‘We’ve been here for 2,000 years’: White settlers,Native American DNA and the phenomenon of indigenization

Abstract

Relying on a populace well-educated in family history based in ancestral genealogy, a robust national genomics sector has developed in Québec over the past decade-and-a-half. The same period roughly coincides with a fourfold increase in the number of individuals and organizations in the region self-identifying with a mixed-race form of indigeneity that is counter to existing Indigenous understandings of kinship and citizenship. This paper examines how recent efforts by genetic scientists, working on a multi-year research project on the ‘diversity’ of the Québec gene pool, intervene in complex settler-Indigenous relations by redefining indigeneity according to the logics of ‘Native American DNA’. Specifically, I demonstrate how genetic scientists mobilize genes associated with Indigenous peoples in ways that support regional efforts to govern settler-Indigenous relations in favour of otherwise white settler claims to Indigenous lands.

Keywords

DNA ancestry testing French-Canadian settler colonialism genetic ancestry hyperdescent Native American DNA,self-indigenization

Introduction

French Québécois narratives tell a celebratory story of unmatched colonial genius, involving an incredible benevolence towards Indigenous peoples in the immediate post-contact era. While there is no doubt that French policies and practices differed from other European imperial powers, how these practices are popularly envisaged today in Québec have ultimately laid the groundwork for a daring twist: The French Québécois increasingly reimagine themselves as Indigenous to the Americas, in the form of a mixed-race, métis society.

I first became aware of several of the common tropes indigenizing the French Québécois during my doctoral fieldwork in 2008−2010. As I have argued (Leroux, 2010), this specific symbolic repertoire relies on generations-old ideas about sexual relations between the early French male settlers and Indigenous women in the St. Lawrence River Valley. Whether in the remarkable 149% increase in self-identified métis between 2006 and 2016 (Statistics Canada, 2017), the appearance of nearly twenty organizations representing their political interests since 2003 (Michaux, 2014) or the celebration of the so-called Québec métis in popular culture (Gaudry and Leroux, 2017), the indigenization of the French Québécois has found sustained momentum in the past decade-and-a-half.

These public claims rely heavily on a populace well-educated in family history, due to efforts for over a century to collect, disseminate and popularize the extensive documentation collected by Catholic institutions throughout the French Regime (1608−1763). Several historians have argued that these rich genealogical records represent an unparalleled global archive of ancestral history (Choquette, 1997; Desjardins, 1990; Jetté, 1993). In fact, the extensive genealogical infrastructure in Québec ensures that family history research has become a common pastime, with the three largest national genealogy organizations boasting a combined tens of thousands of members (Caron, 2006). Today, all Québécois descendants of seventeenth-century French settlers can trace their ancestry upwards of ten generations to the St-Lawrence River Valley settlements using a remarkable array of public and private infrastructure (see Leroux, 2015).

The range and accessibility of genealogical infrastructure has likewise enabled the development of a robust national genomics sector in the province (see Bibeau, 2004; Hinterberger, 2012a, 2012b). As part of this pivot towards molecular technology, DNA ancestry testing has become relatively ordinary in scholarly research of Québec population genetics, often in combination with the existing genealogical data. Genetic scientists with one such project, the Échantillon de référence québécois: Épidémiologie génétique et génétique des populations du Québec (EGGPQ), have produced nearly twenty studies over the course of the past decade, in which they specifically examine the ‘diversity’ of the Québec national genome.

In this article, I examine how research on genetic ancestry contributes to political efforts to redefine indigeneity in ways that oppose Indigenous forms of self-determination. In particular, I analyze four separate EGGPQ studies that have identified and mobilized genes previously associated with peoples indigenous to western Alaska, eastern Russia, Greenland and central Canada. Building on TallBear’s (2013b) foundational work problematizing ‘Native American DNA’ as a natural entity, I tease out how EGGPQ scientists ensured that these genes affected contemporary French Québécois-Indigenous relations in the far eastern region of Québec. In particular, genetic scientists mobilize these specific genes in ways that support regional efforts to govern settler-Indigenous relations in favour of otherwise white settler claims to Indigenous lands. Before I turn to my empirical analysis though, allow me to briefly discuss a number of social scientific responses to the DNA turn in racial science.

The DNA turn in racial science

Troy Duster, a US-based sociologist, has led the critical engagement with racial genomics for nearly three decades (see Fujimura, 2015 for an overview). His recent contribution outlines the elements of a social scientific intervention into what he calls the ‘molecular re-inscription of race’ currently taking place in labs across the planet (Duster, 2015). As he argues, ‘developments in several fields of inquiry and practice related to molecular genetics … have actually served to re-inscribe race as biological category’ (p. 2; see also Reardon, 2012: 807–808). Duster outlines part of the infrastructure for the molecular re-inscription of race by examining DNA ancestry testing. He explains how we are only able to access a tiny amount of ancestral DNA through the two most common types of DNA ancestry tests: Y chromosome DNA testing identifies a male’s father’s father’s ancestry, while mtDNA testing identifies a male or female’s mother’s mother’s ancestry (see Emery et al., 2015; Jobling et al., 2016). That may seem like a significant portion of one’s ancestral DNA, but two out of sixteen ancestors (or four generations back) only represents 12.5 percent of one’s ancestors, two out of 64 ancestors (or six generations back) only represents 3.125 percent of one’s ancestors, etc. Since many of the researchers and/or companies offering Y chromosome and mtDNA ancestry analysis do so for intervals of several centuries, they are often providing results based on much less than one percent of one percent of one’s ancestors.

A decade ago, Bolnick, joined by thirteen other leading scholars of science (Bolnick et al., 2007: 399), warned the scientific community about the risks involved in genetic ancestry testing, the same type of research undertaken in the EGGQP project: ‘(i) the tests can have a profound impact on individuals and communities, (ii) the assumptions and limitations of these tests make them less informative than many realize, and (iii) commercialization has led to misleading practices that reinforce misconceptions.’ And yet, as we will see below, scientists continue to insist that their results point to precise measurements of genetic ancestry, which are then redefined as racial and/or national identity.

