Prospecting the past: genetic perspectives on the extinction and survival of indigenous peoples of the Caribbean

Abstract

In this paper, I examine discourses of survival and extinction regarding the fates of indigenous Caribbean peoples and the manner in which genetic ancestry data influences these discourses. I argue that ideas of extinction and survival are intricately tied in places where a hybrid national identity is generally accepted, thus making the incorporation of genetic data into these debates more malleable. Meanwhile, other Caribbean contexts present the possibility for genetic data to significantly affect people's conception of how indigenous people should fit within contemporary conceptualizations of the nation. Secondly, I explore the incongruities between folk and scientific understandings of ancestry as well as how ideologies of race, histories of colonialism, and political economy affect the manner in which researchers present genetic ancestry. Finally, I call for genetic anthropologists to “look beyond the laboratory” and to be prepared and willing to engage in the repercussions of their research. Such an engagement would involve the repudiation of racist applications of genetic ancestry data and making meaningful attempts to include and collaborate with members of the studied communities.

Keywords:

• word
• Caribbean
• genetic ancestry
• indigenous identity

Introduction

The study of identity has been central to anthropology because it is foundational to understanding how people recognize similarities and differences within the self, the collective self, and others (Baumann and Gingrich 2005; Hartog 1961; Rabinow 2008, 179–193). As a result of the technological advances in the fields of genetics and genomics within the last three decades (Heard et al. 2010; Yu et al. 2004, 2012), new forms of cultural knowledge have emerged that inform people's identities in relation to (un)healthy bodies, kinship, gender, nationality, and/or race – to only name a few possibilities. Consequently, alternate approaches to the study of identity have developed within the social sciences that consider how molecular evidence works to shape processes of identity formation and maintenance, with a particular empirical focus on the social actors invested in reproducing genetic technology (Ali-Khan et al. 2011; Bardill 2010; Brodwin 2002b, 2002a; El-Haj 2007; Elliott and Brodwin 2002; Johnston 2003; Lock et al. 2007; Royal et al. 2010; Taussig 2004).

Emerging genetic data in the Caribbean since the late 1990s have presented an excellent opportunity to observe how notions of biological ancestry shape and are shaped by historical discourses of extinction and survival regarding indigenous Caribbean peoples in the Greater and Lesser Antilles. In this paper, I analyze the cultural contexts of these discourses in relation to the genetic ancestry data. First, I aim to better understand the place of genetic technology in processes of identity formation in the Caribbean by contextualizing discourses of survival and extinction within colonial histories, nationalisms, and ideologies of race. Genetic ancestry data have variously entered the social fields where such discourses are deployed, but the data do not seem to uniformly affect people's indigenous identity or claims against indigenous identity. Furthermore, I suggest that in addition to historical context, it is important to consider the political economies in which these discourses circulate. Second, I aim to formulate a critique of the very bio-anthropological concept of ancestry, particularly as it relates to existing data in the Caribbean. Folk understandings of ancestry may or may not coincide with scientific understandings of ancestry, and scientists have a responsibility to tackle the political implications of their research by articulating the intellectual context of genetic ancestry data in population genetics and evolutionary theory.

Many scholars have taken a critical approach to the study of genetic technology as a cultural form in various social settings, but there has been less commentary from genetic scientists regarding how their scientific bodies of knowledge figure into social fields beyond their laboratories. I began working in the Caribbean in 2004, when over a five-month period I travelled throughout the Anglophone Caribbean for my research to the islands of Dominica, Barbados, Grenada, St. Vincent, St. Lucia, Trinidad and Tobago, St. Kitts, Antigua and Barbuda, and Bahamas (Benn 2006). In addition to interacting with island officials, community organizers, obtaining informed consent from participants, and collecting samples, I carried out interviews with the objective of learning how individuals self-identified and how they explained their genealogical ancestry. The focus of my dissertation work was African ancestry, but even then I met a few dozen individuals who talked about their indigenous ancestry. In 2011, I spent a summer in Accompong Town, Jamaica, exploring traces of indigenous ancestry among the Maroons. As part of National Geographic's Genographic Project, in 2012 and 2013, I approached the indigenous communities of Trinidad and Tobago, Dominica, and St. Vincent in order to examine through genetic ancestry the peopling of the Caribbean. I obtained samples in St. Vincent and Trinidad and Tobago, and I was able to return and discuss results with participants in Trinidad. Although I have not been able to obtain samples in the Kalinago Reserve in Dominica, my discussion with community leaders and other people around the islands has been insightful and informed ideas presented in this article. I have also spent several months since 2004 in Puerto Rico and had numerous conversations with people who are well aware of the genetic ancestry research carried out in the island and publicized in national newspapers. I have also interacted and observed members of the Taíno movement in fairs and archeological sites: places where Puerto Rico's indigeneity are performed and displayed. Finally, in addition to my own research, my overall critique is also informed by readings of Caribbean history and genetic ancestry in the region.

