Indigenous Knowledge in a Postgenomic Landscape: The Politics of Epigenetic Hope and Reparation in Australia

Introduction

It is well-documented that Indigenous peoples around the world have consistently rejected genetic research for ethical, cultural, and political reasons (Reardon and TallBear 2012; Kowal 2016). Genetic research conducted on “socially identifiable” populations can reinforce essentialist biological concepts of race (Foster, Bernsten, and Carter 1998; Tsosie 2007), and Indigenous populations have raised concerns over issues of consent, cultural ownership, the use (and abuse) of DNA and other bodily products, and the many differences between scientific and Indigenous understandings of bodies and kinship (Dodson and Williamson 1999; Reardon 2005; TallBear 2007; Garrison 2013; Hook 2009). In Australia, these concerns occur in a historical context where Indigenous people have been the focus of biological research that supported scientific claims of inferiority, the “doomed race” theory, and, later, policies of assimilation that removed children of “mixed” ancestry from their families (Anderson 2002; Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission [HREOC] 1997; McGregor 1997). Due to this fraught history, Indigenous Australians have, until recently, remained cautious about genetic and genomic research, and so very limited research has been conducted in this population (Kowal 2013).

In sharp contrast to this resistance to genetic research, the recent rise of epigenetics has been embraced by Indigenous peoples in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. Over the last five to ten years, there has been a remarkable increase in the use of environmental epigenetics ¹ as an explanatory framework that draws upon the relationship between biological mechanisms and social lives to understand ongoing intergenerational Indigenous disadvantage and ill-health (Kowal 2016; Kowal and Warin 2018). Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians (hereafter Indigenous Australians) remain the least healthy population group in Australia (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare 2015), and it is well-documented that rapid cultural destruction, coupled with decades of slow violence in the form of government policies and marginalization from mainstream society, is to blame (Atkinson, Nelson, and Atkinson 2010; Boulton 2016).

This paper argues that the uptake of Indigenous epigenetics in Australia points to a “political economy of hope” among those that produce and consume biological knowledge (Rose and Novas 2005; Petersen 2015). In this variation of Rose and Novas’s concept, biology is no longer a blind destiny but mutable, improvable, and potentially reversible. Epigenetics introduces a distinctive pathway to this view of the biological as a hopeful domain open to environmental and structural intervention and manipulation, a pathway that expands the potential sources and mechanisms of intervention in Indigenous people’s lives.

We begin our exploration into this particular bioeconomy of hope with a vignette describing an event where a prominent Indigenous academic used the concept of epigenetics to frame Aboriginal health in an optimistic light (in comparison to the negative framing of “deficit discourse,” Fogarty et al. 2018). This framing is paradigmatic of the collective narrative of hope, co-constituted by Indigenous histories, environmental epigenetics, and health that we examine in this paper.

Following a description of the study, we broaden the argument by describing how the molecular embodiment of colonial oppression provides a biological explanation for the intergenerational transmission of historical trauma. Moreover, we suggest that epigenetics is an appealing conduit for this discourse as it reconfigures singular and bounded concepts of the environment and personhood toward more dynamic and relational models. For many Indigenous people, personhood is not located in individuals but known in relation to other persons, Country, and across time and space. Epigenetics appears to correspond to Indigenous aspirations, to foster legal and human rights, and to reflect Indigenous knowledges. Thus, in the context that we write about, dominant (and counterhegemonic) Indigenous conceptions of personhood align with epigenetics and reinforce each other. As we explore, epigenetics is used in specific ways in the biopolitical economy of hope surrounding Indigenous health discourses. The uncertainty of the science, particularly surrounding the reversibility of epigenetic changes and their transgenerational inheritance, is, however, generally overlooked. The alignment of epigenetics and Indigenous knowledge is therefore provisional, dependent on features of human epigenetic change and inheritance that are not yet clear in the scientific literature.

In the final sections, we question whether the humanitarian usage of epigenetics to reinforce notions of acquired multigenerational bio-injury as a platform for political reparations may give rise to new forms of biolegitimacy (Fassin 2000, 2009) in which the epigenetic body is used as an historical testimony of colonial violence. ²

In our argument, we coin the term strategic biological essentialism to understand the biological turn in the representation of Indigenous rights. Strategic essentialism, a term attributed to Spivak, describes the process by which a minority group represents particular qualities as (culturally or biologically) inherent to the group in order to foster claims for social justice and rights. A strategically essentialist claim strategically overlooks the fact that qualities (e.g., connection to land or vulnerability to the state) are not homogenously shared across groups: qualities are represented as inherent in what Spivak ([1985] 1996) describes as “a scrupulously visible political interest” (p. 214).