TallBear (2013b) sensitively documents the transition from blood to genes over the past two decades among some of the most-researched people in the world – Native Americans. TallBear explains how the logic behind the search for ‘Native American DNA’ in molecular science relies on the narrative that Indigenous peoples are bound to disappear into a ‘sea of admixture’. Little room is provided, she argues, for change and transformation:

Notions of ancestral populations, the ordering and calculating of genetic markers and their associations, and the representation of living groups of individuals as reference populations all require the assumption that there was a moment, a human body, a marker, a population back there in space and time that was the biogeographical pinpoint of originality. (TallBear, 2013b: 6)

Purity, it seems, continues to be the ghost haunting racial science, one that conveniently facilitates white settler strategies that undermine Indigenous self-determination in the contemporary era. In fact, the legitimacy afforded its scientific basis means that molecular technology such as DNA ancestry testing continues to intervene in complex political and social matters in ways that lead to unforeseen material consequences. As such, ‘Native American DNA’, in TallBear’s (2013b) terms, refers to ‘a material-semiotic object with power to influence indigenous livelihoods and sovereignties’ (p. 17). Increasingly, DNA ancestry testing is marketed as a means to discover one’s definitive molecular origins, and thus, is being used to redefine tribal and settler identities in the United States (TallBear, 2007), Indigenous and settler/mestizo identities in Latin America (Kent, 2013; Kent and Santos, 2014; Wade et al., 2014), and, as I demonstrate in this article, First Nation and Métis sovereignty in Canada, posing risks to Indigenous claims to land and life.

Munsterhjelm’s (2014) research on molecular science as a form of biocolonialism in Taiwan echoes Tallbear’s work. In particular, Munsterhjelm argues that genetic research acts as ‘an emerging technology of sovereignty’ (p. 4) in Taiwan that re-signifies the social and political basis for ongoing settler colonialism. ‘The networks in which genes originate are forgotten over time, and, as a result, genes tend to become black boxes, treated as objects or coherent unified entities imbued with various organizing properties’ (Munsterhjelm, 2014: 72). Yet genes exert a form of agency, in that they ‘make a difference’ in the world around them. Ultimately, both TallBear (2013b: 136) and Munsterhjelm (2014: 74) argue that genes linked to Indigenous peoples in the lab are treated as ‘natural’ resources in settler society – European settlers in TallBear’s work and (Han) Chinese settlers in Munsterhjelm’s – becoming the property inheritance of these same settlers, who consequently use these resources to govern settler-Indigenous relations in keeping with existing colonial frameworks (see also Reardon and TallBear, 2012: 235).

Some scholars (Duster, 2015; Wade et al., 2014) use the concept of ‘genomic sovereignty’ to refer to the proprietary basis for genetic difference in national contexts. A key component of genomic sovereignty, according to Benjamin (2009: 342), is the ‘deliberate interpretation of genomic data to match the sociohistorical record and a re-imagining of historical and cultural narratives to make sense of genomic findings.’ Tying the work on the molecular re-inscription of race and the settler colonial dynamics at play in genetic ancestry research with a focus on the place of the nation, in this article I track how precisely ‘Native American DNA’ makes a difference in contemporary political and social deliberation and relations in Québec.

The turn to genetic ancestry and diversity in Québec: The EGGPQ project

For the past four decades, two of Québec’s most renowned historical demographers – Hubert Charbonneau (1975, 1990) and Bertrand Desjardins (1990, 2008) – have argued consistently that ethnic and racial homogeneity were pronounced in New France. Desjardins (1990) explicitly locates his argument as a response to the scholarly construction of a ‘myth of diversity’ among early French settlers that was amplified by several Québécois historians in the mid-to-late 1980s. Analyzing the marriage contracts signed during the French Regime, he deduces that French (mostly Norman, West and Parisian metropolitan) ethnicities made up 97% of the overall ethnic composition of the population of New France by 1763 (the end of the French regime). By contrast, Acadian ‘ethnicity’ accounted for 0.6%, English was 0.9%, other European ethnicities were 1% and Indigenous ‘ethnicities’ accounted for 0.4%. Desjardins’ research, and the work of many of his colleagues (Charbonneau et al., 2000), confirms that the ancestors of early French settlers by and large originated in Ancien Régime France.¹

To be clear, Desjardins’ research does not seek to deny French-Indigenous sexual and familial alliances, but it does offer compelling evidence of the relative absence of this form of historical union. As he asserts, ‘all “old stock” Québécois probably have at least one Indigenous person in their family tree, but the actual importance of the phenomenon remains negligible’ (Desjardins, 1990: 72, my translation). Since an estimated 95% of French Québécois share at least one seventeenth-century ancestor, then we can expect a remarkable overlap in ancestral history (Bibeau, 2004: 127), including with respect to the relatively few Indigenous women to appear in the Québec family tree prior to 1700.

In an interview entitled, ‘Myth or reality: The Aboriginal origins of the Québécois’ (Beauregard, 1993), Charbonneau, the co-founder of Québec’s first university-based genealogical research institute in 1966, explains that thirteen Indigenous women are recorded in the marriage registries in New France prior to 1680 (out of a population of nearly 3,700 other ‘founders’, which represents just under 0.4%). Despite the small number of potential Indigenous ancestors, most French Québécois who can trace their origins to New France prior to 1680 share at least one of these women as their ancestor. As Bouchard and De Braekeleer (1990) have explained, ‘distant consanguinity’ (the presence of an ancestor common to both spouses, more than five generations deep) has had an undeniable homogenizing effect on the French Québécois genome for over three centuries. The likelihood of sharing one of these Indigenous women as a distant ancestor increases as long as French Québécois continue to intermarry, since the overall number of ancestors (nearly) doubles every generation. Thus, not only was the particular phenomenon of French-Indigenous unions relatively negligible in New France, but in Desjardins’s work, English and other European ethnicities make up together almost quintuple the percentage of the Indigenous ancestry of French settlers by the time of the British Conquest. In other words, if it is probable that every ‘old stock’ Québécois has at least one Indigenous ancestor going back to the seventeenth century, it is much more likely that they have multiple English, Irish, Swiss, German or Portuguese ancestors over the same time period.

