “we hold that it was the Polynesian element in that people that enabled them to navigate their vessels from the Western Pacific to New Zealand…the Melanesians never made voyages other than what may be called coasting trips among the islands of their own groups.”15

12 Murray P. Cox, ‘Indonesian Mitochondrial DNA and its Opposition to a Pleistocene Era Origin of Proto-Polynesians in Island Southeast Asia’, Human Biology , vol. 77, no. 2 (2005), 186. 13 Peter Bellwood, James J. Fox and Darrell Tryon, ‘The Austronesians in History: Common Origins and Diverse Transformations’, in Peter Bellwood, James J. Fox and Darrell Tryon, ed., The Austronesians: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, Canberra: ANU E Press (2006), 1–13. 14 Sir Peter Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa), Vikings of the Sunrise, Christchurch: Whitcomb and Tombs (1964), 47–51. 15 Ronald B. Dixon, “A New Theory of Polynesian Origins,” The Journal of the Polynesian Society, vol. 30, no. 2 (118) (June 1921), 89.

3

ABOUT ANCESTORS

57

The Pacific has long been a region of projects whose assertion was also in part self-discovery. Reviewing the work historically, the archaeologist Patrick V. Kirch has argued that H¯ıroa strongly affirmed his M¯aori ancestry yet remained conscious throughout his professional life that he was not regarded an equal by many whites, and perhaps some of his scholarly colleagues. His migration theory was “not surprisingly one that avoided any association between the Polynesian people and the darkskinned inhabitants of Melanesia.”16 Here, there are multiple debates at stake: whether a likely voyaging and settlement route came from Asia, or whether Southeast Asia was a transit for peoples migrating from what are today China and Taiwan; whether groups fused with ancestral Lapita pottery cultures in contemporary island Melanesia, or Near Oceania; whether these Asian–Oceanic links are themselves overstressed, and how they align with local genealogical and legendary knowledge of ancestors populating from the earth, skies, and seas themselves in islands.17 As suggested above, cultural and localized identifications can be extraordinarily varied and wide-ranging. Yet, when attached to avowedly scientific inquiry and speculation, different forms of proximity to civilization and, as we’ll see—whiteness—become weighty factors. These possibilities have been defined by divergent theories and customary narratives—be it the idea of unique origins in local places, links to an Austronesian lineage, or a possible shared evolutionary heritage straddling Asia and Oceania that incorporates forebears from Indonesia, Taiwan, China, or the Philippines. Notably, both Asian and Euro-Christian perspectives framed European speculations on the populations of Oceanian islands, from inhabitants being the lost tribes of Israel, to recognition as the survivors of sunken civilizations. The Asian approach has an early intellectual provenance in Western thinking. Early modern and later Enlightenment European voyages provide documented reports of presumed connections. One can point to trans-Pacific voyages after 1520, such as those of the Spaniard Álvaro de Saavedra, who surmised that Islanders in Los Jardines (likely Enewetak) 16 Patrick Vinton Kirch, On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press (2000), 25. Moira White, “Dixon, Skinner and Te Rangi Hiroa: Scholarly Discussion of Polynesian Racial History, 1920–49,” The Journal of Pacific History, vol. 47, no. 3 (June 2012), 369–87. 17 Kirch, On the Road of the Winds, 20–1.

58

M. K. MATSUDA

probably came from China. Likewise, the famed Manila galleon route after 1565 linked the Philippines and Guam, while Pedro Fernández de Quirós connected the “black people” he saw in the Santa Cruz Islands to the Philippines. Equally, the Dutchmen Willem Schouten and Jacob Le Maire (1615), and Abel Tasman (1642) crossed the central Pacific to the Indonesian islands, and also traversed the coast of New Guinea, reporting on what they saw as Asian influences in the Melanesian islands.18 These suppositions about Oceanian and Asian connections were updated and revisited by ethnological folklorists and colonial officials. Among the nineteenth-century colonial officials were Sir George Grey, famed for his collections of M¯aori oral traditions and stories, and especially scholar Abraham Fornander, who built up his highly influential theory of Polynesian origins from comparative linguistic studies. In detailed reconstructions, Fornander argued for an Indian origin, drawing on “creeds, legends, and customs,” brought by Polynesians “as a prehistoric heritage into the Pacific.” From these he declared: “I think myself justified in believing that the immigrants coming from the north-west, from [the southern Indian plateau of] Deccan, were the preponderating majority, and absorbed into themselves those who came from the north and north-east, from Further India.”19 Other scholars such as Edward S. C. Handy, head of the Marquesan party of a large Oceanic ethnographic research initiative—the Bayard Dominick Expeditions (1920)—set forth a reinforcing theory of Polynesian origins and migrations based heavily upon Tahitian data. He proposed “a complex diffusionist scheme, in which various Polynesian culture ‘traits’ were correlated with ‘Brahmanical’ and ‘Buddhistic’ cultures from India, Indo-China, Malaysia, and China.”20 This Asian chronicle of origins was only partially an exercise in ethnographic and linguistic analysis already by the late nineteenth century. It was also, often and significantly, an exercise in arrogating Islander history to lineages determined by a white settler colonial heritage. Fornander, for example, as a settler in the Hawaiian kingdom with a juridical role among missionaries and planters revolving around the royal court, 18 Bronwen Douglas, Science, Voyages, and Encounters in Oceania, 1511–1850, New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave (2014), 52–63. 19 Abraham Fornander, An Account of the Polynesian Race: Its Origin and Migrations, London: Trubner & Co., (1885), 35. 20 Kirch, On the Road of the Winds, 21.

3

ABOUT ANCESTORS

59

believed himself authorized “to speak on behalf of the Polynesian people, to unravel the past of their national life.”21 To him, that meant locating Hawaiians within an India defined by an Aryan heritage from the subcontinent, a civilizing, settler legacy Islanders could no longer access, but that he himself, as a more direct Aryan inheritor, could fully embody. In effect, he displaced Oceanian histories to Asia and then to Aryanism and then to what Maile Arvin has trenchantly described as, “possession by whiteness.” This approach was widely embraced by scholars dedicating themselves to Polynesian origin reconstructions from an outlander perspective. By 1919, the New Zealand ethnologist and civil surveyor, Stephenson Percy Smith, was observing, “Such a large number of notes have accumulated on the subject of Aryan and Polynesian points of contact that the subject must be deferred to another occasion.” His attempt at a brief field survey in his co-founded Journal of the Polynesian Society, contended that “it is now acknowledged that the Polynesians belong to the Caucasian family of the human race, as do the Aryan people of India,” and he offered his tracings of common mythological traditions and customs, and described wars at the upper waters of the Ganges between the “very dark, or black people…much despised and abhorred by the fair ‘Heaven born’ Aryans.”22 Smith, like Fornander, pursued Western academic genealogical knowledge through philological and folkloric studies to argue broadly that “it is a fair deduction from the traditions, that they can be traced as far back as India.” Smith claimed that similarities in linguistic and cultural development supported his contention that Polynesian Pacific Islanders were “the remnant of one of the most ancient races of the world.”23 What antiquity conveyed however, was very specific, and very Western classical. Initially, this was hard to decipher. Relying heavily on the study of oral traditions, Smith was attuned to the ways that genealogical evidence could be the critical link between history and legend. He argued that legends and tales were evidence of ideologies and beliefs but—lacking chronological frameworks—were too imprecise to be of historical value. 21 Maile Arvin, Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai‘i and Oceania, Durham and London: Duke University Press (2019), 55. 22 S. Percy Smith, “The fatherland of the Polynesians: Aryan and Polynesian points of contact,” The Journal of the Polynesian Society, vol. 28, no. 109, no. 4 (1919), 20–1. 23 S. Percy Smith, Hawaiki: The Original Home of the Maori: With a Sketch of Polynesian History, Christchurch: Whitcomb and Tombs (1904), 65.

60

M. K. MATSUDA

Yet, he suggested, tools were available to diligent researchers: “luckily we have an approximate means of fixing dates in Polynesian History through the genealogical tables. It is probable that no race has more highly valued their pedigrees, or possessed so many.” As he understood it, authority and genealogy were inseparable, such that an aspirant to a chiefdom would be able “to recite his pedigree for at least twenty generations.”24 Smith correctly emphasized the importance of genealogical approaches to Polynesian histories, though he did not elaborate on their cultural and cosmological values beyond marking generations and chronologies. He and others, like the American ethnologist and philologist Horatio Hale, did, however, rely strongly on such empirical and culturalhistorical linguistic reconstructions for human classifications, unlike much of nineteenth-century race-based typology.25 Smith did not, however, escape the logic of civilization and distinction that structured his ultimate assumptions about where genealogies would lead. As Fornander, he averred that Polynesians were intelligent and charming—qualities he attributed to “their common source with ourselves from the Caucasian branch of humanity, which induces in us a feeling of sympathy and affection above that felt toward any other race.” Again, proud lineages ultimately came from one origin—that of the Caucasian.26 This focus on the ways scholarly and scientific orders of knowledge attaining to whiteness is a subject significantly studied by Warwick Anderson in works like The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen, and The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia.27 Anderson has regularly turned his lens not upon the way that science explodes myths about whiteness and race, but rather marshals its own medical and research practitioners to

24 Smith, Hawaiki, 21–2. 25 Horatio Hale, The Origin of Languages and the Antiquity of Speaking Man,

Cambridge: John Wilson and Son, (1886). See also, Smith, Hawaiki, 21–2. Also on panPolynesian genealogical identity, and the particularity of sacred families, see Niel Gunson, ‘Great Families of Polynesia: Inter-island Links and Marriage Patterns’, Journal of Pacific History, vol. 32, no. 2 (1997), 139–52. 26 An argument elaborated by Maile Arvin, Possessing Polynesians, 43. 27 Warwick Anderson, The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into

Whitemen, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins (2008); as well as Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia, Durham and London: Duke University Press (2006).

3

ABOUT ANCESTORS

61

fortify existing hierarchies with remarkable intellectual alacrity. If eighteenth and nineteenth-century British colonial settlers in Australia early defined themselves as change agents in an unfamiliar and seemingly hostile new environment, the early twentieth century saw that “scientists would instead attempt to shift the boundaries of ‘whiteness’ and incorporate Aboriginal Australians into the category of distant relatives and object lessons.”28 These “hard hereditarian” views argued that Aboriginal groups were primitive but also Caucasian, therefore justifying the protection and advancement of British settler interests in the name of common ancestry. Native American DNA scholar Kimberly TallBear has carried these structural color line imperatives into the contemporary practices of genomic science by asking, “How can science become less ‘white privileged?’” Not all scientists are white but they potentially access that privilege of whiteness when they don the symbolic white coat. Despite anti-racist aspirations, genomics potentially compounds the power of white-controlled institutions to police non-white identity. It’s part of an enduring Eurocentric monopoly on what constitutes knowledge and history.”29 Rather than only looking at the intentions of individual practitioners, she recommends looking at the institutions and networks that support them. Broad interpretive claims about Oceanian ancestors and origins began from early Islander and outlander contacts, developed through erudite study within European knowledge canons and methods, and continued to be made by Western researchers and colonial scholars of Pacific histories across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through folkloric, ethnological, linguistic, documentary, and archaeological means, and into the medical sciences, blood typing, and genetic analysis. These analyses have themselves been consistently challenged by Indigenous genealogical traditions and Islander assertions of origins and scientific

28 Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia, New York: Basic Book (2003), 192–3. 29 Kimberly TallBear, “Anthropology, Genomics, and Whiteness,” in Alexa Walker,

Brian Egan, and George Nicholas, eds., DNA and Indigeneity: The Changing Role of Genetics in Indigenous Rights, Tribal Belonging, and Repatriation, symposium proceedings, Vancouver (October 22, 2015), 42–3. Jenny Reardon and Kim TallBear, “Your DNA Is Our History: Genomics, Anthropology, and the Construction of Whiteness as Property, “ Current Anthropology, vol. 53, no. 5 (April 2012), https://doi.org/10.1086/662629.

62

M. K. MATSUDA

knowledge creation based on ancestral and localized narratives decolonized of Western scientific practices. Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith notes, “While the history of biological anthropology in the Pacific, like the field generally, does not have an illustrious past, we can at least acknowledge and learn from our past mistakes,” a commitment dedicated toward new forms of practice.30 These new practices mean partnerships and collaborative research with Indigenous communities, and sometimes with Indigenous leaders of the research itself. In tandem, and sometimes in conflict with institutional, laboratory-based protocols of scientific authority, genealogies remain key to these projects and continue as central to a contested field for reading and understanding histories and knowledge in Islander contexts. By the postwar period, decolonization—and continuing anti-colonial struggles—led to increased attention by Indigenous communities, scholars, and activists to local traditions and knowledge of origins and heritage. As part of this, and in contradistinction to European ideas of Enlightenment and imperial histories, Islander scholars have multiple narrations of historical experiences. Damon Salesa has pointed out that “Samoans, like other Polynesians, ordered much of their lives by means of genealogies (gafa). Genealogies reaching back to the creation of the cosmos mapped out and connected both past and present, gendering, sequencing, and accounting for the universe and its peoples.”31 Roots in the islands and through deities may have been legendary, but familial research would show ancestors with deeper ties to larger and more distant worlds, in both time and space. These are not only academic questions, but instances of what researchers like Donald Evans have called “genetic curiosity.” Evans has engaged with interviews and oral tradition studies, inquiring into the complexities of genealogical whakapapa in M¯aori communities. As one respondent commented to him, reflecting the interests evident in Kightley and Rarere’s documentary voyage: “I know some of us are interested in like following genetics back to origins, like the

30 Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith, “Biological Anthropology and Genetics in Pacific History,”

245. 31 Damon Salesa, ‘Samoa’s Half-Castes and Some Frontiers of Comparison’, in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 83. See, also, David Chang, The World and All the Things upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (2016), 1–15.

3

ABOUT ANCESTORS

63

recent one is they’re able to track M¯aori genetics back through Taiwan, back through into Asia, that’s the latest one. It’s very interesting.”32 Family historians using multiple commercial DNA services like Ancestry.com or 23andMe also elaborate the findings of their own familial searches and what they might mean for not only their own parental lines but also the ways that knowledge and categories concerning the DNA composition of Pacific peoples is constituted. Researcher and blogger Kalani Mondoy observes, for his site HawaiianDNA, that his blog is largely focused on what he regards to be his discoveries and experiences in genetic genealogies, primarily focused on “autosomal DNA where I figure out how my matches and I connect. As a K¯anaka Maoli (aboriginal Hawaiian), I am learning how complex autosomal DNA can be when looking for close matches among other Polynesians.”33 Some of his specific interests combine both observations about commercial DNA services with parsing of the information they provide—especially linking Asia and the Islands. In one posting, Mondoy relates his interest in a new Pacific Islander category generated by the commercial DNA service Ancestry.com: “I noticed Filipinos had been coming up in that category as well.” Seeing overlaps between Southeast Asian and Polynesian statistical assays, Mondoy suggests, “A Taiwanese aboriginal would have about the same amount as Filipinos, ranging around 25%–29%. A friend that I know whose mother is a Taiwanese aboriginal and he got DNA tested came up with 13% Polynesia and 37% Asia East. This is nearly identical to what half Filipinos would get.” He pursued conclusions that appeared to indicate the impact of Southeast Asian genetic lineages for many people connected through his research, “including Polynesians, of which makes up about 80% of their genome.”34 Based on the results from the cross-referencing of different commercial DNA testing services, Mondoy suggested, “We will probably see a lot more people of Southeast Asia origin come up

32 Donald Evans, ‘Whakapapa, Genealogy, and Genetics’, Bioethics 24, no. 4 (2012): 182–90. On ‘M¯aori group subjects’, see M. Benton et al., ‘Complete Mitochondrial Genome Sequencing Reveals Novel Haplotypes in a Polynesian Population’, PLoS ONE, vol. 7, no. 4 (2012), e35026. 33 Kalani Mondoy, “Polynesiacategory-Ancestry.com (part 2),” HawaiiDNA.wordpress. com (June 30, 2015). 34 Kalani Mondoy, “Polynesiacategory-Ancestry.com (part 2),” HawaiiDNA.wordpress. com (June 30, 2015).

64

M. K. MATSUDA

with the Pacific Islander/ Polynesia/ Melanesia category as a proxy for Southeast Asian as more get tested.”35 Some of Mondoy’s general conclusions include that scientific evidence confirms very strongly “what we already knew from our oral traditions, that we came from the same few ancestors who came from different parts of Polynesia.”36 The emphasis on shared connection to direct ancestors is resonant especially in the Hawaiian tradition and its implications have been taken much beyond the construction of family lineages. Hawaiian scholar and political activist Haunani-Kay Trask underscored how genealogies are evidence of ancestry beyond curiosity and very much inseparable from an anti-colonial sovereignty politics. She presented her own views on lineage with an equally resonant emphasis on genealogies; stating that “all Polynesians begin anything formally or informally with their genealogy and that means your line of descent.” Tracing her own bloodlines through her mother and father, she points out: “those two lines carry with them obligations which is to carry forward the protection of the people and the land, those are traditional obligations.”37 Trask also famously framed her sense of genealogy and identity around the specificity of the Hawaiian Islands. Her critique is less about different views of origins, than the ways that science itself is defined: whether it has the power to claim truths and exclude the insights and values of other forms of knowledge. The question raised is who should—and who becomes authorized—to speak on the origins of some populations and communities; or all of them. This rejection parallels the genealogical approach where ancestral knowledge is principally a set of obligations manifesting care for the land and a present community connection, in distinction to an ideal signification (progress, civilization, science). Yet, beginning in the twentieth century, the domains of historical investigation most directly aligned with genealogical knowledge and practice continued to change dramatically. From studies of kinship networks and imperatives

35 Kalani Mondoy, “Polynesiacategory-Ancestry.com (part 2),” HawaiiDNA.wordpress.

com (June 30, 2015). 36 Kalani Mondoy, “Polynesiacategory-Ancestry.com (part 2),” HawaiiDNA.wordpress. com (June 30, 2015). 37 Haunani-Kay Trask, interview by Man Chui Leung, Vancouver Writers Festival, November 1996, https://web.archive.org/web/20030118040345/http://mypage.dir ect.ca/e/epang/InterviewHaunani.html (accessed February 23, 2021).

3

ABOUT ANCESTORS

65

of familial transmission, human pasts were increasingly investigated by new researchers and storytellers as questions of the life sciences.38 Genetics, practiced through animal husbandry and seed selection across eons, was systematized in modern form by the Mendelian inheritance studies at the beginning of the twentieth century. More than another century later, genetic research in the early twenty-first century had become so indivisible from reliance upon DNA sequencing, that it is almost necessary to recall the field has an Oceanian history between Mendel’s time and the 1950s description of the double helix and its molecular code. Asian and Oceanic questions were part of that history. Genomic researcher Murray Cox has pointed out that early studies of genetic diversity worldwide very much included Southeast Asian islands and Oceania, and that ABO blood sampling research has a rich history. He maintains that “contrary to popular opinion, geneticists have been helping to reconstruct Pacific prehistory for the last 90 years.”39 It is valuable to locate these developments historically. The timing is almost contiguous generationally with what is conventionally regarded as the onset of classical field anthropology, considering Bronislaw Malinowski’s work in New Guinea and the Trobriands, and the launching of the Bayard Dominick ethnographic field expeditions in the 1920s.40 From ethnographic observation, leading-edge genetic research gradually developed through sampling and classifying blood markers, commonly associated with major ABO blood types. This exsanguination approach to human population genetics dominated the field for almost two generations, with blood sampling from local populations in the field by researchers a standard practice. Historians like Warwick Anderson have richly catalogued the roles of fieldwork and bloodwork as constitutive of both scientific and imperial projects from Australian settler colonialism

38 Matt Matsuda, ‘Genetic Drift: Pacific Pasts and Futures’, in Warwick Anderson, Miranda Johnson and Barbara Brookes, ed., Pacific Futures: Past and Present Honolulu: University of Hawai ‘i Press (2018), 49–68. 39 Murray P. Cox, ‘Southeast Asian Islands and Oceania: Human Genetics’, in Immanuel Ness, ed., The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing (2013), 2, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444351071.wbeghm837 (accessed February 9, 2021). 40 Cox, ‘Southeast Asian Islands and Oceania’, 2; Kirch, On the Road of the Winds, 21.

66

M. K. MATSUDA

through the Nobel Prize-winning medical studies of the controversial D. Carleton Gajdusek with the South Fore people in New Guinea.41 Genetics and ancestry tracing became part of bloodwork histories. A key source for reading this ABO genetic history is to look at a noted 1965 study on blood group variations in Micronesia.28 The argument begins with an interweaving of oral traditions and documentary knowledge to indicate connections between Oceanic and Asian cultures and underscores Carolinean traditions indicating longstanding and repeated contacts with peoples from the Philippines, Indonesia, and New Guinea. Notably, the argument focused on webs of connections, rather than origins; “these have included not only voyages, both deliberate and accidental within the Caroline chain, but also trips to and from the Mariana, Marshall, Gilbert, and Ellice Islands, and also to Polynesia, the Philippines, New Guinea, Indonesian islands and islands in western Melanesia”.42 In addition, documented claims suggested voyages also between Japan and the Marshall Islands, as well as the Carolines with Shanghai in China, and Palau and Pohnpei (Ponape). The survey of blood group variations suggests a long traditional and historical record of interaction and voyaging between Oceanic and maritime Asian people built around documentary and oral evidence in dialogue with genetic science. Working through the ABO blood type samplings, the team noted that comparisons of gene frequencies for Micronesian, Polynesian, and Indonesian/Malay subjects pointed to “an overlapping picture,” and a firm conclusion that the current Micronesian population was heavily influenced by the intermixing of populations.43 Even more intriguing is the critical recognition given to genetic drift in studies of hematological evidence where it intersects and is necessarily developed in dialectic with a broader theory of culture, navigation, and selective contingency. The contributors note that genetic variations are 41 Warwick Anderson, The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen, Baltimore: JHU Press (2008). 42 R.T. Simmons et al., ‘Blood Group Genetic Variations in Natives of the Caroline Islands and in Other Parts of Micronesia’, Oceania, vol. 36, no. 2 (1965), 132–70. 43 Ibid., 146. At this time (1965), the state of the discipline for gene frequency assess-

ment was blood typing. In Micronesia, international interest was initially by Takasaki and Misaitsu from Japan, as summarized by T. Furuhata, ‘The Blood Group Distribution of the Ainu, Formosan Aborigines, and Inhabitants of Micronesian Islands’, Japan Medical World, vol. 8, no. 12 (1928), cited in William C. Boyd, ‘Blood Groups’, Tabulae Biologica 17 (1939), 229.

3

ABOUT ANCESTORS

67

not simply the function of biology and geography, but “subject to historical accident and chance,” including what they call “the vicissitudes of history,” whether natural phenomena like typhoons and volcanic eruptions, or warfare, famine, or cultural changes in sexual practices—the very expressions of what population geneticists call genetic drift. In these situations or conditions, the survival or reproduction of limited numbers of individuals means a gene pool with successive generations all issuing from a “fortuitous” few, rather than a mean or average.44 Because of these uncertainties, the scientific argument is ultimately reliant not on genetic typing, but on genealogy. The researchers argued that only a long-term and highly detailed “genealogical history of each community” could properly explain the gene patterns presented in the research samples. Importantly, the team argued, “we cannot explain or understand the variations we encounter by studying only the sustained forces of natural selection.”45 In effect, the 1965 study recognized the complexity and contingency of historical genetics, offering a resonant vision of overlapping blood types dependent for understanding on multiple registers of oral, document-based, and contemporary cultural evidence to indicate the linkages and distinctions between Asian and Oceanic populations. ABO blood studies were later supplemented and then superseded by newer technologies. Lab techniques were developed that are known and practiced today by college biochemistry students, including the polymerase chain reaction, whereby DNA samples are multiplied chemically for study, and gel electrophoresis, in which the DNA fragments are separated in gels—revealing the arrays that constitute patterns today recognized as DNA sequences. These developing tools and techniques, focused on the molecular elements of genetics, did not possess the contextual dimensions of historical obligation to the present and future manifested in, for example, post-colonial and neo-colonial activism. Yet the two are interwoven historically in the history of Pacific ancestries. Genealogical studies of “Polynesian origins,” like those of Fornander, and especially, Smith, rendered chronologies and genealogical tables as antiquarian evidence, much like early dismissals of Oceanic archaeological research as revealing

44 Simmons et al., ‘Blood Group Genetic Variations’, 152. 45 Simmons et al., ‘Blood Group Genetic Variations’, 152.

68

M. K. MATSUDA

only fragments of immobile, fixed cultures. Living Polynesians, it was surmised, existed as had their ancestors. Kirch has criticized this as “the unquestioned rejection of any in situ cultural change or development in Pacific island cultures,” based on the erroneous belief that “all was static and timeless in Oceania.”46 This view would remain a colonial imperative, underscoring custom and tradition as authentic by definition of Islanders lacking self-transformative power. This narrative would be challenged in the later twentieth century both by Indigenous activism and committed research within the field of archaeology itself. The venerable Lapita tradition, for example, has continually re-examined new ceramic finds and their motifs. As well as continually re-evaluating the Lapita chronology, this research shows that localized groups generated important “innovations” in tools and techniques, leading to “the creation and consumption of new designs” which provide evidence of changing social positions and aesthetic preferences.47 Expansions—or delimitations—of chronologies have regularly been tied to both studies and employment of newer technologies. Historicity, as Kirch observes, required “the discovery of time depth.”35 Scientifically, this developed powerfully through the work of archaeologists, particularly with the introduction of Willard Libby’s radiocarbon dating technique to Oceanic research in the 1950s. This had the effect of providing scientific evidence for historical knowledge of ancestors across successive generations at multiple island sites. Yet the new tools alone could not provide definitive answers to questions as complex as historical origins. Careful archaeological teams studying population dynamics have pointed out that “it is certainly possible that monotonic increases in radiocarbon dates do correspond with exponential increases in human activity and population … but this relationship needs to be demonstrated using multiple proxies from many sites; a burden of proof that few regions can satisfy.”48 46 Kirch, On the Road of the Winds, 23. 47 Stuart Bedford et al., ‘Debating Lapita: Distribution, Chronology, Society and Subsis-

tence’, in Stuart Bedford and Matthew Spriggs, ed., Debating Lapita: Distribution, Chronology, Society and Subsistence, Canberra: ANU Press (2019), 6; Geoffrey R. Clark and Olaf Winter, ‘The Ceramic Trail: Evaluating the Marianas and Lapita West Pacific Connection’, in Stuart Bedford and Matthew Spriggs, ed., Debating Lapita: Distribution, Chronology, Society and Subsistence, Canberra: ANU Press (2019), 49. 48 Ben Marwick, ‘Change or Decay? An Interpretation of Late Holocene Archaeological Evidence from the Hamersley Plateau, Western Australia’, Archaeology in Oceania 44, Supplement: Pilbara Archaeology (2009), 20.

3

ABOUT ANCESTORS

69

The archaeologist Mickaelle-Hinanui Cauchois has pointed out the critical tensions inherent in archaeological work, especially from an Indigenous perspective: How will I respond to the elder who asks me why archaeologists make up stories about things that our tupuna (ancestors) probably did not want us to know? How can I explain to the scientific community that I respond to the elder ‘me neither, I don’t really believe us when we build up models with so few data and pretend to explain what happened in the past?’

Further, as Cauchois finally remarks, “All that people want to know is where we are from, when we first arrived … to confirm that we Polynesians have a great history to be proud of.”49 In the twentieth century, the challenge of how to tell that story was increasingly contested between Indigenous knowledge and narrative, historical, linguistic, and archaeological reconstruction, and blood typing. And, soon, the analysis of DNA additionally deepened—and complicated—the picture. Critically, in the same decade as Libby’s deployment of radiocarbon dating, time depth also developed through the chemical and molecular study of human bodies themselves. In the twentieth century, ancestry studies pushed even further through linguistics, ethnology, archaeology, genealogy—and into molecular genetics. The work sometimes looks like that pursued by historians—using evidence, analysis, and narratives—but rendered with new tools. As a computational biologist, Murray Cox has used his laboratory techniques to reconsider the work of academic historians and scholars. He points to the reconstructions of population distributions according to archaeological evidence as seen with Lapita pottery and radiocarbon dating, as well as the relationships of languages, referencing the work of Johann Reinhold Forster in the 1770s with Captain James Cook. For his purposes, he also

49 Mickaelle-Hinanui Cauchois, Mark Dugay-Grist and Herman Mandui, ‘Last Words’, in Ian Lilley, ed., Archaeology of Oceania: Australia and the Pacific Islands, Carlton: Blackwell, (2008), 365. See also, Tautala Silauleleioamoa Asaua (Samoan), “Understanding Archaeology from a Samoan Perspective,” Kathy Kawelu (Hawaiian), “Take Only What You need, and Leave the Rest,” Gerard O’Regan (Ngai Tahu Maori), “Working for My Own,” Makere (Margaret) Rika-Heke (Maori), “Haere Tika Tonu Atu—Keep Going Forward,” in George Nicholas, ed., Being and Becoming Indigenous Archaeologists, London and New York: Routledge (2016).

70

M. K. MATSUDA

argues, “importantly, however, history is also carried in the DNA of living people, as well as being preserved in the bones of ancient individuals.”50 The development of molecular genetic approaches offered new tools to revive the question not only of magnitudes, but vectors—that is, beyond shared genetic materials, to which groups were ancestral to others, stretching back in time and space. Advances in the study of haplotypes—gene variations that tend to be inherited altogether by individuals—became key. Here, the unresolved questions posed by early twentieth-century ethnologists reemerged: a science that would determinedly allow the search for probable origins in Asia. As Cox recounts the molecular research chronicle, “in 1989, Hertzberg and colleagues identified a DNA variant that is largely restricted to Polynesians and connects them firmly, and quite recently, back to the Asian mainland. This study was the first to reconstruct directional movements across the Pacific.”51 The work continued into the twenty-first century with the further development of “the remarkable power of whole-genome technology…applied to people across the region,” as an approach in support of refining the dimensions of populations and population movements.52 The conclusion appears to be clear regarding Asian lineages, but the search for such histories—and the definitions of those lineages— has always been fraught. While the DNA evidence is compelling, other elements have been drawn from archaeology, linguistics, or human geography for convincing portraits. Archaeologists like Peter Bellwood have noted that collections of pottery stone adzes, shell ornaments, and animal bones can be used to infer “incursions” of Austronesian-language speakers and reconstructions of human migration patterns. Studies of these patterns in turn “bring up the issue of ancient DNA,” and population mixtures—in his case in the Northern Moluccas. Overlapping approaches indicate that “the archaeological record around 2000 years ago is supported by a previous whole-genome autosomal DNA analysis of

50 Murray Cox, ‘Southeast Asian Islands and Oceania’, 1. See also L. Luca Cavalli-

Sforza, Paolo Menozzi and Alberto Piazza, The History and Geography of Human Genes, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1994). 51 Cox, ‘Southeast Asian Islands and Oceania’, 1–2. 52 Geoffrey K. Chambers, Hisham A. Edinur, “Reconstruction of the Austronesian

Diaspora in the Era of Genomics,” Human Biology, vol. 92, no. 4 (October 6, 2021), 247.

3

ABOUT ANCESTORS

71

modern Indonesian populations.”53 Careful work seeks to engage genetic knowledge as only one strand in the reconstruction, or preservation, of a historical lineage. Sometimes overshadowed by the grand human movements posited by uniquely DNA-based historical tracing, is the disagreement within the general field of molecular genetics itself about the interpretation of data and what constitutes viable, convincing sample sizes and evidence. In the early twenty-first century, this became a domain of considerable debate. Exploring the place of Indonesia as part of “an ancient genetic highway linking Asia and the Pacific,” research geneticist Meryanne Tumonggor from 2011 to 2013 reviewed a multiplicity of scenarios, from expanding agricultural groups migrating from Taiwan through the Philippine archipelago and down through Indonesia and out to the Pacific, to other more situated hypotheses involving Austronesian groups that originated in and radiated out from today’s Indonesian archipelago.54 Mapping upon a “spectrum of origin models,” Tumonggor cautiously suggested, that “ancestral-derived haplotype orders are consistent with a rapid expansion from Taiwan to the Philippines and Indonesia, but population dispersals in the opposite direction are equally likely.”55 Her caution showed that there was still significant dispute about the Taiwan derivation. A research team out of Leeds including Martin Richards, Pedro Soares, Teresa Rito, and Jean Trejaut received notable attention around the same time (2011) for reporting that “the link to Taiwan does not stand up to scrutiny.” “In fact,” they argued, “the DNA of current Polynesians can be traced back to migrants from the Asian mainland who had already settled in islands close to New Guinea some 6– 8,000 years ago”. Based on wide sampling of mitochondrial genomes, the team declared, “we can be confident that the Polynesian population—at least on the female side—came from people who arrived in the Bismarck

53 Peter Bellwood, ‘The Northern Spice Islands in Prehistory, From 40,000 Years Ago to the Recent Past’, in Peter Bellwood, ed., The Spice Islands in Prehistory: Archaeology in the Northern Moluccas, Indonesia, Canberra: ANU Press (2019), 211–21. 54 Meryanne K. Tumonggor et al., ‘The Indonesian Archipelago: An Ancient Genetic Highway Linking Asia and the Pacific’, Journal of Human Genetics, vol. 58, no. 3 (2013), 165–6. 55 Tumonggor et al., ‘The Indonesian Archipelago’, 170–1. See also, J. Stephen Lansing et al., ‘An Ongoing Austronesian Expansion in Island Southeast Asia’, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, vol. 30, no. 3 (2011), 262–72.

72

M. K. MATSUDA

Archipelago of Papua New Guinea thousands of years before the supposed migration from Taiwan took place.”56 Other research teams, like that led by Manfred Kayser, have also studied “the genetic affinities of the Austronesian-speaking peoples,” and argued that correlations of data could not precisely identify overlays between linguistic and genetic evidence.57 His team first surveyed the existing theories, summarized as the “express-train” model, which posited a rapid expansion of Polynesian ancestors from Asia and Taiwan along the coastlines of the Melanesian islands, and the “entangled-bank” model, which hypothesized a much longer history of cultural influence, kinship building and genetic connection between peoples who would later become distinguished as Southeast Asians, Melanesians, and Polynesians. Showing greater support for the express-train model, Kayser’s team drew on linguistic, archaeological, and genetic evidence analyzed from both mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited maternally, and Ychromosome DNA, inherited paternally. In either case, the mode of transmission operates because for both female and male, part of the parental genome is passed on to children directly without combining with the other parent. As such, part of the genetic material is biologically identical (barring mutations) across generations, allowing researchers to read for the putative Last Common Ancestor of individuals and groups. Such work has led to the strong development of the “Out of Africa” thesis for all humans, and the popular conceptualization of the African “Mitochondrial Eve” as the female mother of all living humans. Researchers have described this nonrecombining portion of genetic materials, as containing “a relatively simple record of the human past.”58

56 Pedro Soares, Teresa Rito, Jean Trejaut, et al., “Ancient Voyaging and Polynesian Origins,” American Journal of Human Genetics (February 3, 2011), https://doi.org/10. 1016/j.ajhg.2011.01.009; also University of Leeds, ‘Genetic Study Uncovers New Path to Polynesia’, Science Daily, February 7, 2011, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/ 2011/02/110203124726.htm (accessed February 9, 2021). ); Martin Richards et al., ‘Ancient Voyaging and Polynesian Origins’, The American Journal of Human Genetics, vol. 88, no. 2 (2011), 239–47. 57 E. Hagelberg et al., ‘Molecular Genetic Evidence for the Human Settlement of the Pacific: Analysis of Mitochondrial DNA, Y Chromosome and HLA Markers’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B, vol. 354, no. 1379 (1999), 141–52. 58 M.E. Hurles et al., ‘Y Chromosomal Evidence for the Origins of Oceanic-speaking Peoples’, Genetics, vol. 160, no. 1 (2002), 289–303.

3

ABOUT ANCESTORS

73

Yet, precisely because of the differing male and female source distinctions, what is so intriguing about genetic tracing through DNA is that conclusions can depend very much upon which materials are utilized. Thus, as the research team points out, oral traditions, linguistic, and archaeological evidence tell different stories—but so also do distinctions between mitochondrial and Y-chromosome markers and other biological assays. As the findings concluded: “Studies of maternally inherited mtDNA markers have favored an Asian origin of Polynesian maternal lineages… In contrast, studies of paternally inherited DNA markers from the nonrecombining portion of the Y chromosome (NRY) have revealed a mostly Melanesian origin of Polynesian paternal lineages.”59 Out of this, the team proposed an alternative to both the “expresstrain” and “entangled-bank” theories, suggesting that Polynesian ancestors did, in fact, have genetic origins in Asia and Taiwan, but did not move quickly and coastally along the Melanesian archipelago. Rather, the interactions were more on the model of a “slow boat,” with extensive and extended contacts, and a complex, intertwining of possible heritages, Polynesian and Melanesian, traceable to constantly biologically admixed and culturally and linguistically resituated Asian ancestors. These conclusions in turn raise interesting questions. If female and male dimensions of mitochondrial and Y-chromosomeDNA studies do produce differing sets of evidence, what else besides molecular biology might account for different genomic patterns? Tumonggor et al. suggest that genetic markers indicate that “the men and women of island southeast Asia have followed quite different social histories.”60 Where samples were drawn or extracted might indicate women moving across wider geographies between villages, settlements, and communities, while men remained located in their own local territories. As such, studies of gene frequencies would be well served by focusing not only on haplotypes, but social explanations, such as “patrilocality,” where men remain in their natal community, but women move to the home village of their husband.61

59 M. Kayser et al., ‘Melanesian and Asian Origins of Polynesians: mtDNA and Y Chromosome Gradients across the Pacific’, Molecular Biology and Evolution, vol. 23, no. 11 (2006), 2234–44. 60 Tumonggor et al., ‘The Indonesian Archipelago’, 170. 61 Tumonggor et al., ‘The Indonesian Archipelago’, 169.

74

M. K. MATSUDA

Or the opposite may be the case. In his own studies, Murray Cox favors a theory of matrilocal residence, whereby married women remained in their home community, while their husbands moved.62 Differing conclusions could be ultimately dependent upon selecting sources of evidence, geographies of analysis, and historical interpretations. Tumonggor indicates cultural change over time as the factor that most affect the record, noting the case of Indonesian colonization that “does not comprise merely a Melanesian substratum with a single expansion of Austronesian speakers, yet rather involves multiple waves of human migration, coupled with an extensive admixture process.” In this way, male and female settlement and kin dynamics both embraced and surrendered social practices over time, underscoring not a definite organization for Islanders, but a “shift from matrilocality to patrilocality in most of the populations across the archipelago.”63 The technical nature of the analysis at times belies the cultural and political issues at stake and the uncertainty of even the best evidence. Given the multiple possible emplotments of available data, origin debates remind us of the complex historical forces that shape research interests and even the most advanced methods. The critical point remains that the focus of such debates about “origins” between Asia and Oceania must necessarily be integrated with a theory of culture and as such devoted to the disciplinary constitution of historical knowledge. Where genealogy and genetics intersect, history is not only mapped, but also set into contest—different methodologies and tools of analysis, different data sets, different assumptions as to what should count as the foundational elements of a true past. Knowledge of ancestors and their journeys is constituted from multiple sources—cultural practices, origin narratives, genealogical pedigrees, historical records, archaeological fragments, and linguistic traces, all responding to fluid imperatives of heritage and identity. As Kayser suggested, “the human settlement of the Pacific Islands represents one

62 See Murray P. Cox et al., ‘Autosomal and X-linked Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms Reveal a Steep Asian-Melanesian Ancestry Cline in Eastern Indonesia and a Sex Bias in Admixture Rates’, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, vol. 277, no. 1687 (2010), 1589–96. 63 Meryanne K. Tumonggor, ‘Genetic Insights on the Human Colonization of Indonesia’, (PhD thesis, University of Arizona. 2014), 8, 22.

3

ABOUT ANCESTORS

75

of the most recent major migration events of mankind. Polynesians originated in Asia according to linguistic evidence or in Melanesia according to archaeological evidence.”64 Or—by his own genomic research—in and from both Asia and Melanesia, with conclusions about likely routes, time sequences, and degrees of interaction between populations continually debated. Even the carefully sampled molecular data of genomic science underscores how different approaches to historical evidence and temporal structures produce different theories. More recently an international team under the direction of Hirofumi Matsumura has developed research about Austronesian dispersal models that begins with Austronesian-language models as “a proxy for human movement.” Their work draws on a cave site in Gua Harimau, Sumatra, to study burial practices and conduct cranial morphometric analyses, and utilizes DNA samples from teeth and bones for mitochondrial study and genotyping. The research results indicate evidence for two or three “distinct populations from two separate time periods,” therefore not consistent with single origins, but multiple layers of populations, mixing, and likely superseding each other.65 The perspective of “it depends” still shapes these debates, with tendencies toward the “express” model.66 From the question of “origins” and ancient derivation to archaeological and anthropological and linguistic reconstructions, to a complex examination of hematological and molecular overlays, genetics and genealogy continue to underscore the interrelated nature of scientific and historical research, and the Asian and Oceanic links that from blood types to molecular genetics have kept them together as central to debates about reconstructing, authorizing, and maintaining the past. There is new science to supplement classic philology and folkloric studies and archaeology, and genetic knowledge both reinforces and challenges genealogical traditions.

64 Kayser et al., ‘Melanesian and Asian Origins of Polynesians’, 2234. 65 Hirofumi Matsumura et al., ‘Cranio-morphometric and aDNA Corroboration of

the Austronesian Dispersal Model in Ancient Island Southeast Asia: Support from Gua Harimau, Indonesia’, PLoS ONE, vol. 13, no. 6, (2018), e0198689. 66 Jonathan S. Friedlander, Françoise Friedlander, Floyd A. Reed, et al., “The Genetic Structure of Pacific Islanders,” PLOS Genetics, vol. 4, no. 1 (January 2008), https://doi. org/10.1371/journal.pgen.0040019.

76

M. K. MATSUDA

New work regularly refines and complicates models. Questions about the Native American influence on the settlement of at least the Eastern Pacific remains live as gene flow studies indicate genetic admixture derived from at least one contact event between Polynesians and peoples from present-day Colombia even before the settlement of Rapa Nui Easter Island. Detailed studies also propose sea voyages specifically from Rarotonga and the Cook Islands out to the Tuamotus from the 1100 s to the 1300 s CE.67 The genetic evidence complements and challenges the work of other disciplines and is especially good at generating narratives of transmission and continuity—and origin. Yet the debates continue. Not only did historical forces shape the quality, selectivity, and, indeed, survivability of genetic evidence, but the overlapping and at times conflicting interpretations around its employment indicate a reflexive need to still consider the uncertainties over the voyaging and migrating corridors that connect Asia and Oceania, the peoples that traveled them and the routes, circuits, that brought them to landfalls where human histories began. And, to continuously reimagine the questions and arguments about who speaks for, to, and with the ancestors.

67 Alexander G. Ionnidis, Javier Blanco-Portillo, Andres ˙ Moreno-Estrada, “Native American gene flow into Polynesia predating Easter Island settlement,” Nature, vol. 583 (2020), 572–77; Alexander G. Ionnidis, Javier Blanco-Portillo, Karla Sandoval, et al., “Paths and timings of the Peopling of Polynesia Inferred from Genomic Networks,” Nature, vol. 597 (September 23, 2021), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03902-8.

CHAPTER 4

The Ancient Mariner

In 1999, the M¯aori poet and academic Robert Sullivan published his classic Star Waka, a collection of one hundred poems, written in the rhythms of oral tradition, constituting 2001 lines to mark a new millennium.1 Both ancestral voyaging and contemporary cultural politics are manifested throughout the collection and also embodied in the title, whose evocation of “star” indicates both the celestial navigation of legendary navigators as well as cultural radiance, as well as “waka,” often rendered as canoe, yet also defining the crew itself, or a container or box for precious valuables, and always a carrying across or forward. The author himself notes briefly, “I wrote Star Waka with some threads to it: that each poem must have a star, a waka or the ocean. This sequence is like a waka, members of the crew change, the rhythm and the view changes—it is subject to the laws of nature.”2 Some commentators have read Star Waka as an “intervention into a global cultural market that figures diversity as a positive resource at the same time as it needs to extinguish the threats of alterity,” and that this manifests as an

1 Robert Sullivan, Star Waka, Auckland: Auckland University Press (1999). 2 Robert Sullivan, Star Waka, iv. From Star Waka by Robert Sullivan, © 1999 Robert

Sullivan. By permission of Auckland University Press.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. K. Matsuda, Genealogies, Genomes, and Histories in the Pacific, Palgrave Studies in Pacific History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45449-3_4

77

78

M. K. MATSUDA

attempt to reimagine relationships between “the cultural politics of representation, cultural decolonization, and indigeneity at the interface of the postcolonial and the global.”3 The collection begins with a prayer of voyaging, “to hold lashings and fittings close /amid the swelled guts of Tangaroa/A prayer to scoop out sustenance–/sweet fish caught by divers in bright saltwater/marinaded in coconut and hunger.” These Sullivan frames through other prayers, to preserve food and supplies for the voyage to Aotearoa, and to honor the ancestors who are the yams, taro, and k¯ umara riding with the navigators on the swells, a journey from one historical and legendary homeland to another.4 The first numbered poem connects past and present through the waka, with generations of blood, water, families, seafaring, and lineages. Star waka is a knife through time. Crews change, language of each crew changes, as fast as sun burns ground, and tongues curse him. Crews take longer, yet learn less about makers of waka, meanings of star. Inheritors of body, watched by spirits watching star. Star hangs on ears of night, defining light. Hear sounds of waka knifing time—aue, again, what belongs to water belongs to blood. Crews leap aboard leap out, with songs of relations and care to send them. Whole families have journeyed here, they continue the line….5

Pacific histories are very much about journeys, origins, and ancestors, and ways of telling histories. Sullivan’s waka also intertwines voyaging

3 Chris Prentice, “A knife through time”: Robert Sullivan’s Star Waka and the Politics and Poetics of Cultural Difference,” ariel: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 37, nos. 2–3 (July 2006), 111–12; also, M. Keown, “Our Sea of Islands: migration, métissage in contemporary Polynesian writing,” International Journal of Francophone Studies, vol. 11, no. 4 (2008), 503–22. Also, Katherine Baxter and Lytton Smith, “Writing in Translation: Robert Sullivan’s Star Waka and Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory,” Literary Geographies, vol. 2, no. 2, (2016), 263–83. 4 Robert Sullivan, Star Waka, 1. 5 Robert Sullivan, Star Waka, 3. From Star Waka by Robert Sullivan, © 1999 Robert

Sullivan. By permission of Auckland University Press.

4

THE ANCIENT MARINER

79

legacies with his own family history, tracing back through the generations: “If I had a fleet of sixty four,/forty would be Maori./Then eighty. A hundred and sixty./Three hundred and twenty./To the beginning of the Maori people./I have these parts of these genealogies written/ Linking parts of me with different waka.”6 Where generations branch into genealogies and then into deep times, they begin to overlap with multiple lines of ancestor tracing. Just as Sullivan is linked to different waka through his generations of forebears, geneticists using molecular methods attempt to read backward through generations of markers that trace to progenitors and presumptive origins. In this way, chromosomal variations indicate where different subgroups, or haplotypes, branched out from common genetic ancestors. An American geneticist and popular impresario of genetic genealogy, Spencer Wells, has presented his work as the pursuit of “the ultimate human history…written in our genes.”7 That human history is, in fact, many histories. As historian Damon Salesa has pointed out “Indigenous Pacific histories comprise an antiquity and diversity that stretches back, starting in New Guinea, 40– 50,000 years,” built upon small populations voyaging across the then continent of Sahul, domesticating sugar cane, taro, and bananas, and hunting marsupials. Notably, however, the major theme of Pacific history is that “Pacific peoples were voyaging earlier, and much farther than anyone else,” and with extraordinarily complex routes and destinations.8 Molecular biology has, in fact, along with continuing archaeological work, helped redefine these voyaging histories of the early Pacific, from the deep time of Melanesian habitation and Lapita cultures, to the archipelagic dispersals of peoples who would become collectively known as Polynesians. Biological anthropologist Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith has suggested that the “human settlement of the Pacific in general, and the origin of

6 Robert Sullivan, Star Waka, “Waka 80,” studied in Peter Marsden, “From waka to whakapapa, Or: Carving your own canoe. The verse of Robert Sullivan,” New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre, http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/sullivan/ marsden.asp (accessed November 27, 2021). 7 Spencer Wells, The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, Princeton: Princeton University Press (2017). 8 Damon Salesa, “The Pacific in Indigenous Time,” in David Armitage and Alison Bashford, eds., Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People, Houndsmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2014), 33–4.

80

M. K. MATSUDA

the Polynesians in particular, have been topics of debate for over two centuries. Polynesian origins are most immediately traced to people who arrived in the Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa region ≈3,000 B.P,” with direct and debated links and lineages through the cultural complex of the Lapita peoples—named for the distinctive dentate pottery style—traced through settlements from Southeast Asia to a full efflorescence in Melanesia.9 These routes of culture have been overlaid with haplotypes that indicate movement and evolution of a subsequent ancestral Polynesian people whose forebears may have shaped their own bloodlines by mixing with Austronesian and very old Papuan cultures before launching into the deep-water Pacific to islands they call homelands today in circuits that encompassed Hawai‘i to the north, Rapa Nui Easter Island to the east, and Aotearoa New Zealand in the south. Genetic evidence strongly indicates these lines of transmission, which correspond to many forms of traditional knowledge, at times reinforcing oral traditions. What is critical historically, however, is that such research does not so much offer resolutions as open up new histories about origins and migrations and the relationship of the past to the present. Salesa examines this through genealogies by indicating how deep history is not only a tracing of ancestors, but a complex spatial, temporal, and multisited translation of time itself. In fact, “Genealogy orients time toward ancestors and descendants, not to an external systematic or a disembodied calibration of time.”10 The genealogical experience is therefore highly particularistic and dedicated to local engagements with the world, rather than an encompassing, progressive chronicle of humanity as civilization and advancement. In this way, Pacific genealogies take on particular historical functions: they archive families and lineages in ways responsive to present claims of heritage, surroundings, and standing; they are inseparable from places and therefore key to self-identification, both landed and marked by personal birthplaces as well as those resonantly spiritual. Likely the most encompassing of Indigenous genealogies is therefore the genealogy of the Pacific 9 Lisa Matisoo-Smith, Judith H. Robins, “Origins and dispersals of Pacific peoples: Evidence from mtDNA phylogenies of the Pacific rat,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 101, no. 24 (July 2004), 9167. 10 Damon Salesa, “The Pacific in Indigenous Time,” in David Armitage and Alison Bashford, eds., Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People, Houndsmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2014), 41.

4

THE ANCIENT MARINER

81

Ocean itself, composed of multiple and unique maritime cultures and societies, reef markers and zones, and the “native seas” from the sawei or kotau around Yap or Chuuk and Pohnpei, the Moana-nui-a-kiva around Aotearoa New Zealand and the Cook Islands, or the Vasa Loloa or Vaha Toha encircling Samoa or Tonga.11 The deep time genealogies—and therefore knowledge—of seas and transits was not widely accepted in Western academic narratives of oceanic ancestral voyaging well into the twentieth century. Questions about how, when, and how many voyagers might have made the transits and transformation from ancient ancestors to Indigenous peoples in island homelands carried over from earlier disputes based on archaeological and meteorological and oceanographic evidence about the difficulties of deep-ocean travel, such that Polynesian voyagers and their epic sea travels were always in question. One of the most resonant of Pacific historiographical debates that invited controversy and demanded a convincing response came from the question of Polynesian settlement histories. For decades, back to the arguments of the New Zealand historian Andrew Sharp, came claims that Polynesian settlement of islands now occupied by Indigenous peoples could only have occurred accidentally, through stranded castaways, storms, and drift. In Sharp’s estimation, credibility was lacking as to whether Polynesian peoples, without Renaissance sailing technologies, could possibly have voyaged intentionally from the central Pacific all the way to the far reaches of the Hawai‘i, Aotearoa, Rapa Nui triangle—and in some instances return.12 Currents and meteorological patterns alone suggested this would not be possible for ancient mariners. The response came in the 1970s through the stunning achievements of the historical, performance replica sailing canoe, The H¯ ok¯ ule‘a, which sailed by traditional means, confirming by practice what archaeological work and computer simulations had not. The epic retelling of the H¯ok¯ule‘a story, from the founding of the Polynesian Voyaging Society by artist and historian Herb Kawainui K¯ane, anthropologist-surfer Ben Finney, and waterman Tommy Holmes, to the historic connection with Micronesian wayfinder Mau Piailug, the determination of Hawaiian Nainoa Thompson to learn the tradition, the courage and death of Eddie

11 Damon Salesa, “The Pacific in Indigenous Time,” 48. 12 Andrew Sharp, Ancient Voyagers in the Pacific, Baltimore: Penguin Books (1957).

82

M. K. MATSUDA

Aikau on a trial voyage, the tragedies, triumphs, struggles, and continuing legends and legacies has been well recounted elsewhere.13 The salient and fundamental point regarding navigation was that the routes, means, techniques, and knowledge of the ancestors could, in fact, be validated. This achievement was historically notable for not being uniquely a scholarly experiment deriving from a well-funded research institution, but for having developed through personal and community engagement in a collective movement of politics and consciousness that has been denominated the Hawaiian Renaissance of the 1970s. That era encompassed multiple protests, counter-cultural, environmental, and anticolonial upheavals. These included land rights movements on Oahu; demands for reform of the Hawaiian Homes Commission; growing interest in Black and Chicano rights actions taking place at California universities; national liberation struggles around the world; revivals of Hawaiian music, dance, and language; anti-militarist protests against the US military utilizing the islands of Kaho‘olawe as a practice site for bombing and ordnance testing and live fire exercises linked to pilot training for the Vietnam War. The H¯ok¯ule‘a legend may have had elements of a scholarly reenactment of maritime archaeology to some, but it quickly became much more. The Polynesian Voyaging Society to this day recognizes the epochal first journey from Hawai‘i to Tahiti—thought impossible after millennia of almost-lost wayfinding knowledge—as an initial Voyage of Rediscovery, and “more than a voyaging canoe—(the H¯ok¯ule‘a) represents the common desire shared by the people of Hawaii, the Pacific, and the World to protect our most cherished values and places from disappearing.” That protection meant a joint affirmation of Pacific-wide histories, underscoring that the Tahitians “have great traditions and genealogies of ancestral canoes and navigators,” but lacked a living, contemporary tradition of voyaging or of open-ocean canoe building. So, when H¯ ok¯ule‘a arrived in Pape‘ete Harbor, over half the island’s people came out to see the historic moment as a reconnection, and a “spontaneous affirmation

13 See Herb Kawainui Kane, “Founding the Polynesian Voyaging Society, Building and Naming the H¯ok¯ule‘a”; Ben Finney, “A Voyage in Hawai‘i’s Past” (1975); Nainoa Thompson, “Voyaging and Cultural Revival,” all collected at: http://pvs.kcc.hawaii.edu/; Kathryn Louise N¯alani Wilson, N¯ a Mo‘ok¯ u ‘auhau Holowa‘a: Native Hawaiian Women’s Stories of the Voyaging Canoe H¯ ok¯ ule‘a, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Otago (2010).

4

THE ANCIENT MARINER

83

of what a great heritage we shared and also a renewal of the spirit of who we are today.”14 The continuity of heritage and spirit, and enactment of cultural identity were key for many of the initial H¯ ok¯ule‘a recruits. Asked about her early involvement with the voyaging proposal at a time when the founders were still raising support and crews, Hawaiian canoer Penny Rawlins Martin recounted that “Kaho‘olawe was happening, the music was changing and pretty much the renaissance had started. And so, you start looking at things differently, you start questioning things. So, I think when I came back from college, I really started questioning my identity.”15 Not only was this voyaging an enacted form of history and a continuing demonstration of ancient skill and superlative navigational knowledge transmitted into the present, it was by definition genealogical. As N¯alani Wilson-Hokowhitu has put it, the voyages did not only resolve a historical and scientific debate through “proof.” They also embodied “a return to the importance of traditional forms of historical narratives rather than merely an insertion of evidence via a conventional Western academic social science approach; hence, the priority of voyaging genealogies.”16 Wilson-Hokowhitu sailed with H¯ ok¯ule‘a on a voyage to Rapa Nui, and her journey was more than either an experiment or a cultural reclamation. Her stories, in her words, “serve as counter narratives to the disempowering notion that only Pacific Islands men navigated and initiated voyages,” underscoring the powerful role that women have played in the Hawaiian Renaissance tradition, while interviewing five other women who sailed with the H¯ok¯ule‘a. More, she proposes this joint recognition not just as a claim, but a shared, acknowledged, and “deeply rooted epistemology among Pacific Indigenous peoples that our ancestors are with us.” This is also an understanding that challenges and “moves the colonially imbued notion that we are ‘lost’ or ‘drifting.’ The conceptualisation of loss, or being lost, is reminiscent of the anthropological debate that Polynesians drifted, or accidentally arrived to new islands.”17 14 The Polynesian Voyaging Society, “The Story of Hõk¯ ule‘a,” http://www.hokulea. com/voyages/our-story/ 15 Makiko Yamada, A Question of Representation: Two Conflicting Perspectives in the 1976 H¯ ok¯ ule‘a Project, Master of Arts Thesis, Honolulu: University of Hawaii, American Studies (December 1998), 49. 16 Kathryn Louise N¯ alani Wilson, N¯ a Mo‘ok¯ u‘auhau Holowa‘a, 10. 17 Kathryn Louise N¯ alani Wilson, N¯ a Mo‘ok¯ u‘auhau Holowa‘a, 101–3.

84

M. K. MATSUDA

As herself a voyager and shaper of the histories with the H¯ ok¯ule‘a, Penny Rawlins Martin also observed where fractures occurred around scientific priorities and personal lineage and identification that might have been addressed sooner regarding the collaborative work of the founders and the role of the Hawaiian crew and navigators. With Hokule’a, remember earlier I said we felt a responsibility to the Hawaiian people. You wanted the canoe to be as Hawaiian as possible. You know what I’m saying? The people who were in charge, Ben Finney and other people, they were in charge of the initial project. You know they were looking at it as an experiment. And I believe so, because that’s why Hokule’a was built to disprove Andrew Sharp and Thor Heyerdahl. And that’s a good thing to do. But I don’t think they had realized the emotional impact Hokule’a was gonna have on the people of Hawaii, especially at this renaissance time. I don’t think they realized it.18

Over subsequent generations of new canoes launched, tributes and reverence paid, and navigators trained, that recognition came globally, and the impact across the Pacific of claiming, defining, and determining intentional canoe-based histories continues to have major resonance. Ancestral groups as navigators and Indigenous human settlers as legendary founders of great cultures are the heart of many traditions, particularly in the Marshalls and Micronesian Islands, which continue to labor for recognition, despite the eminence of Mau Piailug’s historic contributions as a navigator. In the Oceanian Pacific, these debates necessarily align voyaging histories and cultural politics. These have been questions raised also for M¯aori histories in Aotearoa New Zealand. Though not attached to a singular storied replica canoe like the H¯ok¯ule‘a, M¯aori history is also deeply built upon voyaging and genealogical settlement origins. The Great Fleet tradition of settlement of the islands both draws upon and is generative of this, as Robert Sullivan’s Star Waka demonstrated. In the early twentieth century, Stephenson Percy Smith and Hoani Te Whatahaoro Jury assembled genealogical records to propose that the Polynesian explorer Kupe came upon the islands of Aotearoa and that a Great Fleet of canoes from the legendary homeland of Hawaiki near Tahiti brought the M¯aori as a founding community in 1350 CE. The voyaging tale has become a genealogical 18 Makiko Yamada, A Question of Representation, 65–6.