The fate of indigenous Caribbean peoples: discourses of extinction and survival

Though much is unknown about the first inhabitants of the Caribbean, archaeological studies suggest the presence of humans in the Greater Antilles dating to at least 5000 years ago (Keegan and Diamond 1987, 49; Rouse 1992). Material culture left behind by early inhabitants indicates that there were successive waves of people from perhaps Florida and both South and Central America into the Caribbean (Hulme 1992; 1986; Keegan 1995; Toro-Labrador, Wever, and Martinez-Cruzado 2003). Demographic estimates place about three to five million people on the islands at the time of European contact (Livi-Bacci 2003; Paquette and Engerman 1996; Rouse 1992). Despite the variability in the estimates, there is agreement that the numbers of native individuals tragically decreased post-European contact. The extent of this demographic decline is an ongoing debate (Daniels 1992; Jacobs 1974; Reher 2011). Although historians, starting with the Spanish chroniclers, have treated this demographic decline as a self-evident truth regarding the relative disappearance of indigenous people, it is important to recognize the cultural dimensions that have shaped common understandings of what it means for indigenous peoples to survive or go extinct (or disappear).

Rather than treating discourses of extinction and survival as opposite ends in a spectrum, ideas of extinction and survival have coexisted in Caribbean peoples' attempts to meaningfully interpret their experiences of colonization over the last five centuries. A survey of the historical literature from the Greater and Lesser Antilles reveals many instances in which extinction and survival simultaneously account for an indigenous past. Take, for example, the following explanation of the “biological and cultural heritage” of Puerto Rico's aborigines by a prominent anthropologist and historian in the island over the second half of the twentieth century, Ricardo E. Alegria:

But if the indigenous society, as such, disappeared during the first half of conquest and colonization, many Spaniards and African Blacks mixed with them since then, and from the very first years a mestizo population emerged that has left its biological and cultural imprint in Puerto Rico. Many of the physical characteristics of our Indians such as copper skin color; black, thick, straight hair; protruding cheekbones; Chinese-like yes [epicanthic fold] and “shovel-teeth,” are some of the characteristics that still subsist in our population … The cultural heritage, nonetheless, is more important and more evident than the biological [heritage]. (Alegría, Haydon, and Rico 1988, 47; my translation; emphasis added)

Alegria is careful to delineate what has disappeared and what has survived. Indigenous society is no longer in existence as a result of demographic changes and colonial domination. Similarly, physical characteristics have survived as a result of the “mixing” with peoples of European and African descent – also as a result of demographic and colonial history. Of course, the point of juncture and disjuncture between disappearance and survival is the emergence of a mestizo population. The idea of a mestizo emergence appears to be incompatible with the continuity of indigenous society, and the survival of indigenous physical traits seems to be compatible with a narrative of cultural hybridity. For Alegria, indigeneity involves a set of cultural traits practiced in isolation from, presumably, other non-indigenous peoples. Also, Alegria has an implicit model of biological survival that relies on phenotypic traits. Thus, we can see how extinction and survival are complicated in the Caribbean by notions of hybridity or creolization. (See Munasinghe 2006 for a provocative critique of colonization.)

In my anthropological experiences throughout the Caribbean, I have observed that most researchers, officials, and laypersons subscribe to ideas similar to Alegria's articulation of the fate of indigenous peoples. Most commonly shared is the idea of indigenous peoples as “savages” who can be either tied to a more natural state (i.e. “noble savages”) or represent an archaic version of humanity. The question of how people explain biological survival varies between islands depending on demographic and colonial history. To many of the people I have encountered, these configurations of indigenous survival and extinction are unproblematic. That is, the historical role of indigenous of Taínos or Caribs is uncontested in public spheres, so there is little urgency to rethink indigenous history. Whether mestizo, Black/West Indian, or multicultural, established national ideals are embedded in everyday and symbolically charged ritual practices; and these practices make it difficult for alternative historical narratives to gain political prominence. Nonetheless, ruptures in this sense of historical normalcy have been present for centuries. For example, Kalinagos (Caribs) in Dominica have lived on the eastern side of the island for a century on a colonially recognized Reserve since 1903 (Layng 1983); oral histories establishing various forms of historical continuity exist in concentrated rural regions in Puerto Rico (Castanha 2010; Feliciano-Santos 2011), Cuba (Barreiro 2006), and Trinidad (Forte 2005). Voices claiming indigenous survival have grown louder over the last few decades (Forte 2006b), but these claims have been met with public skepticism and even strong scholarly repudiation (Haslip-Viera 2013). Keeping in mind the historical entanglements between ideas of extinction and survival, in what follows, I delineate how these discourses intersect in contemporary Caribbean contexts.