In the case of Indigenous epigenetics, we point to the limitations of strategic biological essentialism. Enacting forms of citizenship through identification with a history of biosocial deprivation may not only lead to intensified biopolitical attention from the State but also consolidate quasi-essentialist notions of specific biological difference among certain populations seen as epigenetically different (e.g., with distinctive methylation profiles as a result of their prolonged exposures to pathogenic environments, Mansfield 2012, 2017; Meloni 2016). In conclusion, we argue that while epigenetics offers a bioeconomy of hope that the effects of settler colonialism can be recognized and reversed, the conjunction of epigenetics and Indigenous knowledges may lead to new forms of biolegitimacy that reproduce essentialisms.

Epigenetics and the Political Economy of Hope

In “The Politics of Life Itself,” N. Rose (2007) suggests that a defining feature of contemporary power in advanced liberal democracies is governance through freedom within a political economy of hope. A political economy of hope involves a grassroots and collaborative approach to the promises of new biomedical technologies such as the molecular links between environmental factors and chronic disease in epigenetic research. Such political projects, as Rose and Novas (2005) argue, engender new forms of biological citizenship and biosociality in which patients and communities advocate for greater awareness and improved services in collaboration with medical experts, pharmaceutical companies, and government bodies.

A version of this biopolitics of hope was recently demonstrated by a plenary speaker at an Australian conference on the developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD) and epigenetics. DOHaD is now an international field of research that focuses on the epidemiological associations between maternal health, prenatal, and intrauterine fetal development and susceptibility to chronic disease in adult life (Warin et al. 2011). Professor Sandra Eades (2015), a Noongar woman from Mt. Barker, Western Australia, medical doctor and eminent health researcher, presented on “life course and epigenetics.” She warned the predominantly clinical audience that her presentation was going to be different: “I want to tell you a rambling story of how I make sense of life course and DOHaD and that might contribute to Indigenous health over time.” She immediately positioned her Indigeneity alongside DOHaD and epigenetics. “This is a story about history” she said, “but not my life from birth to death, this is about life course across many people’s lives—and this fits with the DOHaD story.” Drawing from numerous federally funded medical studies that she has led and been involved in as a biomedical researcher, she talked about the problems of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases in many Indigenous Australian communities. She recounted research demonstrating that maternal stress shortens the telomere length in offspring (telomeres are the “caps” at the end of chromosomes and their length is associated with aging and cancer) and how exposures such as smoking or poor nutrition in pregnancy effects DNA methylation, birth weight of babies, and adult onset disease across generations.

Eades juxtaposed her discussion of these scientific findings within her own biography, tracing intergenerational transmission of noncommunicable diseases by showing photographs of her family members. She couched her biography in terms of cycles of disease risk that weaved in and out of bodies over several generations, pointing to positive changes in her mother’s and her own generation—such as eating simple foods incorporating bush tucker (traditional foods)—that have reversed biological mechanisms and produced resilience to ill-health. She concluded by returning to the theme of the conference: “We really are linked to our past—through mechanisms such as epigenetics, microbiomes, telomeres & others…[I’m giving you] a cyclical view of health across generations and science is catching up with that spiritual view of health” (Eades 2015). In response to her presentation, a British Australian geneticist from the audience suggested that “epigenetics is almost a plausibility [sic] of what Aboriginal people have known for thousands of years.” In this statement, he privileged Indigenous knowledges and portrayed Western science as belatedly “catching up,” inverting the hierarchy that usually organizes and prioritizes data and knowledge at a scientific meeting.