4

THE ANCIENT MARINER

85

part of claiming history, even as it is questioned in its historical dimensions by critics of the scholarship—whether the chronologies are accurate, fabricated, or freighted with colonial assumptions, and whether the evidence is materially verifiable, intentionally religious-poetic, or likely, a composition of multiple knowledge traditions.19 Still, those traditions are strong, and are the foundations of localized genealogical lineages. The city of Gisborne, east coast of the North Island, is home to a large public sculpture designed by master carvers and artisans Derek Lardelli, Te Aturangi Nepia-Clamp, and Bill Baker. It is shaped like a tauihu—canoe prow—for a voyaging canoe and celebrates the M¯aori navigators who made landfall from the legendary homeland of Hawaiki and populated Aotearoa centuries before the appearance of other humans. One of those ancestors, Toi Kai R¯akau, is central to the design, and the god of the sea Tangaroa and the demigod M¯aui also feature prominently. Notably, Toi Kai R¯akau is flanked by two intricate spirals. One recognizes the direct roles of Ranginui the sky father and Papat¯ ua¯nuku the earth mother as creators of all. The other spiral is likewise a genealogy, here, a lineage of lives and connected ancestors that partially unwinds into a kupenga, or fishnet, to capture all other genealogical lines that are woven together across the generations into the present.20 Commenting on the genealogical embeddedness of such M¯aori whakapapa lineages, N¯epia Mahuika has noted that “whakapapa emphasise ocean and island lineages, and are reference points to the many ‘Hawaiki’ or ‘origin points’ from where ancestral M¯aori navigators set sail. Genealogies, like these, have framed the history of waka (canoe) migrations, and are illustrations of how whakapapa assert human genealogies that coalesce with the supernatural and spiritual planes.”21 The waka tales and voyages are more than just claims on historical settlement, but foundations of an entire historical lineage and experience. As such they are not only domains

19 R¯ awiri Taonui, ‘Canoe traditions - The meaning of canoe traditions’, Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/canoe-traditions/page-1 (accessed October 30, 2021). 20 Derek Lardelli, Te Aturangi Nepia-Clamp, Bill Baker, “Te Tauihu Turanga Whakamana: Explanation” (explanatory panel and description), Gisborne, New Zealand (2022). 21 N¯ epia Mahuika, “A Brief History of Whakapapa: M¯aori Approaches to Genealogy,” Genealogy: Special Issue: Indigenous Perspectives on Genealogical Research, vol. 3, no. 2, 32 (May 2019), https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy3020032

86

M. K. MATSUDA

of scholarly inquiry, but everyday practice. When meeting others, particularly in a formal setting, M¯aori genetics researcher Phillip Wilcox follows the self-introduction of the pepeha, speaking out the mountains, rivers, and ancestral houses of his forebears—and then the ancestral canoes, T¯akimitu and Kurahaupo, of his line, before setting forth his iwi and hap¯ u (tribe and clan) as foundational to his understanding of and commitment to genomic science.22 In older academic registers, the application of genetic investigations has a developed history connected to M¯aori canoes and voyaging by means of DNA sampling. Reporting on efforts to trace legendary and genealogical histories through molecular biology, the medical and science writer Allan Coukell asked in 1998, “Were the first human inhabitants of New Zealand accidental castaways, as some theories would have it—or were they intentional colonizers? Scientists and historians have debated the issue, but new DNA evidence suggests that the ancestors of present-day M¯aori New Zealanders were almost certainly part of a planned migration.”23 The genetic evidence came from studies comparing the mitochondrial DNA of a set of M¯aori women and other islanders in eastern Polynesia—the home of M¯aori ancestors according to tradition, archaeological, and linguistic reconstructions. The research attempted to “determine what size of founding group was most likely to give rise to the present-day distribution of mtDNA among M¯aori.” The use of mt—or mitochondrial—DNA is specific, for it is DNA not located in chromosomes but in energy organelles of the cells, passed directly from mother to children, which fathers cannot do, apart from their Y-chromosome genetic information. As mitochrondrial DNA is not combined in reproduction and comes only from mothers, mutations are infrequent and reasonably identical across a dozen generations. Using statistical modeling and tens of thousands of computer simulations, researcher Rosalind Murray-McIntosh and colleagues estimated between 50 and 70 women as part of an Aotearoa founding event. The interest

22 Philip Wilcox, “Concepts of (Hereditary) Inheritance,” GENE222 Guest Lecture, University of Otago (August 10, 2021), slide 2, “Pepeha (who am I?).” 23 Allan Coukell, “Genes and Genealogy,” New Zealand Science Monthly Online (October, 1998), http://nzsm.webcentre.co.nz/article1834.htm. For a deeper cultural reading of these narratives and “waka memory,” see Alice Te Punga Somerville, Once Were Pacific: M¯ aori Connections to Oceania, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (2012), 58–9.

4

THE ANCIENT MARINER

87

in ancestors and communities is a salient example of reclaiming histories in ways that incorporate newer sources reimagining small communities, and even the critical evidence provided by male and female biological distinctions into formulating narratives. When applied to founder questions, we might consider such reassertions of history alongside the challenge of reincorporating islander journeys and epistemologies, and frame them by noting the debates framed whether Polynesian cultural expansion was intention or accidental, reviewing questions of navigational genealogies and abilities and roles of chance and circumstance. As seen, N¯alani Wilson-Hokowhitu focused on the historical interpretation of drift, and how a community can claim its own directions in a decolonizing world by demonstrating unmatched navigational skill. The “chance” examples can and are, moreover, also appropriated to examine personal historical ancestral lineage and uniqueness. These are often focused on explanations of the ways that smaller populations and communities have greater “drift”—that is, they vary widely away from the mean, not having the sheer statistical numbers that would tend to mitigate fluctuations in random samplings. Founder effects and bottlenecking, which describe the ways that new settlements tended to magnify inherited characteristics from particular individuals due to small numbers of community members—are widespread. The importance of each individual becomes even more profound in defining ancestors. This is true not only in terms of research science, but personal family research, as the presenter of the Hawaiian DNA weblog, Kalani Mondoy, has commented, “Shortly after getting my DNA results back in May 2013, I learned that the majority of my DNA predicted connections are an endogamous connection…Being Polynesian (Hawaiian), I am a result of generations of constant bottlenecking and founder’s effect that have occurred through the centuries. This effect is more pronounced among eastern Polynesians like Maoris and Hawaiians whose homeland were the last places in Polynesia to be settled.”24 Thus, projects that determine to trace all descendants to few ancestors linked not only through genealogy, but DNA, are keenly interested in the size and the composition of settlement groups. In effect, the estimates that indicate clustering of M¯aori voyagers are unlikely to have been 24 Kalani Mondoy, “Finding a DNA connection despite endogamy,” posting (August 1, 2015), https://hawaiiandna.wordpress.com/ (accessed November 26, 2021).

88

M. K. MATSUDA

scattered castaway survivors over serial accidental episodes, but rather intentional arrivals in a “relatively large number” of Polynesian canoes. Such work, following observations by biological anthropologist Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith, underscores “support for the deliberate exploration and settlement of the Pacific by ancestral Polynesians, and are in line with theories that have been developed and are being further developed as archaeological, genetic, and linguistic evidence accumulates.“25 But not all projects are focused on an exploration and demonstrable dialogue between Indigenous and molecular science traditions, and in those cases, tensions arise. Initiatives with grander ambitions of tracing the genetic origins of the entire human species such as the Human Genome Diversity Project of the 1990s and the Genographic Project of the twentyfirst century depend upon the global sampling of genetic material from individuals and groups.26 Of special interest have been the genes of Indigenous communities—presumed to be more directly ancestral and unmixed by a larger gene pool. As Hawaiian attorney Le‘a Malia Kanehe has pointed out, such communities were egregiously denominated as simultaneously more untouched and also, potentially disappearing on the fatal impact model by some population geneticists, and all were drawn into a grand scheme as a “unique resource” to trace back, through haplotypes, the origins of a singular human species migrating out of the African continent.27 This would have seemed, in the views of the Genographic Project organizers, to establish an unobjectionable and all-embracing family-of-man view of humanity, reinforcing the common heritage of all people and challenging the prejudicial superficiality of racial theory and divisions. Yet the actual response was quite different, as the project did not sufficiently take into account the historical dimensions of post-colonialism, sovereignty struggles, and claims for territory, culture, and Indigenous ways of knowing. 25 Cited by Coukell, “Genes and Genealogy,” http://nzsm.webcentre.co.nz/articl e1834.htm. For a full overview, Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith, “Biological Anthropology and Genetics in Pacific History,” The Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean, vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2023), esp. 225–45. 26 For a detailed history of the Human Genome Diversity Project as it developed, Jenny Reardon, Race to the Finish: identity and governance in an age of genomics, Princeton: Princeton University Press (2005). 27 Le‘a Malia Kanehe, “From Kumulipo: I Know Where I Come From—An Indigenous Pacific Critique of the Genographic Project,” in Aroha Te Pareake Mead and Steven Ratuva, eds., Pacific Genes & Life Patents, Wellington: Llamado de la Tierra (2007), 114.

4

THE ANCIENT MARINER

89

If everyone can be telescoped into a common ancestry, then what claims are there for Indigenous peoples and their claims to distinctive cultures and lands? As M¯aori attorney Moana Jackson objected, “I’m sure part of the Genographic Project will be to try to strengthen some of the existing theories about the arrival of indigenous peoples in various countries, and that has a sordid history because it has been used to diminish indigenous rights.” Le‘a Malia Kanehe has framed such research by critiquing its very objectives. “Although the Genographic Project needs us, we do not need, nor should we want the project to proceed in our region…we do not need genetics to tell us what we already know. I know where I come from: Mai Kumulipo (the source in deep darkness), Mai Ka Pae ‘Aina o Hawai‘i (from the Hawaiian Archipelago).”28 Kanehe further disputes the implied stasis of apartness designation put upon Pacific Island peoples, and recognizes the interconnected histories of Oceania. “We have strong traditions of navigation throughout the Pacific, which indicates that we were not isolated islanders with homogenous genomes, rather genetic add-mixture undoubtedly occurred in the region. We also have oral histories and strong similarities in our native languages, cultural and spiritual beliefs that inform our understanding that we are indeed related.”29 Kanehe’s citation of genetic admixtures and cultural traditions together is a key point, for cultural contexts and history are critical to determining genealogies. It is, in fact, one of the very methods of genetic genealogy, and perhaps its blind spot, that erases cultures and appears to make determinations of ancestry completely dependent upon the statistical study of single nucleotide polymorphisms. As Ramya Rajagopalan and Joan Fujimura have indicated, genetic genealogies regularly rely on aligning “ancestral origins” with “chunks of DNA” held together by a concept of “relatedness.” As they explain, “Researchers do not consider all groups as suitable subjects for the admixture mapping approach. They only work with study subjects that they feel comfortable describing

28 Le‘a Malia Kanehe, “From Kumulipo,” 125. 29 Ibid, 125.

90

M. K. MATSUDA

as members of populations descended from encounters between two previously “geographically isolated” groups.”30 Importantly, then, an assumption is built in that subjects identifying with a particular “race” or ethnicity, “are more genetically related to each other than to individuals who do not identify with the group.” This is a much-debated and critiqued assumption. In this way, for example, an “African allele” is “estimated to be more frequent in African ancestors than European ancestors… Thus ‘chunks of DNA’ in the genome acquire geographical qualifiers.”31 The “genes” are distinguished in categories that are as much defined by time, place, and thus historic socio-cultural context as by nucleotide sequences. As Rajagopalan and Fujimura suggest: Genetics then is not a stand-alone discipline, basing its research only on its statistical techniques. Biological scientists’ knowledge and their research outcomes are also steeped in fields of research that study pieces of bones, pottery, and language phonemes. And just as there are debates in anthropology about how to make meaning of these materials, so too must we address these issues with respect to the field of population genetics.32

Is it possible then to conceive of genetic research which illuminates historic possibilities like the H¯ ok¯ ule‘a canoe voyages, adheres closely to the methodologies of genetic sequencing and statistical inference, while also paying attention to socio-cultural contexts in time? As noted earlier, Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith has been exploring such research, employing DNA to reconstruct Polynesian voyaging and settlement histories. Yet her approach is noteworthy for its cultural context: much of her genetic 30 Ramya Rajagopalan and Joan Fujimura, “Making History via DNA, Making DNA from History: Deconstructing the Race-Disease Connection in Admixture Mapping,” Wailoo, et al., Genetics and the Unsettled Past, 146. See the general critique of “relatedness” in Eviatar Zerubavel, Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity, Community, New York: Oxford University Press (2013). 31 Ibid, 147 and 155–7. The classic statement about population genetics and “races,” is Richard Lewontin’s 1972 work in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, in which he articulated the contested, but never overturned analysis that 85% of human genetic variation is to be found within populations—not “between” them. See also A.W.F. Edwards, “Human genetic diversity: Lewontin’s fallacy,” BioEssays, vol. 25, no. 8, (2003), 798–801; Richard Lewontin, It Ain’t Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions, New York: NY Review Books (2001); also the overview by Spencer Wells, The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, New York: Random House (2002), 16–8. 32 Ibid, 147.

4

THE ANCIENT MARINER

91

sequencing is done not through human subjects—as we have seen, a fraught approach—but through commensal animals, that is, those that traveled with humans. In particular, she is noted for her work on the rattus exulans, the Pacific Rat, at once a historically revered creature and also a destructive pest. The rat is an excellent test subject because it is widespread throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific, can be traced through variant haplotypes like other organisms, and because it can be used as a surrogate for the likely tracings of human voyagers. The rat’s presence in the Pacific Islands indicates that it was likely carried—either intentionally as food, or unintentionally as a stowaway or pest on ocean-going craft. It is also possible that it “drifted,” but is not known to be a long-distance swimmer.33 The idea of focusing on rats may seem innocuous, but it is in fact a critical observation. For such research reincorporates what other approaches, uniquely concerned with the transmission of nucleotide sequences, often lack: a proper recognition given to a theory of culture. Far from isolating genetic material to study and then plotting it statistically, DNA here is a relationship between animal and human that necessitates an extensive web of inference and evidence to imagine and reconstruct voyaging canoes, maritime shelters, food ways, sacred beliefs, and likely survival practices that brought and kept them together. Genetic science is here precise in its assertions yet framed by cultural and contingent circumstances. As Michal Denny writes, through the use of molecular biotechnologies, teams like that of Matisoo-Smith “have found evidence which suggests that the hypothesis that the Lapita were the only ancestors of Polynesians may not completely explain the situation.” Rather, more complex possibilities arise from focusing on determining “the genetic origins of animals and plants that are known to be associated with human settlements in the Pacific.”34 Such work is in lineage to scholars like Robert Langdon, who argued for the importance of a multi-sited “trans-oceanic hypothesis” concerning domestic fowl, and

33 Lisa Matisoo-Smith and J.H. Robins, “Origins and dispersals of Pacific Peoples: Evidence from mtDNA phylogenies of the Pacific Rat,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 101, no. 24 (2004), 9167. This discussion also summarized in, “Genetic Drift: Pacific Pasts and Futures,” by Matt Matsuda, in Warwick Anderson, Miranda Johnson, Barbara Brookes, eds., Pacific Futures: Past and Present (2018). By permission of the University of Hawai‘i Press, 53–7. 34 Michal Denny and Lisa Matisoo-Smith, “Rethinking Polynesian Origins,” 5–7.

92

M. K. MATSUDA

the human/animal pairings “that crossed both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans long before Columbus,” work pursued and updated by newer generations of studies.35 This is a salient approach, like that of early blood type and ethnographic studies when properly observant of local genealogical knowledge, for it does not uniquely attempt to trace statistical origins directly through DNA samplings of living individuals, but rather focuses on the deployment of a theory of historical culture. That theory is manifested in exploring flora and fauna as actors in a drama of conscious human intervention. As Denny put it, “These are known as commensal plants and animals because they have a close relationship with humans as food items, companions, or because they are important for other cultural reasons. Examples of these animals include rats, pigs, dogs, and chickens.” The first commensal animal studied by the Matisoo-Smith team, the Pacific rat or kiore, is considered a threat to native plant and animal species by the New Zealand Department of Conservation. Yet it is nonetheless a creature with a celestial genealogy tied to the k¯umara or sweet potato. The god Rongomaui stole k¯umara from his elder brother, brought them to earth, and impregnated his wife Pani, who birthed the k¯umara known by humans. Pani’s youngest daughter, Hinemataiti, became the ancestor of the kiore, already bearing a legacy of stealing k¯umara, which was passed on to the rats. The focus on the DNA of the kiore is also an engagement with a tradition of songs, tales, and proverbs framing the growth and legendary history of M¯aori settlements. The approach is not without its own questions. As Matisoo-Smith herself indicates, “Since our first application of the ‘rat as proxy’ model for human mobility, we have regularly faced questions regarding the intentionality of the introduction of rats and the possibility of recent historic transport of the species.” The researchers have built data around additional hypotheses based on a greater mixing of rat genetic materials 35 Robert Langdon, ‘When the blue-egg chickens come home to roost: new thoughts on the prehistory of the domestic fowl in Asia, America and the Pacific Islands’, Journal of Pacific History, vol .24, no. 2, (1989), 164. See also updates including, Alice A. Storey, Daniel Quiróz, Elizabeth A. Matisoo-Smith, “A Reappraisal of the Evidence for Pre-Columbian Introduction of Chickens to the Americas,” and Terry L. Jones, “Re-introducing the Case for Polynesian Contact,” in Terry L. Jones, Alice A. Storey, Elizabeth A. Matisoo-Smith, José Miguel Ramírez-Aliaga, eds., Polynesians in America: Pre-Columbian Contacts with the New World, Lanham and New York: Altamira Press (2011).

4

THE ANCIENT MARINER

93

had the Rattus exulans been spread randomly by stowaway animals, or “competitive exclusion of secondary introductions.”36 The critical observation here is the importance of understanding the past through engaging a multiplicity of different research and knowledge traditions. At stake here are forms of knowledge in dialogue, regarding long-distance canoe voyaging, trading networks, and the capacity for deep-ocean navigation and settlement. These projects, like that of the H¯ ok¯ ule‘a can be identified as insistent attempts to write “another” history of the Pacific through the traditional capacities and knowledge of Polynesian forebears. This holds true, and in some ways is even more imperative for voyaging traditions not only as startling technical feats, but embodied practices of navigators handed down across generations. Noted earlier, Albert Wendt’s “Inside Us The Dead” narrative is, in fact, multiple genealogical narratives woven together: of Polynesian voyagers, outlander missionaries, distant European sea captains, island mothers, and remembered brothers. Of the voyagers, Wendt describes “my Polynesian fathers who escaped the sun’s wars/ seeking these islands by prophetic stars,” and their stories are not so much prior, as overlapping of all the others. It is not only origins, but what they become that matters. This continuity of multiple pasts and presences and connections is unlike the linearity of positivist history and ideologies of scientific progress. Alice Te Punga Somerville has clarified that the M¯aori genealogical universe of whakapapa, though its layering, is both selective and exhaustive, an imperative not just to structure lineages, but to know which histories to tell, and what futures to imagine based on the right order of all elements and actors. Mere Roberts and John Fairweather’s community studies verify this, as in one respondent’s “Whakapapa provides an understanding of how the world works.” That is, a history shaped by an understanding “of how things came to be and what their place in the world i.e. is not just about the origins of things but the correct relationships of things one to another; this is all in the whakapapa.”37

36 Matisoo-Smith and J.H.Robins, “Origins and Dispersals of Pacific Peoples: Evidence from mtDNA Phylogenies of the Pacific rat,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, vol. 101, no. 24 (June 7, 2004), 9167–72. 37 Alice Te Punga Somerville, Once Were Pacific: M¯ aori Connections to Oceania, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press (2012), 51–4, 82–3. Mere Roberts and John Fairweather, “South Island M¯aori Perceptions of Biotechnology,” Research Report No. 268, Lincoln University: Canterbury (2004), 19.

94

M. K. MATSUDA

These insistent moves away from singular explanations or “simplistic models” create knowledge that is equally multidimensional, rather than exclusive and dismissive of other traditions. Aroha Te Pareake Mead has indicated the need for mutual recognition around scientific and cultural determinations of genealogical heritage. According to Mead, “the human story might be written in genes from a scientific point of view but the human story from a cultural point of view is actually written in our culture, it’s in our language, it’s in our art, it’s in our dance, it’s in our tradition.”38 The focus here is dual: how the scientific and cultural determinations of genealogical heritage are both necessary for the proper advancement of knowledge. Yet, focus on the historical, cultural, and political dimensions of knowledge constitution is fraught, as Indigenous contributions are not always well-regarded. One archaeologist underscoring the empirical methods of many Indigenous communities—that the community knowledge base is built over generations of observation of nature, cultivating, sampling, and learning in the field—found his published work met with such commentaries as “The author is clearly knowledgeable about his field but lacks a clear understanding of the scientific method…a series of anti-science and postmodernist rants have been passed off as fact.”39 Such hostility or condescension upholds a singular model by pre-determining what counts as scientific. Implicit here, is that especially for Indigenous and (often) marginalized communities, is the question of specific claims rooted in local cultures versus broad legal, administrative, and scientific claims adhering to a universalized regime of enforcement. In response to inquiries about the introduction of research on genetically modified organisms in New Zealand, Paul Reynolds of Ng¯a Puhi and Ng¯ati T¯uwharetoa notes that while much is made of public good and spiritual risk in such debates, critical issues are invested in the local: “What was important for Ngati Wairere was to exercise their rights and responsibilities of self-government

38 Aroha Te Pareake Mead, cited Le‘a Malia Kanehe, “From Kumulipo: I Know Where I Come From—An Indigenous Pacific Critique of the Genographic Project,” in Aroha Te Pareake Mead and Steven Ratuva, eds., Pacific Genes & Life Patents, Wellington: Llamado de la Tierra (2007), 125. 39 George Nicholas, “An uneasy alliance: Indigenous Traditional Knowledge enriches science,” The Conversation (February 18, 2019), https://theconversation.com/an-uneasyalliance-indigenous-traditional-knowledge-enriches-science-109212

4

THE ANCIENT MARINER

95

with the authority to monitor what happens in their own rohe (region/ territory).”40 The methods of research themselves are not in question— but their use and the authority of their practice, usage, and legitimation are. The Hawaiian scholar and noted activist Haunani-Kay Trask presented her own views with an equally resonant emphasis on genealogies as globally resonant, yet non-universalizing as claims of Hawaiian knowledge in a 1996 interview: “All Polynesians begin anything formally or informally with their genealogy and that means your line of descent. So, I am descended from the Pi‘ilani line of Maui and the Kahakumakaliua line of Kaua‘i and first through my mother, the second through my father. Those two lines carry with them obligations which is to carry forward the protection of the people and the land, those are traditional obligations.” For Trask, this was very much a question of historical and cultural primacy, as she made famously clear: “…the lessons of the genealogy are that we come from the land. I like to say to white people, well you say you come from monkeys and that’s your problem, but we don’t. We come from the land. We know where it is. We know who we are. We know what our obligations consist of.”41 Trask’s point about “monkeys” is a clear rejoinder to evolutionary biology and natural selection as constituted in a universalized postDarwinian scientific practice. It is a key observation, for assertions of historical primacy are debates about authorizing ancestors. Trask first evokes “Polynesians,” but then speaks of her own familial lines and a “we” that informs her sense of the Hawaiian community. The knowledge is personal, ancestral, and localized; it is not a claim on the practices, beliefs, or laws of even other Oceanic peoples, nor does it invalidate multiple possibilities of origins: it demands regard for difference, rather than imposed mutuality. Is such insistence on regarding respect for and engagement with multiple traditions incommensurable? Both scientific as well as historical and cultural practice are largely defined by the dialogues about who determines the methodologies and confirmation of acceptable knowledge. Aroha Te Pareake Mead, observing the solid, if cautious, participation by 40 Paul Reynods, “The Sanctity and Respect for Whakapapa: the Case of Ngati Wairere and AGResearch,” Pacific Genes & Life Patents, 55. 41 Interview with Haunani-Kay Trask, (Writer’s Festival, Vancouver, 1996), as cited: http://mypage.direct.ca/e/epang/InterviewHaunani.html (accessed November 2014).

96

M. K. MATSUDA

Indigenous communities in health research and ancestral investigations, notes, “It needs to be stressed that indigenous peoples are not antiscience.” She underscores M¯aori Congress Indigenous Peoples meetings recommending research by and for Indigenous peoples and “participation in any other national and international bodies by indigenous peoples.”42 The issue, therefore, is not one of anti-science, but rather what it is that Indigenous peoples consider to be good, beneficial, or sustainable as science. As the Native Hawaiian genome scientist and anthropologist Keolu Fox has informed his Twitter followers, “We’re not anti-science, we’re anti-colonialism—if you’re an advocate for Hawaiian culture & Indigenous/Native sovereignty…WE need your support.”43 More, his own research work observes and integrates all the imperatives that usually widen science/local knowledge divides, and instead pulls them together. For his work on gene editing, Fox argues that “appropriate empiricalbased evidence and detailed theoretical considerations should be used for evolutionary explanations of phenotypic variation observed in the field of human population genetics (especially Indigenous populations).” In search of best practices toward verifiable, replicable experimental outcomes, he surveys genome editing tools, point mutation introduction, limitations on base editors, signatures of natural selection in sequencing, the thirty gene hypothesis, and environmental interactions with genes and ecological pressures. Yet his scientific research finds no contradiction with also concluding that It is our responsibility as members of the genome engineering and population genetics community to identify potential profiteers and ensure that biomedical patents do not create conflicts between potential stakeholders…By involving Indigenous peoples in the research surrounding genetic variation identified in communities, we can engage in a more ethical and

42 Aroha Te Pareake Mead, “Genealogy, Sacredness, and the Commodities Market,” Cultural Survival: Genes, People and Property, vol. 20, no. 2 (Summer 1996). http://www.culturalsurvival.org/ourpublications/csq/article/genealogysacredness-and-commodities-market, 6–7. 43 Keolu Fox, in reference here to halting construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope project of international astronomy research units on Mauna Kea mountain on the island of Hawai‘i (July 15, 2019) 11:09 a.m.

4

THE ANCIENT MARINER

97

equitable research and encourage Indigenous self-governance in biomedical research.44

Fox does not focus on the question of whether one tradition—scientific or Indigenous—is more true, or even if one might also be true, but instead asks a harder question as to why there cannot be a restructuring of the aims and epistemologies of the scientific method itself, including who has control of data to study whom and what, the possibility of conclusions that may not be universally generalizable, and the faults in theorizing an efficient mechanism in natural selection without accounting for historical and cultural interventions. In this he combines multiple priorities: an emphasis on resource sovereignty, an imperative for cultural specificity rather than generalization, and he proposes a direct critique of the frameworks within scientific questions and research theories themselves are generated. In the case of genomic data, Fox argues that clear, if often unacknowledged, parallels exist between cellular matter, extraction of information, and “every other resource such as oil, diamonds, rare earth minerals, and timber.” As with all resources, information can be both used to educate and inform as well as to abuse authority and interest. As a researcher, he favors medical and biological projects that can function as a form of sovereign expression rooted in authority of knowledge and data gathered and interpreted by local communities. This means marking not just information provided but control of the uses and exploitation of that information for benefit. Likewise, as a newer scientific methodology, he inquires whether the research questions being asked are “rooted in or prioritized by the community from which they are extracting DNA,” recognizing that reference to the greater good requires refinement to “whose greater good?” As with Trask, infinitely generalizable applications are not as primary as acknowledgment and working with “local complexities,” particularly when linked to health issues and disparities in individual communities.45

44 Keolu Fox, Kartik Lakshmi Rallapalli, Alexis C. Komor, “Rewriting Human History and Empowering Indigenous Communities with Genome Editing Tools,” Genes, vol. 11, no. 1 (2020), https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4425/11/1/88/htm 45 Keolu Fox and Stephanie DeMarco, Interview, “Keolu Fox revises historical narratives with genome data,” Drug Discovery News, vol. 17, no. 7 (July 2021), https://www.dru gdiscoverynews.com/keolu-fox-revises-historical-narratives-with-genome-data-15218

98

M. K. MATSUDA

Fox’s particular integration of scientific research and decolonized science practice also, ultimately, returns to Polynesian canoe voyaging, and the question of ancient settlement. In this case, he offers a counterpoint to what are now familiar lines of investigation: the acknowledgment of Polynesian deep-water navigational prowess; the out-of-Taiwan trajectory with the Austronesian diaspora; the question of ancestral survival and continuity; the logic of genetics underscoring a cultural and historical framing of Polynesian accomplishments, rather than only a Darwinian adaptation based on biological adaptability. In this, he dialogues with the noted “thrifty gene” hypothesis of anthropologist James Neel, who proposed that Polynesians were unusually well suited to long, uncertain, and strenuous ocean explorations and migrations because of adaptation to “hypercaloric storage.” In this thinking, Polynesian seafaring groups were, due to this genetic advantage, able to survive the “feast and famine cycles” of voyaging, eventually settling throughout the Polynesian triangle over generations migrating out first from Taiwan and into the Pacific. The key point for both Neel and Fox, however, is that Neel developed part of his thinking around observations that “a lot of indigenous communities developed metabolic diseases like obesity and type two diabetes.” From these contemporary medical studies, he conjectured that, having long since moved away from strenuous, ocean-going movement and migration, ancient navigators—as peoples “predisposed for hypercaloric storage”—found themselves more sedentary and storing too much body mass, leading them to develop type two diabetes and metabolic disorders. Fox thinks of this as “a nice story,” but indicative of theory based on biological evolutionary determinism and evacuated of a lived experience of peoples and interactions with their environments, and with each other. As he says, “it discounts our culture. We had canoe plants like sweet potato and taro that we carried with us on our voyages. We worked on animal husbandry. At no point did we ever have problems with calorie scarcity during our diaspora.”46 To understand genomic predispositions would be to also account for social relations, resource management, plant cultivation, and animal knowledge.

46 Keolu Fox and Stephanie DeMarco, Interview, “Keolu Fox revises historical narratives with genome data,” Drug Discovery News, vol. 17, no. 7 (July 2021), https://www.dru gdiscoverynews.com/keolu-fox-revises-historical-narratives-with-genome-data-15218

4

THE ANCIENT MARINER

99

As with Matisoo-Smith’s and Robins’ genetic study of commensal animals, conclusions in this way must be necessarily integrated with practices from culture, or at least as reconstructed through traditions and results “from other fields such as archaeology, comparative linguistics, and molecular biology of human populations.” This will be “the only way we can fully understand the complex prehistory of this region. We argue that each of these data sets need to be analysed independently and then synthesized within a model or models that allow for such complexity. Simplistic models that constrain the history of language, biology, and culture with a single explanation are clearly inappropriate for understanding the human settlement of the Pacific.”47 As Fox, Indigenous researchers have also forwarded this question, proposing genetic studies that not only align culture, history, practice, and laboratory science, but also center Indigenous self-determination, developing participatory models, and placing indigenous values centrally in decision-making processes.48 Whether such promising efforts will develop remains a matter of skepticism for many. Aroha Te Pareake Mead—likewise with many Indigenous scholars—does not view her work on the legal and colonial epistemologies of most genetic research as anti-science, but as an inquiry into a different kind of science. But she does reflect further on whether she would “have a different reaction to biotechnology had my first experiences been more culturally affirming.” The future can be wished, but the past is not easily overcome, and the record has not been encouraging for most Indigenous communities. “This technology was never designed for the affirmation of cultural diversity. It is underpinned with ideologies of colonization, globalization and ownership over the very elements that make life sacred and meaningful to the bulk of the world’s population.”49 What is sacred, over and again, is proper regard for different traditions by which peoples became who they are with the knowledge they

47 Matisoo-Smith and J.H.Robins, “Origins and dispersals of Pacific peoples,” 9172; Alicia Sanchez-Mazas, Roger Blench, Malcolm D. Ross, et al., Past Human Migrations in East Asia: Matching archaeology, linguistics and genetics, Routledge: London and New York (2008), 23–39. 48 Riley I. Taitingfong, “Islands as Laboratories: Indigenous Knowledge and Gene Drives in the Pacific,” Human Biology, vol. 91, no. 3 (June 2020), 179–88. 49 Aroha Te Pareake Mead, “The Polynesian Excellence Gene & Patent Bottom Trawling,” Pacific Genes & Life Patents, 52.

100

M. K. MATSUDA

constructed and their own life heritages. Lea Lani Kinikini Kauvaka has pointed out that life stories for her are bound within familial ritual practice and place-based genealogies. This is necessary, “as it locates the speaker to the listeners, and uncovers the speaker’s spiritual and physical lineages, both those present and also those separated by space or time, life or death. We have a knowledge that our ancestors are never far from us.”50

50 Lea Lani Kinikini Kauvaka, Maui’s Sons: A Life Writing Genealogy of Return, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Auckland (2009), 54.

CHAPTER 5

Warriors

Acknowledging ancestors is not only a question of paying respects to voyagers and their legendary and genomic chronicles, but conveys direct imputations of carrying on an embodied heritage. Where that heritage is woven together with centuries of shared history and colonial violence and discrimination, it also surfaces not only affirmations of connections to the past, but embodied assumptions about communities, their marginalization, and the very possibilities of escaping one’s own biology and colonized legacy. One place where genetic applications to historical, cultural, and political matters immediately become embroiled in cautionary tales are attempts to define community characteristics across time and lineage by ascribing them to genetically transferred and therefore biologically encoded historical traits. These, often, are assigned and defined as “racial” characteristics. In a notable debate, which has become a centerpiece case study, this has meant the attempted explanation and determination through molecular science of criminality and violence in M¯aori communities in some ways issuing from propensities determined by a “warrior gene.” This research, advanced in 2006 by researchers Rod Lea, a genetic epidemiologist, and biologist-geneticist Geoffrey Chambers, and

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. K. Matsuda, Genealogies, Genomes, and Histories in the Pacific, Palgrave Studies in Pacific History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45449-3_5

101

102

M. K. MATSUDA

presented at an international genetics conference in Brisbane, was organized around studies of mutations to a gene sequence linked to a monoamine oxidase-A (MAO-A) complex—an enzyme that affects the action of neurotransmitters in the brain, and therefore moods and behaviors.1 They were building on a seasoned line of inquiry. Identifying the MAO-A gene mutation is credited to Dutch research Han Brunner in 1993, followed by a decade of studies examining lineages of violent men in families, the role of child abuse, and—in capital cases in the United States and Europe—legal defense strategies around genetic predispositions to aggression that in some instances led to manslaughter rather than murder judgments. Lea and Chambers showed that the gene was more common in M¯aori than “white” populations (56 to 34 percent). This fit in with broader surveys showing similar patterns in AfricanAmericans and, notably, also a higher incidence of the gene in both Chinese and Taiwanese populations, though these were less remarked upon. Their work, in turn, has been part of a continuing set of studies dedicated to the question of whether “positive selection” may have demographically led to MAO-A as a behavior-influencing trait in Polynesian populations.2 As with many debates about genetic implications, the point was not so much the sample, but the remarkable conclusions that were quickly debated and disputed in research, media, and medicine: correlations of the gene with greater tendency to aggression, addiction, and antisocial behavior, with a corollary link made by many, if not the researchers themselves, to violence, criminality—and prison time—all attached to a particular cultural and historical community.3

1 Lea RA, Hall D, Green M, Chambers GK. “Tracking the evolutionary history of the warrior gene in the South Pacific.” Presented at the Molecular Biology and Evolution Conference in Auckland, Jun 2005, and the International Congress of Human Genetics, Brisbane Aug, 2006. See Rod Lea, Geoffrey Chambers, “Monoamine oxidase, addiction, and the “warrior” gene hypothesis;” Tony Merriman, Vicky Cameron, “Risk-taking: behind the warrior gene story;” Peter Crampton, Chris Parkin, “Warrior genes and risktaking science,” collected in The New Zealand Medical Journal, vol. 120, no. 1250, (March 2007), 5–93, 59–62, 63–65. 2 David Eccles, Donia Macartney-Coxson, Geoff Chambers, Rodney Lea, “A unique demographic history exists for MAO-A gene in Polynesians,” Journal of Human Genetics, vol. 57, no. 5 (March 2012), 294–300. 3 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17339897

(Lea

and

Chambers);

5

WARRIORS

103

The warrior gene proposals were widely reported by press and general media, and also stringently contested in scholarly forums. Lea argued for the value of the research, pushing back against “negative twisting” of the conclusions “by journalists or politicians to try to explain nonmedical, antisocial issues like criminality.” Rather, he proposed to be focused on risk-taking behaviors tied to smoking and alcohol addiction. In this way, the research would be more encoded within the frameworks of contributions to public health and social welfare studies.4 Not everyone was convinced, even with the refinement to suggest dispositions and tendencies rather than predeterminations toward particular acts. Critical scholars have continued to study the outcomes of the controversy, arguing that “the researchers failed in their obligation to clearly place the influence of monoamine oxidase (or the so-called ‘warrior gene’ polymorphism) in a wider socio-political context.” In this way, the dissension issued not from the laboratory conclusions, but the ways that “the researchers ventured to explain the impact of the monoamine oxidase gene on antisocial behaviors,”—without providing any supporting framework of cultural, environmental, or economic influences and limitations on populations.5 The ensuing furor about the possible implications of the broad conclusions and imprecision about contexts accelerated into responses from community leaders as well as other research scholars. One team critical of the implied conclusions argued, “there is no direct evidence to support such an association in M¯aori. Insufficient rigour in interpreting and applying the relevant literature, and in generating new data, has…done science and M¯aori a disservice.”6 Sociologically, as presented through the warrior lens and then exploited and re-narrated in mass media, the warrior gene thesis was—and continues to be—a strikingly contentious debate around explanation for behaviors as genetically heritable without apparent

“Monoamine oxidase, addiction, and the “warrior” gene hypothesis, New Zealand Medical Journal, 120 (1250); U2441 (March 2, 2007). 4 Jon Stokes, “Scientist defends ‘warrior’ gene,” NZHerald. Co. (Monday, March 5,

2007). 5 D. Wensley, M. King, “Scientific responsibility for the dissemination and interpretation of genetic research: lessons from the “warrior gene” controversy,” Journal of Medical Ethics vol. 34, (2008) 507–09. 6 T. Merriman and V. Cameron, “Risk-taking: Behind the warrior gene story,” New Zealand Medical Journal, vol. 120, (March 2, 2007), 1250.

104

M. K. MATSUDA

regard for disparities, at times significant, with income levels, educational attainment, and healthcare access in M¯aori and P¯akeh¯a (white) communities. Other scholars, drawing on academic literary and historical studies, have indicated that the supposed evidence of the warrior gene’s own genealogy “was derived from a simplistic account of M¯aori history that owed much to popular cultural framings on warriorhood.” One critic called the attempt a “romanticized figuration in genetic terms,” which did not recognize the “cultural tropes, narratives, and representations” behind the warrior identification and its highly controversial and disputed dimensions.7 In this, the foundations of the debate were as much about what had historically constituted the warrior ascription itself, and how— and with what real consequences—rather than a unique disagreement about the applicability of molecular biology to behavior. Historically, the “warrior” debate was built into a cultural narrative woven through historical impressions and typing, and cultural selffashioning. In 1642, at the time of the first known European encounter, by the Dutchman Abel Tasman, with the Ng¯ati T¯umatak¯okiri tribe, skirmishes were already common among the M¯aori clans, and the violence between M¯aori warriors and Tasman’s crew set a narrative that led the Dutch captain to designate his mooring as Murderer’s Bay, as “we could not hope to enter into friendly relations with these people.”8 Intertribal Musket Wars of the first half of the nineteenth century also led to tens of thousands of deaths, as M¯aori tribes clashed with each other, at times over traditional disputes, and latterly in the context of European introduction of firearms, as well as land sales and seizures, territorial and resource exclusions, trade and imperial alliance favoritism, and political upheaval across the islands. Chiefs like Hongi Hika and Hone Heke are widely known, and even legendary, in the history of Aotearoa New Zealand for their bloody exploits against rival tribal groups. The respected prowess of many M¯aori leaders’ “warlike” qualities often overshadowed the intricate planning and military engineering and p¯ a (palisade, trench, bunker) fortifications that have become historically credited with much of the success in defending against and beating back 7 Clare Baker and G. Raumati Hook (cited), “Warrior Genes,” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 4, no. 66. (2020), 755–79. 8 http://www.theprow.org.nz/events/the-first-meeting-abel-tasman-and-M¯ aori-ingolden-bay/#.VwB-jz-J8XB

5

WARRIORS

105

British colonial troops. James Belich has convincingly demonstrated that this long-ignored distinction abetted the persistent narrative of M¯aori men as traditionally savage fighters while devaluing their strategic innovations, an earlier, easier narrative for British military commanders and settlers to accept.9 From this, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century growth of the warrior narrative derived significantly from “what one might call ‘the ordinary violence’ of M¯aori life,” as Christina Thompson has suggested. This mythology of violence can be noted as sheer negative stereotyping, or it can also be grasped as a cultural patterning framed by the Victorian embrace of rediscovering or reinventing ancestral warrior heroes as an ideology of bravery and stoicism in the service of a pious, salvationoriented mission tied to uplift others, and—in the British case—further empire and civilization. Enamored of Arthurian legends, Anglo-Celtic mythologies, and romantic odes to distinguish the bourgeoisie from other social orders in an aristocratic vein, the warrior ethos was powerful because it could be split between different imputations: “it could imply dignity, courage and daring. But it could equally well be used to suggest cowardice, cruelty and moral turpitude.”10 Both were readily employed both at home and across the Empire. When applied to colonial violence during the New Zealand Wars of the middle of the nineteenth century, scholars have repeatedly noted, for example, that “A dichotomy was formed between the civilized, intelligent warfare pursued by British troops and the ‘lower’ form of war waged by M¯aori,” an imputed distinction that carried on and continues to the present as a “martial race discourse.”11 As much as warfare practices can be hierarchized historically, they can also be assimilative, inflected to accommodate multiple traditions in the case where institutions wish to re-adopt an almost legendary legacy of a warrior tradition. Maria Bargh and Quentin Whanau have noted that the New Zealand Defence Force in 1994 adopted M¯aori names for its

9 James Belich, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict, Auckland: Auckland University Press (1986, reissued 2015). 10 Christina Thompson, “A Dangerous People Whose Only Occupation Is War: M¯ aori and Pakeha in the 19th Century New Zealand,” The Journal of Pacific History, vol. 32, no. 1 (1997), 113–4. 11 Franchesca Walker, “Descendants of a Warrior Race”: The M¯ aori Contingent, New Zealand Pioneer Battalion, and Martial Race Myth, 1914–19, War & Society, vol. 31, no. 1 (2012).

106

M. K. MATSUDA

branches, signifying warriors of the sea, tribute of the God of war, and warriors of the sky for the navy, army, and air force, a move to suggest full integration of the armed services and recognition of a “traditionally tribal warrior people.”12 Anthropologist Alondra Oubré has noted the canonical nature of both real wars and then the mythologizing of those conflicts to Aotearoa New Zealand histories, while also suggesting the broader role violence might play in determining survival in new environments. “Historically, warfare was a central part of traditional M¯aori culture because, after all, these South Pacific islanders had to compete vigorously for limited natural resources.”13 Such competitive, evolutionary models are not unattractive in some interpretations. Interestingly enough, in explaining his own work, Rod Lea made a broad case for the value of the research not by enumerating determinant behavioral factors at the molecular level, but by weaving those factors into a historic logic closely tied to a calculated past: “Historically M¯aori were fearless warriors. Indeed, reverence for the ‘warrior’ tradition remains a key part of M¯aori cultural structure today.” Moreover, he suggested that “the MAO-A gene may have conferred some selective advantage during the canoe voyages and intertribal-wars that occurred during the Polynesian migrations.”14 This suggested a genetically based survivability trait defined as a sturdiness and martial quality inhering in—by “selective advantage”—an implied Darwinian logic. This elaboration of transmitted fearless adventuring and strength did not, in itself, go unnoticed. The selective advantage hypothesis remains powerful, of resourceful, skillful peoples evolving within a historical landscape of voyaging, settlement, and scarcity. If correct, this would underscore proper attention to a highly refined development of ingenuity and natural knowledge to forage, hunt, cultivate and establish communities—that is, survive. Yet, the warrior designation as a logical ascription is intriguing in that it binds together warfare with an almost inherent logic of political struggles as a presumed form of natural survival. That Hongi Hika and Hone Heke are revered paragons of embodied warrior character and eminence is however, not for them having been birthed 12 Maria Bargh and Quentin Whanau, “M¯ aori as “Warriors” and “Locals” in the Private Military Industry,” Wicazo Sa Review, vol. 32, no. 1 (Spring 2017), 104–6. 13 Alondra Oubre, “The Extreme Warrior Gene: A Reality Check,” https://scientias alon.wordpress.com/2014/07/31/the-extreme-warrior-gene-a-reality-check/ 14 Jon Stokes, “Scientist defends ‘warrior’ gene,” NZHerald (Monday, March 5, 2007).

5

WARRIORS

107

as fighters or even warlords expressing natural necessity. They were both, rather, warriors by dint of their ambitions and interests within the context of European colonial connections to and encroachments upon Aotearoa. Hongi Hika of Ng¯a Puhi iwi was famously affected by his family’s military loss to a rival clan, leading him to seek out and travel with European sailing crews, befriend the missionary Samuel Marsden, and make a globespanning trip across the Pacific and Atlantic all the way to England in 1820. There, he was introduced to King George IV, told stories about trade and agricultural education, and acquired what he really was after: muskets, which he perceived would shift the power balance in the Islands and allow him the conquest of his enemies. This proved prescient and soon led to widespread musket warfare and reorganization of the political landscape. For his part, Hone Heke was likewise a famed war leader around Koror¯areka bay, yet also a historical figure for having been—debatedly— the first to sign the Treaty of Waitangi with British representatives. His boldness hardly indicated affection for overlordship, however, and he quickly became a strenuous objector to loss of trade revenue in his territories with the relocation of the colonial capital to Auckland. He became a wily politician at times flying the American stars and stripes to upset the British crown when not receiving the material benefits of Waitangi he’d believed due to him. He is popularly noted especially for leading armed protests and raiding parties to cut down the flagstaff over Koror¯areka town flying the symbol of British authority four times while also attacking the settlement and building his own fortifications over many years in actions labeled as a “rebellion.” As parts of the New Zealand historical record, the attribution of a famed warrior tradition to such M¯aori political leaders was neither undeserved nor unfounded and, in fact, widely respected and even revered. That tradition, however, does not delimit its most famous exemplars as inheritors of an aggressive biological adaptation, but rather the creators and representatives of a highly complex and ruthless political leadership that also encompassed agricultural tools and experiments, religious adherences and dalliances, seafaring, diplomacy, and diversionary military tactics and strategic thinking. All of these were in turn very much given shape by opportunism with, exploitation of, and violent resistance to British commercial and colonial authority. Ty K¯awika Tengan has notably ‘ framed masculinities in Hawai‘i and in Aotearoa as constituted by the tensions between imperialism, colonialism,

108

M. K. MATSUDA

and decolonization. In the Hawaiian case, he has observed that not only colonizers, but “‘Oiwi men often glorify the M¯aori as representing the epitome of ‘real’ Polynesian masculinity, that of the fearless warrior.”15 As a function of this, particular and presumably ideal characteristics are promoted, defining the “proper” masculinity—as compared to “marginalized” masculinities that break along lines of ethnicity, class, and sexual difference. The supposedly proper view also is framed within patriarchal relations and—in many cases—status as ascribed by (for settlers) ownership and control of property. Colonized men are purportedly sexually threatening, and violent by nature, thus well suited for masculine roles defined principally by labor, the military, and by sports.16 In a noted article, Brendan Hokowhitu took up and deconstructed exactly these nineteenth-century legacies in his “Tackling M¯aori Masculinity: a Colonial Genealogy of Savagery and Sport,” leading with the observation that M¯aori masculine physicality was not a presence merely experienced, but constructed—and very much within a colonial framework, to be civilized, and conquered, in military confrontation, in controlling labor, and later in sports like rugby. As Hokowhitu notes, M¯aori men (t¯ane) representationally grew within a “genealogy of representations” within which the white man as colonizer possessed the mental fortitude to “exercise is own will, virtuous, secular, liberated in thought, and autonomous. Conversely, the Other—the savage man—was represented as encumbered by his inability to evolve, ruled by his passions, physical, immoral, and sinful.”17 By the early twentieth century, this meant boarding school headmasters pronouncing that M¯aori boys “could not bear the strain of higher education,” and were thus destined for agricultural labor, or the salvation of sport, due to presumed athleticism, and the natural arena for “the disciplined brute, with his aggression and savagery confined.” As

15 Ty K¯ awika Tengan, “(En)gendering Colonialism: Masculinities in Hawai’i and Aotearoa,” Cultural Values, vol. 6, no. 3 (2002), 240. 16 Ty K¯ awika Tengan, “(En)gendering Colonialism,” 246–50. See commentaries on “Rainbow Warrior” mascot controversies,” 249–50. 17 Brendan Hokowhitu, “Tackling M¯ aori Masculinity: A Colonial Genealogy of Savagery and Sport,” The Contemporary Pacific, vol. 2, no. 16 (2004) 259, 265. See also the overview by Lena Rodriguez, “Science or bio-piracy? A sociological examination of genetic research into the ‘warrior gene’ in modern Polynesia,” ms (n.d.).

5

WARRIORS

109

a counter-narrative, Hokowhitu pushes back against the “colonial indoctrination of a physical masculine prototype,” and raises examples “beyond such hypermasculine constraints” by focusing on statesmen, scientists, writers, and creative artists “such as Pei Te Hurinui Jones, Ralph H¯otere, Selwyn Muru, Muru Walters, Paratene Matchitt, Witi Ihimaera…, along with intelligentsia such as John Rangihau, Hirini Melbourne, Ranginui Walker,” and many others, whose images and visibility is often too small compared to sports and warrior imaginaries in popular culture.18 Clearly, the historical “warrior” tradition encompassed multiple knowledges, skills, and potential interpretations beyond simple propensities to personal aggression—or criminality, as defined by deviations from and resistance to British colonial law. Responding to the warrior gene hypothesis, leaders in M¯aori communities moved narratives in alternate directions, to a different understanding of history, one not so distilled to a logic of survival and dominance—or warriors. They did not dispute the martial characterization, but did deepen and elaborate the historical knowledge that had disappeared in contemporary narratives, and the imputation of an aggressive quality with a determined social profile. M¯aori Party leader Tariana Turia argued, “I’m very pleased to say that the majority of M¯aori people don’t feel criminally inclined.”19 In a notable commentary, lawyer Moana Jackson offered, “Once were gardeners, once were poets, once were singers,” concluding with “once and always, we’re lovers.”20 A more comprehensive reading of the warrior ascription clearly deepens more than just the arguments for martial robustness. Even ethnographer Elsdon Best, in his 1902 “Notes on the Art of War, as Conducted by the Maori of New Zealand,” led his collection of proverbial sayings pertaining to war by valorizing watchfulness and fighting to the last, yet underscored, from his translation, He toa taua, he toa p¯ ahekeheke; ko te toa ngaki kai, e kore e paheke, that “He who is but a warrior will fail,

18 Brendan Hokowhitu, “Tackling M¯ aori Masculinity, 268, 270, 277. 19 “New Zealand’s M¯ aori people don’t have “warrior gene” that makes them violent,”

9/11/2009, 1:44:24 AM by ANI. 20 Moana Jackson, “Once were gardeners—Moana Jackson on the scientific method and the “warrior gene,” YouTube.com, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfAe3Zvgui4 (Accessed, February 28, 2023).

110

M. K. MATSUDA

but who is brave in his cultivation of food will flourish.”21 The historical broadening, rather than reduction of supposed genetically carried tendencies pushed against not only the scientific conclusions reported at the Brisbane conference, but a larger historical narrative. Notably, Brian Dickson, a M¯aori elder, trenchantly observed: “I could wrap all his words up in one–colonisation.”22 In this context, colonial dominance meant the collapsing of a historical legacy of political violence into a contemporary imperative of biologically and genetically determined aggression reframed as criminality, yet made narratively logical by appeal to overdetermined and presumptively defined martial qualities of a presumed warrior past. This elision of aggression and genetics tied to a simple version of a complex political and military tradition brought strong criticism and responses. Gary Hook succinctly noted what other skeptics of the warrior gene assertion also maintained, “While conviction rates for domestic violence of M¯aori exceed those of any other group there is no indication that the (monoamine oxidase gene) system carried by M¯aori functions any differently from that of any other ethnic group and certainly no evidence to indicate that it was anything to do with violent behaviour in M¯aori.” Critical journalists quickly added “Racial stereotyping, particularly by scientists, was unethical and scandalous.”23 What underlies all this is partially the question of unwarranted conclusions, or scientific practice based on dubious correlations of data with assumptions. Even more, however, the case underscored the much larger issue of determining genetic characteristics through a lens of the abovementioned “racial stereotyping,” and the complex errors that result, especially when imputing sampled characteristics as particular to individual life histories. Ties of racialized types to inherited tendencies have multiple historical antecedents. They are woven into the very constitution of encounters between local peoples and settler colonialists all around the world, from

21 Elsdon Best, “Notes on the Art of War, as Conducted by the M¯ aori of New Zealand, with Accounts of Various Customs, Rites, Superstitions &c., Pertaining to War, as Practised and Believed in by the Ancient M¯aori,” Part III, in The Journal of the Polynesian Society, vol. 11, no. 3 (43) (September 1902), 127–62, this citation, 128–9. 22 “New Zealand’s M¯ aori people don’t have “warrior gene” that makes them violent,” 9/11/2009, 1:44:24 AM by ANI. 23 Gary Raumati Hook, in “Scientist Debunks Warrior Gene,” New Zealand Herald (September 11, 2009).

5

WARRIORS

111

North and South America to Oceania and Australia, to Africa and Asia. All are broadly, and familiarly, characterized by “the devaluing of Indigenous polities as prehistorical ‘savages,’ racialized populations, or apolitical ‘cultures’ and the categorizing of Indigenous lives as ultimately disposable.” These intertwined tendencies—toward imputations of savagery, racial generalization, and devalued social and cultural standing, not only build from, but also “reinforce each other.”24 The Southern Cross newspaper (1865) offered a standard racist M¯aori type. “He has received a kind of rough polish, which only deceives the unobservant, but beneath this varnish he is a cunning, scheming, deceitful savage….”25 This was a common trope around the Pacific, and around the colonial world. Notes for the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (1914) describe the Solomon Islands as “a group of islands in the Pacific Ocean, east of New Guinea…The inhabitants are principally Melanesians, and are warlike cannibals.”26 Outraged sportswriters in England (1989) denounced late tackles by Fijian rugby players in England, exclaiming “…in a series of savage atrocities Fiji dragged their name in the mud as they tried to mug England.”27 These all built around the racialist and colonial ideologies of the time, aligned with religious precepts, and later conflating anthropological notions of the primitive with pre-salvation savagery and exclusion from civilization.28 The scientific elements—particularly cranial studies, notably pursued by Samuel George Morton and Joseph Barnard Davis to support direct scientific racism in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world

24 René Dietrich, “Introduction: Settler Colonial Biopolitics and Indigenous Lifeways,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, vol. 42, no. 2 (2018), 1–2. 25 Philip Matthews, “Cunning, deceitful savages: 200 years of M¯ aori bad press,” (June

3, 2018), https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/103871652/cunning-deceitful-savages-200years-of-mori-bad-press 26 William Muss-Arnolt, “Chapter XLVI: The Melanesian Mission, II, “The Book of Common Prayer Among the Nations of the World, London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (1914). 27 Daily Express (1989) cited in “Fiji ‘savages’ create unwanted history,’ ESPN (1 January 2000), https://africa.espn.com/rugby/story/_/id/15457968/fiji-savages-createunwanted-history 28 For academic studies, George K. Behlmer, Risky Shores: Savagery and Colonialism in the Western Pacific, Stanford: Stanford University Press (2018); Stephen M. Younger, “Violence and Warfare in Precontact Melanesia,” Journal of Anthropology, vol. 2014 (2014), https://doi.org/10.1155/2014/658597.

112

M. K. MATSUDA

around purported evidence of white European superiority, found subtler, anthropological advance for Polynesian studies by Ronald B. Dixon of Harvard and Louis Sullivan of the American Museum of Natural History in the early twentieth century.29 Dixon and Sullivan were occupied by measurements and conclusions that assayed to determine “fundamental or primitive types, while those having one or more of their indices medial in value were the result of crossings or blending of the fundamental type” and their “dolichocephalic, hypsicephalic, and platyrhine” variations.30 Their conclusions underscored their own Pacific hierarchies of negrito, Melanesian, and Malay peoples, with Polynesians favored, if largely because of their nearness to Caucasians. Notably, this focus on elements like skulls and the hierarchization of human types had, overtly or subtly, also characterological and behavioral elements entered into its analyses. Australia’s Aboriginal peoples particularly were particularly held in contempt from the mid-nineteenth century for anatomical characteristics purportedly of a “prognathous type hardly over that of the orang-outan,” therefore confirming “the lowest and most degraded picture of wretched humanity, scarcely rising in their grovelling and debased dispositions above the very level of brutes.”31 The focus on disposition as deriving from biology is notable. Not only the generically imputed savagery, primitivism, and barbarism for disfavored subjects of study, but also—when regarded closer to home—those characteristics translated into social threat. These questions were also reinvented and reframed to address social consternation by European thinkers investing the case-based methods of science and investigation to unsettling issues of concern regarding class, discrimination, and poverty—not in colonies, but in their own continental cities and villages. The noted and 29 Ricardo Roque, “Enslaved Remains, Scientific Racism, and the Work of CounterHistory (Part One),” History of Anthropology Review 45 (2021): https://histanthro.org/ news/observations/enslaved-remains/. 30 Ronald B. Dixon, “A New Theory of Polynesian origins,” The Journal of the Polynesian Society, vol. 30, no. 118 (1921), 79 Louis Sullivan, “The Racial Diversity of Polynesian Peoples,” The Journal of the Polynesian Society, vol. 32, no. 126 (1923), 83. 31 See Morton (1854) and Aeneas (1844) as cited in Kay Anderson, K. & Colin Perrin,

‘‘The Miserablest People in the World’: Race, Humanism and the Australian Aborigine’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, vol. 18, no. 1 (2007), 14. Detailed history in “’Rare Work for the Professors’: Phrenologists and the Australian Skull, c. 1830–1874,” in Paul Turnbull, Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillian (2017), 151–94.

