On October 9, 2010, I posted a blog entry (re-posted below) in which I respond with a mixed review to the Genographic/Seaconke Wampanoag jointly-authored publication "Genetic Heritage and Native Identity of the Seaconke Wampanoag" (Zhadanov et al 2010). In short, my thoughts were that Genographic's genetic data could undercut tribal identity and attendant political claims. The Seaconke Wampanoag who were sampled were shown to have almost no "Native American" genetic lineages. It remains to be seen what the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) would do with such data. It could be damaging to a tribe looking for recognition from the U.S. government and its attendant rights and resources. However, I characterized the jointly-authored article as also a step forward for Genographic in that it simultaneously foreground non-genetic tribal histories. Scientific publications usually give short shrift to non-genetic knowledges. I have been very critical of Genographic elsewhere. In the interest of analytical fairness, I wanted to also acknowledge what the project did right. But this month, things have taken a turn for the worse in Genographic's relations with some of its indigenous subjects. My October 2010 post has been extensively referenced by the Peruvian organization Asociación ANDES in their comprehensive critique of the Genographic Project's now thwarted plans to sample Q'ero people, descendants of Incas, who live in a rural area of the Cusco Region of Peru.

Asociación ANDES raises important points in their communiqué that I'd like to highlight and cross-reference with the productive response of another body to the kind of "old school" research that Genographic is accused of. That is, research practices that are top-down, primarily extractive in that they benefit researchers, their institutions and economic networks while returning little or no intellectual or economic benefit to usually much less powerful research subjects. In addition, such research and how it conceptualizes history and personhood may directly assault indigenous conceptions of history and personhood that condition indigenous claims to self-governance and rights to land and resources. After all, is it not genetic and other biophysical data, non-indigenous historical narratives, and the moral frameworks of a scientific state that hold sway in dominant courts and institutions? Certainly, indigenous historical narratives, moral frameworks, and data (sometimes biophysical but also sometimes immaterial and not knowable by science) do not hold much sway.

Asociación ANDES accuses Genographic scientists of "neo-colonial" research. It's difficult to argue with the organization given the uneven benefits that accrue to those who research versus those who extend their arms to have their veins opened, or who part their lips to have the cotton swab inserted. The biological resources of such individuals are extracted so cleanly and quickly that it is sometimes difficult to see the political economic similarities between these procedures and the much messier extraction through the centuries of indigenous natural resources via minerals mining and land theft and development.

For those in doubt, let me substantiate the comparison between old and neo-colonialisms a bit more fully. As I summarize Asociación ANDES incisive points and relate them to another important document that I called attention to in yet another post, the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) Guidelines for Health Research Involving Aboriginal People. CIHR is the Canadian equivalent to our National Institutes of Health (NIH). Let me emphasize that the research problems highlighted by Asociación ANDES are the types of practices that are viewed as problematic and addressed by the CIHR guidelines. The guidelines help remedy the unsurprisingly colonial context of human subjects research that has always been entangled with and not separate from the colonial practices of nation states. A comparison with the CIHR guidelines shows that Asociación ANDES' critiques are not radical, but their ideas are increasingly recognized as fundamental to ethical research today. "Ethical" in a post-colonial era means also culturally competent, politically respectful, and mutually beneficial, as the CIHR guidelines attest to. Roderick R. McInnes, immediate past president of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG), in his presidential speech at the 2010 ASHG annual meeting, highlighted multiple principles that are consistent with Asociación ANDES call for ethical research.

Following, I paraphrase Asociación ANDES' critiques of Genographic. In bold, I paraphrase CIHR guidelines that address such problems:

