by Bryan Sykes
In one way this result demolishes the genetic definition of race, as applied to the Seaconke Wampanoag at any rate. It shows the multitude of individual ancestral origins, which, taken either individually or together, would never be able correctly to assign anybody to the tribe with any conviction. As such it is a vivid demonstration of the impossibility of doing the same in any Native American tribe. At the same time I thought it must be disappointing for the Seaconke since, at first sight, it hardly supports the notion of direct biological descent from the original tribal members. And yet it is a true reflection of the genetic makeup of the tribe. However, Michael Markley, one of the paper’s authors, reassured me that, even though I might have been surprised, he considered the results from the Genographic Project were consistent in every way with the Seaconke’s developed ancestry and oral history.
When Richard and I had visited Rick Kittles in Chicago, he had told me about his experience with another group whose appeal to genetics to back up a claim to the entitlements of tribal membership had also produced an ambiguous result. Back in 2004, before the time of chromosome painting, Kittles had been asked to help members of the Freedmen Association of Oklahoma fight their expulsion from the Seminole Nation three years earlier. As my Cherokee volunteer, “Lucas Jackson,” had recently explained to me, the Florida Seminole were one of the five tribes forcibly relocated west of the Mississippi in the 1830s.
Like the other “Civilized Tribes,” the Seminole had kept black slaves and after Emancipation in 1863, the freed slaves became full tribal members. They were treated as equals by the tribe with no boundaries to intermarriage, with the freed slaves—the Freedmen—often marrying the children of their former masters. What seemed to be a model of racial inclusion continued for more than a century, as the editor of the local newspaper the Seminole Producer remarked in a revealing account in Wired magazine: “You’ve got Indians marrying whites, Indians marrying blacks. It was never a problem until they got some money.”8
The money that put an end to decades of harmony was a combination of gaming receipts accrued since the passing of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988, and American government reparations for historic land seizures. For the Seminole the reparations alone amounted to $56 million, according to the Wired account. Once the money began to pour into the tribal coffers, applications for tribal membership mushroomed. For example, membership of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, which also saw a similar increase in its financial fortunes, rose from fifty thousand in 1980 to more than a quarter of a million today. In 1983 the Cherokee introduced a requirement for tribal members to carry a “Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood” that was open to anyone who could establish a genealogical link to the Dawes Rolls. As we have already seen, the rolls were not directly concerned with any literal concept of a blood relationship, but the very title of the certificate infers a link based on biology. When the Seminole expelled all two thousand black members of the tribe in 2000, it was not long before the Freedmen realized that directly establishing at least a degree of authentic Native American ancestry through a DNA test should help them challenge the expulsions where other legal means had failed.
When Kittles heard about this from a friend at the University of Oklahoma, he paid a visit to a conference of the “Descendants of the Freedmen of Oklahoma,” the organization dedicated to ending “discrimination against people of mixed Indian African descent,” and offered free DNA ancestry tests to delegates. This was before the refinement of the chromosome portraits was available, and the tests were based on the less sensitive AIMs technology Kittles had developed with Mark Shriver of the University of Pennsylvania. Even so, the AIMs tests would give a figure, however crude, for the degree of Native American ancestry in the Freedmen’s DNA, which could be compared to other groups of people. Kittles tested a total of ninety-five Freedmen descendants and presented his results to an expectant audience at their 2005 annual conference. He had found that the proportion of African ancestry among the Freedmens’ descendants ranged from the lowest at only 4 percent to the highest at 76 percent. Likewise there was a large range in the proportion of European ancestry among the group, ranging from zero to 62 percent. When it came to the most keenly anticipated result, the component of their genomes that was assigned to Native American ancestry, the figures fell between zero and 30 percent, with an average of 6 percent. This was, as Kittles announced to the hushed audience, roughly the same as the average African American from Baltimore or New York City.
Even though this was a lower average component of Native American ancestry than many descendants had hoped for, several declared there and then that they would use the results to press for tribal membership. But the prospects for success do not look bright, judging by the reaction of the Seminole leader, Jerry Haney, who was behind the expulsion of black tribal members in 2000. When asked by the Wired reporter if he would reconsider his stance based on new DNA evidence his reply was brutally frank: “They can claim all the Indian they want,” he said, “but they cannot become a member of the Seminole Nation by blood. They’re down there [on the roll] as Freedmen. They’re separate.” Nor does litigation offer much hope to disenfranchised Freedmen descendants as complete tribal autonomy in matters of membership has repeatedly been upheld in the courts, up to and including the U.S. Supreme Court.
The original source of the problem traces back to the way the all-important Dawes Rolls were compiled back in 1906 by a delegation of mainly white clerks sent out from Washington. It was their task to vet applications for tribal membership and entitlement to the landholdings that were being distributed. Applicants were directed to one of the tents that had been put up, one of which dealt with the Freedmen. The enrollment system was bound to be arbitrary, and in the absence of documentation or the ability to speak an Indian language, several applicants found themselves on the Freedmen’s Roll based on a clerical assessment of their physical appearance. The fact that siblings were sometimes assigned to different rolls only emphasizes the intrinsic fallibility of the system. In those cases, one sibling would be issued a blood-quantum certificate while the other on the Freedmen’s Roll would be denied one, even though their ancestry was exactly the same.