Discourse of extinction

According to the extinction discourse, native populations within the Greater Antilles dwindled from several million to virtually nothing as a result of physical abuse, migration, disease, and genocide within two generations of European contact (Crosby 2004; Kiple 1984; Roberts 1989). Pockets of remnant indigenous Caribbean populations in the Lesser Antilles managed to survive, but not without substantial loss of language and other cultural traditions as a result of forced assimilation (Basso 1977; González 1971). The demise of native populations was further hastened with the complete acculturation into colonial society. This movement into the various strata of colonial life meant that indigenous Caribbean people were no longer considered native if they adopted different lifestyles or if they were of “mixed blood.” Indeed, colonials viewed conversion into Christianity as an explicit movement away from indigenous ways. Adhering to this discourse, references to indigenous Caribbean peoples tend to be in the past tense and refer to any people with supposed genealogical ties to these groups specifically as descendent populations.

What fuelled this particular interpretation of history? The extinction discourse as purported by historians, ethnologists, archeologists, and other academics appears to have been derived from a number of sources, an important one being colonial-era censuses (Carew 1996; Krech et al. 2004). Much of the data that exist on the numbers of indigenous Caribbean people comes from the larger islands in the Caribbean-Hispaniola and Cuba. Through examinations of colonial census data, it appears that indigenous Caribbean people disappeared entirely from the counts. While this disappearance could be due to en-masse genocide, it could also be due to resistance on the part of the natives as well as a politically and economically motivated under-representation of indigenous Caribbean people by census-takers (Castanha 2010; Guitar 2002). Given the economic and personal motivations of the native person and the European colonists, it was to nobody's advantage to have a detailed accounting of indigenous Caribbean people (Castanha 2010). Discrepancies may also have arisen based on how people were categorized within the census. Irving Rouse, an influential Caribbeanist archeologist, noted that in the 1514 census of Hispanola, 40% of the wives of the Spanish colonists were native women (Rouse 1992). These marriages, in addition to the conversion to Christianity and a “European” lifestyle, resulted in the re-categorization of individuals not as native but as Spanish or “other” (Guitar 2002). Jason Yaremko, a historian, traces the processes that contributed to the extinction discourse of Cuban native peoples (Yaremko 2009). According to Yaremko, beyond genocide and migration, the processes leading to the extinction of the indigenous Caribbean population was also facilitated by the work of ethnologists, archeologists, missionaries, and other people such as consuls or military officials. The reports of extinction made during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by these researchers and workers were based on descriptions of rural life in Cuba as well as racial ideologies that typified the Social Darwinist views common during this era. Yaremko cites, for example, British consul David Turnbull and anthropologist Carlos de la Torre, among others, who in their publications in the mid- to late nineteenth century about Cuba lament the total or nearly total extinction of native populations. Evident in these writings is that despite physical appearance and self-identification of the study participants the presence of indigenous Caribbean people was based on racist notions of “nativeness.” Movement away from “nativeness” was grounded on the degree of acculturation – or lack thereof – into the majority population and included factors such as clothing, occupation, or lifestyle. Those who did not adhere to a lifeway that was thought to be “native” were not deemed to be native but instead were descendants of the native population (distinctly not native) or only had partial native ancestry. Furthermore, as anthropologists and the like made these assertions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there was a broader context of comparison found in populations throughout the Americas, where presumably more “authentic” indigenous peoples could easily be found. These researchers' pronouncements that indigenous Caribbean people were, for all intents and purposes, extinct and perhaps only sporadic individual descendants remained reinforced the idea that indigenous Caribbean people were indeed extinct.

It is important to point out that there is an implicit folk biological model at work with discourses of extinction that often obfuscates various historical trajectories of indigenous peoples. There is no question that genocide took place throughout the Greater and Lesser Antilles. In the case of smaller islands and coastal communities in bigger islands, whole communities were often wiped out. With such occurrences, one could see how a biological model of species extinction would be deemed appropriate to describe the fates of indigenous peoples in particular locales. However, discourses of extinction often do little to disentangle genocide from other common historical occurrences, such as alliances between indigenous peoples and colonizers, early and frequent partnerships between colonizers and indigenous women, regrouping of defeated indigenous groups, marronage, and the incorporation of indigenous peoples into colonial society. To discursively conflate whole population genocide with other indigenous “fates” is a form of symbolic violence that undermines the various strategies taken by indigenous people to subsist during colonial times. Moreover, the linguistic models of indigenous “absorption” (into colonial society), “disappearance,” or “extinction” makes biology out of social processes. This conceptual shift is aided by the colonial perception of indigenous peoples whose racial classification included a social or cultural attachment to nature; therefore, in discourses of extinction, disruptions to indigenous populations and social practices are equally deemed as forms of extinction. Many Caribbean nations have fully incorporated and celebrated these colonial racial ideologies and the narratives of indigenous extinction that accompany them.

