Since the 1980s, the genetic study of human variation known as population genomics has produced several key discoveries and innovations. These include the use of genetic mutations as a “molecular clock” to evaluate the early histories of modern populations.Footnote 1 Such technologies have placed the origins of humanity in eastern Africa and traced the subsequent genetic diaspora across the continents. These developments have generated an increased interest in the early histories of nations, evident, for example, in the growing number of national genome projects.Footnote 2 However, while providing an intriguing opportunity to ground national projects in prehistory, population genomics has challenged national conceptions of time and space by rendering national histories mere eyeblinks along the eon-spanning trajectories of human evolution and by erasing the geographical boundaries between the national and the global. Contemporary accounts of national origins, then, are faced with a contradictory task. While they seek to appeal to audiences that view science as the epistemically privileged mode of knowledge production, they also need to maintain the national focus on the presence of which the very possibility of national narrative is premised.
Western national frameworks often rely on a split between history and prehistory, in which history is associated with preserved objects and shared recollections, while prehistory appears as an oddly timeless state that precedes the beginning of historical time. National narratives are typically focussed on written documents (constitutions, early print media), cultural artifacts (statues, buildings, memorials), circulated images (war photographs, the Moon landing), and mediated experiences of public events (the murder of JFK, 9/11). Accounts of national origins often disappear in a haze beyond the point where the roots of the nation-state as a cultural entity can be traced. This logic of immediacy encourages us to perceive ourselves as bearing witness to a shared past. The passage of evolutionary history, by contrast, is not recorded in cultural objects, relying instead on an incomplete fossil record and debated DNA evidence that cannot easily produce a feeling of historical recognition.
Rewriting national narratives as evolutionary narratives, then, involves integrating what cannot be remembered within the affective framework of what is imagined as shared national memory. This article asks how recent attempts to depict the origins of the modern United Sates within an evolutionary framework negotiate the split between history and prehistory in order to produce a sense of cherished national past. My analysis focusses on the 1996 discovery of Kennewick Man, the ancient human remains that became the object of a widely publicized legal, political and epistemic battle between local Native American groups and representatives of the scientific establishment. What makes the Kennewick controversy a particularly interesting case is that it illustrates both the conceptual challenges posed by the evolutionary framework and the intricate politics of ethnic difference that underly narratives of American origins.
In what follows, I first examine the key question that accounts of the roots of the US have sought to tackle: the arrival of Paleo-Indians in North America thousands of years before the European colonists. I then turn to the Kennewick discovery, which, I suggest, unsettles the temporal logic of both Euro-American and Native American belonging. I continue by exploring a fictional account of Kennewick Man's life, Kathleen O'Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear's popular novel People of the Raven, which uses nostalgia as a narrative tool in order to accommodate both Paleo-Indian roots and the idea of a national trajectory. This use of nostalgia bridges the gap between history and prehistory through temporal ambiguity, while masking unresolved questions about racial definitions and epistemic differences. Nostalgia also finds support in the common portrayal of genes as characterized by temporal flexibility, thereby investing the evolutionary origins of the nation with emotional appeal and cultural resonance.