Building on the scholarly work in historical demography, Bibeau (2004: 100) has traced the emergence of genomics in Québec as relying upon three factors linked to family history research: the passion for genealogy in Québec, the ready access to online genealogical databanks, and the fact that 100% of the French settlers in the original settlements can be located in existing genealogical databanks. The EGGQP project was founded in 2002 on the scaffolding provided by the genealogy sector, in order to contribute to ongoing debates about the ‘origins’ of the French Québécois. The scientific project is the first of its kind to combine the cutting-edge technologies associated with genomics and the existing genealogical infrastructure to re-examine the ancestral history of the French Québécois (Vézina et al., 2012: 89). One way that the EGGQP confirms this dynamic is in its affiliation with the BALSAC project, the largest academic genealogy project in Canada that also serves as a training ground for many of the EGGQP genetic scientists. BALSAC was founded in 1971 and has since received tens of millions of dollars of public and private research funding to reconstruct the ancestral history of the French Québécois (see Leroux, 2015). Without a doubt, the EGGQP’s research project bears out Hinterberger’s (2012a: 82) observations about the rise of national genomics in Québec: ‘Older technologies of group categorization such as genealogical records [are] fundamental to understanding and approaching what might be considered “new” genomic techniques and technologies.’ In this context, several teams of interdisciplinary scientists associated with the EGGPQ project recently turned to DNA ancestry testing to make a case for the ‘diversity’ of the Québec national genome. On its home page, the EGGPQ project explains that its objectives are

to characterize the genetic diversity of individuals among the Quebec population [in order] to build a bank of genomic samples that can be shared with the scientific community. … This database will be useful to researchers in genetic epidemiology and population genetics. It will represent an important source of information for various studies on the genetic structure and history of the Quebec population.

As part of its mandate, the EGGPQ project has published a number of genetic ancestry studies focusing on specific white ‘ethnic’ genes in the Québec genome, such as those associated with the Irish (Tremblay et al., 2009), Acadians (Bergeron et al., 2008), as well as ‘Germanic’ genes (Tremblay, 2010). It is notable, in the specific national context of French-language and English-language social tension that exists in Québec society, that the EGGQP project has not undertaken a study on genes associated with the English. The Québécois national context determines in which ways ‘diversity’ is constructed and mobilized by scientists in the lab. Without a doubt, the most common focus of its commitment to characterize the genetic diversity of the Québec population is its study of Native American DNA, gesturing to the importance of genes associated with Indigenous peoples in this specific national context.

DNA ancestry testing in Gaspésie

Hyperdescent and the genetic indigenization of French Québécois settlers

Drawing on a sample collected in 2005, Moreau et al. (2009) conducted mtDNA and Y Chromosome ancestry testing among a sample of 397 unrelated (to the third generation) Gaspésian residents. Their sample included individuals who self-identified with four European settler population groups (French-Canadians, Acadians, British Loyalists and Channel Islanders). Their findings indicated that 13% of French Canadians, 18% of Channel Islanders, 7% of British Loyalists and 1% of Acadians in their regional sample carried mtDNA haplogroups associated with Indigenous peoples.² Overall, just under 10% of their sample carried these mitochondrial sequences. Moreau et al. concluded, on the basis of the frequency of the mtDNA haplogroups (each of which represents differences in human mtDNA) and their distribution among the four population groups, that these individuals were directly related to French settlers from the St. Lawrence Valley who migrated to the region (up to 500 kilometres away) at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Their inference was in keeping with the conventional understanding of French settlement in the Lower St. Lawrence basin (e.g., Charbonneau et al., 1987).

Most of the same genetic scientists set out to reinterpret their previous conclusions in a follow-up study published two years later (Moreau et al., 2011). They suggested that Acadians who arrived from the Atlantic coast (present-day Nova Scotia) may have migrated north within Gaspésie two centuries ago, which could mean that they are ultimately responsible for the presence of the aforementioned mtDNA haplogroups among the Gaspésian settler population. The evidence, in the form of the appearance of a specific haplogroup among the Gaspésian settler population that matches one found among eighteenth-century Acadian migrants (whom the authors call ‘Métis’), ‘evokes’ the possibility of an alternative history of French migration in the region that supports certain political efforts to recognize the existence of so-called métis people in Gaspésie.

Most relevant to my discussion here is the precise ways in which Native American DNA is mobilized in the second Moreau et al. study. First, the authors quickly slip into calling ‘admixed’ Acadian settlers ‘Métis’, as a way to identify individuals with the tiniest representation of genes associated with Indigenous peoples, in some cases, with evidence limited to one ancestral line going back thirteen generations. To critical race theorists familiar with twentieth-century strategies to solidify racial hierarchies, such a repurposing of Native American DNA might at first glance appear synonymous with notions of hypodescent, popularized as the ‘one-drop’ rule. The logic of hypodescent not only reified a tiny fraction of African-American ‘blood’ in US contexts, but more critically, ensured that those fixed by this trace of biological inheritance were seen as inferior in a manner that reconstituted white plantation society.³ Its primary function was to entrench white men’s control over black women’s bodies, ensuring that children conceived through sexual violence remained the property of slaveowners. Jordan (2014) has demonstrated that the psychological and social underpinnings for the one-drop rule were formed in the first several generations of life in what became the United States. By the mid-1800s, the logics of hypodescent appeared in a variety of legal codes in the US South at a time when the white plantation order sought to defend its practice of racial slavery (Hickman, 1997). The one-drop rule was eventually made famous as part of the Jim Crow-era segregation of African-Americans, an important component of which was the legal prohibition of interracial sex and/or marriage.⁴