Discourse of survival

According to the discourse of survival, native Caribbean populations experience continuity to the present day. Survival entailed adapting to new circumstances post-European contact. Within the last few decades, revisionist discourses regarding the fate of indigenous Caribbean populations have been published by academics. Rather than being extinct or on the brink of extinction, researchers began describing resistance and reclamation movements among native Caribbean communities (e.g. Bellot 2009; Forte 2010; Guitar, Ferbel, and Estevez 2006). The change in perception seen within the body of Caribbean research must be predicated on a belief that while indigenous Caribbean peoples were dramatically affected by colonialism, they were not completely extinguished. Despite changes in lifestyle and exogamous marriages, proponents of this discourse cite several factors in support of the existence of contemporary indigenous Caribbean peoples.

One primary factor used in support of indigenous Caribbean peoples survival is the presence of self-identified native communities throughout the Caribbean, most notably is the Kalinago Reserve (formerly known as the Carib Reserve) located in eastern Dominica. In 1903, British authorities designated 3700 acres for the native population of the island. According to the Minority Rights Group International, 4000 Kalinago live on the reserve (www.minorityrights.org, website access date 28 April 2011). Other indigenous Caribbean groups can be found in Arima, Trinidad, in the North Windward Carib community, in St. Vincent, and throughout Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic (http://indigenouscaribbean.ning.com/; http://indigenousreview.blogspot.com/). As represented in various native publications and within academic research, these indigenous Caribbean populations are sociologically distinct entities with different histories, and at times have faced diverse social and economic challenges (Bellot 2009; Boomert 2009; Feliciano-Santos 2011; Forte 2010; Hudepohl 2011; Ingram 2009; Matthei and Smith 2008; Palacio 2000). Survival, then, relies on biological continuity and contemporary forms of social organization. Furthermore, one of the primary functions of these social organizations is to recover and conceptually emphasize lifeways and worldviews from indigenous peoples that existed before European contact and have been marginalized in historical and nationalist discourse after colonial domination.

A second and related factor used in support of the existence of Caribbean indigenous Caribbean populations is that state and local governments and agencies recognize some of these communities. Several indigenous Caribbean peoples have organized themselves into transnational groups designed to represent the interests of their communities. Some examples of these groups include the Caribbean Organization of indigenous Peoples (COIP, http://coipnews.blogspot.com) and the United Confederation of Taíno People (UCTP, www.uctp.org/). The COIP includes groups from the islands of Dominica, Puerto Rico, St. Vincent, and Trinidad and Tobago. These organizations have been successful in gaining recognition from different states as well as from the United Nations. This type of recognition may be viewed as influential in fueling the reclamation of native identity, and it is tied to regional and global politics of indigenous rights.

A third supporting factor of contemporary Caribbean indigenous people existence comes from archeologists and anthropologists. Despite the overwhelming belief that indigenous Caribbean people had vanished from the Caribbean, archeologist Miguel Rodríguez Ferrer noted in the mid-nineteenth century that there were established indigenous Caribbean communities within the Cuban hinterland (Yaremko 2009). In the early to mid-twentieth century, anthropologist and geneticist Reginald Ruggles Gates reported coming across individuals with “Indian blood” in Cuba. In his 1954 publication, Ruggles Gates described native families found within several towns in southeast Cuba (1954). Though Ruggles Gates repeatedly referred to natives in the past tense and detailed their demise in Cuba, he concluded, “That the Indians of Cuba were exterminated by A.D. 1600 is not strictly true” (1954, 93). Ruggles Gates had actually been preceded by 50 years in eastern Cuba by an ethnologist named Stewart Culin (Rodgers 2010; Yaremko 2009). Culin interviewed self-defined “Indios” and consistently referred to the indigenous Caribbean people he met as Indian. However, despite the self-identification of his informants, Culin concluded that the indigenous Caribbean people of Cuba were indeed extinct, citing the various markers of acculturation into the majority population. To proponents of the survival discourse, Culin's work would be considered substantial because the self-identification of those he interviewed provides support to the temporal continuity of native communities in the Caribbean. Contemporary anthropologists have tended to emphasize the oral histories about indigenous survival and attacked dominating discourses of extinction on theoretical and empirical grounds. The scholars who contributed to Forte's (2006a, 2006b) edited volume emphasize the notion of resurgence as the most appropriate way to understand peoples who were never fully wiped out and whose cultural practices persisted historically. Contemporary claims of indigeneity are not new, they are organized expressions of cultural forms that have always existed in the Caribbean. In addition, scholars (Castanha 2010; Feliciano-Santos 2011; Forte 2006a) emphasize how indigenous peoples in various islands accept hybridity but reject extinction via hybridity.