What is missing in all of this is a parallel measure of Native American ancestry among the enrolled tribal members, which has not been done. Kittles is not alone in suspecting that such a test would reveal that they, too, had a very mixed genetic background, and that many of today’s enrolled members of the Five Nations would have lower proportions of Native American ancestry than some descendants of the Freedmen.
18
Portraits of America
Detail from bronze of Phillis Wheatley by Meredith Bergman. Boston’s Women’s Memorial, Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts.
Gina Paige was able to squeeze us into her busy schedule the following day, just as she was setting off again to address a conference in Charleston, Virginia. To make things easier, we met in the refurbished splendor of the concourse at Washington’s Union Station, the most magnificent railroad terminus of our trip so far. The gilded ribs of the barrel-vaulted roof reflected the soft white floodlights and classical statues graced alcoves around the second-floor balcony. Gina met Ulla and me in one of the many concourse restaurants and, after ordering lunch, we got down to business. It was Halloween and the station was full of young men and women in elaborate costumes, which livened up the atmosphere but made it hard to hold a conversation without shouting.
Unlike Rick Kittles, the scientific brains behind African Ancestry, Paige had a business background with experience in several commercial areas, the last working for a bakery products company. She was frustrated that, in any of the major sectors, there were no truly new products. Innovations were merely minor modifications of existing products—a line extension or a new flavor whose marketing depended on exaggerating their basically trivial advantages. So when she was introduced to Kittles, she immediately recognized that genetic genealogy was a genuinely new market an
d that excited her. Combining their complementary skills, Kittles and Paige set up African Ancestry. Like so many African Americans, Paige felt passionately about her own community and was very aware of the sense of disconnection many black people felt. She could also see the potential to assuage that feeling by reinforcing their African origins through DNA. From the start, African Ancestry had a strong sense of mission.
Just as with Bennett Greenspan in Houston, all of us had shared some common experiences from customers, but Paige’s mainly African American customers were more anxious about what happened to their DNA than Greenspan’s largely white clientele. In her opinion, this had a lot to do with now-discredited medical research programs directed at African Americans. The most notorious of these was the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, a long-term study on the clinical progression of untreated syphilis among African Americans named after the Arkansas district where it took place. Begun in 1932 and not abandoned until 1972, the Tuskegee experiment offered various health-care benefits to participants in exchange for regular checkups and blood tests. However, one benefit that was not made available, and was in fact deliberately withheld, was treatment with penicillin, whose ability to cure syphilis was known as early as 1947. Doctors keen not to disrupt the long-term aims of the study did not offer a treatment that would have helped their patients. Many died who might have lived. When the experiment was finally exposed in the Washington Star and the New York Times, it was immediately terminated. In the aftermath, clinical trial and consent protocols were overhauled to prevent a recurrence, and, in 1997, President Clinton issued an apology on behalf of the U.S. government. Even now, the memory of Tuskegee makes African Americans very wary of the intentions of official health programs and suspicious about the potential for some sort of eugenic misuse.
I became aware of this danger myself when advising a UK Parliamentary Select Committee inquiry into the impact of genetics. In my position as special adviser it was part of my job to recommend particular fields that the inquiry might cover and one of these was the effect of prenatal screening programs for serious genetic diseases. As well as considering the usual suspects like cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy, I also suggested we take a look at sickle-cell anemia and another inherited disorder of red blood cells called thalassemia. Both these diseases offer some protection to carriers against malarial infection, which is why they are both common where malaria is endemic. Thalassemia is found in the Mediterranean islands of Cyprus and Sardinia and is a health problem in those parts of Britain, like some London boroughs, with high densities of Cypriot immigrants. As we saw earlier, the mutations persist even where malaria is absent. In another superb example of well-organized genetic screening, like Tay-Sachs among Ashkenazi Jews, thalassemia has been virtually eliminated in both Cyprus and Sardinia.
The situation with sickle-cell disease is scientifically similar, but has again exposed the suspicions of the black community. Sickle-cell anemia is very common in West Africa, and is therefore a health issue not only in Africa itself but also in countries, like the United States and Britain, where West Africans have settled, voluntarily or otherwise. The Select Committee had invited a spokeswoman from the National Sickle Cell Program to one of the regular evidence sessions held in the Gothic surroundings of the House of Commons in London overlooking the Members’ Terrace and the River Thames. In these sessions, each witness is interrogated by one member of Parliament with others joining in to ask supplementary questions. These are open meetings with members of the press and the public present, and all the evidence is published. From the dozens of distinguished witnesses and the hundreds of other submissions, I remember this particular session and the evidence from Marion McTair very well. I have a copy of the report on my bookshelves that contains a verbatim transcript of the evidence to the inquiry from McTair on behalf of the National Sickle Cell Program. The screening program was basically designed to replicate the very successful thalassemia and Tay-Sachs efforts to diagnose carriers and offer couples at risk of having a sickle-cell child some genetic counseling and also advice on the option of selective termination of affected pregnancies.
