Dr. Kim Tallbear

About Kim Tallbear

I am a citizen of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate in present day South Dakota, USA through my maternal line. I am also eligible for citizenship through my maternal grandfather in the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes in present day Oklahoma. I was raised on the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe reservation in South Dakota where many of my maternal relatives also reside, and in St. Paul, Minnesota by my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother.

In August 2015, I immigrated to Canada to take up a position as Professor in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta. I came to the University of Alberta to work with one of the strongest groups of Indigenous Studies scholars anywhere in the world. In 2016, the Government of Canada awarded me a Tier II Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Environment. In 2021, I was awarded a Tier I CRC in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Society. Along with my collaborators, I am building a research and training program at the University of Alberta that is focused on Indigenous peoples’ engagements with science and technology as those fields and projects serve Indigenous sovereignty.

I originally trained to become a community and environmental planner at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP). From 1992-2001 I worked on various planning projects for national tribal organizations, tribal governments, federal agencies and in private consulting. I worked primarily on projects having to do with tribal government interests in nuclear waste management and on a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) funded project to explore the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI,) for Indigenous peoples of human genetic research. Realizing that my deeper intellectual interests were in the cultures and politics of science and technology and their implications for US-based tribes and other Indigenous peoples, I returned to graduate school. In 2005, I completed a Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Cruz in History of Consciousness. Working with Professors James Clifford and Donna Haraway, I wrote a dissertation exploring the concept of “Native American DNA” as an object of human population genetics research and as a focus of the direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic ancestry testing industry. I taught for 18 months at Arizona State University in Tempe in the Department of American Indian Studies before spending one year as a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in both Gender & Women’s Studies and in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management (ESPM) at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2008 I was hired as Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy in the ESPM Division of Society & Environment. During the 2012-13 academic year, I was a Donald D. Harrington Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin. In 2013 I accepted a position as Associate Professor of Anthropology and Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) at Texas.

For two decades, I studied how genetic science is co-constituted with notions of race, “tribe,” and “indigeneity.” My monograph on the subject is titled Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (2013).

More broadly, I am interested in the historical and ongoing roles of science and technology (technoscience) in the colonization of Indigenous peoples and others. Yet because tribes in the US and other Indigenous peoples insist on their status as sovereigns, I am also interested in the increasing role of technoscience in Indigenous governance. How do U.S. tribes and other Indigenous peoples resist, regulate, collaborate in, and initiate research and technology development in ways that support Indigenous governance? What are the challenges for Indigenous peoples related to science and technology, and what types of innovative work and thinking occur at the interface of technoscience and Indigenous governance? Finally, does Indigenous governance of and through research and technology development influence the priorities, practices, and values of technoscientific fields? My research, collaborations and teaching draw on Indigenous, anti-colonial, feminist, and queer science studies analyses that enable not only critique but generative thinking about the possibilities for decolonizing science and technology.

From 2010-2013, I served as an elected member of the Council of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). I am a former Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation (PETF) Fellow (2018-2021). I have also served as a member of the Executive Program Committee (EPC) for the 2016 American Anthropological Association (AAA) annual meeting and an organizer of the “Unsettling Science” plenary panels at the 2021 Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) annual meeting. I was an original faculty member for the University of Illinois’ Institute for Genomic Biology Summer internship for INdigenous peoples in Genomics (SING) USA and have also advised the President of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) on issues related to genomics and Indigenous peoples. In 2018, I co-founded the Summer internship for INdigenous peoples in Genomics (SING) Canada. I am also an advisory board member for the Science & Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz.