Inventing the Thrifty Gene - The Science of Settler Colonialism by Travis Hay (review)

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Metadata	Details
Publication Date	2024-03-01
Journal	Native American and Indigenous Studies
Authors	Krystal S. Tsosie

Abstract

Reviewed by: Inventing the Thrifty Gene: The Science of Settler Colonialism by Travis Hay Krystal S. Tsosie (bio) Inventing the Thrifty Gene: The Science of Settler Colonialism by Travis Hay University of Manitoba Press, 2021 IN INVENTING THE THRIFTY GENE: The Science of Settler Colonialism, non-Indigenous historian Travis Hay writes a compelling critique of James Neel’s flawed “thrifty gene hypothesis,” a concept that still pervades many settler-geneticists’ understanding of Type 2 diabetes mellitus in Indigenous people. This hypothesis is an extension of similar “mismatch” narratives; it posits through an evolutionary biology lens that a disease state emerges due to a divergence between Indigenous Peoples’ supposedly innate and genetic predisposition to storing higher blood glucose levels attuned over centuries of traditional diet patterns and periodic famine that have become maladaptive to recent or “modern” carbohydrate-and starch-rich industrialized diets. This narrative is repeatedly substantiated in Western settler-scientists’ explorations of diabetes, although it has been discredited by many who have rightfully pointed to colonial and structural factors—such as forced removal of culturally based foodways, destabilized food sovereignties, and inequities in preventative healthcare—as more evidence-based contributors to the diabetic state in Indigenous peoples compared to reductionist, simplistic narratives rooted solely in DNA.1 Hay cites these works, but he also weaves a readable and accessible history of how these concepts and dichotomies (Indigenous versus Western, “premodern”/ancestral versus modern/industrial) can be misused and serve as settler hubris reified as “science” through a singular, narrow lens of genetics. Much of Hay’s book is an extended exploration of how Western academia has foundationally situated race as a biological construct in the fields of human genetics and genomics, anthropology, and even medicine. While contemporary human genetics and genomics research tries to eschew its eugenicist past—which led to dangerous, hierarchical constructions of genetic racism—academic scholars still must check each other to ensure that studies based on exploring genetic variation and differences between populations do not biologically reify “race.” For instance, a 2018 open letter signed by sixty-seven scientists and researchers criticized geneticist David Reich’s book Who We Are and How We Got Here for substantiating differences between groups as being of genetic not social constructions.2 As [End Page 142] long as researchers continue to push for increased inclusion of Indigenous Peoples in genetic studies, the need will remain for a book such as Hay’s, which questions the situation of Indigenous bodies as sources for settler-science’s extraction and benefit. As Hay writes, just as Indigenous lands and resources were usurped by colonialism, “Indian blood, like diamonds, and oil, thus became supremely valuable to settlers” (90). As a part of an intensive diagnostic analysis of Neel’s genetic interest in Indigenous Peoples, Hay deconstructs Neel’s “obsess[ion] with Indian blood” as a preoccupation “with his own biological self,” which is an interesting critique of the man often regarded as the father of modern human genetics (87). The emergence of Hay’s book comes fortuitously timed with recent and ongoing conversations to include Neel’s legacy that has impacts for policy and the reckoning of genetic science.3 However, in considering the centricity of damage that one settler-scientist can do, we must also take care not to grant too much power in storifying the influence of one man as a proxy of the fields’ sins at large. After all, in terms of the study of Indigenous genetics, settler-science already has a lot to atone for as it moves forward. Krystal S. Tsosie KRYSTAL S. TSOSIE (Diné/Navajo Nation) is assistant professor in the School of Life Sciences in the Center for Biology and Society at Arizona State University. Notes 1. Southam et al., “Is the Thrifty Genotype Hypothesis Supported by Evidence Based on Confirmed Type 2 Diabetes- and Obesity-Susceptibility Variants?”Diabetologia 2009 52, no. 9: 1846-51. 2. “How Not to Talk about Race and Genetics” Buzzfeed Opinion, March 30, 2018, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/bfopinion/race-genetics-david-reich). 3. “Response to Allegations against James V. Neel in Darkness in El Dorado, by Patrick Tierney,” American Society of Human Genetics 70, no. 1 (2002): 1-10…

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/nai.2024.a924414