DNA USA

by Bryan Sykes

  That evening, the no-soliciting notice went up again, and I asked my football tutor, Monica, why that was. Even though only a week had passed, the 49ers had another home game. Sure enough Mr. and Mrs. McDonald arrived from Florida and as before their son Ray came to say hello to them. After he left, Ulla homed in (in the nicest possible way), and before long we had joined Ray senior and his wife, Labrina, at their table. They were absolutely charming, and we talked about their son’s football career from high school to college and then as a professional. And, yes, they did come to watch every single home game and, yes, it was a long way, but well worth it. We soon began to discuss what it was that we were doing in San Francisco, and they both became very interested. On the origin of their McDonald surname, they had no idea how they had come to have it but they would quite like to know whether they were related to the chiefs of the eponymous Scottish clan. I explained the procedure, in this case a simple cheek swab from Ray senior and a Y-chromosome test. I went to get a kit from our room while Ulla kept on talking. Back at the table, the coffees were arriving. At that point the coach, Mike Singletary, came in, still with his red shoes, and greeted them briefly before moving quickly off in the direction of the players’ suite. I can’t say for sure if the coach’s presence had been the immediate cause, but I could see that Ray senior was having second thoughts when he said that he would need to talk to his son. I knew the chance was lost. But never mind, we had all enjoyed a good conversation, one we would not have had were it not for our research. The next day the 49ers went down to a heavy defeat.

  Among the many friends and relatives whose portraits Mountain had painted, genetically speaking, one stood out from the rest. Not in her attributes as a friend, but rather in her chromosomes. Whereas most came out colored in the expected hues, Caucasian blue or African green, or a mixture of all three, like King and Burchard, “Ilsa Lund”’s chromosomes came as a genuine surprise. “Ilsa”’s ancestry, as far as she knew at the time, was monotonously British—“bog standard” was the term she used. In that respect her European background mirrored many of Mountain’s customers who had purchased the DNA tests principally for the health information they contained. When Mountain first saw “Ilsa”’s chromosome portrait she was so excited that she called her immediately. That had been only a few days before, so when “Ilsa” met us at what had become our usual table in the hotel lobby, the news was still fresh. She had brought her chromosome portrait with her and immediately put it on the table. I could see at once what Mountain had found so surprising. Among the blue chromosomes were long tracts of African green. Not just a small fleck but really long stretches covering four chromosome arms. In numerical terms, almost 8 percent of her DNA had a recent African ancestry.

  “Ilsa” told us that her family had been in the Carolinas from the early days. She had not yet tracked down the immigrant ancestors, but all the signs were that most or all of them had arrived in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. The only inkling of something other than a completely European background was that one of her great-uncles had claimed, without much evidence to back it up, that there might have been a Delaware Indian somewhere in there. Given her brown hair, very slightly olive skin, and brown eyes, “Ilsa”’s coloration would not have stood out from that of the crowd back home in England. Nevertheless, in the past she had been taken for a Cuban, a Puerto Rican, a Mexican, an Israeli, and even an Eskimo. Not so her sister, who according to “Ilsa” was a blue-eyed blond.

  Since she had just learned of her African ancestry, I was interested in her immediate reaction to it, before it had really sunk in. She was certainly surprised, but only because from what limited knowledge she had of her ancestors, none of them had been African. If anything, she said, she might have expected some American Indian ancestry because of her great-uncle’s theories. She would have welcomed that outcome because she felt, like many other Americans I met, that some Indian blood would be a good thing to have, a connection to the original Americans. She certainly had no strong adverse reaction to finding that she had an African American ancestor, or any very positive one either. Judging by the long lengths of uninterrupted green chromosome segments, there was probably only one and, on the doubling-dilution-per-generation rule, he or she would have joined the genealogy about three or four generations ago. A great- or great-great-grandparent, in other words. After her initial surprise, “Ilsa”’s next puzzle was to identify this unexpected ancestor. She had told her cousin Greg about this, and he, being an avid genealogist, was on the case. Her own theory was that her African ancestor might have joined the family tree around the time of Reconstruction, but she promised to update me on any developments as she and Greg dug into their past. A year later she let me know that further tests on her relatives had confirmed that her African American ancestor was on her father’s side, but that was as far as they had gotten. I had the distinct impression that “Ilsa”’s relatives were not so eager as she was to find out more.

  When we met in San Francisco I had asked “Ilsa” whether the news of her ancestry had any effect on her attitude toward African Americans, maybe those she knew through work. “Ilsa” works in the IT department of one of Silicon Valley’s large biotech companies, and she said that most of her colleagues were Indian (from India, not America) or Chinese. Only a minority were European, and there were only two African Americans she could think of. One irrelevant detail that caught my attention was that, despite this being California, the only Latinos in the company were on the janitorial staff. So she didn’t know enough African Americans to feel any immediate empathy with her newfound cousins. She had not booked a trip to West Africa yet, and would definitely not be checking the African American box at the next census. She hadn’t told her elderly mother yet, but her blue-eyed blond sister’s reaction was telling: “It’s nothing to do with me,” as if it were an African ancestry that “Ilsa” had inherited but she had not. Obviously “Ilsa”’s African ancestor would also be her sister’s, and barring an extreme statistical freak, they would have roughly the same amount of African DNA.