Discourses in contexts

One of the challenges of understanding the politics involved discourses of survival and extinction in the Caribbean is lack of attention paid by many of the actors involved to the different contexts in which these discourses emerge. First, the political economy in which discourses are employed by activists, scholars, and laypersons varies significantly. The Kalinago Reserve in Dominica comprises a territorial polity with communal land ownership and internal governance. In Trinidad, the Santa Rosa First Peoples Community in Arima is an incorporated community association heavily invested in its cultural heritage which in 2011 was awarded 25 acres of land by the Trinidadian government (Anonymous 2012; News 2013). The Puerto Rican Taíno movement exists on an even broader national and transnational social space. Given these differences, it is often surprising to not hear activists and scholars recognize these differences. Global cultural forms of indigeneity are clearly at work here, and they differently inform discourses of survival and extinction. On the one hand, indigenous survival is predicated on indigenous rights on a global level that tend to have a strategic homogenizing effect – hence the existence of the Caribbean Organization of Indigenous Peoples and their efforts to gain recognition from entities such as the United Nations. On the other hand, notions of indigenous existence are fueled by the global circulation of misrepresentations of “real Indians,” which proponents of extinction believe are nowhere to be seen in the Caribbean.

Second, racial ideologies and their ties to nationalism vary significantly. In the Hispanic Caribbean, claims of being “Indian” are often tied to a rejection of African heritage or Blackness (Candelario 2007; Duany 2001). In places like Trinidad, St. Vincent, and Dominica more dichotomous (Black/White) ideologies of race give way to experiences of indignity that are not necessarily exclusive of Blackness. In St. Vincent, for example, the very notion of the “Black Carib” is indicative of a racial ideology of hybridity that is not so closely related to national ideology as is the case in the Hispanic Caribbean. In Trinidad, the political space for multiculturalism at the national level (Khan 2004) makes the claims of the Carib community much more viable than they have been for the Taínos in Puerto Rico.

Having mapped out some of the competing claims of extinction and survival and probing how these discourse circulate in different contexts, I now turn my attention to the anthropological genetics of the Caribbean. Rather than taking the following section as a body of knowledge external to the discourses in question, I want to engage the genetic strands of these discourses in order to formulate an engaged critique of genetic ancestry as it relates to the Caribbean.

Anthropological genetics and the Caribbean

While the many modern DNA studies on contemporary Caribbean populations only include those of primarily African and European ancestries (Harris 2006; Miljkovic-Gacic et al. 2005; Molokhia et al. 2003; Murray 2010; Salas 2005; Salas et al. 2005), there are several studies that also consider those with indigenous Caribbean genetic ancestry over a number of Caribbean islands (Benn Torres, Kittles, and Stone 2007; Benn Torres et al. 2012; Fernandez-Cobo et al. 2001; Herrera-Paz, Matamoros, and Carracedo 2010; Lalueza-Fox et al. 2001, 2003; Lleonart et al. 1999; Martinez-Cruzado 2001; Martinez-Cruzado et al. 2005; Mendizabal et al. 2008; Miljkovic-Gacic et al. 2005; Monsalve and Hagelberg 1997; Salas et al. 2005; Tajima et al. 2004; Toro-Labrador, Wever, and Martinez-Cruzado 2003). Collectively, these papers illustrate that indigenous Caribbean ancestry is represented within contemporary Caribbean populations; however, the amounts of indigenous Caribbean ancestry greatly varies across the islands. In general, higher amounts of indigenous Caribbean ancestry tend to be found within Spanish or Dutch speaking populations, though sizable indigenous Caribbean genetic contributions have been detected in populations from Dominica and in the Garinagu (descendent of Africans and indigenous Caribbean peoples originally from St. Vincent but exiled to Honduras in the late seventeenth century) (Benn Torres, Kittles, and Stone 2007; Crawford 1986; Crawford et al. 1981).

Many of the mentioned studies rely on mitochondrial and Y-chromosome markers to access ancestry and evaluate the influence of microevolutionary process on the population. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and Y-chromosome markers are uni-parentally inherited markers.¹ Because both the mtDNA and Y-chromosome markers are inherited unchanged and have been well characterized across human populations, they are useful for learning about the maternal and paternal lineages, respectively (Crawford 2007). However, because of the uni-lineal inheritance of these markers, the multiplicative increase in number of ancestors in each preceding generation, and the phenomenon of shared ancestry within and between families, uni-lineal markers are informative about only up to two members of an individual's family tree (Mielke, Konigsberg, and Relethford 2010). Thus, the limited resolution of these markers, as it pertains to the individual genetic test-taker, has been a major critique of the effectiveness of such markers in interpretations of genealogical histories (Wagner 2010). However, genealogical histories of individuals are not the primary concern of scientists concerned with region-wide migration and admixture patterns. Instead, it is critical to understand that in relation to populations, with adequate sample size, uni-parental markers have been quite informative in delineating which past populations contributed to the gene pool of current populations (Jobling, Hurles, and Tyler-Smith 2004).