5

WARRIORS

113

notorious work of Cesare Lombroso is often cited in histories of criminology as exemplary of nineteenth-century attempts to define “the born criminal,” from a case with Giuseppe Villella, known as an arsonist and thief. As Lombroso wrote of his clinical epiphany while formulating his theories around cranial morphologies: “At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal—an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals.” Lombroso ultimately believed that elements of “criminality” would be inherited as a form of atavism and that criminals could therefore be identified by physical signs and defects that disposed them to being like other putatively uncivilized peoples, that is—savage.32 Lombroso reached his peak of influence in the 1880s. His physiognomic theories are discredited and no longer accepted—in their nineteenth- and early twentieth-century forms. A century later, in the 1980s, the heritability of antisocial and criminal behaviors nonetheless remained live questions in detailed research into the biological elements of psychology. American psychologist Sarnoff Mednick was highly visible during a lengthy career for his work and publications such as “Genetic Influences in Criminal Behavior,” and “Biology and Crime,” in which he elaborated psycho- and neurophysiological studies leading to a fundamental point, “that biological factors are relevant to criminality, and their exclusion for policy consideration is a function of fear and of prejudice which perhaps should itself be resisted.”33 His larger view was that if criminality had a heritable base, that knowledge could be engaged to understand that offenders needed treatment as much as punishment, a perspective that was both influential and controversial. He was especially noted for his work on schizophrenia and for studies with former student, clinical psychologist Terrie E. Moffitt, whose own research focused on the genetic influences of psychiatric illness in parents, and influences on

32 Emma Mason, “The Born Criminal,” Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of Modern Criminology, History Extra, (October 9, 2015). http://www.historyextra.com/article/fea ture/born-criminal-lombroso-origins-modern-criminology. 33 Sarnoff A. Mednick, Jan Volavka, “Biology and Crime,” Crime and Justice, vol. 2 (1980), 87; Sarnoff A. Mednick, William F. Gabrielli Jr., Barry Hutchings, “Genetic Influences in Criminal Behavior: Evidence from an Adoption Cohort,” in Katherine Tielmann Van Dusen, Sarnoff A. Mednick, eds., Prospective Studies of Crime and Delinquency, Dordrecht: Springer (1983), 39–56.

114

M. K. MATSUDA

“violent and recidivistic criminal behavior.”34 She is also noted for studies of abnormal behaviors over life histories with the longitudinal Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study in New Zealand, and her work with collaborator Avshalom Caspi on studying childhood to adult antisocial behavior patterns. Their 2002 research notably had findings indicating the importance of the gene that encoded monoamine oxidase-A (MAO-A). Not, in this case, to conclude tendencies toward aggression, but as a defense against a brutal external world. “Maltreated children with a genotype conferring high levels of MAOA expression were less likely to develop antisocial problems.” Other contemporaneous research agreed with the findings that “Genotypes associated with high levels of MAOA activity” appeared to be relatively shielded from abuse and neglect—in this case, if they were white. However, “this protective effect was not found for non-white abused and neglected individuals.” In these studies, the researchers reflected on potential lab inaccuracies of DNA sequences used to determine where gene transcription takes place, as well as a possible “differential effect for whites and non-whites” that could include “contextual factors (e.g. environmental stressors).” 35 This line of hypothesizing, generally denominated “gene–environment interactions,” and relatedly, “epigenetic factors,” kept genetic analysis front and center in building behavioral models, but looked significantly to the ways that environmental factors affect the expression of the genes, so as to “elucidate the potential effect of parental raising on MAO regulation and its protective effect in the face of early stressors.” Or, to look

34 Terrie E. Moffitt, “Genetic Influence of Parental Psychiatric Illness on Violent and Recidivistic Criminal Behavior,” doctoral dissertation, National Criminal Justice Reference Service, no. 98133 (1984). Abstract suggests: “Results show that parental psychiatric illness contributed significantly to offspring criminal behavior, especially in interaction with parental criminal behavior. Multiple recidivistic and violent offending were characteristic of the subjects’ biological backgrounds.” 35 Avshalom Caspi, Joseph McClay, Terrie E. Moffitt, et al., “Role of genotype in the cycle of violence in maltreated children,” Science, vol. 297, no. 5582 (August 2, 2002), 851. Also, Cathy Spatz Widom, Linda M. Brzustowicz, “MAOA and the ‘cycle of violence:’ childhood abuse and neglect, MAOA genotype, and risk for violent and antisocial behavior,” Biological Psychiatry, vol. 60, no. 7 (October 1, 2006), 684.

5

WARRIORS

115

at “the prolonged expression of the MAO gene in chronic stress…Given the link between MAO, stress reactivity, and aggression.”36 Given the tensions between genetic determinism and socio-political criticisms of reductionist approaches to molecular analyses of cultures and behaviors, some researchers and even Indigenous communities have seen cautious promise in epigenetic approaches. If genes—as DNA segments—can change their function without altering their sequences by methylating—adding carbon-hydrogen groups—in response to external stressors, then the genome is not invariable but adaptive, or protective, regarding environmental and social impacts. In Australia, research teams have noted that for an increasing number of Indigenous Australians, “environmental epigenetics offers an important explanatory framework that links the social past with the biological present, providing a culturally relevant way of understanding the various intergenerational effects of historical trauma.” That is to say, “past injustices are embodied collectively and passed on through generations via poor mental and physical health, addiction, and violence.” These are illnesses and traumas of colonization.37 The potentials of this recognition are critically built on a reassessment of genomic promises weighted by commitments to socio-cultural critiques of historical inequities. Questions of defining moral—and criminal—character are, in this way, recognized as significantly defined by social institutions and opportunities along with those for education, work, and access to health care. Access is unequally distributed. Sociologist Troy Duster classically set forth many of these arguments by critiquing the ways that social scientific research conclusions can be predetermined by eugenics-like institutional assumptions. In a noted commentary on a study of orphaned children from deceased parents of different social classes, he observed research that proclaimed the study to have taken place under relatively uniform conditions. “Children raised in an orphanage are

36 Alexios-Fotios A. Mentis, Efthimios Dardiotis, Elenni Katsouni, George P. Chrousos, “From warrior genes to translational solutions: Novel insights into monoamine oxidases (MAOs) and aggression,” Translational Psychiatry, vol. 11, no. 130 (February 18. 2021), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41398-021-01257-2 37 Megan Warin, Emma Kowal, Maurizio Meloni, “Indigenous Knowledge in a Postgenomic Landscape: The Politics of Epigenetic Hope and Reparation in Australia,” Science, Technology, and Human Values (February 17, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1177/016224 3919831077

116

M. K. MATSUDA

‘under relatively uniform conditions?’ A host of social, economic, personality, ethnic, birth-order, etc., factors that are in continuous variance and interaction fall away and are suddenly ‘relatively uniform.’”38 Responding specifically to the warrior gene controversy in 2007, M¯aori Member of Parliament Hone Harawira was reported by the New Zealand Herald to have demurred on the genetic tendency suggestion by informing his readership, “the main factors contributing to M¯aori violence were high unemployment rates, poor health, lower life expectancy, poor education achievement, and in many cases severe poverty.”39 Even where, as in the case of the warrior gene, direct violence is not imputed as a necessary inherited propensity, a constellation of risktending behaviors—often framed as social and public health issues—can still become entangled. For example, Dana Wensley and Mike King have noted that abuse of alcohol is a serious area of study for genetic researchers, yet “influences on problem drinking patterns should have been mentioned alongside the potential influence of genetics.” If these are social and cultural—that is, environmental and shaped by peer drinking expectations—they are also historical: “Alcohol and tobacco were introduced to M¯aori by the early settlers. Problems with addiction to these substances clearly falls into the definition of Mate P¯akeh¯a, namely those conditions contributed to by environmental influences that pertained after colonization of New Zealand by the early settlers.” Likewise, as far as gambling, aggressiveness, and even criminality, behavior is shaped by circumstances, and, echoing Hone Harawira, “M¯aori are twice as likely than non-M¯aori to be living below the poverty level.”40 Still, though the morphology of skulls as determinants of social, moral, and legal behavior are widely scorned now, debates about heritable tendencies and behavioral expressions are very central to controversies at the heart of genetic science. That particular phenotypic tendencies are

38 Troy Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics, New York: Routledge (2003), 105. 39 “M¯ aori ‘warrior’ gene linked to aggression,” The New Zealand Herald (August 8,

2006). Also, “Once were warriors: gene linked to M¯aori Violence,” Sydney Morning Herald (August 9, 2006). http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/once-were-warriorsgene-linked-to-M¯aori-violence/2006/08/08/1154802890439.html 40 D Wensley and M King, “Scientific responsibility for the dissemination and interpretation of genetic research: lessons from the “warrior gene” controversy,” Journal of Medical Ethics, vol. 34, no. 6 (2008), 507–9. This citation, 508.

5

WARRIORS

117

heritable is not widely disputed, but that these tendencies can be behavioral and ascribed to groups—and more, to groups as defined by ethnic and racial codings—is the site of controversy. Why pursue such conclusions? At least a dual argument operates: one, that the logic of scientific investigation promotes the advancement of novel, material conclusions with biological explanations tied to research and reputational opportunities. Second, that the ascription of complex issues involving institutionalized prejudice, racism, and allocation of political and economic resources is just that—complex. Genetically based reasoning is, while technically complex, ideologically simpler; the matter can be circumscribed, understood, and—most importantly—repaired with the proper applications of molecular biology and biochemistry. If the challenges of a society are fundamentally biological, they can be ultimately resolved through medical science and practitioners dedicated to the so-defined advancement of positive knowledge and practice. However, defining experiments or drawing convincing conclusions from social, political, and historical challenges does not derive from agreed-upon standards of expertise. Arguably, the linking of “violence” to a particular community is simultaneously not only denatured of historical complexity, but imprinted in alternate narratives. It is noteworthy that in the year the warrior gene research elicited controversy, a context of violence, familial generation, and cultural typing was taking place. The warrior gene controversy became public just months after a widely publicized news story. On June 13, 2006, infant brothers Christopher Arepa and Cru Omeka Kahui were admitted to an Auckland hospital with serious head injuries, and upon examination, bruises, and previously fractured ribs. Their father, Chris Kahui, was charged with abuse and murder, but a jury trial declared him innocent. Police suspicion remained on the mother Macsyna King, but no charges were brought. The family was reported to be uncooperative during the investigation prior to the brothers dying in the hospital, and throughout the case, high-profile press coverage argued that “Twins’ family ‘agreed to thwart police.’”41 Print, broadcast, and online media were quick to tie together the genetic research science 41 Michael Field, (June 24, 2006), “Twins’ family ‘agreed to thwart police.’” The Dominion Post. Isabella Margaret Gladstone Clarke, “A Kahui Exception? Examining the Right to Silence in Criminal Investigations,” dissertation, Dunedin: University of Otago Faculty of Law (October 2007).

118

M. K. MATSUDA

proposal with the aggression thesis: “Warrior gene theory sparks debate and highlights domestic violence in New Zealand,”42 and “M¯aori Gene Claim Stirs NZ Family Violence Debate.”43 In the New Zealand context, this was quickly anchored in the notoriety of M¯aori author Alan Duff’s famed novel of a M¯aori family and an abusive father, Once Were Warriors, made into a critically acclaimed film by Lee Tamahori. Controversies around literature, film, and cultural stereotyping shaped comments that marked the Kahui case, with evocations in the press of “clones of Jake Heke,” (the father) and an analogy by the New Zealand Prime Minister, Helen Clark, about “a Once Were Warriors-type family.”44 Notably, though, parallel responses to the family from within M¯aori communities were still addressed to questions of shared community experience of connecting generations. Finding resistance to investigative cooperation within the Kahui family, M¯aori Party co-leader Pita Sharples framed his frustration with lack of shared purpose and the right relation of past and present, after attempting to engage the family with a group of elders. “We found a very dysfunctional group of young people who were in the first place not listening to the old people and who were arguing with themselves…they don’t have their M¯aoritanga, there was no respect for the elders at all…”45 Joanne Warner’s work around “emotional politics” in social work and child protection has been a lens through which to see a number of older to younger and parent to child controversies, notably the constitution of the “Bad M¯aori Mother.”46 This was underscored by the Kahui tragedy and outrage, as Prime Minister Clark offered in public remarks, “Clearly there was a maternal love deficit of a gross kind. Very little interest shown

42 News-Medical.Net “Warrior gene theory sparks debate and highlights domestic violence in New Zealand,” (August 9, 2006); 43 Sam Savage, “M¯ aori Gene Claim Stirs NZ Family Violence Debate,” Red Orbit.com (August 9, 2006). 44 Paul Chapman, “Violence is blamed on ‘warrior gene’ in the M¯ aoris,” The Telegraph (August 10, 2006). 45 NZHerald.co.nz, “Kahui silence disgusting, says Sharples [audio report] (Tuesday, June 27, 2006). 46 Joanne Warner, The Emotional Politics of Social Work and Child Protection, Clifton: Bristol, Policy Press (2016), 141.

5

WARRIORS

119

in those very, very vulnerable small babies.”47 In this case, the crossgenerational argument was also decidedly and ideologically gendered, focusing on the vulnerability of the infants, but given explanatory force through the “deficit” of maternal love presumed to inhere naturally in the mother.48 Once these comments were picked up and framed by journalists, they became forms of narrative power reinforcing journalistic preferences for stories of betrayal—a mother abandoning her proper place as caregiver and motherhood itself, and wantonly disregarding her duty in favor of her self-satisfaction. Much was imputed by summaries of the half-sisters of Macsyna King saying she never wanted to be a mother. “It’s obvious isn’t it?… She is into parties and groups of people,” comments that were integrated with journalistic observations concerning lack of employment, unstable partner relationships, and drinking in the household.49 One group dedicated to addressing violence against children skeptically noted, “The other chestnut that will surely be dragged out for cracking is welfare. The fact that the Kahuis were on benefits did not escape anyone’s attention, and for many the link between welfare and child abuse is a causal one.”50 Historians like Vicki Lukere have long shown how antecedents for these narratives were set through the nineteenth-century colonial invention of the “native mother,” as a figure lacking in maternal instincts and knowledge of basic childcare and hygiene practices. This figure was presumed, through ignorance or incapacity, to be the reason for high rates of infant mortality, a conclusion that often stringently ignored the role of colonial disruptions to local cultures and economies, and European-introduced epidemic diseases into Indigenous societies. 47 NZHerald.co.nz, “Kahui case will remain closed ‘at this point.” (Monday, May 26, 2008) 48 NZHerald.co.nz, “Kahui case will remain closed ‘at this point.” (Monday, May 26, 2008) 49 Linda Jean Kenix, “The Traitor and the Hedonist: The Mythology of Motherhood in Two New Zealand Child Abuse Cases,” Media International Australia, vol. 139, no. 1 (2011), 46. Elena Maydell, “‘It just seemed like your normal domestic violence’”: Ethnic stereotypes in print media coverage of child abuse in New Zealand,” Media, Culture, & Society, vol. 40, no. 5 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443717737610 50 D. Wynd, Child Poverty Action Group, Violence against children: Domestic violence and child homicide in New Zealand: Discussion paper (July 2006). https://www.cpag. org.nz/assets/Backgrounders/Violenceagainstchildren.pdf

120

M. K. MATSUDA

In 1890s Fiji, this Native Mother was described as having no instinctual imperative to care for children, a figure “ignorant, superstitious, in the thrall of traditional midwives, and dirty.” As Lukere notes, the colonial promulgators of this image at times adapted another favored stereotype— that of the poor, Working-class Mother in Europe, “held responsible for racial decay in England and elsewhere at the time.” Remedies in the name of child protection included investigation and prosecution of Fijian women for presumed cases of abortion, infanticide, or child neglect, and a Hygiene Mission of Catholic European and Fijian sisters who “visited Fijian women in the villages, inspected their houses, and gave all manner of instruction on baby-care, cleanliness and nursing.”51 Equally, critical scholars have noted that criticisms of the mother in the Kahui case were also paired with “uneducated M¯aori man” stereotype of brutal physicality for the father as a masculine model based on warrior assumptions.52 The imputed dimensions of aggression were inseparable from the warrior imputation, yet the image also raised questions about the ways educational assumptions were diffused into a general stereotype threat. What did it mean to be uneducated, and was that also localizable in populations? Researchers on secondary school “achievement gaps” across decades find “teachers’ expectations different depending on the ethnicity of the student…expectations were highest for Asian and Pakeha students, and lowest for Pasifika and M¯aori.” Interviews confirm these survey results, for example that “Eight out of 10 teachers interviewed believed there were deficits in M¯aori and Pasifika students’ home backgrounds and that they lacked goals, motivation and aspirations.”53 Or, “New Zealand national statistics clearly highlight the social disadvantage and deprivation is strongly correlated to cultural identity…and, by and large, those most

51 Vicki Lukere and Stewart Firth, “The Native Mother,” in “Colonial Administration and the Invention of the Native,” Donald Denoon, et al., eds., The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1997) 281–2. 52 Andrew Eruera Vercoe, ed., Educating Jake: Pathways to Empowerment, Harper Collins: New Zealand (1998). 53 Hana Turner, Christine M. Rubie-Davies, Melinda Webber, “Teacher Expectations, Ethnicity and the Achievement Gap,” New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, no. 50 (2015), 55–6.

5

WARRIORS

121

likely to experience disadvantage and deprivation are of M¯aori or Pasifika heritage.”54 Such studies do not surprise the general reading public; in fact, they confirm widely entrenched beliefs about social-economic disparities and the impacts of cultural marginalization. However, different conclusions could be drawn—that government and institutions were failing their own communities and reproducing widespread inequities, or that teachers were reporting on bad parenting, or improper home environments that were leaving children vulnerable to violence or failure. Scholars working in critical social work have noted that the tragic and prominent case of child abuse and neglect propelling the Kahui twins into a national debate generated political and governmental panics which drove the social support resources “away from family empowerment and towards a child rescue paradigm.” The logic of this was to underscore a neoliberal politics of emphasizing individualized family responsibility and morality, thereby justifying the withdrawal of institutional responsibilities of the state from communities, other than for policing. These created policy frameworks “used to reinforce anti-M¯aori or anti-immigrant rhetoric” within conservative, capitalist, political frameworks animated by ideas of personal care, sacrifice, and self-reliance—i.e. blame families and traditions, refuse to acknowledge severe social and economic inequities of a fractured and prejudicial body politic. 55 These are questions and biases with wide racial, colonial, and postcolonial resonance. Formal studies in Australia advocating for resource support of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities underscore “self-perpetuating ‘regimes of truth’ in a context where some people are agents and others are made ‘objects’ of the discourse.” Specifically, “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people” is itself encoded as a problematic term that becomes a label—“associated with particular negative tropes, including unhealthy, undereducated, unemployed, violent, and

54 David McLeod, “E rua taha o te awa: There are two sides to the river…Navigating ‘social justice’ as an indigenous educator in non-indigenous tertiary education,” 55 Paul Bywaters, Brid Featherstone, Kate Morris, “Child Protection and Social Inequality,” Social Sciences, vol. 8, no. 2, 42 (2019). https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci 8020042; Melissa Hackell, “Managing anxiety: Neoliberal modes of citizen subjectivity, fantasy and child abuse in New Zealand,” Citizenship Studies, vol. 20, nos. 6–7 (July 2016), 867–82.

122

M. K. MATSUDA

socially dysfunctional.” These ascriptions are then in turn further framed as indicative by association of “overcrowding, neglect and substance abuse.”56 In Aotearoa New Zealand, all of this elides the ways in which the framing of the questions themselves are already coded through historical and political categories. Particularly in ascribing a quality or tendency to a group like “the M¯aori” as a genetic type. Denatured from culture, tradition, or history, “M¯aori” becomes a racialized object rather than a genealogically rooted and situated presence. Interviewing South Island M¯aori neighbors about the impact of genetic science on local communities, Mere Roberts and John Fairweather have noted that “many felt compelled to give a ‘M¯aori answer’ i.e. one that conformed to the researcher’s, the legislative, the media stereotype.” Pushing back against general characterizations, whether social, political, or—in this context— scientific, one respondent made clear: “Some M¯aori were losing sight of who they are as individuals. We’re sick of being told by the media, statistics, research, legislation.”57 In the warrior gene case, Lea courted dispute by being quoted as indicating that his research “is controversial because it has implications suggesting links with criminality among M¯aori people. Obviously, this means they are going to be more aggressive and violent.”58 M¯aori leaders denounced the implications of tendencies toward violence and aggression as genetically inherited characteristics of a community, excoriating the research as prejudicial, racist, and uninformed of social and cultural conditions. Even efforts to rectify the genetic research by historic and cultural appeals to a proud warrior tradition, as noted earlier, were disputed along the lines of disagreements concerning the tensions between scientific study and literary cultural representations as manifested in warrior evocations. In fact, just how much questions in the debate became built not upon scientific disputes, but the construction of warrior definitions and

56 William Fogarty, Hannah Bulloch, Siobhan McDonnell and Michael Davis, Deficit

Discourse and Indigenous Health, Canberra: The Lowitja Institute and National Centre for Indigenous Studies, the Australian National University (2018), 30. 57 Mere Roberts and John R. Fairweather, South Island M¯ aori Perceptions of Biotechnology, Research Report no. 268 (July 2004), 58. 58 Chapman, “Violence is blamed on ‘warrior gene’ in the M¯ aoris.” The Telegraph (August 10, 2006).

5

WARRIORS

123

presumed attributes drawn from centuries of encounter history, colonization, and struggles for recognition anchors the controversy in time and place. Once Were Warriors as a novel then film—succeeded by two other novels following overlapping characters—was widely praised for an unsparing and often brutal vision of a struggling M¯aori family, but author Witi Ihimaera also called the storytelling “victim-blaming, M¯aoribashing,” that would reinforce exactly the neoliberal, neo-colonial tendencies in the New Zealand population away from responsibilities for social equity, welfare, and justice.59 This, historically, is exactly what developed through rescue scenarios rather than structural reform. Yet, perhaps the most salient responses to these tendencies have come from what might initially appear to be unexpected sources: those adopting or being ascribed the mantle of warriors anew, breaking with the old, overdetermined frameworks. M¯aori educator David McLeod has forcefully argued that “there is more to understanding and appreciating the M¯aori worldview than simply knowing the language and cultural norms.” Rather, he underscores a proverb cited by the Ministry of Education, “Ehara taku toa I te toa takitahi, engari he toa takitini,”—“My strength is not that of a single warrior, but that of many,” a responsibility he ties to the fulfillment of social justice aims, and a fundamental interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi as a statement of bicultural governance and power-sharing, and partnership, participation, and protection.60 In this way, the warrior genealogy continues to surface, and be contested, though in new definitions, not reduced to aggression and violence on a debatable bio-historical model and cultural imaginary, but framed around different values and imperatives, consonant with generations and finding the traditional characterization of warrior culture and commitment to violence strikingly insufficient and in need of reimagination. Historically linked forever to New Zealand history is the Greenpeace flagship, The Rainbow Warrior, destroyed by French saboteurs with

59 Clare Baker, “Warrior Genes,” Modern Fiction Studies 66, vol. 4 (2020), 776. See Witi Ihimaera, “He Mihi,” in Andrew Eruera Vercoe, ed., Educating Jake: Pathways to Empowerment, Harper Collins (New Zealand: 1998) ix. 60 David McLeod, “E rua taha o te awa: There are two sides to the river…Navigating ‘social justice’ as an indigenous educator in non-indigenous tertiary education,”

124

M. K. MATSUDA

magnetic mines in Auckland Harbor during protests against French nuclear testing on the Moruroa atoll. In a journalistic piece, “This is what a social justice warrior looks like,” a chronicle unrolls of a Salvation Army officer, Campbell Roberts, being awarded the Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for this humanitarian work, noting that the calling “was woven into Campbell’s DNA before he was even born,” being that his father had been a baby abandoned to the Army’s children’s home a century earlier.61 Many young internet bloggers also express and wrestle with sentiments around the multiple meanings of a warrior tradition, where it belongs, and who it describes—often still with a pejorative and dismissive valance. The SJW labeling has become an epithet, and some activists respond. “You call me a social justice warrior like it’s a bad thing,” or, in a matter of self-definition, “I’m supposed to be offended that you called me someone who strives for a better society?”62

61 Ingrid Barratt, “This is what a social justice warrior looks like,” War Cry Magazine, (January 26, 2019), 6–9. 62 Grant Shimmin, “You call me a social justice warrior like it’s a bad thing,” Timaru Herald: Stuff, (June 14, 2019); Mandy Te, “The social justice Warriors,” Critic: Te Arohi, no. 1, (February 22, 2015).

CHAPTER 6

The Immortal Man

In October 1995, the Canadian non-governmental watchdog group, the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) issued a press release indicating that the United States had declared a patent on the cellular material of a Hagahai man from Papua New Guinea. It was the first time that a claim on a non-American “indigenous person” had been made, and the RAFI release indicated that the man had “ceased to own his own genetic material.” A global controversy ensued, activists and journalists denouncing as “outrageous” what seemed a “dehumanizing theft” and a new form of genetic slavery.1 Headlines promised a “Battle Over Blood,” and a suit at the International Court of Justice in the Hague. Some legal scholars and research scientists pushed back, attempting to disentangle what they called sensationalist and poorly informed claims about distinctions between developing laboratory cell lines and owning “a person,” while also suggesting critics were hysterical and anti-scientific. The Hagahai case, widely cited and debated over decades, has been the subject of a score of studies; it is a landmark in the history of ethical and 1 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, London: Zed Publishers (2012), 103. This discussion also summarized in “Genetic Drift: Pacific Pasts and Futures,” by Matt Matsuda, in Warwick Anderson, Miranda Johnson, Barbara Brookes, eds., Pacific Futures: Past and Present (2018). By permission of the University of Hawai‘i Press, 57–62.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. K. Matsuda, Genealogies, Genomes, and Histories in the Pacific, Palgrave Studies in Pacific History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45449-3_6

125

126

M. K. MATSUDA

legal controversies issuing from questions of genetic research and claims of biopiracy.2 Who speaks has become a critical question, particularly from the late twentieth century, a period in which issues of bodies, ownership, sovereignty, knowledge, and commercial value once again ignited, drawing older struggles over slavery, indentured labor, and unfree bodies and legacies became entangled in the promises of the genomic age. The broader framing for the controversy and its legacies came by means of a shift from the experience of the Cold War to what some have seen—in the wake of retrenchment around the collapse of the Soviet Union— toward a neoliberal focus on the conflation of research knowledge to constructions of capital investment. Political and economic power, and a practiced indifference to cultural diversity, as Aroha Te Pareake Mead has indicated, is, indeed, a critical tension that overlays the common characteristics and joined stories found in post-colonial struggles over cellular and genetic materials. In the postwar Pacific, geopolitical questions focus on superpower nation-states, particularly China and the United States, along with the economic might of Japan. Realignment continues to take place, not only between the great powers, but the regimes of knowledge and control that flow between them. Among these is, of course, the power of capital, circulated in interests and markets from and through Japan, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, and South America. Where this capital becomes manifest in flesh and blood is often through industrial and commercial projects: in the postwar period, the tragic spectacle of Japan’s industrial modernization played out when the mercury poisoned bodies of villagers around Minamata became worldwide news. The tortuous process of attributing responsibility to the manufacturers of the synthetic chemical products raised questions about accountability and the human costs that made Japanese development part of the postwar

2 A very small sampling includes, Stuart Kirsch, “Property Limits: Debates on the Body, Nature and Culture,” Eric Hirsch, Marilyn Strathern, eds., Transactions and Creations: Property Debates and the Stimulus of Melanesia, New York and Oxford: Berghan Books (2004), 22–31; David Robie, “Cell lines and commodities: The Hagahai patent case,” Pacific Journalism Review, Vol. 4, (November 1997), 79–81; Gary Taubes, “Scientists Attacked for “Patenting” Pacific Tribe, Vol. 270, no. 5239, Science (November 1995), p. 1112; Alain Pottage, “The Inscription of Life in Law: Genes, Patents, and Bio-politics,” Vol. 61, Modern Law Review (1998), p. 740; Margaret Lock, “The Alienation of Body Tissues and the Biopolitics of Immortalized Cell Lines,” Body & Society, Vol. 2, Nos. 2–3 (2001), 63–91.

6

THE IMMORTAL MAN

127

economic miracle in Asia. It is also evident in large-scale monocropping in sugar and palm oil in Oceania and Southeast Asia, in industrial fishing by enormous factory fleets that drift-netted entire sections of the Pacific almost to extinction, and in concrete high-rise coastlines, such as Waikiki Beach in Honolulu, where tourism developed as and remains a driving capital industry. Governmental and regional organizations such as the South Pacific Forum Secretariat, have aligned with the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization around global economic liberalization, regularly at odds with Indigenous communities.3 These are all parts of histories shaped through politics and economics on a staggeringly interconnected worldwide stage. Stewart Firth and colleagues have located these within a broad framework of globalization, arguing “In one sense globalization is not new and has affected the Pacific Islands since outsiders first ventured there over two centuries ago,” especially through trade and labor regimes that drew Pacific Islanders into plantation, mining, whaling, and harvesting circuits whether from William Bligh’s breadfruit requisitions on The Bounty, to cotton and sugar plantations in Queensland and Fiji. This also encompassed sandalwood gangs across Melanesia and north in Hawai‘i, or M¯aori and K¯anaka Maoli groups on sealing and whale crews across all Pacific hemispheres. These commodity and exploitation circuits gradually incorporated all islands in trade and labor exchange, later accelerated by commercial and information imperatives of the late twentieth century increasingly characterized by “economic exchanges across national borders, a communications revolution that continues to shrink the globe, and the worldwide shift by governments to neoliberal economic policies.”4 Epeli Hau‘ofa appreciated that these shifts lay at the heart of tensions between agitation for a decolonized future—and the persistence of colonial forms of domination through control of capital, labor, information, and technical knowledge. He could see that the embrace of a globalized world, though seemingly dedicated to transnational liberation and political autonomy, was in fact another iteration of “the notion of cumulative development or modernization, which is equated with progress towards

3 Maria Bargh, “Romance and Resistance in the Pacific: Neoliberalism and Indigenous Resistance in the Pacific,” Revue Juridique Polynésienne, 1 (118), 251–74. 4 Stewart Firth, ed., Globalisation and governance in the Pacific Islands, Canberra: The Australian National University Press (2006), 1.

128

M. K. MATSUDA

the capitalist utopia, the dream of the wretched of the earth.”5 Without alternative experiences of time and relationships of past and present deeply rooted in cultures and practices, “decolonization” would mean only material satisfactions generated elsewhere, and would itself remain a cipher for administrative transfer aid support without true change. One postwar narrative, in a “Pacific Century” register of unlimited prosperity, looked to not only Asia but Oceania as a chronicle of transformation, addressing old colonial racist and empire tropes though a newly unleashed market economy, ceaselessly collapsing local communities into capital and information flows, while underscoring Pacific Islanders as “risk-loving, enterprising, seafaring forebears, whose voyages opened the vast South Pacific, and who developed a distinct material culture and civilization in remote, resource poor islands.”6 Perhaps intended to compliment, or simply to mislead, such enthusiasms are yet coded within entrepreneurial answers to presumably deficient and distance locales, framed by an ideology of neoliberalism—“opening up of the world’s markets, labour pools and resource bases to all economic competitors on theoretically equal terms.”7 Part of building this world meant trying to engage more polities and communities in putative profit opportunities by providing vast, circulating, but regularly self-serving aid and reform prescriptions. In a joint declaration of 2004, the leaders of the Pacific Island Forum, the regional alliance dedicated to issues of common interest in Oceania, met to discuss a Pacific Plan for Strengthening Regional Cooperation and Integration. The signatories addressed the local governance and welfare issues they faced with unemployment, poverty, and uneven abilities to provide social services, and framed these within a larger perspective: “Modernisation and globalisation have brought wonders to our shores but they have also exposed the vulnerability of our small island developing states. They have threatened our family and community bonds and

5 Epeli Hau‘ofa, “Pasts to Remember,” 66. 6 Claire Slatter, “Neo-Liberalism and the Discipling of Pacific Island States—the Dual

Challenges of a Global Economic Creed and a Changed Geopolitical Order,” Stewart Firth and Vijay Naidu, Understanding Oceania, Canberra: ANU Press (2019), 155. 7 Claire Slatter, 154.

6

THE IMMORTAL MAN

129

values, weakened our ability to live off the land and sea, and upset our harmony with the natural environment.”8 This meant free trade deals that threaten local production economies, extraction production that sends local resources for sale elsewhere, up to and including the growth of outmigration as the foundation of Island remittance economies, where thousands of citizens working overseas provide significant revenue to home countries, often lacking infrastructure to challenge the export economies of highly industrialized nation-states. Yet economic and capital questions are not only about transported goods produced and labor movements, but the circulation of knowledge and legal regimes. In this, challenges of extraction also coalesce around the constellation of research laboratories, venture investors, technology firms, government projects, and clinical practitioners that constitute “science.” Some of that is, in turn, “Big Science.” The global human genome mapping initiatives of the 1990s and into the twenty-first century are widely accepted to have been, in government and private ambition, multinational, multi-billion-dollar efforts in the scope of the Apollo moon landings under NASA, the so-declared War on Cancer of the 1970s, and the commercial-academic crossovers of regenerative medicine and stem-cell research. Broad critiques of globally networked institutions of scientific research and capital often draw their cases and evidence from episodes that focus on the specificity of capital interests that support individuals and teams, and the material and intellectual benefits, both potential and substantive, they would gain. As one group of scholars has pointed out, research is intensely incentive-driven. That is, it is not only powered by a scholastic interest in learning and discovery: “For scientists, these incentives include paid consultancies, patent rights, licensing agreements, stock options, direct stock grants, corporate board memberships, scientific advisory board memberships, media attention, lecture fees, and/or research support.”9 Melinda Cooper has made this argument in the context of a shifting history—as the Cold War gave way to the last decades of the twentieth century and the emergence of a “neoliberal consensus” organized around 8 Elise Huffer, “Regionalism and Cultural Identity: Putting the Pacific back into the plan,” Stewart Firth, ed., Globalization and Governance in the Pacific, 43. 9 D. Bolnick, D. Fullwiley, T. Duster, et al., “The Science and Business of Genetic Ancestry Testing,” Science, vol. 318, October 19, 2007.

130

M. K. MATSUDA

shifting whole sectors of the global economy away from the productivity of individual workers to the reproductive capacity of nations. In the aftermath and continuing upheavals of post-colonialism—decolonization, oil shocks, nationalization of foreign investment—a scientific and industrial complex grew to rival that of the Cold War military-industrial complex, driven by Big Science imperatives. Unlike the strategic, defensive, and containment objectives of the former, the new consensus was shaped by an ideology of overcoming the economic and political limitations of traditional industrial capitalism through perpetual growth denominated by innovation.10 Operating within a network of richly funded research networks eager to develop corporate partnership for commercialization of novel biomedical technologies, this may seem self-evident. Yet, as Laura Foster has argued in her work on gender and intellectual property research, neoliberalism is an architecture of law, finance, and politics in which privatization and free trade become privileged as means for both domestic and international exchanges at the expense of those not similarly sourced. Critically, though the idea of free trade evokes open competition for goods and services, in practice “it is also beset by increased regulation, in particular, the control and management of knowledge through patent laws.” In this way, nature is still a public good—but is managed in the private sphere under market mechanisms. “For example, cell lines are extracted and isolated …then patented, giving owners exclusive rights to temporarily control the uses of their invention. Such privatization places human bodily tissue into global circuits of capital, where cell lines and DNA sequences take on value as biopolitical.”11 Patent rights are, effectively, monopoly protection rights, chartered for particular numbers of years as advancing both innovation and fair trade. The new order was not organized around the time-discipline of industrial labor or manufacturing capacity, but a knowledge economy, and as such, held together and powered by patents and intellectual property. In Oceania, the effects can be profound and immediately problematic for

10 Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era, Seattle: University of Washington Press (2008). 11 Laura A. Foster, “Patents, Biopolitics, and Feminisms: Locating Patent Law Struggles over Breast Cancer Genes and Hoodia Plant,” International Journal of Cultural Property, no. 19 (2012), 372–3.

6

THE IMMORTAL MAN

131

changing economies and legal regimes, yet—as elsewhere in the decolonizing world—also still deeply rooted in a keen experience of historical, exploitative hegemony. As Fijian legal scholar Joeli N. Vakabua has put it, globalization is a very serious challenge to Pacific communities on questions of control over intellectual and natural resources, and it is challenge that continues to be built upon “colonialism and imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth century,” that incorporated Oceanian communities “into the global system in a way which has rendered them marginal and powerless in the face of global corporate hegemony.” In particular, notes Vakabua are the legal and ethical questions around intellectual property rights “relating to gene ownership.”12 Globally known activist scholars and critics like Vandana Shiva have framed this phenomenon as a neo-colonialism: “The land, the forests, the rivers, the oceans, and the atmosphere have all been colonized, eroded, and polluted. Capital now has to look for new colonies to invade and exploit for its further accumulation—the interior spaces of the bodies of women, plants, and animals.”13 In the genetic register, Alphonse Kambu, environmental law expert of Papua New Guinea, has argued, “A gene contains DNA, which is the code of life. Thus, patenting genes, the building blocks of life, implies that life itself is being patented.”14 Biotechnology advocates have argued for the necessity of corporate ownership of life forms as critical to investment and business success. These cases have been forwarded not in terms of capital wealth generation, but with promises of not only applied technologies or human exploration, but immediate benefit—decoding the genome would allow better disease treatment, and a finer understanding of human genetic inheritance and genealogies. As Catherine Bliss has analyzed this, the narrative is inflected to appeal to rectification of history, as “it is not some general belief in progress, some skeptical value, humanistic vigor, or vocational virtue that is at play. Rather, a highly contextualized set of

12 Joeli N. Vakabua, “A Fijian’s Perspective on the uses and ownership of Intellectual Property,” Aroha Te Pareake Mead and Steven Ratuva, eds., Pacific Genes & Life Patents: Pacific Indigenous Experiences & Analysis of the Commodification & Ownership of Life, Wellington: Call of the Earth Llamado de la Tierra (2007), 102. 13 Vandana Shiva, Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge, Boston: South End Press (1997), 54. 14 Alphonse Kambu, “Lessons from Omissions in the Hagahai Patent Case,” Pacific Genes and Life Patents,” 142.

132

M. K. MATSUDA

norms and practices imbues this science with a commitment to correcting past injustice and establishing a new future.”15 Proprietary ownership of genetic information, then, does not present itself as privatization of the commons. Rather, genomics firms and laboratory complexes assert their own capabilities for reconstructing ancestry and addressing health and wellness at the molecular level, for particular ethnicities and communities, targeted therapies, familial connections, and personalized medicine as exemplars of equal care and access operating under a self-conscious banner of enlightened knowledge. These promises of a deeper, richer, and healthier future are predictably entangled in the tensions of decolonization. The post-colonial in the Pacific, as Susan Najita puts it, is replete with “false promises”; indeed, she argues that, “though independence is a reality for many, true decolonization has not occurred.” Rather, Najita surveys the possibilities and hazards of an “emergent decolonization.” What does this look like, materially? Notably, the epidemiologist Robert Desowitz has mordantly observed, “If ‘emerging diseases’ had a sense of humor, they would be amused at being ‘discovered’ like some lost tribe. They’ve always been there; only circumstance has newly brought them to the body and mind of their human associated.” The twin “emergences” of Najita’s decolonization and Desowitz’s focus on cellular material are useful together, particularly the latter’s ironic iteration of discovering lost tribes. Desowitz has been both a participant in and skeptic regarding the intersection between molecular Big Science and indigenous peoples. In particular, he laments the high-minded, patent-driven researchers working “on the micromolecular level, taking human genes for sale to the highest bidder.” He notes, “resentment has been especially bitter when the genetic material has been taken by the biomedical industry of the wealthy world from poor-world people. The governments and intellectuals of the third world have regarded this as colonialism in contemporary form.”16 Indeed, Alphonse Kambu has argued, “modern biotechnology certainly poses critical questions of non-violent crimes, infringements and deprivation of rights and freedoms through the patenting of life forms 15 Catherine Bliss, Decoding Race, 10. 16 Robert Desowitz, Federal Bodysnatchers and the New Guinea Virus, New York: W.W.

Norton (2002), 192–3. See also, Emma Kowal, “Orphan DNA: Indigenous Samples, Ethical Biovalue, and Postcolonial Science,” Social Studies of Science, vol. 43, no. 4 (August 2013), 577–97.

6

THE IMMORTAL MAN

133

especially where human genes are the subject matter of patents, and adequate consideration of the risks and benefits is essential.”17 The case that most illuminated these tensions was the Hagahai controversy. Aroha Te Pareake Mead has underscored the large question: that the copying and reproduction of cellular materials was itself a strategy to “dehumanize the human-ness of genes.” To the latter point, Linda Tuhiwai Smith has noted, “The old colonial adage that knowledge is power is taken seriously…indigenous communities probably know more than the dominant white community about issues raised by the Human Genome Diversity Project, for example, or the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.”18 Debates often failed to recognize the reality that many indigenous peoples experienced the impact of imposed knowledge regimes. Ultimately, the Hagahai patent claim was dropped, though the cell material remains commercially available. Strong views on the case are still the norm. In reviewing new publications about Oceanic genetic controversies, Tok Blong Pasifik in 2007 averred, “One of the earliest offences involved the US government, which filed patents on DNA cells taken from the Hagahai tribe in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands in the early 1990’s. Neither the individuals, their communities nor governments were informed; the US government rejected their later objections as inconsequential.”19 Part of the divide engendered by the controversy was, indeed, the framing of the case as an offense perpetrated by an imperious American government. More particularly, however, this was a series of actions taken by the US Office of Trademarks and Patents in response to a request by the National Institute of Health. That, in turn, was made by NIH researcher Richard Yanagihara and his laboratory team in collaboration with the medical anthropologist Carol Jenkins. The story is an unwinding tale of Jenkins’ work with the Hagahai in the Western Schrader Mountains in Madang Province, the commitments of the Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research in Goroka, and Yoketan Ibeji, the man whose cellular material was taken as part of an initial public health study. It was,

17 Alphonse Kambu, “Lessons from Omissions in the Hagahai Patent Case,” Pacific Genes and Life Patents,” 142. 18 Ibid, 103, 16. 19 Tok Blong Pasifik, vol. 5, issue 1 (2007).

134

M. K. MATSUDA

indeed, a story of promises, discovery, and debates framed by the politics of emergent decolonization.20 The Hagahai are a hunting and horticultural group in Mandang, numbering fewer than 300 in the late twentieth century, and largely unknown to outsiders until sustained contacts in the middle 1980s. Jenkins was an anthropologist working with the Papua New Guinea Institute for Medical Research and would develop great familiarity over the years with the people and villages. Her anthropological and medical work with the Hagahai in the late 1980s is highly detailed, encompassing population and culture studies, epidemiology, serology, and examinations of trade, marriage, settlement, and subsistence strategies.21 One of her interests was trying to understand Hagahai culture and relative community health from both external and the Hagahai’s own perceptions of isolation from the rest of the world. The “isolation” theme would prove prophetic. Archaeological evidence suggested relative apartness of the clans in the highlands, yet also trade contacts, especially with Kobon and Kalam peoples possibly dating back millennia, including exchange in salt, shells, iron pyrites and stone, then, steel axes by the first decades of the twentieth century. Outside explorers, missionaries, and anthropologists learned details of language, burial practices, and spiritual beliefs, while government officials establishing medical posts made occasional contacts. Overall, though, “in the period 1930–1980, it appears that the Hagahai did indeed experience considerable social isolation,” at first only tangentially following, but then slowly taking up the pattern of settlement clusters around mission bases favored by the government.22

20 Alain Pottage, “The Inscription of Life in Law: Genes, Patents, and Bio-politics,” in Roger Brownsord, et al., Law and Human Genetics: Regulating a Revolution, Hart Publishing (1998), 148–151. For the complexity of scientific, cultural, political, spiritual readings of experience, interaction, and value in medical histories, Warwick Anderson, The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins (2008); as well as Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia, Durham: Duke University Press (2006), and Anderson, “Objectivity and its Discontents,” Social Studies of Science, vol. 43, no. 4 (August 2013), 557–76. 21 Carol Jenkins, Mary Dimitrkalds, Ian Cook, Ray Sanders and Neville Stallman, “Culture Change and Epidemiological Patterns among the Hagahai, Papua New Guinea,” Human Ecology, vol. 17, no. 1 (March 1989), 29–30. 22 Carol Jenkins “Culture Change and Epidemiological Patterns,” 37–8.

6

THE IMMORTAL MAN

135

One of the effects, according to Jenkins, was however, the recognition that epidemic diseases in the region were not merely plagues to be attenuated by establishing medical posts and treatment, but outbreaks occasioned by transformations brought by contact itself. “Cultural changes, largely induced by mission workers, have directly contributed to increased disease transmission and have only partially ameliorated the intensity of these diseases.” The focus on culture is key, for the responsibility here lies not specifically with the missions introducing the pathogens—though that happened too—but behavior and organizational changes that abetted their spread through villagers and their interactions with each other: “The highly mobile lifestyle of the Hagahai, which contributed both to a diversified diet with a high protein intake, and a widely scattered population, has been discouraged. The frequency and extensiveness of interpersonal contact have markedly increased” leading to disease transmission exacerbated, in some instances, by the reuse of contaminated needless use for phlebotomy and other medical procedures.23 In early reports, Jenkins noted that the Hagahai largely lived apart from other settlements in the region, but that in late 1983: “several Hagahai men, recognizing a steady decline in their population, walked across the Yuat River to a mission station in the Baiyer River Valley to request medical aid.”24 This was part of a long-term challenge, as “Epidemics of newly introduced infectious diseases began to affect the Hagahai seriously around the time of World War II, when trade for steel axes escalated in their region. Survivors from that time describe what appears to be a combination of influenza and dysentery, which decimated the population.” Already, it was contact itself that appeared to be having deleterious effects. Jenkins’ work was to address the health questions directly and to deal with overall impact from outside the region. She reported that village-level medics and missionaries came with good intentions, but all bore the wish to in some ways alter the tradition and practices of the Hagahai in presumably favorable ways. In some cases, though the culture was left alone, the impacts of engagement were still hazardous.

23 Carol Jenkins “Culture Change and Epidemiological Patterns,” 54. 24 Carol Jenkins, “The Hagahai: Isolation and Health Status in Papua New Guinea,”

Cultural Survival Quarterly, issue 12.1 (Spring, 1988); Jenkins, “Health in the early contact period: A contemporary example from Papua New Guinea,” Social Science & Medicine, vol. 26, no. 10 (1998), 997–1006.

136

M. K. MATSUDA

Even the least interfering missionary, a kind man with medical training, might have inadvertently helped to spread an epidemic of hepatitis B through inadequate sterilization of needles. He also took at least a dozen men with him to his mission headquarters at various times and even traveled with five men to Lae, a city on the coast. One influenza epidemic is directly traceable to such a visit; the pattern of disease spread for several other infections, including mumps, suggests transmission through these travelers.25

The populations became the hosts and carriers of the diseases themselves. In response, Jenkins tried to build health resources on the ground. “We have raised funds for a solar refrigerator and a much-needed vaccination campaign, which is currently underway. We have brought in a better-trained and enthusiastic young man as well as a part-time female nurse to replace the previous, inadequate workers. We intend to continue to monitor the demographic situation…it is also imperative that we help protect the Hagahai from biological and cultural extinction.”26 The work, however, could never be uniquely about localizing the initiatives and protecting the community in Mandang. Jenkins’ own reports were self-conscious about offering medical and material support and the changes those very actions brought to the Hagahai. She catalogued trade items and shifting expectations, and attempts to mediate their impact. More, serological testing and phlebotomy required blood sampling, and in a global medical network, samples were requested and made available to research facilities around the world. This was a common imperative of genomic, population, and diversity research. As the World Health Organization reported of a meeting dedicated to population genetics in 1992, “There was general agreement that the best way for the study of the human genome diversity is the collection and maintenance of a resource of cell lines and DNA samples from numerous individuals from populations all over the world that could be available to investigators worldwide. Immortalization has the advantage of making the material available almost indefinitely.”27

25 Carol Jenkins, “The Hagahai: Isolation and Health Status.” 26 Ibid. 27 E. K. Ginter, “The Human Genome Diversity Project: Report of WHO Temporary Adviser,” typescript, Pennsylvania (October 28–31, 1992), 3.

6

THE IMMORTAL MAN

137

Researchers at the NIH in the United States had some keen interest in learning what they could about cellular material from largely unknown peoples. Framing this was a historical vision, tied to Jenkins’ own interest in the role that isolation did or did not play into the health of the Hagahai communities. Biologies in cases like those of the Hagahai were aligned with the particularities of “isolation” as a virtue, for a “gene pool” that was therefore unique and highly valued. In some instances, it was particularly the notion that peoples had been outside the mainstream of history, as defined by an integrated modernity, that had increased their value. This was true across the Pacific Islands and was a persistent narrative, from state of nature idealism in the eighteenth century to contemporary genomic research. In 2000, Autogen Ltd., an Australian biotechnology firm, put together a deal with the government of Tonga to establish a research lab in the capital of Nuku‘alofa and “collect DNA samples and map the genetic mix of the population and its diseases,” toward the end of identifying genes presumably associated with diabetes and obesity. The Tongan government was to receive royalties from commercial ventures. Journalistic reporting on the proposed arrangement underscored the salience of Tonga as a site for such genomic research by referring to “Faraway Tonga.” Within a few paragraphs, one article led with “The isolated Pacific archipelago of Tonga,” cited “Tonga’s isolation and the ethnic homogeneity of its Polynesian population” and referred to experiments “being conducted among isolated people who share similar DNA maps.” As the Autogen chairman commented, “There may be a gene that’s common to a particular family and you need to isolate it. That’s easier if the population has been isolated.” It also helped that the “inhabitants of small Tongan villages have been blood relations, living in extended groups,” even though urbanization had now “complicated the gene pool.”28 Clearly, the value of the Tongan proposal to Autogen lay in how to effectively draw benefit from defined elements of an island, isolation, and genealogical kinship ties. This tendency generated what would be one of the most disputed designations to come out of the aims of the Human Genome Diversity Project in the early 1990s: the appropriate way to engage and reference

28 Patrick Barkham, “Faraway Tonga cashes in on its gene pool secrets,” The Guardian (November 22, 2000).

138

M. K. MATSUDA

work with Indigenous populations, particularly those in small communities with threatened environments. In an attempt to avoid languages of the civilized, primitive, or ahistorical, the HGDP suggested: Some existing terms such as “endangered” populations can have various connotations. Many populations around the world, especially isolates living traditional lifestyles, will soon disappear as independent units because of disease, economic or physical deprivation, genetic admixture or cultural assimilation. In this Report, we refer to such groups as “Isolates of Historic Interest” (IHI’s), because they represent groups that should be sampled before they disappear as integral units so that their role in human history can be preserved.29

If supposedly well-intended, the “isolates” language exploded and became a rallying cry for Indigenous communities opposed to reckless and exploitative medical and genomic research. The effort to avoid the iteration of endangerment strongly reinscribed the narrative of disappearance and—especially—of “isolation,” therefore generating a particularly powerful obligation to salvage and maintain the biological matter of the vanishing communities, presumptively following the logic that a generically imputed human history—if not the community’s own—would continue on. The conflation of isolation with historic interest was particularly strong in that it provided the potential for novel genetic material and unique adaptability traits in the Hagahai that otherwise might not be evident in a more admixed or, as noted, assimilated population. Uniqueness mattered. What Richard Yanagihara in Bethesda, Maryland, and his team would discern, is that Hagahai villagers had genetic material that predisposed them to leukemia, yet they themselves did not manifest any symptoms of the illness. The investigation focused on a set of human T-cell leukemia lymphoma viruses (HTLV). The research suggested undefined but intriguing medical possibilities, since “high prevalences of antibodies against HTLV-1 have been reported for several coastal and inland Melanesian populations.”30 A patent application was made in 1990 for an immortalized cell line—an in vitro culture induced to 29 Human Genome Diversity Project (1992), 5, cited in Jenny Reardon, Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in the Age of Genomics, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1995), 198. 30 Richard Yanagihara, Carol L. Jenkins, et al., “Human T Lymphotropic Virus Type I Infection in Papua New Guinea: High Prevalance among the Hagahai Confirmed by

6

THE IMMORTAL MAN

139

reproduce itself indefinitely for study purposes. If the Hagahai vanished as a community, the cells would continue to live and serve medical science. In March 1995, Yanagihara, Jenkins, and the NIH research team received a patent on a cell line, viral preparation, and bioassay derived from samples taken from Yoketan Ibeji. The patent documentation claimed that, “The establishment of a cell line persistently infected with an HTLV-1 variant, derived from a healthy New Guinean, would facilitate testing in Melanesia, where high prevalences of HTLV-1 infection have been found. Such a cell line would have important application in testing populations elsewhere in the world and in the development of a vaccine for the prevention of infection.”31 In effect, the genetic material of a previously unknown culture would benefit the public health of the globe. The blood sample thus became a record of a genetic lineage with a promissory value projected on the future. As a biological assay, it was an anticipation of a deliverable future for medical care and cure, and an offer of stewardship for science and humanity.32 Not everyone agreed. In October 1995, RAFI issued its press release. The following March, Jenkins was pulled from an international flight on the tarmac at Port Moresby as she was on her way to a World Health Organization conference in El Salvador. Dominic Sengi, a Foreign Affairs official for the PNG government and former journalist, had actually launched a public and global controversy by penning a front page article in The Nation under the headline BATTLE OVER BLOOD. Angry about what he’d heard of the patents, he had written, “We must be on our guard against biological bounty hunters who are continually searching for novel, non-obvious and useful discoveries to support their industries back home.”33 Ordered not to leave the country, Jenkins was called to account for herself in a meeting with Gabriel Dusava, the PNG Secretary for Foreign

Western Analysis,” The Journal of Infectious Diseases, vol. 162, no. 3 (1990), 649–54. Also, United States Patent 5, 397, 696, p.1. 31 United States Patent 5, 397, 696 Yanagihara et al. March 14, 1995, Papua New Guinea human t-Lymphotropic virus, p. 3. 32 Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby, Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy, Durham: Duke University Press (2014). 33 Sean Dorney, “Jenkins Vindicated, Official Castigated,” The Independent, March 29, 1996, p. 16.

140

M. K. MATSUDA

Affairs. Yoketan Ibeji and another Hagahai man, Korowai Gane, accompanied her, and the Secretary concluded, “I must say that a much better appreciation of the arrangements under which the research is being carried out has been established; It is also clear that this research has been done with the full consent of the Hagahai people as well as approval from the PNG Medical Research Institute and that the benefit of this research, when fully realised, will be shared among all concerned.” Jenkins was cleared of biopiracy accusations, but the controversy over life form patents and profits was just beginning. Jenkins, who finally left research in PNG, defended her actions as a trusteeship, in which as a patent holder she could transfer any material benefits from the cell line back to the Hagahai. She argued that, far from being exploited, the Hagahai community very well understood the principle of informed consent and had written documentation stating “We Hagahai are happy that she signed this paper.”34 Colleagues and friends defended her actions and underscored her long association and personal ties with the Hagahai. They also pointed out, if it mattered, that the chances of any commercial developments were extremely remote. Critics countered that despite good intentions, the scenario was uncomfortably paternalistic, as no Hagahai or PNG representatives were directly named to the patent, and outraged voices came from all quarters pointing up the dramatically insufficient legal statutes in PNG and around the world for addressing and adjudicating the patent, ownership, and commercialization rights of human biological material. RAFI argued that they were aware of promises to share 50 percent of any royalties with the Hagahai, yet “despite many oral, written and legal requests to the US Government and other officials in the patent for copies of such a document to be made public, ‘nobody involved with the patent had produced a copy, or any record of an oral agreements.’” This raised questions— 50 percent of what? Whose share, and after whose costs and proceeds were subtracted?35 In interviews with Hagahai community members, Dr Pauline Lane has reported that villagers “feel that Jenkins had helped their community, but they also felt that maybe they had been cheated out of

34 Desowitz, Federal Bodysnatchers, 196. 35 David Robie, “Cell lines and commodities: the Hagahai patent case,” Pacific

Journalism Review, vol. 4, no. 1 (1997), 87.

6

THE IMMORTAL MAN

141

some money for their blood. They did give informed consent for blood to be taken, but not to be taken out of the country for research.”36 Eric Kwa, chief of Maramuru, and PNG law school has similarly argued, “As an experienced scientist Dr. Jenkins was ethically required to inform the government of PNG of her plans to transfer and patent the Hagahai cell line in the US…Patenting the cell line under her own name also raises serious doubts…Why did she not register the patent under the name of the Independent State of PNG which is the custodian of the people?”37 In contrast, Robert Desowitz has related a written statement presented by Yoketan Ibeji and Korowai Gane at their meeting with the Foreign Affairs secretary: “Part of this money does not belong to the PNG government, no way. Why should they get the money? When they get the money they do not think of us, the Hagahai.”38 In addition to disputes over the relationship between governments and peoples loomed a historical question. Here, Kwa took up an argument about national histories written through the lens of a post-colonial engagement with molecular science: “The Hagahai saga revealed huge gaps and weaknesses in the PNG legal system. There was an urgent need to fill the gaps in the law and also establish or strengthen existing institutions to deal with gene ownership and sustainable use…The tale of the Hagahais is the tale of a nation. The exploitation of the Hagahais by the NIH and the US is by extension an exploitation of Papua New Guineans generally.”39 The case itself, exhaustively debated by legal scholars, activists, and human rights groups, had its episodes and events incorporated into any number of historical narratives. Desowitz asks, “Was the Hagahai – HTLV-1 controversy the ‘index case’ of a legal patent right exclusivity 36 Le‘a Malia Kanehe, in Pacific Genes & Life Patents, 127. 37 Eric Kwa, “In the Wake of the Hagahai Patent: Policy and Legal Development on

Gene Ownership and Technology,” in Aroha Te Pareake Mead and Steven Ratuva, eds., Pacific Genes & Life Patents: Pacific Indigenous Experience & Analysis of the Commodification & Ownership of Life, Wellington: Llamado de la Tierra and the United Nations University (2007), 155–7. 38 Robert S. Desowitz, Federal Bodysnatchers and the New Guinea Virus, New York: W.W. Norton (2002), 196–7. 39 Eric Kwa, “In the Wake of the Hagahai Patent,” 156. Multiple essays in Kathy Whimp and Mark Busse, eds., Protection of Intellectual, Biological, and Cultural Property in Papua New Guinea, Canberra: ANU Press (2013), esp. Rosa Kambou, Lohi Matainaho, Kathy Whimp in Chapters 8, 9, and 10 for genetic property questions.

142

M. K. MATSUDA

war over DNA and other life materials that is to come in the unfolding twenty-first century?…It’s going to be a battle, sometimes bitter, over the sovereignty of national genes.”40 The genetic inheritance of a people, woven into their flesh and blood, was becoming the marker of a struggle over the political and economic future of post-colonial nations and their biovalue identities. After all, extracting an individual’s blood to become a separate medical and commercial commodity requires changes to civil identity, social order, and crosses over a number of critical and global–local interrogations into “reorganization of the boundaries and elements of the human body.” It is a point underscored by Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell, whose research into blood and organ transfers, and other tissue economies, has led to questions that implicate dilemmas in civil identity, social order, and legal definitions of the person. “What does it mean when the human body can be disaggregated into fragments that are derived from a particular person but are, strictly speaking, no longer constitutive of human identity?”41 What is the status of divided individuals? Do they have claims once their fragments enter social circulation? As made evident in the Hagahai case, the key argument is that in the biotech domain, the mechanisms of control and exploitation are hidden, since the potential wealth derives from human molecules and proteins. “Today only a small number of samples are needed, because DNA is extracted, active ingredients are identified, immortalized cell lines are created, and intellectual property rights are then established.” In this way, biotechnology is adept at “deftly disguising the linked matters of inalienable wealth, property rights, and potential exploitation.”42 In his extensive critique of the Hagahai situation, Alphonse Kambu has moved the conversation toward exactly these types of questions, noting that “at the time of the Hagahai case, PNG is assumed to have had no clear policy or legislation in place to handle R&D and the issue of patentability of life forms including human, plant, and animal inventions.” Yet, Kambu explains, much can be drawn from the PNG constitution, intellectual property legislation, and—especially—customary laws and practices, or

40 Desowitz, Federal Bodysnatchers, 201. 41 Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell, Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs and Cell

Lines in Late Capitalism, Durham and London: Duke University Press (2006), 7. 42 Margaret Lock and Vinh-Kim Nguyen, An Anthropology of Biomedicine, 220.