When Ms. McTair, who is black, was asked by one of the MPs for her opinion of the screening program, she recalled a visit from a lady who was a sickle-cell carrier herself and was also married to another carrier. The rules of genetics mean, with her and her husband both being carriers, that she has a one-in-four chance of bearing a child with sickle-cell disease at every pregnancy. After their first child, who was affected, she became pregnant again and decided on a prenatal DNA diagnosis. This unfortunately identified the fetus as having two copies of the mutated gene and thus bound to develop sickle-cell disease. Reluctantly she agreed to a termination. Again she became pregnant, and again, very unluckily, the prenatal DNA test came back positive for sickle-cell. At this point the woman went to see Ms. McTair to ask her advice about what to do. She said, “I don’t want to abort it, I don’t trust the doctors.” “Why don’t you trust them?” “Because I can’t understand why this is the third time I’m carrying a child with sickle-cell disease. I think maybe the doctors don’t want me to have this child. It’s the wrong color, and it’s not the type of child they want in Britain today. They want white ones, bright ones and not black, daft ones.” Ms. McTair asked her why she said that and she could not say, but in her mind it was how she felt. What a contrast to the Ashkenazi Jews, who saw how genetic testing could help rid them of the scourge of Tay-Sachs and also to the Sicillians, who overcame their deep religious opposition to abortion, with the Catholic Church turning a blind eye, in order to achieve a comparable result and eliminate thalassemia from their island.
One in twelve African Americans carries the sickle-cell gene, which makes for about two million carriers. One in every 144 (i.e, 12 × 12) couples will both be carriers with a 25 percent chance of having a seriously ill child, so there is every reason to develop a screening program. But when the parliamentary committee came over to America for a week of evidence gathering, we heard that suspicion of a racially targeted eugenic motive lying behind a sickle-cell screening program in the United States had led to its suspension. Unlike the genetically parallel problem of Tay-Sachs disease among the Ashkenazim, where there have been no affected births for several years, even now, one in five hundred black babies in the United States is born with sickle-cell disease. This is a tragedy caused solely by the historical suspicion of the black community and one that doesn’t appear to be getting any better, as it has now become enmeshed in political arguments about the “slavery health deficit” and calls for reparations. Paige has to deal with this innate suspicion all the time, which is one reason why, like Oxford Ancestors, her company destroys its customers’ DNA samples as soon as the analysis is finished.
Paige is also in the front line of the sometimes angry reaction from African American men whose tests reveal that they carry a European Y chromosome, which roughly a third of them do. She knows very well that this is an emotional rather than an intellectual response, as most of her customers realize it is a possibility. And as with most emotional responses to unexpected news, things calm down after a while as people begin to accept the situation. After Paige has talked them through the initial stages of apprehension, they usually come to accept how it might be possible, especially when questions to other family members uncover half-forgotten tales of a white ancestor. This is not true for the reverse situation, as Paige explained with an example. A white man from Texas, with all his ancestors on both sides of the family white for as long as anyone knew, complained bitterly when his mitochondrial DNA came back as African. After the usual assertion that “there must be some mistake” and demands for retesting—which returned the same result—he still could not accept that he had a black ancestor. Of course this begs the question of why he chose to have his DNA analyzed by Paige’s company, African Ancestry, in the first place.
We finished our conversation by talking about the future of the genetic genealogy business. All “
long-established” organizations like African Ancestry, Family Tree DNA, and Oxford Ancestors have felt the impact of new companies offering much cheaper rates. These are usually no more than agents who act as intermediaries between their customers and a lab but know nothing about the underlying science or how to interpret genetic results. All three of us—Bennett, Gina, and ourselves at Oxford Ancestors—get frequent calls from customers who have bought on price from a cheaper outfit and then want someone to explain what their results mean. In genetics, as in life, you get what you pay for.
We left Paige at the station and in the gathering dusk, walked back past Capitol Hill and along the Mall to our hotel. Halloween parties were breaking out all over the place. You take it far more seriously in the United States than we do in Britain.
Paige had very kindly put us in touch with two of her customers with strong views on genetic testing among the African American community, and the next day we met up with them. The first was Toby Cooper, a bubbly and engaging woman who ran her own government contract business. The location was our hotel lobby, but this was an arranged meeting rather than a piece of DNA hustling. Toby already knew about her own mitochondrial DNA through African Ancestry, which had located her matrilineal roots to Cameroon in central West Africa. Her father’s Y chromosome had its closest matches on the slave island of Bioko off the Cameroon coast. She was a great fan of this kind of testing and the solid links it had made to her African roots. After I had explained chromosome painting, she was equally keen to have a go at that. “I can’t wait. Isn’t it amazing what you can find out about yourself these days,” she effervesced. She went to the ladies’ room to provide the saliva sample, and when she returned with it safely in the tube, I asked her more about herself.