While the congruence between child development and Indigenous knowledge has been demonstrated through previous initiatives such as the Strong Women/Strong Babies/Strong Culture program of the 1990s, (for an overview of this program, see http://www.healthinfonet.ecu.edu.au/key-resources/programs-projects?pid=357 and Lea 2008) what was striking about this presentation was not just the positioning of Indigenous knowledges alongside molecular biology but the embodiment of these differing epistemologies and ontologies through Sandra’s multigenerational biography and biology. She spoke to relations of kin and ancestry, of Country, of time and place, of histories, of loss of land, and of multiple bodies enfolded through multiple times and spaces. She drew direct reference to these formulations of biography and biology within the political economy of hope engendered in postgenomic sciences—the hope that the adoption of healthy lifestyles, improved social determinants such as Indigenous education and housing, and cultural resilience can have positive, intergenerational biological effects.

It was Eades’s use of epigenetics to frame her notion of intergenerational Indigenous health that led us to further investigate emerging forms of biopolitics constituted through Indigenous epigenetics. This paper draws on our experiences of participating in these genetic, epigenetic, and DOHaD forums (conferences, seminars, workshops); analysis of relevant media, policy, and reports; and five key informant interviews conducted in 2016 by Warin. ³ Interviewees included Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian researchers working directly in Indigenous epigenetics and DOHaD (on neurodevelopment, pregnancy and nutrition, fetal alcohol syndrome, and genetics). The focus of these interviews was to explore whether and how Indigenous and scientific epistemologies intersect within DOHaD and epigenetic research. Snowball sampling was used to identify potential participants across Australia, and informed consent was obtained for semistructured interviews that took place in person or via telephone. Two of the interviewees identified as Indigenous Australians, and all were conducting research through Australian universities (in collaboration with government Departments of Health, Aboriginal Primary Health Care, and Indigenous Community Health).

Before going further, it is important to note that (as one of our interviewees explained) epigenetics is not a word you will hear “on the ground” in Indigenous communities; there is as yet, no “everyday of epigenetics” (Pentecost 2016). Currently, it is predominantly Indigenous academics, Indigenous Health Organizations, and medical bodies that are advocating epigenetics as a tool to understand Indigenous health. However, we still consider it useful to analyze these nascent discourses before they disseminate further into Indigenous health practice and policy.

The authors of this paper do not identify as Indigenous, and we are mindful that there are certain cultural and gendered knowledges/practices that are not appropriate to explore or publish. As a medical anthropologist, Warin has a decade of experience working in a life-course research group and more recently with Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers on urban Indigenous experiences of food and pregnancy in an Australian metropolitan city. Kowal is also a medical/cultural anthropologist and a physician who has two decades of experience working in Indigenous health research and has long-standing research expertise in the area of genetics and Indigenous Australians, and Meloni has international expertise in the historical, ethical, and biopolitical implications of epigenetics.

The Molecular Embodiment of Historical Trauma

In academia and among health activists, constructs of historical trauma have proliferated in the last two decades, in the context of growing legitimation of notions of trauma and victimhood (Fassin and Rechtman 2009; Niezen 2013). The concept of historical trauma is often used to “describe the impact of colonization, cultural suppression, and historical oppression of many Indigenous peoples” (Kirmayer, Gone, and Moses 2014, 300; Lock 2015). It is widely acknowledged that Indigenous Australians have experienced trauma as a result of colonization, and in many Indigenous families and communities, the effects of this trauma continue to be passed from generation to generation (Atkinson, Nelson, and Atkinson 2010).

Within health research (including Indigenous health), historical trauma has been most clearly embraced by those affiliated with the social determinants of health and explored through the lens of racism (Carson et al. 2007; Berkman and Kawachi 2000; Kuzawa and Sweet 2009, Krieger 2003; Paradies et al. 2015). All of the interviewees recognized these close links between historical trauma, racism, and poor Indigenous health. One researcher who has worked in remote and urban Indigenous settings commented: “there is so much trauma going on in present day communities and Indigenous people have long talked about it being as a result of many past atrocities and traumatic experiences.”

In the last five to ten years, understandings of the effects of trauma on the health of Indigenous people in Australia and other First Nation peoples (in the United States, New Zealand, and Canada) have expanded to incorporate epigenetics and epigenetic-inspired models, significantly broadening the ways in which trauma is embedded in the body. For example, in their work on historical trauma among Indigenous Americans and Alaskans, Walters and colleagues (2011) state that “scholars [are now pointing] to the amassing of evidence at the cellular level that powerful stressful environmental conditions can leave an imprint or ‘mark’ on the epigenome (cellular genetic material) at key development periods, that can be carried into future generations with devastating consequences” (p. 11).