NARRATING NATIONAL ORIGINS
Literary scholars have long argued that narrative is a powerful technology of knowledge that tends to make ideas and assumptions appear as if logically necessary.Footnote 3 National narratives build on this same narrative dynamic. National narratives are predicated on the construction of totalized entities, “the nation” and its “people,” through a set of ethnic, cultural, and geographical differences that often exceed national discourse.Footnote 4 The discursive coherence of “the nation” and “the people” is crucial for the continuation of the national narrative, and thus the promise of a national future relies on the narrative domestication of ethnic and cultural heterogeneity. The imagined unity of the nation and its people is, of course, never fully stable. To mend this ambivalence, national narratives strive to invoke teleology by producing what Donald E. Pease calls “a horizon of narrative expectations emanating from a national origin and organized by a national purpose.”Footnote 5
The concern for national future is often articulated through an effort to identify a point of origins for the national narrative. In the case of US history, this search for a proper narrative trajectory is complicated by the long history of Native Americans in North America. Annette Kolodny shows that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Euro-American accounts of American history were dominated by two mutually exclusive yet persistently coexisting theories about the role of Native Americans in the prehistory of the continent.Footnote 6 On the one hand, Native Americans were portrayed as prelapsarian figures located outside history, as if time only began with the arrival of the European colonists in 1492. This narrative strategy cast Native Americans as eternal children who simply did not have the means to survive in a civilized world and therefore were destined to disappear. On the other hand, there was a growing conviction among commentators that the elaborate cultural artifacts discovered at ancient burial sites were designed by a now lost Old World civilization. This “Mound Builder” myth rendered Native Americans barbaric sinners who had destroyed the original civilization, and therefore deserved to be removed from their lands (which, the myth insisted, were not theirs in the first place). This narrative framing rendered Native Americans as neither ancient nor civilized.Footnote 7
Yet the Euro-Americans' discursive triumph was not complete. The Euro-American view of writing as a sign of true communal existence renders prehistory a distant, blurry territory. Native American narratives, by contrast, highlight oral tradition, which sees knowledge as a product of an uninterrupted historical continuum. In her exploration of nineteenth-century Native American histories, Meghan C. L. Howey notes that many Native American authors insisted that what the Euro-Americans saw as a “puzzle” of Native American origins (and hence prehistory) was not a puzzle for the Native Americans.Footnote 8 What complicates the picture further is that many Native people have collected and integrated paleontological evidence – fossilized animal bones, for example – into their accounts of prehistory, as Adrienne Mayor demonstrates.Footnote 9 Native American accounts of origins, then, do not necessarily operate in strict opposition to the methods and purposes of science, but rather tread on the same cultural and epistemic territory.
New discoveries of archaeological and paleontological evidence during the twentieth century began to fill in the picture of the prehistory of the continent, correcting some of the openly racist assumptions made by the early Euro-American commentators. The discoveries of stone tools at sites near Clovis, New Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s gave rise to the view that all indigenous peoples in the Americas are descended from a single culture (called Clovis after the discovery site) that had arrived across the Bering land bridge from Siberia some 12,000 years ago. This “Clovis first” hypothesis was finally questioned in the 1990s, after an expert panel determined that an archaeological site discovered in Monte Verde, Chile, in 1977 indeed pre-dated Clovis culture.Footnote 10 In the same decade, population genomics entered the debate about American prehistory. Using mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA from contemporary Native Americans and Asian populations, as well as prehistoric human remains, population geneticists have provided various estimates of the number and time of pre-Clovis migrations from Siberia.Footnote 11
Scientists have been keen to suggest that the population-genetic understanding of human difference as gradual genetic variance has challenged distinct racial categories.Footnote 12 In particular, the conceptual shift from race to population is often seen as indicating genomics' inherent antiracism, as population is a technical term that may refer to groups of various kinds often considerably smaller than a race. However, science studies scholars have argued that assumptions of racial difference underlie the idea of population. First, in order to study the composition of populations, scientists have to connect individuals to specific populations, a task that involves problematic methodological choices.Footnote 13 Second, the molecularization of human differences has raised questions about the ownership of ethnically marked genetic material in scientific practice, pharmaceutical industry, and the construction of genetic databases.Footnote 14 For example, the widespread use of the HeLa cell line, derived from the cancer cells of an African American woman, Henrietta Lacks, in the 1950s, and the circulation of the DNA collected from the Havasupai tribe by Arizona State University scientists in the early 1990s, are underwritten by the assumption that indigenous and minority people's bodies should serve the larger community – even when those individuals or their families have not consented.Footnote 15
When the Kennewick remains entered the public consciousness in 1996, they became an object of a political struggle about the American national narrative, the nature of racial categories, the ownership of human bodily material, and the role of new scientific technologies such as DNA analysis in resolving these three questions. As the following sections demonstrate, these issues are all implicated in questions of temporality and knowledge.
