Constituting Knowledge across Cultures of Expertise and Tradition: An Ethnographic Study of Indigenous Technoscientists and Their Collaborators

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Indigenous peoples respond in diverse ways to genome science projects depending on the particular questions being asked, and the methods and histories of those fields. Increasingly, they resist scientific inquiry that they view as in conflict with their values. In the U.S. and Canada, our research sites, indigenes are regulating research, making property claims on scientific data, and requiring certain benefits in return for granting researchers access to their communities. Native American tribes show interest in initiating/funding genomic research in order to directly bolster their intellectual and governance capacities. Tribes also emphasize and fund training in science and technology fields as a capacity-building strategy that they see as necessary for self-governance and community flourishing. Accordingly, Native Americans and Canadian First Nation individuals enter technoscientific fields in order to support indigenous self governance and to diversify in terms of personnel and modes of thought fields that impact indigenous lives. This project will investigate indigenous genome scientists as agents in the democratization of genome science fields using archival and ethnographic methods. Because they facilitate or challenge indigenous genome scientists? roles as knowledge producers at the intersection of genomics and indigenous governance, tribal regulators, cultural experts, and community members will also be a focus of research, especially as they address the intersections of genomics with both indigenous ?traditional? and bureaucratized ways of knowing. Subjects will be drawn from fields to which indigenous peoples and governments are connected; they include basic human population genetics research (i.e. on human migrations and evolutionary questions) and biomedical research. Indigenous scientists are still few in number and they work with non-indigenous collaborators who also broker knowledge and opportunities for scientific inquiry between the laboratory and the tribe. Thus we will also focus on non-indigenous scientists? roles in integrating scientific practices, priorities, and values into indigenous governance.Intellectual meritThis research has intellectual merit for genome science fields, for STS, and for society. The work of indigenous scientists and collaborators may suggest cross-fertilizations of values and knowledges. Diversifying the classroom, the field, and the laboratory may be only the beginning. Beyond who inquires, who samples, and who does data analysis, are new research questions, theories, methods, and governing arrangements emerging at the intersections of genomics and indigenous knowledges and practices? For STS, this research adds to its postcolonial strand of scholarship, which is undertreated in the U.S. and which is important for making STS itself more multicultural.Broader impactsThis research will suggest opportunities for and highlight the barriers to making genome science norms more multi-cultural and compatible with indigenous communities? needs. Will the result be cross-fertilizations of genomics and indigenous knowledges and values as the field and laboratory are diversified? Will the result be new research questions, theories, methods, and governing arrangements when indigenous peoples act as researchers and not simply as research subjects? This project will reveal opportunities and challenges for increasing the distribution of social benefits from genome science to indigenous peoples whose needs and values are often labeled as in conflict with modern science.