6

THE IMMORTAL MAN

143

Kastam, “one source of law which the majority of people upholds and thus, may provide some authoritative guidance to the issue of human gene patenting.”43 More, Aroha Te Pareake Mead, then deputy convenor of New Zealand’s M¯aori Congress, responded in a direct communication to journalist David Robie, “Although many traditional cultures may not have words for ‘genetics’ or ‘DNA,’ most have strong customs protecting the sanctity of hair, blood, and saliva / mucus—the three sources of DNA most commonly tapped by Western researchers…Now, human beings and the very life force and genealogy contained within, have become products.”44 Importantly, in extending this assessment, Kambu reads the Hagahai case less as a matter of property and profit, than individual and group self-determination. In fact, he argues, “Patenting of human genes is an issue of human rights deprivation…patenting genes, the building blocks of life, implies that life itself is being patented.” He fully suggests, some observers equate the patenting of human genes as ‘modern day slavery’ that treats human beings as property or mere objects without any value of life. Patenting human genes or slavery is closely related to inhuman treatment in the non-violent sense, where the taking of a patent on a gene degrades the freedom to enjoy life to the fullest. Modern biotechnology certainly poses critical questions of non-violent crimes, infringements and deprivation of rights and freedoms.45

Warwick Anderson has pointed out the ways it is not necessarily the intentions of political colonialists, but the practices of scientific knowledge organization that can lead to conflicts. The very practice of freezing and preserving samples, as an instance, can have profound resonances in terms of what is a life or person, and what is an object of study. Comparing the techniques of Fore sorcery in New Guinea with laboratory protocols, Anderson notes, “Fore sorcerers were turning ‘things’—as they appear to us—into live persons, so their bundles might have effects on contemporary victims. Scientists, in contrast, are seeking to make persons 43 Alphonse Kambu, “Lessons from Omissions in the Hagahai Patent Case,” 141–3. 44 David Robie, “Cell lines and commodities: the Hagahai patent case,” Pacific

Journalism Review, vol. 4, no. 1 (1997), 84. 45 Ibid, 142.

144

M. K. MATSUDA

into frozen things—into scientific valuables, suspended forms of life no longer commensurate with estimates of donor personhood. To make who into what. The deep freeze of the laboratory thus is a place of modern conjuring and enchantment, as much as enlightenment.”46 Nor is this unsettlement only around the ontology of scientific extraction and immortalization. Spiritual knowledge and belief are also powerful prevailing currents in the debates—not by being anti-science as a caricature, but by carefully weighing ethical and sovereignty questions as necessary components of what constitutes benefit for a community and for a broadly defined humanity. In 2001 the Tonga National Council of Churches met to discuss bioethical questions, beginning its own joint declaration with a recognition that all peoples of the Pacific are “equally created in the image of God and in fellowship with one another,” and that while God is the source of all life past, present, and “yet to come,” there is responsibility of Pacific Island peoples to their own communities. Notably, their statement reflects the inextricable principles of recognition and also the importance of genealogies, in that peoples of the Pacific should be “respected and valued for their identity as distinct people,” and that all living things should be treated “in a way that respects their intrinsic value as living generational manifestations of creation.” These principles, in the words of the Council, are commitments to the lives of future generations, thereby underscoring that The peoples of the Pacific are the guardians of their heritage and have the right to protect and control dissemination of the heritage; the peoples of the Pacific have the right to manage their own biological resources, to preserve their traditional knowledge and protect these from expropriation and exploitation by scientific, corporate, or governmental interests.47

In effect, the debates about biological specimens are less about projections of knowledge and generalized human benefit, than specific responsibility to inherited practice and understandings of communities toward 46 Warwick Anderson, “The Frozen Archive, or Defrosting Derrida,” Journal of Cultural Economy, published online, February 24 (2014). 47 Statement of Bioethics Consultation, Tonga National Council of Churches Centre, Nuku‘alofa, Tonga (2001), in Aroha Te Pareake Mead and Steven Ratuva, eds., Pacific Genes & Life Patents: Pacific Indigenous Experience & Analysis of the Commodification & Ownership of Life, Wellington: Llamado de la Tierra and the United Nations University(2007), 245–6.

6

THE IMMORTAL MAN

145

their own distinctive legacies as peoples. With a strong, interwoven logic, the declarations of the Council all build upon each other, from strong faith in God to respect and human dignity, to imperatives assigned to the uniqueness of Pacific cultures across generations, from past to future. The Hagahai case impacted all of these questions. In 1996, Ruth Liloqula, a cabinet secretary, plant pathologist, director of agricultural research, and official of the police and national security for the Solomon Islands was asked about the Human Genome Diversity Project. She indicated forthrightly that very little was clearly understood about the intent of the project at the time, but that “the case that is known to Solomon Islands is that of the Hagahai man of Papua New Guinea.” More, she noted that “the information on the application to patent a human cell line derived from a Solomon Islander first came out during research conducted in support of Papua New Guinea’s opposition to the Hagahai patent.”48 For Liloqula, the alliance of opposition was very deeply rooted in a very specific understanding of what the potential of medical breakthroughs might mean: “the program is for the benefit of a few scientists who have failed to learn from what is already happening to the indigenous people who are being exploited and who gain very little or nothing at all from such experiments.” In fact, she suggested, “These groups of researchers most probably do not know who they are, where they are from, and what they are.”49 To address this, Liloqula did not simply raise the criticism and state governmental resistance, but offered a lesson. Broadly, she underscored that “Indigenous people know who they are, where they come from what genetic traits are in their families, and have always known where they are going.” The challenges they faced were not of self-understanding or greater knowledge, but “introduced ways of life, sickness, and social problems, problems associated with new ways of economic and political development.”50 48 Ruth Liloqula, “Value of Life: Saving Genes versus Saving Indigenous Peoples,”

Cultural Survival, (June 1996), https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/culturalsurvival-quarterly/value-life-saving-genes-versus-saving-indigenous-peoples 49 Ruth Liloqula, “Value of Life: Saving Genes versus Saving Indigenous Peoples,” Cultural Survival, (June 1996), https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/culturalsurvival-quarterly/value-life-saving-genes-versus-saving-indigenous-peoples 50 Ruth Liloqula, “Value of Life.”

146

M. K. MATSUDA

Against these upheavals, “Solomon Islanders all have one thing in common. This is to protect life, the indigenous knowledge, and resources of indigenous people.” Of the Indigenous, she notes, “The largest group of people in in Solomon Islands are the Melanesians, living “with their kin in small villages on their tribal land,” and supported by small-plot agriculture, fishing, hunting, and pig-raising. Authority is extended through elders, with priorities to family, community, and tribe, and “human dignity, morality and respect.” 51 Of research promises, she elaborated: We are a country where there is very limited modern technology, facilities, and educated people in this area, and we need to be assured that our genetic material will not be used to destroy us. Already, the removal and utilization of our natural resources has not put us in any improved position, but has benefited those outside our country. We are much worse-off now, despite all the large-scale development. The only thing we have left and can call our very own is our genetic make-up.

Her deep skepticism and challenge derived not from an opposition to understandings of heritability, or a refusal to embrace complex biological concerns in generational transmission, for she observes, “There may be no word for ‘genetics,’ but our people have a good and accurate idea about heredity and genetics,” referencing strict rules about marriage between immediate family lines and consequent “sickness, bad luck, weak children, and children who are disabled.” In related lineage terms, she underscored that “Before the arrival of the Western World or culture, Solomon Islanders put great value in knowing exactly their genealogy and whether or not they were born of the woman or man in their tribal group,” a critical knowledge for ensuring community security, continuity, and ordered relations. Rather, Liloqula’s challenge was a question of authority and regard, such that “The difference between those that have the university papers and the traditional experts is that traditional experts respect human dignity and life.”52 These are resonant elements of the struggles over genetic ownership. Not the worth of science, but the ways that knowledge and practice

51 Ruth Liloqula, “Value of Life.” 52 Ruth Liloqula, “Value of Life: Saving Genes versus Saving Indigenous Peoples,”

Cultural Survival, (June 1996), https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/culturalsurvival-quarterly/value-life-saving-genes-versus-saving-indigenous-peoples

6

THE IMMORTAL MAN

147

can together form definitions for human benefit as social, moral, and ethical, shaped by values of reciprocity, respect, and sanctity. In the Pacific case, these understandings are necessarily inflected by and inextricable from histories of exploitation from centuries before and the legacies of colonialism in a hoped-for self-determined age. Like Liloqula, the Tongan political activist and advisor Lopeti Senituli has commented widely on biopiracy issues and directly reflected on “the dismay and anger of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific regarding what is in effect the ultimate encroachment of the ‘ngeia ‘o e tangata,’ dignity of the human person.” He offered his own historical analogy: “They came for sandalwood. Now the bastards are after our genes!”53

53 Lopeti Senituli, “Ngeia ‘o e Tangata—It’s about human dignity!” Pacific Genes and Life Patents, 176–7.

CHAPTER 7

The Tree of Life

The evocation of sandalwood, the great press-gang enslavement commercialized wood of the nineteenth century and the connection to bioprospecting is not a far reach in Pacific historical narratives. At another end of a chronology, Margaret Lock and Vinh-Kim Nguyen have located the Hagahai controversy in a lineage from the early modern spice trade to the biopharmaceutical age, arguing, “We have come a long way from the time in the seventeenth century when the British East India Trading Company, the Dutch East India Company, the Danish East India Trading Company, and their various rival companies were importing hundreds of thousands of sacks of peppers and spices from East and Southeast Asia…these ships were in effect floating medicinal chests.”1 This emphasis on the extraction and exploitation of botanicals and ties to genetics is longstanding in histories of the Pacific. Indeed, knowledge about—and more critically—control of seeding, sprouting, and growing plants and then controlling their generations has long been a lever of imperial power. The Dutch, in the Spice Islands, famously attempted to prevent any future germination of traded seeds by soaking them in lime. And the Dutch were not alone in focusing on 1 Margaret Lock and Vinh-Kim Nguyen, An Anthropology of Biomedicine, “Moral Boundaries and Human Transformations,” Oxford and Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 220.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. K. Matsuda, Genealogies, Genomes, and Histories in the Pacific, Palgrave Studies in Pacific History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45449-3_7

149

150

M. K. MATSUDA

botanicals as sources of wealth and power. As Raquel A. R. Reyes has pointed out, “Five of the fifty-six expeditions organized by the Spanish Crown from 1750 to 1800 were solely focused on plant collecting.”2 It was through botany and collection of species that the crown built greater resource knowledge of an enormous geographical empire, engaged in the prestige of scientific discovery, and explored commercially viable and medicinally useful new plants. In addition, global colonial possessions meant confrontations with newer diseases and maladies for Europeans. Allying natural history with religion produced “the geographically inspired notion that God had created a botanical cure for each and every disease in the same location from whence the disease originated.”3 Equally, the German erudite Johann Reinhold Forster sailed with Captain James Cook and other navigators with a particular aim: to undertake the beginnings of a “global inventory” of plants with profound future political-economic implications for exploitation. Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan have called this the “Colonial Politics of Botany”—not only the study of, but commercial cultivation, control, and marketing of plants.4 One can refer back to the Dutch spice monopoly, but also to plantation systems supporting sugar cane, tobacco, cotton, coffee, or tea. Upon these were built powerful mercantile and royal houses supporting planters, commercial agents, naturalists—and often—slave systems.5 The connection between Dutch spice extractions, sandalwood, and Spanish botanicals may seem only an allusive connection to histories of genealogies and genetics, but both fundamentally issue from a common principle: the formal political, legal, and sometimes military control of plants—as with people—as resources with the ability to reproduce themselves across time, and thus provide endless regenerative value, 2 Chiyo Ishikawa (ed.), Spain in the Age of Exploration 1492–1819, Seattle Art Museum, University of Nebraska Press (2004), 171–2. 3 Robert Voeks and Charlotte Greene, “Gods Healing Leaves: The Colonial Quest for Medicinal Plants in the Torrid Zone,” Geographical Review, vol. 108, no. 4 (2018), 545–65. 4 Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, eds., Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press (2005). 5 David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill, eds., Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1996/ 2011). See also, Anne Marris, “Johann Reinhold Forster and the Ship Resolution as a Space of Knowledge Production,” in Frank Biess, et al., eds., German Histories and Pacific Histories: New Directions (2017), 153.

7

THE TREE OF LIFE

151

profit—and in the most contested cases—the possibilities of providing or depriving populations of basic food sources. In historical measure, the flora of Oceania have been troubled by these colliding imperatives of imperial politics and struggles over the meaning and use of the natural world, which in many Islander cultures is not a distinguishable category from that of human history, ancestry, and moral purpose. Protecting and addressing the interrelated genealogical web that entangles all living things in a material and spiritual order provides a deeper foundation for what, in themselves, are political, resource, and environmental debates. Sometimes, these struggles become visible in unexpected ways. In March of 2015, a historic cyclone hit Vanuatu, devastating the country and wrecking much of the infrastructure and public services. Entire communities were displaced and dependent on relief efforts. One of the key elements of the recovery and rebuilding efforts was, as always, food— especially in a nation heavily dependent on gardens, small plots, and localized agriculture in seed crops and root crops. With more than 90% of crop and food-growing gardens destroyed, the Vanuatu Director of Biosecurity Timothy Tumokon made clear that Vanuatu had a vital need for “quick growing vegetable seeds…we have seen that crops have been virtually wiped out in most of these places and so seeds are very, very critical that they have become part of the whole recovery process.” In spite of the emergency, however, and with seeds entering the country in large relief shipments from Australia, New Zealand, and New Caledonia, and along with travelers aiding relatives and family, he also issued a specific directive: “we will not allow any seeds that are, that have genetically modified material in them into the country.”6 Tumokon made clear that food supply was vital, yet he pointedly argued that “we are protecting the environment as well as the livelihood of the people who are affected by the cyclone.”7 This dual imperative—both environment as well as livelihood—was deeply entwined in autonomy questions. The distribution of genetically modified seeds globally has been, over decades, a source of environmental, political, cultural, and historical contest. In the Vanuatu emergency, Director Tumokon 6 Timothy Tumokon in “Farmers Told Not to Worry About GMO Issues and Vegetable Seeds,” Daily Post /Vanuatu (April 7, 2015). 7 Timothy Tumokon in “Farmers Told Not to Worry About GMO Issues and Vegetable Seeds.”

152

M. K. MATSUDA

challenged the means by which the products of commercial genetic engineering could literally take root in the country. This recognized the ways that agribusiness multinationals—notably the Monsanto Corporation—would foster dependence on patented seed crops, creating classes of dependent farmers worldwide required to purchase, year upon year, their own seeds from the company and maintain their crops with other company-supplied fertilizers and chemical pesticides, notably glyphosate, known commercially as Roundup. At the same time Tumokon also had sharp words for members of anti-GMO groups such as the Stop OGM Pacifique, which entered Vanuatu bearing uncertified seeds collected from backyard gardens in New Caledonia. By confronting the group and confiscating such seeds, Tumokon set notice that championing small-plot agriculture was insufficient to meeting the biosecurity protocols of the Vanuatu government. This was not an argument only about global and local, big capital and local producers; it was about political sovereignty. These issues crosscut many of the contemporary controversies that underscore GMO debates based upon science, public health, and welfare questions. In 2016, a hundred Nobel Prize winning scientists signed an open letter decrying the anti-GMO activism and political tactics of the global environmental organization Greenpeace, asserting that genetically modified crops and foodstuffs were, in fact, not hazardous to general health. Citing scientific consensus and numbers of academic and industry studies, the Nobel Prize winners lamented campaigns based upon what they deemed erroneous claims about the unknown and possibly deleterious health effects of consuming modified foods, with consequences ranging from susceptibility to allergic reactions to actual mutations and cancer activation in the human body. Most of the Nobel laureates’ arguments have been credibly, scientifically verifiable, to the degree that the struggle has been over public welfare and individual health. Yet in Oceania, as other parts of the developing world, the controversies are often, in fact, only partially about nutritional, medical, and scientific consensus, and quite a lot about custom, practice, anti-colonialism, and the right to have access to, and grow healthy traditional crops. Controversies presented as uniquely focused on scientific safety and questions of public health generally fail to allow for the degree to which the struggles are significantly focused on sovereignty and local determination of food policy. This in itself is tied up with the work of local farmers, smallholder agriculture, customary

7

THE TREE OF LIFE

153

diets, and long traditions that weave together food, culture, and family practices.8 That struggles over genetics and GMOs are widespread across the Pacific, is underscored in this way particularly in terms of elemental and culturally invested foods that play foundational roles not only in providing sustenance to communities and populations, but in so doing, foreground genealogies tying them to community identities across generations. As such the introduction of genetically modified organisms, particularly through the translocation of genes from one species to another, can be a disruption of a political and cultural as well as scientific order. Such disruptions are rarely simple botanical debates. They are resonant as full embodiments of decolonization struggles: assertions of sovereignty in the face of imperial might as capital controls over food crops and markets, and patent regimes whose enforcement compels small farmers to adopt dependent livelihoods tied to purchasing supplies of patented seeds. Suspicion of GMOs is the projection of an alternate historical future, one tied to self-determination. It is also the articulation of a radically different, Pacific Islands way of defining and understanding what a plant or crop actually is. Botanical scholars have enumerated the sophisticated and interdependent ways that plant life has been employed by island peoples for food, but also literally woven, built, and incorporated into daily lives and entire life cycles through uses in fiber craft and basket weaving, fishing nets and lines, canoes and houses through barks, frames, and palm thatch. Indeed, one M¯aori interlocutor has commented on the connection between genealogical knowledge, plant materials, and proper cultural practice: “Weavers also should know the whakapapa of the patterns they are using…traditional weavers usually know the plants and what they are saying; ‘the plants tell a story’ and this influences what the weaver does.”9 The plant world is also manifest in the form of tapa and other pounded bark cloths, as carved in musical instruments or sporting objects, through war in the form of weapons, in ritual and spiritual practice through reserved knowledge of dedicated wise men and women, and in medicinal knowledge by

8 Jeff Lyon, “Nobel Laureates Pick Food Fight with GMO Foes,” JAMA Network/ American Medical Association (November 1, 2016). 9 Mere Roberts, John Fairweather, “South Island M¯ aori Perceptions of Biotechnology,” Research Report no. 268 (July 2004), 55.

154

M. K. MATSUDA

kahunas, tohunga, and other keepers of plant-based poultices, solutions, powders, and liquids.10 The “genetic” struggle is particularly notable where the plant is a staple food crop that also resonates in histories as an ancestor—a part of the genealogy of the people and their civilization itself. It is not only a foodstuff, but as a character with its own kin and family relations extending back in descent to communities living in the present day. This has been studied by scholars who have noted that critical foodstuffs such as the k¯umara, or sweet potato, issue from a long and storied lineage, having been born as siblings of multiple varieties to a goddess and a god, the knowledge of whose origin led to the original migration of ancestors out of an ancient homeland and into the islands of the Pacific as now occupied. These are all tied together through the genealogical layering, arrangement, and taxonomy of whakapapa, as an understanding of kinship and practice as an overlay of spiritual and material knowledge.11 Tony Ballantyne has articulated this in detail, noting that the k¯umara is not only a vital foodstuff, but is itself deeply encultured. The very planting historically was properly carried out by teams under the aegis of a chief, with appropriate prayers and differentiated labor roles from digging with the proper sticks, to planting, to cultivating. At each point, the growth of the k¯umara was understood as the function of a series of precisely defined and recognized ritualized forms of knowledge.12 A statement of the inseparable constitution of foods and cultural politics was made for Hawaiian K¯anaka Ma‘oli experience in a 1996 interview with HaunaniKay Trask, who noted: “in terms of the country, which is the land base, in our genealogy the land is one of the people Papahanaumoku (Earth Mother) and she made the Sky Father, Wakea, and they produced the islands and from the islands came the taro plant and from the taro plant came the people--first the chiefs then the people.” This inseparability of ancestors, Earth and Sky, island, and taro is foundational, as the first chiefs and peoples of the islands are all the progeny of the taro. As Trask puts it, the “lessons of genealogy” are that the people of Hawai‘i come from the 10 Beatrice Kraus, Plants in Hawaiian Culture, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press (1993). 11 Mere Roberts, Brad Haami, Richard Benton, et al., “Whakapapa as a M¯ aori Mental Construct: Some Implications for the Debate over Genetic Modification of Organisms,” The Contemporary Pacific, vol. 16, no. 1 (Spring 2004), 1–28. 12 Tony Ballantyne, Entanglements of Empire, 221.

7

THE TREE OF LIFE

155

land, and that “because we come from the land, we have to take care of the land, and because the taro plant is the first thing that came from the land and not the people, we must take care of the taro.”13 She recognizes this as an obligation. As such, taro is kin and ‘ohana, a familial understanding of care, responsibility, and completeness. As historians of Hawaiian plant culture have noted, “the terminology used for taro was adopted into that of the family; just one example of this is the term ‘ohana, the family or kin group. ‘Ohana is derived from the ‘oha of taro, the offspring (sucker) attached to the mother corm (underground stem).” The taro in this tradition is the first-born child from whose body sprang the plant. Taro embodies interconnections between “nature, divinity, and kinship,” and manipulations of its generation and growth also entail changes to powers like mana and the physical body forms of the god K¯ane.14 It is not surprising, then, that while cross-switching genetic materials between species is, in a monotheist view, “playing God,” here it is less a sin of pride in a Biblical presumptiveness—though it does reflect that also in strongly Christian Pacific Islands, such as Tonga—and more an elemental misalignment of where things belong in shared balance, and right order in kinship systems—as with chiefs and peoples, brothers and sisters, mothers and children. In Aotearoa New Zealand, on the one hand, notes one M¯aori correspondent: “those things in that whakapapa are fixed; they can’t be moved around,” and “We are going too far; these things will turn around and bite us in the bum.” On the other hand, it is important that there is no standard “M¯aori view,” and another respondent dismissed the contention

13 Haunani-Kay Trask, interview by Man Chui Leung, Vancouver Writers Festival (November 1996), https://web.archive.org/web/20030118040345/http://mypage.dir ect.ca/e/epang/InterviewHaunani.html (accessed 23 February 2021). See also, Jessie Kaleinohea Cleghorn, “Written Direct Testimony of Jessie Kaleinohea Cleghorn,” https:// dlnr.hawaii.gov/mk/files/2016/10/F-6-Witness-Testimony-Kaleinohea-Cleghorn.pdf, 1, speaking of her great-great grandmother. “It is through her lineage that I am related to Wakea and Papahanaumoku. These ancestors, Wakea and Papahanaumoku, are who tie me genealogically to Mauna Kea and they are present today in my DNA, this is where their knowledge and their wisdom are accessible for learning.” 14 Beatrice Kraus, Plants in Hawaiian Culture, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press (1993), 5; for a detailed analysis of multiple Indigenous and scientific epistemologies, Mascha Gugganig, “The Ethics of Patenting and Genetically Engineering the Relative H¯aloa,” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, vol. 1, no. 82 (2017), 52.

156

M. K. MATSUDA

that human intervention disturbs the distinction of natural versus unnatural: “In that case all forms of technology are unnatural in that nature didn’t make them. Nature didn’t invent cars or aeroplanes, so should we be anti-cars? But humans are natural aren’t they? A part of nature? So human technology must be natural.”15 Such discussions defeat simple dichotomies. Arguments about what is natural or unnatural, and how these distinctions should apply, tend to be inconclusive this way, as far as any kind of broader generalization. The perspectives on the value of what things exist in nature and whether they have primacy remains disputed. As such, genetic modification is only partly a debate about “science” vs. “tradition,” or technical knowledge vs. spiritual practice. Resistance to genetic engineering is not anti-scientific nor in contest about what is no longer part of nature. Rather, these are disputes about genetics and genealogies as self-identification and selfdetermination. Indeed, an advisory to the New Zealand government, Toi te Taiao: The Bioethics Council, made this point in 2004 on the eve of a large debate about the potentials and pitfalls of genetic engineering: “What makes this topic so controversial and polarizing is interesting because the science is reasonably straightforward and the practical consequences—especially for human health—are beneficial and commonplace.” In this way, “the controversy is not so much about the science as it is about the moral significance of interfering with what to some people represents the very essence of humanity, our genetic material.”16 Though perhaps framed as controversies about supporting or denying the value of scientific knowledge by Nobel Prize winners, these are fundamentally sovereignty questions: who has the knowledge, who makes the decisions, and who benefits? The challenge is that in such scenarios, international research labs and patent regimes regularly presume, as protocol, that the knowledge is generated uniquely at the biotech research phase. Notes a respondent to a survey on genetic engineering, “I am anti GE [genetic engineering] because I am pro-M¯aori…if you really thought about what it was to be M¯aori it was about whakapapa, mauri, etc.” This came up in another case commented by the Toi Te Taiao, in a 2005 report, “Whakapapa and xenotransplantation: animal-to-human 15 Mere Roberts, John Fairweather, “South Island M¯ aori Perceptions of Biotechnology,” Research Report no. 268 (July 2004), 60 and 50. 16 Toi te Taiao: The Bioethics Council, “Whakapapa and the Human Gene,” Wellington (February 2004).

7

THE TREE OF LIFE

157

transplantation.” The Council underscored its mission to “Enhance New Zealand’s understanding of the cultural, ethical, and spiritual aspects of biotechnology,” with a working group that “identifies with biotechnology from a M¯aori perspective and as a Treaty of Waitangi partner.” The report begins with a medical observation: “M¯aori as an ethnic group suffer three times the rate of diabetes and ten times the rate of kidney failure compared to non-M¯aori.” No mention is made of why this might be the case, or social, economic, and political disparity factors. The query, rather focuses on the future possible uses of animal cells and tissues to treat chronic disease, noting, “These transplants are known as xenotransplantation or animal-to-animal transplantation,” which “may see potential gains in M¯aori health.” The Council does note, however, that “M¯aori may find the notion of xenotransplantation worrying and potentially inconsistent with tikanga M¯aori,” the customary practices and correct values.17 Notably, xenotransplantation was the very crux of a global controversy that erupted in 2002 when biotechnology company Diatranz sought approval for pig-to-human cell transplants in New Zealand in support of diabetes remediation research. But public controversy led to cancellation of approval, and the company’s departure for the nearby Cook Islands, where free association with New Zealand but an autonomous government declared its intention to participate. Medical commentators, other research teams, and foreign governments weighed in on the ethics, capitalist intentions, and dangers of animal-to-human retrovirus threats of the proposal, warning of sanctions, including withdrawal of travel privileges for any person transplanted with the genetically modified cells. While the questions were framed about the advisability of the medical applications, the controversies flared around who had the right to engage in the debate or offer approval: government officials, patients seeking experimental treatments, entire communities, and what did it mean to transfer prohibited research in one nation to nearby island locales with more favorable and profitable business relations? Cook Islands notable Te Tika Mataiapo—Dorice Reid—openly asked, “Are the lives of indigenous people less important than those of others?” The Diatranz firm made a familiar argument about scientific progress concerning the New Zealand prohibition, commenting “We have been delivered a vital blow, but it won’t stop xenotransplantation. 17 Toi te Taiao: The Bioethics Council, “Whakapapa Xenotransplantation: Animal to Animal Transplantation,” Wellington (February 2004), 6.

158

M. K. MATSUDA

It’s happening elsewhere.”18 The plan was not to shift the study population, but to experiment on Cook Islanders living in New Zealand in any case, who would visit the Cook Islands for the trial and then return to New Zealand. While Cook Island government officials declared that New Zealand had “absolutely no right to interfere in an internal Cook Islands’ matter,” traditional leaders, a religious advisory council, and even the Cook Islands Chamber of Commerce responded that there were “no borders for bio-risks,” that it was unacceptable to merely be a “jurisdiction of convenience,” and that international consent should be sought to avoid the threat the Cook Islands might be deemed a “rogue nation.” No one questioned the potential medical benefits of the trial or the real suffering of diabetes pain and daily injections of possible participants, though public discussions also raised questions about the relative balance of “techno-fixes” and investments in health programs and preventative medicine. The company withdrew its testing plan and sought a different venue in Australia, with company founders asserting that New Zealand had “missed out.”19 Reid argued for sovereignty over and protection of genes as a “key resource of the new world bio-economy,” noting, as often, that “our isolation and diversity makes the Pacific Islands particularly attractive.” She also backed traditional leaders as those who could “provide a useful check and balance on government decision-making.”20 This was a sentiment widely reflected around the Pacific, where communities and governments are not always, or even often, aligned. In Aotearoa New Zealand with M¯aori interests, the view was less about an essential incommensurable stance regarding genetic science than an “imbalance of power,” leading to a situation where “M¯aori had no real input into the decision-making process” according to community members interviewed on genetic engineering questions. Regarding M¯aori 18 Te Tika Mataiapo—Dorice Reid, “Pig Cell ‘Guinea Pigs’—An Experience of ‘Xenotourism’: The Proposed Diatranz Experiment in the Cook Islands,” in Aroha Te Pareake Mead, Steven Ratuva, eds., Pacific Genes & Life Patents, Wellington: Llamado de la Tierra (2007), 83–4. 19 Te Tika Mataiapo—Dorice Reid, “Pig Cell ‘Guinea Pigs’—An Experience of ‘Xenotourism’,” 86–7. Also, Kristie Archer, Faith McLellan, “Controversy Surrounds Proposed Xenographic Trial,” The Lancet, vol. 359, no. 9310 (March 16, 2022), 949. 20 Te Tika Mataiapo—Dorice Reid, “Pig Cell ‘Guinea Pigs’—An Experience of ‘Xenotourism’,” 87. Also, Lisa Callagher, Brian Karlson, Nadine France, Christiano Bellavitis, “Living Cell Technologies: Finding a Path to Market for Xenotransplantation Therapy,” International Journal of Technology Transfer and Commercialisation, vol. 16, no. 1, 37–60.

7

THE TREE OF LIFE

159

scientific researchers, “if more were employed in the research institutions and could influence the sort of science being done, have more control over it, and also get around the flax roots and communicate with their people, maybe M¯aori wouldn’t be so distrustful.”21 Other discussions also underscored not the value of scientific and medical research, but the community and identity issues linked to whakapapa. Focus group observations with M¯aori communities on biotechnology questions have raised such questions: “One participant (a younger woman affiliated to a North Island iwi) had been told of someone who had received a heart transplant turning up at their marae claiming the right to land in their rohe, because his heart had been donated by someone from that iwi.”22 The group wondered, what rights did this confer? Though it was clear that “organ transplants did not affect one’s DNA and therefore could not be passed on to one’s children,” what did this mean for mana and whakapapa? Notably, these are not the same debates as longstanding questions about whether indigenous knowledge, like the M¯aori m¯atauranga, can or should be considered as a form of scientific understanding, or can be a different science, woven through with localized custom, legend, and authoritative tradition. In this case, the reference does not deny, but engages with the direct administrative, community boundaries, land claims, financial control of leading-edge biotechnological processes, and experimental protocols. This and a M¯aori way of doing things, as one interview respondent averred, “If some of these technologies were locally owned with M¯aori control, ownership and governed by M¯aori tikanga, I might be prepared to consider them.”23 Such discussions necessarily mean overlays and tensions between economic, political, ethical, and cultural questions. In the Hawaiian Islands, the rainbow papaya is a good example of an engineered foodstuff that was genetically created in order to develop a breed that could resist ringworm blight, and preserve much of the market for tropical 21 Mere Roberts, John Fairweather, “South Island M¯ aori Perceptions of Biotech-

nology,” Research Report no. 268, Canterbury: Lincoln University (2004), 50. 22 Focus group 10, Mere Roberts, John R. Fairweather, “South Island Maori Perceptions of Biotechnology,” Research Report no. 268, Canterbury: Lincoln University (September 2004), 55. 23 Mike Dickison, “M¯ aori Science: Can Traditional M¯aori Knowledge Be Considered Scientific?” New Zealand Science Monthly (May 1994).

160

M. K. MATSUDA

fruit. Many local farmers have resisted the modified papaya, committed in some cases to organic farming practices, but all deeply suspicious of corporate encroachment upon their land. Needless to say, controversy has followed efforts to block the import, but also the growing of GMOs in the Hawaiian Islanders. Such controversies ripple across the Pacific. In the Philippines and other parts of Southeast Asia, the question of Golden Rice has become a stalking horse—engineered with daffodil genes to produce greater quantities of beta-carotene and alleviate blindness from vitamin A deficiencies. Golden Rice has been a test case for rhetoric and claims: that the bioproducts are untested and unsafe for human health; that opponents of the crop practice a politics of moral irresponsibility—condemning large, often impoverished, populations to nutritional disorders and blindness; that the questions are not really about the efficacy of the rice, but whether locally grown indigenous plants would not provide much the same, or superior, benefit if cultivated and allowed to thrive in an increasingly monoculture global economy. The science and health arguments become contests of persuasion and ethics. Yet, the logic of change is still less about which plant or vegetable is the most or least healthy, even while significant claims are made for each party, and more about the larger questions of autonomy. Regarding Golden Rice, one M¯aori community member commented that the vitamin A health tragedy was not really a scientific question since it “could be solved tomorrow by politicians…” Rather than invest in engineering new solutions, “All they had to do was distribute the food surpluses to those who needed them.”24 Other interviewees evoked the basis of self-determination and individual decision-making: “we can’t decide for others what’s good for them. If it will help save other peoples’ lives they should have the right to choose to eat those things.”25 And also, by community and individual decision, to refuse, or negotiate for something else. Resistance here comprises significant anti-colonial thrust, framed by a key concern: keeping visible the work, livelihoods, and expertise of small farmers rather than reducing complex debates to questions of

24 Mere Roberts, John Fairweather, “South Island M¯ aori Perceptions of Biotechnology,” Research Report no. 268, Canterbury: Lincoln University (2004), 59. 25 Mere Roberts, John Fairweather, 50.

7

THE TREE OF LIFE

161

nutritional efficacy. Here, critiques that small farmers cannot provide sufficient food for growing populations is doubly displaced by land tenure systems that reduce and under-resource smallholdings in favor of export monocropping; sustainable local farming is partly an agricultural feat, and a significant political challenge organized around land reform issues, which many governments are loath to confront. This erasure is, in turn, another dimension of the deliberate unrecognition of generations of cultural and historical knowledge and natural practice tied to use of botanicals, flora, and food plants. Such knowledge can become the center of controversies that have swirled around one of the great levers of power in a global knowledge economy: traditional practices, and the rise of patent claims and resistance for iconic Pacific plants. Ikechi Mgbeoji has strongly argued that scientific knowledge as recognized through discovery, innovation, and then a patenting system premised on unique development, is an exploitative practice that structurally rewards Western research, funding, and legal protocols, and intentionally—or at least willfully—disparages and fails to recognize prior, Indigenous knowledge as scientific or part of a research and codified knowledge base. As such, Indigenous knowledge is naturalized, and—particularly because held as community rather than individual property—superseded by a patent regime that recognizes only named individuals and controlled, experimental processes. In short, this defines “biopiracy” as “a misappropriation of indigenous peoples’ knowledge and biocultural resources, especially through the use of intellectual property mechanisms.”26 In this way, the experience and practice of interdependence and strictly limited exploitation of resources has, under patent regimes, revived for many island communities the context of colonialism and decolonization. Aroha Te Pareake Mead puts it: “There is an almost desperate attempt by the descendants of colonizers to consign the terra nullius perspective to history… gene patents bring back haunting and painful memories to indigenous peoples of a legacy of European colonial domination.”27

26 Ikechi Mgbeoji, Global Biopiracy: Patents, Plants, and Indigenous Knowledge, Ithaca: Cornell University Press (2006), 12. 27 Cited in David Robie, “Cell Lines and Commodities: The Hagahai Patent Affair,” Pacific Journalism Review, vol. 4, no. 1 (November 1997), 78. See also Sandra Bamford,

162

M. K. MATSUDA

The evocation of terra nullius is highly intentional here. It is not surprising to consider agitation for and agreements concerning Indigenous knowledge in the context of the Mabo case of the 1990s out of which Eddie Mabo, a Torres Strait Islander, argued to have claim to his own land through the principle of native title. The legal case went on for a decade, and ultimately resulted in a significant anti-colonial recognition. Not accepted until the late twentieth century was the reality that Indigenous peoples of the Australian continent and islands had long-established customary ownership and transmission of their lands. This contested the British, and then Australian juridical and legal claim of Australian lands being held by the crown through the doctrine of terra nullius —that the land was claimed and seized because “empty.” This principle of lack of occupation did not attempt to suggest anything quite as absurd as imagining that no inhabitants roamed, worked, or settled the lands of the Australian continent, but rather that they were nomadic, wandering, made no improvements, and—most critically for Western legal purposes—could not demonstrate a regime of knowledge, law, custom, and tradition that indicated any sense of land “ownership”—the famous necessary proof of “native title.” That a generation of customary, oral, and symbolic presentations was necessary to demonstrate the effective reality of native title as a governing principle of inherent ties over land without European charters or documents, yet with its own logic of surveys, boundaries, and resources in a given domain, is an indicator of the difficulty of reimagining what, from a Crown perspective, had only been a struggle over traditional practices and peoples confronting the institutional force of law. Yet similar circumstances obtain in the case of Islander community resistance to the extraction and exploitation, at times by patenting, of local resources. Communities labeled anti-scientific or resistant to change, or uninformed, superstitious, and reactionary, are enjoined to demonstrate a logic of native title for traditional territory: that is, Indigenous knowledge as a protected and defensible system of practice and experiential application in contrast to laboratory-based experimentation, printed record-keeping, and publication.

“On Being ‘Natural’ in the Rainforest Marketplace: Science, Capitalism and the Commodification of Biodiversity,” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Anthropology, vol. 46, no. 1 (Spring 2002), 35–50.

7

THE TREE OF LIFE

163

This is particularly a noteworthy discussion because evidence for title to land as evidenced by gainful working of crops was available from early European contact records. In Tonga in 1773, James Cook noted island gardens “planted with fruit trees, roots, in great taste and elegance and enclosed by neat fences made of reeds.” He equally enthused about places resembling “the most fertile plains in Europe, here was not an inch of waste ground…Nature, assisted by a little art, nowhere appears in a more flourishing state than in this isle.” Other visiting captains exclaimed, “We admired the state of their agriculture, to which they applied themselves as the principal and most useful occupation of that society.” Dumont D’Urville noted, “Neither our public parks nor our large flower gardens are cared for with such attention as are the malae, the orchards, and even the fields of the islanders of Tonga.”28 Tonga, especially, has often been cited as a case apart—having never fallen under colonial rule as its national history presents itself—and the strength of the horticultural base is here aligned with recognition of a highly developed state of agricultural practice. Far from untended, savage lands, or mere idylls of bountiful nature, Pacific Island environments were long cultivated and developed following sophisticated practices. Crops were grown and dozens of varieties produced of key staples such as taro and k¯umara, or yams and roots in many Melanesian islands. The complexity of applied customary knowledge is particularly true not only in crops and farming, but a domain where specialist knowledge is highly revered: medicine and healing. In medicinal cases, the expertise and practice are often maintained by women in local communities, as parts of protected and particular knowledge. Here, debates about genetically modified organisms, or traditional economies of scale, are battles over pluralistic knowledge developed outside of the experimental reproducibility criteria of laboratory scientific practice, in favor of the equal regard for the learned and inherited knowledge of generations. Studies of traditional medicine, including in the Marshall Islands, note that medicinal protocols, in contradistinction to a segmented professional and clinical practice, are thoroughly integrated with environmental knowledge, and often located among women and youth in many communities, where the “medical” focus is on the management “of resources 28 Paul Van Der Grijp, Identity and Development: Tongan Culture, Agriculture, and the Perenniality of the Gift, Leiden: KITLV Press (2004), 73.

164

M. K. MATSUDA

and the environment.” One study, for example, examines healing practices by gaining community input on a local logging operation and sawmill, commenting on waste and destruction of foliage and forest cover, as well as oil leakages into water sources. Much of this is straightforwardly practical: poor stewardship is disrespectful and hazardous in that it directly impacts the survivability and therefore harvesting of medicinal plant species. It is the understanding and balance of women’s knowledge, men’s knowledge, and derivation from the stewardship of the natural world that informs healing practices. Generally understood “interconnections between spirit, mind, and body” are neither mystical nor esoteric. Though spiritually infused, the danger of their misalignments become more properly understood when grasped materially—“massage, potions, poultices, chants” are all necessary elements of healing that can be put in disarray by losses of territory, forest destruction, and land degradation as cultural erosion. Loss of particular environments means direct loss of plant sources, supplies, their phytochemicals, and the practices built around them. This is particularly salient where the knowledge is transferred as lived practice across generations, rather than academically codified.29 Though often regarded skeptically, the continuity between human, natural, and spiritual worlds is strongly experiential for Indigenous communities that are not regarding, studying, or analyzing forest and village cultures, but living in them—and depending upon them. Karie John Kawowo from the Binandere peoples of New Guinea noted to a conference dedicated to Indigenous knowledge and property: Most of the Indigenous people in Papua New Guinea still rely to some extent on the use of its biologically rich ecosystems for their subsistence, economies, materials, medicines, and, through their relationship with the environment, their world view. This relationship is intimate and continuous, and most Indigenous people view themselves as part of a personalized ecosystem encompassing both the human and non-human inhabitants.30

29 Irene J. Taafaki, Maria Kabua Fowler, Randolph R. Thaman, Traditional Medicine of the Marshall Islands: The Women, the Plants, the Treatments, Suva: IPS Publications, University of the South Pacific (2006). 30 Karie John Kawowo, “Biopiracy in the Pacific,” Presentation, Indigenous Knowledge Conference (2001).

7

THE TREE OF LIFE

165

Recognizing use and exploitation of natural resources within a framework of interdependence and common care can seem a fraught balancing act. Some groups and individuals make sense of the tensions linking extraction and benefit by drawing distinctions between bioprospecting and biopiracy. To some M¯aori community members, both are to be held at a distance as indicative of interference with nature. For others, though, bioprospecting has long been a historical reality, and the primary question was one of community advantage: “it’s been going on for ages even by our own people. So why shouldn’t we (M¯aori) benefit?”31 Biopiracy, on the other hand, is to be clearly resisted—the taking of natural materials and knowledge without permission, and worse, the staking of claims to legal ownership over those materials and knowledge. This is much to the point, for though almost all bioprospecting cases are controversial, not all instances of the extraction and purposing of local knowledge are outlandishly exploitative in the same ways. The genetic logic of the mamala tree is an instructive case in point, an instance where a plant bark native to Samoa, and other Pacific islands, was demonstrated in US research labs to have remarkable antiretroviral properties. Declarations, treaties, and agreements and activism have been the tools to register that both credit and benefit are shared between molecular researchers and also “local healers,” and “village elders” who have strongly cultivated, protected, and developed the fundamental curative knowledge about the plants across generations. In this instance the principal characters are Epenesa Mauigoa, a traditional woman healer on the Samoan island of Savaii, Falealupo village, and Paul Alan Cox, a noted ethnobotanist. Cox also worked later with healer Pela Lilo, also of Falealupo. Through field research in the medicinal properties of flora in the Falealupo rain forest, Cox developed knowledge related to local medicine principally from Mauigoa. In territories such as Savaii, healers like Mauigoa are the doctors and pharmacologists for the local communities, steeped in remedies and botanical chemistry for multiple ailments and afflictions. Mauigoa’s knowledge encompassed some one hundred twenty or more herbal remedies and solutions for illness, and one in particular—for the fiva sama sama—interested Cox as it described a means of combatting what Western medicine would call viral hepatitis. Mauigoa demonstrated how the bark from the mamala

31 Mere Roberts, John Fairweather, 57.

166

M. K. MATSUDA

tree could be stripped and then brewed into a tea for a very effective treatment. Plants with natural, evolved antiviral properties are of great interest to pharmacological research, and Cox sent a sample for chemical analysis to the National Cancer Institute in the United States. Researchers identified the active agent in the mamala bark as the molecule Prostratin, an enzyme that activates the function of other proteins. Between 1987, when Cox was learning from Mauigoa, and 1992 when the NCI isolated Prostratin, a number of contexts and elements aligned. This was an era of global political and social concern, social stigmatization, and also federally supported big medicine pursuing scientific research on the AIDS virus, with investigations into antiviral compounds of significant interest to researchers. In 1981, the US Centers for Disease Control first described rare lung infections in young, otherwise healthy young men in California and doctors in New York reported on a rare cancer, Kaposi’s sarcoma. The CDC and local health officials begin tracking cases and in September 1982, the CDC used the term Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome for the first time. By 1987, US polling respondents named AIDS “the most urgent health problem facing the world,” and the issues were debated on the floor of the United Nations General Assembly, the first disease ever so discussed. In addition to the traditional institutions of power, newer voices were galvanized both in support of and against them. That same year, American author and activist Larry Kramer founded ACT UP, a directaction coalition to force accountability onto governments and officials, pharmaceutical and insurance companies, accelerate medical research and treatment approvals, resolve patent disputes, and combat anti-gay discrimination and violence. In the Pacific Islands, leaders of public health and environmental services officers met to address the crisis as it was inflected by the particularities of longstanding Oceanian questions and colonial legacies. They formulated policy on the spread of intravenous drug infections and raised discussions of disease outbreaks brought by tourists whose presence was often favored by local politicians and business leaders, but who also created unregulated public health challenges. As J. T. Villagomez summarized it for the Northern Mariana Islands and for his colleagues, the growing crisis was tragically familiar. In a guarded reference to smallpox, cholera, syphilis, and typhus brought by Euro-American sailing crews in earlier centuries, and the fatal colonial

7

THE TREE OF LIFE

167

mismanagement of the measles in 1875 Fiji and a virulent 1918 influenza in Samoa, Villagomez offered: “We know, from past experience what a devastating effect previous communicable disease epidemics have upon the island populations, and we are resolved not to permit AIDS to extract such a toll from our unique Pacific culture and civilization.”32 In the Pacific Islands, this had a resonance through ancestral communities that had at times been decimated by a quarter or more through epidemic infections. For the Pacific Islands to now play a direct role in combatting the most feared, global disease of a generation, was sobering. Locally, though Prostratin had been known from studies in Australia, it had not been understood in the context of the mamala tree, and not isolated as an active agent in a treatment for a malady recognized as viral in nature. Strikingly, as researchers joined these lines of inquiry, Prostratin became applied to assays of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and inhibited the ability of the virus to infect cells. More, the Prostratin also acted to force latent or dormant HIV from cells, thus exposing the virus to immune system destruction before the entire body would be weakened by the undetected growth of latent but dangerous viral replication. With characteristic drama, global media reported: “Researchers say Samoan Mamala tree tea bark could lead to HIV-AIDS cure,” and “Samoa’s Gift to the World: A New Way to Fight AIDS.”33 Many of the stories focus on a familiar trope—the discovery of a miracle compound in a jungle setting from ancient knowledge. It took more work by Cox and Samoan advocates to ensure that recognition of Mauigoa as a healer and woman did not disappear from the “discovery” story of Prostratin in the context of local healing applied to global research on AIDS. The challenge was to not become a case study in agnotology—the examination of the ways that actors and critical contributions to knowledge are historically narrated out of discovery stories. Much hinged on whether the story was built around Prostratin as the product of a high-technology laboratory, or a natural healing element long ascertained by traditional knowledge. Much here, in turn, depended 32 J.T. Villagomez, “AIDS in the Pacific,” Asia–Pacific Journal of Public Health, vol. 2, no. 4. (1988), 221–3. 33 See Lynn Yaris, News Center, “Samoa’s Gift to the World: A New Way to Fight AIDS,” Berkeley Lab: Bringing Science Solutions to the World (November 5, 2004), https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2004/11/05/samoas-gift-to-the-world/.

168

M. K. MATSUDA

upon the definition, in fact, of traditional . A salient reckoning comes from the Four Directions Council of the First Nations of Canada: “What is ‘traditional’ about traditional knowledge is not its antiquity, but the way it was acquired and used. In other words, the social process of learning and acquiring which is unique to each indigenous group lies at the heart of its ‘traditionality.’”34 Mauigoa’s knowledge was based upon both inherited learning, yet fully developed through regular foraging, combining, extracting, and preparing remedies based upon her own practice. Her knowledge was not archaic but experientially based. This has long been a critical debate within local knowledge and intellectual property questions. Laura Foster’s work on the global adoption of the South African hoodia plant for a weight-loss supplement by the global natural supplements industry underscores continuing and contentious issues due to the lack of attention regularly misdirected around indigenous women’s contributions to pharmacological knowledge. Whereas Khomani San women customarily utilized the plant for breast-feeding and gas remedies in babies, and knowledge was passed across generations from mothers and grandmothers, the herbal supplement industry focused on male hunter narratives to market their extracts as contributions to active Western lifestyles. The obligation of care and responsibility connecting generations as familial and genealogical practice was made invisible by recognitions of simple commercial and “biocaptial value,” as were the persistent insufficiencies in colonial systems of food, education, and access to health care supporting the communities involved.35 Such questions were very much in the air as Epenesa Mauigoa’s knowledge and the Samoan medicinal tradition were discussed in 1989 as the National Cancer Institute patented Prostratin which, over the years, continues to attract favorable pharmaceutical comment as a phorbol ester (used to study tumor and pain interactions) that “inhibits HIV infection and viral spread at the entry/

34 Ikechi Mgbeoji, Global Biopiracy: Patents, Plants, and Indigenous Knowledge, Ithaca: Cornell University Press (2006), 10. 35 Laura A. Foster, “Patents, Biopolitics, and Feminisms: Locating Patent Law Struggles over Breast Cancer Genes and the Hoodia Plant,” International Journal of Cultural Property, no. 19 (2012), 388–9.

7

THE TREE OF LIFE

169

fusion step of viral life cycle” while also eliminating latent viral reservoirs in cells.36 In 2001, the American Aids Research Alliance acquired the license. The University of California at Berkeley, under chemical engineer Jay Keasling, then negotiated an agreement to use escheria coli bacteria as vectors to generate mamala genes, and thus develop a synthetic version of Prostratin. As the wood of the tree could not provide significant material to be massproduced on an industrial pharmaceutical scale, the Prostratin would be created in clinical laboratories and 20% of commercial revenues would go to the Samoan people, including the local villages. Noted Cox: “I gave my word to these people that I would protect their financial interests, so it was a great thing for me to go back to the village and say I kept my word.”37 The Memorandum of Understanding between the government of Samoa and the Regents of the University of California, Berkeley, recognized Samoa as a sovereign nation “whose people for thousands of years have faithfully accumulated and transmitted from generation to generation knowledge about the healing properties of their island plants.” The Memorandum acknowledged permission from the Samoan government, Chiefs and orators of Falealupo, and Epenesa Mauigoa and Pela Lilo upfront. Notably, the agreement conveyed, “Both the indigenous intellectual property and the genetic material of the mamala tree are part of the national sovereignty of Samoa, as recognized by Samoan custom, Samoan law, and the Convention on Biodiversity.” Regarding licenses, royalties, and income from Prostratin, 50% was dedicated to the Samoan government, one-third to Falealupo village with small percentages to other villages, and with attention to genealogical legacies, 2% apiece “to the lineal descendants” of Epenesa Mauigoa and Pela Lilo, in a trust “for the health, education, and well-being of said descendants.”38 36 Marjan Hezareh, “Prostratin as a New Therapeutic Agent Targeting HIV Viral Reservoirs,” Drug News and Perspectives, vol. 8, no. 18 (2005), 496–500. 37 “Samoa Claims Rights to AIDS-Fighting Gene Found in Pacific Tree Bark,” Auckland (AFP) (October 22, 2004), http://www.spacedaily.com/news/spacemedicine-04zzq. html. For Cox’s own account see Paul Alan Cox, “Ensuring Equitable Benefits: The Falealupo Covenant and the Isolation of Anti-viral Drug Prostratin from a Samoan Medicinal Plant,” Pharmaceutical Biology, vol. 39, no. 1 (2001), 33–40. 38 “Memorandum of Understanding Between the Government of Samoa and The Regents of the University of California, Berkeley for Disposition of Future Revenue from Licensing of Prostratin Gene Sequences, an Anti-viral Molecule,” Pacific Islands Legal

170

M. K. MATSUDA

Negotiable outcomes in this case led to cooperative undertakings involving genetic science and local knowledge, though questions of sovereignty, ownership, and benefit continue to complicate any tidy narratives. Environmentalist Clark Peteru from Falealupo was not impressed by the Prostratin agreement, describing it as paternalistic and arguing “This deal is being hailed by some, but it is not as rosy as it looks.” Saying that the people of Samoa were not consulted, he called it “an attack on sovereignty, not a defense of it.”39 These were national—and international—disputes. In 2004, newswires indicated a national debate as “Samoa claims rights to AIDS-fighting gene found in Pacific tree bark.” Indeed, Commerce Minister Joe Keil announced, “What we are doing now is getting the rights so that when they need to proceed (with the drug) they will have to get it from Samoa.” Keil, in fact, made more than an administrative legal claim; he asserted a sovereign ownership over the genetic properties of the mamala tree: “We have the rights to the research, and we--only in Samoa--can produce or harvest the mamala tree, so that they have to deal with us and the people in Samoa.” This was surprising since the mamala was not unique to the Samoan islands. More, the move was a reminder that medicinal and scientific matters, under a patent regime, become instantly political. Notably, Peteru, a chief from Falealupo where Mauigoa and Cox initially shared and developed knowledge about the mamala, was more cautious: “Claims of ownership over any part of (the tree) could provoke objections from other countries,” he told Agence France Presse.40 Commerce Minister Keil straightforwardly praised Cox’s long association with Falealupo, and Cox himself averred, “No other nation has collaborated so freely with scientists in the study of homalanthus and no other nation can claim that its indigenous knowledge led directly to the discovery of the antiviral properties of Prostratin.” Referring to the 1992 International Convention on Biodiversity, he indicated, “The

Information Institute (August 13, 2004), http://www.paclii.org/cgi-bin/sinodisp/pits/ en/treaty_database/2004/1.html?stem=&synonyms=&query=prostratin 39 Michael Field, “Samoa Forest Holds Secret of Future Drugs,” Pacific Islands Report (January 25, 2005), https://www.pireport.org/articles/2005/01/25/samoa-for est-holds-secret-future-drugs. 40 “Samoa Claims Rights to AIDS-Fighting Gene Found in Pacific Tree Bark,” Auckland (AFP) (October 22, 2004), http://www.spacedaily.com/news/spacemedicine-04zzq. html.

7

THE TREE OF LIFE

171

Samoan extension of sovereignty to the gene sequence is therefore on strong ground under the CBD and under international law.”41 Whether as resistance to global agribusiness corporations, or legal claims between different Island nations over intellectual cultural properties, the point about sovereignty of gene sequences is a key contest and major issue.42 In Aotearoa New Zealand, one M¯aori interlocutor noted about bioprospecting, for example, “In principle this is useful. M¯aori have been engaged in this for centuries, so have all other indigenous peoples as part of their subsistence livelihoods.” The practice of searching out, sampling, and refining knowledge of the natural world for use and benefit was not contested. In this instance, kaitiakitanga—guardianship and care for the environment—became the motive principle, a practice that is fundamentally about “looking after the intrinsic right to survive of both humans and the other species we utilize,” the ability to generate, reproduce, and flourish across generations.43 As imperatively understood by whakapapa, the environment of an area necessarily embraces the lineages and taxonomies of small plants, climbing plans, groupings of flax, Tawa trees, insects, distinctions between plants of dark edged leaves, those that provide muka, swamp growers, fiber-producing, and the different manifestations of T¯ane, who brings all close, makes “everyone snore (sleep) together,” and reaches out to communities.44 Debates about long-term survival are, for many Oceanian communities, very clearly linked to maintaining local environments. Not only in terms of critical natural resources, but the ways that plants, food, animals, and elements are interrelated through custom, community practices and belief, language, culture, history, and spiritual connections. 41 “Samoa Claims Rights to AIDS-Fighting Gene Found in Pacific Tree Bark,” Auck-

land (AFP) (October 22, 2004), http://www.spacedaily.com/news/spacemedicine-04zzq. html. 42 Ruha Benjamin, “A Lab of Their Own: Genomic Sovereignty as Postcolonial Science Policy,” Policy and Society, vol. 28, no. 4 (2009), 341–55. Jesús M. Siqueiros-Garcia, Pablo Francisco Oliva-Sanchez, Gabriñe Saruwatari-Zavala, “Genomic Sovereignty or the Enemy Within,” Acta Bioethica, vol. 19, no. 2 (December 2013), 269–73. 43 See Roma Mere Roberts, “Walking Backwards into the Future: M¯ aori Views on Genetically Modified Organisms,” Inaugural Journal of the World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium/WINHEC (2005). 44 Jonathan Te Rire, “Taxonomy—M¯ aori Whakapapa Versus Western Science,” International Journal of Arts & Sciences, vol. 5, no. 3 (2012), a highly detailed description of “subsets” of whakapapa, 59, 67.

172

M. K. MATSUDA

These in turn are located in legacies of community and displacement, national and indigenous sovereignty struggles, pasts of indentured labor and sandalwood gangs, visions and portents of the global capitalist future. New threats, on the other hand, were recognizable by their reductive approaches to complex histories and webs of life, the “right relationships to plants and animals.” Commercial bioprospectors, by definition, “are only interested in extracting the active ingredients. Once they have done that they are not interested in the plant’s long-term survival or that of its habitat.” In this, the tools of genetic modification may be new and dramatically unfamiliar, but the practice is old, and must be continuously confronted within a framework of anti-colonialism. Commercial extraction is always in danger of becoming biopiracy: “It imposes on nature, instead of working with nature. In this regard it is a form of intellectual and technological colonization by scientists. It’s not empowering – it’s overpowering.”45

45 Mere Roberts, John Fairweather, “South Island M¯ aori Perceptions of Biotechnology,” Research Report no. 268, Canterbury: Lincoln University (2004), 46 and 20.

CHAPTER 8

In the Blood

In 2012, lawyers in Honolulu filed a lawsuit on behalf of Leighton Pang Kee, who had been rejected in his attempts to claim the right to apply for Hawaiian homestead land—properties leased to Native Hawaiian K¯anaka Maoli for 99 years at $1 per year. By law, applications could only be made by claimants demonstrating themselves to be “50 percent Native Hawaiian.” What this meant was to be decided according to presumed biological criteria as determined through kinship. Pang Kee had been adopted, but knew his father to be Native Hawaiian. His father, however, was deceased, so Pang Kee established familial relation through his father’s living brother, by using DNA sampling to show a correlation between his own DNA and his uncle’s. The Hawaiian Homelands agency regarded this evidence with skepticism, but did move to review the possibility that DNA could be utilized in making claims.1 Judicially focused on the right to be considered for a homestead lease— a property and entitlement question—the argument turned on a claim of direct kinship as determined by an alignment between DNA and a legislative employment of the meaning of blood. As the suit filed on behalf of Pang Kee put it: 1 “Rulemaking Underway for DNA Testing for Hawaiian Homelands,” Honolulu Star Advertiser (December 28, 2015).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. K. Matsuda, Genealogies, Genomes, and Histories in the Pacific, Palgrave Studies in Pacific History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45449-3_8

173

174

M. K. MATSUDA

Declaring that Plaintiff has an absolute right to obtain a timely determination of his qualification for a Hawaiian homestead lease…based on the standard of the scientific proof, including DNA test results, and other evidence necessary to establish his qualification for such a lease…Declaring that Plaintiff’s natural father is Earick Kukonu, Sr., which establishes that Plaintiff had the requisite blood quantum to qualify for a Hawaiian homestead lease.2

Here, DNA plays the role of biological evidentiary base upon which to build a case determined by kinship, to satisfy a “blood” criteria that exists largely as a historical and legal category. Blood, in this case, is less an inheritance of material substance, or a genetically inscribed proof of relationship, than a judicially determined fact and “legitimating category” whose sole logic is “how much?”. The employment of this logic has been notably unpacked by K¯ehaulani Kauanui, who has observed the interwoven strains of politics, sovereignty, and indigeneity in the Hawaiian case. By tracking the history of race politics in the islands, she notes the gradual articulation of multiplicities of categorizations—pure races, white races, half-castes, half-breeds, métis, and mixed bloods—all with different legal ascriptions over the course of Hawaiian colonial history since the nineteenth century. The blood quantum question arose and became colonial policy in arguments about who was “really” or “still” a Hawaiian, and therefore, who should be entitled to land? The context for this arises from the increasing authority of white commercial, planter, and missionary interests in the Hawaiian Islands in the nineteenth century. A redistribution of land rights, the Great Mahele of 1848, effectively permitted outlanders to acquire large properties through purchase, with the Hawaiian royal house maintaining considerable holdings and the kama‘aina—local, Indigenous peoples of the land, having only small holdings. Successive monarchs were compelled to cede more power, including through the 1887 Bayonet Constitution forced upon King Kalakaua by planters and missionaries backed by militias, and the armed seizure, with support of US Marines, of the kingdom itself from Queen Lili‘uokalani in 1893. Taken as a territory by the United

2 Ashley K. Obrky, Camille K. Kaeama, Attorneys for Plaintiff Leighton Niakala Pang Kee, “Hawaiian Home Lands DNA Lawsuit,” First Circuit Court, Honolulu, Hawai’i (September 24, 2012).

