Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas

history.
The movement out of Beringia seems as clear to us today as the
movement out of Africa, the peopling of Australia, or the multiple
migrations of people into Europe. But when we look back through the
millennia of human history with knowledge that these journeys happened,
we can’t help but be influenced by bias: It had to happen this way because
this is how it happened. We draw great arrows on maps, confidently
pointing southward; we only need to collect some more genomes and do
some more analyses in order to fill in the rest of the details.
But this perspective is a foolish one. It erases the reality of the actual
history. History is a far messier process, a complicated network of
individual choices driven by both the desire for exploration and the
necessities of survival. Only from the great distance afforded to us by
13,000 years or more of elapsed time can we see an entire movement of
peoples as an arrow on a map.
For many of the descendants of these ancient travelers, the detached
assuredness we (non-Native) researchers try to maintain is precisely the
problem. The disconnected view of ancient human remains as simply part
of natural history, like the fossils of extinct trilobites—the legacy of
Thomas Jefferson and the scientists that followed him—underpins the
history of genetics and anthropology.
But when scientists turn our lens onto our own history, we are forced to
examine ugly things: science used to justify racism, insensitivity in the
pursuit of high-impact publications, and atrocities committed in the name of
research.
We who work in this field cannot erase our past mistakes—and many of
us, myself included, have done research in the past using approaches that
we now recognize as wrong. We must acknowledge this, as well as the fact
that we have benefited from an unjust system. Only then can we
conscientiously address our practices so that our quest to understand ancient
humanity helps us maintain our own. In doing so, we must be cognizant of
what we are asking for from Indigenous peoples when we design our
research.
We are asking for their DNA, which is often considered sacred.
We must consciously ask ourselves, Am I treating the DNA as sacred?
We are asking for trust from people whose trust has been violated all too