In Local American DNA, Kim TallBear shows how DNA testing is a powerful-and problematic-scientific process that is useful in determining close natural relatives. But tribal membership is definitely a legal category which has created in dependence on certain social understandings and historical contexts, a set of principles that entangles hereditary information inside a web of relatives, booking histories, tribal guidelines, and government rules. At a larger level, TallBear asserts, the ‘markers’ about Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Guarantee of Genetic Technology that are discovered and put on specific groups such as for example Local American tribes carry the imprints from the cultural, racial, ethnic, national, as well as tribal misinterpretations of the humans who study them.

TallBear notes that ideas on the subject of racial science, which knowledgeable white definitions of tribes in the nineteenth century, are unfortunately being revived in twenty-first-century laboratories. Because today’s technology seems so persuasive, more and more Native Americans have got begun to believe their personal metaphors: ‘in our blood’ is providing way to ‘in our DNA.’ This rhetorical drift, she argues, offers significant implications, and eventually, she displays how Local American claims to land, resources, and sovereignty that have used years to ratify may be seriously-and permanently-undermined.