In her study of Hawaiian identity in the wake of US imperialism, Kauanui (2008: 50) observes of hypodescent in relation to Indigeneity that, ‘in settler societies, depending on the context, the so-called inferior racial stock is not always regarded as a pollutant’. At different times in settler colonial history, ‘red’ and ‘white’ blood have been imagined as easier to blend, in keeping with the assimilationist logic at the basis of efforts to civilize Indigenous peoples. Regardless of the relative ease associated with race-mixing, both ‘red’ and ‘white’ blood have been consistently imagined as resisting fusion with ‘black’ blood, ensuring that the ‘one-drop’ rule has been unevenly applied across and even within racial formations. In other words, the idea of hypodescent does not capture the specific ways that Indigenous blood has circulated in the white settler imaginary, and using it here might elide hypodescent’s particular force in regulating Black subjectivity. As Kauanui (2008) argues, ‘[w]e need to account for the contrasts between assimilative projects and boundary drawing “antipollution” approaches to relationships understood as interracial and how they differed historically for American Indian and white mixes versus African American and white ones’ (pp. 199–200).

Given Kauanui’s careful attention, I look beyond hypodescent as an explanatory tool. Instead, I propose that an inverse of hypodescent – hyperdescent – is at play here.⁵ In medicine, the most common definitions of the prefix ‘hyper’ include beyond and more than. When EGGPQ scientists mobilize Native American DNA in a manner that indigenizes white Québécois settlers, they are operating ‘beyond descent’ into the political realm of assimilation, as explained by Kauanui. The fact that ‘red’ and ‘white’ blood are imagined as easier to blend is intimately connected to the push to de-politicize and racialize Indigenous polities. Hyperdescent provides the basis for white settlers to become Indigenous in a manner that undermines Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, as I demonstrate below. Not only do genetic scientists facilitate the distance between French Québécois and other white settlers, but the logic of hyperdescent supports French Québécois mobility away from settler status, supporting a variety of forms of Québec nationalism.⁶

These efforts to indigenize the French Québécois population through hyperdescent remain contested by provincial and federal governments, and more importantly, by regional Indigenous peoples and the Métis in the West. In this sense, the EGGPQ scientists are not simply applying neutral, pre-existing categories, but are using genes as material linkages that connect unspecified Indigenous peoples with today’s French Québécois. One of the principal organizing properties of Native American DNA in their research, then, is to transform an Indigenous ancestor at least seven generations ago into a marker of a new form of French Québécois (Indigenous) identity. Since individuals participating in their study were unaware of their Native American ancestry prior to their participation (Moreau et al., 2011: 247), and that over the course of the past 7−10 years, a period loosely corresponding with the EGGPQ’s lab work timeframe, the Gaspésie region has become home to the largest self-declared métis movement in Québec (and Canada), EGGPQ scientists have played a key role in awakening the Gaspésian population to Native American DNA’s ‘power to influence indigenous livelihoods and sovereignties’.

The Gaspésie ‘métis’ and the politics of Native American DNA

At its annual general meeting in mid-September 2015, the Métis Nation of the Rising Sun (MNRS) – founded as the Communauté métisse de la Gaspésie in 2006 – publicly announced the results from about twenty DNA ancestry tests that its members had taken earlier in the year.⁷ In the meeting minutes available on their website, the organization’s president explained to the sixty or so members present, ‘We did about 20 tests so far, and they all came out positive to show we’ve been here for 2,000 years’ (MNRS, 2015). The original Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) news report on the matter mimicked the MNRS president’s implausible statement in its headline, claiming that the ‘métis’ presence in Gaspésie dated back two millennia. The CBC eventually corrected its coverage, explaining that it was actually the Indigenous ancestors of today’s ‘métis’ who had lived in the area up to 2,000 years ago (CBC, 2015). While the difference between these two statements might at first glance seem minute, they represent radically different visions of the regional population.

First, the MNRS president explicitly uses the results of the DNA ancestry tests to indigenize an otherwise primarily French Québécois settler population. Locating what TallBear calls a ‘biogeographical pinpoint of originality’ to the Gaspé Peninsula up to 2,000 years ago, the so-called métis attempt to territorialize their presence through DNA. Given that the organization itself only formed in 2006 and that many of its own members are new to this emerging identity, claims to a 2,000-year-old existence are quite remarkable. After all, in a message to members on its website, the MNRS explains the genesis of the Gaspésie ‘métis’ as the result of ‘interethnic contact’ between Europeans and Indigenous peoples in the eighteenth century, or less than 300 years ago. Fullwiley (2014) explains the normative temporal logic used in these types of ancestral claims:

[Genetic ancestry] requires limiting history to two ‘depth of time’ scales: the twenty-first-century ‘present’ and the Age of Conquest ‘past’, when the populations of the ‘New World’ encountered each other. That is when the sexual politics of enslavement and conquest resulted in new dynamics of genetic mixing that are imagined not to have taken place before. When present-day people display such mixing, geneticists term this ‘admixture’ (p. 805).

Emphasizing the temporal dimension of genetic ancestry – when are you from? – allows us to expose the political basis for genetic ancestry claims (see Kahn, 2015). The choice of when to begin the clock in their message to members – in this case, in the early contact period – is within the conventional ‘depth of time’ scale for genetic ancestry tests. Yet, the MNRS president’s evocative statement – that they have been there as Métis for 2,000 years – moves the depth of time back by a factor of nearly seven. Again, the MNRS illustrates the usefulness of Native American DNA, which it mobilizes as a natural resource that ‘makes a difference’ in their vision of settler-Indigenous relations.⁸