Another noted limitation of genetic ancestry tests is the distribution of mitochondrial and Y chromosome haplogroups, or genetic families. Though haplogroups are generally continent specific, they are not stringently restricted to particular regions but instead can be found, though at low frequencies, across the world (Jobling, Hurles, and Tyler-Smith 2004). Accordingly, there is the possibility that a lineage that is thought to have come from a specific place due to its high frequency in that region of the world may in fact be from somewhere else where the same haplogroup is present but at a much lower frequency. Thus, in interpreting population history based on uni-parental markers, it is important to incorporate other lines of evidence, such as archeological data, historical data, or oral histories, into the interpretation of the genetic data. Of course, these are lines of evidence that are at the center of the extinction–survival debate, and this means that the interpretation of genetic data is intricately tied to the political contexts described above. While the limitations regarding individual ancestry and frequency of haplogroups around the world can restrict how genetic technology can inform inquiries about the past, genetic data have proven useful for making broad inferences about past evolutionary processes (e.g. medical) that would otherwise be left unaddressed (Novembre and Ramachandran 2010; Ramachandran et al. 2010).

As it pertains to the survival/extinction discourse of indigenous Caribbean peoples, for the most part, geneticists and other academics either do not engage – as a matter of conscious ideology – the question of extinction or existence of these populations or they tend to accept and relay the extinction discourse (Byrnes et al. 2011; Hopper 2008; Lalueza-Fox et al. 2001; Martínez Cruzado 2002). Geneticists might understand their scientific practice as passive, but this position is untenable because their claim about biological processes enters discursive fields where other biological claims about the past already exist. When it comes to thinking about population histories in the trans-Atlantic world over the last 500 years, questions of what it means to be indigenous and ideas about race and creolization have greatly influenced how genetic ancestry data are presented, interpreted, and generally understood by interested parties.

Genetics and the shaping of indigenous identity

Genetic data have been employed in support of both discourses of survival and extinction. Supporters of survival perceive genetic data as evidence of a legacy of surviving indigenous people, and supporters of extinction interpret genetic data as the biological presence of an extinct population. Through its scholarly interlocutors, genetic ancestry seems to have entered discursive fields in the Caribbean where ideological positions are well entrenched. Data for public intellectual debates are more abundant for Puerto Rico, so the following discussion will focus on those developments. I will, however, discuss some of my observations from throughout the Anglophone Caribbean. Although confidentiality agreements with participants prevent me from discussing how the political dynamics of any one indigenous community might affect the reactions of participants to genetic ancestry research, I will highlight cultural commonalities and divergences for different islands and indigenous communities.

Between 2001 and 2005, several researchers published anthropological genetic work highlighting the genetic ancestry of contemporary Puerto Ricans (Fernandez-Cobo et al. 2001; Martinez-Cruzado 2001; Martinez-Cruzado et al. 2005). All of these studies systematically illustrated that upwards of 60% of living Puerto Ricans can trace their ancestry to indigenous Caribbean peoples. None of the papers outwardly acknowledge the existence of native peoples, either avoiding the question or as Fernandez-Cobo et al. concluded, the biological relationships, “ … carried by the Taíno Indians can be found in today's Puerto Rican population despite the apparent demise of these people more than two centuries ago” (2001, 385–402). In the aftermath of these studies, a succession of publications by Gabriel Haslip-Viera, a historian, and Jorge Estevez, a scholar/social activist, illustrated the varying interpretations of the genetic data. In their interchange, Haslip-Viera and Estevez both argue for the importance of genetic data as it pertains to Puerto Rican identity and the Taíno resurgence movement (Estevez 2008; Haslip-Viera 2008). Drawing on linguistics, material culture, in addition to genetic data, Estevez argues for survival and continuity of Taíno people. He concludes his argument,

Taíno ancestry, culture and customs have always been with us. It is time to elevate the Taíno to their proper place in history. Our ancestors contributed many things that are central to us still to this day. It should not come as a surprise that we also have a genetic connection.

Estevez emphasizes the self-determination of Taíno groups and does not rely on any one line of evidence. He argues that the genetic data simply support the right of Taíno people to assert themselves, but it is not a precondition for self-determination. In response, Haslip-Viera notes the limited resolution of mtDNA citing, “In actuality mtDNA … only constitutes a tiny element or residue of the total genetic composition.” He concludes that due to historical facts regarding the fate of indigenous Caribbean peoples in addition to the reality that commercially available genetic ancestry tests generally reveal that native ancestry is minimal among Puerto Rican testers, Taíno ancestry should not be “privileged” more prominently than other ancestries found with contemporary Caribbean populations. Haslip-Viera emphasizes the admixed genetic nature of Puerto Rican people and questions why Taíno ancestry should be singled out by any group in Puerto Rico. Ultimately, he sees in the genetic data evidence of racial creolization of African, Taíno, and Spanish.