  Our next appointment in the Bay Area was also one of the most intriguing. “Will Kane” met us in the lobby, and we settled down at one of the tables away from the hubbub and ordered a late lunch of soup, half an eggplant sandwich, and a bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, one of my favorites. As we tackled our food, she (we were getting very short of predetermined pseudonyms by then) began to tell us about herself. The first thing I noticed about “Will” was her aura of calm and detachment. It was noticeably different from that of “Ilsa Lund,” or of “Mildred” and “Ned” from Atlanta. She told Ulla and me that she had been born and raised on the Navajo reservation near the Four Corners region, where the state lines of Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado all come together. Her mother was a Navajo, although her distant ancestor had been abducted from the nearby Hopi reservation. Her grandmother spoke only Navajo. Her father was an anthropologist who had come to the reservation, met and married “Will”’s mother, and stayed. Her home had been near the small town of Kayenta, Arizona, not far from Monument Valley. It is a very rural region, very dry, and with many people raising sheep for a living. Both her parents worked as language teachers, and “Will” had attended high school in Kirtland, a two-hour bus ride from Kayenta, just over the border in New Mexico.

  She had always enjoyed science in high school, and when she enrolled in college at the University of Arizona in Tucson, she soon found herself working on a genetics project on albinism, the pigmentation disorder in which melanin production is faulty, resulting in very pale skin, hair, and eyes. Albinism is present among the Navajo and other Southwest Indian tribes, and “Will”’s supervisor set her the task of finding out whether the mutation, in a cell-membrane protein, that caused it was the same in the Navajo as had been found in other tribes. To do this “Will” had collected DNA samples from her own tribe, though she had been careful to double-blind the results so that she never knew the identity of the donors. To cu
t a long story short, she did find a new mutation among the Navajo that was subtlely different from those in neighboring American Indian tribes. She thought that the likely reason why the mutation was confined to the Navajo was because their numbers had been severely reduced during the long conflicts with European settlers, starting with the Spaniards, and then the European Americans. Although there were now more than a quarter of a million Navajo, the tribe had been reduced to about five thousand after they had been forcibly interned at the tiny Bosque Redondo Reservation near Fort Sumner, New Mexico, in the mid-1860s. The reservation was completely unsuitable, and many Navajo died before they were allowed home in 1868. In “Will”’s opinion this was the event that squeezed the population down to a small bottleneck through which the particular mutant version of the albinism gene had passed and then flourished as the population increased.

  “Will” had done this work around the time of the ill-fated Human Genome Diversity Project, of which more later, that had resulted in the tribe issuing a moratorium on genetic testing on the reservation. Being herself a Navajo, “Will” had been allowed to collect the samples she needed for her albinism research, but only outside the boundaries of the reservation. After she graduated from the University of Arizona, “Will” came to Stanford as a graduate student and started work on the pigmentation genes of the mouse, a popular model organism for genetic research that can then be extended to understanding more about humans. The project had worked out very well, because the week before we met, “Will” had successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation at Stanford. One of her advisers had been Joanna Mountain, which is how we came to be introduced.

  Outside, a pelican was flying across the lagoon between the hotel and the airport runway, periodically diving headlong into the water in search of supper. I could see its crop extend as it gulped in a mouthful of seawater and then expelled it, trapping and swallowing any edible creatures that it contained. Inside we ordered some more sandwiches and another bottle of wine. Our conversation turned back to her experience of the Navajo attitude to genetic testing. “Will” was about to begin postdoctoral research into the ethical issues involved. She wanted to overcome the resistance that had developed because she could see the health benefits that might follow from Navajo participation. But everything that had happened, the Havasupai case and the Human Genome Diversity Project, had made the Navajo very wary of genetics, and of science in general. Just as Serle Chapman had told me about the Cheyenne, there was understandable indignation over cooperating in genetics projects only to be told that your long-held tribal beliefs about your origins were wrong.

  I spoke again to “Will” after I sent her a copy of her chromosome portrait. She was making some progress in her conversations about genetics with the tribe, and was making a formal study of the impact of the Havasupai court settlement, but it had been hard work. She had been perfectly happy to take part in my research for the book, and we had taken a DNA sample for her chromosome portrait. With her European father and Navajo mother, it would be quite easy to distinguish between the chromosomes that she had inherited from each of her parents. But what fascinated me was that, while she was very interested in what the DNA might reveal about the ancestry of her European father, she really did not want to know about her mother’s contribution. It was as if the enthusiasm for genetics shown by my European volunteers and the resistance to it that I had witnessed among Native Americans were living side by side in the same individual. Her paternal chromosome wanted to know while her maternal chromosome did not.