• BAD INFORMED CONSENT PROCESS. Genographic did not approach local/regional authorities to get approval for their research plan, nor did they consult research subjects before plans were announced to the community that DNA would be collected. Genographic's Web site asserts that informed consent should be "deliberate, considered, individual and collective." To the contrary, a one-page flyer with patronizing language was delivered to the community not long prior to the planned DNA collection. A powerpoint presentation was planned immediately prior to DNA collection. This allows no time for community input to the research process, nor for real collective consent as collective discussions take considerably more time than individual discussion and consent, which is also not easy given the difficult subject matter. CIHR Article 4: Researchers should consult community leaders first to obtain their consent before approaching community members individually. CIHR Article 11.1: A researcher has an obligation to learn about, and apply, Aboriginal cultural protocols relevant to the Aboriginal community involved in the research.
• UNCLEAR ON FUTURE RESEARCH AND USES OF SAMPLES/DATA. Genographic has not clearly identified future planned genetic studies and therefore future uses of blood samples and sequence data. In addition, future disposition of collected samples is unclear. It is important to be clear on these matters because it has been a common practice for genetic researchers to trade samples between labs with no reconsent of samples for different research projects--projects to which the original donors might object. CIHR Article 12: Researchers should respect the proprietary interests of individuals and communities in data and samples, obtain consent for transfer of data and samples to third parties and for secondary uses if samples or data can be traced back to individuals or communities. CIHR Article 13: Biological samples should be considered "on loan" to the researcher unless otherwise specified in a research agreement. This article is influenced by Doris Cook's and Laura Arbour's "DNA on Loan" concept.
• DISRESPECT OF GOVERNMENT JURISDICTION. Genographic has disregarded Cusco's regional government sovereignty by not contacting the government prior to planning collection. Genographic should have made its intentions known to "state, regional, and indigenous" governing bodies to acquire approval. CIHR Article 2: Community jurisdiction over the conduct of research should be understood and respected. (Asociación ANDES is unclear about the relations between state, regional, and indigenous governing authorities in its communiqué. It seems important to know whether indigenous self-determination is supported by regional and state authorities.)
  
• POTENTIAL STIGMATIZATION. Genetic sequences linked to indigenous communities today may in the future be linked to particular medical conditions that can stigmatize indigenous populations as peoples. Thus privacy and anonymity as a collectivity is key for indigenous peoples. Individual anonymity and privacy--the stuff of standard informed consent models--is inadequate for indigenous groups. Asociación ANDES charges a Genographic scientist from Peru with writing about a particular indigenous group having a "defective gene" that "predisposes them to infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and HIV..." CIHR Article 5: Concerns of individual participants and community regarding anonymity, privacy, and confidentiality should be respected and addressed in a research agreement.
• DISREGARD OF INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE, SCIENTIFIC CHAUVINISM. Genographic purports to tell the genetic "truth" about Q'eros' indigenous identity, whether they are in fact related to the Incas or the Aymara or to Amazonian peoples. The Q'eros already know who they are, and their ancestors in non-genetic ways. CIHR Article 1: Researchers should understand and respect Aboriginal world views, including responsibilities to the people and culture that flow from being granted access to traditional or sacred knowledge. Article 7: Aboriginal people retain their inherent rights to any cultural knowledge... The researcher should also support mechanisms for the protection of such knowledge...
  
• BAD SCIENCE. "Historical claims by molecular biologists sometimes overreach their field of competence and what can ultimately be concluded through science and the historical record. They are influenced by and reliant on assumptions about genetically 'isolated' or 'inbred' populations that discount historical fluidity of cultures and previous intermarriage." This shortcoming in researcher knowledge can be in part remedied by CIHR Article 3: Communities should be given the option of a participatory research approach. Also by CIHR Article 14: The Aboriginal community should have opportunities to participate in data interpretation and to review conclusions to ensure accuracy and cultural sensitivity of interpretation.
• SCIENTISTS, STATES, AND INDUSTRY, BUT NOT INDIGENES BENEFIT FROM RESEARCH. Asociación ANDES charges the project with existing only "to satisfy the curiosity of Western scientists" who stand to benefit by gaining publications and scientific prestige, while the Q'eros get "molecular 'proof' or 'disproof' of their heritage" with profound legal and social consequences. If genetic data is used to argue against indigenous heritage, a peoples' claims to self-governance, land, and resources are compromised. Genographic has not secured the indigenous involvement needed to articulate a research scope in which indigenes might actually benefit. Indeed, economic benefits stand to accrue only to non-indigenous scientists as they build their careers. Critics fear that nation-states and commercial actors may also benefit from the extraction of indigenous genetic data that seeds the biotechnology industry just like the extraction of indigenous natural resources has long benefited non-indigenes. In addition to CIHR Article 1 that calls for researcher respect for Aboriginal world views, CIHR Article 9 enlightens: Research should be of benefit to the community as well as to the researcher.
• FULL DISCLOSURE OF COMMERCIAL INTERESTS & PROTECTION OF INDIGENOUS INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY. While Genographic prohibits commercialization of genetic samples and data by members of its consortium, Genographic scientists should fully disclose their support for and ties to industry in their other research projects, including to the biotech industry. Published "sequence and diversity data" may be commercially exploited by other, non-Genographic scientists. This kind of openness would engender real informed consent, disclosing fully who benefits and how. CIHR Article 8: Concerns over and claims to intellectual property should be explicitly acknowledged and addressed prior to research and expectations of all parties stated in research agreement. CIHR Article 12.1: Researchers should respect the rights and proprietary interests of individuals and communities in data and biological samples generated in the course of research, and such interests should be stated in research agreements unless communities waive the right. Again, Article 13 regarding the DNA being "on loan" to the researcher is instructive.
• COMMUNITY CAPACITY BUILDING NECESSARY? Real informed consent may be impossible without specialized training in genetics, without which it is difficult to evaluate scientists' claims. CIHR Article 10: Researchers should support education and training of Aboriginal people in the community, including training in research methods and ethics. This is followed by CIHR Article 14: Aboriginal community should have opportunities to participate in data interpretation and to review conclusions to ensure accuracy and cultural sensitivity of interpretation.