THE KENNEWICK CONTROVERSY
In July 1996, two college students watching a hydroplane race near Kennewick, Washington state, stumbled upon a skull on the banks of the Columbia River. They contacted the police, who discovered more bones along the shore, presumably washed out of the bank during the flooding of the river earlier that year. The coroner called a local forensic anthropologist, James Chatters, who had previously examined bones for the coroner's office. Based on the shape of the skull, Chatters tentatively identified the remains as those of a Caucasoid male, and would have considered them as belonging to a late nineteenth-century settler but for one fact: there was a cascade point, the type of spear point used by Paleo-Indians, embedded in the pelvis. Chatters sent a bone fragment to the University of California at Riverside for radiocarbon dating, which determined it to be approximately 9,300 years old.
The Kennewick remains' racial ambivalence was more than a matter of scientific curiosity. The 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) determined that any human remains found on federal land that could be associated with a current Native American tribe should be returned to that tribe.Footnote 16 Since the particular section of the Columbia River was under the jurisdiction of the US Army Corps of Engineers, local Native American groups could request repatriation. As the great age of the fossil made it to the press, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, together with four other Native American groups, filed a request for immediate repatriation of the remains. Eight scientists filed a suit to challenge the repatriation, arguing that the remains were so old that they could not be affiliated with any tribe – and even if there was a link, it could be determined only through a scientific study of the bones. To complicate things further, other parties joined the controversy. Responding to the initial Caucasoid classification, a Californian neo-Norse pagan cult called the Asatru Folk Assembly filed their own suit, arguing that Kennewick Man was their ancestor. In 2001, after the Kennewick remains became linked with Polynesia and the Ainu of Japan, a man of Polynesian descent, J. P. Siofele, also filed a motion to claim the remains.
Bonnichsen et al. v. United States took nearly eight years to conclude. In 1998, the remains were placed under the supervision of the Department of the Interior (DOI) and moved to the Burke Museum in Seattle, where no one was allowed to view them. In 1999–2000, the National Park Service conducted a series of tests (including an inconclusive DNA analysis) in order to determine whether the tribes were affiliated with the “Ancient One” as defined by NAGPRA.Footnote 17 In September 2000, after reviewing the results, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt sided with the tribes and ordered repatriation. The scientists filed an appeal, and, in 2002, US Magistrate John Jelderks ruled that the tribes were not affiliated with the Kennewick remains in a way that would justify repatriation. Both the tribes and the DOI appealed. In February 2004, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Jelderks's decision, granting the plaintiff scientists a permission to study the bones. The scientists were given limited and strictly scheduled access to the remains in 2005 and 2006. While there have been excited announcements of the “benefits” that the study “promises to us all,”Footnote 18 the planned scientific volume on the Kennewick remains is pending.Footnote 19
The Kennewick discovery was covered extensively in the local and national media. One of the most widely read early newspaper articles was Timothy Egan's “Tribe Stops Study of Bones That Challenge History,” published in the New York Times in September 1996.Footnote 20 Egan's piece clearly illustrates the cultural stakes involved in the Kennewick case, especially its implications for the idea of American roots. Based on Chatters's initial Caucasoid hypothesis, Egan describes the ancient remains as “a riveting discovery” that “adds credence to theories that some early inhabitants of North America came from European stock.” Egan also replaced Chatters's word “Caucasoid” with “Caucasian,” thereby turning a theoretical anatomical term into an ethnic identification familiar from everyday politics of American multiculturalism. The idea of European ancestry gained further momentum when the first facial reconstruction of Kennewick Man by Chatters and sculptor Thomas McClelland was published in 1998 and became linked to the image of the British Star Trek actor Patrick Stewart. As Ann M. Kakaliouras observes, Kennewick Man has become a widely circulated popular figure on the Internet, appearing regularly especially on white-supremacist websites, which claim that the true first Americans were white Europeans, not Native Americans.Footnote 21 While participating in the ongoing cultural negotiations over ethnic diversity in contemporary America, these suggestions of European ancestry also echo the nineteenth-century Mound Builder myth described above. These scenarios of European versus Native American historical primacy were reinforced by the common belief that contemporary ethnic categories – Native American, European, Asian – could accurately characterize past human diversity.Footnote 22
