PBS is one of the few media outlets that even bothers to mention Native Americans, and again the only time this network disappoints me is when Henry Louis Gates gets in the game. Let me start by saying that I enjoy Dr. Gates' programs, his enthusiasm for his subject, and his willingness to take a fresh look at American life. And I was mostly pleased with his recent PBS production,
Faces of America, which detailed the documented history of several diverse celebritiies, as he had done before with African American individuals (also mostly celebrities.) I like family stories, and I like the way he presented them. I like the background music and graphics.
Some highlights for me: Stephen Colbert (of the Colbert Report) learned that his great-something grandmother came from Ireland, landing in New York
two days before the 1863 Draft and Race Riots in protest of the Civil War. Welcome to America! Colbert remarked, the first thing his ancestors learned was to not fight for the rights of black people. Great insight.
I was mostly happy until the end, when Dr. Gates presented his guests with racial admixture pie-graph charts of their DNA. Mexican-American actress Eva Longoria turned out to be 66% European (presumably Spanish), 31% Asian, and 3% African. Gates says on-camera that the "Asian" DNA includes Native American DNA. To her credit, Longoria herself knew about the African presence in Mexico, and she was not suprprised or bothered by the evidence in her own ancestry.(having a child with her Afro-German-French husband probably helped her to have some openess on the subject) She actually lamented having less indigenous Mexican ancestry than she had believed.
Why is the Native American DNA now being listed as "Asian DNA?" The Gates show lists European and Asian as separate DNA strains, and those two populations actually share the Eurasian landmass, so why is the DNA of the Americas, both North and South, reduced to a subset of the Asian? If Amerindians have been the most separate of continental populations, why is Amerindian DNA now being considered a subcategory of a population from which it has been supposedly separated for fifteen millenia?
Is this the same agenda that promoted the ice-age fossil Kennewick man as a Caucasian and of course the true "discoverer of America?"
I mean, seriously, Dr. Gates, when one travels north across the Sahara, there is no sharp break when the population changes from black African to Arab north African to Mediterranean white. And there is no sharp line between the so-called white races and Asian races when one travels east from Russia to Central Asia. These changes are gradual, but still science separates these DNA strains as separate "African," "European" and "Asian." But somehow the Ameriindian DNA must be subsumed under "Asian."
Is this a conspiracy to deprive the Amerindian of any standing whatsoever?
Which leads me to another celebrity profiled, author Louise Erdrich, who refused to have her DNA tested. Her father is German and she has even written books about it, but she was not subjecting her mother's Ojibway DNA to any TV show racial admixture test. An elder told her that her DNA was essentially private community property and it was not Erdrich's to give away. In one move she protected her privacy and her own people's Sovereignty over their identity. Kudos to her. She was Ojibway and that was that, and no genetic lab was going to get the chance to redefine her. Now that's Sovereignty.