Original 5/12/2011 Disclaimer: I rely on Asociación ANDES describing accurately Genographic's public relations materials and their actions on the ground, or lack of action. The problems the organization points out are consistent with my critiques and those of others, both scholars and activists, of Genographic and of genetic research on indigenous peoples historically.

10/17/11 Update: Since I originally wrote this blog entry, a colleague, an anthropologist of science who works in Latin America has translated for me the original letters between the Peruvian indigenous community leadership, the Cusco regional President, and National Geographic. These letters in Spanish are linked to in the May 6, 2011 ScienceInsider article that covered this story. The English translations, which are consistent with ANDES' analysis of the situation, will soon be available at the Web site Genomics, Governance, and Indigenous Peoples.

An article out this year in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology highlights the potential incongruence between Native American identity and genetic ancestry. (Thanks to geneticist Bryan Sykes for tipping me off to it. How had I missed it?) Zhadanov et al’s “Genetic Heritage and Native Identity of the Seaconke Wampanoag Tribe of Massachusetts” would be more aptly titled, “Genetic Heritage vs. Native Identity . . .” This study completed by the folks over at Genographic is paradoxical to say the least. First, the downside: the paper in one sense represents a superfluous genetic study of the tribe’s genealogy. Any student of New England history and anyone who looks at Wampanoag people knows they’ve been intermarrying with “European” and “African populations” for a long time. We didn’t need genetic analysis to tell us this. There was a minor surprise in what they uncovered in their analyses of Seaconke Wampanoag citizens mtDNA and Y chromosomes, or their maternal and paternal lineages respectively. That the majority of both of their lineages were traceable to “African” and “West Eurasian” lineages is not what surprises me. I know something about New England tribal history. Slightly surprising is that the only direct Native American lineage they did find is traceable very probably to one Cherokee ancestor who married a Wampanoag several generations ago. But given the way that Indians from different tribes moved around during the 20th century, meeting at boarding schools, pow wows, at Haskell, at conferences . . . I’m not really surprised by that either. There is no genetic indication then of Wampanoag ancestors. This genetic situation is a bit more incongruent with their Wampanoag identity than I predicted in my 2007 Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics (JLME) article, “Narratives of Race and Indigeneity in the Genographic Project,” but not by much.

No, what surprises me is the tone of this article that does not conflate Native American identity with Native American genetic lineages. For example, authors note that “the high frequency of nonnative haplotypes in this population, along with the paucity of Native American haplotypes, reveals the substantial changes in the genetic composition of the Seaconke Wampanoag Tribe in post-contact American history” (Zhadanov et al 2010: 586). This is an important passage that explicitly grounds the people as Wampanoag first. Their genetic lineage is not deterministic.

And that is the fascinating upside to this study. People who know my work know that I’ve been pretty critical of Genographic. But in this article they are very good about not trumping the tribe’s Wampanoag identity with their genetic findings. The authors spend about 1/3 of the paper recounting the literature on New England history and the impact of European or white settlement on the numbers and state of Wampanoag. And they do this historical accounting in a way that emphasizes Wampanoag survival and not simply their decimation in the face of a brutal colonization. This is a flip of Genographic’s usual narrative (and the Human Genome Diversity Project before it)—that the indigenes are all vanishing and therefore must be sampled as quickly as possible.