Recent Australian reports on intergenerational trauma and its effects have begun to incorporate epigenetics. Boulton (2016), for example, suggests that in Australia, “there is emerging evidence that intergenerational patterns are in part mediated through epigenetic factors…in relation to response to stress…malnutrition…central adiposity…diabetes…[and] cardiovascular disease” (p. 3), which must be contextualized within the historical frame of colonization. The enfolding of structural violence and trauma into individual and collective bodies is referred to by one Indigenous Australian scholar, who draws explicitly on US epigeneticist Michael Skinner’s work, as “communal wounds” (Gilbert 2017). The molecular embodiment of historical trauma thus shores up what (as one interviewee said)—“Aboriginal peoples have known for years” that past injustices are embodied collectively and passed on through generations via poor mental and physical health, addiction, and violence. Epigenetics is therefore, as another interviewee put it, “consistent with Indigenous knowledge systems.”

At a recent presentation at the Lowitja Institute’s ⁴ International Indigenous Health and Wellbeing Conference in Melbourne, one of the invited keynote speakers (Indigenous scholar professor Katrina Walters, a member of the Oklahoma Choctaw Nation) metaphorically represented historical trauma as the embodiment of both the breeze that blows over generations and the water that the ancestors carry in all of their bodies across generations. Drawing explicitly on DOHaD and epigenetic discourses, she moved beyond a static model of bodies to one of epigenetic memories in which “our bodies, our minds, our spirits are inextricably linked across the flows of time, space and place” (Walters 2016). Historical trauma, she said, is “not something innate to our biology but something we accumulate over our lifetime and over our ancestors’ lifetimes as well” (Walters 2016). Despite Walters’s claim that trauma is “not innate to our biology,” we consider her notion of bodies shaped by trauma as a novel form of biopolitics. Once accumulated in the body, trauma becomes innate to local Indigenous biologies (Lock 2015), transmitted to future generations.

This accumulation of biosocial injury across generations is now appearing in Indigenous Australian health research and reported in official government documents, with epigenetics cited as further evidence for new interventions and urgent action. The Australian “First 1000 Days” organization provides an example. Internationally, the movement promotes optimum nutrition in pregnancy and early childhood to minimize future disease (UNICEF, n.d.). The Australian First 1000 Days model is Indigenous led and explicitly embraces concepts of historical trauma, DOHaD, and epigenetics in order to make claims about rights, social justice, equity, and embodied, multigenerational damage. This program is supported by a discourse of hope. Led by the chair of the council and Research Advisory Committee, Torres Strait Islander woman professor Kerry Arabena, the Australian First 1000 Days team state that “this is what hope can look like” and foregrounds the “need to be healed from the experiences of dispossession and colonization and the intergenerational impacts of poorly designed and executed policies” as a key aspect of providing good antenatal and early childhood environments (Arabena, Panozzo, and Ritte 2016, 28). Interviewees in our study pointed to recent policy documents from National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (NACCHO 2013) and the National Health and Medical Research Council forum on research translation in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health (2016), which identify epigenetics as a priority policy area (see also Australian Medical Association 2013). The head of the national peak body for Indigenous-controlled health services has stated that “epigenetic modifications can be passed from mother to child, with implications for the health of immediate and subsequent generations” (Australian Government 2016).

These links between epigenetics and Indigenous health, expressed by the most senior and influential Indigenous health researchers and leaders, embrace a specific representation of epigenetic science. The popularity of epigenetics within Indigenous health discourses is not matched by the nascent state of the science, a version of “epigenetic hype” seen more generally (Häfner and Lund 2016; Deichmann 2016). In particular, two aspects of epigenetics—transgenerational inheritance and reversibility—are much more controversial and contingent than one would suspect from Indigenous health reports and presentations from Indigenous researchers. It is well established that epigenetic changes have intergenerational effects through two mechanisms: direct parental effects on the gametes or fetus or grandparental effects via the ova of the female fetus. However, transgenerational inheritance—that is, inherited epigenetics effects in the absence of exposure—is controversial. Evidence that epigenetic effects can be transgenerationally inherited in humans is highly contested, although this is considered to have been established in nonhuman animal models (for an overview, see Hanson and Skinner 2016). Despite this, claims of the role of epigenetics in intergenerational trauma generally assume that epigenetic changes are transmitted beyond one or two generations (e.g., Walters et al. 2011). Second, discourses of epigenetics in Indigenous health imply that epigenetic changes are reversible through interventions and that these changes can be sustained through time—both claims that are currently scientifically unclear. Epigenetic profiles differ between cells, organs, and across time, complicating efforts to design and evaluate epigenetic interventions (Kundaje et al. 2015; National Human Genome Research Institute).

