Kim TallBear

In 2018, Senator Elizabeth Warren released the results of a DNA test to prove her claim to Cherokee Native American ancestry. This raised many questions surrounding how one can claim Native American ancestry and who can decide if these claims are true or false.

In Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science, TallBear argues that genetic testing is a scientifically unreliable method. Since much of her work coincides with much of this situation, TallBear published a post to her Twitter in 2018 titled, “Statement on Elizabeth Warren’s DNA Test”. In the statement, she claims the situation ultimately as settler-colonial definitions of who is Indigenous.

In her later work, TallBear is focused on sexuality, specifically on decolonizing the valourization of monogamy that she characterizes as emblematic of "settler sexualities". She pursued this topic of study through a blog written under an alter ego, "The Critical Polyamorist". TallBear was part of a panel discussing decolonizing institutions such as relationships, at the National Women's Studies Association meeting in 2016.

TallBear’s first book, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science, was released in 2013 by the University of Minnesota Press. Described as a "provocative and incisive work of interdisciplinary scholarship", the book examines the science of hereditary genetics and the problematic consequences for Indigenous identities. Specifically, TallBear’s critique focuses on the ways the language employed by genetic scientists—and its subsequent marketing of DNA testing—can reduce what it means to be Indigenous to genetically determined characteristics. TallBear’s research shows how this often relies on traditions of scientific racism historically directed at Indigenous populations. The assertion of genetic determinism, TallBear argues, is often at odds with generations of cultural traditions Indigenous communities have used to collectively self-identify—traditions that focus on relationships, and shared value systems negotiated by social relations.

In 2010, TallBear was elected to be a member of the Council of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), and served in the position until 2013. In late 2016, she became the first ever Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience and Environment. As she is an anthropologist specializing in the cultural intersection of science and technology, TallBear is a frequent media commentator on issues of Tribal membership, genetics and identity.

After graduating, TallBear worked for 10 years as an environmental planner for United States federal agencies, tribal governments, and national tribal organizations. She later worked for a non-governmental, Indigenous environmental research organization in Denver. This organization started holding workshops that researched the implications of mapping of the human genome and the genetic research on Indigenous peoples. It was through this workshop that TallBear found a desire to continue her education, and subsequently completed her PhD at the University of California, Santa Cruz in History of Consciousness in 2005.

Kim TallBear (born 1968) is a Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate professor at the University of Alberta, specializing in racial politics in science. Holding the first ever Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience and Environment, TallBear has published on DNA testing, race science and Indigenous identities, as well as on polyamory as a decolonization practice.

TallBear was born in 1968 at a public hospital in Pipestone, Minnesota. She grew up moving back and forth between the Sisseton and Flandreau reservations in South Dakota. During this time, she was mostly raised by her maternal grandmother and great-grandmother, until the age of fourteen when she went to live full time with her mother in St. Paul, Minnesota.