8

IN THE BLOOD

175

States during the Spanish–American War of 1898, the islands effectively became a colonial protectorate. In 1920, a Hawaiian Homes Commission Act established land and homestead possibilities for “any descendant of not less than one-half part of the blood of the races inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands previous to 1778.”3 As Kauanui notes, blood quantum is not really a measurable, biological entity in itself. Rather it was defined by colonial questions of Indigenous mortality and survival issues. In highly structured, limited restoration efforts, blood inferred lineage claims that became the core of policies “to return some Hawaiians to the land, rather than return land to Hawaiians.” In this, blood criterion emerges as way of avoiding recognizing entitlement to specific lands and rights, and instead proposes remedies in statist welfare.4 Critically, by establishing a standard around who can be known as Native Hawaiian “full blood,” or “part,” the very logic over time of presumed blood dilution away from a putative, authentic, full blood, means that historically, claims to identity and recognition get weaker, and assertions for and struggles for sovereignty erode. Blood quantum is therefore less a means of establishing a common criterion for biological identity than a colonial project in the service of dispossession: it is ultimately about exclusion, and reduces historical, kin-related, genealogically entangled peoples to racial minorities defined by a substance rather than Indigenous peoples with sovereignty claims. As Kauanui explains it, blood quantum was hardly an organic and logical means to determine who would be denominated as a Hawaiian. Rather, as a deliberate construction to control Hawaiian lands, it has been a superficially biological, familial, and genealogical strategy, “to undermine K¯anaka Maoli sovereignty claims–-by not only explicitly limiting the number who could lay claim to the land but also reframing the Native connection to the land itself from a legal claim to one based on charity.”5 As such, she argues, dangers and historical distortions inhere in drawing on supposedly biological criteria to determine the identities of Indigenous peoples. 3 Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, 1920 (Act of July 9, 1921, c 42, 42 Stat 108). 4 J. K¯ ehaulani Kauanui, Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and

Indigeneity, Durham: Duke University Press (2008). 5 J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity, Durham and London: Duke University Press (2008), 9.

176

M. K. MATSUDA

Rather, Kauanui favors kinship and genealogical models as demonstrably more inclusive. She contests the understanding of racial mixedness as Indigenous dilution, arguing against reductive biology in favor of cultural resilience, which does not locate itself in declension narratives of degeneration and extinction—still the substance of colonial encounter fatal impact tropes. “Only by ignoring Hawaiian genealogical practices could exogamy be viewed as a one-way road to cultural disappearance, where racial purity is confused with survival and leads to an assumption of inevitable decline.”6 The Hawaiian scholar David Chang has also argued that ancestral Hawaiians had a broad, mobile, and geographical understanding of relatedness: “K¯anaka understood they had a genealogical as well as spatial relationship to…other places in the world—that is, they had ancestors and relations elsewhere in the world.”7 Since blood quantum and genetic debates focus on reductive authenticity, families with mixed histories, racially defined, are routinely evoked to disqualify Native Hawaiians who don’t measure up for benefits as “inauthentic,” purposefully forwarding an institutional framework premised upon assimilation and dispossession.8 The deep entrenchment of this blood-based heritage and inheritance model as codified by law can take unexpected, yet by its own logic, purposeful turns. Maile Arvin has unpacked the ways in which five K¯anaka Maoli men, in 2005, filed suit against the Office of Hawaiian Affairs for “failing to restrict several of their social programs to the definition of “native Hawaiians” as being “of not less than one-half part blood.” The case hinged on determinations of distinctions between “native” and “Native” and whether the plaintiffs—as meeting the colonial criteria— did not represent a more historically oppressed group. As the plaintiff’s attorney argued, blood quantum was itself a necessary protection for indigeneity and historical experience, as “without blood quantum, everyone will be Native Hawaiian.” These arguments were clearly entangled in colonial histories that framed, and encouraged, “blood quantum ideals in order to prove…distinction from other racial groups or racially mixed

6 J. K¯ ehaulani Kauanui, Hawaiian Blood, 15. 7 David Chang, The World and All the Things Upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies

of Exploration, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (2016), 8. 8 J. K¯ ehaulani Kauanui, Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity, Durham and London: Duke University Press (2008).

8

IN THE BLOOD

177

people in Hawai‘i.”9 These were further complicated by analogies to Native American nations and the proposed legislation knows as the Akaka Bills which would offer K¯anaka Maoli special status within the United States—unpopular with Hawaiians who regarded the bills as enforcing recognition of American sovereignty over Hawai‘i, rather than admission that the islands were stolen lands and that K¯anaka Maoli remained Polynesian peoples, not assimilated Americans. These historical and legal entanglements in turn evolve from and dialogue with much broader narratives. Some questions of direct descendance derive from defense of heritage. Others concern ideologies of purity and pollution, as with miscegenation laws and the legal prohibition of intimate relations between peoples of perceived different races, as in the institutional racism of United States or South Africa through the twentieth century. Some involve attempts to reclaim originary ethnic nationalisms, whether in European states or East Asia from ancestral clans and almost mythical forbears whether Han, Yamato, or Aryan. Some concern postulations of pride concerning mixed genetic inheritance as inflected by social stratification along lines of blood, color, and culture as in Latin American states. Scholars of historical anthropology in Brazil, for example, note how debates regarding national identity developed through interrogations about blood, population, and biological diversity in generalizable periods from the turn of the nineteenth century to the interwar period, to the postwar and contemporary. From the 1870s, physician-anthropologists like João Baptista de Lacerda argued for “whitening” of the population to counter degeneration presumably brought on by Black and Indian mixing with “European/ Aryan blood.” By the 1910s, Lacerda’s successor at the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro, Edgard Roquette-Pinto, still denigrated “inferior and primitive” Indians, but deemed that to be a culture challenge to be overcome by civilization and eventual evolution. The postwar and the UNESCO debates about a new order of decolonized peoples meant that “Gradually, the application of the concept of race to the human species became contested in itself, in particular with the rapid expansion of population genetics from the 1960s onward. This field

9 Maile Arvin, Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai‘I and Oceania, Durham and London: Duke University Press (2019), 136–7, 153.

178

M. K. MATSUDA

used analysis of blood types, enzymes, and proteins…thereby displacing morphologically based analysis.”10 This narrative, from primitive degeneration, to assimilation, to the resituation of identity and national or community inclusions and exclusions into legal and knowledge frameworks determined by bodily substances, was widely replicated throughout the colonial world and has shown tenacious persistence. In North America, blood politics were historically linked directly to settler colonialism and growing US military and administrative jurisdiction over territories incorporated into the United States. Kimberly TallBear has noted for the Native American experience, blood quantum was a “much-debated and well-established tool for testing racial authenticity. It had its birth in the U.S. federal government’s colonization of American Indians,” as a means of promoting group Indian identity and administrative bordering around widely distinctive Indian nations and communities; it has been “used to determine who is really an Indian in an official capacity” since the late 1800s. She notes further that, more recently, DNA analysis “is integral to (if not totally representative of) blood quantum,” in that it “equates genetic markers with cultural continuity and seeks to use DNA to support or deny an individual or group claim to culture and political rights.”11 Both practices, she notes—blood quantum and DNA—have been adopted and continue on as means by which many tribal governments make determinations of tribal membership, a fraught process contested by claimants that allows assertion of a biological criterion for acceptance or denial shorn of genealogical, kinship, relational, or cultural ties. In the Pacific Islands, narratives of personal and national identity formation are intrinsic to and inseparable from histories of trade, migration, immigration, and settler colonialism, and the boundaries they both built and troubled. Vicki Luker has extensively studied these phenomena also in terms of what presumably pure and mixed blood might mean 10 Ricardo Ventura Santos, Michael Kent, Verlan Valle Gaspar Neto, “From Degeneration to Meeting Point: Historical Views on Race, Mixture, and the Biological Diversity of the Brazilian Population,” in Peter Wade, Carlos López Beltrán, Eduardo Restrepo, and Richardo Ventura Santos, eds., Mestizo Genomics: Race Mixture, Nation, and Science in Latin America, Durham and London: Duke University Press (2014), 38–45. 11 Kimberly TallBear, “DNA, Blood, and Racializing the Tribe,” Wicazo Sa Review 18 (1) (January 2003), 81–2. Kimberly TallBear, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (2013).

8

IN THE BLOOD

179

through the “half-caste problem” in the early decades of the twentieth century. She notes that “Half-castes were significant because they affronted ideals of racial purity and challenged the real or imagined structures, including colonial structures, founded thereon.” Their presence—indeed existence—underscored the tensions and vulnerability of the presumed moral and enlightened rule of colonialists, their anxieties about being minorities reliant on political, administrative, and military power, and the fact that “half-castes were in effect metonyms for interracial sex. Male or female, they were its proof and product,” an unsettling and often transgressive reminder of intimacies and violence that “complicated the process envisaged for shaping a national identity.”12 The gradual obsolescence of the half-caste designation came with the era of decolonization, as racial language favored by colonial empires was pushed back by assertions of autonomy and Islander states, like Western Samoa in 1962, followed by the Cook Islands and Niue, became independent. Within administrations of local rule and new political identities, the heyday of biological assimilation as government policy based on white colonial elites was challenged by cultural and political agitation in favor of indigeneity. In this new configuration, “many people of mixed ancestry who had formerly stressed their European connection began to stress the indigenous,” and denying such claims would be of serious political consequence, tantamount to “discounting the survival of an indigenous identity and tradition.”13 The term half-caste fell out of regular usage, no longer supported by the structures that made it prejudicially necessary, and evolved, in many instances, from an epithet cast against political and social opponents of mixed-blood heritage to an identity claim and reappropriation by newer generations. In fact, in some parts of the Pacific, social, demographic, and cultural transformations since the last part of the twentieth century have reversed or complicated the language and experience of mixed ancestry claims. Emma Kowal and Yin Paradies note that white-identification in Australia is no longer necessarily a choice or desideratum for children of white and Aboriginal descendants, but a refused attribution. In fact, 12 Vicki Luker, “The Half-Caste in Australia, New Zealand, and Western Samoa between the Wars: Different Problem, Different Places?” Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard, eds., Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750–1940, Canberra: ANU Press (2008), 309. 13 Vicki Luker, 325.

180

M. K. MATSUDA

“the majority of the children of mixed marriages are identified by their parents, and later identify themselves, as Indigenous. In addition, some of those who are not raised with an Indigenous identity but later discover they have Indigenous ancestry are drawn to identify and build social ties with Indigenous relatives or the Indigenous community where they live or work.” In this way “white-skinned Indigenous people refuse to be white,” and therefore refuse assimilationist histories and reclaim their own.14 These mixed-blood decolonial transformations are not only descendant experiences of European outlanders in Oceania, nor only of white administrative hegemony. They also encompass Chinese men trading with and forming families with Aboriginal women of the Northern Territories in Australia; “blended East Asians” including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean intermarriage in predominantly Micronesian or Anglo-Saxon environments; M¯aori and Pakeha relations in Aotearoa New Zealand; the métis question of French colonists in New Caledonia, indigenous Kanak, and indentured laborers from Indochina, Vanuatu, and around East Asia; the “liminal status” of West Papuan Indonesian and Melanesian individuals entangled in claims on who can speak and with what heritage for the independence of West Papua, as well as a constant tracing of colonial determinations of natives, non-natives, and, as noted, “half-castes” evolving into mixed-race ascriptions.15 All of these, as instances, point up the blurred lines of colonial categories that have shaped the very framing of life histories in terms of race and the enduring overlays of claims, identifications, classifications, and disparities. These histories are connected by being not only registered and recorded but embodied. With a contemporary interest in the experiences of parents raising ethnically mixed identity children, Rachael Violeti Leafe asks a primary question—from whom do I descend?—and responds by reflecting on photographs of grandparents from both sides of her family: “The photos emanate a legacy of life lived, survival, and endurance…despite the political currents that influence how I perceive my identity and the world around me, the centerpiece of photographs gives me a sense of belonging from which I can continue my journey and mission in life.” This question of belonging derives from not the continuity of a defined 14 Emma Kowal and Yin Paradies, “Indigeneity and the Refusal of Whiteness,” vol. 20, no. 1, Postcolonial Studies, (2017), 9. 15 Farida Fozdar and Kirsten McGavin, Mixed Race Identities in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, New York: Routledge (2016).

8

IN THE BLOOD

181

tradition, but the incorporation of multiple lineages, such that being of both M¯aori and Samoan descent “seemingly placed me in a juxtaposition, where in many instances others have judged and questioned my authenticity as M¯aori or Samoan,” based on cultural and language knowledge. She goes on to consider her children, who are of M¯aori, Samoan, and Tokelauan descent, wondering, “what must it be like for this generation to negotiate and develop a strong sense of identity that connects them to the ethnic communities to which they truly belong?”16 This question of identity and authenticity as defined by blood and culture is underscored also by Kauanui, whose family relations question “how Hawaiian” she is, and also Karlo Mila-Schaaf, whose poetry and generational studies and personal reflections on polycultural capital elaborate the meanings of Pacific and Pasifika identities. These occasion observations on her own embodiments: “As I have a Tongan father, and a Palangi / Pakeha Mother, this positions me as both Tongan and Palangi and to some degree neither fully or ‘properly’ Tongan nor Palangi.” Rather than embrace one at the expense of the other, she offers that her subject position itself “disrupts the binary between self and other, Pasifika and Palangi, native and colonizer, insider and outsider. I hold all of this within my body.” With a historical eye, she also reflects on herself as a “half-caste,” as proof of binary disruption, sex, and the embodied outcome of a “pregnant potential.”17 Sometimes, this was not only a situationally born, but consciously learned process. David Fa‘ave recalls being hospitalized as a student for a heart condition, placing him in an institution where “for nine months I learnt to assimilate,” reading books, listening to his teachers, using a knife and fork at meals. With a white staff, rules, and even walls, “I felt as though there was no space for colour particularly in me being able to speak and practice my Tongan culture.” Upon returning to intermediate school, a change had taken place. “To other Pasifika students, despite me sharing the same skin colour as them, I however was grouped as a palangi because I spoke like a white person. Sometimes I was referred 16 Rachael Violeti Leafe, The Influence of Shifting Pacific Identities in Learning: The Experience of Parents Raising Children of Mixed Pacific Ethnicities, Masters Thesis, Massey University, Palmerston North (2017), 1–2. 17 Karlo Mila-Schaaf, Polycultural Capital and the Pasifika Second Generation: Negotiation Identities in Diasporic Spaces, Doctoral Thesis, Massey University, Albany (2010), 15–16.

182

M. K. MATSUDA

to as a ‘fie palangi’ (wannabe white person).” The meaning of all this to any common notion of a singular Tongan, much less Pacific, community was deeply complicated. Classmates kept a distance from his educational ambitions and parents took pride in this classroom academic successes.18 As lived negotiations, these experiences incorporate both struggles and affirmations. Poet and writer Tanya Chargualaf Taimango remembers a wonderful childhood growing up in Guam, except for the fact that “I didn’t always fit in with the Chamorro look,” and that even within her own extended family, “I felt shunned sometimes because I was half Korean.” At the same time, the questions of lineage and sanguinity could come together in connecting self, parents, and children through questions from her seven year old son: “‘Mom? How many bloods do we have?’” She reflects on her own heritages, Chamorro and Korean, while noting, “My children, factoring in their father’s DNA might have eight ethnicities. It’s a beautiful and dizzying thing all at once.”19 As an expression of experience, culture, and genealogy, she distinguishes and balances the multiplicities by arguing, “I think purity can be boring actually. There are so many reasons to draw lines in the sand, but really, our worlds intermingle all the time. As long as you honor your origins, no matter how many you may have, then you are doing yourself and your ancestors justice.”20 Historically, clashes precisely arise where the lines are drawn not by those of the embodied experience but by legal and administrative power in the name of, for example, preserving colonial legacies. This is where such ambiguity is institutionalized in social hierarchy and political representation. These imagined lines between groups can be reinforced through separation, shifted toward accommodation, or reconstituted vertically so that communities engage, yet in a determined, hierarchical fashion. This is the very logic of blood quantum: the legal authority to determine

18 David Fa‘ave, “Negotiating the VA: ¯ The ‘Self’ in Relation to Others and Navigating the Multiple Spaces as a New Zealand-Raised Tongan Male, Phiona Stanley, Greg Vass, eds., Questions of Culture in Autoethnography, London and New York: Routledge (2018), 66–8. 19 Tanya Chargualaf Taimango, “Mixed Race Pacific Poetry Conversation,” Interview conducted by Craig Santos Perez, originally published in Asian American Literary Review (Fall 2013), http://craigsantosperez.com/mixed-race-pacific-poetry-conversation/, also with Grace Taylor, Karlo Mila-Schaaf. 20 Tanya Chargualaf Taimanglo, “Mixed Race Pacific Poetry Conversation.”

8

IN THE BLOOD

183

where lines are drawn, and in effect, whose origins and ancestors can be rightfully acknowledged. Beyond the Hawaiian Homelands questions, debated cases from Hawai‘i also unpack the prejudice and bias against Tongans and Micronesian Islanders by a contemporary society of Hawaiians, yet one dominated in class and privilege terms by whites and East Asians or Americans of Asian descent. These narratives are themselves entangled in the global negotiations of mixed identities, of individuals navigating not “belonging” to one group or another, and a constant critique of idealistic projections of post-racial societies that disguise racially based hierarchies. Jonathan Okamura has especially unpacked the ways that intermarriage and multiraciality in the Hawaiian case, as well as immigration have constituted an imaginary of a “racial paradise,” deepening the complexity of ethnic relations, while including or precluding groups from Japanese to Filipinos to Samoans and K¯anaka Maoli.21 In the blood quantum case for K¯anaka Maoli, multiraciality is not only a cultural or ethnic indicator of engagement with broader histories, but a direct delimiting—a forced and imposed dichotomy—between biology and legal standing. As the Pang Kee case shows about blood as a defining element of indigeneity, one concern is what DNA testing can ultimately determine about kinship and, historically, personal ancestry. Indeed, identities taken as expressions of “racial,” as opposed to cultural and historical, categorical human types are fraught because of the very logic of forming pedigree genealogies through DNA tracing. Such frameworks are necessarily incomplete—and overlapping with every other human. As scholars of biology-based identities have noted often, DNA cannot “literally tell you about ‘your ancestry,’” but “only half of your ancestry a generation ago, a quarter two generations ago, and so on, shrinking exponentially the further you go back.” As such, “if one goes back far enough, there aren’t enough ancestors to go around, and everyone’s ancestors overlap with everyone else’s, and the very concept of personal ancestry becomes meaningless.”22 Even, and especially where populations have been significantly “mixed” for generations, it is the very 21 Jonathan Y. Okamura, Ethnicity and Inequality in Hawai‘i, Philadelphia: University of Temple Press (2008). 22 Dorothy Roberts, noting Steven Pinker, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, The New Press: New York (2011), 63, 247.

184

M. K. MATSUDA

logic of this diversity as set against the search for an original type that can confound and mislead. Questions about DNA as an elaboration of blood legitimacy are themselves framed even more broadly by ancestry tracing as a domain that crosses over issues of generation and procreation, and whether they lead to, or are separated from, reproduction and transmission. Property claims connected by a chain of inference back to legal inventions of indigeneity, are themselves built on assumptions about preserving and protecting limited and declining populations. These assumptions, in turn, emanate from a historical moment when questions of hereditary fitness became ascribed to entire peoples. The classical Western history of heredity tells a story of individuals standing in a chain of ancestors and forebears, each generated or even pre-formed through the vital force and material of a father and mother. A new being is defined and circumscribed by natural and non-natural qualities, including the balance of inherent humors and spirits, and shaped by environment, climate, and nutrition. This vision of heredity was, however, transformed across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by a newer conception of life as not only reproduction and combination, but a continuous and evolving line adapting or perishing according to circumstances, and succeeding or failing to transmit its hereditary material and knowledge. The former concept explained how individuals in each generation embodied the inherited characteristics of their forebears. By the middle nineteenth century industrial age of Charles Darwin and Francis Galton, evolutionary thinking framed by natural selection shifted the emphasis to become an understanding of heredity as an indeterminate set of characteristics either well or poorly adapted to regular material and historical transformations. As such, it was not so much a record of an inherited past, but a projection upon the future—who would survive to reproduce? During the heyday of nineteenth-century European global imperial ascendance, the phenomenon of bourgeois nationalism shaped polities increasingly obsessed with the search for the powerful master relationship between demographic transition, territorial expansion, and economic development. In the context of colonialism and the establishment of overseas Empire and settler colonies, classical genetics, Mendelian in nature, was employed to make sense of a new presumed hierarchy of races and civilizations, through a focus on the offspring of sexual reproductive crossings, and a detailed examination of morphological traits, and blood

8

IN THE BLOOD

185

or somatic indicators as evidence of the futurity or extinction of particular peoples. Such thinking provided the research science framework behind what was, in most other ways, a project largely of political economists, public health and welfare advocates, demographers and geographers, and moralists and reform leaders. They rallied around ill-defined, but powerful ideas of communities and individuals as examples of races, to be determined by blood quanta and ultimately governed by the application of breeding and selection models to enhance the stock of human societies—the practice of what Galton would claim as eugenics. In Oceania, this would have resonances in colonial public health campaigns premised upon raising standards of local hygiene and civilization; in removal of children from presumably detrimental and dying cultures to be trained for gainful servant work in Anglo society; and—in resonances that carry to the contemporary period—the related institution of blood quantum as a means of defining authentic indigeneity, and therefore political, social, cultural, and economic identities and entitlements. Framing and reviving many of these questions in the late twentieth century was the increasing visibility of what, in other contexts, might have seemed like highly institutional Big Science research in molecular biology and genetics: the international Human Genome Project from 1990 to 2003. The HGP was a global effort to fully “map” the human genome and, ambitiously, herald a new era of predictive and personalized medicine based on individuated knowledge of gene sequences and mutations. The Project was formally launched by the US government and supported by the US Department of Energy and National Institutes of Health in a consortium that included scientific teams also in Western Europe, China, Australia, and a wide range of commercial partners and competitors. A contemporaneous initiative was also launched in the early 1990s by famed Stanford University evolutionary and population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza. The Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) was equally assembled as a consortium of global researchers, in this case with a common interest in questions of genetic diversity, migration tracing, and characteristic group mutations as represented in worldwide indigenous populations. Though separate from the HGP, Cavalli-Sforza himself noted, “it was not until the Human Genome Project was in full swing that the idea of a large-scale systematic study of human genomic variation was raised.” In particular, he and his collaborators were interested in

186

M. K. MATSUDA

“renewable samples from well-chosen populations, for which any part of the genome could be examined.”23 The focus on well-chosen populations has a compelling logic for ensuring proper scientific rigor in studying and analyzing test cases. The very same logic became potentially corrosive when applied to cultural and political questions. Cavalli-Sforza proudly noted that the HGDP acquired blood and genetic materials from peoples inhabiting all five continents, yet he also framed them as “populations of anthropological interest,” that is, to be primarily identified as scientific research subjects. He also highly valued those “that were in place” before the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries “when navigation of the oceans became possible,” a debatable claim given knowledge of Polynesian migrations and voyaging. More, however, the idea of being already in place is corollary to “original populations” before the phenomenon of admixtures between peoples, thereby creating highly varied complexity out of presumed purity, a full-blood analogy. From this, most critically, derives a narrative that populations of genetic interest are the living descendants of groups isolated from history and transformation, and therefore most valuable for being representative of a surviving past. In addition, the HGDP had quite a large claim to make about that past. As Cavalli-Sforza puts it, “the interpretation of history is fragile,” because it cannot be repeated under experimental conditions. This would seem to acknowledge that domains of knowledge, history, custom, science, can be aligned and placed in dialogue, and not collapsed into nor reduced one to another. Yet, Cavalli-Sforza suggested, his methodology could surpass these limits, such that “the comparison of evolutionary histories obtained from different parts of the genome and for different genetic mechanisms…provide an analogue of a repeat of the same history.”24 Pasts could be theoretically benchmarked, tested, and perhaps challenged. For the HGDP, this was evidence of positive knowledge—confidence and verification of the historical record. For indigenous communities acting in autonomy and anti-colonial contexts, the potential consequences were quite different. In Australia, blood and cellular materials had been collected from Aboriginal peoples for research purposes between the 23 L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, “The Human Genome Diversity Project: Past, Present, and Future,” Nature Reviews Genetics, vol. 6 (April 2005), 333–40. 24 L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, “The Human Genome Diversity Project: Past, Present, and Future,” Nature Reviews Genetics, vol. 6 (April 2005), 333–40.

8

IN THE BLOOD

187

1960s and 1990s. A moratorium on the use of the materials went into effect in 1990, with potential researchers stymied by the same questions that would lead the HGDP to be declared a “vampire project” by groups that declined participation, or protested the efforts as “biocolonialism.” Also critical here has been an engagement with blood, in particular, as more than a biospecimen. One research team has noted that, within the cosmologies of many Aboriginal groups around Australia, “Blood both acts out and is acted upon,” it is a “source of abiding power with the ability to influence actions and emotions, to weaken and to heal the body, and to transform and commute energy through the body, the landscape, and the spiritual world.” Menstrual blood from women is said to invigorate men, and some groups “consider that blood can regenerate varying forms of life in an exchange between the living and the dead, and between ancestral beings and living humans.”25 In 2016, an Indigenous-governed National Centre for Indigenous Genomics in Australia began outreach to communities in efforts to determine the use of thousands of DNA blood and cellular samples held in storage. The administration and protocols of the Centre were designed precisely so that, “the Indigenous community are driving how the Centre operates.” Some communities at least nominally support the preservation and archiving of relatives’ and ancestors’ blood and cells as evidence of their spiritual persistence—if reclamation rights remain with the families, such that “some Aboriginal people who maintain such beliefs may view the stored samples of their kinsmen as a potential resource for use in ceremonies aimed at regeneration.”26 Still, the very engagement with blood and tissue, and—especially— DNA samples in any way other than as a legacy of continuity troubled some activists like Rodney Dillon, who—reflecting on issues familiar also from Hawaiian homestead controversies—argued that, “governments may use DNA tests to define people as not Indigenous enough in order

25 Emma Kowal, Ashley Greenwood, Rebekah E. McWhirter, “All in the Blood: A Review of Aboriginal Austalians’ Cultural Beliefs About Blood and Implications for Biospecimen Research,” Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics, vol. 10, no. 4 (2015), 348. 26 Emma Kowal, Ashley Greenwood, Rebekah E. McWhirter, “All in the Blood,” 351.

188

M. K. MATSUDA

to ‘deny’ them basic rights and further assimilate them into Australia’s majority European culture.”27 The Australian Law Reform Commission has published extensively on these questions, setting forth formal arguments and guidelines regarding legal frameworks for kinship and identity, definitions of Aboriginality, genetics and “race,” genetics, ancestry, and identity, genetic testing and Aboriginality, identity and self-determination.28 In legal terms, by proposals of the Commonwealth Department of Aboriginal Affairs in the early 1980s, “An Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander is a person of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent who identifies as an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander and is accepted as such by the community in which he [or she] lives.” This now foundational “three-part” determination equally emphasizes descent, self-identification, and acceptance by a community. In an era of evolving genetic testing and even greater claims to scientific precision for mapping ancestry, one Social Justice Commissioner has cautioned about an increasing emphasis on proof of descent. “Indigenous customary law does not rely on linear proof of descent in the Judeo-Christian genealogical form of ‘Seth begat Enosh begat Kenan’…a person may have been adopted into a kinship group where there is no direct or suitable offspring to carry out ceremonial obligations.” In this, the cultural network of familial relatedness is not constrained to biologically defined progeny. Here, argues the Commissioner, “Genetic science should have no part to play.”29 Indeed, Emma Kowal, as a medical doctor and anthropologist while at the National Centre for Indigenous Genomics, argued, “There is no genetic test for Aboriginality, all that [genetic] testing ever does is compare your genes sequences with a sample, with someone else’s gene sequences or a group of gene sequences.”30 In parallel to the legalistic DNA alliances of Pang Kee, and K¯ehaulani Kauanui’s analysis of blood

27 Andrea Booth, “DNA May Be Used to ‘Divide and Conquer’ Indigenous People, Rights Campaigner Fears,” NITV, (May 18, 2016). 28 Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC Report 96), Essentially Yours: The Protection of Human Genetic Information in Australia. 29 Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC Report 96), Essentially Yours: The Protection of Human Genetic Information in Australia, note 43. 30 Andrea Booth, “More than 7,000 DNA Samples Could Help Reconnect Stolen Generation Members with Their Families,” NITV (May 12, 2016).

8

IN THE BLOOD

189

quantum in the Hawaiian case, Rodney Dillon speculates that an Indigenous person could be recognized as Aboriginal, but also “not Aboriginal enough,” and so ineligible to claim lands under the Commonwealth’s 1993 Native Title Act. This is particularly fraught because the terra nullius framework in Australia made it extremely difficult for claimants to prove some sort of continuing cultural, or prior historical connections. Dillon pointed to the forcible removal of Indigenous children with mixed heritage from their families that began in the late nineteenthcentury and extended until 1970 as an egregious example of the staggering roadblocks facing individuals attempting to assert heritage claims. Lamentably, Dillon has noted, “For some people that’s all they’ve got to rely on, perhaps—DNA…science—to try and prove who they are.”31 Many of these issues, from definitions and practices of race and eugenics to legal determinations of blood quanta, to DNA and genetics as arbiters of identity, dispossession, and possible reparation, are wound together in Australian history through the intentions and agony of the Stolen Generations. The Stolen Generations is a term that marks the thousands of Australian Aboriginal children who were forcibly removed from their families, supposedly for better lives, from about 1909 to 1969 as part of a state assimilationist policy. It is noteworthy that this policy roughly coincided with the White Australia generations (1901–1966) which supported the exclusion of non-British and non-Northern European migrants. The Stolen Generation as a term identifies not only Aboriginal lives taken from families, but a conscious attempt to reshape entire cultures by breaking the links of genealogies, customs, language, rituals, and material and spiritual knowledge between parents and children. By preventing the transmission of experience from one generation to another, successive governments practiced what some scholars and activists have labeled an attempt at cultural genocide, and an active employment of eugenics principles, even if not classic eugenicist programs of human sterilization and anti-miscegenation. Such positions have been the source of intense historical debate about the degree to which intentions of uplift and absorption of “halfcaste” Aboriginal children were more forms of intentional eradication or misguided and racist reformism, though there is little disagreement that by removing or stealing children, futures were built for many 31 Andrea Booth, “DNA May Be Used to ‘Divide and Conquer’ Indigenous People, Rights Campaigner Fears,” NITV, (May 18, 2016).

190

M. K. MATSUDA

around church orphanages, reformatories, minimal education in industrial schools, training for service work, and—especially for the girls who were a key target—marriage with a specific aim. The widely noted testimony of Aboriginal woman Barbara Cummings underscores this: “It was a presumption for many years that we girls would grow up and marry nice white boys…we would have nice fairer children who, if they were girls, would marry white boys again and eventually the colour would die out.”32 The ideological framing behind this gradual whitening of the population is generally attached historically to The Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia (1915–1936), A. O. Neville , and the Protector of Natives in the Northern Territory (1927–1939), Cecil Cook. It was Cook, notably, who articulated political frameworks about blood quanta through his suspicion of “the half-caste,” whose continued presence in redefinitions of a white Australian society posed what he considered to be an incalculable menace. His genealogical vision was built around solving the threat of mixed-blood and mixed-race individuals by subsuming future generations to an encompassing unity: “the problem of our halfcastes will quickly be eliminated by the complete disappearance of the black race, and the swift submergence of their progeny in the white.”33 Historians continue to debate about the ways in which the Neville and Cook removal policies were assimilationist or eugenicist. To the degree that eugenics is strictly or formally defined by statist initiatives to prevent miscegenation, practice sterilization of presumed undesirables, and encourage breeding between members of a selected, targeted, and privileged population, the forced removal is only fitfully eugenicist: the policies did not discourage, but rather promoted “racial” intermarriage and a paternalistic public welfare ethos. To the degree that the definition more broadly describes organized policy attempts to develop “desirable”

32 Barbara Cummings, in Andrew Solomon, “The Stolen Generations: An Unending Disaster for Australia,” The Guardian (May 22, 2014). 33 In Rob Watts, States of Violence and the Civilising Process: On Criminology and State Crime, London: Palgrave-Macmillan (2016), 206.

8

IN THE BLOOD

191

heritable qualities or outcomes in a population by encouraging the reproduction of particular types of people—this can be located in a generalized historical domain of eugenics as a form of dominant assimilation.34 Whether the term itself applies has become a critical contest, as eugenics historically became tainted and discredited by the distortions and horrors of Nazi-era atrocities in the name of race, state, and purity. Eugenics as a way of understanding a society, and then as a popular ideology of improvement embraced by intellectual elites around the world—and especially in the United States and Europe—formed out of a loose intersection of population demography, public health, Mendelian genetics, and their applications to social policy. That the policies of forced removal grew out of ideas about race, improvement, and social policy for the supposed good of both Aboriginal and white Australia, at times belied the brutality of the practice itself. One woman has described being taken as a girl by police while at the post office: “They pushed the mothers away and drove off, while our mothers were chasing the car, running and crying after us. We were screaming in the back of that car. When we got to Broome they put me and my cousin in the Broome lock-up. We were only ten years old.”35 Even in cases of recognition of opportunities, lingering questions from removed children have often been about genealogy and its role is determining identity and history—both personal and for a larger community. As one man who was adopted as a boy into a family in Victoria put it, he straightforwardly benefitted from education and a good home. Still, he said, “It’s all the non-material stuff that I didn’t have—the lineage. It’s like you’re the first human being at times…how do you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve come from?36 The Bringing Them Home report, drafted by government committees to address the legacy of the forced removal policies, recognized this

34 Stephen Garton, “Eugenics in Australia and New Zealand: Laboratories of Racial Science,” in Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, New York: Oxford University Press (2010), 253–4. 35 Confidential evidence, 821, “Western Australia, removals occurred in 1935, shortly after Sister Kate’s Orphanage, Perth was opened,” Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, Commonwealth of Australia (1997), 6. 36 Confidential evidence, 136, Victoria: Man adopted into a non-Indigenous family at 3 months, Bringing Them Home, 11.

192

M. K. MATSUDA

displacement as a fracture in the connections between culture, genealogy, and identity through human relations. “Separated children were not only removed from their families. They were also removed from their communities and land, cultures and heritage…the first step is usually to find one’s family records. The second is to meet and rebuild one’s family if possible.”37 And what are family records and family reunions in the age of genomics? The National Centre for Indigenous Genomics has become a twenty-first-century place of possibilities that align the need for historical records and archives with family histories and applications of DNA tracing. In 2015, the Centre was approached by the Kimberley Stolen Generation Aboriginal Corporation, a collective dedicated to “activities and projects that acknowledge the experiences of members of the Stolen Generations and help them come to terms with it.” Ken Riddiford, the CEO, related his observations upon encountering the blood vials taken and stored over previous decades by researchers as a legal moratorium wrestled with the appropriate and respectful use of Indigenous biological materials. “We walked into this room at this vat that contained all of these samples and the moment they pulled all of these blood samples out we immediately thought, ‘well…this allows us the ability to trace people back to their country’.”38 Genomic science offers possibilities, though within clear limitations. As Emma Kowal noted, “there is no genetic test for Aboriginality,” and all that sequencing can do is demonstrate likely statistical similitudes between different individuals and groups—not direct proof of ancestry or kinship. For those whose individual lives were torn away from familial and genealogical connections, still, some promise of new community is thinkable. As Kowal puts it, if a collaborative effort can work out realistic and respectful protocols, then possibilities exist to say, “well, [this person’s DNA sample is] similar to samples that were collected [in a particular location] it’s possible that people could find relatives.”39

37 Cultural renewal, in Bringing Them Home, 317. 38 Andrea Booth, “More Than 7,000 DNA Samples Could Help Reconnect Stolen

Generation Members with Their Families.” NITV, http://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/ 2016/05/10/thousands-dna-samples-may-reconnect-families-torn-apart-assimilation-pol icies. 39 In Andrea Booth, “More than 7,000 DNA Samples.”

8

IN THE BLOOD

193

This phenomenon of drawing upon genomic science as a tool in the recreation of lost heritage, and the assertion of new communities, has been described by the historical sociologist Alondra Nelson as “the social life of DNA.” In particular, Nelson examines the ways that DNA as a molecular biological entity has acquired social values that place it at the center of questions regarding definitions of race, the framing of reparations disputes, and the possibilities of reconciliation. It is especially this latter that moves discussions away from the ways that states, legal systems, laboratories, and research and capital agents imagine and employ the value of genomics, and into a much more personalized experience of historical reconnection with broken ties, lost from ancestors across generations. In Nelson’s work this has special resonance in African-American familial networks because of the slave trade between the African continent and the Americas, and the deliberate erasure of familial, geographical, and cultural ties. Much of the work of genetic advocates like Dr. Rick Kittles and African Ancestry DNA, is framed around tracing sequences and haplotypes to determine a participant’s likely regional origin on the African continent, thereby asserting a claim to a group with a current African nation.40 While deeply involved in analyzing the data sequences of Y-chromosome, mitochondrial DNA, and autosomal makers, he also draws significantly on correlating oral histories to piece together stories and lineages that connect both the African and the North American continents in ways possibly indicative of not only geography but region and localized lifeways. These practices derive from noting, for example, that enslavement practices in the American South could vary widely as “plantation owners became more particular in selecting specific groups of Africans for their labor forces…The owners of rice plantations in the Carolinas and Louisiana requested enslaved Africans from the Senegambian region, and tobacco planters in Maryland and Virginia requested Gold Coast Africans.”41 In this way both individuals and cultural communities were mapped onto the productivity imperatives of the slave economy that tried to exploit knowledge of physical and cultural geography. Nelson points 40 Alondra Nelson, The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome, Boston, MA: Beacon Press (2016). 41 Rick Kittles and Charmaine Royal, “The Genetics of African Americans,” in Alan H. Goodman, Deborah Heath, M. Susan Lindee, eds., Genetic Nature/Culture, Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press (2013), 219–20.

194

M. K. MATSUDA

out the at times disorienting experience, yet also the genuine importance, appeal, and identity formation that takes place around such communities reconstructed through histories—and also through genomic science promises. Fractured by historical dispossession and trauma, individuals can connect and be recognized as kin through the statistical probabilities of DNA sampling. Such a logic operates partially in parallel attempts to reconnect Aboriginal individuals in Australia with kin from the Stolen Generations. Some of these ties are or will be with DNA-related or “blood-related” relatives. Others will be genetically aligned through a logic more akin to Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities.” His vision proposed that widely dispersed individuals, groups, and political entities fictively connected through technologies of common literature and discourse networks to forge common identities as members of nation-states, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.42 All of these questions of blood quanta, of genealogical membership or kinship, of the Stolen Generations and debates over assimilation, Aboriginal Protection, or eugenics, of the promises and limitations of genomic science as a tool of history and identity are related by powerful disputes about the relationship of generations and genealogies. They are all intertwined and sharpened by their focus on the continuity or disappearance (or presumed disappearance) of a people over time, and the efforts to abet continuity, take on the work of supporting the last members of a civilization, or perversely define members of a community by a standard that is, over time, inexorably defined so as to extinguish itself. They are all questions also of how to reconnect present and past as a means to sustain a future. All are related to the key question, one that runs through questions of genealogies, family lines, inheritances, heredity, and transmission: what happens to the next generation?

42 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso (1983).

CHAPTER 9

The Unborn Child

In efforts to shape a new history and future, Tongan activist Lopeti Senituli was involved in the work of the Pacific Indigenous Peoples’ Knowledge and Intellectual Property Rights Consultation and that collective’s forging of a 1995 Treaty for a Lifeforms Patent-Free Pacific. Among the principles of the treaty: “Commitment to the quality of life of future generations is fundamental to the world view of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific.” Equally, “All lifeforms should be treated in a way that respects their intrinsic value as living generational manifestations of creation.” Genetic inheritance was firmly recognized as inseparable from Indigenous peoples as guardians of their own heritage—with a right to “protect and control dissemination of that heritage in the name of future generations.”1 Notably, the treaty drew on tenets set forth by the 1993 Mataatua Declaration issued from the First International Conference on the Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights of Indigenous Peoples in New Zealand. Importantly, Senituli also noted that the treaty took inspiration 1 Treaty for a Lifeforms Patent-Free Pacific and Related Protocols (1995), article III, “Principles.” On the meaning of being born into Pacific histories, see Alice Te Punga Somerville, “Inside Us the Unborn: Genealogies, Futures, Metaphors, and the Opposite of Zombies,” in Warwick Anderson, Miranda Johnson, Barbara Brookes, eds., Pacific Futures: Past and Present, Honolulu: University of Hawai ‘i Press (2018), 69–80.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. K. Matsuda, Genealogies, Genomes, and Histories in the Pacific, Palgrave Studies in Pacific History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45449-3_9

195

196

M. K. MATSUDA

from an even earlier legacy of grassroots activism: “It contained about 50% of our Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Treaty.”2 This activist genealogy and tradition is well worth remarking. The NFIP began as a grassroots coalition of movements in the mid-1970s and led to the drafting of a People’s Charter which, as the underscoring of both “nuclear-free” and “independent” indicate, was not circumscribed uniquely to anti-nuclear weapons and testing struggles. Much of its success also directly lay in the ways that nuclear testing was viscerally experienced as a continuing direct assault against Indigenous peoples and their independent self-determination and decolonization struggles. These were not efforts guided from major metropolitan capitals but powered by local commitments and activists. Anti-colonial and anti-testing movements date back to the immediate postwar and found Pacific-wide common cause within two decades. Alliances were founded, and met regionally, in Fiji in 1970, Ponape in 1978, and Hawai‘i in 1980. In Vanuatu in 1983, a People’s Charter was adopted, drawing together indigenous activists from across the Polynesian islands, Kanaky-New Caledonia, Aotearoa New Zealand, West Papua and East Timor, the Philippines, the North American coastline, and from East Asia, including Japan and South Korea. The Charter clearly announced, “We, the people of the Pacific have been victimized too long by foreign powers. The Western imperialistic and colonial powers invaded our defenceless region, they took over our lands, and subjugated our people to their whims.” The Charter further denounced “alien control” and the destruction of local environments by weapons toward a strategy that “has no winners, no liberators and imperils the survival of all humankind.”3 The Fijian feminist Amelia Rokotuivuna was a key leader of the anti-nuclear movement, along with her work for Fijian democracy and Citizen’s Constitutional Forum in the 1990s. She began, though, decades earlier, working with trade unions, university students, and a networked anti-nuclear Pacific movement against, especially, continuing

2 Kaling Sevenirante, “South Pacific Region Moves to Protect Indigenous Wisdom,” Interpress Service APC Networks (May 24, 1995); Matt Matsuda, Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2012), 368. 3 Disarmament & Security Centre, Aotearoa/New Zealand, “Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement” (October 29, 2021), http://www.disarmsecure.org/nuclearfree-aotearoa-nz-resources/nuclear-free-and-independent-pacific-movement.

9

THE UNBORN CHILD

197

French testing in Moruroa as head of the Fiji YWCA. As Rokotuivuna described her commitment, “Protests by members of the Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific movement were almost daily events. For several years, every Saturday somebody was out on the streets leafletting. And the University of the South Pacific Students’ Association was almost always marching or protesting.” Eventually, she and her colleagues were summoned to meet the Prime Minister, who tacitly supported many of their positions while maintaining his official connections with France. “He would do his diplomatic thing but he evidently felt the French should decolonize.”4 Rokotuivuna still ultimately lost her position in the political conflicts, but the movement persisted, and activist campaigners like Dr. Ema Tagicakibau have continued to build on the Rarotonga Treaty of 1985, by which thirteen state parties agreed to ban development and testing of nuclear weapons in Pacific territories.5 The entanglements of nuclear testing, decolonization, and—ultimately—the “commitment to the life of future generations” were never clearer than in this site of genetic disruption with claims upon the past and future in the tides of Pacific colonialism. In the Micronesian islands, Cold War technologies created and left legacies that claimed victims not only past and present, but into the future across generations.6 It is not a remarkable parallel that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 brought a horrific end to the Pacific War and also spurred significant global interest in the study of human genetics, heretofore a somewhat languishing academic field attached to the biological sciences. Better known for elegant experimental work tied to fruit flies and model organisms, genetics as the study of radiological effects and mutations in humans greatly expanded in the postwar period at the same time that the US and European powers made effective use of their colonial authority in Micronesia and the South Pacific islands. The general history of this period and the globally recognized images of the mushroom clouds

4 Amelia Rokotuivuna, in Amelia Rokotuivuna (Fiji)—Peace Women Across the Globe (September 20, 2021), https://wikipeacewomen.org/wpworg/en/?page_id=3426. 5 Ema Tagicakibau, “The South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty: 35 Years On,” Development Policy Centre (January 22, 2021), https://devpolicy.org/the-south-pacific-nuc lear-free-zone-treaty-35-years-on-20210122-2/. 6 Joseph H. Genz, Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘¯ opua, Monica C. LaBriola, Alexander Mawyer, et al., Militarism and Nuclear Testing, vol. 1 of Teaching Oceania Series, Monica LaBriola, ed., Honolulu: Center for Pacific Island Studies (2016).

198

M. K. MATSUDA

are widely known, usually noted by tests such as the notorious Bravo or Castle blasts and their oceanic contamination. Yet the nuclear age in the Pacific was not limited to a few, tightly controlled experiments. From the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki until 1958, the United States detonated sixty-seven atmospheric nuclear devices in the Marshalls, including 23 at Bikini and 44 in the Enewetak Atoll region. In the following four years, Great Britain exploded a dozen more nuclear bombs on Johnston Atoll in the Central Pacific and a dozen in Australia. For thirty years beginning in 1966, France conducted 193 atmospheric and underground tests at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls, raising protests from Tahitian leaders and communities and global rights activists. This resistance formed an intertwined part of the history of the nuclear Pacific. In French Polynesia, independence leader, deputy to the French Assembly, war veteran, and revered Tahitian politician Pouvanaa a Oopa protested French actions from the 1950s and his later memorial and monument became a meeting place for public resistance to French nuclear testing in 1995. Former President of French Polynesia Oscar Manutahi Temaru moved to have the United Nations General Assembly recognize French Polynesia as a territory to be decolonized and brought cases against successive French governments for crimes against humanity for continued nuclear testing.7 Well-documented histories include support for Indigenous islander activism by environmental organizations including Greenpeace, whose Rainbow Warrior flagship was mined and sunk by French operatives in Auckland Harbor in 1985. The Treaty of Rarotonga was signed one month later. Though the United States, France, and Britain agreed to the Rarotonga protocols, the United States has never ratified the agreement. Research about the effects of nuclear weapons, however, began immediately and has been consistent since the dawn of the atomic age. The connection to genetics research and imperatives was strategic, and highly institutionalized. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission was noted for funding—with generous budgets—almost half of the federally supported genetic research in the United States. This prioritization was driven by the search for “conclusions regarding possible mutational damage in humans required elucidation of the various forces

7 Jenny Te Paa-Daniel, “For 40 Years, Oscar Temaru Has Protested the French Presence in the Pacific,” The Spinoff (September 1, 2020).

9

THE UNBORN CHILD

199

that affected the genetic structure of human populations.”8 Importantly, the AEC was also the government agency in charge of determining atomic testing policy—which was tied to the ability to extract data from atmospheric assays of detonated weapons. In this way, the agency was an advocate for strong ties between genetic studies and weapons testing as continuous research projects. Invested in these imperatives, the agency openly questioned any genetic research, and geneticists, who were critical of weapons testing, particularly as it concerned fallout. As one scholar has noted, “In their attempt to demonstrate the harmlessness of test fallout, AEC officials argued that low levels of radiation were at worst genetically insignificant, and at best, genetically beneficial”—the latter based on a dubious Darwinian model of evolutionary process, by which the principle of fitness and survivability would mean the selection of beneficial radiation-induced mutations in humans toward an improved species.9 This did not sit well with the consensus scientific view that any accumulation of induced mutations can lead to unforeseen and unwanted consequences in humans. The AEC did not take kindly to geneticists like Alfred Henry Sturtevant—noted for first mapping a chromosome in 1911, and thus the ancestor of genome mapping—for criticizing their policies in public statements, “There is no possible escape from the conclusion that the bombs already exploded will ultimately result in the production of numerous defective generations.” The AEC regarded such statements as alarmist, being in opposition to atmospheric testing on genetic and medical grounds alone.10 The AEC’s involvement in genomic policy continued over generations. In the twenty-first century, Barbara Rose Johnson has observed, “It is noteworthy that the Department of 8 See Barbara Rose Johnson, ed., Half-Lives & Half-Truths: Confronting the Radioactive Legacies of the Cold War, Santa Fe: The School for Advanced Research (2007), 28; also “Increased emphasis continued to be given to integrated research studies on various types of radiation, providing data on the effects on radiation on biological systems,” in United States Atomic Energy Commission, Sixteenth Semiannual Report, US Government Printing Office (January–June, 1954), 56. 9 Michael William Seltzer, “Atomic Testing and Population Genetics: The AEC and the Classical/Balance Controversy, 1946–1957,” Virginia Polytechnic Institute/Thesis (October 19, 1993), 1–2. 10 Michael Willliam Seltzer, Atomic Testing and Population Genetics; the AEC and the Classical/Balance Controversy, 1946–1957 , Blacksburg, Virginia: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Thesis, 1993), 86.

200

M. K. MATSUDA

Energy (the successor agency to the AEC) was more recently a major force in the initiation and execution of the Human Genome Project— an undertaking of great interest to medicine and human biology in general.”11 In fact, when the hugely expensive mapping of the human genome began formally as an international government enterprise in the 1990s, major press outlets like the New York Times reported on the disgruntlement of some academic research teams about all the funds diverted from their own priorities and methods, while also noting the keen interests of major supporters: The idea for a huge DNA analysis project first arose at Los Alamos and Lawrence and Livermore Laboratories, the Energy Department’s national weapons research centers. Scientists there were trying to determine whether the offspring of the survivors of the Hiroshima bomb had mutations in their DNA as a result of their parents’ exposure to radiation…the weapons laboratories also were seeking novel ways to use their huge data banks and technical resources for civilian projects that would keep them busy in the event military research declined in a more peaceful era.”12

The foundation for these imperatives had begun immediately with the atomic destruction of Hiroshima, and is an area of study significantly undertaken by M. Susan Lindee, who has detailed the extensive works by medical teams and geneticists like Robert Neel in postwar Hiroshima as lead researchers with the American Occupation. Examining Japanese victims of the atomic bombings, Neel and his teams formed the intellectual and administrative core of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, using classical Mendelian crossing analyses to determine detrimental effects of radiation. With technical precision, the teams engaged survivors, arrayed them according to degrees of exposure to the bomb’s hypocenter, and tried to correlate medical distress, disease, or abnormality. They also sought to create data sets from rabbit breeding and plant samplings to judge mutations. Genetic researchers were keenly

11 Barbara Rose Johnson, ed., Half-Lives & Half-Truths: Confronting the Radioactive Legacies of the Cold War, Santa Fe: The School for Advanced Research (2007), 28. 12 Natalie Angier, “Great 15-Year Project to Decipher Genes Stirs Opposition,” New York Times, section C, p. 1, (June 5, 1990).

9

THE UNBORN CHILD

201

implicated in developing the etiology of radiation effects from civilian victims of exposure.13 In fact, arguably, the scientific method has ruled throughout as the research has continued since the 1940s. In his 1947 report, “The Question of the Genetic Effects of the Atomic Bomb,” Neel posed his question, “Have the various plant and animal species involved in the bombing, including man, received sufficient irradiation to effect a detectable increase in the mutation frequency?” He indicated that direct attribution remained elusive to demonstrate, therefore “A specific pathology in the next generation can never be attributed directly to the effects of the bomb.” As such, a testable approach was critical. “One must therefore have control studies comparable in extent to those on irradiated persons.”14 Utilizing a classic experimental model, generations later, in 1991, the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, established as part of the continuing studies, announced a germline mutagenesis workshop with the aim to better understand long-term effects of atomic bombings. Key among the researchers’ interest was the participation of survivor’s children, “the most important source of information related to human mutation studies.” These offspring would be a source of “unique scientific opportunities,” focused on comparing them as sources of radiation exposure data to control groups through the lens of genetic mutation rates.15 The interest in the scientific information available through the irradiated bodies of Japanese survivors and offspring remained paramount and was underpinned from the beginning by claims of professional authority and political objectives tied to the postwar and developing Cold War tensions. As the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission argued in its first General Report of 1947, “It would be in keeping with the best scientific tradition and ideals if the National Academy of Sciences would send scientific men of vision to Japan as an advisory team or panel.” The legitimizing presence of American medical and biological scientists would

13 M. Susan Lindee, Suffering Made Real, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1994). 14 James Neel, Appendix No. 6: “The Question of the Genetic Effects of the Atomic

Bomb,” Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission General Report, National Research Council (1947), 56–8. 15 M. Susan Lindee, Suffering Made Real, 251.

202

M. K. MATSUDA

provide the proud self-fashioning of science as enlightened leadership of a new world order. This was not simply esteem of profession, but deeply implicated in postwar political reconfigurations. As the Report intoned, “the fate of America will be determined much more by the establishment of policies in Japan than most Americans realize.” This was due in no small part to “the ascendant leadership of science today.” However, the Commission did not limit its purview to the production of experimental knowledge, but also advocated for an internal logic connecting science and geopolitics, arguing for scientific leadership of Japanese rebuilding, cautioning that while future allyship was possible, “if we handle her unwisely, she will drift to other ideologies.”16 The Commission proposed for itself a direct role in managing bodies and medical knowledge as elements of anti-communist and anti-fascist politics of the already-ignited Cold War. This intertwining of politics and Big Science continued through the subsequent decades as the Cold War became defined by great power interventions in global national liberation struggles, propaganda battles, and the threatening specter of a nuclear arms race. While the United States initially led with its atomic arsenal, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union soon followed. Nuclear testing as a simultaneously secretive, yet highly visible assertion of military power, became a shared theater of destructive potential justified in the name of national security and scientific knowledge. The warfare that began in Japan continued as scientific studies across multiple Pacific Island regions. In 1997 Etienne Teparii of the Polynesian Liberation Front spoke at World Conferences against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs in Hiroshima and on behalf of Oscar Temaru, “It is a duty and a moral obligation for all Indigenous Peoples in the Pacific and in the world to join Japan in the commemoration of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”17 Addressing the Sydney Anti-Bases Action Committee, Teparii related periods of nuclear testing in Moruroa and Fangataufa, for which “all the statistics have been hidden by the French army.” When someone dies, he noted, “automatically the doctor must be 16 Paul S. Henshaw and Austin M. Brues, Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission General Report (1947), 5. 17 Etienne Teparii, “Global Hibakusha: Polynesia,” 1997 World Conference Against A & H Bombs, Hiroshima (1997), http://www.antiatom.org/GSKY/en/hbksh/poly. htm.

9

THE UNBORN CHILD

203

a military doctor. That’s a law. And the papers are secret, even the family has not the right to know anything about the death.”18 The troubling documentation of human subject records is clearly described in scientific studies from the Marshall Islands. As reported by Department of Energy documents, medical examinations of the Rongelapese in the 1950s indicated “The mean neutrophile count at one year after exposure had reached the control level. The delay in complete recovery of lymphocytes and platelets is similar to that reported in the two-year follow-up studies of the Japanese casualties of the atomic bombings.”19 This research was launched immediately and continued through the subsequent decades. A little less than a year after the bombing of Hiroshima in summer of 1946, the US Navy moved Operation Crossroads, an enormous fleet of warships, target vessels, and transports with scientists, dignitaries, media, sailors, and technical equipment into the Marshall Islands. The Marshalls were becoming a US Trust Territory, and with the authority of a colonial power, the Navy designated the Bikini Atoll as an optimum protected anchorage, largely “uninhabited,” for its testing. The 167 Bikini residents were moved to Rongerik Atoll, as their home islands were blasted. The Bikinians were sent to Ujelan and then Kwajalein Atoll and lived in tents next to a military airstrip. They moved on to Kili, which also had no lagoon or fishing and starved again, living on transported goods. Return to Bikini did not occur until 1974, when families were allowed to resettle. Soil was cleared, trees planted, and houses built to give the community a new start. After four years, alarming levels of radiation in their bodies from contaminated fish, crabs, and coconuts forced their evacuation again to live scattered around the Marshall Islands and across the Pacific, with newer lives made in Hawai‘i, California, and Arkansas. The losses of ancestral homelands and generations in this case are not simply a historical function of the passage of years but an outcome of deliberate erasure. Teresia Teaiwa underscored this in a 1994 touchstone essay, “Bikinis and other s/pacific n/oceans,” in which she parsed 18 Etienne Teparii, “We are Tahitians,” The Guardian: Newspaper of the Socialist Party of Australia (August 9, 1995), https://ratical.org/ratville/nukes/Mururoa08.15.95.txt 19 Atomic Energy Commission, Return of Rongelapese to Their Home Islands, Marshall Islands File Tracking Document ID, Aac 125/30 (February 1957), 24.

204

M. K. MATSUDA

out the ideological, commercial, and militaristic mechanisms by which global familiarity of the bikini bathing suit—created by Louis Reard in 1946—celebrated Allied successes in World War II by providing seminude female bodies to a mass public while relegating the bodies of irradiated Marshallese to medical and political reporting. In effect, the pointed sexuality of the bathing suit and its immediate postwar appearance—literally named by Reard from news headlines of the atomic test site as a sort of imaginary Pacific idyll—underscored that “The sacrifice of Islanders and military personnel during nuclear testing in the Pacific cannot be represented without threatening the legitimacy of colonial power…in the end the female body is appropriated by a colonial discourse to successfully disguise the horror of the bomb.” Through this, real bodies and unborn children are erased and “The bikini-clad woman is exotic and malleable to the same colonial gaze which coded Bikini Atoll land its Islanders as exotic, malleable and, most of all, dispensable.”20 By 1954, the United States had already detonated a newer, more destructive technology: the hydrogen bomb, code named Bravo. On March 1st in the early morning, inhabitants of the Rongelap Atoll east of Bikini were astonished to see two suns on the horizon. Aruko Bobo remembers, “we saw flashing lights, then a loud sound of explosion, then strong wind hit. Chickens and roofing tins flying all over made us frightened…it was like the air was alive…Everything was crazy…I found my hair was covered with a white powderlike substance.”21 The Marshallese were exposed to significant beta and gamma radiation from fallout and debris, leading to “loss of hair, depressed blood cell and leukocyte counts, flulike symptoms, fingernail discoloration, nausea, and radioisotope activity in the urine.” Some also had immediate wounds. One medical researcher reported of the Marshallese Hiroshi: “He had first-degree burns covering 90 percent of his body and had suffered complete loss of hair. The extent to which his body was burned was such that the bones in his feet were exposed.”22 Even those who survived the initial impact faced a poisoned environment, Chiyoko Tamayose remembers, “I returned to Rongelap in 20 Teresia Teaiwa, “Bikinis and Other s/Pacific n/Oceans,” The Contemporary Pacific, vol. 6, no. 1 (1994), 92–3. 21 Barbara Rose Johnston and Holly M. Barker, Consequential Damages of Nuclear War: The Rongelap Report, Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press (2008), 99. 22 Ibid., 105–6.