Rather than inaccurate or just premature, the representation of epigenetics as uncontroversially transgenerational and reversible is best understood as the rationality underlying the bioeconomy of hope surrounding Indigenous health discourses. In the next section, we explore further the apparent congruence between epigenetics and Indigenous knowledges.

The Openness of Epigenetic Environments and Indigenous Ontologies

The entanglement of social and biological environments and the porousness of bodies to the effects of historical trauma are key elements of the appeal of epigenetic discourses for Indigenous people. Although “the environment” is by no means a singular term in the social and life sciences and has a complex history (Pearce 2010; Warin and Martin 2018), epigenetics challenges us to rethink prevailing body/environment configurations that have become mainstream in the West since the making of the modern body of biomedicine (Cohen 2009). While a full compartmentalization of the body from the environment was more an ideal than a reality in biomedical practice (Nash 2006), especially in the colonies (Anderson 2006), and theories of disease have always involved penetration of bodily boundaries before and after the rise of the modernistic body of biomedicine, the idea of an impermeability and stability of hereditary material has been an established dogma since the late nineteenth century (after Weismann and the rise of genetics, see Meloni 2016). This notion (which took place at the same time as the rise of germ theory) contributed to a shift in the locus of causation in etiological theories from the outside to the inside of the body, supporting a view of a stable and insulated biological individuality in which each individual possessed, from birth to death, unique genetic material walled off from environmental signals (Buss 1987; Gilbert, Sapp, and Tauber 2012).

In as much as a gene could interact with a certain environment in an interactionist view of genetics, a neat distinction between these two factors was never seriously in question during the twentieth century. Epigenetics, and the wider notion of a “reactive genome” that cannot be completely distinguished from its environment (Keller 2015), represents a profound disturbance for these ideas of an immured and invariable genomic code and hence for wider notions of the body as distinct from the environment (Lock 2015).

Another way to think about the relative openness of epigenetic mechanisms is through temporality. Genetic variation is, like epigenetics, a product of interactions between genes and the environment (Hellenthal et al. 2014). However, while genetic changes occur in a random way (mutations) and over the slow timescale (or “deep time”) of evolutionary adaptation, epigenetic changes occur in the “real” time of lived experience and memory and are directly triggered by environmental inputs. The epigenome appears as a much more fine-grained “biosocial archive” (Relton, Hartwig, and Davey Smith 2015) where microevents occurring throughout the life course (exposure to toxins, diet, stress) leave stable molecular imprints that can today be detected via epigenetic biomarkers. The “postgenome”—a concept of the genome that includes epigenetics—is thus thought to be “far more fluid and responsive to the environment than previously supposed” (Jablonka and Lamb 1995, 26). It is rewritten as an “an exquisitely sensitive reaction mechanism” (Keller 2015, 10) that can change (at the level of expression) within the parameters of the human life span (Lappé and Landecker 2015). In this more permeable and “plastic” view of biological life, the environment is not something that simply happens outside bodies as an exposure but works in and through highly relational entities and telescopes differing time and spaces in a nonlinear fashion. Within an epigenetic temporality, pasts and futures can coalesce in the present.

Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers we interviewed recognized the porousness of bodies and environments and the enfolding of past, present, and future epigenetic temporalities as congruent with Indigenous perspectives on “Country” and well-being. They noted that the Indigenous concept of Country is not synonymous with “the environment” but better understood as a vital force and an interconnected web of social, ecological, and spiritual relationships. Country epitomizes the way of existing in and viewing the world that might be termed the “relational ontology” of Indigenous Australians (McCoy, Tuck, and Mckenzie 2016; see also Arabena 2015). As with all cultural understandings of health, Indigenous understandings of health are presented as diverse and complex (see Gee et al. 2014). Key elements, however, are interconnectedness and relationality between a range of human and nonhuman entities and places. Well-being is maintained through relationships of mutual care of kin and a range of nonhuman and country affiliations and obligations that are described by Law or Dreaming and encoded within the landscape (D. Rose 1992, 1996; Reid 1982). Individuals identify places and ancestors as parts of themselves, “in which people and land are almost inseparable” (Myers 1986, 25).