As suggested in the opening section, the “discovery” of national origins in evolutionary history involves building a temporal trajectory across the history–prehistory divide. The Kennewick controversy sheds light on three aspects of these temporal negotiations. First, it casts the Native American idea of an oral historical continuum against the Euro-American view of prehistory as a mysterious terrain. For example, Rochanne Downs, a representative of the Great Basin Inter-Tribal NAGPRA Coalition, is quoted as saying, “We don't have a prehistory … We have one continuous history.”Footnote 23 Similarly, the Umatilla officer Armand Minthorn refers to the tribes' “oral histories that go back 10,000 years”Footnote 24 and states, “We already know our history.”Footnote 25 Downs's and Minthorn's use of pronouns is telling: for them, this is a question of “we” and “our history,” not national or even continental history. This rhetoric of us versus them also underlies the plaintiffs' public statements. In Egan's article, one of the plaintiffs, Douglas Owsley, is quoted as saying, “If there is no further opportunity to examine these remains, we will be losing information that is important to every American.” This rhetoric produces an imaginary national community of “every American” while insisting that knowledge provided by science will be relevant for Native Americans as well – even if they refuse to recognize this importance. Similarly, another plaintiff, Robson Bonnichsen, is quoted as stating, “This is a battle over who controls America's past … We have always used the term paleo-Indian to describe remains of this era. But this may be the wrong term. Maybe some of these guys were really just paleo-American.” As Native American roots become “just” history, Paleo-American heritage assumes temporal and thus epistemic primacy. This suggests that the Kennewick controversy is not only about what is “indigenous” as stated in NAGPRA, but also what is “American,” an ambiguous word that invokes both continental, prenational history and a national – even ethnic – body of people.
Second, the Kennewick controversy made explicit the belief that science may transgress the history–prehistory divide. This becomes evident in the common depiction of the remains as a historical document and of science as an act of deciphering its message, as when forensic anthropologist Hugh Berryman is quoted as saying, “The bone records its own history … This is like a rare book. We're reading a page at a time.”Footnote 26 Crucially, this portrayal aligns science with progress, while casting indigenous tradition as an impediment to progress.Footnote 27 Thus the plaintiffs' lawyer, Alan Schneider, is quoted in the media as stating, “Science can't proceed if scientists can't get access to new data,”Footnote 28 and the New York Times cultural critic Edward Rothstein declares that repatriation decisions are motivated by “the desire not to fully explore but to fully appease.”Footnote 29 Many Native Americans have protested such claims by emphasizing that they oppose only the belief that science always provides the ultimate answer, not science as a mode of inquiry.Footnote 30
Third, these cultural negotiations over prehistoric knowledge are highly emotionally charged, as suggested by the recurring expressions of excitement, fascination, anger and frustration by participants and commentators in the controversy. The emotional stakes are articulated particularly clearly in James Chatters's account of the controversy, Ancient Encounters: Kennewick Man and the First Americans, in which he depicts his experiences as the first examiner of the bones.Footnote 31 The book is written in the language of deeply felt professional and personal duty: “the forensic anthropologist is the advocate for the dead, and as the individual who gathered this man's remains from the riverbank I feel a personal responsibility and attachment to him.”Footnote 32 This sense of emotional and moral accountability is linked to the ethics of speaking and listening, as when Chatters states that “Kennewick Man had come to us from long ago, with many stories to tell of his life, his times, and his people.”Footnote 33 Conveniently vague yet emotionally loaded, the “us” that Chatters imagines have an obligation to listen and to learn. This rhetoric places Chatters's book at the heart of the heated debate over who counts as “us” and “them” in accounts of American prehistory.
