DNA tests all very well but they take us only so far
These days you are whoever you say you are. But even that can create headaches, say Geoff Chambers and Paul Callister.
Who am I and where do I come from? Many New Zealanders ask themselves these important questions. This is the basis of our identity as individuals and as members of groups. The article Seeking the truth in DNA (March 24) tells us just how popular it has become to seek answers through genetic testing companies like Ancestry.com. For a few dollars and a small saliva sample all will be revealed.
But will it? What these tests do show is who our deep-time ancestors were and where they came from. Their results may be surprising to some. It is possible to be born in Dublin to two rock-solid Irish parents and yet be told that you are Scandinavian. This dilemma can only be resolved by learning about historical population movements and invasions.
In New Zealand our focus is often on the Ma¯ ori v European identity. The article above told the story of Oriini Kaipara, whose DNA test showed that she was 100 per cent Ma¯ ori rather than just 80 per cent as she had expected. This sparked a ‘blood quantum’ debate. This became entwined with a wider discussion led by Simon Bridges about what constitutes our sense of identity. It is time now to unpack the history of these ideas for all round better understanding.
This is not a simple issue and has led to all manner of social ills all around the world. It would have been evident to the Nga¯ ti
Tu¯ matako¯ kiri, who saw Dutch explorers sail into Golden Bay in 1642, that their two peoples were significantly different in appearance, language and customs. But while differences between these two groups may have been obvious to all, historic forms of biological-based classification gave rise to many forms of racism.
In Brazil today this is still going on. In an attempt to reverse generations of social injustice their government introduced reverse discrimination scholarships. These were intended to improve educational prospects for black people. An outcry quickly developed that some recipients were not black enough! University committees were formed to decide on such cases. They did so not by genetic testing but by observation and interview. Some decisions were frighteningly simplistic – if you have an afro haircut then you must be black and so merit a scholarship.
Back in New Zealand as time went on Ma¯ ori and new arrivals married, as people everywhere will do. In time a new admixed generation sprang up. These children began to be characterised by the blood quantum measure as explained above.
In the US this sort of procedure led to the simpler ‘hypodescent’ or ‘one drop’ rule. Thus, many predominantly white people became classed as black just because they had or were suspected to have one drop of black blood.
This scheme did not seem to work in a reciprocal fashion and just one drop of white blood never made anybody white.
Later, in the 1920s, social science moved the grounds for group inclusion from biology to culture. How you lived and how you acted became the critical deciding factor.
One interesting consequence of this type of scheme concerns the Cherokee Freedmen. These are the descendants of freed African slaves who were adopted by one tribe of Cherokee Indians.
This all went along happily for more than 150 years until economic incentives led to a political move to oust the Freedmen and non-ancestral Cherokee. Ironically, the same group of activists also wanted to exclude their relatives living in Florida on state benefits for nonparticipation in tribal culture. Something that certainly could not be said of the Freedmen.
Ancestry and culture became blended in the concept of ‘ethnicity’ popular from around the 1980s. This is a very effective description, but fails for those who have adopted nontraditional lifestyles. Worse still, researchers have used this term not only to mean ethnicity but also to mean ancestry and/or culture and/or all three together.
When interviewer-based surveys try to gather data on ethnicity their questions may not always capture what they are aiming for; rather, it is the interviewees’ opinion on what ethnic group (or groups) they think they belong to.
Partly in response to this sort of experience, the idea of ethnicity has now been replaced by today’s ‘gold standard’ democratic definition – self-declared ethnic affiliation. In short, you are who you say you are.
This may or may not allow people to nominate a mixed or multiple group membership depending on which form you are filling in. Also, your declaration is not subject to approval from the group(s) you claim to belong to. This is the current New Zealand Standard Ethnicity definition.
Over the years official New Zealand agencies have used, and continue to use, a whole variety of these historical definitions. We have given examples in our online discussion paper ‘Marrying’ demographic and genetic measures?
These examples show how data may not be comparable between agencies or even within a single agency.
Potentially, this could create a real headache for any administration hoping to live up to Treaty of Waitangi obligations. But first they need to be aware of them. This is particularly significant for health researchers who have to map culture-based statistics on to biological reality. These can never be the same thing due to intermarriage and admixture and the disconnection between official ethnicity and genetics.
Finally, the self-declaration definition may seem fair enough to most people but even this can cause some real distress. In the US a woman called Rachel Dolezˇal found herself at the centre of a very unpleasant media storm.
As president of the Spokane chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), she was called out as a white person passing herself off as black. Ann Morning gives a good account of this unfortunate chapter in US race relations in her article Race and Rachel Dolezˇ al. In her defence, Dolezˇal claims that she had always identified with being black, despite having two apparently white parents.
In conclusion, hi-tech DNA tests are all fine and dandy, but they can only take you so far. And then only if you can properly understand and interpret their results. They still can never tell us who we really are.
In New Zealand we urgently need to better understand the various group definitions and how they are applied.
We need to know what they mean with respect to the allimportant statistics that describe our population and guide our politicians. It is high time to get these debates out in the open. ❚