This entanglement of person, bodies, and environments was clearly evident in interviewee perspectives on the potential affinities between Indigenous health and epigenetics. One non-Indigenous developmental researcher suggested that the Indigenous health workers she worked with might not necessarily hold a “scientific knowledge of epigenetics,” but they positioned the environment (rather than the individual) as central to health and well-being:

If we look after the environment the environment looks after us…Indigenous cultures and people are so intimately connected to the land and environment and other people and relationships, and every one of those things can create an epigenetic change…if you’re well connected to land and well connected to ancestors and traditions, [then] you will have a long and healthy life. So that to me, kind of speaks to the really unconscious understanding of epigenetics.

Trauma, Epigenetics, and Biopolitics

In May 2017, on the twenty-year anniversary of the landmark Bringing them Home report on the Stolen Generations, ⁶ Indigenous Australians handed the prime minister a report seeking a national reparation program for all Aboriginal children forcibly taken from their families prior to 1970. In commenting on this report, CEO of the national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Healing Foundation, Richard Weston (2017), drew on everyday understandings of historical trauma and its relationship to epigenetics, when he stated:

Trauma affects the way we think, act and behave. It is overwhelming and changes the way our brain and body works. For Aboriginal people that were taken from their families it has caused incredible suffering for individuals and communities in many different ways over many generations.

Australian governments are beginning to respond to Indigenous concerns with schemes to provide financial compensation (e.g., for stolen wages) and to fund activities that support healing, although these responses are both belated and highly inadequate. In 2007, the Tasmanian government set up a $AUS 5 million Stolen Generation Fund, and in 2017, the South Australian government set up a similar scheme. The New South Wales government offers financial compensation to survivors of the Stolen Generations under a multimillion-dollar policy acknowledging the harm inflicted on Aboriginal communities by the forcible removal of children. The scheme included a $AUS 5 million “healing fund” to address “the impacts of trauma not only for survivors but also for their families, descendants and communities” (New South Wales Government 2016). The Healing Foundation, an Indigenous mental health organization set up in response to a landmark report about the Stolen Generations (HREOC 1997), believes that around 17,000 Indigenous Australians today are direct victims of the Stolen Generations, but over one-third of the Indigenous population—over 114,000 people—are direct descendants of those victims. The work of the Healing Foundation is aimed at stopping the “cycle of trauma,” so that these descendants, and their future descendants, can avoid inheriting the trauma of their ancestors (Healing Foundation, n.d.).

How will the cycle of intergenerational trauma be stopped? One answer was given at a health conference in 2015 by Associate Professor Mark Wenitong, another leading Indigenous medical doctor and health researcher. In many presentations (e.g., “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health—the Narrative—Epigenetics to Agency”), Wenitong draws on histone modification and methylation to explain poor Indigenous health. ⁷ “These things are heritable, they are not genetic changes, but they are heritable across generations. So it means if we want to stop some of these changes happening we need to start now.” In a presentation in which the concept of hope was central, he called for maternal and child health programs based on epigenetic evidence, alongside empowerment, cultural continuity, and economic participation (Wenitong 2015).

Given the popularity of epigenetic discourse among leading Indigenous scholars and researchers, it seems inevitable that epigenetic-based health programs will emerge, although it is not yet clear what form they will take. It is therefore a critical time to consider the models of biopolitics of race, biosocial identities, and biological citizenship that may flow from epigenetic thinking. Such models would not constitute a return to a “geneticized conceptualization of race” (e.g., a notion of “race as a fixed genetic characteristic,” Morning 2011, 2014; Frank 2015), but a biopolitics that draws on plasticity—specifically environmental determination of genomic expression—highlighted by the particular version of epigenetics we have addressed here. This emerging landscape problematizes any attempt to neatly parse the social and the biological, as social constructionist critiques of race have thought possible (Morning 2011). By illuminating new molecular pathways through which social experience permeates gene expression, epigenetics returns us to views of biology as porous and “impressionable” matter.