Perhaps the most emotional aspect of Chatters's book is the emphasis placed on futurity. Dedicated to the “future generations of Americans, whose right to know the full story of their homeland's past was the motivation for this book,” the book renders the past, present, and future as intimately connected. The sense of obligation that Chatters evokes is thus directed to a future:
I felt a profound sense of loss. I had been given a gift from the past, an opportunity to learn from an ancient ancestor and to convey what he could tell me. I had not gotten the scientific corroboration needed to establish his validity as an early American. I had failed him. I had failed posterity.Footnote 34
This feeling of “having failed” both Kennewick Man and “posterity” indicates that national future is premised on the proper appreciation of the past. The obligation to future Americans, that is, is organized by a sense of longing for the past, which itself operates as a longing for the future. Significantly, such two-way yearning is ultimately nostalgic. We shall turn now to a fictional account of Kennewick Man's life that sheds light on this mutual embeddedness of nostalgic longing and national roots.
NOSTALGIA, ROMANCE, AND THE NATIONAL TRAJECTORY
Nostalgia is commonly understood as a form of longing for a past era or a lost place.Footnote 35 This place or time does not, however, have to be real or personally experienced, as nostalgia can be directed to an age or site that the nostalgic individual has never visited, such as the imagined geographic location or fantasized historical moment whence one's family, community, or nation allegedly came. Nostalgia is also characterized by temporal ambivalence, as the direction of longing is not always obvious. As Adam Muller observes, nostalgia “belongs neither to the present, the past, nor to the future, and yet it remains in some way attached to all three of these temporal zones.”Footnote 36 Similarly, Svetlana Boym notes, “Fantasies of the past determined by needs of the present have a direct impact on realities of the future.”Footnote 37 In other words, nostalgia relies on an imagined causal connection between temporal zones, so that implicated in the desired past is an alternative present and a previously unimagined future. This is indeed how nostalgia operates in Chatters's book.
Boym suggests that nostalgia always includes a collective dimension, which separates its logic from more personal emotions. For Boym, “nostalgia is about the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory.”Footnote 38 As a means of negotiating personal and collective trajectories, nostalgia is ultimately a structural dynamic, “a particular way of ordering and interpreting the various ideas, feelings, and associations we experience when thinking of the past,” as Kimberly K. Smith puts it.Footnote 39 Narrative is a key mechanism through which nostalgic longing takes shape. Nadine Attewell captures this when she describes nostalgia “as this longing for the certain shapes the past assumes as history, as narrative.”Footnote 40 I would add here that the shape of narrative that history takes also involves a specific rewriting of the narrative shape of the future.
Nostalgic longing is often perceived as irrational. Accordingly, nostalgia is linked with “sentimentality and a degraded popular culture, and hence with genres – the formulaic romance, for instance – coded as feminine,” as Attewell observes.Footnote 41 This suggests that popular fiction provides a textual site where the logic of nostalgia may be effectively examined. What makes popular romance particularly suited for this task is its understanding of narrative as literally organized by longing. I shall use archeologists Kathleen O'Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear's popular historical novel People of the Raven as an entry point to the dynamics of nostalgic longing underlying the Kennewick controversy. The novel also sheds light on how nostalgia may operate as a narrative tool in contemporary attempts to include evolutionary history within national projects.
Published in 2004 at the end of the trial, People of the Raven imagines the prehistoric circumstances of Kennewick Man's life. The authors openly support the plaintiff scientists: the book's foreword argues for the scientific study of the Kennewick remains, and the fictional epilogue imagines the moments of intense study before authorities arrive to collect the prehistoric human remains, a scene familiar from Chatters's book – only this time the scientist is female and part Native American. Echoing Chatters, the epilogue claims that the intended repatriation would remove the remains “out of context with his past” by sidestepping the concerns of national (Euro-American) history.Footnote 42 It also portrays repatriation as “a form of murder,” as if it resulted in the actual death of an ancient people, while simultaneously standing for an annihilated (national) future.Footnote 43
Yet the book seeks to reconcile the viewpoints of modern science and Native American heritage, as it describes and often celebrates the past Paleo-Indian cultures. Set in prehistoric Washington, the novel traces the destinies of two racially distinct tribes who struggle for survival in an increasingly harsh environment. The North Wind People are the first-comers in the area, whose chief Cimmis is Kennewick Man. However, the novel focusses on the Raven People, who rise to resist the raids, murders, and rapes by the North Wind People. The novel's narrative ties the accelerating destruction of villages and the struggle for power within the two communities to the developing romance between the Raven leader Rain Bear and the former North Wind matron Evening Star. Predictably, the story ends with the banishment of the North Wind leaders (including the wounded Cimmis), the first stages of peace between the tribes, and Rain Bear and Evening Star's union, thereby celebrating collaboration and unity – both ethnic and heterosexual.
