Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas

dominated by the story of how Europeans colonized the continents. In the
stories of Christopher Columbus reaching San Salvador, or the Pilgrims
founding Plymouth Colony, or Hernán Cortés conquering the Aztecs,
Native Americans are often relegated to marginal roles as supporting
characters, bystanders, victims, or antagonists. Precontact histories of
Indigenous peoples are given far less prominence, and many of those that
do exist in popular culture are rife with outdated scholarship (at best) or
blatant pseudoscience (4). With some notable exceptions, Native Americans
preserved their histories in oral, rather than written, stories. European
colonists did not view these oral traditions as equivalent to their own
histories.
In these frameworks, Native peoples are marginalized or forgotten,
excluded from public conversations, and portrayed as inhabitants of the past
rather than contemporary members of society. Their own knowledge too
often is ignored by non-Native scholars. This ultimately contributes to the
erasure or marginalization of Indigenous peoples in society at large. The
contributions of Native artists, politicians, writers, traditional knowledge
keepers, and scholars are unappreciated. Indigenous knowledge, sacred
practices, and regalia are appropriated and commodified by white people. In
some cases, academics repackage and re-interpret traditional knowledge as
their own scholarship without credit to Native experts.
None of this marginalization is accidental. Since the beginning of
colonialism in the Americas, Native peoples have been removed, enslaved,
or eliminated from their lands in order to make way for settlers. One way
for colonizers to justify their claims to Native lands was to portray them as
empty. The Native peoples who did remain were characterized as “savage”
and backward, in need of the “civilizing” that the settler nation could
provide. Disregarding or expunging Native histories from the broader
narrative has been a crucial part of the larger strategy to discount the
validity of age-old Native rights to lands the settlers wanted. Sadly, this
practice of historical marginalization continues into the present day; as we
shall see later in this book, DNA has been increasingly used as a tool for
promoting narratives that disenfranchise Native peoples.
A greater awareness of the histories of Indigenous peoples on the
American continents—that gives as much weight to the time before 1492 as
after it—won’t fix these issues alone. But it is an important step in itself.