NAM: Havasupai Tribe takes control of genetic material

Wednesday, April 18, 2012  

"For Native Americans in need of good research on their persistent health issues, the troubling case of Arizona’s tiny Havasupai Indian tribe “put genetic research on the front burner,” stated Ron Whitener, executive director of the University of Washington’s Native American Law Center in Seattle.

The $700,000 settlement that Arizona State University (ASU) made two years ago with the Havasupai—plus the return to the tribe’s care of 151 remaining blood samples from a university freezer—chilled research cooperation throughout Indian Country. Some tribes even wanted to halt any cooperation with genetic research institutions, Whitener said.

Members of the small Havasupai band had discovered that without their permission ASU scientists and graduate students had mined blood samples tribal members provided in the early 1990s for purposes beyond the diabetes studies they had agreed to.

Not only did ASU researchers publish studies and write graduate dissertations based on tribal blood samples, the studies included “things the tribe found very offensive,” Whitener said.

“Probably most offensive,” Whitener asserted, was ASU research “looking at inbreeding among this very small tribe located at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.”"

Get the Story:
Blood and Sovereignty--Native Americans Give Voice to Studies on Them (New American Media 4/18)