This emphasis on heterogeneous origins casts the prehistoric struggle between the Raven and North Wind peoples as parallel to the current epistemic struggle over the correct account of American origins, so that the past battle appears as both a narrative re-enactment and a historical predecessor of the modern one. This narrative strategy equates imagined Paleo-Indian history with national history, as the present sets the framework within which the past is interpreted. It also casts the present as no wiser than the past, as suggested by the tension between ethnically marked communities – in this case, the symbolically white scientists and the symbolically never-quite-modern Native Americans. The narrative of future communal coherence that the novel envisions, then, is a failed narrative, as it does not deliver what it promises.
Yet the past is imagined as a source of wisdom in order to imagine an alternative present and future. This is where nostalgia enters the picture. The present that the novel's prehistoric narrative seeks is not necessarily our present, nor is the future it envisions the future that will emerge from our current reality. This becomes evident in a scene where Rain Bear decides not to kill an evil North Wind healer who travels with his blind son through Rain Bear's village. When the healer leads the massacre of another Raven village, Rain Bear doubts his earlier decision. Evening Star, however, responds,
Then the boy was the key to the Raven People's future. And it's the future that you must face. Your people need to be shaped and molded. The story is told that when you came to this land, it was as a few scattered clans, loosely affiliated, and then only by your language. Canoe load by canoe load, you drifted down from the north, hunting, and moving on. Is that what you wish to be forever?Footnote 44
This invocation of origins suggests that roots are important in rethinking the future, and that change is necessary so that the narrative of the tribe (and, by implication, the contemporary nation) may produce a satisfactory trajectory. It also posits the future as the ultimate object of nostalgia, while imagining the beginning of the narrative as a promise of continuity. This connection between imagined origins and fantasized destinies is invested with a sense of causality that renders the alternative present and future paradoxically both impossible and logically necessary. At the same, the unresolved question of both past and present racial differences disappears from the narrative focus.
Rain Bear and Evening Star's sexual union becomes the locus of this nostalgic longing. The romance plot is a convenient tool for nostalgia because romance actualizes the promise of futurity.Footnote 45 The formulaic patterns through which the protagonists' love story develops – immediate attraction, intense dialogue, mutual doubt about the relationship – produce a sense of recognition and predictability. The reproductive underpinnings of both romance and national narrative become evident toward the end of the book, when the Raven leaders decide what to do with their enemies. Rain Bear argues that the North Wind leaders should not be killed:
Don't you understand? It's our families that we're talking about. If we choose the wrong path today our sons and daughters will continue to kill each other until we are all so weak the Cougar People or the Buffalo People will move into our lands, and we will be their slaves.Footnote 46
This invocation of “our sons and daughters” implies that both national and romantic narratives produce offspring. The literally reproductive union of Raven and North Wind men and women, represented by the two protagonists' marriage, thus places heterosexual reproduction at the heart of the national project. As queer scholar Lee Edelman observes, the image of the child we repeatedly encounter in cultural discourse stands for “reproductive futurity,” the pervasive assumption that children are our only route to futurity, thus leaving those who do not reproduce outside the cultural logic of continuity.Footnote 47 Promising reproductive futurity (children, future generations) and narrative continuity (a temporal trajectory), heterosexual desire structures the teleological ambitions of the national narrative.
GENOME TIME AND PREHISTORIC NOSTALGIA
This privileging of a reproductive continuum also underlies the media coverage of the Kennewick controversy. In particular, it informs the representation of DNA in the controversy. I would thus like to conclude by briefly examining the connection between prehistoric nostalgia and the idea of DNA as historical evidence.