The social impressionability of biological matter is, however, no less fraught with dangers of biopolitical intervention than any view of a fixed and unchangeable biology (Meloni 2016, 2019). The recognition of being “plastically” shaped by an external environment or lifestyle does not diminish but goes hand in hand and possibly even intensifies the need to intervene in time, in the specific window of opportunity where human biology is receptive to social intervention. Further, an epigenetic biopolitics may lead to a condemnation of one’s condition if the accumulated effects of historical burden have made their cause irredeemable. Although the responsiveness of the epigenetic body to the environment is appealing to some Indigenous people, bodies that are deeply permeable to outside forces are no less vulnerable to forms of vigilance and disciplinary practices than bodies that are seen as stable and permanent (Meloni 2019; N. Rose 1998, 170).

These dangers were recognized by all of the interviewees. One informant suggested that if there is no attention to the “malleability” of epigenetics, then the science can be presented as “very deterministic—there’s always a risk that people start to adopt eugenic approaches…and it will weaken social policy rather than strengthen it.” Another interviewee noted the “slippery slope” between epigenetic-inspired pre- and postnatal health care and eugenics, suggesting:

There will be people saying they would like to understand epigenetics to see if we can treat a disease better, but there will be people who say “We’d like to think about epigenetic screening prenatally to weed out all those who are unfit.” It’s a very small voice at the moment…but I know quite a senior person who does have certain views about the worth of some people….

Such contradictory logics of empowerment and intensified governance highlight the inherent dangers of engaging strategic biological essentialism. To use suffering bodies to legitimate human rights, as Fassin (2000, 2009) reminds us in his concept of biolegitimacy, is a political tactic that can provide certain types of leverage. In the case of Indigenous epigenetics, this tactic leverages a biopolitics of hope and is gaining visibility for new ways to address Indigenous ill-health, healing, and reparation. But through this strategic biological essentialism, the environment may become essentialized, enfolded into a powerful language of damage that justifies heightened biopolitical governance.

Conclusion

In this paper, we have examined why some Indigenous researchers and policy makers in Australia and other postcolonial contexts are linking narratives of historical trauma, DOHaD, and environmental epigenetics to frame the negative intergenerational consequences of past injustices and make claims for stronger investments in health and health care, particularly in early life.

While the evidence for transgenerational transmission of trauma remains uncertain, ⁸ the political economy of hope has forged ahead, offering new pathways for redemption. For Rose and Novas (2005), hope is aspirational, promising political and economic benefits. However, hope is also an ambiguous space. As we have argued, these types of claims for reparations may become the source of a new political hope but also the platform to remake essentialist distinctions and single out special human groups based on their unique exposure to a history of social hardship that is enfolded into the body and transmitted as biological difference (Meloni 2017). In other words, even though the appeal of epigenetics is an apparent corrective to biological determinism and essentialism, Indigenous epigenetics may simply produce a new form of biological essentialism that is environmentally and historically determined but no less essentialist.

Indigenous Australians’ embracing of environmental epigenetics can be counterproductive, for in engaging in strategic biological essentialism, power relations may be concealed. Epigenetics may offer new strategies to lobby for protection from biosocial injury but also has the capacity to conceal forms of governance that may follow from the identification of biological damage. In her work on Aboriginal children, epigenetics, and politics in British Columbia, Murray (2018) sounds a warning to such colonialist dynamics. She argues that an epigenetically grounded Early Development Instrument is based on the eugenic-based classification of “vulnerable Aboriginal children” (Murray 2018, 225), furthering State justification for biopolitical intervention in Indigenous lives (such as forced relinquishment of children).

In the context of Indigenous health in Australia, there will be multiple political possibilities and moral claims about the use, value, and interpretation of environmental epigenetics. While the discourse of epigenetics inspires optimism for many Indigenous Australians through a rhetoric of freedom that corresponds to their own ontologies and life experiences, supported by the authority of expert medical discourses, in practice, it has the potential to swing from one form of determinism to another. People may no longer be “determined” by “their genes” but by their milieux, history, and social and physical location (molecularly incorporated into the body), thus fostering emerging forms of environmental determinism and “environmental biopower” (Lorimer 2017). These complex power dynamics need to be acknowledged in the Indigenous engagement with epigenetics and the biopolitical strategies in which it is discursively wielded.