  My last meeting in San Francisco was to catch up with someone I had met in Oxford a few months before setting out for the United States when he had been among the guests at a dinner at my college in Oxford. The conversation at our table soon turned to what work we were each doing and, when it was my turn, I explained that I was researching a genetics book on America. At that point one of the guests surprised me by revealing that he was a Cherokee Indian. I looked as closely at him as the low light, and manners, allowed. He certainly seemed to have some of the features I had been led to expect, including high cheekbones, dark hair and eyes, a proud and distinctive nose, and slightly darker than usual skin tone. Although he was based in Oxford, he explained that he was going back to the United States for the next two semesters at Berkeley, and that he was leaving the very next day.

  I realized long ago that Oxford college dinners had an unwritten rule. Though conversations might indeed be fascinating and engrossing, even intimate, no promises made on these occasions need ever be kept. It is the university equivalent of “we must do lunch sometime.” However, on this occasion we did keep in touch and arranged to meet in San Francisco. Which is how Ulla and I came to be driving over the Bay Bridge to Oakland and up the freeway toward the Claremont Hotel on the hills behind Berkeley. This location was much closer to the UC campus than our airport hotel, and I welcomed any excuse to return to the terrace restaurant with its fabulous views back across the bay and to the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. “Lucas Jackson,” his new pseudonym, was waiting for us and had already ordered one of the Claremont’s renowned ruby grapefruit cocktails. The sun was hovering over the bay, and the heat of the day was slowly fading. As another two ruby cocktails arrived, we sat back to enjoy the view. The lazy thud of tennis balls coming up from the already floodlit courts below combined with the first effects of the ruby specials to lend a very relaxing tone to the reunion.

  Although we were meeting in San Francisco, “Lucas Jackson” had been brought up farther south, in Los Angeles. Even so, here I was, on the farthest west coast of America, meeting someone whose Cherokee ancestors had traveled, over many generations, three thousand miles from the other side of the continent. As “Lucas” started to talk about his ancestors and what they meant to him, I looked more closely at his face in daylight than I had been able to in the low artificial light of a college dining hall. He is tall and slim, with dark eyes and noticeably dark eyelashes. His hair is dark brown too, but closely cut. His skin pigmentation is a little darker than mine, but he in no way resembles the images of American Indians of either my imagination or of photographs I had seen. By now a plate of spicy calamari had arrived, and my recorder captured “Lucas”’s words between mouthfuls:

  “The Cherokee were originally from Georgia and South Carolina. They were one of the five so-called Civilized Tribes, the others being the Creek, Choctaw, Seminole, and Chickasaw, I think. They got the name because they were already living a settled agricultural life when they encountered the earliest European settlers. They lived in long rectangular houses, had their own governments and legal systems, wore cotton clothes, and grew corn and squashes on irrigated plots.

  “At first relationships with the Europeans were pretty good. There was trading and intermarriage. Nevertheless the Cherokee kept themselves apart from other Indian tribes, which is why we look different, so I am told.

  “The Cherokee had their own language, of course, but they were unique in that they became the only American Indian tribe to have a writing system. This was all down to one man, Sequoya. Like many Indians, Sequoya, who was a silversmith, was impressed by European writing. He called it ‘talking leaves.’ Single-handed, he produced a system of letters and symbols to represent words around 1820. At first he had a lot of difficulty persuading fellow Cherokees to adopt his new system. He traveled to Cherokee settlements in Oklahoma and Arkansas to explain it. It is still used there today. Sequoya’s dream was to reunite the fractured Cherokee Nation through language but, after a crusade through Arizona and the Southwest, he died in Mexico, trying to link up with dispersed Cherokee who had moved there. And yes, the giant redwood was named after him, or so I believe.

  “Back in the Carolinas relations between Cherokee and the Europeans began to deteriorate as the British Americans, in particular, wanted to expand their colonies westward further into Cherokee territory. This was in the early 1800s. The encroachment was sporadic to begin with. There was no deliberate policy of mass d
isplacement, at least not yet. However, as land first rented by Europeans was then purchased, my ancestors were gradually pushed westwards. I don’t know whether there was any organized armed resistance, but I suppose that when persuasion failed there would have been raids, then counterraids. That would have provided the excuse for the forced evictions. You can see it happening. At first my ancestors were displaced into the mountains, the Appalachians, where the land was much poorer than in South Carolina.

  “After the Louisiana Purchase at the start of the nineteenth century, vast territories were taken over by the United States. Thomas Jefferson, the president, thought there was plenty of room in these new territories for all the Indians who were living east of the Mississippi. In the opinion of the Congress, the so-called Civilized Tribes had made such good progress toward integration, that they seriously considered establishing an Indian state in the new territories and admitting it to the Union. But the southern states, Georgia in particular, demanded more Indian land in order to expand the plantations. They threatened to secede from the Union if they couldn’t get it. So Congress passed the Indian Removal Act around 1830. The main driving force behind the act was the man who signed it into law, President Andrew Jackson, whose face is on the twenty-dollar bill.

  “The act called for the removal of all Indians living east of the Mississippi to the new U.S. territories on the other side of the river. Although many Cherokee set off westward immediately, my ancestors, along with most of the tribe, lacked the means to do so. They were eventually evicted and forced to march on foot. This was the notorious ‘Trail of Tears.’ Four thousand Cherokee died on the journey, the soldiers who drove them along the way refusing to allow them to stop to tend to the sick or even to bury the dead.