More recently, there was a flurry of negative responses to a conference presentation by Byrnes et al. (2011) and subsequent summary article by Young (2011a) about genetic histories of indigenous Puerto Rican peoples. The conference presentation was titled “Genomic Reconstruction of an Extinct Population from Next-Generation Sequence Data” and the summary article was titled “Breathing Life into an Extinct Ethnicity.” Byrnes et al. initially noted that Taíno peoples had become extinct and vestiges of their genetic legacies could be observed in modern Puerto Rican peoples. This statement was clearly aligned with generally accepted understandings of indigenous people, which echoes Alegria's position but adds new genetic data. The revised version of the article was published with an apology from Nature News and expressly asserted the existence of Taíno peoples. The Nature News article was changed to “Rebuilding the Genome of a Hidden Ethnicity” (Young 2011b). Comments to the summary article lauded the research but condemned the assertions of extinction. Self-identified Taínos made many of the comments that appeared at the end of the article. Commenter Roberto Borrero summarizes the sentiment of many readers who responded to the summary news article:

This is an interesting article however it <is> promoting misinformation by stating the Taíno no longer exist. It is unfortunate that this magazine and those conducting the DNA study would seek to comment on the culture of a living people. Taíno DNA remains because Taíno people remain. (Young 2011b).

The debate between Haslip-Viera and Estevez and the exchanges on the pages of Nature News demonstrate how the colonial legacies of racial ideologies continue to shape contemporary debates. For Haslip-Viera, the paradigm of racial mixture is intricately tied to cultural mixture. That is, creolization is a biological and cultural process. Moreover, colonial ideas about an ideal indigenous type as a “full-blooded” Indian are explicitly operational in his use of genetic ancestry data. Byrnes et al. have a similar understanding, although their assertions about hybridity couched in scientific language. What is particularly interesting in this case is how Young initially reads “ethnicity” where Byrnes et al. write “population.” Moreover, in the subsequent change of title, ethnicity becomes “hidden” – but if ethnicity is hidden and ethnicity stands for population, then can biological population be hidden? I would suggest that the answer to this query is “yes” if one accepts notions of mestizaje that are native to the Caribbean. On the other hand, Estevez and commentators to Young's summary article embrace a cultural understanding of genetic ancestry that is closer to hypodescent (or “one-drop rule”). Native blood is not and cannot be diluted with the presence of African or European blood, “native-ness” simply exists. By extension, the presence of alleles common to populations from the Americas within contemporary Caribbean populations is just as illustrative as alleles common to people from both Africa and Europe in shaping the concept of exactly who is native.

In the Anglophone Caribbean the situation is quite different. The ideal of creolization was neither part of British colonial culture nor embraced as national ideology in the anti-colonial movement over the latter half of the twentieth century. Whether thinking about the Kalinago Reserve in Dominica, the Black Caribs in St. Vincent, or the Santa Rosa Carib Community in Trinidad, the ideological space for indigenous peoples with a hybrid past is more of an open question than a counter-cultural movement. To be sure, debates about the authenticity of these indigenous groups occur. Many people outside those community claim that too much mixture has taken place in order for indigenous peoples to be “real Indians.” Nonetheless, claims for indigenous recognition are not perceived as an affront to a national ideology. In fact, contemporary models of multiculturalism in these islands make claim for indigenous recognition more viable. This has been especially the case in Dominica and Trinidad, where the communities have reached various levels of state recognition. Genetic ancestry, however, has presented some potential challenges to these indigenous communities because results sometimes reveal either little indigenous ancestry or too much African ancestry. Many of the research participants I have interacted with in the Anglophone Caribbean tend to have a favorable outlook when genetic tests reveal any hints of indigenous ancestry: perceived hybridity has generally not been an obstacle for celebrating the detection of indigenous genetic ancestry. Moreover, participants who do not have detectable evidence of indigenous genetic ancestry have been universally firm on their knowing that they are in fact descendants of indigenous peoples and happy to celebrate the traces of indigenous ancestry found in relatives and/or friends. Dominica, however, seems to be one place in the Caribbean Antilles where members from the indigenous community are in a position to either take or leave what genetic technology has to offer – a direct result of them holding political territory and governance.

Given the relationship between genetic ancestry and discourses of extinction and survival described above, I would argue that it is critical for genetic scientists to actively engage the repercussions of their studies. First, many of these genetic ancestry studies are being carried out for historical purposes. In such studies, the concept of ancestry should be employed to describe a history of migration and gene flow. Such migrations and gene flow, in turn, should always be understood and interpreted within the greater evolutionary history of our species – a species that is specially characterized by its adaptability to environments on a global scale over a relatively short period of evolutionary time. European colonization of the Americas brought people together from geographically distant places, and such migration patterns accentuate the bio-geographical imprint in genetic ancestry tests of Caribbean peoples. But simply because the geographic origins of a population are more accentuated in an ancestry test as a result of a particular colonial history does not mean that indigenous peoples were in the past biologically “pure” any more than West Africans or Europeans. The people of the Caribbean today are “genetic hybrids” just the same way that the people of the world are “genetic hybrids” if by “hybrids” we mean a people whose biological population is characterized by a complex history of gene flow and genetic drift. It is in that hybridity that we find human biological diversity, which is essential to the survival of any species. In short, ancestry research does not necessitate that we make assumptions about the genetic homogeneity of the parental populations in question.