No doubt Genographic’s tone is  related to the fact that they share the byline with tribal community members (3 are listed as co-authors). This is also a welcome change from the old school days (still in existence for many) in which a tribal group is named in the short acknowledgements at the end of the paper, thanked for donating their blood samples. Or even worse, some papers from the early 1990s and before actually thank agencies such as the Indian Health Service (IHS) or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) for turning over blood to the scientists. One wonders about the informed consent in those situations.

Of course, others who have not developed this relationship of collaboration and no doubt moral obligation that the Genographic authors have developed with their Wampanoag collaborators may not be so forgiving. The Bureau of Indian Affair’s (BIA) Office of Federal Recognition (OFA), for example, mediates tribal recognition cases in large part by calling in the disciplinarians to pass judgment on the authenticity of Native identity claims. So historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists get a good deal of say. There is no good reason why genetics and biological anthropological evidence will not be brought into the mix. Let us hope that regulators and policymakers in our genetically rather fetishistic country do not hold Genographic’s findings against the Seaconke Wampanoag people.

On April 12, 2011 I organized (in concert with UC Berkeley's Science, Technology, and Society Center--STSC) this syposium that brought together animal studies scholars in queer and critical race studies with scholars working within longer-lived indigenous approaches to knowing “nonhumans.” Below are the opening remarks that I presented at the symposium. Following are links to the iTunes podcasts of the events:
Part 1: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/why-animal-queer-animalities/id390697297?i=93318980
Part 2: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/why-animal-queer-animalities/id390697297?i=93318979

Opening Comments
Kim TallBear, UC Berkeley

I have organized this morning’s symposium with the Science Technology and Society Center (STSC) here at Berkeley under Cori Hayden’s leadership (with tons of help from our student assistant Judith Gray). Our purpose is to bring into the center of this burgeoning field of animal studies empirical analyses of human/nonhuman relations—indeed social relations—that privilege frameworks of critical race theory, queer theory, and indigenous and post-colonial (or is that anti-colonial?) theory.

The last decade has seen an upsurge of important scholarship in the field of “animal studies.” Under this rubric, scholars with roots in a variety of disciplines from across the spectrum of the social sciences and humanities attempt to recover knowledge territory claimed by and for the natural sciences alone over the last several hundred years. Today, we have scholars representing (and surely their allegiances bleed across disciplinary lines) library and information sciences, cultural studies, political science, linguistics, Africana studies, Gender & Women studies, sexuality studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. There is also prominent scholarship in this field coming from anthropology, geography, and multidisciplinary environmental studies. Not to mention the actual social lives lived by both humans and nonhuman persons (if I can borrow language from indigenous ontologies) that will influence today’s conversation.

Within this already critical field of animal studies, thinkers aim essentially to dismantle hierarchiesin therelationships of “westerners” with their non-human others. A prime example is the recent move to “multi-species ethnography" by anthropologists, geographers, and other social scientists. Scholars apply anthropological approaches to studying humans, to the social relations (not simply “interactions”) between humans and nonhumans, located in their social and physical habitats. As S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich comment in the introduction to the recent Cultural Anthropology special issue on the topic, new anthropological accounts are starting to appear in which nonhumans (animals, plants, fungi, and microbes) previously relegated to the status of “bare life” or “that which is killable” are now appearing “alongside humans in the realm of bios, with legibly biographical and political lives” (545).[1] In short, “multispecies ethnography centers on how a multitude of organisms’ livelihoods shape and are shaped by political, economic, and cultural forces.” Organisms have livelihoods. Our panelist, Scout Calvert’s scholarship on the work done to cattle and the work that cattle do in our industrial meat complex - and the effects on the lives of cattle and humans - can be understood within this tradition.