Second, these genes then become the property inheritance of Gaspésian settlers, who use them to narrate the history of their presence in the region. DNA is used to significantly alter their relationship to Indigenous peoples currently living in Gaspésie. The 2015 meeting minutes explain that the results of these DNA ancestry tests have emboldened the community’s legal efforts to obtain Aboriginal rights, ‘[The chief] believes that these tests might help métis community members to defend their rights, for example, when they’re arrested for fishing or hunting illegally’ (MNRS, 2015, my translation). It is worth noting that the Mi’kmaw people, whom the Gaspésie ‘métis’ claim as ancestors, have their own origin stories in the region (see Gespe’gewa’gi Mi’gmawei Mawiomi, 2016) that forego any European presence. However, in the MNRS’s more recent version of their history, the sustained Mi’kmaw presence in the region known as Gespe’gewa’gi (Gaspésie in French) disappears in favour of a ‘métis’ presence, a rather bold statement in favour of Euro-settler primacy.⁹

The MNRS goes further and regularly portrays its members as the only authentic Indigenous people in ‘their’ territory, at the same time as they display a normative white settler sense of national belonging. The MNRS made several audacious historical claims in a public document that the organization prepared for a government commission. First, it asserts that the Québécois ‘métis’ are the only remaining Indigenous people in all of Québec:

We present this document to you as the only direct descendants of Québec’s First Peoples whose members were not all killed by microbial shock. We stand as witnesses to the errors of Official History, which teach us that there are Métis and Indians while there is only one Indigenous Nation in Quebec. (Communauté métisse de la Gaspésie et al., 2007, my translation)

The MNRS claims that they exist today as an ‘Indigenous’ people due to both the strength of their European ancestry and the minute presence of genes associated with Indigenous peoples. The organization’s statement continues by further setting out its logic for being the only truly authentic Indigenous people in Québec:

Your creation of reserves, which began in 1831–32, forced only the most miserable among us to live there … [We] refused to die on ‘your’ reserves. We assert before you and the Québécois descendants that we accepted on our soil that we are not on federal land, but on Québécois ‘provincial land’. … We assert that our ancestors refused the reserves and that we remained free due to [our] inhuman efforts. Diseases that came from Europe … killed the [Indigenous] half of ourselves. Only the descendants mixed with Europeans survived these plagues. (Communauté métisse de la Gaspésie et al., 2007, my translation)

In this revisionist narrative – one that elides the ongoing existence of nearly 100,000 Inuit, Cree, Innu, Mi’kmaw, Maliseet, Anishinaabeg (Algonquin), Mohawk, Huron-Wendat, Abenaki, Naskapi and Atikamekw people across more than 1.5 million square kilometers – the Gaspésie ‘métis’ insist that what makes them distinct as a people is their stubborn insistence on remaining free from control of the federal government, a concern they would likely share with Québec nationalists of all stripes. In their narration of history, the very existence of Indigenous peoples in present-day Québec is due entirely to the presence of a European lineage. Presumably, the more European (genetic) ancestors found among any Indigenous people, the more likely they are to survive into the present, illustrating TallBear’s assertion that the logic behind the search for Native American DNA relies on the belief that Indigenous peoples are bound to disappear into a ‘sea of admixture’. The MNRS affirms an overtly biological nature of Indigeneity in a manner that supports their Euro-settler dominance.

The Mi’kmaq, it seems, are useful only inasmuch as they provide the MNRS with the genetic basis for political claims that undermine existing Mi’kmaw treaty rights first negotiated at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Genes, it seems, enable the MNRS to ‘do things they could not do without them’ (Munsterhjelm, 2014: 72). In this case, the MNRS mobilizes Native American DNA in order to govern settler-Indigenous relations in ways that favour otherwise settler claims to Mi’kmaw lands, as evidenced by a recent statement from their website: ‘This vast and diverse territory, with such breathtaking natural beauty, was never colonized nor ceded to Europeans who arrived on our soil; it has remained the property of the descendants of the original [First Nations] inhabitants … the Métis’ (MNRS, 2016, my translation). Besides the fact that it insists on upholding land as a property relation in settler terms, the MNRS literally writes the contemporary Mi’kmaq out of place. The thousands of Mi’kmaq in Gespe’gewa’gi who continue to affirm and maintain their relations with their ancestral land are cast aside by the logic of Native American DNA. ‘Indigenous notions of peoplehood as emerging in relation with particular lands and waters and their nonhuman actors’, as TallBear explains, ‘differ from the concept of a genetic population, defined as moving upon or through landscapes’ (TallBear, 2013b: 6, emphasis in original). The MNRS clearly expresses its Euro-settler relationship to land as property.

Even so, since their own claims to Indigeneity are tied to the otherwise insignificant presence of genes associated with Indigenous people in the form of mtDNA haplogroups, they must find a way to account for their belated arrival in the region that gestures towards the Mi’kmaq. In this case, the MNRS cannot erase the Mi’kmaq completely; instead, they reconstitute the Mi’kmaq as Métis (just like them), which allows the MNRS to claim Mi’kmaw lands as their own without irony.

Enabling Native American DNA

Returning to Moreau et al.’s later study, it is crucial to note how genetic scientists inform these debates about settler-Indigenous relations. Indigenous peoples, including the Mi’kmaq and the Métis, have been clear that Indigenous peoples themselves must retain the ability to define kin and make citizens through the ontologies that animate their specific governance structures.¹⁰ In fact, there exists a robust literature on the matter of Métis self-determination and sovereignty that questions the existence of ‘métis’ people outside of the northern plains in parts of what is presently known as the Northern United States and Western Canada. As I illustrate above, while EGGPQ scientists suggest that the residents of Gaspésie in their study are Indigenous, at various points they juxtapose these same ‘métis’ people with their ‘Native American’ hosts (Moreau et al., 2011: 252). This type of slippage in their own use of language betrays the common belief that ‘métis’ people are less Indigenous than ‘non-admixed’ Indigenous people.