9

THE UNBORN CHILD

205

1957, three years after the nuclear fallout contaminated my homeland and at the time when scientists informed us that the land was clean and safe to go back home. I noticed that not everything was right in 1957. The arrowroots that before grew everywhere were gone. The coconut trees were bearing green and yellow nuts from the same tree; very unusual. The water changed color when we cooked our foods; we tried to change the water many times, but the same thing kept happening.” With few provisions, and often plagued by acute hunger, the Rongalapese ingested contaminated coconut crab, pandanus, and shellfish. Noted Timako Kolnij, “Even though it was bad, I ate them. I didn’t think about it. The food we ate gave us blisters in our mouth.”23 For many Islanders, responses of bewilderment and fear have since given way to mistrust and anger. The former magistrate of Rongelap, John Anajin, is clear in his understanding of the intent of the scientificmilitary community: “From the beginning of the testing program in our islands the United States has treated us like animals in a scientific experiment for their studies. They come and study us like animals and think of us as ‘guinea pigs.’”24 This view was strongly reinforced and exhaustively documented in formal 1994 oversight hearings of the US House of Representatives dedicated to determining radiation exposure of Islanders from Pacific nuclear tests. Legal counsel for the people of Bikini opened his remarks, “Have I seen evidence of U.S. Government officials deliberately planning to expose Marshallese to fallout? No. Have I seen evidence of U.S. official failing to take immediate action to get Marshallese out of harm’s way? Yes…so either way, the result is the same, irradiated Marshallese and U.S. scientists measuring the long-term effects on them.”25 Concurred Congressman Eni F. H. Faleomavaega: “We do know that Brookhaven National Lab has conducted over 40 years of research and

23 “Nuclear Nightmare Lingers in Marshalls,” Pacific Islands Report, Honolulu: Pacific Islands Development Program/East West Center (June 14, 2005); also Johnson and Barker, 99. 24 As cited by Martha Smith-Norris, Domination and Resistance: The United States and the Marshall Islands During the Cold War, Honolulu: University of Hawai ‘i Press (2016), 97. 25 Oversight Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Natural Resources, House of Representatives, “Radiation Exposure from Nuclear Tests in the Pacific,” serial no. 103–69 (February 24, 1994), 8.

206

M. K. MATSUDA

studies on the Rongelap and Utirik peoples. We also know that the health data collected on the people has never been subjected to outside, independent medical review. Mr. Chairman, the record supports my personal belief that the residents of these islands were left there deliberately in order to provide scientists working for the U.S. Government with ‘human’ specimens to test the after-effects of radiation exposure.”26 Historian Martha Smith-Norris’ studies of military and medical records from the era indicate that such claims were not unfounded. In the fulfillment of scientific research interests, Dr. Robert Conrad, a former naval officer, was appointed by the US government to be director of the project dedicated to medical studies of radioactively exposed Rongelapse and Utirikese in 1955. He had significant interest in comparing select repatriated communities as experiments. In one return action, he enthused that “the size, age, and sex distribution of this group compared closely with that of the exposed Rongelapese, and its shared genetic heritage was considerably closer than that of the original control group.” This allowed for more precise calibration of radiation dose measurements in food and environments. Particularly useful were the large number of children in the group who “were the same stock (blood relations) and would live post-return under the same environmental conditions as the exposed populations.” As such, and with preferred lineages tied to classical hereditary “blood relations,” they were selected as unexposed controls to better frame a “valuable ecological radiation study on human beings” through isotope accumulations in the body.27 The roles of direct genealogy and the scientific imperatives of genetic outcomes in irradiated populations became parts of the same questions. In addition to what researchers classified as prompt somatic effects— those causing immediate biological harm—were “delayed” somatic effects, such as cataracts, thyroid disorders, and cancers. The degree to which such damage is also genetically heritable in humans is inconclusive, but radiation exposure safety guidelines agree that “the limits used 26 Oversight Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Natural Resources, House of Representatives, “Radiation Exposure from Nuclear Tests in the Pacific,” serial no. 103–69 (February 24, 1994), 62. 27 As cited by Martha Smith-Norris, Domination and Resistance: The United States and the Marshall Islands During the Cold War, Honolulu: University of Hawai ‘i Press (2016), 88.

9

THE UNBORN CHILD

207

to protect the exposed person from harm are equally effective to protect future generations from harm.”28 While the question of whether radiation disorders are inherited remains open, damage caused by pre-natal and continuing exposure is welldocumented. Embryo and fetus cells divide rapidly and are vulnerable to changes in their environment. Reports on radiation research widely acknowledge, “Ionizing radiation from nuclear activity is known to have mutagenic properties and is therefore likely to have detrimental reproductive effects.”29 Holly Barker has made the same case specifically from her work with the people of the Marshalls, and the damage caused by fallout exposure and bioaccumulation across generations: “radiation is mutagenic, it mutates DNA, so it’s not just the living people who are first exposed, it’s all of their offspring.”30 Chiyoko Tamayose has testified to the effects of exposure through her own children, “I have one son that had liver cancer; he was operated on at the Kuakini Hospital in Honolulu and he died during the operation. He left a family of 4 children and a wife. Another son had problems with his thyroid - so severe that he could not eat nor swallow water. A daughter was born with the lower body so soft as if there was no bone.” She also reported, “I have a 40-year-old son who was born with a good size blister on his back. Two weeks later we were sent to the Naval Hospital in Guam for surgery. The doctors informed that they’d never seen that type of case before. He became paralyzed; he crawls around the house, he helps me

28 The official Radiation Effects Research Foundation, a cooperative Japan-US Research Organization: “No suspected case was found that could have occurred newly following parental exposure to A-bomb radiation. Further studies are under consideration.” See details at, http://www.rerf.jp/radefx/genetics_e/dna.html. 29 Hagen Scherb, Kristina Voigt. “The Human Sex Odds at Birth After the Atmospheric Atomic Bomb Tests, after Chernobyl, and in the Vicinity of Nuclear Facilities,” Environmental Science and Pollution Research, vol. 18, no. 5 (2011), 697. Wendy N. Nembhard, Pearl A. McElfish, Britni Ayers, et al., “Nuclear Radiation and Prevalence Of Structural Birth Defects Among Infants Born to Women From the Marshall Islands,” Birth Defects Research, vol. 111, no. 16, (July 2019), 1192–1204. 30 Holly Barker, “U.S. Nuclear Testing in the Marshall Islands,” Public Talk, Seattle, Washington (February 24, 2012), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z41NiV agLc4 (49:12).

208

M. K. MATSUDA

prepare meals when I am tired; he changes his own pampers. He’s a great son, but very heart-breaking for a mother to see in that condition.”31 From Rongelap, displaced inhabitants continue to suffer from high rates of leukemia, multiple myeloma, lymphomas, and cancers of the thyroid. From the 1950s, rates of liver and cervical cancers were 30– 60 times higher in the islands as compared to the United States and life expectancy dropped to about 40 years. Critically, loss of health was also wound around losses of land, diet, and household economy, which as reported by Johnston and Barker, “severely inhibits the Rongalapese ability to produce or reproduce cultural knowledge about the local environment—knowledge that is essential to the survival and long-term well-being of the community.” Notably, “Rongalapese communities are wracked by high incidences of suicide, malnutrition, alcoholism, smoking, and lack of physical fitness.”32 Physician and frequent advocate on Marshallese health support, Seiji Yamada has also reviewed the constant displacements, the lack of staples like taro and breadfruit, the dependence on processed and canned foods, the breakdown of cultural and community support values, and obesity, alcohol and substance abuse, and pathogenic spread of viruses, which he calls “the social production of cancer.”33 As a Marshallese primary care physician, Dr. Sheldon Riklon observes more emphatically, “But look. You destroyed our land. You destroyed where we can go and get our fish, where we grow our taro and vegetables. You changed our way of living. We’re not fishing in the morning. Instead we’re eating canned goods sent by the USDA—canned chicken, canned fruits and vegetables, Spam…And of course, you can’t go out early in the morning and grow Spam. You can’t grow canned chicken. You’re going to just sit around.”34 The radiation’s direct damage to health across generations is the most widely noted of nuclear testing depredations, but only one element of

31 “Nuclear Nightmare Lingers in Marshalls,” Pacific Islands Report, Honolulu: Pacific Islands Development Program/East West Center (June 14, 2005). 32 Johnston and Barker, Consequential Damages, 168. 33 Seiji Yamada, “Cancer, Reproductive Abnormalities, and Diabetes in Micronesia: The

Effect of Nuclear Testing,” Pacific Health Dialog, vol. 11, no. 2 (2004), 219. 34 Dr. Sheldon Riklon, interviewed in Kenneth Brower, “The Atolls of Arkansas: Doomed by Climate Change, Marshall Islanders Find a New Home in Springdale” (December 27, 2018), https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2019-1-january-february/fea ture/atolls-arkansas-marshall-islands-marshallese

9

THE UNBORN CHILD

209

the genealogical threat. The involuntary resettlements have meant improvised, unsanitary communities in refugee-like conditions. As testimonies to official investigations underscore, the constant emphasis on the importance of displacement and land as despoiled and alienated is critical—the stealing of the future is not only limited to health and radiation-induced diseases, but also continuity of entire living cultures: “Environmental contamination has robbed the Rongelapese of their customary access to natural resources used to sustain households, communities, customary exchanges for other goods, or income generation. As a result, the Rongelapese are unable to practice principles of responsible stewardship, and they are unable to transmit their knowledge of sustainable access and use of resources to younger generations.”35 Testimony to the Nuclear Claims Tribunal shows how everything about the testing experience—health damage, environmental poisoning— and forced relocation itself—reshaped culture in ways that fractured custom and tradition. In a claim for redress and compensation, Isao Eknilang reported: It was difficult because we lived in tents for several months. We had no privacy, and many aspects of Marshallese custom were broken, particularly those relating to adults changing their clothes or trying to leave to go to the bathroom in front of children of the opposite sex…Another custom that people began to violate for the first time I remember was not sharing food with people. The Navy gave some food to us Rongelapese, but it was not adequate. I remember a fist-fight that broke out over whether or not to share our food resources.36

The noted scholar of the Micronesian Islands, Francis X Hezel, likewise has noted that local island society is organized around family units and corresponding social relationships, defined by division of work and practices and transmission of generational understanding. Families “had to rear their children, passing on to them their life skills, family history and the wisdom of the past…As the basic economic unit, the family had 35 Holly M. Barker and Barbara Rose Johnston, “Seeking Compensation for Radiation Survivors in the Marshall Islands: The Contribution of Anthropology,” Cultural Survival (March 2000), www.culturalsurvival.org, accessed September 2021. 36 Isao Eknilang, “Claimants’ Exhibit C-1,” p. 22, Nuclear Claims Tribunal, Republic of the Marshall Islands, https://web.archive.org/web/20140517172030/http://nuclea rclaimstribunal.com/.

210

M. K. MATSUDA

to acquire and maintain the resource base that it would live off—that is, land…the basic formula in traditional island society was simple: without land there was no way to live, and without family there was no way to access land.”37 In fact, in adjudicated compensation claims for Islanders for loss of land and livelihood, the Nuclear Claims Tribunal noted, for Bikini, “the peoples’ identity, the very essence of their perceptions of themselves, was intimately tied to their home atoll. The system of land rights provided much of the underlying structure for the organization of the community.” In Enewetak, putting a monetary figure on compensation was fraught. “Traditionally, Marshallese do not sell land rights which are acquired by birthright. Hence, there is an absence of a real estate market, and while Marshallese customary system of land tenure has not only precluded the development of a normal market, it fosters an attitude about land which does not include the concept of market value.”38 Both cornerstones—family relations and lands—were sundered by nuclear colonialism. In the case of land, this sometimes meant actual obliteration and relentless contamination. The outcome has been a fracturing of heritage and traditional practice, and the increase of younger people drifting away from homelands that have little to offer, the direct historical outcome of Cold War science and military technologies tested and then held for data collection for decades through the twentieth century. This paints an almost desperate response, a closed future issuing from colonial legacies. Perhaps the greatest voice to date for this experience was Lijon Eknilang, who carried the history she attempted to overcome by speaking up for the children that for her, remained unborn. She explained her experience with the effect of nuclear radiation. “I cannot have children. I have had miscarriages on seven occasions.” Her story is also that of an entire community, and she speaks for others, “Many of these women are from atolls that foreign officials have told us were not affected by

37 Francis X. Hezel, “The Unmaking of the Micronesian Family,” Unpublished Manuscript, Micronesian seminar (1998). 38 Enewetak, MEMORANDUM OF DECISION AND ORDER at pp. 14–15, Nuclear Claims Tribunal, Republic of the Marshall Islands. https://web.archive.org/web/201405 17172030/http://nuclearclaimstribunal.com/.

9

THE UNBORN CHILD

211

radiation. We know otherwise, because the health problems are similar to ours.”39 There is a young girl on Ailuk today with no knees, three toes on each foot and a missing arm. The most common birth defects on Rongelap and nearby islands have been ‘jellyfish’ babies. These babies are born with no bones in their bodies and with transparent skin. We can see their brains and hearts beating. The babies usually live for a day or two before they stop breathing. Many women die from abnormal pregnancies, and those who survive give birth to what looks like purple grapes that we quickly bury.40

This is critical, for it is not the unique tragedy of a woman or a family, but of a culture and heritage. As Mylast E. Bilimon has pointed out, “Land was passed down through the line of the mother, meaning most Micronesian societies were matrilineal…Women represented life and bearing children signified the continuation of life of a clan.” In this way “the well-being of women was of utmost importance because they are the reason new families are formed, and in matrilineal societies in Micronesia like the Marshall Islands, lineages and clans continue to flourish.” Bilimon also cites Christine McCourt on maternity care: “Giving birth is a process which creates new social persons and roles: the foetus becomes a social person and the woman giving birth becomes a mother, her partner a father and new families are formed.”41 The note about partners is equally critical, for as Lijon Eknilang explains, the jellyfish babies are more than a tragedy of unborn generations, they are also indicators of stigma that divides communities. “On one of those occasions, the child I miscarried was severely deformed - it had only one eye…Our culture and religion teaches us that reproductive abnormalities are a sign that women have been unfaithful. For this reason, 39 Lijon Eknilang’s testimony, see Zohl de Ishtar, “A Survivor’s Warning on Nuclear Contamination,” Pacific Ecologist (Summer 2006), 50–2. Also Lijon Eknilang, “Nuclear Survivor Stories,” Marshall Islands Story Project, http://mistories.org/nuclear-Eknila ng.php. 40 Lijon Eknilang, “Learning from Rongelap’s Pain,” Seattle Journal for Social Justice, vol. 2, no. 1 (May 2003), 318. 41 Mylast E. Bilimon, Traditional Postpartum Practices in the Marshall Islands: Inquiries Into Stigma Against Non-Participating Women, University of Guam (thesis, 2020), 27–8, citation of McCourt, 28.

212

M. K. MATSUDA

many of my friends keep quiet about the strange births they have had.”42 Stigma soon split apart families around radiation exposure. In testimony to the Nuclear Claims Tribunal, Almira Matayoshi commented, “The two hardest things for us to talk about are the divisions in our families caused by the bomb, and what happened to our bodies. The Rongelapese who weren’t exposed wouldn’t admit they were Rongelapese. This was awful because we were family, and this is the worst kind of damage to have splits in the family.” Isao Eknilang, evacuated with family to Kwajalein, remembered, “Our relatives on Ebeye were afraid of their own family members, they were afraid to visit us for fear they would get radiation from us.”43 The stigma has been passed through families to children and cut off the genealogical ties that connected communities, and past and future. As Kobang Anjain recalled, “the kids made fun of me, and they would say: ‘Etal bwe jenaaj radioactive ippem,’” [Get out of here because we’re going to get radiation from you.] Norio Kenbenli has equally noted, “people would always point at us, they knew who we were. Many people used to say things like: ‘Don’t marry the Rongalapese because they are sick and your kids will be sick.’”44 In extended oral testimony, Neisen Laukon conveyed similar stories: One day the doctors came to the school and gathered all the people from Rongelap to take them to a hospital to examine them. It was shameful for me because people made fun of us. They say, “there go the poison people.” They didn’t want to associate with us or come near us. There was a boy who wanted to date me, but I was contaminated, he didn’t want to have anything to do with me…so I grew up ashamed and hurt, and thought all the people of Rongelap were some kind of lepers, all things that I grew up hearing, my grandmothers and the elders, everything they talked about things, they started crying, because of everything that had happened to them, but no one told them or explained anything to them, so it was like nothing had happened and no one cares.”45 42 Lijon Eknilang, Ibid. 43 In the Matter of The People of Utrik, et al. Claimants’ Exhibit C-1, p. 22., reported

in Before the Nuclear Claims Tribunal, Republic of the Marshall Islands, NCT no. 23– 06,103. 44 Barbara Rose Johnson and Holly M. Barker, Consequential Damages of Nuclear War: The Rongelap Report, 151. 45 Neisen Laukon, “Present at the Birth,” Our Shared Nuclear Legacy: Assessing Health Impacts and Inequality on the 75th Anniversary of the 1st Nuclear Test, hosted by the

9

THE UNBORN CHILD

213

She did note that the family struggled long to have health care and coverage, though doctors did show up regularly and immediately to request blood samples and collect information over the years. In addition, specific communities, like Ebeye, became outliers of US military operations on islands like Kwajalein, where the American military maintained a missile testing program. Growing up in economic, political, and legal dependence, Islander workers shuttled to and from contract work, transforming the atoll into “the US Army’s cheap labor camp,” and “the suicide capital of Micronesia,” riven by slum conditions and infectious diseases.46 Dislocated, dispossessed, and marginalized in their ancestor’s islands, Marshallese in the Ebeye orbit of American military testing find their own genealogies severed in favor of genetic knowledge of mutations across generations. Whole body scan radiation counters allow regular, continuing data collection on the Marshallese in facilities established by the Department of Energy. Consent forms indicate: “You will sit in the chair where we will measure the amount of radiation in your body…We would like for you to be tested at least once a year.”47 At the same time, these medical check-ups do not address the fractures of history that the American presence has meant. In oral histories, Lirok and Kelen Joash recount what has been lost to lineages and generations. “We gave them all this and what do we get in return now?…And if they plan to give us something in return, who would they give it to? Some of us have already gone. The older generation is gone. They died…Many died, those who lived there, to whom the reef belongs, they are gone. And we are left with just us, the younger generation, and this from an aged man.”48

Marshallese Educational Initiative (MEI) (June 29-July 1, 2021), https://www.mei.ngo/ nuclear. 46 Martha Smith-Norris, Domination and Resistance: The United States and the Marshall Islands During the Cold War, Honolulu: University of Hawai ‘i Press (2016), 153. See overview, Shannon Marcoux, “Trust Issues: Militarization, Destruction, and the Search for a Remedy in the Marshall Islands,” Columbia Human Rights Law Review, online, http://hrlr.law.columbia.edu/hrlr-online/trust-issues-militarization-destru ction-and-the-search-for-a-remedy-in-the-marshall-islands/ (January 2021). 47 Martha Smith-Norris, Domination and Resistance, 155. 48 Interview of Lirok & Kelen Joash by Jefferson Paulis, translated by Newton Lajuan,

Marshall Islands Story Project, www.mistories.org (May 5, 2008).

214

M. K. MATSUDA

The personal recounting was never only a lament, but an incisive claim of survival and for justice. Restoring the genealogies would mean action and redress at an international scale. In 1983 the Nuclear Claims Tribunal was established to adjudicate for damages, medical care, personal injury, and education related to the testing. By an agreement between the United States and the Marshall Islands, funds were allocated to provide a compensation fund to be paid to Islanders of Bikini and Enewetak, and also Rongelap and Utrik, for at least fifteen years of medical treatments and radiological monitoring, and the compensatory payment of claims. For Bikini, the Tribunal concluded that multiple hearings, briefs, testimonies, expert opinions, voluminous documents, and arguments led to a singular conclusion: “the stark reality that the People of Bikini have remained in exile for some 55 years now. Although the Tribunal has determined that the People of Bikini have suffered loss and injury to their person and property, nothing can compensate for that simple fact and all of the attendant intangible damage, loss, and hardship suffered by the Bikini community over the years.”49 Similar conclusions were reached for Enewetak, Utirik, and Rongelap, with orders designating settlements totaling in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Only parts of this were ever awarded. Bikinians like Tomaki Juda remained committed to redress in spite of the challenges and US government inattention: “I have never stopped suing the US governments in their courts for these causes…I never stopped negotiating with the US government in order to press them for help in our struggles.”50 By 2009, Micronesian newspapers headlined, “Marshall nuclear claims tribunal halts payments, on verge of shutdown,” with critics assailing “the U.S. and Marshall Islands governments for negotiating without carefully considering the magnitude of the compensation issues facing these victims.”51 The unsettled histories remain. Lijon Eknilang is also noted for bringing her experience to the International Court of Justice in the Hague in November, 1995. She made a claim on both the past and the future 49 Conclusion and Order (March 5, 2001), Bikini, Nuclear Claims Tribunal, Republic

of the Marshall Islands. https://web.archive.org/web/20140517172030/http://nuclea rclaimstribunal.com/. 50 Interview of Tomaki Juda by Mary Silk, translated by Newton Lajuan, Marshall Islands Story Project, www.mistories.org (March 6, 2008). 51 Marianas Variety News Staff, “Marshalls Nuclear Claims Tribunal Halts Payments, on Verge of Shutdown,” Marianas Variety (July 16, 2009).

9

THE UNBORN CHILD

215

through the congenital history written in her own body, not as victim, but as messenger. “I have come to share my experience with you because I want you to see your future—what is going to be—through me.”52 By speaking, Eknilang did more than share her story. She made a claim on the histories of the future. For the Marshall Islanders, some of those in the meantime meant new communities, where ancestral islands are distant, though families and relations are close, tracked through continuing voyages. The wayfinder here is John Moody, whose story has been reported by journalists around the world. A native of the Marshall Islands who left his islands in the late 1970s, Moody journeyed for education on a Pell Grant invitation to study at the University of Oklahoma. By the mid-1980s, he’d moved to Springdale, Arkansas, married locally, and was working at Tyson Foods in poultry processing. He became the anchor for emigration that followed, enabled by a Compact of Free Association that allowed Marshallese to work and travel in the United States without a visa. Some 15,000 now live and work in Arkansas, beginning initially with Moody’s relatives. Moody moved out of town, partly to give him space from Springdale, where his legacy is so well known. “That’s what they call me…Pioneer.”53 Others who came, like Jacob Masha from Majuro, made clear the family networks and connections: “This place got a population,” because “everyone is related.”54 The Marshallese community continues to build, advocacy groups, community gardens, strong ties with churches, struggles with health, clinical services, language learning, and working for children’s education with local school districts. Many families are active in state-wide sports tournaments, and are known for the celebratory festivities around kemeem—first

52 Lijon Eknilang, see Anono Lieom Loeak, Veronica Kiluwe, Linda Crowl, eds., Life in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (Suva, 2004), 123–71; Zohl de Ishtar, ed., Pacific Women Speak Out for Independence and Denuclearisation, Christchurch: Raven Press (1998). 53 John Moody, in John D. Sutter, “You’re Making This Island Disappear,” https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2015/06/opinions/sutter-two-degrees-marshall-isl ands/ (2015; see also: Walter F. Roche Jr., Willoughby Mariano, “A Ray of Hope in Springdale,” The Baltimore Sun (September 17, 2002); Bret Schulte, “For Pacific Islanders, Hopes and Troubles in Arkansas,” The New York Times (July 4, 2012), Dan Craft, “The Marshallese population continues to grow in Arkansas,” Northwest Asian Weekly (January 13, 2011); accessed November 29, 2021. 54 Cited in Bret Schulte, “For Pacific Islanders, Hopes and Troubles in Arkansas,” The New York Times (July 4, 2012).

216

M. K. MATSUDA

birthdays—on Saturdays. American-born Marshallese children are eligible for federal health insurance like Medicaid, entitlements like Social Security, and voting rights in the United States, though Compact migrants, while paying US taxes, are not. Some lives, especially those of the older generation, embody the entire history of the postwar. In Springdale, Lumon Benjamin speaks of his mother, Mira Joshaia Benjamin, born in 1929 on Bikini Atoll. “She is one of the few survivors from the 167 that were evacuated in 1946 that are still living today,” he notes, recounting the forced relocations to Rongerik, to Kwajalein, to Kili Islands, and then—in Mira Joshaia’s case, migration to Springdale. “She came to the United States to find medical opportunities and a better life. Yes, she was able to find these opportunities but they come at a big price. She is an old lady that cannot work, doesn’t have any medical insurance and other kinds of programs that might help at her age.” She would like to return to Bikini, but it is contaminated. Back in the Islands, “she has her own lands and she doesn’t owe anybody for her lands. The lands were given to her from her ancestors.”55 From ancestral islands, though Cold War scientific and military politics, to personal and familial hopes in Arkansas, Benjamin continues to carry a fractured past toward the future. Bridging younger and older generations, including those born and raised in the United States, is the Arkansas Coalition of Marshallese. Founded by US Armed Forces veteran, court interpreter, and public health advocate Melisa Laelan, the community is organized to gather at public parks to craft rebbelib stick charts marking the swell patterns and navigational understandings of storied voyaging traditions, to share food, dancing, Marshallese traditional canoe presentations, and choral singing in community halls. Embodied legacies, genealogies, harms, and persistence weave through all of these celebrations also. Seeking out histories of imperial violence and creative redress, musicologist Jessica Schwartz has worked with Marshallese communities around oral histories. As she explains, “Marshallese will often note that they do not have a written

55 In Kenneth Dickerman, Lawrence Sumulong, “Forced Out of Their Homes by Years of U.S. Nuclear Testing, the Marshallese Diaspora Has Spread to Springdale, Ark.”, The Washington Post (January 22, 2021); accessed November 29. 2021.

9

THE UNBORN CHILD

217

history; rather, they rely on their voices to interactively share their oral histories in story and song.”56 The importance of voice is therefore more than simply communication; it is the embodiment and expression of a culture and historical continuity across generations. This is more than metaphorically related to nuclear colonialism due to the widespread thyroid cancers in the population, along with “visible scars on their necks as reminders of the surgeries that caused many of them issues with their voices and communication…Women would explain that they would not speak or sing for periods of time after the surgeries in fear of hearing their altered voices and enduring a gendered stigmatization.” Neisen Laukon recalled the trauma that affected her entire family: “My cousin was really scared whenever they said they were going to cut her throat. She said I may never talk…mute you know. Sing. They can’t sing and she was scared.”57 The fear and terror remain manifest in these accountings. But some have made it a point to both speak and sing nonetheless, including at performances in the name of activism and Nuclear Victims’ and Survivors’ Remembrance Day ceremonies, pushing back against both figurative and literal silencing of their experience and making claims upon the future. In equal fashion, the Marshallese poet, writer, and performance artist, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner has turned her own commitments and artistry to expressions of time, space, history, and the urgency of an entire people, culture, and tradition under threat. She writes of the legacies of nuclear testing and militarism, of racism and the forced migration of generations, and of newer threats from climate change and inundation of ancestral islands from rising sea levels. Her expressions capture the personal and the familial—the lost legacies of new generations in poems like Fishbone Hair, about her young niece’s childhood battle with leukemia, and the continuing shadow of colonialism, empire, and nuclear testing after generations, rained down on everyday lives, struggling with a legacy, but determined to tell, and retell the story. There had been a war raging inside Bianca’s six-year-old bones White cells had staked their flag They saw it as their destiny they conquered 56 Jessica Schwartz, “Matters of Empathy and Nuclear Colonialism: Marshallese Voice Marked in Story, Song and Illustration,” Music and Politics, vol. 10, no. 2 (2016), 2. 57 Jessica Schwartz, “Matters of Empathy,” 9–10.

218

M. K. MATSUDA

The territory of her body They said it was manifested it all fell out I felt bald and blank as Bianca’s skull … They said she only had six months to live That’s what the doctors told those fishermen over 50 years ago When they were out at sea just miles away from Bikini The day the sun exploded58

58 Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, “Fishbone Hair,” Video Poem, https://kathyjetnilkijiner.com/ 2016/03/25/fishbone-hair-full-poemvideo/ (posted March 25, 2016). From Iep J¯ altok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter by Kathy Jet¯nil-Kijiner. © 2017 Kathy Jet¯nil-Kijiner. By permission of the University of Arizona Press.

CHAPTER 10

Theft and Gifts

K¯a‘ai are woven sennit—coconut fiber—caskets of the Hawaiian ruling class. Anthropomorphic in shape, the headpieces of the caskets are braided around the skulls of revered royalty and inlaid with mother-of-pearl, with woven trunks of bodies bearing the other bones and mortal remains. Probably the two most famous such caskets carried L¯ıloa, a Hawaiian king, and his descendant Lonoikamakahiki. Their bones were given a secret resting place, according to custom, in Waipi‘o Valley on the Big Island of Hawai‘i, the sacred Valley of the Kings and the boyhood home of the unifier of the Hawaiian Islands, King Kamehameha I (c. 1758–1819). The k¯a‘ai of L¯ıloa and Lonoikamakahiki are notable, for in the nineteenth century, the ancient casket tradition had been waning under the Christian influence of notable Hawaiian power brokers like the queen consort and regent of the Hawaiian Kingdom, Ka‘ahumanu, the favorite wife of Kamehameha I. A royal mausoleum, the Mauna ‘Ala, was constructed near Honolulu in the 1860s and royal generations moved the bones of their ancestors to the new resting place. The k¯a‘ai of L¯ıloa and Lonoikamakahiki, who were the guardians of the bones of Kamehameha, passed down from generations to Queen Lili‘uokalani (1838–1917) and her own heir Prince Kuhio (1871–1922), who recognized their uniqueness. Prince Kuhio ultimately conveyed the k¯a‘ai from

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. K. Matsuda, Genealogies, Genomes, and Histories in the Pacific, Palgrave Studies in Pacific History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45449-3_10

219

220

M. K. MATSUDA

the mausoleum to the Bishop Museum in Honolulu in 1918, where they became extraordinary objects of study and knowledge of Hawaiian traditions and practices.1 In February of 1994, the caskets disappeared from the Bishop Museum. The Museum reported them stolen. The implication of theft stirred intense news coverage and has long been alleged to have been carried out in cooperation with employees of the museum itself, as there was no evidence of forced entry. Doors were unlocked, security alarms not triggered, clear storage locations known as well as access to locked cabinets and restricted areas of the museum. Formal investigations were and continue to be inconclusive and charges have never been brought. The whereabouts of the k¯a‘ai remain unknown. Puna Lerma, heading the Hawai‘i Island Burial Council, has noted disquiet about theft of invaluable museum holdings to be shared by communities, scholars, and students, yet that there are also greater dimensions, which concern the right order of the gods, humans, and the earth: “We have to get our ancestors planted in the ground where they belong. They form the foundation for everything that is living. Because they were here before us and have been here longer, they deserve respect.” That respect included careful treatment of bodies and especially bones—the iwi—which concentrated and retained divine power and shaped both natural order and the energy of those bones’ possessors. When asked particularly about the disappearance of the k¯a‘ai from the museum, Lerma has offered: “Let’s put it this way, I believe the k¯a‘ai are back in Waipi‘o, where they belong.”2 The k¯a‘ai incident continues to resonate with questions. The caskets were undeniably taken from the museum. If this was theft, who was stealing from whom? Removed from their original resting places in Waipi‘o Valley, they were taken by royal order to the Mauna ‘Ala mausoleum under Christian influence, transferred to the Bishop Museum

1 Roger G. Rose, Reconciling the Past: Two Basketry K¯ a‘ai and the Legendary L¯ıloa and Lonoikamakahiki, Bulletin in Anthropology, no. 5, Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press (1992). On the politics of the woven arts and Hawaiian history, see David Maile, He Moena P¯ awehe Makana: Weaving Anti-capitalist Resistance into Kanaka Maoli Critiques of Settler Colonialism, presented paper, Washington, DC: Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) (June 2015). 2 Betty Fullard Leo, “Sacred Burial Practices” (February 1998), http://www.coffee times.com/feb98.htm.

10

THEFT AND GIFTS

221

for scientific and historical study and—likely—were returned to a traditionally unknown resting place in Waipi‘o Valley. What, in fact, would be restored in the order of ancestors and inheritances by the theft, or was it a rightful return? Hawaiian legal scholar E. Sunny Greer has noted, “Native Hawaiians believe that a person’s mana was contained in the iwi (bone) even after death.” Thus the “bones of the dead were guarded, respected, treasured, venerated, loved or even deified by relatives…” In fact, she notes “the people’s right to their homeland was customarily considered perpetual because their ancestors were buried within the land.”3 The relationship of bones, burials, land, sovereignty, and museum collections have all been long intertwined by controversies over respect for ancestors, meanings for living generations, and the politics of genealogy. Museum culture in Hawai‘i has been studied by Halena Kapuni-Reynolds, who observes that claims to legal rights are inseparable not only from lands and the disposition of material objects and mortal remains, but the centrality of genealogical understandings of history and culture. The “Ali‘i collections” of the Bishop Museum, he notes, comprise those objects attached to or connected with the lives of the Hawaiian rulers, “men and women whose mo‘ok¯u‘auhau (lineages) stretched back thousands of generations to cosmogonic origins…Safeguarding mo‘ok¯u‘auhau was (and is) integral to the maintenance of ali‘i identity because it was through an ali‘i’s genealogy that their rank and status was determined.”4 These narratives of theft, bones carrying histories and cosmologies, their inherent lineages and claims upon sovereignty and homeland, ultimately impress on questions of genealogy—and genetic understanding of the past both in conflict and in seeking rightful restoration. The k¯a‘ai narrative is so insistently about what was taken, but also, where and to whom embodied histories belong—and what their proper

3 E. Sunny Greer, “Na Wai E Ho‘¯ ola I N¯ a Iwi? Who Will Save the Bones: Native Hawaiians and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act,” AsianPacific Law and Policy Journal, vol. 14, no. 1 (2012), 34–5. For a case study involving disturbed graves during excavations for a commercial retail project, see Greer, “Kaleikini v. Thielen: Deconstructing Hawai‘i’s Burial Laws to Look Beyond Removal and Reburial,” Paper for Prof. Kapua Sproat (May 1, 2008); also, Linda W. Greene, “Pu‘ukohola Heiau, Kaloko-Honokohau, Pu‘uhonua O Honauneau,” A Cultural History of Three Traditional Hawaiian Sites, Denver: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service (1993). 4 Halena Kapuni-Reynolds, “Mo‘ok¯ uauhau (Genealogies) of Care: Curating Ali‘i Collections at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum,” Studies in Arts and Humanities, vol. 3, no. 2 (2017), 84–5.

222

M. K. MATSUDA

places are. Theft here is not a mere criminal transgression, but a meditation on pasts and lives both given and taken. Theft, in fact, is very much a central part of constituting Pacific Island historical narratives, and many of these tales are originary—of how peoples came to be, of first encounters that established legends, and histories. In the deep time of the Oceanian Pacific, Rongomaui from the world of deities above Aotearoa stole the k¯ umara—sweet potato—from the heavens and made it available to the people of the land. As noted in earlier discussions, the whakapapa of the k¯umara is intrinsically connected to that of the kiore—Pacific rat. Rongomaui, with the celestial k¯umara taken from his older brother, impregnated his own wife, Pani, who birthed the earthly k¯umara. But the demigod M¯aui shamed Pani and her daughter, Hinemataiti, who in turn stole her mother’s k¯umara, becoming the ancestor of the kiore. To study the kiore today is to also engage the genetic genealogy of this tradition. In Tonga, Samoa, and Hawai‘i, the trickster M¯aui is also regarded for his cleverness, stealing fire from the underworld, bringing vegetables and fruits, or the warmth of the sun. Yet, the legacies of M¯aui are those of the demigod within whose theft lies a gift—of knowledge, living things, and growth to a land and people, the foundations of a culture that grew across generations into an Oceanian kingdom. Such gifts incur not debts, but responsibilities.5 Yet the Pacific is also replete with other assertions, familiar European encounter narratives that are notable in that they describe an imposed logic of deceptive character and morals set upon Island peoples, and provide templates for both navigational and fatal encounters. For centuries, the lens of stealing was focused one way—largely through European records of the perfidy and disrespect by Islanders for possessions and property, even as Indigenous peoples found their native lands claimed in the name of distant imperial monarchs. On his transit of the oceanic waters he would label the Pacific in 1521, Ferdinand Magellan became the first European to make landfall on the Mariana Islands, north of Guam. Some of the local CHamorus took a skiff tied to one of his ships during violence between sailors

5 Susan Kapulani Antonio, “Stolen Identity: Defining ‘Aihue from a Hawaiian Perspective,” Master of Arts Theses: Pacific Island Studies, University of Hawai‘i, Manoa (December 2003), 45–9. On gifts, David Uahikeaikalei‘ohu Maile, “Gifts of Sovereignty: ¯ Settler Colonial Capitalism and the Kanaka ‘Oiwi Politics of Ea” (2019), https://digita lrepository.unm.edu/amst_etds/81, 18–21.

10

THEFT AND GIFTS

223

and the islanders. Magellan named the islands “Ladrones” or “Islands of Thieves,” a name that historically persists. Louis Antoine de Bougainville wrote his chronicle of arriving in Tahiti in 1768, replete with enticing maidens, complicated negotiations and trade with Oberea, the local ruler whom he considered to be Queen of the islands. Bougainville’s secondin-command, Nicolas Pierre Duclos-Guyot, kept a regular chronicle, journaling, “thieving flourished” during the French party’s sojourn. In fact, even as Bougainville’s ships transited the coastline of Chile, DuclosGuyot noted a recurring theme, “the savages began to be troublesome: they stole several hatchets, some provisions, and clothes from us. As they seemed inclinable to theft and fraud, I took the resolution to let nobody lie on shore.”6 On his fateful encounter with the Hawaiian Islands, James Cook was first celebrated, and then found to be burdensome by the chiefs with his extended and returning visits and requisition needs. Some of the Hawaiians took his ship’s cutter, precipitating a much-debated decision in which Cook tried to take King Kalani‘opu‘u as a hostage to assure its return. In the fighting that ensued, Cook was killed. Debates about his death continue. Hawaiian scholars have challenged questions of theft, noting that material items taken from ships and landing parties were not under kapu, or prohibitions from ruling orders, and would appear available in exchange for valuable provisions, particularly without possessive institutions of property ownership. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, theft took on even more resonant meanings in the era of Pacific colonialism, when possession by imperial powers saw Islander kingdoms like Hawai‘i seized by American planters with the aid of US Marine forces, with both political and cultural consequences. Not thievery of objects and items, but of histories and, indeed, entire nations. In testimony for the Hawaiian state government, the Association of Hawaiian Civic Clubs offered a well-noted tension in who was honored and recognized in educational institutions: “Schools are named for presidents and historic figures that did irreparable harm to the Hawaiian Kingdom—a high school is named for Theodore Roosevelt who was a Secretary of the Navy in 1898, and

6 Alexander Bolyanatz, Pacific Romanticism: Tahiti and the European Imagination, Westport, CT and London: Praeger (2004), 100–2.

224

M. K. MATSUDA

worst insult of all, Mc Kinley High School, to honor the man who presided over the theft of a nation by receiving it from the thieves.”7 Regular protests, placards, editorials, and news continue to revolve around the status of Stolen Lands. Debates continue about whether the US government should recognize a Native Hawaiian government, as most notably proposed by Senator Daniel Akaka on the model of Native American Indian communities and Department of the Interior recognition. On the question of who has stolen from whom, Uahikea Maile has observed, “The thief returns to the scene of the crime asking for forgiveness but refusing to return what they stole.”8 Theft and restitution are critical to these questions: land, heritage, history—and sovereignty. Claims revolve around every dimension of Hawaiian experience read through colonialism. “It took our nation, prohibited our spiritual beliefs and practices, substituted our diet, banned our language, desecrated our burial grounds, stole our iwi and moepu and sapped our mana.”9 Notably this definition of seizure outlines a nation stolen through the outlawing of daily habit, tradition, and practice and brief, and the physical possession of bones and artifacts bearing genealogical connectedness and spiritual power. The affront and challenge of this seizure and possession can be found in a singular legal enactment as the Hawaiian Kingdom was overthrown in 1893, forcibly became anAmerican territory after the Spanish–American War of 1898, and then was absorbed by the United States as its 50th state in 1959. It is from these histories that the questions of reclamation and stolen land claims come. As she lost power to mainland white planters, missionaries, and the backing of US military forces, Queen Lili‘uokalani strived to maintain what she could of the sovereignty of her nation. In the end, only one piece of territory remained: the Mauna ‘Ala—the royal mausoleum, 7 Association of Hawaiian Civic Clubs, “Senate Concurrent Resolution 109, SD1 (SSCR3388),” House Committee on Hawaiian Affairs/House Committee on Culture & the Arts (April 20, 2012). 8 Uahikea Maile, “The US Government Has Always Given Native Hawaiians a Raw Deal. It Still Does,” The Guardian (March 4, 2021). See David Uahikeaikaleiohu Maile, ¯ “Gifts of Sovereignty: Settler Colonial Capitalism and the Kanaka ‘Oiwi Politics of Ea” (2019), https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/amst_etds/81 9 E. Sunny Greer, “Na Wai E Ho‘¯ ola I N¯ a Iwi? Who Will Save the Bones: Native Hawaiians and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act,” AsianPacific Law and Policy Journal, vol. 14, no. 1 (2012), 38. See also, Lee Cataluna, “Moepu Are Not for Our Eyes to See,” Honolulu Advertiser (December 13, 2005).

10

THEFT AND GIFTS

225

the sacred and historic place that houses the bones of the Hawaiian royalty and highest ali‘i. In 1900, the Queen worked with both her allies and political rivals to ensure that the Mauna ‘Ala would not be subject to American federal laws, a demand recognized by a joint resolution of the US Congress. Whereas almost all other public facilities and formal ceremonies in Hawai‘i must fly the American flag, on the acres of the Mauna ‘Ala, Kamehameha’s national flag of the Hawaiian nation can fly alone. In this way she acted “to preserve a space to contain the bones of the ruling chiefs and their families; a sovereign space that serves as a symbol of hope for, perhaps, the future restoration of the Hawaiian nation.”10 As is evident, the priority on sovereignty, bones, ancestors, and colonialism are inextricably intertwined in Hawaiian histories, embodying the connectedness of lineages of the mo’ok¯ u‘auhau, only initially analogous to simple genealogies, and more firmly derived from the material evocation of the bones of ancestors, not only where they find final rest, but through the humerus, the place to stand tall, to protect. These experiences complicate and elaborate the deeper dimensions of what theft might mean in terms of taking and restoring a community. As we have seen, by the postwar, the evocation of genealogies would take on new meanings in an era in which the telling of the past and the shaping of contemporary identities began to be restructured by an extraordinary concatenation of global and Oceanian decolonization struggles, rethinking on questions of race, culture, and civilization, and new historical interventions from unexpected quarters: the life sciences and especially genetic sciences. In an era of decolonization and sovereignty struggles, political and cultural claims and reassertions continue to permeate persisting legacies that intertwine with the new genetic and genomic histories of the Pacific, and thus entangled, are encoded in many of the same languages of theft of centuries before: biopiracy, vampire science, stolen generations, life patents, outlawed languages, and practices. These are terms of theft not only of objects, but the kidnapping of children, the extractions of blood and tissues, and taking of hair, bones, the robbery of access to lands, languages, heritages, and appropriation and exploitation of cultural practices. They begin with bodies, analogized to slavery and reduced to data. The Central Australian Aboriginal

10 E. Sunny Greer, “Na Wai E Ho‘¯ ola I N¯ a Iwi? Who Will Save the Bones,” 39.

226

M. K. MATSUDA

Congress, having renamed the Human Genome Diversity Project “the vampire project,’ offered that “The Vampire Project is legalized theft. The Vampire scientists are planning to take and to own what belongs to Indigenous people.”11 Writ large, genetic science built on this promise of drawing from the remaining ancestral world the promise of gifts—some of the largest in the world: an understanding of ancestors and an appreciation of a diverse, anti-racist humanity, cures for disease, help for struggling communities with new and better therapies and pharmaceuticals. But unlike the k¯umara of Rongomaui, instead of a gift inside of a theft, there was theft within the gift. This snare was part of the new world order of the postwar, manifested immediately with the well-documented and direct ties between two domains that overlapped with surprising regularity: genetic science and institutions of colonial dominance. The genetic interest reached back to extensive US government investment in studies of radiation contamination from nuclear weapons—both in war and in testing, and the appeal to gifting peace and prosperity to the world, already a primary ideology from the first Bikini tests. In February 1946, the military governor of the Marshall Islands, Commodore Ben H. Wyatt, travelled to Bikini and famously, or notoriously, asked the Bikinians to join him on the beach one Sunday after church services. He asked the assembled Islanders if they would leave their atoll “temporarily” so that the United States could commence the testing of its new atomic weapons, the first such military experiments since the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of the previous year. Wyatt made the request for “the good of mankind and to end all wars.” Chief Juda deliberated with his people, and also heard the promises about the temporary relocation and the benefit to the peace and prosperity of the entire world. As Darlene Keju-Johnson reports, “Very few of us Marshallese spoke English or even understood it. There was one word that stuck in the chief’s mind, ‘mankind.’ He knew that word because it is in the Bible. So he said, “If it is in the name of God, I am willing to let my people go.”12 11 Matthew Rimmer, “The Genographic Project: Traditional Knowledge and Population Genetics,” Australian Indigenous Law Review, vol. 11, no. 2 (2007), 34–7. 12 Darlene Keju-Johnson, “For the Good of Mankind,” Seattle Journal for Social Justice, vol. 2, no. 1 (May 2003), 309.

10

THEFT AND GIFTS

227

The good of mankind and the end to all world wars for the supposedly temporary relocation for a scientific enterprise would be an immeasurable gift. Keju-Johnson further notes, however, “The naval officer did not tell the chief that the Bikinians would never see their home again. Bikini is off-limits for another 30,000 years. It will never be safe for people ever again.”13 Even as the realities of permanent exile and the continuing and terrifying threat of radiation-induced illness became incontestable, still the logic of understanding the destructive power of nuclear weapons and the radiation effects on victims for generations was deemed useful by a military, scientific, and industrial network of medical researchers working with the Department of Defense and Atomic Energy Commission. The testing continued and studies of mutations and illness became part of the protocol for the revived field of human genetics. Linked to these studies and moving forward in a manner parallel, genetic study in the postwar actively engaged new molecular tools to address and—it was hoped—overcome social and political horrors of the previous generations by displacing race into populations, and by UNESCO’s ideals, being avowedly anti-racist. As noted earlier, the newly configured science would show that race science of the nineteenth century and eugenics and genocide of the twentieth were distortions of a commonality and diversity critical to understanding the connectedness of a global humanity, a scientific evolutionary desideratum as well as a standard bearing for United Nations internationalism. What purportedly would change was a distancing from attempts to hierarchize a humanity of races, impute distinctions between savagery and civilization, or exterminate “brutes.” It would be an attempt at reparative science—clarifying ancestries, uncovering health-linked mutations, advocating for the common constitution of a genomically defined humanity. But though unity of peoples was biologically proclaimed, the acknowledgment of their Indigenous histories and futures was not. Decolonization of knowledge, history, and older legacies still remained. Signal announcements for such initiatives adopted misreadings of the political, historical, and cultural upheavals framing decolonization, even through well-intended scientific exploration. Luca Cavlli-Sforza’s famous first proposal for a diversity project in the journal Genome underscored the “Call for a worldwide survey of human genetic diversity: a vanishing

13 Darlene Keju-Johnson, “For the Good of Mankind,” 309.

228

M. K. MATSUDA

opportunity for the Human Genome Project.” The elements continued attempting to inaugurate new histories while persisting with a logic of fatal impact and the salvage of disappearing Indigenous peoples. The interest in Pacific Islanders, and Indigenous communities worldwide had an unerring logic: humanity is a large construct; indigeneity is defined by local communities and is precisely the reason that genomic science took a compelling interest: mapping populations genetically was premised on the search for diversity and its implications, and that meant the familiar and troubled value placed on “isolation.” In fact, statements from the working groups of the Human Genome Project in 1991 and 1992 indicated special interest in “isolated human populations,” who would be “far from airports and modern laboratories,” also “mostly rural,” and “populations that are vanishing because of mortality, migration, admixture, etc., and that are potentially important for historical genetics.” These all formed a logic to lock living peoples and cultures into pre-modern and ancestral pasts. The Project particularly sought those “representative…of the world before the expansion of present dominant groups.”14 As a preservation of disappearing peoples and their molecular diversity, these efforts would be, genomics researchers claimed, profoundly antiracist and all embracing. The project sought to represent diversity as a verified gift, and for researchers, that meant the collection of samples by Indigenous communities so highly prized for their supposedly pristine ancestral blood. Otherwise, the “human” genome would be constructed from samples drawn largely from Western, industrialized populations, which seemed inherently self-defeating for an initiative with an ambition to represent the world. This alone would, it appeared, clearly be antiracist. By contributing, peoples the world over would learn about human diversity, the importance of distinctions yet the commonality of biologies. Indeed, humanity itself had now become the gift—and would be the outcome of a search for knowledge encoded in the benefit for a totalized human world.

14 Jenny Reardon, “The Human Genome Diversity Project: A Case Study in Coproduction,” Social Studies of Science, vol. 31, no. 3 (June 2001), 360–3. See L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, A. C. Wilson, C. R. Cantor, R. M. Cook-Deegan, and M. C. King, “Call for a Worldwide Survey of Human Genetic Diversity: A Vanishing Opportunity for the Human Genome Project,” Genomics, vol. 11, no. 2 (1991), 490–1.

10

THEFT AND GIFTS

229

More, this would support not only the scientific unravelling of racism in favor of global humanism, but provide new, visionary medical treatments for the scourges of illness and debility. As such, this was not only a desirable enterprise—but an imperative. As one journalist reported in 2020, “Since its birth 30 years ago, proponents of the Human Genome Project have promised that genetics research would yield untold health benefits for all of us.”15 Indeed, in 1990, James Watson himself asserted that failing to move the project ahead and usher in those benefits as quickly as possible would be “essentially immoral.” Yet, who were “all of us?” In succeeding years, Watson would become notorious for his remarks justifying ethnic and anti-gay prejudice, claiming inferior intelligence of African and Black communities (which he attributed to genetics), and denigrating women’s contributions to science.16 The relationship of scientific promises and social and cultural priorities remained fraught. Here, despite the attendant controversies and resistance from Indigenous communities to many forms of genetic research— including medical research—it was not opposition to scientific intervention in itself that evolved as a stumbling block in ambition or intention. Contemporary surveys of Indigenous communities, in fact, underscore health research question responses that indicate a strong and longstanding adhesion and desire to benefit their personal health, own communities, and even generate a common fund of knowledge for medical practice broadly. It is profoundly not an anti-scientific stance. Notes one survey study dedicated to Hawaiian views on, for example, biobanking—the holding of blood and tissue samples for research: “multiple respondents noted the potential for medical research to yield advancements in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease. Moreover, at least 1 respondent in each of the 10 focus groups in this study connected participation in health research to Native Hawaiian values of helping others or contributing to the ‘common good.’”17 15 Erik Parens, “The Inflated Promise of Genomic Medicine,” Scientific American (June 1, 2020), https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-inflated-promise-of-gen omic-medicine/. 16 Natalie Angier, “Great 15-Year Project to Decipher Genes Stirs Opposition,” New York Times, section C, page 1 (June 5, 1990). For Watson’s own controversies, see, Josh Gabbatiss, “James Watson: The Most Controversial Statements Made by the Father of DNA,” The Independent (January 13, 2019). 17 Riley Taitingfong, Cinnamon S. Bloss, Cynthia Triplett, Julie Cakici, et al., “A Systematic Literature Review of Native American and Pacific Islanders’ Perspectives on

230

M. K. MATSUDA

But the “who benefits” question remained at stake. The study also concluded, “Native Hawaiians in another focus group study were more willing to participate in clinical studies if they perceived it would benefit their family and/or their broader community.”18 The surveys show a marked interest in connections to community members as leaders, and direct benefits. Many Indigenous leaders have wondered why so much attention was paid to preserving cellular evidence of ancestry and so little apparent concern was paid to social and political inequities that challenged their current communities. These issues framed and were prioritized not only for community health questions and concerns about insurance and care access discrimination based on health data, but also extended back to the broader ambitions of the Human Genome Diversity Project. Researchers were perceived to “arrive to Indigenous communities with the sole purpose of collecting samples, then leave with no further communication or concern for the welfare of the community.” As the Indigenous People’s Council on Biocolonialism—developed in response to the HGDP—queried about this apparent disjunction in priorities, “Why the tremendous interest in saving the genes of Indigenous people and not the people themselves?”19 Where the blood, tissues, and genetics of the living and the bones and burials of the deceased join together remains inescapably around questions of consent, autonomy, authority, and continuity of living communities as well as the means to honor ancestors: the exercise of sovereignty. Bodies giving samples, taken for experiments, or laid to rest in caves or museums, are material manifestations of history, culture, and genealogies tied to places, the cultural knowledge of those places, and the establishment of heritage. Citing UNESCO protocols, Halena Kapuni-Reynolds notes that heritage is “transmitted from generation to generation, is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history, and provides them with

Health Data Privacy in the United States,” Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, vol. 27, no. 12 (October 2020), 1992–3. 18 Riley Taitingfong, Cinnamon S. Bloss, Cynthia Triplett, Julie Cakici, et al., “A Systematic Literature Review of Native American and Pacific Islanders’ Perspectives on Health Data Privacy in the United States,” 1993. 19 Debra Harry, “The Human Genome Diversity Project: Implications for Indigenous Peoples,” Abya Yala News, vol. 8, no. 4 (1994), 13–15.

10

THEFT AND GIFTS

231

a sense of identity and continuity.”20 These embodied experiences are also inseparable from genealogical understandings of bodily substances and tissues and their genetic elements, such that surveys indicate “Indigenous participants commonly understood biospecimens as an extension of the meaningful relationships they have to their ancestors and traditional lands, which has a significant impact on the ways they would like their specimens handled, the purposes toward which they would like them to be used, and understandings of who ‘owns’ the specimens.”21 And, by the embrace of genealogy, who has authority over ancestors, their histories and the lands they draw from, the bodies and value given to their descendants down to the present day. As the examples from bones to specimens have indicated, these debates have been true in museum councils, biomedical laboratories, archives, and land courts.22 At times, all of these elements converge around the potentials and cautions surrounding genomic histories. Above, the histories of the stolen k¯a‘ai, their bones, and mo‘ok¯ u‘auhau were recounted through the relationship between Waipi‘o Valley, the Bishop Museum, and the Mauna ‘Ala, the royal mausoleum. The mausoleum itself was formally designed and under construction throughout the early 1860s under the direction of King Kamehameha IV and Queen Emma and completed under the reign of Kamehameha V in 1865. It drew in part architecturally on Western-style tombs, established earlier for the bodies of King Kamehameha II, born Liholiho (1797– 1824), and his wife, Queen Kam¯amalu, influenced by those monarchs’ state visit to Great Britain and in particular Westminster Abbey in London in 1824. Curator of the Mausoleum, Bill Maioho, has noted that the king

20 Halena Kapuni-Reynolds, “Mo‘ok¯ uauhau (Genealogies) of Care: Curating Ali‘i Collections at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum,” Studies in Arts and Humanities, vol. 3, no. 2 (2017), 88. 21 Riley Taitingfong, Cinnamon S. Bloss, Cynthia Triplett, Julie Cakici, et al., “A Systematic Literature Review of Native American and Pacific Islanders’ Perspectives on Health Data Privacy in the United States,” 1995. 22 Jon Daehnke, “Responsibility to the Ancestors, Responsibility to the Descendants: Artifacts, Stewardship, and NAGPRA in Hawai‘i,” in Lena Mortensen and Julie Hollowell, eds., Ethnographies and Archaeologies: Iterations of the Past, Gainsville: University Press of Florida (2009).

232

M. K. MATSUDA

“refused to step in there, because he wasn’t blood-connected. These were the kings, and he felt he had no right to walk around their caskets.”23 Liholiho had great reverence for the lineages of British monarchy, and considerations of death and legacy became parts of his own unfortunate history. Both Liholiho and Kam¯amalu contracted measles in London and died, just a week apart. Their bodies were returned to Hawai‘i aboard a Royal Navy frigate, and a coral house was built as a resting place for them near the ‘Iolani Palace. Their bodies were moved later by descendants to a completed Mauna ‘Ala’. As with the k¯a‘ai story, a museum also plays a role in this narrative. Though Liholiho’s body returned to Hawai‘i, his intricate, ceremonial feather cape remained in Britain—perhaps intended as a royal gift to King George—and became part of the collection and display of the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. As an anthropologist and genomic scientist, Keolu Fox notes from the collection a particular artifact—not the splendor of the cape, but a lei niho palaoa, or whale ivory necklace. Nor is it the whale tooth that attracts interest, but an observation that “the thick corded lei supporting the whale ivory pendant is composed of braided human hair collected from Hawaiian Kings.” As Fox puts it, this lei “is not just an artifact, but an ancestor.” In historical, cultural, royal, genealogical—and molecular biological—dimensions, Fox recognizes that the artifacts are colonial as well as historical materializations of past lives. More, that they are not only invaluable as markers of Polynesian history and culture, but are themselves, “the physical remains of our ancestors—our hair, genealogy, and DNA—and they are on display the world over.”24 Fox underscores a full cognizance of the potential of ancient DNA to help elucidate questions of human history and ancestry, and in his own work he specifies a hope “to apply genomics to the remains of Hawaiian men and women who lived hundreds to thousands of years ago,” to understand how Hawaiian genomes have been shaped by European colonial diseases like leprosy, smallpox, and syphilis. At the same time, he critically reflects on the practices of his own profession, for “extracting 23 William “Kai” Bishop Kaihe‘ekai Maioho, curator, Royal Musoleum at Mauna ‘Ala, “Pohukaiana,” http://www.pacificworlds.com/nuuanu/native/native3.cfm (November 19, 2021). 24 Keolu Fox, “Lei Niho Palaoa and Digital Tools to Safeguard Against the Illicit Use of Ancient DNA,” Hawaiian Archaeology, vol. 15 (2021), 1.