This work is both methodologically and ethically innovative. Yet is also has starting points that can only partially contain indigenous standpoints, and thus the importance of bringing indigenous voices to this table. One contribution of indigenous studies is to localize human/nonhuman relations in cultural, political contexts.  Anthropologist Paul Nadasdy’s study of the Kluane First Nation and other Arctic hunting peoples is instructive here.[2] Nadasdy documents reciprocal exchanges (sometimes coupled with domination and its elements of coercion, deceit, and danger) between northern hunters and nonhuman persons who they know to be “thinking beings.” Sometimes these beings “consciously give themselves to hunters,” sometimes they have to be outwitted. Very importantly, Nadasdy explains hunting societies’ ontologies (what they know) rather than their beliefs about the world. And he calls anthropologists to beware of their own discrediting languages that would see animal gifts to humans as metaphor rather than reality. A second contribution is to extend the range of nonhuman beings with which we can be in relation.  Much animal studies work restricts its attention to beings that “live,” e.g. dogs, bears, mushrooms, microorganisms. It is animal studies after all. But for many indigenous peoples, our nonhuman others may not be understood in even critical western frameworks as living. Nadasdy is primarily concerned with human and animal prey, but he also acknowledges similar relations among northern indigenous people and other “objects” and “forces” (trees, stones, thunder, etc.) which are known to be “sentient and intelligent persons” (29). Like our methodological choices, language choices are ethical choices and are key in this project of constituting more democratic relations and worlds. Indeed, animal studies may be an inadequate construction for capturing human and nonhuman relations across cultures.

The idea then behind this symposium is to bring together scholars within animal studies who focus on queer and critical race approaches with scholars working within longer-lived strands of study, indigenous approaches to knowing “nonhumans” that are focused on critiquing settler colonialism and its management of nonhuman others. For example, Zakkiyah Jackson brings together queer theory, African diasporic feminism and animal studies to look at how black gender is animalized.  Critical race theory, queer theory and indigenous studies—including Noenoe Silva and Jon Goldberg Hiller’s work on Native Hawaiian ontologies and relations with sharks and pigs (in distinction to state “natural resource” management of these beings)—all seek to disrupt the division between human and animal. These critical approaches make the link between dualisms and the relegation of certain humans to the realm of less-than-human, to the realm of the animal. Violence against animals is linked to violence against particular humans who have historically been linked to animality. There are real implications, as these speakers will show, for who and what gets to live, and who and what gets to die when the human/animal split is made.

There are multiple theorists who I need to thank for spurring my thinking on this topic and for being (whether they know it or not) inspirational for this symposium: these are my academic colleagues in the world of animal studies, including all of you on this panel. They also include my friend and colleague S. Eben Kirksey (co-editor of the special Cultural Anthropology issue on multispecies ethnography), who in true feminist tradition is always quick to share theoretical insights, ethnographic contacts, and other opportunities in order to proliferate the thinking and innovation in this field.

Equally importantly though, I have been spurred to interest in this topic by individuals who would not consider themselves part of the animal studies scholarly world, indeed some are not even in the academy, but their work and lives are chiefly oriented towards Native American and indigenous self-determination. As part of that broader goal, these thinkers live and/or theorize social relations between humans and nonhuman persons.

Two important names come to mind: First, is the noted Native American scholar, Vine Deloria, Jr., who, in his theorizing of the concept of “American Indian metaphysics,” refuses the binary so integral to our dominant culture—that of science versus religion—or material versus immaterial.[3] For Deloria, those terms might apply to the West that in its particular history has insisted on severing “religion” from “science,” erecting a hard barrier between what humans can know through their materialistic, empirical investigations and what is believed to exist beyond the known material world. In disrupting the science/religion divide in American Indian thought, Deloria’s theorizing implicates a second boundary, that between human and nonhuman persons. Deloria writes of the importance of social relations (not simply interactions) between “animals,” “energy,” “spirits,” “rocks,” “stars,” in the constitution of American Indian knowledge about the world. Deloria’s theorizing allows for conversations and analyses of meaningful relations between humans and nonhumans, including beings not classed as animate, that are not explicable wholly by materialist science.

These conversations have implications on both ethical and methodological levels (indeed methods are ethics) for how we inquire formally and for how we live. If nonhuman persons’ animacy (to use Mel Chen’s term) is taken seriously, can our scientific hypotheses be expanded, and thus our knowledges made more multi-cultural and potentially more robust? Second, what are the implications for how we live with and among the variety of our human and nonhuman kin who have been variously animated and de-animated in our sciences, religions, and governance structures?