Several Métis scholars have recently called for an understanding of Métis identity that opposes its purely biological meaning – mixed-race (Adese, 2016; Andersen, 2008, 2014; Gaudry, 2016; Macdougall, 2006; O’Toole, 2017a). For example, Andersen (2008) proposes a specific understanding of Métis in terms of peoplehood, explaining the genesis of the Métis Nation in the Red River Valley in the nineteenth century:

Red River Métis collectively created, borrowed and combined elements to form a distinctive culture and lifestyle separate from both their Euro-Canadian and First Nations neighbours, including a new language, form of land tenure, laws, a distinctive form of dress, music, a national flag and, in 1869–70, distinctive political institutions. Indeed, by Canada’s formal establishment in 1867 the Métis constituted an indigenous nation of nearly 10,000 people possessing a history, culture, imagined territorial boundaries, national anthem and, perhaps most importantly, a sense of self-consciousness as Métis. (p. 350)

Andersen is not denying the ‘mixedness’ of the Métis; rather, he argues that all Indigenous peoples are mixed in ways that parallel Métis hybridity (Andersen, 2014: 5; see also Gaudry, 2016: 152−163). In so doing, he aims to undermine the dominant racial classification system, or what he calls the ‘ontological ordering’, of the Métis as somehow less Indigenous than other Indigenous peoples. ‘Certainly those “First Nations” living adjacent to Métis communities’, Andersen argues, ‘were no less susceptible to the intermixing that resulted from, for example, the political economy of the fur trade. All indigeneity is – or perhaps more precisely, “analytically can be” – hybrid’ (Andersen, 2014: 38). In this way, it is not mixedness that defines Métis people but rather their Métisness – belonging to a particular Indigenous social and political formation called the Métis Nation from what is now generally called Western Canada. Andersen’s intervention dovetails with TallBear’s concerns about the use of Native American DNA to redefine tribal identities along strictly bio-logical terms, as in the case above with the MNRS’s reconstitution of the Mi’kmaq. What now becomes clear is that ‘métis’, as used by the EGGQP research team, simply means any degree of ‘admixture’ between genes associated with ‘Europeans’ and ‘Native Americans’, an understanding that is actively opposed by longstanding Métis political organizations, as well as Métis scholars.

The EGGPQ scientists’ understanding of ‘métis’ to signify any post-contact degree of genetic admixture also facilitates the effort to reconstitute the Mi’kmaw Nation to suit white settler colonial interests. In this case, the so-called métis replace the Mi’kmaq as the original inhabitants of Gaspésie, ensuring the former’s ascendancy in settler colonial society. Of course, the Mi’kmaq, just as the Métis, have their own existing Indigenous lifeways and self-understandings that challenge the EGGPQ team’s use of Native American DNA to determine social and political identity.

The EGGPQ scientists also use Native American DNA to speculate openly about early French settler and Indigenous social relations. For example, in order to explain the disappearance of a specific haplogroup of mtDNA in the nineteenth century among today’s Acadian-descendant population in the southeastern part of Gaspésie, the authors must account for the separation of ‘admixed’ and ‘non-admixed’ Acadians in the principal area of Gaspésie with a continuous Mi’kmaw presence. In other words, why did Acadians with some genes associated with Indigenous peoples leave the principal area with a Mi’kmaw presence, while Acadians without these genes remained? The authors can only speculate that some social or political process may be responsible for ‘a disruption in friendly cohabitation with Native American hosts, driving Métis families eastward’ (Moreau et al., 2011: 252). Their favoured explanation is that the establishment of permanent British rule may have been responsible for a reorganization of land tenure that could account for the movement of admixed Acadians. While that may certainly be the case, the scientists acknowledge that it does not explain the fact that non-admixed Acadians were more likely to remain in the region near Mi’kmaw people.

Despite the EGGPQ scientists’ own results suggesting that admixed Acadians were the first to leave a region with a significant Mi’kmaw presence, they nonetheless fall back on the comforting historical narrative of French settler benevolence. According to Benjamin (2009), one of the key components of genomic sovereignty is the interpretation of molecular findings to ‘match the sociohistorical record’. Accordingly, the authors do not seem to consider that Acadians – whether admixed or not – could have been in conflict with the Mi’kmaq as French settlers whose existence in Mi’kmaw territories represented a threat to the Mi’kmaq. Instead, they recycle the common narrative that the only true colonial power in the region were the British. In other words, the organizing properties of genes reconfirm that British settlers were colonizers, and French settlers were ‘friends’ of Indigenous peoples, in ways that support dominant forms of Québec nationalism. By grafting Native American DNA onto Québec national belonging, the authors omit the possibility that the so-called Acadian métis simply did not build and/or maintain the type of kinship relations that would have been essential to forging meaningful co-habitation with the Mi’kmaq. Native American DNA serves the Gaspésie ‘métis’ as ‘an emerging technology of sovereignty’ (Munsterhjelm, 2014: 4) that finds ‘friends’ and ‘family’ where perhaps none existed.

Importantly, TallBear (2013b) argues that genetic scientists who seek to tell a story of human migration, as in the case with this specific EGGPQ study, tell it from the perspective of ‘those who did the encountering’ (5). In keeping with TallBear’s assessment, at no point in their study do the scientists discuss Mi’kmaw understandings and experiences of the encounter, which is a common theme in the EGGPQ’s broader project. Without a doubt, engaging with Mi’kmaw intellectual efforts to resist French Québécois settler encroachment in the region would undermine the EGGPQ’s population genetics project as well as the MNRS’s political genesis. Consequently, the Mi’kmaq are never invoked directly; instead, their ancestors are repackaged as Native American DNA, with all the ‘power to influence indigenous livelihoods and sovereignties’ that this concept entails.