10

THEFT AND GIFTS

233

the best-quality DNA from ancient remains requires the partial destruction of those specimens. And once bones, teeth, hair and so on are ground into dust, future opportunities for using them to understand our past are lost.”25 Rather than a rush to sampling, data collection, and publication, Fox urges researchers to develop less invasive techniques and to definitively involve cultural communities in making determinations about the use of human remains of ancestors. Critically, he also ties the perils and potentials of ancient DNA to very contemporary concerns. Referring to Liholiho’s collection in Cambridge, Fox observes, “These ancient locks of hair included in the lei niho palaoa contain DNA, and if that DNA is extracted and sequenced by genome scientists moving forward with industrial-scale paleogenomics sequencing projects…it could have profound effects on policy related to the determination of blood quantum in Hawai‘i.”26 We have previously seen how colonial blood quantum legacies continue to structure land, resource, and recognition entitlements for Indigenous peoples from Hawai‘i to Australia, marking both with policies of deliberate exclusion and uneven attempts at restitution from Homelands benefits to Stolen Generation justice. These issues and locales are contemporaneous around not only blood sampling and blood quanta, but, as Fox alludes, genealogy, DNA, and the scientific and political analysis of hair. Because of the ways that single DNA samples can be utilized to extrapolate general characteristics of communities and populations, both individual and collective studies of hair have large ramifications. In a notable bridging across generations of research controversies, in the 1920s, the British anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon acquired a lock of reddish-brown hair from a young Australian Aboriginal man at a railway station encounter in Southwestern Australia. The hair remained in a collections drawer of the British Museum for almost a century, brought to light again in 2011 by Eske Willerslev, a University of Copenhagen evolutionary biologist, whose team sequenced the DNA in the hair to create the first complete Aboriginal Australian genome. As ultimately published, the research compared this genome with those of others from China, Europe, Papua New Guinea, and African Yoruba 25 Keolu Fox and John Hawks, “Use Ancient Remains More Wisely,” Nature (August 28, 2019). 26 Keolu Fox, “Lei Niho Palaoa and Digital Tools to Safeguard Against the Illicit Use of Ancient DNA,” Hawaiian Archaeology, vol. 15 (2021), 4.

234

M. K. MATSUDA

to determine that “The Aboriginal and Melanesian genomes were the most alike. Both resembled European and Asian genomes more than the African’s, indicating that their ancestors left Africa in the same group, but that the forebears of Aboriginals and Melanesians first broke away to Asia, while others headed to Europe and the Middle East.” This movement, in turn, was dated to indicate a two-wave settlement of Asia.27 The research, later developed further in 2016, had large implications for the reconstruction of ancient DNA-premised models of migrations, histories, and human population settlements. It was, however, not uniquely a triumph of complex, technical science and research imagination, but a controversy over the bioethical dilemmas of the hair sample itself. When the research first became known, pre-publication, disquiet moved through the Australian anthropological community. Commentary in Nature argued, “To be sequencing DNA from the hair of a deceased indigenous person is uncharted ethical territory,” and many uneasy researchers and ethicists—including those who had advised the troubled HGDP in the 1990s—cautioned of releasing research based on an element of a person’s body long held as a museum piece without consultation with groups representing Aboriginal communities.28 Notably, Willerslev indicated that he had not been previously observant of these considerations as his own institution’s review board categorically regarded hair specimens of the deceased as archaeological and not biological in nature, a distinction that needed to be reassessed and reconsidered. Australian colleagues had Willerslev contact the Goldfields Land and Sea Council of Kalgoorlie, Western Australia for consultation.29 In a subsequent correspondence published in Nature, the research manager of the Council indicated approval of the study, “the decision to allow analysis of the 90-year-old hair sample was made by the duly mandated people…In granting their permission for research, the board exercised properly defined moral, cultural and legal authority to speak on behalf of the Aboriginal people there.” The decision further clarified that, upon investigation, “the hair sample was almost certainly given to British 27 Ann Gibbons, “Aboriginal Genome Shows Two-Wave Settlement of Asia,” Science, vol. 333, no. 6050 (September 23, 2011), 1689. 28 Emma Kowal and others, in Ewen Callaway, “Aboriginal Genome Analysis Comes to Grips with Ethics,” Nature, no. 477 (September 28, 2011), 522. 29 Ewen Callaway, “Aboriginal Genome Analysis Comes to Grips with Ethics,” 522.

10

THEFT AND GIFTS

235

ethnologist Alfred Cort Haddon voluntarily in the early 1920s,” citing this as an informal exchange and an acceptable practice—but definitively not one that would be continued as “a model for all such exchanges in the future.”30 All additional research would require a standard of clear consent. The meanings of hair and cultural and historical understanding are also foundational to not only single individuals representing potentially identifiable communities and representatives, but multiple members of communities spread across geographies and generations. One of the bestknown cases unfolds around yet another museum, the South Australian Museum in Adelaide, where locked rooms hold collections of Aboriginal cultural items, many sacred, and not appropriate for general public display. One cabinet is filled with thousands of envelopes, each labeled and referenced for its content: a lock of human hair. The collection has been known in Australia, though largely within anthropological research communities. In the twenty-first century it has also become broadly publicized as the center of an ambitious effort, the Aboriginal Heritage Project, to study DNA from hair and remains of Indigenous Australians and, potentially, reconnect families and heritages. The hair samples themselves have a controversial history and legacy, having been collected over generations beginning in 1928 by the Australian and American ethnologists Norman Tindale and Joseph Birdsell. Their field teams are noted for their intensive genealogical work gathering information about Aboriginal Australian communities, making and taking scores of photographs and films, hand drawings and illustrations, maps, and sound and voice recordings. Their archives hold collections of family tree information naming more than 50,000 individuals and—clippings of more than 5000 hair samples. Aboriginal elder of the Kaurna people, Lewis O’Brien, was born in 1930 to an Irish father and a great-grandmother’s line that traces back to Kudnarto—also called Mary Ann Adams—who was displaced by land seizures in the nineteenth century, married Tom Adams in 1848 and is recognized as the ancestor of many Kaurna generations to the present day. Her name is affixed along with Wellington’s to a square in Adelaide, a presence celebrated by scholars like Georgina Yambo Williams, who underscores the inseparability of land and heritage: “As a Kaurna person, 30 Craig Muller, “Correspondence: Aboriginal People Agreed to DNA Study,” Nature, vol. 478 (October 27, 2011), 459.

236

M. K. MATSUDA

I have grown up with oral traditions and understandings about places and their significance that do not necessarily appear in the historical record…placenames are the ‘skeletal remains’ of the historical surviving reality of Kaurna First Nations peoples, once a peaceful and intact body of lore/ law of the land.”31 Both material and figurative, the bones and body configure the inseparability of land from the authority and history of its inhabitants. Kudnarto’s descendant, Lewis O’Brien, served as an adviser to the Aboriginal History Project as a noted educator and scholar, and one with direct experience of the Tindale and Birdsell field work: one of the locks of hair in the museum collection is his. As recounted by journalists in 2019, O’Brien …remembers Tindale visiting Point Pearce, the mission where his aunt lived in 1938. Tindale interviewed O’Brien, aged 8, and his brother, and measured their heights and the length of their arms, among other things. Tindale also snipped a lock of O’Brien’s hair. “I felt like a guinea pig,” says O’Brien, an elder with the Kaurna people, who is now 89 and lives in nearby Adelaide. O’Brien didn’t like how Tindale studied Aboriginal people, but he can see that the collection is a valuable resource for unravelling history for some communities.32

In his role as elder and arbiter on the benefits and cautions of genomic genealogies, O’Brien indicated general support of a DNA-comparison effort, where specifically wanted and requested. “I want to be able to say, ‘we’ll get you tested and help you find out where you come from,” he noted, while working with what, in other contexts like the HGDP, had become so controversial—attempts to compare individual DNA sequences against genetically constructed reference maps of regions and lineages. In this case—maps were built around sequencing the DNA for Tindale’s and Birdsell’s hair samples.

31 Rob Amery, Georgina Yambo Williams, “Reclaiming Through Renaming: The Reinstatement of Kaurna Toponyms in Adelaide and the Adelaide Plains,” in L. Hercus, F. Hodges, and J. Simpson, eds., The Land Is a Map: Placenames of Indigenous Origin in Australia, Canberra: Pandanus Books in association with Pacific Linguistics (2002), 267. 32 Nicky Philips, “Indigenous Groups Look to Ancient DNA to Bring Their Ancestors Home,” Nature, vol. 568 (2019), 294–7, https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-011 67-w.

10

THEFT AND GIFTS

237

Ancient DNA and population geneticists continue to work on these efforts, following protocols that require direct community visits and explanations of the research being undertaken on extracted or acquired biological samples, ancient and contemporary. Private meetings are arranged for families whose relatives have become known as parts of museum holdings, and specifically the Tindale collection, through their hair or recorded image. On DNA questions particularly, attention is paid to addressing family concerns about genetic information that could lead to cultural, legal, or historical misidentification, or perpetuate legacies of exclusion, prejudice, land and heritage dispossession. Grounding these discussions remains the foundational principle that Aboriginality cannot be claimed or adjudicated uniquely about genetic inheritance, but has been, since the 1980s, a determination that must consider accounts of self-identification as well as the critical acceptance by a community equally with records of familial descent. The DNA sequencing, led by Alan Cooper and Ray Tobler utilizing techniques from ancient DNA analysis and population genetics, provides individuals and families with information drawn from the ancestral hair sample framed by attempts to observe and caution about any divergences from known family histories. The larger work, based on more than a hundred hair cuttings, sketches out a continent-wide map of Aboriginal groups, likely migration and kinship relations, and potential overlapping knowledge with other ancestral remains whose provenance remains undetermined. These include bones and human remains held by the thousands for study purposes in museum collections, and generically designated “Aboriginal,” which might be identified and returned to specific communities by crossreferencing anthropological knowledge, as well as evidence from hair samples or other DNA examinations.33 This latter question is a reckoning with a process of community building that is not only expressed through affirmation of claims of the living, but reconciliation with ancestors. In the Yidinji community, elder Gudju Gudju Fourmile offers, “When our remains are off Country, we try to make sure they come back,” as reburial

33 See Paul Turnbull, “Colonial Museums and the Indigenous Dead, C. 1830–1875,” in P. Turnbull, Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan (2017), 195–222; also “Judicious Collectors, 1870–1914,” 223–56.

238

M. K. MATSUDA

and the reunification of bones and land is “a big thing for many tribal groups.”34 Repairing those historical legacies means addressing many kinds of places and the borders around them. Ngarrindjeri and Barkindji archivist and cultural and education employment consultant Deanne HanchantNichols has worked on genealogy, genomics, and reparations questions with Australian institutions extensively. She recognizes that issues of theft permeate a dialectic of Indigenous activism and demands for repatriation of remains and artifacts and emphasizes efforts to build cooperative approaches to scientific sampling and study premised upon consultation and consensus. Still, she expresses a resonant theme through her involvement in such work: “For many, many years, science kept us out. We had no role in museums other than for them to steal our stories, steal our artefacts and steal our bones.”35 The promises yet limitations of approaches built upon Indigenous political vigilance, acquisition of legal consent, or valorizing distinctions between “good and bad science” are readily apparent—they continue the tradition of distinguishing self-defined researchers from research subjects. Historians of science have noted that “there were disturbing connections between science, museums and the collecting of ancestral remains,” yet as the connections evolved to be based on investigations of human variation (not blatantly on discredited theories of Indigenous primitivism or inferiority), the questions became increasingly difficult to disentangle.36 As such, it is the role of science itself as a method and enterprise rather than a content that has come into question with greater promise arising 34 Nicky Philips, “Indigenous Groups Look to Ancient DNA to Bring Their Ancestors Home,” Nature, vol. 568 (2019), 294–7, https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-01901167-w. For broader knowledge, David Jones and Darryl Low Choy, eds., Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Yurlendj-nganjin. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars (2021). 35 Deanne Hanchant-Nichols, in Nicky Philips, “Indigenous Groups Look to Ancient DNA to Bring Their Ancestors Home,” Nature, vol. 568 (2019), 294–7, https:// doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-01167-w. See also, Christopher J. Wilson (Ngarrindjeri), “Becoming a Ngarrindjeri Archaeologist: The Journey to and from Suburbia,” in George Nicholas, ed., Being and Becoming Indigenous Archaeologists, London and New York: Routledge (2016), ch. 35. 36 Paul Turnbull, Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillian (2017), 197; on multivocal museum practice and silenced voices, Emma Kowal, “Spencer’s Double: the Decolonial Afterlife of a Postcolonial Museum Prop,” BJHS Themes, vol. 4 (September 2019), 55–77.

10

THEFT AND GIFTS

239

at the interstices of where research groups, local councils, advisories, and practitioners are both the actors and the acted upon. Some scholars have expressed this as knowledge production that, to possible degrees, moves away from “scientific institutes in colonial metropoles,” and toward “provincializing science into one ‘indigenous knowledge tradition.’” In this, it would resituate science practice into dialogues and engagements with the local communities it seeks to study, rather than recapitulate the presumptive eminence of universalized constitutions of knowledge. Contrary to simply following or building a more rigorously ethical science within a continuing institutional tradition, it considers “epistemic and reparative decolonization,” as a destabilized foundation for both history and scientific evidence.37 Some of this involves newer actors. Ngarrindjeri archaeologist Christopher Wilson has reflected on early discriminatory experiences that “made me more aware of my indigeneity and made me form closer ties with other Indigenous youth.” This was a path that led him to pursue science, culture, and arts studies toward his doctorate and the ability to share “the extensive history that we have that goes back before our colonial history.” On Ngarrindjeri repatriation questions, he’s offered, “This helps the community through a necessary healing process.”38 This is both a call for consideration as well as an attempt to cogently express a series of fractures, limits, shifts, and new articulations that have for generations been transforming genealogies and histories through a relentless and slow process of continuing decolonization—both in politics and practices of knowledge. Such knowledge historically evolved from imperial science toward a universal humanity and anti-racist scientific UNESCO project in the postwar era, as global experiences of conflict, population displacements,

37 Timothy Neale, Emma Kowal, “‘Related’ Histories: On Epistemic and Reparative Decolonization,” History & Theory, vol. 59, no. 3 (September 2020), 403–4. On the theme, “Mistrust is a significant but not insurmountable barrier to the acceptance of genomics by Indigenous people,” and a modelling of ethical protocols, see Emma Kowal, Simon Easteal, Mick Gooda, “Indigenous Genomics,” Australian Science (July/August 2016), 18–20. 38 Dr Christopher Wilson, “Ngarrindjeri Archaeology,” interview, Flinders University (September 20, 2017), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fkj0_gDFHDo, and “Australia’s First Indigenous PhD in Archaeology,” Flinders University News (September 20, 2017), https://news.flinders.edu.au/blog/2017/09/20/australias-first-indigenousphd-archaeology/.

240

M. K. MATSUDA

and devastation of homelands sought correction in carefully considered, yet self-contradictory efforts to observe strictly respectful and ethical protocols for human studies, including genealogical and genomic research. In establishing the HGDP, Cavalli-Sforza was clear about his intentions to “Take steps to ensure that all samples are collected with meaningful informed consent, obtained from the government of the country, the local official authorities, the population sampled as a group, and also from every sampled individual.” This general prescriptive was also detailed and defined—citing attention to samples, risks, regions, situations, customs, languages, and relevant legal boundaries. It also displayed both the protections and the limits of those protections that were built into assumptions about engaging informed consent as an interactive process. Encourage the full participation of the sampled population, as may happen, for instance, by giving the population a role in designing the questions to be studied, physical participation in the process (ideally, when possible, by carrying on as much of the investigation locally, as possible, with the maximum possible participation by local scientists and personnel, and in the process promoting technology transfer), and later keeping the population informed about results. All this will be more easily feasible if, for each population, an anthropologist who is in continuous contact with that population is involved in the process.39

Here, both the ethical imperative of consent, as well as its inherent limitations are evident. Participation from local communities in experimental design is encouraged, as well as regular consultation. It is also straightforward to see that a line falls between local subjects of research and local “scientists and personnel,” and that anthropologists will be hopefully assigned to engage with the “populations.” More, the very question of consent, a bulwark principle of Western legal practice and bioethics, is further troubled rather than resolved by shifting the consent framework from individuals to communities. Legal scholars have duly noted, “Human genome research destabilizes established notions of the ‘consenting research subject,’ because individuals who donate DNA samples for research studies necessarily reveal sensitive information not 39 Luca Cavalli-Sforza, The Human Genome Diversity Project, Washington, DC: National Science Foundation, Office of Scientific and Technical Information Identifier: 505327 (December 31, 1994), https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/505327.

10

THEFT AND GIFTS

241

only about themselves, but also about others genetically linked to them.” This is particularly true with population-specific research—back to the HGDP—that strongly emphasizes smaller groups, often joined by densely interrelated kin and community networks.40 In addition to these complications, Jenny Reardon has explored in detail the staggering conundrum of a research team trying to obtain informed consent of a group. Not because of necessary resistance from members, or even the challenges of engaging absolutely all members, but because researchers pursuing a strictly consent model would necessarily be “producing the very ‘community’ and ‘population’ identities that it aimed to study.”41 In effect, by presuming genetic populations could map to social and cultural groups—or even regional geographies—it would mean that experts in molecular biology would be determining community boundaries and membership. A group that charged itself to draft a Model Ethical Protocol for the HGDP immediately abandoned the Western standard of individual consent in favor of a group consent model, on the principle that where collective knowledge about entire populations was sought, those members should determine participation and approval. However, members of the Protocol committee, in discussion with Native American and other global Indigenous communities soon were asked, and asked themselves: “Is the population this village? Is it the plains Apache? Is it all the Apache? Is it all Na Dene speakers? Is it Native Americans? What’s the population…is it a population where you can meaningfully ask either the group as a whole or some representative body for permission?”42 It became clear that in order to request group consent, groups would first have to be created so as to have identifiable constituents with whom to have the discussions. In this way, protocol discussions questioned whether a pan-M¯aori organization existed or would be appropriate to speak for “M¯aori” interests in scientific-medical research. As CavalliSforza’s original proposal indicated, such questions might ultimately rely 40 Gordon R. Mitchell and Kelly Happe, “Informed Consent After the Human Genome

Project,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs, vol. 4, no. 3 (Fall 2001), 375. 41 Jenny Reardon, “The Human Genome Diversity Project: A Case Study in Coproduction,” Social Studies of Science, vol. 31, no. 3 (June 2001), 378. 42 Jenny Reardon, “The Human Genome Diversity Project,” 375. The key work is this field is Kim TallBear, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press (2013).

242

M. K. MATSUDA

upon assigned anthropologists or other experts, “knowledgeable about the population.” The key question here, however, was not the degree of expertise or considerate knowledge available, but a more incisive claim of decolonization: the authority to determine who belongs—a sovereignty right. As one Native attorney made abundantly clear, “Tribal membership is one of many sovereign rights that outsiders have attempted to circumvent or deny of native people…Only native people are able to make these decisions, not scientists, lawyers, or ethicists.”43

43 Jenny Reardon, “The Human Genome Diversity Project: A Case Study in Coproduction,” Social Studies of Science, vol. 31, no. 3 (June 2001), 376–7. For fundamental definitions, see Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith, and Michelle H. Raheja, “Sovereignty,” in Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith, and Michelle H. Raheja, eds., Native Studies Keywords, Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press (2015), 3.

CHAPTER 11

Genetic Drift

In 2021, the Seattle biotechnology company, Variant Bio, welcomed Huti Watson to their Ethics Advisory Board. In a detailed interview exploring her role, she was asked about her own upbringing and formative influences toward commitments in bioethics, cultural continuity, and community engagement. She spoke first of her mother, and the M¯aori language, and also about the histories that shaped both their lives. Her mother, Watson noted, “was a product of the ‘Urban Drift’ that happened with her generation,” a period bounded by the late 1930s to the mid1980s when many families moved way from rural and tribal communities toward cities, creating a “cultural divide between rural and urban M¯aori and a cultural divide between those who were separated from their heritage.”1 Evoking “drift” was an arresting way to begin a conversation about working on equity and justice issues with a biotechnology company. Economic treatises from the 1930s—such as by Otago economist Allan G. B. Fisher—saw New Zealand drift debates as barometers of prosperity, citing academic arguments that, “As a community grew in wealth the 1 Noah Collins, “Huti Watson Joins Variant Bio’s Ethics Advisory Board” (December 7, 2021), https://medium.com/variantbio/huti-watson-joins-variant-bios-ethics-advisoryboard-2013066c6836 (accessed August 10, 2022).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. K. Matsuda, Genealogies, Genomes, and Histories in the Pacific, Palgrave Studies in Pacific History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45449-3_11

243

244

M. K. MATSUDA

proportion of farming to total population would steadily diminish…To complain about the world-wide drift to the towns is to complain that the world as a whole is growing richer.”2 Troubling this narrative of political-economic triumph for a largely P¯akeh¯a audience, Pare Keiha and Paul Moon have proposed a long view history of M¯aori urbanization, tracing back to Polynesian canoe-borne settlement, exploration of the islands, and the search for autonomy and authority after the development of British settler colonialism. By the midtwentieth century, they argue, “the urban migration of M¯aori was to mirror the earlier efforts of their Austronesian ancestors,” yet one marked by a weakened sense of localized communities, and the fraying of “kinship links, the traditional division of labour, community cohesion, cooperative economic development, and traditional political structures.” This meant significant dislocation and frequent marginalization in a society where M¯aori “are increasingly a minority.” However, along with struggles also came “alternative expressions of social, cultural, and economic organisation,” and powerfully, a fashioning of histories that connected rather than separated generations across generations and places.3 Huti Watson made the logic of such histories very clear: “For me, genetics is about whakapapa, and the relationship to your ancestors.” To retain genealogies across generations “impacts on how we engage with and think about research.” Her work with Variant Bio, then, was very much framed by longer histories than medical ethics in product or therapy development: Urban drift was a huge part of my life and helped me to see exactly what racism meant. It also helped me to understand the hardships of Indigenous people and those that are a direct result of colonization such as the appetite for land and resources by colonisers, and the injustices wrought among Indigenous people.4

2 Allan G. B. Fisher, The Clash of Progress and Security, London: Macmillan and Co. (1935), v–vi. 3 Pare Keiha, Paul Moon, “The Emergence and Evolution of Urban Maori Authorities: A Response to Maori Urbanisation,” Te Kaharoa, vol. 1, no. 1 (January 12, 2008), 2–3, 5–6. 4 Noah Collins, “Huti Watson Joins Variant Bio’s Ethics Advisory Board” (December 7, 2021), https://mediumcom/variantbio/huti-watson-joins-variant-bios-ethics-advisoryboard-2013066c6836 (accessed August 10, 2022).

11

GENETIC DRIFT

245

Her “important thing to remember,” was that being pro-Indigenous “doesn’t mean being anti-European or anti-Western.” This she understood especially to be true when addressing social inequities and health disparities—not rejection of dominant traditions, but “finding a space where you can work in a way that helps to create better balance.”5 As a M¯aori bioethicist and advocate for Indigenous perspectives, Watson and other board members were tasked with ensuring genomics research participants had clear consent protocols, and that approved research properly embraced traditional knowledge that provided direct benefits to the communities involved. As a moment in time, perhaps as notable was the fact that Watson was succeeding Waikato researcher Maui Hudson, who had already spent years developing Indigenous Data Governance principles, combining his genomic and cultural knowledge into formal protocols with initiatives focused on Traditional Knowledge and Biocultural Labels. Such a prescription was more than a symbolic politics aligning scientific goals and community sensibilities or providing cultural awareness to scientists; it was and is an active project of changing the actors. Foundational work by Hudson and other Indigenous scholars has built upon arguments that “It is vital that we do not perpetuate the continued disempowerment of Indigenous communities through the appropriation of their genetic heritage and genomic data.” Hudson emphasizes “continued recognition of Indigenous rights and interests, as well as a commitment to partnership and power sharing in the development of genomic research initiatives.”6 In a likewise manner, Hawaiian Keolu Fox has dedicated himself to improved protocols and practices of scientific management, and to also 5 Noah Collins, “Huti Watson Joins Variant Bio’s Ethics Advisory Board” (December 7, 2021), https://medium.com/variantbio/huti-watson-joins-variant-bios-ethics-advisoryboard-2013066c6836 (accessed August 10, 2022). Note also, from a research article headed by Maui Hudson and Aroha Te Pareake Mead, “The literature provided some consistent messages about the key M¯aori cultural concepts and values relevant to biotechnology and genetic research. There is a general consensus that whakapapa (genealogy) sits as the key concept for M¯aori communities,” Maui Hudson, Aroha Te Pareake Mead, David Chagné, et al., “Indigenous Perspectives and Gene Editing in Aotearoa New Zealand,” Frontiers of Bioengineering and Biotechnology (April 11, 2019), 6. 6 Maui Hudson, Nanibaa’ A. Garrison, Rogena Sterling, et al., “Rights, Interests and expectations: Indigenous Perspectives on Unrestricted Access to Genomic Data,” Nature Reviews Genetics, vol. 21 (2020), 377–84; Maui Hudson, Stephanie Carroll, “Technologies to Operationalize Indigenous Data Sovereignty,” ELSIhub (October 6, 2020), https://elsihub.org/collection/technologies-operationalize-indigenous-data-sovereignty.

246

M. K. MATSUDA

becoming himself one of those genome scientists to redefine Indigenous research. Broadly, this has meant redrawing the field not uniquely as studies of Indigenous populations or groupings, but as work done by Indigenous communities. In this way, actual control of sampling, testing, and housing of data is in local hands, and the knowledge gained is an expression of community understandings, practices, and sovereignty. Fox has argued, “One way to facilitate a paradigm shift toward equitable benefit sharing would be to ensure that Indigenous people have control of data from Indigenous populations, including digital sequence information.” This underscores a reorientation of scientific research practice in ways that deconstruct the relative role of definitions—and separations—between researchers and research subjects. Thus, advocates for practices like Indigenous data sovereignty have been building networks and institutions toward participation of Indigenous people in “the governance of data and biologic samples and for the use of digital tools that define sample usage rights in order to increase transparency and integrity in the use of digital sequence information.”7 Tahu Kukutai and colleagues have assayed these questions in policy and legislative terms in national and United Nations registers, determining that “While the Western idea of data sovereignty’ can be seen as a product of the digital age and nation-state,” Indigenous data sovereignty reaches deeper in time and underscores the proper historical and cultural location for determining authority over the use and purposes of Indigenous community data, extending from individual information to territories, regions, and lifeways. Notably, Kukutai observes that such prescriptions are built on “indigenous oral traditions, which included a complex set of rights and responsibilities concerning the use of community-held information.”8 Not defined by modern administrative regimes of proprietary information and individual ownership, the data is encultured and historically

7 Keolu Fox, “The Illusion of Inclusion—The ‘All of Us’ Research Program and Indigenous People’s DNA, The New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 383, no. 5 (July 30, 2020), 411–13. Also, Maui Hudson, Nanibaa’ A. Garrison, Stephanie Russo Carroll, et al., “Rights, Interests, and Expectations: Indigenous Perspectives on Unrestricted Access to Genomic Data,” Nature Reviews Genetics, vol. 21 (April 6, 2020), 377–84. 8 Tahu Kukutai, John Taylor, eds., Data Sovereignty for Indigenous Peoples: Toward an Agenda, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR), vol. 38, Canberra: ANU Press, (2016), 14–5.

11

GENETIC DRIFT

247

situated. Legal scholars have broadly noted that traditional knowledge— based on specialized learning and deeply intergenerational transmission— is “remarkably similar to intellectual property rights,” including farmers’ crop techniques, handicrafts, music, dance, community stories, as well as medicinal treatments that are “protected under modern intellectual property law as copyright, patents, trademarks or plant breeder’s rights.”9 As noted, these claims on rights are not necessarily new; they form a continuity that has long historical roots and has undergone significant evolution across generations. In a 1998 article, medical doctor and Hawaiian sovereignty leader, Kekuni Blaisdell, offered his own history: “The modern era in the Pacific indigenous rights movement may be considered to have begun after World War II in 1946 with two major events,” which he identified as the United Nations Charter Chapter XI, Article 73, and the galvanizing impact of nuclear testing in the Pacific. It was an era when, he suggested, “Even the terms ‘indigenous’ and ‘indigenous rights’ were yet to gain common usage.”10 This was very much reflected in political decolonization itself globally. A study of Article 73 underscores the ostensibly anti-colonial yet determinedly paternalistic “sacred trust” of UN members, which, according to the text, “have or assume responsibilities for the administration of territories whose peoples have not yet attained a full measure of selfgovernment.” Notwithstanding that self-government had been occluded or overthrown historically by colonialism itself, the focus of the extant powers and their presumably enlightened charge was to oversee the NonSelf-Governing Territories to ensure “their political, economic, social, and educational advancement.”11 Most of this would take place along metropolitan models, during an extended post-war era of “development” theory and practice, so acerbically and humorously observed by Epeli Hau‘ofa in classic short-fiction collections like Tales of the Tikongs. Hau‘ofa’s characters—thoughtful, clever, indifferent—were regularly exploited, suffered under, and demonstrated their adaptations to the interests of outlanders who sought 9 Paul Kuruk, Traditional Knowledge, Genetic Resources, Customary Law and Intellectual Property, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited (2020), 14–5. 10 Kekuni Blaisdell, “The Indigenous Rights Movement in the Pacific,” In Motion Magazine (May 25, 1998), https://www.inmotionmagazine.com/pacific.html. 11 United Nations, “Text of Article 73,” https://legal.un.org/repertory/art73/eng lish/rep_orig_vol4_art73.pdf, 5.

248

M. K. MATSUDA

to improve local life through religion, politics, or investment while remaining themselves unconscious of their own conceits.12 By the time of the twenty-first-century United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Article 31 of the 2007 international statement emphatically underscored Indigenous rights for communities to maintain, protect, and develop “their own cultural heritage” and knowledge, “as well as the manifestations of their sciences, technologies and cultures, including human and genetic resources, seeds, medicines, knowledge of the properties of fauna and flora.” These in addition to literary and oral traditions, sports, and visual and performing arts. The formalized language focused not upon the obligations of the colonial powers to develop their formerly subject peoples, but upon recognition that “indigenous peoples have suffered from historic injustice as a result of, inter alia, their colonization and dispossession of their lands, territories, and resources.”13 In this way, the Charter and Declaration tracked changes in the expression of decolonization from the twentieth to twenty-first centuries, from paternalistic to justice and sovereignty oriented: the United Nations has marked its own history by recognizing 1990 as the 30th anniversary of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, and has continued to mark sequential International Decades for the Eradication of Colonialism, the first from 1990–2000, leading up to a fourth extending from 2021–2030.14 This continuity of highlighting decolonization developed historically in parallel through building work done in UN alliance, and across decades in local communities and the networks that connected them through common, popular agitation for self-determination. As Aroha Te Pareake Mead has chronicled, annual sessions of a UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations (WGIP), established a global network of communication and exchange, while being tasked with “developing a

12 Epeli Hau‘ofa, Tales of the Tikongs, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press (1994

ed.). 13 United Nations, United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 61/ 295 (107th Plenary meeting, September 13, 2007), 3, 22. 14 United Nations, “International Decades for the Eradication of Colonialism,” https://www.un.org/dppa/decolonization/en/history/international-decades (accessed August 13, 2022).

11

GENETIC DRIFT

249

draft Universal Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.”15 In describing her experience of work on the Declaration, Mead conveys walking into the United Nations with issues of the iwi, representing a community and feeling alone, then discovering an entire global network of Indigenous peoples, including “people we were told were extinct,” or “told by governments that they had chosen to assimilate and didn’t want to be Indigenous.”16 But from that point forward, she knew “we can’t unsee and unhear each other.” She has also regularly underscored, predating the United Nations, the important role of early Pacific leadership on Indigenous cultural property and rights: In commemoration of the 1993 UN International Year of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, the nine Iwi of Mataatua (the Bay of Plenty Region) lead by Ngati Awa, convened the world’s First International Conference on the Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

With participants coming from across the Pacific, South and North America, as well as Asia and Europe, the week-long gatherings and discussions led to the noted Mataatua Declaration, which has since “moved on to occupy a place in history as one of the first international indicators identified by indigenous peoples of the ethics and protocols which should be considered by any individual or organisations accessing indigenous cultural and intellectual property.”17 Such recounting recognizes the generations of histories underlining contemporary struggles, where Islander claims on the future, protests, challenges, counter-narratives, and political movements have been accompanied by widespread activism and cooperation toward Pacific-wide, and worldwide, bodies of consultation and resulting conventions. In addition to the Mataatua Declaration, these include the Nuclear Claims Tribunal of 1983; the Treaty for a Lifeforms Patent-Free Pacific and Related Protocols (1995); the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban

15 Aroha Te Pareake Mead, “Misappropriation of Indigenous Knowledge: The Next

Wave of Colonialism,” http://www.nzlii.org/nz/journals/OtaBioethRp/1994/3.pdf, 5. 16 Aroha Te Pareake Mead, “Speech for UNDRIP Conference at Te Papa, Wellington,” New Zealand Human Rights Commission (September 26, 2017), https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=q1aEEZH9fGA. 17 Aroha Te Pareake Mead, “Misappropriation of Indigenous Knowledge: The Next Wave of Colonialism,” 5.

250

M. K. MATSUDA

Treaty (1996); a Traditional Biological Knowledge, Innovations and Practices Act (2000); a Statement of Bioethics Consultation from the Tonga National Council of Churches Centre (2001); a Model Law for the Protection of Traditional Knowledge and Expressions of Culture (2002); the Paoakalani Declaration (2003).18 The protections asserted in these agreements derive from not only claims to intellectual property rights, but assertion of responsibilities to longer historical practices and obligations. As Mead put it about the Mataatua Declaration, “Although a lot has happened since 1993, the Declaration still remains one of the most useful articulations of the problems and the solutions. Those of us who drafted the Declaration were very clear that the main issue is one of indigenous self-determination.”19 These obligations—toward sovereignty and to directly serving historically marginalized communities—continue to evolve, as do their reckonings with changing legal, political, financial, and technological currents. Working within definitions and ethics of Traditional Knowledge does not exclude full exploration of the possibilities of newer tools and developments. In 2022, the journal Cell published an article by Indigenous researchers at the University of California San Diego and the Native BioData Consortium in South Dakota on the possibilities of blockchain and distributed ledger technology for holding genomic data within an Indigenous sovereignty framework. The authors recognized the association of blockchain technologies with cryptocurrencies and other data decentralization initiatives, as well as their extreme energy consumption, yet hoped to develop sustainable systems through cooperative co-design, because “blockchains can be used to keep track and mediate access to health and genomic records or used to enable sharing of data to a validated digital identity.” This would mean that, rather than being held by governments or research institutions, “each Indigenous nation can control access to their members’ sensitive 18 See full texts collected in Mead and Ratuva, Pacific Genes & Life Patents, 197–269. Also individually searchable, e.g. “Mataautua Declaration,” https://www.uaf.edu/ ankn/indigenous-knowledge-syst/mataatua-declaration-on-c/; “Paoakalani Declaration,” https://19of32x2yl33s8o4xza0gf14-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/Pao akalani-Declaration.pdf; “Tonga National Council of Churches,” http://www.ipcb.org/ issues/human_genetics/human_populations/tonga/bioethics_consult.html. 19 Aroha Te Pareake Mead, “Understanding Maori Intellectual Property Rights” (paper), https://news.tangatawhenua.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/MaoriPropert yRights.pdf.

11

GENETIC DRIFT

251

health information and prioritize research that is linked to community priorities.”20 In effect, this approach included rather than excluded Indigenous peoples in design, management—and governance of their own biological samples. The authors reviewed familiar historical narratives and imperatives, noting that Indigenous populations, regularly underrepresented in research and medical support, became “variants of interest” when it came to genomic research because of their relatively low degree of European admixture.21 Thus, genomic assays from Indigenous communities became “the target of researchers,” often without consent, or benefit from the extractions made with their biologies. The blockchain proposal was one way to think about this in a potentially new framework. Rather than hazard misuse of such information, decisions about proper use could be made within communities by internal governance consensus, and then “a smart contract can automate the execution of an agreement to mediate access to the genomic data off-chain to the requestor.”22 The proposal focused significantly on operating “within the jurisdiction of tribal lands,” and the “sovereign architecture” of shared community goals and self-governance benefits. The connections with sovereignty questions are essential. As Tahu Kukutai and Donna Cormack have argued about Indigenous data sovereignty (IDS), though political and historical differences among communities are many, so also are shared Indigenous experiences, such as a general agreement that within the context of nations not recognizing Indigenous governance, “self-determination is an inherent and 20 Tim Mackey, Alec J. Calac, B. S. Chenna Keshava, Krystal S. Tsosie, Keolu Fox, “Establishing a Blockchain-Enabled Indigenous Data Sovereignty Framework for Genomic Data,” Cell, vol. 185, no. 15 (July 2022), 2626–31. 21 Statement on website of Aotearoa New Zealand Genomic Variome, “Genomics diag-

nosis in human health in Aotearaoa is hampered because most of our understanding of genomic variation associated with disease comes from studies on Western European and East Asian populations,” genomics-aotearoa.org.nz (accessed August 2022); Tina Hesman Saey, “DNA Databases Are Too White, So Genetics Doesn’t Help Everyone. How Do We Fix That?” Science News (March 4, 2021), https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ genetics-race-dna-databases-reference-genome-too-white; on categorical cautions regarding “Pacific” ascriptions to genomic information, Nuala A. Helsby, “CYP2C19 and CYP2D6 Genotypes in Pacific Peoples,” Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, vol. 82, no. 5 (November 2016), 1303–7. 22 Mackey et al., “Establishing a Blockchain-Enabled Indigenous Data Sovereignty Framework for Genomic Data,” Cell, vol. 185, no. 15 (July 2022), 2626–31.

252

M. K. MATSUDA

desired outcome.” Critically, their central argument is an extension of past histories into the present: “the fullness of IDS cannot be realized within the architecture of the colonial settler state.”23 In this, colonialism—and decolonization—shape scientific pursuits as articulations of current—and prior—histories. For M¯aori, the mass production, collection, storage and use of data in Aotearoa NZ can be understood as a “replaying” of a familiar colonial experience, whereby “resources” are seen to be open for exploitation and extraction of profit, with little regard for Indigenous knowledge systems and ways of conceptualizing benefit.24

In Hawaiian terms, Keolu Fox looks to develop opportunities toward an inseparably joined set of priorities to advance “Native Hawaiian technological independence, Indigenous data sovereignty, and most importantly enable self-governance.” This means engaging K¯anaka Maoli not just in the laboratory, but in overlapping questions involving land title, repatriation of ancestral remains, resource policies, and “decisions involving Hawaiian history, material culture, and modern or ancient DNA.”25 The Indigenous scholars’ engagements are not unique to contests over medical and genomic data, but elements expressing a broad sea change in multiple and intersecting transformations of knowledge production. The deeply historical primacy of genealogical experience remains inseparable from the way disciplines are changing and being changed. As Samoan scholar Unasa Leulu Felise Va‘a put it, “genealogy has come to emphasize genealogical connection not just to Oceania (Moana) but also to intellectual tradition.”26 Native Islander anthropologists Ty P. K¯awika Tengan, 23 Tahu Kukutai, Donna Cormack, “‘Pushing the Space,’ Data Sovereignty and SelfDetermination in Aotearoa NZ,” in Maggie Walter, Tahu Kukutai, Stephanie Russo Carroll, Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear, Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Policy, Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge Publishing (2022), 22–4. 24 Tahu Kukutai, Donna Cormack, “‘Pushing the Space,’ Data Sovereignty and Self-

Determination in Aotearoa NZ,” 525. 25 Keolu Fox, “Lei Niho Palaoa and Digital Tools to Safeguard Against the Illicit Use of Ancient DNA, Hawaiian Archaeology, vol. 15 (2021), 4. 26 Unasa Leulu Felise Va‘a, “Indigenous Anthroplogy and the Kava Myth in Manu‘a,” Pacific Studies, vol. 33, nos. 2/3 (August/December 2010), 202–4. Also, key interventions in the genealogy of Pacific Studies: Vicente M. Diaz, J. K. K¯ehaulani Kauanui,

11

GENETIC DRIFT

253

T¯evita O. Ka‘ili, and Rochelle Tuitagava‘a Fonoti have articulated their own professional and cultural experiences as part of this by setting forth how they practice anthropology through genealogical understandings. As scholars they underscore concerns “with the intersection, interweaving, and interconnection of people, titles, and lands, as well as ideas and academic disciplines,” and are widely cognizant of “the numerous notions of genealogy in Oceania,” including the hohoko and whakapapa, the mo‘ok¯u‘auhau in Hawaiian, gafa in Samoan, and ‘uhinga, “genealogical ties of people, land, sea, animals, plants, etc. in Tongan.”27 In fact, Tengan, Ka‘ili, and Fonoti suggest that “articulating visions of anthropology’s future, at least from an Indigenous Oceanic perspective, can be done only through genealogical work—the search for, production, and transformation of connections across time and place.”28 That is, at least partly, understanding not only researchers and subjects, but who all actors are, and their situatedness in relationships of the human and natural worlds. Newer generations of coalitions like the Pacific Early Career Researchers Collective have pulled together scholars from multiple disciplines to “juxtapose our understanding of Pacific research excellence with global notions of research excellence.” These initiatives are organized around understanding “how we, as Pacific people, look to excel as researchers and innovators in our own spaces, whether that be about Pacific methods or knowledge systems, or interests outside of that,” while

“Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge,” The Contemporary Pacific, vol. 13, no. 2 (Fall 2001), 315–41, and Teresia K Teaiwa, “L(o)osing the Edge,” The Contemporary Pacific, vol. 13, no. 2 (Fall 2001), 343–57. 27 Ty P. K¯ awika Tengan, T¯evita O. Ka‘ili, Rochelle Tuitagava‘a Fonoti, “Genealogies: Articulating Indigenous Anthropology in/of Oceania,” Pacific Studies, vol. 33, nos. 2/3 (August/December 2010), 159. 28 Ty P. K¯ awika Tengan, T¯evita O. Ka‘ili, Rochelle Tuitagava‘a Fonoti, “Genealogies: Articulating Indigenous Anthropology in/of Oceania,” Pacific Studies, vol. 33, nos. 2/3 (August/December 2010), 140–2.

254

M. K. MATSUDA

representing people, family, and communities.29 It is research as decolonization, and decolonization as the building and transformation of new environments, relationships, and frameworks within and through which to work. In effect, the full expression of newer research cannot take place within existing institutional frameworks, which are themselves undergoing transformation. In Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, for example, the Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC) system long utilized determined rubrics to organize data collection for evidence-based policy proposals. Indigenous-related research was coded at “the six-digit level, meaning as a subset of broader frameworks. In practice, “Indigenous research is presented therefore as a type of health or education research,” rather than as a discipline with its own practices, principles, and standards. Reforms and updates to the classificatory system from 2019–2020 focused on positioning Indigenous research as “its own knowledge domain based on its shared methodologies and approaches,” making it much more visible and measurable, with strong implications for developing research results to have community impacts on local and national policy making.30 Critically, such recognition historically has evolved by engaging a constellation of initiatives related to intellectual property and ownership

29 Pacific Early Career Researchers Collective, Jean M. Uasike Allen (Tonga-Makaunga, Kolovai, Tongatapu, Vavau‘u: Tefisi; P¯alangi), Jesi Lujan Bennett (Guåhan (Guam)Barrigada and Dededo), Zaramasina L. Clark (Tonga-‘Ohonua, ‘Eua; P¯alangi), Kirita-Rose Escott (Samoa-Fasito‘outa, Mulifanua; Ng¯ati Kahungunu ki Wairoa; Palagi), David Taufui Mikato Fa‘avae (Tonga-Ma‘ufanga, Taunga Vava‘u, ‘Eua, Niuafo‘ou; Samoa-Satalo; NiueAlofi), Jasmine Lulani Kaulamatoa (Tonga-Niutoua, Tongatapu, Ta‘anea, Vava‘u; P¯alangi), Rachael Kaulamatoa (Tonga-Niutoua, Tongatapu, Ta‘anea, Vava‘u; P¯alangi), Taniela Lolohea (Tonga-Vava‘u, Ofu, Kolomotua), Melemafi Porter (Tonga-Faleloa, Ha‘apai), Veisinia Pulu (Tonga-Tongoleleka, Kotu Ha‘apai; Fiji-Mualevu, Lau), Sylvia Tapuke (Samoa-Fasito‘otai, Fai‘a‘ai, Sili, Lalovaea, Solosolo; T¯ uhoe, Ng¯ati Hineuru, T¯uwharetoa, Raukawa ki te Tonga), Yvonne Ualesi (Samoa-Mulivai Safata, Pu‘apu‘a, Savalo, Lotopa; Tokelau-Fakaofo; Fiji-Bureta Ovalau), Solema Elspeth Withers (Samoa-Sama‘i, Falelatai, Aotearoa-born in Taumarunui) & Victoria Helen Woolner (Cook Islands-Mauke: Kimiangatau; Papa‘a) “Relational and Collective Excellence: Unfolding the Potential of Pacific Early Career Researchers,” Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand (August 3, 2022), 3, 5. 30 Maggie Walter, Stephanie Russo Caroll, Tahu Kukutai, Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear, “Embedding Systemic Change—Opportunities and Challenges,” in Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Policy, Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge Publishing (2022), 231–2.

11

GENETIC DRIFT

255

issues broadly.31 Alliances such as Local Contexts assemble and articulate standards for Traditional Knowledge (TK) and Biocultural (BC) Notices, while also providing a hub for “Institutions and Researchers to generate Notices and engage with Indigenous communities about the appropriate use of TK and BC labels.” These can include historical and cultural materials and records held by national institutions like state libraries and archives, virtual and material museum collections, publishing platforms and networks, as well as biological and genetic metadata databases. The hub design ensures that different domains can inform each other.32 Maui Hudson has noted that the respect for proper use of knowledge is deeply encoded in historical practice. In a close Indigenous community, prior generations of kahuna or tohunga may have only transmitted guarded knowledge to select successors in traditions bound by long relationships, extended learning, and different forms of traditional lineage. When the knowledge is encoded and printed in texts and books, the relations and meanings change. When that knowledge can then be widely disseminated digitally through networks like the internet, the potential for exploitation increases as the degree of accountability and direct connection falls away.33 The traditional knowledge (TK) and biocultural (BC) initiatives work toward being deeply cognizant of and responsive to these challenges. Labeling that draws attention to the cultural authority behind a particular material or practice in the biocultural domain, for example, already makes distinctions between provenance, multiple communities, clans, and specific criteria and uses: research, open to collaboration, open to commercialization, outreach, and non-commercial.34 As the enumeration of uses indicates, the context of engaging traditional knowledge is not simply drawn from protocols for preservation or antiquarian regard. Rather, they are premised on the potential of new collaboration, connection, education, and even commercial development. The founders of Indigenous Design and Innovation Aotearoa (IDIA) take up this charge very directly, describing themselves as “cultural 31 Paul Callister, Robert Didham, “Who Are We?: The Human Genome Project, Race and Ethnicity,” Social Policy Journal of New Zealand, no. 36 (August 2009), 72. 32 “Grounding Indigenous Rights,” “Indigenous Communities,” “Institutions and Researchers” sections of https://localcontexts.org (accessed August 29, 2022). 33 Maui Hudson, personal communication, New York City (August 22, 2022). 34 “BC Labels,” of https://localcontexts.org (accessed August 29, 2022).

256

M. K. MATSUDA

designers, change makers and innovators,” paralleling language and missions often ascribed to start-up ventures, business accelerators, and social impact organizations. In fact, IDIA declares itself dedicated to “looking to influence and design global change,” but with a key distinguishing requisite: “through an indigenous lens.”35 The areas of support may look familiar: products and services, solutions and outcomes, design, communication, technology, strategy and best practices, with applications to “wellbeing, education, the future of work, and economic stability.” Yet the mission is focused on utilizing cultural and commercial knowledge paired with experience and creativity to “push back against the homogenising and colonising effects of globalisation and technology.” Framing the work as a continuous decolonizing project, the founders also underscore that “We are unapologetically indigenous first. We get to call on the lessons, learnings, and innovations our ancestors worked so hard for and left us to continue.” This continuity leans forward as well as toward the past: “It’s about inspiring and supporting our rangatahi (of all ages) to be the designers of the future, to be the best in the industry, to design the future with positivity, inclusion and passion, and to innovate as our t¯ıpuna did.”36 An example of such work would be the Cultural Integrity Scorecard, a tool for understanding, respecting, and showing reciprocity toward M¯aori culture for New Zealanders—and other non-M¯aori individuals and organizations seeking to “enhance their brands, products and services using M¯aori and Pacific concepts.” Working with Maui Hudson, IDIA developed the card—a series of precisely formulated questions along with a cultural integrity scale, to allow initial self-assessment in areas of indigeneity, design, integrity, and authenticity. The card asks if a product, design principle, or intellectual work uses indigenous knowledge or resources and queries whether products and design have M¯aori partners or participants, whether uses of intellectual property will have beneficial outcomes for M¯aori communities and have acceptable culture alignments. Strong, moderate, and weak score results indicate a range from robust

35 “IDIA—The Centre of Excellence for Indigenous Design,” https://www.idia.nz/ about. 36 M. Barbarich, J. Witehira, J. Moore, “Ko wai t¯ ataou? Who Are IDIA?” https:// www.idia.nz/who-is-indigenous-design-and-innovation-aotearoa.

11

GENETIC DRIFT

257

cultural awareness to likely outright misappropriation and exploitation of cultural forms.37 In this way, particular debates have evolved within an extended historical moment that entwines the decolonizing strands of traditional knowledge and the biocultural, as evidenced by the architecture of questions, guidelines, and evolving practices that frame the development of TK and BC initiatives and cultural integrity. The biocultural label efforts, specifically, are intended to “define community expectations and consent about appropriate use of collections and data,” therefore supporting “a practical application of Indigenous data governance principles to issues of access and benefit-sharing for genetic resources.”38 Such work recognizes that as specific cultural—and especially genealogical and genetic issues are often at the leading edge of evolving juridical disputes, they are deeply rooted in exclusionary histories. As one team sharing research between Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand has noted, the very status of questions relating DNA analysis with Indigenous people’s health, “is globally shaped by intergenerational effects of colonization and ongoing inequitable social practices and policies,” including institutionalized discrimination, racism, and structural violence.39 Aligned movements of redefining those histories have notably focused on direct student education programs. In the United States, specifically in the genomic field, molecular anthropologists like Ripan Malhi are noted for launching initiatives like the Summer Internship for Indigenous Peoples in Genomics (SING) in 2011 to engage participants from Indigenous communities in both the scientific and cultural-historical work of genomics, encouraging some to continue pursuit of genetic and molecular historical and health-related work in advanced study and, eventually, their own laboratories. The programs have trained and provided community for hundreds of young researchers and are now housed in universities

37 IDIA, “Cultural Integrity Scorecard: Cultural Integrity Questions and Appropriation Scale,” https://www.idia.nz/cultural-integrity-scorecard. 38 IDIA, “Grounding Indigenous Rights: Indigenous Communities/Biocultural (BC) Labels,” IDIA, https://localcontexts.org/. 39 Nadine Rena Caron, Meck Chongo, Maui Hudson, Laura Arbour, Wyeth W. Wasserman, Stephen Robertson, Solenne Correard, Phillip Wilcox, “Indigenous Genomic Databases: Pragmatic Considerations and Cultural Contexts,” Frontiers in Public Health (April 24, 2020), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2020.00111, 2.

258

M. K. MATSUDA

in Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Australia as well as the United States.40 In Aotearoa New Zealand, statements of mission underscore the ways that “Significant advances in the fields of genetics and genomics see an increasing focus on M¯aori populations and indigenous species. Research conducted in Aotearoa New Zealand should involve consultation with Iwi M¯aori and it is important that M¯aori understand the technical, ethical, and cultural issues when engaging with researchers in these projects.” In Australia, “Genomic research has the potential to bring benefits to Indigenous people and communities, but also has the potential to cause harm. Despite the importance of genomics for Indigenous peoples and communities, Indigenous people are currently underrepresented in this field.”41 Critical genetics scholars on targeted initiatives are regular partners. At the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Kim TallBear has noted, “SING Canada provided basic science training and highlighted how Indigenous knowledge values and analytical frameworks can be integrated with prion science to inform robust research, monitoring, and management of CWD (chronic wasting disease) in Alberta and beyond.”42 Concerning the SING program in Aotearoa, Maui Hudson observed that “genetics has been a lightning rod for debate in past years,” and “All research in Aotearoa New Zealand should involve consultation with Iwi M¯aori, so it is important that we understand enough about the technical, ethical and cultural challenges to engage researchers in robust discussions.” Deakin University teams guided participants through DNA extraction, isolation, preparation and bioinformatic analysis of samples, discussed genomic ethics, and acknowledged the university lands of the Wathaurong people, offering “At present, there is a limited Indigenous workforce in genomics in Australia, making this workshop a necessary first step

40 Giorgia Guglielmi, “Facing Up to Injustice in Genome Science,” Nature, vol. 568 (April 18, 2019), 290–3. 41 Statements from SING Aotearoa and SING Australia, Summer Internship for Indigenous peoples in Genomics, https://www.singconsortium.org/ (2021–2022). 42 Statement from Kim TallBear, Summer Internship for Indigenous peoples in Genomics, https://www.singconsortium.org/ (2021–2022).

11

GENETIC DRIFT

259

in establishing a network of current and future leaders of Indigenous genomics in Australia.”43 The participants share not only learning and expertise, but frameworks for a relationship between science and historical culture that redefines both. As a professor in mathematics, statistics, and quantitative genetics, Phillip Wilcox co-leads the Aotearoa SING and has shared, “My day job is a (Indigenous) Geneticist and Applied Bioethicist,” and describes his current priorities as: (1) a need for more Indigenous participation in modern genetic sciences, which includes Indigenous peoples doing the research, controlling it, and applying it to the benefit our people as an ultimate expression of tribal sovereignty, and (2) exploring and delivering the emancipatory potential of this form of ’western science’ to reverse negative impacts of colonisation. Finally, (3) positive support and encouragement from various tribal leaders regarding pathways for genetic tools to benefit communities provides drive and motivation for this important work.

Though considering himself something of an “accidental bioethicist” by way of plant genetics, forestry, and family-community ties to radical politics, Wilcox engages SING through both M¯aori educational practice and activism. He cites Moana Jackson’s noted historical framing of genetic modification debates: “the greatest difficulty has been created by the scientific community’s own sense of self, and the notions of the scientific method that have evolved in the European world since the Enlightenment.” This “confined” understanding of the constitution of knowledge has led to the “rejection or demeaning” of alternate or contesting views.44 Wilcox frames the challenges to Indigenous research and benefits within contemporary practices with some likewise straightforward observations: “Institutional Racism = Prioritization and Privileging of ‘Western Science,’” and “Cultural competencies are not a key criteria for employing

43 Summer Internship for Indigenous Peoples in Genomics, The Expansive Issue, no. 2 (2019), 2–4. 44 Moana Jackson, “An Exquisite Politeness: The Royal Commission on Genetic Modification and the Redefining of the Treaty of Waitangi,” paper (August 2001), https://www.iatp.org/documents/an-exquisite-politeness-the-royal-com mission-on-genetic-modification-and-the-redefining-of.

260

M. K. MATSUDA

senior managers except in M¯aori-specific roles.”45 More, funding agencies do not have knowledgeable or responsive assessment methods, false allies with self-interests in political and research interests abound, and the value of advocacy is debated across M¯aori iwi leadership between academics, organizers, and community members. Despite the challenges and the admittedly difficult “going forward,” what might a decolonization of Western science look like as a new way of writing, speaking, and living different histories? A foundational approach would be to examine and diversify a well-developed standard narrative of genetics and genomic histories, marked by canonical figures and accomplishments: the work of Gregor Johann Mendel, the formulations of Darwin and Galton, the studies of Davenport and Pearson, Morgan, and the description of the DNA double helix by Crick, Watson, Franklin, and Wilkins—up through continuing developments in molecular biology, the interventions of UNESCO, and the mapping of the human genome allied with the high-stakes capitalism of biotechnology. Wilcox, on the other hand, begins with tikanga, m¯atauranga and te ao M¯aori, drawing on inheritances and experiences of culture, education, and the M¯aori world. In this way, the knowledge is not circumscribed by a discipline, but dispersed throughout investigations of preand post-colonization agriculture, ethnicity definitions through Indigenous perspectives, medical genomics through M¯aori ethical frameworks, and Artificial Intelligence studies through the lens of Indigenous data sovereignty. Institutionally, the content is rooted in core principles across the life, physical, agricultural, and mathematical sciences, as well as the humanities, law, and philosophy. Wilcox and Simon Hills have even articulated their own genetic chronologies, structuring a periodization around four stages in a historical narrative. In this the m¯atauranga M¯aori (knowledge) is dominant, pre1870. This is succeeded by colonial rule and displacement in the last third of the nineteenth century, persisting through the twentieth. By the turn of the millennium, a consultation model with M¯aori communities became

45 Philip Wilcox, “Confessions of an Accidental (M¯ aori) Bioethicist,” slide presentation (2022–2023), nos. 36, 38, 40.

11

GENETIC DRIFT

261

increasingly favored, developed into the fuller expression of genetic research by and for M¯aori communities in the twenty-first century.46 At each stage, the state of genetic knowledge and science parallels social, political, and cultural histories and is inseparably intertwined with them. The first period is characterized by strong practices of whakapapa, pepeha, and “mate selection in specific instances.” The era of colonial dominance is defined by land confiscation, unsettled communities, and an imposition of “Western” scientific frameworks with little regard for M¯aori knowledge. The “consultation” period is characterized by government commission reports, and debates over ethical research protocols with M¯aori communities. The contemporary period moves toward Indigenous control of knowledge, knowledge creation, and technical capacities in determining and carrying out the research itself.47 Each of these periods can in turn be historically detailed. In tracing genetic science crossings with M¯aori health and well-being (Hauora M¯aori), for example, Bevan Tipene-Matua, Mark Henaghan, and Benita Wakefield distinguish protocols and also three models from the late twentieth century (1980s–1990s): the Whare Tapa Wh¯a model built around the structure of a house, with interdependent physical, spiritual, familial, and environmental supports and interactions; the Wheke model, like the symbolic tentacles of an octopus intertwining individual and group identities with mutual relationships; the Pou Mana model which builds around concepts and values connecting whakapapa to belonging and hospitality, as well as behaviors and practices of fairness, traditional knowledge, heritage, customs, and inseparability from the natural and social worlds. These models parallel developments in molecular genetics, particularly around the wider spread of gene-editing tools and potentials at the turn of the millennium and accompanying debates about safety, respect toward species, and the ethics of Indigenous knowledge. Where geneticists often point out the technical complexity of their science as not always understandable to a larger public, Tipene-Matua and Wakefield offer, “Understanding the approach of the Hauora M¯aori takes specialist

46 Philip Wilcox and Simon Hills, Introduction to Genomics and Genomic Sciences: presented to SING Aotearoa: Summer Internship for Indigenous peoples in Genomics (January 2023), slides 5–9. 47 Philip Wilcox and Simon Hills, Introduction to Genomics and Genomic Sciences, slides 5–9.