A second important influence comes from outside the academy. My colleague and friend, Oglala Lakota architect and Lakota studies expert, Craig Howe, argues with me about Vine Deloria’s intentions. He pushes me to refine my theoretical musings. Yet he has eschewed the mainstream academic life to found the Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies (CAIRNS), which he built on his family’s land between the Rosebud and Pine Ridge Indian reservations in South Dakota. In addition to running Lakota and Native American studies workshops at his facility, Howe lives in daily contact with a host of nonhumans on that land and documents those relations weekly in his blog, Oko Iyawapi (or week count). Whether Howe engages with rabbits who pointedly observe him when he works outside, who alternately take afternoon naps in the shade of his structures, and sometimes thwart his architectural projects with their own work—their adamant digging; whether he studies the lodges of spiders, so akin to tipis in their form; or whether he follows the movements of star people in relation to distant buttes as he plots and builds the structures of the CAIRNS facility, Howe’s documentation of his daily entanglements with mindful nonhumans along with his theoretical challenges inspire my thinking in this area.

This symposium evinces the idea that indigenous theorizing can and should be brought to the same conversational table with feminist, queer, and critical race approaches in order to understand our co-constitution across species lines—or for indigenous ways of knowing, between kinds of persons. It is my hope that these critical approaches can together help us take these border and boundary confusions one step further.

Returning to non-indigenous influences, I (and probably most of us) owe an intellectual debt to a major theorist in this area, Donna Haraway. Her Cyborg Manifesto reminds us that “social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction” (149).[4]  Haraway’s object of attention in that famous essay was a hybrid of machine and organism. “The cyborg,” she noted, “is our ontology; it gives us our politics” (150). Back in the early 1990s, after 200 hundred years of evolutionary theory, Haraway argued that “the divide between human and animal was thoroughly breached” (151), thus making room for the proliferation of cyborgs, both literally and figuratively, in our culture. Cyborgs were also born of a second breach, that between animals/humans (or organisms) and machines (152). Haraway called attention to a third boundary made fluid—that “between physical and non-physical” (153). Writing of electronic worlds such as those co-constituted with the goings on in Silicon Valley, Haraway was outside of but resonant with indigenous theorizing that has never given itself up to the binary of material realism vs. immaterial myth.

Haraway asks us not to be “afraid of [our] joint kinship with [both] animals and machines, not [to be] afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.” Similarly to Vine Deloria, she writes against binaries that proliferate in non-indigenous cultures. Hers include self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, active/passive, agent/resource. She calls us to see from multiple standpoints at once for this kind of “double vision” is more rigorous. “It reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable” from a single standpoint” (154). What is more, this isn’t just about what is just, it’s also about pleasure. Haraway argues that we should take “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and... responsibility in their construction” (150).

Yet Alutiq archaeologist Sven Haakenson reminds us in the Grizzly Man film[5] that Timothy Treadwell, who lived among bears for many summers in Alaska and co-founded the Grizzly People organization, was killed and eaten by a bear precisely because he disrespected a boundary between human and bear communities that Alaska Natives have lived with for millennia. That boundary crossing resulted in that same bear later being shot by the U.S. Park Service. Treadwell would have abhorred the killing of the bear. Which boundaries get crossed? Who takes what agency in particular boundary confusions? Haraway’s call to not only take pleasure, but also responsibility echoes in my head.[6]

I know this is becoming cliché, but I am going to repeat it anyway for there is no better way to say this more concisely: our particular co-constitutions of human and nonhuman matter for who lives and dies in this world, and how. The approaches highlighted in this symposium bring yet a wider array of standpoints into this important conversation that is thriving in the academy, but fortunately is not contained by it.

I look forward to our conversations today and into the future as these scholars and their intellectual compatriots continue to challenge us to (re)think our relations “between kin and kind,” and hopefully even the regulatory regimes that are implicated by these relatings.

[1] S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich, “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography,” Cultural Anthropology 25(4): 545-576.
[2] Paul Nadasdy, “The Gift in the Animal: The Ontology of Hunting and Human-Animal Sociality,” American Ethnologist 34(1) (February 2007): 25-43.
[3]Vine Deloria, Jr., “American Indian Metaphysics,” in Power and Place: Indian Education in America, ed. Vine Deloria, Jr. and Daniel R. Wildcat (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2001), 1-6.
[4] Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: the Reinvention of Nature, Donna J. Haraway (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), , 149-181.
[5] Grizzly Man by Werner Herzog, 2005 (100 min.) 
[6] This paragraph was not in my remarks delivered orally at the symposium. I have added them to this written transcript for clarification.