‘Data of a different order’: Doubling down on scientific legitimacy

In a third study, the EGGQP project team showed its explicit desire to ‘discover’ a higher proportion of genes associated with Indigenous peoples in their French Québécois cohort than previously agreed upon in the scholarly community (Vézina et al., 2012). In it, they linked the genealogical records available through BALSAC with mtDNA testing of nearly 800 participants from four distinct regions of Québec in order to correct what they believe to be an under-valuation of genes associated with Indigenous peoples (the scholarly consensus being in the 1% range, see above) among the French Québécois. In their introduction, the authors suggest that Indigenous contributions to the French Québécois gene pool may be as high as 5−10% – they even go so far as to claim that there have been ‘many controversies’ on the exact proportion in the scholarly literature (Vézina et al., 2012: 88). Their only source to legitimate their claims is a three-page article published by a popular science magazine that includes one interview with a former academic who now runs an international DNA and genealogical consulting firm. The lack of citations to scholarly material and the reliance on a researcher with profit motives suggest that the genetic scientists were strongly hoping to disprove the genealogical research on the matter. As they explain:

The magnitude of the Indigenous contribution based on genealogical reconstructions … cannot claim to be exhaustive or exact. On the other hand, recent advances in molecular genetics give us access to data of a different order and offer us the possibility of developing new approaches to deepen our knowledge on the subject. In fact, we hypothesize that the [Indigenous] contribution [to the Québec genetic pool] is globally underestimated. (Vézina et al., 2012: 89, emphasis mine, my translation)

The EGGPQ scientists mobilize DNA ancestry testing’s scientific imprimatur, and hypothesize that Native American DNA contributes actively to the French Québécois national genome. The EGGQP scientists suggest that the French Québécois are more ‘Indigenous’ than previously thought, while demonstrating no similar commitment to uncover the English, Irish, German or Portuguese genetic origins of the same population. Munsterhjelm’s (2014) research into the use of Aborigine genes in Taiwan provides us with a parallel national context through which to consider the EGGQP’s efforts to link French Québécois identity to Indigeneity: ‘Nationalists often try to strengthen the legitimacy of their sovereignty claims by asserting direct connections to [Indigenous] peoples’ (p. 11). In his study, Munsterhjelm illustrates how genetic scientists have played a crucial role in redefining Taiwanese national belonging by turning contact-era Aborigine ancestry among generations-old Taiwanese settlers into a marker that distinguishes them from the mainland Chinese population (p. 112). In this register, Aborigines become signifiers of Taiwanese settler identity, at a time and in a place where such re-significations hold social and political value to Taiwanese nationalists struggling to oppose international support for the One China policy.¹¹ As Munsterhjelm asserts, ‘scientists’ ability to mobilize the organizing properties of Aboriginal genes is vital to the enactment of sovereignty’ (p. 85). While the politics of nationalism in Québec and Taiwan are distinct, EGGPQ scientists’ explicit desire to indigenize the French Québécois parallels some of the nationalist efforts by scientists in Taiwan.

In the end, after combining the known genealogical data for the 800 participants with their mtDNA profile, the authors express surprise with their results. In both the Gaspésie and North Shore regions, the contribution of genes associated with their Indigenous reference sample to the gene pool of French Québécois participants rose slightly past 1% (what the authors claim is generally accepted in genealogical research) to 1.2% and 1.1% respectively; while in Montréal the figure rose to only 0.3% and in Saguenay the proportion stayed exactly the same, also below 1%. The scientists conclude: ‘If we consider the founders who participated in the making of the French-Canadian Québécois gene pool, the impact of any Indigenous contribution is weak, to the point where the previous figure of 1% may be fair enough’ (Vézina et al., 2012: 103, my translation). Nonetheless, instead of accepting their own results and over five decades of historical demographic research into the matter, in their conclusion the researchers commit to prove once-and-for-all that the descendants of the early French settlers are as ‘Indigenous’ as they believe them to be. ‘In conclusion,’ Vézina et al. state,

our work is continuing, and we have yet to exhaust all of the sources available to identify Indigenous ancestors. However, we can already posit that a large proportion of Québécois count Indigenous peoples among their ancestors and are thus carriers of Indigenous genes. (p. 103, my translation)

As we previously discussed, the scholarly consensus prior to the EGGQP’s study was that the majority of the French Québécois population share among their ancestors a small number of Indigenous women primarily from the seventeenth century. Despite its own findings that confirm the predominant genealogical consensus for the ‘negligible’ presence of Indigenous ancestors in the French Québécois family tree, the EGGQP team reiterates its support for hyperdescent and doubles down on its efforts to identify specific genetic clusters associated with their Indigenous reference sample in the French Québécois gene pool.

What is the value of Native American DNA for the EGGQP scientists – how would the “discovery” of even a 5% contribution to the French Québécois genome make a difference in the lives of the French Québécois? And more importantly, of existing Indigenous peoples? Once again, Munsterhjelm provides us with a comparative framework to consider these efforts by genetic scientists in Québec: ‘A drop or two of Aboriginal blood is considered by Taiwanese independence advocates sufficient for a Taiwanese person to claim an identity distinct from that of a Chinese person’ (Munsterhjelm, 2014: 29). In a similar register, it seems that even a tiny fraction of so-called Indigenous genes is enough to differentiate the French Québécois from other white (English-speaking) Canadians, ensuring their primacy over Québec.

The same team of scientists working under the aegis of the EGGQP, this time again led by Claudia Moreau (Moreau et al., 2013), published a fourth study a year later using genome-wide autosomal data. This time the scientists analyzed single nucleotide variations from among 205 individuals from five different regions of Québec (they added Québec City to the previous four regions). Despite running the samples through three state-of-the-art software programs and focusing on a genetic substance it had not examined previously, the scientists came up with the same results as in their previous study: an average of 1% contribution of genes associated with their Indigenous reference sample to the French Québécois gene pool going back thirteen generations. As they explain:

One percent Native ancestry can be understood as if everybody shared a Native American ancestor 6–7 generations ago. Indeed, a recent study based on four Quebec regional populations indicates that between 53 and 78% of Quebecers have at least one Native American ancestor in their genealogy. Because of the small size of the early Quebec population, the same ancestor often contributed through more than one line to the same contemporary genome, thus suggesting its average occurrence at more distant generations than 6 or 7. (Moreau et al., 2013: 8)

Here, the genetic scientists explain the effect of co-sanguinity among French-settler descendants, a phenomenon that has been well known in historical demographic research for decades. Unlike their previous studies, this one received high-profile media coverage in a large daily newspaper. In an article in the newspaper Le Soleil, Cliche (2013) summarizes the research article, before citing Moreau et al.’s one percent figure. He then informs his readers that the assumed ancestral homogeneity of the Québécois ‘is not as significant as we may have thought’ (my translation). Notably, Cliché’s takeaway is that Québec has a mixed-race genetic heritage. The story ends with the prototypical Québécois ‘voyageur’ finding an Indigenous bride somewhere on the margins of New France, ensuring that the sexual politics of the contact zone remain front and center in the popular imagination. The lesson is clear: Journalists, too, can mobilize the organizing properties of Native American DNA in the service of a broader national project.

