The Indian’s Death to Make Settler “Indigenous” Life: Genetics, Ancestry, and Self-Indigenization in the USA and Canada

For centuries, European trespassers and their descendants have perpetuated the “Vanishing Indian” narrative that predicts Native nations’ inevitable death in the face of European and American progress. This narrative has justified colonial resource extraction and violation of Native nation sovereignties. This talk presents several prominent cases in the USA and Canada to demonstrate the role in ongoing white supremacist appropriation of Native nation resources in the form of employment, artistic, business, and leadership opportunities.

Speaker Bio

Kim TallBear (she/her) is a citizen of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, a Dakota nation in present-day South Dakota. She is a professor in the Department of American Indian Studies, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities campus. She earned a B.A. in Community Planning at the University of Massachusetts-Boston and a Master’s in City Planning (environmental policy and planning) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She earned her Ph.D. in History of Consciousness at University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. Dr. TallBear is the co-founder of the summer internship for Indigenous peoples in Genomics (SING) Canada. She has advised the president of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) on issues related to genomics and Indigenous peoples. She has also advised museums on exhibits related to race and science. In addition to studying genome science disruptions to Indigenous governance and to Indigenous self-definitions, Dr. TallBear studies colonial disruptions to Indigenous sexualities. She is a regular panelist on the weekly Indigenous current affairs podcast, Media Indigena. She is also a regular media commentator in outlets such as CBC, CNN, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, the LA Times, APTN, and the BBC on topics pertaining to Indigenous peoples, science, and technology; on the politics of self-indigenization; and on Indigenous sexualities. She is a former Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation (PETF) Fellow (2018-2021). You can follow her on Bluesky @kimtallbear.bsky.social and read her occasional posts on her Substack newsletter, Unsettle: Indigenous affairs, cultural politics & (de)colonization.

Events details

March 30, 2026

3-4.30 p.m.

Never No Summer, Lory Student Center