Many participants and commentators in the controversy have suggested that DNA could establish whether Kennewick Man and the Native American tribes are affiliated. For example, Chatters maintains that “the DNA would tell us whether he was modern European or American Indian.”Footnote 48 Likewise, the Asatru Folk Assembly's lawyer insists, “Next step is a D.N. A. analysis. That's the bottom line that will determine everything.”Footnote 49 Crucially, this belief in DNA persisted even after the DOI scientists failed to analyze DNA during the trial due to the mineralization of the bones. A 2006 article in Time magazine muses that Kennewick Man's “bones have more secrets to tell” that could be deciphered if “DNA could be extracted and analyzed someday.”Footnote 50 And in a 2012 piece in the Los Angeles Times, Owsley is said to be “convinced a future team might have better luck extracting DNA from the skeleton, perhaps from its teeth.”Footnote 51 As Kimberly TallBear demonstrates, this idea of DNA as the ultimate proof of ethnic affiliation is problematic in several ways: it privileges a few genetic markers over an abundance of cultural, archaeological, and geographical evidence; it confuses cultural tradition with molecular lineage; and it replaces the historical concept of the Indian Nation with the idea of biological race.Footnote 52
Scholars studying the cultural aspects of genomic research have often noted that genomics operates on a distinct conception of time. Jay Clayton, for example, refers to “genome time,” a conception of time in which “the present is made to contain every possible permutation of time as a suddenly legible system of signs,”Footnote 53 so that the “past and future appear inscribed, as theoretical possibilities, within the mathematical space of the code.”Footnote 54 Priscilla Wald, too, emphasizes how genomics rewrites the connection between the past, present, and future. According to Wald, “Implicit in the mapping of the human genome is the possibility (often disclaimed) that geneticists will be able to alter their perspective of human fate, to transform time, in effect, such that the perspective on the future resembles our current perspective on the past.”Footnote 55 Wald refers to this new understanding of time as that of future perfect, since it involves “the sense not only of being able to predict the expression of certain genes (simple future), but of being able to specify those predictions temporally and understand the conditions of gene expression in order to look forward as though looking back (future perfect).”Footnote 56
Like Clayton's genome time and Wald's future perfect, the nostalgic longing discussed above relies on the mutual embeddedness of the past, present, and future. The prehistoric roots of the nation that the Kennewick controversy is “about” can, of course, be told without reference to genomics. Nevertheless, the cultural prominence of genetic discourse reinforces the temporal logic of nostalgia by giving the idea of alternative potential presents and parallel historical trajectories scientific credence. In other words, the temporality of genomics makes the implausible seem oddly reasonable. Yet prehistoric nostalgia differs from genome time by foregrounding an emotion, a sense of longing. It exceeds the temporal logic of genomics by adding a sense of yearning to the idea of alternative presents and potential futures. In doing so, it engenders a feeling of temporal connectedness that is not restricted to (even as it is supported by) the idea of a direct genetic link between the past and the present. Crucially, this metaphorical nature of genetic temporality enables the use of Paleo-Indian roots to shore up a Euro-American national project.
These complex affiliations between nostalgic longing, narrative trajectories, and the temporality of genomics explain, to an extent, why the Kennewick controversy is more than a clash between incompatible epistemic assumptions or cultural traditions. This article has argued that the controversy is underwritten by conflicted narrative aspirations, and that such aspirations reflect the problem of integrating prehistory in the national framework. It has also demonstrated that nostalgia negotiates this dilemma by highlighting the emotional ties – the sense of longing and hence belonging – between prehistory and the present. The emotionally invested narrative trajectories that nostalgia engenders thus provide national narration with considerable rhetorical resources that can be appropriated in the ongoing negotiations of who owns prehistory. By interrogating and critiquing these narrative moves, we may challenge the way in which narratives of national origins erase unresolved cultural issues concerning race, ethnicity, and epistemic authority.