Second, genetic ancestry is neither a simplistic extension of racial ideologies nor is it incorruptible by such ideologies. In a critique of National Geographic's Geographic Project (GP), Reardon and TallBear (2012) argue that the GP's quest to trace our species' global migratory routes amounts to a continuation of nineteenth-century social evolution because it reifies indigenous peoples in remote time and spaces. It is true that genetic ancestry, with its references to geographical origins, resonates with notions of race; but this is mainly because there is a correlation between genetic distance and geographic distance (Mielke, Konigsberg, and Relethford 2010). The intellectual history of biological anthropology (Wolpoff and Caspari 1997) simply does not support the direct line that Reardon and TallBear draw between social evolutionists and GP's director Spencer Wells. Likewise, other scholars (e.g. El-Haj 2007; Whitmarsh 2008) have made similar claims about the role of genomic science shaping racial ideologies with no evidence of their own about how laypersons make sense out of such technology. Their emphasis on how practitioners of science promulgate racial ideologies is a good start, but my experiences with several hundred research participants throughout the Caribbean suggest that people's experiences of race are well entrenched in a multitude of practices that go well beyond the realm of science. There is no question that scientific knowledge has been instrumental in the historical formation of scientific ideologies (Brace 2005), but to assume that it continues to play a central role – especially in the Caribbean – is naïve and simply contradicts the available evidence.

However, if in the Caribbean ancestry data have had limited effect on existing racial ideologies, I do not want to suggest that the science of genetic ancestry is neutral about perpetuating ideas about race. As just noted, there is a serious scientific heritage that continues to affect how scholars of genetic ancestry present their data. For example, Byrnes et al.'s paper title references an “extinct population.” As Caspari (2003) has pointed out, the prevailing notion of population in the biological science is saturated with ideas about discrete mating units tied to particular locales. Such ideas contradict evolutionary processes of gene flow and genetic drift that are characteristic of humanity, whose diversity is best understood as a cline and not discrete units. It is therefore inaccurate for Byrnes et al. to regard pre-Columbian indigenous peoples as populations but not, for example, the colonial society that included the unions of Spanish men and indigenous women. To regard the latter as a starting point of a new mestizo population simply strips indigenous people of their agency and sets an arbitrary biological distinction for a process that is actually the evolutionary norm for humanity.

Finally, I would argue that genetic scientists should engage the community they work with as scholar activists. This, I realize, is a more difficult demand to meet given existing academic norms and research incentives for bio-anthropological research. However, it is irresponsible for genetic ancestry research to continue without attending to the political entanglements in which such research already exists. Engaged bio-anthropological research can entail (1) not conducting certain research studies that could potentially harm a community, (2) collaborating with indigenous groups to incorporate the genetic research into educational and cultural heritage efforts of the community, and (3) taking strong scientific stances against the abuse of ancestry data to support racist positions.

Conclusion

Irrespective of the genetic data itself, the value or worth of this sort of information seems above all to be most related to the personal/professional motivations of the individuals who encounter it. Within anthropological genetics, genetic data are used to highlight biologically based relationships within and between populations. Outside of academe, the same data may be exploited in a very different manner. The debates about Taínos in Puerto Rico demonstrate the multifaceted appropriations of genetic data. For example, the mtDNA data point to the obvious historical process of Spanish men procreating with indigenous Caribbean women. For those who subscribe to some version of indigenous extinction, the mtDNA data suggest a drastic disruption to Taíno society. For those who assert indigenous survival, mtDNA data are an avenue to explain how indigenous traditions were kept through female domestic spaces. New genetic information is incorporated into existing debates, and the discourses that inform those debates are firmly embedded in ideologies of race: extinction through racial hybridity (extinction) and racial distinction despite hybridity (survival). In the Anglophone Caribbean, findings of indigenous ancestry among people who self-identify as “Black” have elicited responses of what I would call “racial recovery” – where indigeneity is recovered within a Black racial heritage without altering blackness. That is, something as unexpected as indigenous ancestry in places where essentially all accept the fact that indigenous peoples were exterminated is interpreted through the more rigid lens of British racial divisions. Thus, genetic data may serve to influence the manner in which group identity, descent, and ancestry are imagined. Consequently, as it pertains to the question of existence or extinction of indigenous Caribbean peoples, genetic data do not simplify the debate; they instead add a layer of complexity to how the past and present are re-imagined. In the end however, genetic data make it possible to prospect the past, to rethink the history of the Caribbean as well as the relationships of its peoples.

Acknowledgements

My deepest thanks to colleagues and anonymous reviewers who assisted with manuscript comments and editing. In addition, I am grateful for the very constructive critiques by my colleague Gabriel Torres. Above all, I thank the study participants without whose cooperation and support this work could not have been completed.

Notes

1 Uni-parental markers are inherited from one parent. mtDNA is inherited unchanged from the mother to all offspring and only females can pass their mtDNA to the next generation. The Y-chromosome contains the genetic information that makes men male and is only inherited only from the father to the son (Jobling, Hurles, and Tyler-Smith 2004, xx, 523 pp.).