Conclusion

This article has examined recent efforts by genetic scientists and a self-declared ‘métis’ organization to redefine indigeneity according to the logics of ‘Native American DNA’. Through ‘hyperdescent’, genetic scientists have mobilized a tiny amount of genetic material in the form of mitochondrial DNA to indigenize an otherwise European settler population in the Gaspésie region of Québec. These specific efforts to identify and classify Native American DNA have continued apace, despite the fact that the French-Québécois population, including this same regional population, carry many more genes from a ‘diverse’ range of European settler peoples. Genetic scientists’ disproportionate focus on and use of Native American DNA suggests that its value as a natural resource is related to its ability to intervene in contemporary white settler-Indigenous relations and national politics in Québec.

I introduced the Métis Nation of the Rising Sun, a political organization that is currently lobbying federal and provincial governments and pressing the courts for legal recognition as an Aboriginal people under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The MNRS recently supported DNA ancestry testing among some of its members, and subsequently mobilized the logic of Native American DNA in its political discourse. I explained how the presence of genes associated with an Indigenous reference sample provided the MNRS with the means to erase the Mi’kmaq from Gaspésie through the logic of genetic admixture. Not only were the Mi’kmaq removed discursively from their traditional territory, but Métis understandings of themselves as a people are replaced by the measure of genetic ancestry, thus confirming Roberts’ (2011) observation about the ‘increasingly prominent trend [in genetic science] … to redefine race as genetic ancestry’ (p. 62, emphasis in original). I concluded this argument by pointing out how present-day Indigenous peoples – notably the Mi’kmaq and Métis – are subsumed under a logic of Native American DNA that places biology in the form of mtDNA at the forefront of Indigenous identity and sovereignty. Yet, as TallBear (2013a), writing in this journal, has argued,

[Genetic articulations of indigeneity] overlook the way that ‘[I]ndigenous’ is used by indigenous peoples to highlight their relations to original peoples from around the world, united not by racial similarity but by colonial historical similarities and a common cause against settler and other forms of colonialism. … Indigeneity recast as genetic becomes a discourse of scarcity and death, rather than what it is, an [I]ndigenous social movement, a discourse of survival. (p. 8)

As such, the MNRS’s use of Native American DNA opposes Indigenous survival in the name of its own birth.

The genetic scientists working on the EGGPQ’s population genetics project use Native American DNA to uphold their own Euro-settler historical vision, one that has no room for Indigenous accounts. Even though the EGGPQ project intervenes rather directly in contemporary debates about indigeneity and Indigenous rights in the region, at no time do the scientists engage with either Mi’kmaw or Métis understandings of relations with Euro-settlers. Genes stand in for social and political analysis, which ensures the scientists’ support for the MNRS’s place as the rightful owners of Gaspésie, substantiating Bolnick et al.’s (2007) concerns about the profound political impacts of genetic ancestry testing. Despite four large-scale studies on genes associated with Indigenous peoples, the scientists do not discuss the possibility that the ‘evidence’ they have uncovered may not prove the existence of the so-called Gaspésie métis after all, at least not according to well-established Indigenous kinship norms; instead they simply reconfirm the mythology at the basis of French Québécois national exceptionalism.

EGGQP scientists’ mobilized the scientific authority of their research in a manner that points to its ‘power to influence indigenous livelihoods and sovereignties’. The EGGQP’s scientific efforts show the underlining nationalist substance of their research. Their insistence on proving, once and for all, a deeper French-Québécois biological connection to Indigenous peoples parallels current nationalist efforts in Taiwan. Whatever the case, the EGGQP has committed itself to continue their elusive search for more genes associated with Indigenous peoples, despite decades of historical and social research into the negligible presence of Indigenous peoples among French-Québécois ancestors and their own molecular research supporting these findings.

Given the prominence and popularity of genealogical data, the mobilization of Native American DNA as a natural resource is a relatively new phenomenon in Québec. In February 2017, another self-declared ‘métis’ organization in the far north of the province announced a partnership with a Toronto-based direct-to-consumer DNA ancestry company; the partnership is meant to confirm its access to Aboriginal rights under Canadian law (Isaac, 2017; O’Toole, 2017b). Whether or not these efforts, including those of the MNRS, result in the legal recognition of a ‘Québec Métis’ people remains to be seen. Regardless of the outcome, the genetic scientists working on the EGGPQ project intervene in complex political and social matters in ways that contribute to forms of French Québécois settler colonialism and nationalism.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges the four anonymous reviewers and Social Studies of Science editor Sergio Sismondo, who each provided generative feedback to this article. Malinda Smith provided the author with an opportunity to present an early draft of this research at the University of Alberta in October 2016 that was much appreciated. The author also thanks Délice Mugabo, Jenny Wills, Jessica Kolopenuk, OmiSoore Dryden, Kim TallBear, Damien Lee and Adam Gaudry for critical insight.

Funding

This study received funding support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (#435–2016–0869).

Notes

Author biography

Darryl Leroux is an Associate Professor of Social Justice and Community Studies at Saint Mary’s University in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia). He is currently working on a study of the use of hyperdescent by French-descendants in Quebec, Nova Scotia, Ontario, New Hampshire and Vermont. His work has been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Memory Studies and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, among others.

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