262

M. K. MATSUDA

knowledge and expertise and it is expected that few geneticists are likely to possess such skills.”48 As a genetic history, therefore, an alternately proposed narrative is not uniquely premised on the reception or adoption of the Mendel-DNA trajectory in localized context. Nor is it a formalistic history of science. Rather, Aotearoa New Zealand is first defined through Austronesian migrations, canoe voyages, and Archaic and Classic periods from huntergatherer to village-based agriculture. These groupings evolved tribal, wh¯anau (family)-centric organizations based on knowledge systems—the m¯atauranga-M¯aori—that were inclusive of human, environmental, and cultural knowledge. The ordering of these relationships placed tribal naming conventions and whakapapa at the heart of genetic histories and inheritance, along with the pepeha self-introduction accounting for ancestors, environment, and community connections, and mokopuna recognition of children and grandchildren. As a foundation, these then are the basic elements of a genetic history that engages ancestry and also cultivation of the k¯umara, tikanga-based ethical research in genetics, and ambitious initiatives to catalogue DNA sequences for M¯aori health applications such as the Aotearoa Variome and Rakeiora projects, partly by cross-referencing genomic data with appropriate use of deep genealogical—whakapapa—knowledge.49 Wilcox underscores the importance of knowing “that M¯aori had many different concepts of (hereditary) inheritance,” and that they are “woven throughout M¯aori society and ways of thinking / being,” in this way informing the meanings and applications of contemporary DNA-based investigations.50 In his workshops for Years 8 and 9 students who might be attracted to the sciences, Wilcox notes, “We try to do it in a way that

48 Bevan Tipene-Matua, Mark Henaghan, “Establishing a M¯ aori Ethical Framework for Genetic Research with M¯aori” (October 24, 2007). Genes, Society and the Future, vol. 1, part 4, Human Genome Research Project, Dunedin, NZ, 2007. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1828470 or Bevan Tipene-Matua and Benita Wakefield, http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1828470. On the question of accessibility to technical science, see commentaries by Cavalli-Sforza and Reich in Introduction, this volume. 49 Philip Wilcox, “M¯ aori Concepts of Hereditary Inheritance,” slide show (August 10, 2021), slides 2, 8–11, 17, 18, 24, 31, 32. 50 Philip Wilcox, “M¯ aori Concepts of Hereditary Inheritance,” slide 34.

11

GENETIC DRIFT

263

engages the kids, and from more of a M¯aori world view. So, we go from whakapapa to DNA and draw the link.”51 In higher education, new institutional roles are built around such connections, such as for a “Senior M¯aori academic” at the University of Otago to provide “support, leadership and advice to the Director and academic staff of the Genetics Teaching Program (GTP).” Built around the culture, customs, practices, values, and traditional methods of tikanga, the science is arrayed within a network of understandings: Tikanga: The GTP formally recognises our commitment to Tikanga by incorporating M¯aori practices and values into our teaching programme. In particular, we recognise there are three key values we must include in our Genetics curriculum. 1. M¯aori concepts/knowledge of inheritance: whakapapa past, present and future. 2. Kaitiakitanga guardianship of genomic data. 3. Genetic research involving T¯angata M¯aori and Taonga species, which must be governed by Tikanga.52

For advancing work by early career researchers in Indigenous Genomics, the SING program has played a marked role. The Aotearoa initiative includes engagements in areas including human genetics, precision or personalized medicine, plant and food and landcare for local crops, and development of guidelines for biobanking.53 In other SING communities, Cree and Peguis First Nation Political Scientist Jessica Kolopenuk envisions a “decentralized, non-hierarchical, and institutional network of SING faculty and alumni whose local and community-driven approaches to knowledge production act as leading examples globally for genomic research that centers indigenous stakes.” Unsurprisingly, Kolopenuk offers a clear hope that “our anti-colonial work in scientific fields will support our broader goals among indigenous sovereignty movements.” Dr. Shayne Bellingham, says, “I am a Wotjobaluk man from the Wimmera region of Victoria and have always had an interest in genetics due to a personal family connection with cystic fibrosis.” As

51 “Wananga Brings Science to Life for 50 Wairoa Students,” The Wairoa Star (January 10, 2019), 6–7. 52 “Role Description: Kaik¯ okiri M¯aori-M¯atai Ira,” Genetics Teaching Programme, School of Biomedical Sciences, Otago University (October 26, 2022). 53 “Our Stories: Sing Internship 2018,” Ng¯ ati Porou Hauroa, https://www.nph.org. nz/story/pakeke (November 17, 2022).

264

M. K. MATSUDA

a geneticist, he notes of SING, “It was amazing to see participants link genomics knowledge with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Ways of Being, Knowing and Doing through connection to culture, country and spirit.”54 Another frequent collaborator and alumnus, Diné and Navajo geneticist-ethicist Krystal Tsosie attended the inaugural SING in 2011, and is noted for her work on the genetic determinants of pre-eclampsia, as well as helping to develop the Native BioData Consortium. She and Keolu Fox also served as global chairs (2022–2023) for the ENRICH initiative—the Equity for Indigenous Research and Innovation Coordinating Hub, a ground dedicated to developing Indigenous-based protocols, policy, data science, institutional practices, and broader public communications. Like many of the scholars and researchers working in Indigenous genomics, Tsosie has a regular presence on social media and has argued that “many tribal nations’ data sovereignty must be empowered and strengthened to prevent long-term, unrestricted access to our Indigenous genomes.” She has also forcefully set forth, “It astounds me how few early career geneticists know the histories of their own fields. I also strongly advocate reading beyond our disciplines. We really need to do better for incoming scientists if we want the field to improve, especially for underrepresented scholars.”55 All of this is a setting for a different dynamic, a science informed by history and culture, and histories and cultural practices both recognized and forwarded through voices always present but not long heard. 2017 social media also followed comments from panels on genetic data, biological heritage, and in multiple forums, Aroha Te Pareake Mead wove together the historical challenges and possibilities: “Selfdetermination is a vision and a goal, one we don’t need permission to pursue,” she noted, also clarifying, “No one can do it by themselves, and no one knowledge system can do it by itself.”56 In providing a broad historical perspective to the question, “Where is Indigenous knowledge going right now?” Mead directly observed the potential of heightened 54 Citations from Summer Internship for Indigenous Peoples in Genomics, The Expansive Issue, no. 2 (2019), 5, 6, 8. 55 Krystal Tsosie, Twitter: Krystal Tsosie @kstsosie, (November 15, 18, 3, 2021). 56 Aroha Mead, cited by Biological Heritage NZ, Twitter (May 8, 2017); Aroha Mead,

cited by Dan Hikuroa, Twitter (March 6, 2017).

11

GENETIC DRIFT

265

global interest in Indigenous knowledge, but also her concerns. “If the behaviors that fed the systemic issues around the conduct of science and research aren’t addressed, then we’ll see the same thing playing out we already do…where you have non-Indigenous researchers claiming to be experts where they are still following an extractive model…of just taking for their own gain.” Her principle for guardianship was not legal protocol but demonstrable commitment to people: “Our knowledge comes with us; it’s not separate from us.”57 Tsosie also made this clear. “Part of the reparations and building processes entail acknowledging harms and traumas which STILL adversely impact our communities. One cannot just gloss over these real histories because they are uncomfortable for researchers. If you’re uncomfortable, imagine how we feel.”58

57 Aroha Mead, “Maori Elder Aroha Mead Shares Her Views on Indigenous Knowledge with Ghazali/#HowToIndigenousNow,” Ghazalli Ohorella, YouTube (December 21, 2020), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnhgmlkEG6o. 58 Krystal Tsosie, Twitter: Krystal Tsosie @kstsosie (November 15, 18, 3, 2021).

CHAPTER 12

Afterword: Family Lines

From the shifting registers of Albert Wendt’s ancestors and ancient voyages to the international testimony of Lijon Eknilang, and the bones and hair of ancestors, multiple Oceanian lives have expressed what has been common to these recountings: an embodied experience of the present, drawing on the past, cautioning a future read through an epoch in which genealogical transformation, colonial legacies and continuities, and scientific enterprises from anthropology to eugenics to genomics have had such a great impact on the Pacific. That impact has been framed by drift, as it guides and shapes histories. Drift is both a precise statistical parameter for determining settlement patterns in population genetics, and it is an allusive indicator of the tensions between the intentionality and contingencies of Oceanian histories, voyaging by art or by accident, community and urban dislocation, exploited by colonial power or shaping determined futures by drawing upon and constantly renegotiating the lineages and responsibilities of the past. These have been stories of a Pacific read through the necessary piecing together of multiple forms of knowledge, from the defining genealogical practices, ancestors, kin, and cultural connectedness of the whakapapa and mo‘ok¯u‘auhau, to the claims of molecular biology, imputations of violence and civilization, and the tracing of nucleotides through genetic

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. K. Matsuda, Genealogies, Genomes, and Histories in the Pacific, Palgrave Studies in Pacific History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45449-3_12

267

268

M. K. MATSUDA

genealogy. It is also a reflection on the ways that these stories are not only instances of reconstructing the past but locating the continuing struggles and unresolved promises of Indigenous sovereignty and the post-colonial Pacific, fitfully claiming evolution from race to culture, from imperial government to kastom, neoliberalism as entangled with national liberation and local rights. All of these lives and events have been addressed by claims for recognition and self-determination in politics and knowledge. They’ve encompassed struggles over authority in recounting familial and cultural lineages; demonstrated assertions of ancestral voyaging traditions; ownership of traditional knowledge and protection regarding exploitable bodily tissues and substances; regard for lived environments and kin who are animals, plants, food crops, and elements of the natural world; rights accrued or lost to colonial designations of authenticity of origin through blood and law; contested definitions of ancient migrations and contemporary molecular tools; thwarted futures by militarism and intergenerational poisoning of the unborn; claims over the final resting places of ancestors and the community sovereignty over nucleotide sequences. Particularly, there have been tales of ancient mariners and commensal animals providing disputes over origin stories and test subjects attempting to trace complex technologies of knowledge, navigation, and survival. They unfolded past and future and asked how the stories would be held and told as heritage. They’ve raised legacies of colonial power and property through debates about the ownership of persons, molecular updates on criminality and savagery, and had resonances to slavery and exploitation set against furtive promise of future benefit through medical advance. They’ve reminded of the interrupted legacies of reproduction and generations that bear bodily burdens, or never lived, colonial warfare visited across future lives. They are also tales not only of interrupted generations, but new generations of scholars, researchers, activists, and actors on a global scale, fashioning international networks of redefined science. Through the negotiation of biologies and academic practices, this also means new ways of telling histories. While activists, politicians, and scholars fought for rights and decolonization of territories and knowledge, artists and writers also established their own movements from the 1960s and 1970s, from Papua New Guinea and Fiji to Tonga, Samoa, Aotearoa New Zealand, Hawai‘i, Guam, and Tahiti and Australia. Much work assails and challenges the legacies of colonialism and dispossession, along with decolonization and

12

AFTERWORD: FAMILY LINES

269

assertion of indigenous networks, histories, and identity building. Poet, writer, and editor Craig Santos Perez observes, that Pacific Islander poems have long addressed “social injustice, militarization, nuclearism, plantationism, disease, tourism, urbanization, racism, homophobia, and environmental degradation.”1 He notes a deep tradition of oral storytelling and the engagement of those voices in the “fervent era of decolonization…when many islands achieved political independence and islanders began to reclaim our indigenous identities.”2 In identity building, poets work in multiple styles, from the formal to the confessional to spoken word and agitational, often linking Oceanian traditions and genealogies. The Tongan, Samoan, and Palagi writer Karlo Mila has worked long with poetry that engages family stories, father, mother, a personal experience growing through recognitions of difference from schoolyards to corridors of power, connected locales across space and generations across time. She speaks of trying to reclaim new dances from old memories, seeing her father cleaning the floor in the manner of his own mother, and feeling sky, seawater, and seasons change as she waits for one of her children to be born. She is also noted for her “Inside Us the Dead (the NZ-Born Version),” a dialogue of sorts with Albert Wendt’s work which she speaks to while hoping that perhaps his words, and her own, can bring her to a place where “maybe I wouldn’t feel so lonely / If my body could recall those connections…”.3 It is a family chronicle as it embodies a woman and a mother with the pride of many heritages, but also the uncertainty and drift, or as she puts it, “afloat, remote, solitary,” unable to clearly grasp and asking about legacies she has inherited, reflecting “I am not capable of thinking/ this blood is a ripple/ in an ocean/ of our blood…”.4 1 Craig Santos Perez, “New Pacific Islander Poetry,” Poetry, vol. 208, no. 4 (June/ August 2016), 373, 375–6. 2 Craig Santos Perez, “New Pacific Island Poetry,” 374. For an overview, Rob Wilson, “Postcolonial Pacific Poetries: Becoming Oceania,” in Jahan Ramazani, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry, Cambridge: Cambridge UP (2017), 58–71. 3 Karlo Mila, “Inside Us the Dead (The NZ-Born Version),” The Contemporary Pacific, vol. 22, no. 2 (Fall 2010), 281–2. 4 Karlo Mila, “Wednesday Afternoon,” “Eating Dark Chocolate While Watching Paul Holmes’ Apology,” “On Joining Pasifika,” “Inside Us the Dead (The NZ-Born Version),” Pasifika Poetry: Karlo Mila, New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre, https://www.nzepc. auckland.ac.nz/pasifika/mila1.asp. Also see Alice Te Punga Somerville, “Inside Us the

270

M. K. MATSUDA

Despite the questioning, the recognition of a corporeal genealogy is strong, and she notes that her body remembers, and that whatever individual knowledge she has regarded in books and other learning, she acknowledges that in her limbs, her hands, in her son, and in every bone is “A memory, of all the bodies that have been/ the making of me.”5 The Samoan writer from Honolulu, William Nu‘utupu Giles, also has worked long with poetry that engages family and the natural world, from hurricanes and seas to, especially, arboreal images of trees that, like family trees, stretch their roots—often in ways unseen. “Prescribed Fire” speaks of a mother from Samoa, and also asks about legacies of the Pacific War, Islander and Asian immigrants, foreign-ness and acceptance only at the price of sacrifice and blood. The question of genealogy is strong, between the blood shed for war and that for tracing lives through familial generations, asking if choices must be made between culture or clothing for one’s own children, “which blood would you want?”6 Though close to, yet dissociated from the past, Nu‘utupu Giles tries to understand his home, Hawai‘i, as both an “immigrant mecca,” while also a place of trying to connect his past, present, and future across the Pacific, a place where the past of a former origin seems lost. Likened to scattered seeds of the banyan tree, arrivals like himself are themselves blown, in the legacy of ancient navigators, voyaging on the winds and seas, thinking about the past, and once again “sprouting aerial roots” to make a home in newfound places. Finally, Nu‘utupu Giles’ “Prescribed Fire” is an affirmation of blood as a lived history, tying a poet to the inheritance of a mother, and also the genealogy of an entire history. “Every day, I am the blood I want / every

Unborn: Genealogies, Futures, Metaphors, and the Opposite of Zombies,” Warwick Anderson, Miranda Johnson, Barbara Brookes, eds., Pacific Futures: Past and Present, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press (2018), particularly commentary on Karlo Mila’s “Inside Us the Dead (the NZ-Born Version),” 71–5. 5 Karlo Mila, “Inside Us the Dead: (The NZ-Born Version),” NZ Book Month Blog (June 2008), http://nzbookmonth.co.nz/blogs/karlo_mila/archive/2008/06/29/ 14494.aspx. 6 William Alfred Nu‘utupu Giles, “Prescribed Fire,” in Craig Santos Perez, ed., Six Pacific Islander Poets You Should Know (April 2016), https://lithub.com/six-pacific-isl ander-poets-you-should-know/.

12

AFTERWORD: FAMILY LINES

271

day, I look around / hold on tight to those I love / and I grow / into an extended / family / tree.”7 From poem to poem by way of warfare, colonialism, race, science, ancestors, culture, politics, militarism, piracy, warriors, and survivors, all episodes here have been entangled by knowledge and culture that employ and contest histories of the past and possible futures. These have come in the language of genealogy, inheritance, obligation, expression, and uncertainty: Pacific tales of “genetic drift.”

7 William Alfred Nu‘utupu Giles, “Prescribed Fire,” in Craig Santos Perez, ed., “Six Pacific Islander Poets You Should Know (April 2016), https://lithub.com/six-pacific-isl ander-poets-you-should-know/.

Permissions

Cover: Tauihu (canoe prow), 19th century, by unknown maker. Acquisition history unknown. Te Papa (ME000187). By permission of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. “About Ancestors,” by Matt Matsuda, The Journal of Pacific History, vol. 56, no. 3, copyright © The Journal of Pacific History, Inc. By permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com on behalf of The Journal of Pacific History, Inc. “Genetic Drift: Pacific Pasts and Futures,” by Matt Matsuda, in Warwick Anderson, Miranda Johnson, Barbara Brookes, eds., Pacific Futures: Past and Present (2018). By permission of the University of Hawai‘i Press. From “Star Waka” from Star Waka by Robert Sullivan, © 1999 Robert Sullivan. By permission of Auckland University Press. From “Fishbone Hair” from Iep J¯ altok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter by Kathy Jet¯nil-Kijiner. © 2017 Kathy Jet¯nil-Kijiner. By permission of the University of Arizona Press. From “Inside Us the Dead,” originally published in Albert Wendt, Poems 1961–1974, Auckland, Longman Paul, (1976). © and by permission of Albert Wendt.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. K. Matsuda, Genealogies, Genomes, and Histories in the Pacific, Palgrave Studies in Pacific History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45449-3

273

274

PERMISSIONS

From “Prescribed Fire.” © and by permission of William Nu‘utupu Giles. From “Inside Us the Dead: (the NZ-Born Version),” © and by permission of Karlo Mila.

Index

A Aboriginal Australians. See Australians, Indigenous Aboriginal Heritage Project, 235–236 Aboriginality. See Indigeneity Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. See HIV/AIDS ACT UP, 166 Adams, Mary Ann (Kudnarto), 235 Adams, Tom, 235 Africa, 32, 88 African allele, 90 African-American people, 15, 102, 193 African Ancestry DNA, 193 African people, enslaved, 193 aggression, causes of, 122 agnotology, 167 agribusiness, 152, 161, 171 AIDS. See HIV/AIDS Aikau, Eddie, 81 Ailuk Atoll, 211 Akaka Bills, 177 Akaka, Daniel, 224

alcohol, 103, 116, 208 alleles, 4, 90 American Aids Research Alliance, 169 American Museum of Natural History, 112 Anajin, John, 205 Ancestry.com, 63 Anderson, Benedict, 194 Anderson, Warwick, 60, 65, 143 animal husbandry, 16, 65 animals, migrations of, 91–92 Anjain, Kobang, 212 anthropology, 36–37, 54–55 and museums, 232, 235 and the Human Genome Diversity Project, 8 and the "primitive", 49, 111 biological, 55, 62 field, 65 future of, 253 genetic, 53 Indigenous practitioners of, 252 in Papua New Guinea, 134 molecular, 257

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. K. Matsuda, Genealogies, Genomes, and Histories in the Pacific, Palgrave Studies in Pacific History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45449-3

275

276

INDEX

physical, 31, 53 anthropometry, 31 anticolonialism, 5, 32 anti-GMO groups, 152. See also genetically modified organisms (GMO) anti-nuclear movements, 32, 196, 202 anti-racism, 5, 8, 227, 228. See also racism anti-science views, 49, 94–96, 99, 144, 156, 229 Aotearoa New Zealand European arrivals at, 104 history of, 14 settlement of, 80, 86. See also M¯aori Apache people, 241 apartheid, 32, 49, 177 archaeology, 53–54, 68–69, 70, 75, 99 Arkansas Coalition of Marshallese, 216 Arvin, Maile, 20, 31, 59, 176 Aryan people, 59, 177 Asilomar Conference (1975), 3 assimilation, 30, 176, 178, 179–180, 189–191, 249 Association of Hawaiian Civic Clubs, 33, 223 Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, 200–202 Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), 7, 199–200, 227 Australia, colonization of, 61, 65, 115, 162 Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC), 254 Australian Law Reform Commission, 188 Australians, Indigenous, 235, 237 and anthropology, 37 and epigenetics, 115 and marriage, 179–180

and museums, 234, 235, 237 and racism, 112 definitions of, 186–188 stereotyping of, 121. See also Stolen Generations Austronesian diaspora, 53, 56, 98 Austronesian peoples, 57, 70–72, 75, 98 Autogen Ltd., 137 Awa, Ngati, 249

B Baker, Bill, 85 Ballantyne, Tony, 154 Ballard, Chris, 29 Bamford, Sandra, 42 Bangham, Jenny, 6 Banivanua-Mar, Tracey, 20–21 Bargh, Maria, 105 Barkan, Elazar, 33 Barker, Holly, 207–208 Barkindji people, 238 Bartelson, Jens, 36 Bastion Point occupation (1977), 49 Bayard Dominick Expeditions (1920), 58 Bayonet Constitution (1887), 174 Belich, James, 105 Bellingham, Shayne, 263 Bellwood, Peter, 70 Benjamin, Lumon, 216 Benjamin, Mira Joshaia, 216 Best, Elsdon, 109 Big Science, 15, 129, 130, 132, 185, 202 Bikini Atoll, 198, 203–205, 210, 214, 226–227 bikini bathing suit, 204 Bilimon, Mylast E., 211 Binandere peoples, 164 biobanking, 229, 263

INDEX

biocolonialism, 10–11, 187, 230 biocultural labels, 245, 257 biocultural notices, 255 bioethics, 18, 156, 243, 249 biopiracy, 10, 23, 147, 161, 165, 172, 225 bioprospecting, 24, 149, 165, 171–172 biotechnology, 8, 44, 99, 131, 142, 157, 260 Birdsell, Joseph, 235–236 Bishop Museum, 220, 221, 231 Bismarck Archipelago, 54 blackbirding, 24 Blaisdell, Kekuni, 247 Bligh, William, 127 Bliss, Catherine, 18, 131 blockchains, 250–251 blood, cultural significance of, 142, 143, 174, 176, 181, 183, 187 blood quantum, 175–178, 182, 185, 188, 233 blood types, 53, 61, 65–67, 69, 178 Bobo, Aruko, 204 bones, cultural significance of, 219, 221, 225, 236, 238. See also iwi (Hawaiian term for bones of the dead) botanicals, 150, 161 Bougainville, Louis Antoine de, 223 Brazil, 15, 177 British East India Trading Company, 149 British Museum, 233 Brookhaven National Laboratory, 205 Brunner, Han, 102 Buck, Peter (Te Rangi H¯ıroa), 56 Buddhism, 58 C Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 232

277

Canada, 168, 258 cancer, 129, 207–208, 217 canoes, 77, 81, 82, 84, 85. See also H¯ ok¯ ule‘a; waka capitalism, 126, 128, 131 Caroline Islands, 66 Caspi, Avshalom, 114 Caucasian peoples, 59–61, 112 Cauchois, Mickaelle-Hinanui, 69 Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca, 8, 18, 186, 227, 240, 241. See also Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 166 Central Australian Aboriginal Congress, 11, 225 Chambers, Geoffrey, 101–102 Chamorro people, 182 Chang, David, 42, 45, 176 Chargualaf Taimango, Tanya, 182 Chief Protector of Aborigines, 190 children abuse of, 102, 114, 118, 119, 121, 189–191 and nuclear radiation, 201, 206, 207, 210, 211 care of, 41, 115, 119, 120 disability in, 146 kidnapping and removal of, 14, 185, 191, 225. See also Stolen Generations Chile, 223 China, 32, 52, 56, 57, 126, 177, 180 cholera, 166 Christianity, 22, 57, 155, 188, 219–220. See also missionaries chromosomes, 17, 86 Citizen’s Constitutional Forum (Fiji), 196 Clark, Helen, 118 Clinton, Bill, 17

278

INDEX

Cold War, 3, 5–7, 197, 202, 210 Collins, Francis, 17 Colombia, 76 Commonwealth Department of Aboriginal Affairs (in Australia), 188 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (1996), 249 Conrad, Robert, 206 consent, 12, 34, 140, 230, 240–241, 251, 257 Cook, Cecil, 190 Cook Islands, 32, 81, 157–158, 179 Cook, James, 69, 150, 163, 223 Cooper, Alan, 237 Cooper, Melinda, 129 Cormack, Donna, 251 Coukell, Allan, 86 Cox, Murray, 65, 69–70, 74 Cox, Paul Alan, 165–171 craniology, 56, 75, 111–113, 116, 219 Cree people, 263 Crick, Francis, 2, 17, 260 criminality, 103 causes of, 116, 122 prevalence of, 101–102, 113 criminality prevalence, 109 criminology, 113 cryptocurrency, 250 Cultural Integrity Scorecard, 256 Cummings, Barbara, 190

D Danish East India Trading Company, 149 Darwin, Charles, 30, 184, 260 Darwinism, 16, 95, 97, 98, 106, 199 data, ownership of. See Indigenous data sovereignty Davenport, Charles, 16, 260

Davis, Joseph Barnard, 111 Deakin University (Australia), 258 decolonization, 21, 128, 225 after WWWII, 62 and genomic science, 33 and the United Nations, 11 changing expressions of, 248 definition of, 21 of history and knowledge, 2–3 methodologies of, 13 of Europe, 32 of science and research, 98, 239, 246, 254, 257, 259–260 definitions if, 30 degeneration, 16, 176–178 de Lacerda, João Baptista, 177 Denmark, 149, 233 Denny, Michal, 91–92 Department of Defense (USA), 227 Department of Energy (USA), 185, 200, 203, 213 de Saavedra, Álvaro, 57 Desowitz, Robert, 132, 141 diabetes, 98, 157, 158 Diatranz, 157 Dickson, Brian, 110 Dillon, Rodney, 187–189 Diné people, 264 disappearing cultures. See extinction dispossession, 14, 20, 30, 175–176, 189, 248 Dixon, Ronald B., 56, 112 DNA and land rights, 173–174, 178 autosomal, 55, 63, 70, 193 commercial services and kits for, 3, 51–53, 63 discovery of, 2, 17, 65, 260 guidelines for experimentation on, 3 mitochondria, 73 mitochondrial, 53–55, 71–72, 86, 193

INDEX

research techniques in, 67 Y-chromosome, 53–55, 72–73, 193 Dominick, Bayard, 65 double helix. See DNA Douglas, Bronwen, 5, 29 drift, 269 definitions of, 4, 87, 267 urban, 243. See also genetic drift DuBois, W.E.B., 30 Duclos-Guyot, Nicolas Pierre, 223 Duff, Alan, 118, 123 D’Urville, Dumont, 163 Dusava, Gabriel, 139 Duster, Troy, 115 Dutch East India Company, 149 dysentery, 135

E Easter Island. See Rapa Nui Ebeye Island, 212–213 Eknilang, Isao, 209, 212 Eknilang, Lijon, 25, 210–211, 214–215, 267 Emma (Hawaiian Queen), 231 endogamy, 180 Enewetak Atoll, 198, 210, 214 ENRICH (Equity for Indigenous Research and Innovation Coordinating Hub), 264 epidemics, 136 epigenetic factors, 115 eugenics, 16, 115, 185 and colonialism, 7, 18 and immigration, 16 in Australia, 24, 189–191 in the Nazi era, 19, 191, 227 in the USA, 16 Eugenics Records Office (New York), 16 Eurocentricism, 61 European Union, 44

279

Europe, decolonization of, 32 Evans, Donald, 62 evidence types of, 75, 76 uncertainty of, 74 exogamy, 176 extinction, 7, 24, 30, 127, 176, 185, 194, 228, 249

F Fa‘ave, David, 181 Fairweather, John, 93, 122 Falealupo (in Samoa), 165, 169–170 Faleomavaega, Eni F.H., 205 “Family of Man”, 17 Fangataufa Atoll, 198, 202 fascism, 5, 202 Fernández de Quirós, Pedro, 58 fertilizers, 152 Fiji, 111, 120, 131 adoption of children in, 41 independence of, 32 slavery in, 52 settlement of, 80 Filipino people, 52, 63. See also Philippines Finney, Ben, 81, 84 First International Conference on the Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 195, 249 Firth, Stewart, 127 Fisher, Allan G.B., 243 Fison, Lorimer, 37 Fonoti, Rochelle Tuitagava‘a, 253 Fornander, Abraham, 58–60, 67 Forster, Johann Reinhold, 150 Foster, Laura, 130, 168 Foucault, Michel, 34–35 Four Directions Council of the First Nations of Canada, 168

280

INDEX

Fourmile, Gudju Gudju, 237 Fox, Keolu, 96–99, 232–233, 245–246, 252, 264 France colonization by, 27, 180, 202 decolonization by, 197–198 exploration by, 223 nuclear testing by, 124, 196 Franklin, Rosalind, 2, 260 free trade, 130 French Polynesia, 198 Fujimura, Joan, 89–90

G gafa (Samoan term for genealogy), 62, 253 Gajdusek, Carleton, 66 Galton, Francis, 16, 184–185, 260 gambling, 116 Gane, Korowai, 139–141 gel electrophoresis, 67 gene–environment interactions, 114 genealogy and the natural world, 43, 44, 46–48, 153–155, 261 definitions of, 34–35, 37–38, 41, 64 Hawaiian term for, 28 Samoan term for, 62 Tongan term for, 41 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, 133 genetically modified organisms (GMO), 152–153, 160, 163 and Treaty of Waitangi, 23 patenting of, 3 seeds, 151 genetic drift definition of, 4, 67, 87 occurence in Pacific populations, 4 genocide, 9, 189, 227

Genographic Project, 88–89 George, Grey, 58 George IV (British king), 107, 232 George, Lily, 36 Germany, 32 Gilbert and Ellice Islands, 32, 66 Giles, William Nu‘utupu, 270 globalization, 8, 11, 43, 127, 131 glyphosate, 152 Golden Rice, 160 Goldfields Land and Sea Council, 234 Gonzalez, Vernadette-Vicuña, 45 Goodyear-Ka‘¯opua, Noelani, 35 Gordon, Arthur, 52 Great Britain colonization by, 231 nuclear testing by, 198, 202 Great Fleet (in Aotearoa), 84 Great Mahele (1848), 174 Greenpeace, 123, 152, 198 Greer, E. Sunny, 221 Gua Harimau (in Sumatra), 75 Guam, 58, 182, 222 Guevara, Che, 2

H Ha‘amonga a Maui (in Tonga), 43 Haami, Bradford, 39 Haddon, Alfred Cort, 233, 234 Hagahai controversy, 125, 143, 145, 149, 233–235 Halaulani, 45 Hale, Horatio, 60 “half-castes”, 174, 176, 179–181, 189–190 Halualani, Rona Tamiko, 45 Hanchant-Nichols, Deanne, 238 Handy, Edward S.C., 58 Han people, 177 haplotypes, 70–71, 73, 79, 88 Harawira, Hone, 116

INDEX

Harvard University, 18, 56, 112 Hau‘ofa, Epeli, 11–12, 14, 127, 247 Hawai‘i independence of, 45 royal family of, 45, 58, 174, 219, 221, 225, 232 USA colonization of, 174, 177, 223–224. See also K¯anaka Ma‘oli (Indigenous Hawaiians) Hawai‘i Island Burial Council, 220 Hawaiian Homes Commission, 82, 175 Hawaiian Kingdom, 45, 58, 219, 223, 224 Hawaiian Renaissance (1970s), 82–83 Hawaiki (near Tahiti), 85 Helmreich, Stefan, 47 Henaghan, Mark, 261 hepatitis, 136, 165 Heyerdahl, Thor, 84 Hezel, Francis X, 209 HGDP. See Human Genome Diversity Project Hills, Simon, 260 Hinemataiti (M¯aori deity), 92, 222 H¯ıroa, Te Rangi (Peter Buck), 56–57 Hiroshima, 19, 24, 197–198, 200–202, 203, 226 HIV/AIDS, 166–167, 168 Ho Chi Minh, 2 hohoko (Tongan term for genealogy), 41, 253 Hokowhitu, Brendan, 108, 109 H¯ ok¯ ule‘a (voyaging canoe), 81–84, 90, 93 Holmes, Tommy, 81 Hone Heke (M¯aori chief), 104, 107 Hong Kong, 32 hoodia plant, 168 Hook, Gary, 110 horticulture, 134, 163 H¯ otere, Ralph, 109

281

Howitt, Alfred William, 37 HTLV-1 controversy, 138, 141 Hudson, Maui, 38, 245, 255–256, 258 human body, integrity of, 142 Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP), 145, 185–187, 236, 238–241 and biocolonialism, 230 and solomon islands, 145 and the Mataatua Declaration, 12 as “vampire project”, 10, 226 ethics of, 9, 234 launch of, 8 launch of (1991), 3 terminology of, 137–138. See also Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca Human Genome Project (HGP), 17, 200, 228–229 Human Immunodeficiency. See HIV/ AIDS human rights, 2, 5, 141, 143 human T-cell leukemia lymphoma viruses (HTLV), 138, 139, 141 hybrids, racial, 31 hydrogen bomb, 202, 204 I Ibeji, Yoketan, 24, 133, 141. See also Hagahai controversy Ihimaera, Witi, 109, 123 immigration, and race, 16, 189 India, 30, 32, 58, 59, 149, 177 Indigeneity, definitions of, 13–14, 188, 192, 228, 237 Indigenous data governance, 245 Indigenous data sovereignty, 246, 251, 264 Indigenous Design and Innovation Aotearoa (IDIA), 255–256 Indigenous People’s Council on Biocolonialism, 230

282

INDEX

Indochina, 180 Indo-Fijians, 52 infant mortality, 119. See also children influenza, 135, 136, 167 inheritance, laws of, 14, 174, 176, 221 intellectual property rights, 195 and cell lines, 142 and botanicals, 168, 169 and misappropriation, 161 beneficiaries of, 12 of genes, 131 of traditional knowledge, 247 treaties and protocols for, 249, 250, 254 International Convention on Biodiversity (1992), 170 International Court of Justice, 125, 214 International Monetary Fund, 127 Ira tangata (M¯aori term for gene), 38 Isolates of Historic Interest (IHI), 138 isolates (supposedly isolated communities), 134, 137–138, 158, 186, 228 Israel, lost tribes of, 57 iwi (Hawaiian term for bones of the dead), 50, 86, 159, 220–221, 224, 249

J Jackson, Moana, 89, 109, 259 Japan, 200 mercury poisoning in, 126 nuclear bombings in, 7, 202–203. See also Hiroshima; Nagasaki Jenkins, Carol, 24, 137, 139–141 Jetñil-Kijiner, Kathy, 217 Joash, Kelen, 213 Joash, Lirok, 213

Johnson, Barbara Rose, 199, 208 Johnston Atoll, 198 Jones, Camara, 31 Jones, Pei Te Hurinui, 109 Judaism, 19, 22, 57, 188 Juda (Marshallese chief), 226 Juda, Tomaki, 214 Jury, Hoani Te Whatahaoro, 84 K Ka‘ahumanu (Hawaiian queen consort), 219 k¯a‘ai (Hawaiian burial caskets), 219, 220–221, 231 Ka‘ili, T¯evita O., 253 Kaho ‘olawe Islands, 82 Kahui family, 117–121 Kalakaua (Hawaiian king), 45–46, 47, 174 Kalam people, 134 Kalani‘opu‘u (Hawaiian king), 223 Kam¯amalu (Hawaiian queen), 231–232 Kambu, Alphonse, 131, 132, 143 Kame‘eleihiwa, Lilikal¯a, 35–36 Kamea people, 42 Kamehameha I (Hawaiian king), 219 Kamehameha II (Hawaiian king), born Liholiho, 231–233 Kamehameha IV (Hawaiian king), 44–45, 231 Kamehameha V (Hawaiian king), 231 K¯anaka Ma‘oli (Indigenous Hawaiians), 35, 154 K¯anaka Ma‘oli (Indigenous Hawaiians), 45, 173, 175–177, 183, 252. See also Hawai‘i Kanak and Socialist Liberation Front, 27 Kanaky people (New Caledonia), 27–28, 180 Kanehe, Le‘a Malia, 24, 88–89

INDEX

Kaomea, Julie, 35 Kaposi’s sarcoma, 166 Kapuni-Reynolds, Halena, 221, 230 kastam (customary law in PNG), 143 Kauanui, K¯ehaulani, 29, 174–176, 181, 188 Kaurna people, 235–236 Kauvaka, Lea Lani Kinikini, 100 Kawainui K¯ane, Herb, 81 Kawharu, Margaret, 48 Kawowo, Karie John, 164 Kayer, Manfred, 72–73 Kayser, Manfred, 55, 74 Keasling, Jay, 169 Keiha, Pare, 244 Keil, Joe, 170 Keju-Johnson, Darlene, 226–227 Kenbenli, Norio, 212 Khomani San people, 168 kidney disease, 157 Kightley, Oscar, 51, 62 Kikiloi, Kekuewa, 43 Kili Islands, 203, 216 Kimberley Stolen Generation Aboriginal Corporation, 192 King, M., 116 King, Macsyna, 117–119 kinship, significance of, 24, 37, 40, 41, 154, 192 kiore (Pacific rat), 92, 93, 222 Kirch, Patrick V., 57, 68 Kittles, Rick, 193 Kobon people, 134 Kolnij, Timako, 205 Kolopenuk, Jessica, 263 Korea, 180, 182 Kowal, Emma, 179, 188, 192 Kramer, Larry, 166 Kudnarto (Mary Ann Adams), 235–236 Kuhio (Hawaiian prince), 219 Kukonu, Earick (Sr.), 174

283

Kukutai, Tahu, 246, 251 k¯ umara (sweet potato), 40, 92, 154, 222, 226 Kumulipo narrative, 42, 46, 89 Kupe (Polynesian explorer), 84 Kwa, Eric, 141 Kwajalein Atoll, 203, 212–213, 216

L labor and migration, 12, 52 forced, 24, 30 indentured, 126, 172, 180. See also slavery Ladrones (Mariana Islands), 223 Laelan, Melisa, 216 Lake, Marilyn, 30 Land Marches (in Aotearoa, 1975), 49 land rights, 163 in Aotearoa, 49 in Australia, 32, 162, 189 in Hawai‘i, 82, 173–175, 183, 221, 224 in Micronesia, 210. See also native title Lane, Pauline, 140 Langdon, Robert, 91 languages, control of, 14 Lapita culture, 53–54, 57, 69, 79, 80, 91 Lardelli, Derek, 85 Laukon, Neisen, 212, 217 Lavatmagemu Declaration, 44 law, customary, 142 Lawrence Laboratory, 200 Leafe, Rachael Violeti, 180 Lea, Rod, 103, 106, 122 legends, as evidence, 59 Le Maire, Jacob, 58 leprosy, 232

284

INDEX

Lerma, Puna, 220 leukemia, 138, 208, 217 Libby, Willard, 68 Liholiho. See Kamehameha II (Hawaiian king) Lili‘uokalani (Hawaiian queen), 45, 174, 219, 224 L¯ıloa (Hawaiian king), 219 Lilo, Pela, 165, 169 Liloqula, Ruth, 147 Lindee, M. Susan, 7, 19, 200 linguistics, 58 Lini, Motarilavoa Hilda, 44 Livermore Laboratories, 200 Lock, Margaret, 149 Lombroso, Cesare, 113 Lonoikamakahiki, 219 Los Alamos, 200 Los Jardines (likely Enewetak), 57 Lukere (Luker), Vicki, 119–120, 178

M Mabo case, 32, 162 Mabo, Eddie, 32, 162 Magellan, Ferdinand, 222 M¯ahina, H¯ufanga ‘Okustino, 41 Mahuika, N¯epia, 49, 85 Maile, Uahikea, 224 Maioho, Bill, 231 Malhi, Ripan, 257 Malia Kanehe, Le‘a, 33, 34 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 65 Malo, David, 46–47 mamala tree, 165–167, 169–170 Manutahi Temaru, Oscar, 198 M¯aori and education, 120 conflicts between tribes, 104 disadvantage suffered by, 116 first encounters with Europeans, 104

health problems of, 157 origin stories of, 222 racism against, 121, 123 stereotypes of, 111, 118, 122 views on science of, 159, 165. See also Aotearoa New Zealand M¯aori Congress, 11, 96, 143 M¯aori Party, 109, 118 Mao Zedong, 2 Mariana Islands, 66, 166, 222 marriage, 37, 146, 180, 190 and migration, 74 exogamous, 40. See also miscegenation Marsden, Samuel, 107 Marshallese people, 204, 208–209 in the USA, 215–216 Marshall Islands, 66, 163, 198, 203, 226 independence of, 32 nuclear testing in, 203–210 settlement of, 84 masculinities, 109, 120 Masha, Jacob, 215 Mataatua Declaration of Pacific and Indigenous Peoples (1993), 11–13, 32, 195, 249–250 Mataiapo, Te Tika (Dorice Reid), 157, 158 m¯atauranga (M¯aori knowledge), 159, 260, 262 Matayoshi, Almira, 212 Matchitt, Paratene, 109 Matisoo-Smith Elizabeth (Lisa), 53, 62, 79, 88, 90–92, 99 matrilocality, 74 Matsumura, Hirofumi, 75 Mauigoa, Epenesa, 165–170 M¯aui (M¯aori demigod), 14, 85, 222 Mauna ‘Ala (royal mausoleum in Hawaii), 219–220, 224–225, 231–232

INDEX

McCourt, Christine, 211 McKinley, William, 224 McLeod, David, 123 Mead, Aroha Te Pareake, 38, 94, 95, 99, 126, 133, 143, 161, 248–250, 264 measles, 167, 232 Medicaid, 216 medicine, traditional, 163, 165, 168, 247 Mednick, Sarnoff, 113 Mei-Singh, Laurel, 45 Meissner, Shelbi Nahwilet, 13 Melanesia archaeology in, 75 early history of, 53, 54, 57, 66, 72, 234 stereotypes about, 111. See also Fiji; New Caledoni; Papua New Guinea; Solomon Islands; Torres Strait Islands; Vanuatau Melanesia 2000 (cultural festival), 27 Melbourne, Hirini, 109 Mendel, Gregor Johann, 16, 65, 260, 262 Mendelian genetics, 31, 65, 184, 191, 200 menstruation, 187 mestizo genomics, 15 Meyer, Manulani Aluli, 16, 35 Mgbeoji, Ikechi, 161 Micronesia, 24 early history of, 56, 66 independence of, 32 recognition of, 84. See also Caroline Islands; Gilbert and Ellice Islands; Mariana Islands; Marshall Islands; nuclear weapons; Pohnpei; Rongelap Atoll migration, accidental, 86–87

285

migration routes, theories of, 51–56, 60, 79–85 Mila-Schaaf, Karlo, 181, 269 Minamata (in Japan), 126 miscegenation, 177, 189–190 missionaries, 1, 58, 107, 120, 134–135, 174, 224. See also Christianity Mitchell, Robert, 142 mo‘o k¯ u‘auhau (Hawaiian term for genealogy), 28–29, 35, 45, 46, 221, 225, 253 Mo‘orea, 43 Moana (Oceania), 252 Model Law for the Protection of Traditional Knowledge and Expressions of Culture (2002), 249 Moffitt, Terrie E., 113 Moluccas, 70 Mondoy, Kalani, 63–64, 87 monoamine oxidase-A (MAO-A) complex, 102–103, 106, 110, 114–115 monogamy, 14 Monsanto Corporation, 152 Moody, John, 215 Moon, Paul, 244 Morgan, Thomas Hunt, 17, 260 Morris, Teora S., 42 Morton, Samuel George, 111 Moruroa Atoll, 124, 197, 198, 202 mothers,criticisms of, 120 Murderer’s Bay, 104 Murray-McIntosh, Rosalind, 86 Muru, Selwyn, 109 museums, 112, 177, 220–221, 230, 232, 235, 237, 238, 255 myths, European, 105

286

INDEX

N Nagasaki, 24, 197–198, 201–202, 226 Najita, Susan, 132 Naouna, Emmanuel, 27 National Cancer Institute (in USA), 137, 166, 168 National Centre for Indigenous Genomics (in Australia), 187–188, 192 National Congress of American Indians, 11 National Institutes of Health (USA), 3, 139, 141, 185 nationalist movements, 5 National Museum of Rio de Janeiro, 177 Native American peoples, 15, 76, 178, 241 Native BioData Consortium, 250, 264 Native Land Court, 37 Native Title Act 1993 (Australia), 189 native title, 162 natural/unnatural, definitions of, 155–156 natural selection, 4, 16, 67, 95–97. See also Darwinism Nauru, 32 Navajo people, 264 Nazism, 5, 19, 191, 202 Neel, James, 98 Neel, Robert, 200–201 Nelson, Alondra, 193 neo-colonialism, 67, 123, 131 neoliberalism, 123, 126–130, 268 Neolithic society, 54–55 Nepia-Clamp, Te Aturangi, 85 Netherlands, 102, 104, 149, 150 Neville, A. O., 190 New Caledonia, 28, 52, 180

New Guinea, 32, 42. See also Hagahai controversy; Melanesia; Papua New Guinea; West Papua New Hebrides, 52 New Zealand. See Aotearoa New Zealand New Zealand Defence Force, 105 Ng¯a Puhi iwi, 94, 107 Ngarrindjeri people, 238–239 Ngata, Apirana, 37 Ng¯ati T¯ umatak¯okiri tribe, 104 Ngati Wairere people, 94 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 35 Niue, 32, 179 Nobel Prize, 152, 156 Nu‘uhiwa, Kalei, 29 Nuclear Claims Tribunal, 209–210, 212, 214, 249 nuclear colonialism, 217 Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Treaty (NFIP), 196 nuclear radiation, genetic and health effects of, 7, 19, 197–202, 204–208, 211, 226–227 Nuclear Victims’ and Survivors’ Remembrance Day, 217 nuclear weapons, 7, 196–197, 203 in Japan, 7, 19, 24 testing of, 7, 196, 198, 204. See also anti-nuclear movments; Bikini Atoll; Hiroshima; Nagasaki; Marshall Islands O O’Brien, Lewis, 235–236 Oberea (Tahitian leader), 223 obesity, 98, 137, 208 Oceanian settlement of, 55–56 Okamura, Jonathan, 183 Okustino M¯ahina, 41 Once Were Warriors (novel and film), 123

INDEX

Oopa, Pouvanaa a, 198 oral traditions, 73, 236, 246, 248 Otago Museum, 56 Oubré, Alondra, 106 P Pacific Concerns Resource Centre, 43 Pacific Early Career Researchers Collective, 253 Pacific Indigenous Peoples’ Knowledge and Intellectual Property Rights Consultation, 195 Pacific Island Forum, 128 Pacific Plan for Strengthening Regional Cooperation and Integration, 128 Pacific rat (Rattus exulans ), 91–93, 222 Palau, 32, 52, 66 Pang Kee, Leighton, 173, 183, 188 Pani (M¯aori deity), 222 Paoakalani Declaration (2003), 250 Papahanaumoku (Hawaiian Earth Mother), 154 Papat¯ua¯nuku (M¯aori earth mother), 85 Papuan cultures, oldest, 80 Papua New Guinea, 23, 80, 135, 164. See also Hagahai controversy; Melanesia; New Guinea; West Papua Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research, 133–134 Paradies, Yin, 179 patents, 140 biomedical, 96 laws of, 130, 140–141, 161, 247 of human cells, 125, 130–132, 139, 143 of plants, 151, 153, 161. See also Hagahai controversy

287

patrilocality, 73–74 Pauwels, Simonne, 41 Pearson, Karl, 16, 260 Peguis people, 263 Pentecost Island, 43 Perkins, ‘Umi, 35 personalized medicine, 17, 132, 185 pesticides, 152 Peteru, Clark, 170 pharmaceutical industry, 47, 166, 168, 169, 226 pharmacology, 7, 165, 168 Philippines, 53, 57, 66, 71, 160. See also Filipino people phrenology, 49. See also craniology Piailug, Mau, 81, 84 plants breeding of, 16 exploitation of, 149–150 meanings and significance of, 153–154, 156, 171 medicinal, 24, 149–150, 163–164 migrations of, 40, 91 taxonomy of, 150. See also k¯ umara; mamala tree; taro poetry, 2, 3, 77–79, 181, 217, 269–271 Pohnpei, 66, 81 Point Pearce (mission), 236 polygamy, 14 polymerase chain reaction, 67 Polynesia colonial status of, 30–31 early history of, 52, 53, 80. See also Aotearoa New Zealand; Cook Islands; Hawai‘i; Niue; Samoa; Tonga; Rapa Nui Polynesian Liberation Front, 202 Polynesian Voyaging Society, 81–82 Ponape, 66, 196 pottery, 54, 57, 69, 70, 80, 90. See also Lapita culture

288

INDEX

Pou Mana, 261 Powys Whyte, Kyle, 13 Prostratin, 166–170 Protector of Natives, 190 proto-Polynesian peoples, 56 pseudoscience, 10, 19. See also craniology; phrenology

R race and UNESCO, 5 categorizations of, 174 definitions of, 5, 9, 20, 31, 101 hierarchies of, 112 race hygiene, 16 racism and pseudoscience, 50 and science, 10, 18, 111, 229 and the Human Genome Diversity Project, 8 fallacies of, 5, 9 institutional, 259 tropes of, 111, 122, 128. See also anti-racism Radiation Effects Research Foundation, 201 radiation poisoning, 204–205. See also nuclear radiation, genetic and health effects of radiocarbon dating, 69 rainbow papaya, 159 Rainbow Warrior, 123, 198 Rajagopalan, Ramya, 89–90 Rakeiora Project, 262 Ralph, 109 Rangihau, John, 109 Ranginui (M¯aori sky father), 85 Rapa Nui (Easter Island), 76, 81, 83 Rarere, Nathan, 51, 62 Rarotonga, 76. See also Cook Islands Rarotonga Treaty (1985), 197

Ratuva, Steven, 23 Rawlins Martin, Penny, 83–84 Reard, Louis, 204 Reardon, Jenny, 241 Reich, David, 19 repatriation, 252 Reyes, Raquel A.R., 149 Reynolds, Henry, 30 Reynolds, Paul, 94 Richards, Martin, 71 Riddiford, Ken, 192 Riklon, Sheldon, 208 Rire, Jonathan Te, 39 Rito, Terasa, 71 Roberts, Campbell, 124 Roberts, Dorothy, 31 Roberts, Mere, 39, 93, 122 Robie, David, 143 Robins, Judith H., 99 Roi Mata (in Vanuatu), 43 Rokotuivuna, Amelia, 196–197 Rongelap Atoll and its people. See also Marshall Islands Rongelap Atoll and its people, 203–213 Rongerik Atoll, 203, 216 Rongomaui (M¯aori god), 92, 222, 226 Roosevelt, Theodore, 223 Roquette-Pinto, Edgard, 177 Roundup (glyphosate), 152 Royal Commission on Genetic Modification (Aotearoa New Zealand, 2001), 22 Royal Navy, 232 Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI), 125, 139–140

S Sahul, 79

INDEX

Salesa, Damon, 40, 62, 79–80 Samoa, 40, 62, 80, 81, 165, 169, 170. See also Western Samoa sandalwood, 149, 150, 172 Santos Perez, Craig, 269 Schiebinger, Londa, 150 Schouten, Willem, 58 Schwartz, Jessica, 216 science and colonialism, 13 and overcoming racism, 10 as imperial history, 10 decolonization of, 98 distrust in, 19 ethics of, 9, 157, 160, 240, 249 oceanographic, 46, 47 prestige of, 16. See also bioethics scientific racism, 111 seas, native, 81 seeds, breeding and cultivation of, 65, 149, 151, 153 self-determination, 10, 13, 160, 248, 251, 264 Sengi, Dominic, 139 Senituli, Lopeti, 24, 147, 195 settlement, accidental, 81, 83 Sharp, Andrew, 81, 84 Sharples, Pita, 118 Shiva, Vandana, 131 sibling relationships, 40–41 Silva, Noenoe K., 46 Simpson, Audra, 13 SING. See Summer Internship for Indigenous People in Genomics Sivasundaram, Sujit, 45–46 skulls. See craniology slavery and sandalwood, 52, 149 and science, 19, 24 and skin color, 5 genetic, 125, 126, 143

289

trade in, 52, 149–150, 193. See also labor smallpox, 166, 232 Smith-Norris, Martha, 206 Smith, Stephenson Percy, 59–60, 67 smoking, 103, 208 Smooove, J., 52 Soares, Pedro, 71 Solomon Islands, 32, 111, 145–146 Somerville, Alice Te Punga, 14 sorcery, 143 South Africa, 32, 49, 168, 177 South Australian Museum, 235 South Pacific Forum Secretariat, 127 Soviet Union, 5, 32, 126 nuclear testing by, 202 Spain, colonization by, 15, 53, 149 Spanish–American War (1898), 175, 224 Spice Islands, 149 spice trade, 149, 150 sports, 49, 108–109, 111, 215 Springbok Tour protests, 49 Stanford University, 185 Statement of Bioethics Consultation from the Tonga National Council of Churches Centre (2001), 250 stereotypes, racial, 110–111, 118, 120 sterilization programs, 16, 189–190 Stolen Generations (in Australia), 22, 24, 189–194, 233 stones, significance of, 42 Stop OGM Pacifique, 152 Sturtevant, Alfred Henry, 199 substance abuse, 122, 208 suicide, 208, 213 Sullivan, Louis, 112 Sullivan, Robert, 77–79, 84 Sumatra, 75 Summer Internship for Indigenous Peoples in Genomics (SING), 217, 257–259, 263, 264

290

INDEX

Swan, Claudia, 150 Sydney Anti-Bases Action Committee, 202 syphilis, 166, 232

T Tagicakibau, Ema, 197 Tahiti, 43, 82, 84, 198, 223 Taiwan, 51, 63, 71–72, 98 migration from, 56, 63, 71–73, 98 TallBear, Kimberly, 61, 178, 258 Tamahori, Lee, 118 Tamayose, Chiyoko, 204, 207 Tangaroa (M¯aori god of the sea), 78, 85 taro, 40, 48, 78–79, 98, 154–155, 163 Tasman, Abel, 58, 104 Tcherkezoff, Serge, 40 Teaiwa, Teresia, 203 Temaru, Oscar, 202 Tengan, Ty P. K¯awika, 107, 253 Teparii, Etienne, 202 Te Punga Somerville, Alice, 93 Te Rangi H¯ıroa (Peter Buck), 56 terra nullius , 161–162, 189 Te Tiriti o Waitangi. See Treaty of Waitangi Thompson, Christina, 105 Thompson, Nainoa, 81 thrifty gene hypothesis, 98 tikanga, 38, 260, 263 Tindale, Norman, 235–237 Tipene-Matua, Bevan, 261 Tjibaou, Jean-Marie, 27 tobacco, 103, 116, 150, 193, 208 Tobler, Ray, 237 Toi Kai R¯akau, 85 Toi Te Taiao: The Bioethics Council, 156 Tonga, 54, 81, 137

Christianity in, 155 genealogy in, 41 horticulture in, 163 independence of, 32 megaliths in, 43 settlement of, 80 Tonga National Council of Churches, 144, 250 Torres Strait Islands, 162, 188, 264 tourism, 127, 166, 269 Traditional Biological Knowledge, Innovations and Practices Act (2000), 250 traditional knowledge, 261 and decolonization, 257 and intellectual property, 247, 250, 268 and mamala tree, 167–168 and migration histories, 80 and scientific research, 245, 255 ethics of, 250 preservation of, 144 trans-oceanic hypothesis, 91 Trask, Haunani-Kay, 34, 64, 95, 97, 154 Treaty for a Lifeforms Patent-Free Pacific (1995), 195, 249 Treaty of Rarotonga (1985), 198 Treaty of Waitangi, 22, 32, 48, 107, 123, 157 Trejaut, Jean, 71 Tsosie, Krystal, 264–265 Tuamotu Islands, 76 Tuhiwai Smith, Linda, 13, 16, 35, 133 Tumokon, Timothy, 151–152 Tumonggor, Meryanne, 71, 73–74 t¯ upuna (M¯aori ancestors), 36 Turaga Nation, 43 Turia, Tariana, 109 T¯ uwharetoa, Ng¯ati, 94 typhus, 166

INDEX

U uhinga (Tongan term for genealogical ties), 253 Ujelan Atoll, 203 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), 8, 177, 227, 230, 260 after WWII, 239 and genetic knowledge, 6 on racism, 5 Social Science Bulletin of, 7 United Nations, 6, 227, 246–249 and anti-racism, 8 and decolonization, 11, 21 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (1960), 248 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007), 23, 248 General Assembly of, 166, 198 International Decades for the Eradication of Colonialism, 248 International Year of the World’s Indigenous Peoples (1993), 249 Western Samoa joins, 2 Working Group on Indigenous Populations (WGIP), 248 United States of America and Bikinians, 214, 226 and decolonization, 11 and eugenics, 16 and Hagahai controversy, 133, 139 and HIV/AIDS, 166, 169 and nuclear bombing of Japan, 19, 200 and slavery, 52, 193 colonization by, 52, 177, 223, 224

291

military programs of, 213 nuclear testing by, 198, 202. See also African-Americans; Native American peoples; Spanish–American War University of Alberta, 258 University of California at Berkeley, 169 University of California San Diego, 250 University of Copenhagen, 233 University of Otago, 263 University of the South Pacific, 197 urban drift, 243–244 USSR. See Soviet Union Utrik Atoll, 206, 214

V Va‘a, Unasa Leulu Felise, 252 Vakabua, Joeli N., 131 vampire project, 10, 187, 226 Vanuatu, 43, 151–152, 180 2015 cyclone in, 151 independence of, 32, 44 Vanuatu Indigenous Peoples Bureau, 44 Variant Bio, 243–244 Venter, Craig, 17 Vietnam, 32, 82 Villagomez, J. T., 166 Villella, Giuseppe, 113 violence causes of, 105, 116–117, 119, 122 mythology of, 105 prevalence of, 110 Viraelo Boborenvanua (Chief, Nation of Turaga), 44 viruses, 138, 157, 165–167, 169, 208. See also HIV/AIDS vitamin deficiencies, 160 volcano goddess, 43

292

INDEX

W Wailoo, Keith, 2 Waipi‘o Valley (in Hawai‘i), 219–221, 231 waka (M¯aori term for canoe), 77, 85 Wakea (Hawaiian Sky Father), 154 Wakefield, Benita, 261 Waldby, Catherine, 142 Walker, Ranginui, 109 Wallace, Alfred, 30 Walters, Muru, 109 Warner, Joanne, 118 warrior gene, 101, 109–110, 116–118, 122 warrior narrative, 104–109 Wathaurong people, 258 Watson, Huti, 243–245 Watson, James, 2, 17, 229, 260 Wells, Spencer, 79 Wendt, Albert, 1–2, 8, 93, 267, 269 Western Samoa, 2, 32, 179. See also Samoa Wensley, D., 149 West Papua, 180. See also Papua New Guinea whakapapa, 22, 41, 171 and identity, 159 and kinship, 154, 244 and plants and animals, 171 and Treaty of Waitangi, 48 and weaving, 153 and Western science, 49 and Western taxonomies, 39 and xenotransplantation, 156 definition/meaning of, 38–41, 49, 93, 253 of k¯ umara, 222 transformation of, 49 Whanau, Quentin, 105 Whare Tapa Wh¯a, 261

White Australia Policy, 189 whiteness and colonization, 30, 31 and science, 57 myths about, 60–61 possession by, 59 privilege of, 61 Whitt, Laurelyn, 10 Wilcox, Phillip, 3, 86, 259–260, 262 Wilkins, Maurice, 3, 17, 260 Willerslev, Eske, 233–234 Williams, Georgina Yambo, 235 Williams, Rimuu, 52 Williams, Rosalind, 17 Wilson, Christopher, 239 Wilson-Hokowhitu, N¯alani, 28, 35, 42, 46, 83, 87 women and capitalism, 131 and menstruation, 187 as contributors to science, 229 as healers, 163, 164, 168 as navigators, 83 effects of nuclear radiation on, 213, 217 in Fiji, 120 K¯anaka Maoli, 35 migrations of, 73 World Congress of Indigenous Peoples (1993), 10 World Health Organization, 136, 139 World Trade Organization, 127 World War II, 5, 8, 53, 197, 204, 270 Wotjobaluk people, 263 Wyatt, Ben H., 226

X xenotransplantation, 156–157

INDEX

Y Yamada, Seiji, 208 Yamato ancestry, 177 Yanagihara, Richard, 133, 139 Yidinji people, 237

Yugoslavia, 32

Z Zerubavel, Eviatar, 37

293