Inventing the Thrifty Gene

The Science of Settler Colonialism

Travis Hay

• Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780887559365
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

Though First Nations communities in Canada have historically lacked access to clean water, affordable food, and equitable health care, they have never lacked access to well-funded scientists seeking to study them. Inventing the Thrifty Gene examines the relationship between science and settler colonialism through the lens of "Aboriginal diabetes" and the thrifty gene hypothesis, which posits that Indigenous peoples are genetically predisposed to type 2 diabetes and obesity due to their alleged hunter-gatherer genes.

Hay's study begins with Charles Darwin's travels and his observations on the Indigenous peoples he encountered, setting the imperial context for Canadian histories of medicine and colonialism. It continues in the mid-twentieth century with a look at nutritional experimentation during the long career of Percy Moore, the medical director of Indian Affairs (1946–1965). Hay then turns to James Neel's invention of the thrifty gene hypothesis in 1962 and Robert Hegele's reinvention and application of the hypothesis to Sandy Lake First Nation in northern Ontario in the 1990s. Finally, Hay demonstrates the way in which settler colonial science was responded to and resisted by Indigenous leadership in Sandy Lake First Nation, who used monies from the thrifty gene study to fund wellness programs in their community.

Inventing the Thrifty Gene exposes the exploitative nature of settler science with Indigenous subjects, the flawed scientific theories stemming from faulty assumptions of Indigenous decline and disappearance, as well as the severe inequities in Canadian health care that persist even today.

Chapter One
On the Origins of Thrifty Genes

Charles Darwin and the HMS Beagle

I struggled when writing this book with the question of where to begin the story of the thrifty gene hypothesis. Issues of origin, of rupture, and of reanimation proved to be difficult to periodize meaningfully. When did this idea begin? And with whom? Initially, I considered locating the origins of the thrifty gene hypothesis within the travelogues of the Récollets and Jesuits, who often wrote of the “Indians” of the New World with bodies far different from their own. There are many relevant examples in The Jesuit Relations—a collection of seventeenth-century Jesuit travelogues often regarded as founding texts in Canadian anthropology. For example, one seventeenth-century missionary noted that “the Savages do not eat as we French do” and went so far as to insist that “eating among the Savages is like drinking among the drunkards of Europe.”1 “The Savages have always been gluttons,” wrote this observer, and “eat their food as long as they had any, . . . for that is the kind of life they live, feasting as long as they have something.”2 The Jesuits made much of the difference in foodways across the colonial divide and interpreted these differences with reference to the loaded categories of vice, virtue, civilization, and savagery that they brought with them.3 Yet these categories lacked the scientific specificity necessary to include them meaningfully within the history of the thrifty gene hypothesis. Furthermore, The Jesuit Relations corresponds to a French colonial project that was rooted in a dominant Christian metaphysic in which racial differences were generally ascribed to biblical accounts of Adam as opposed to scientific stories of mitochondrial Eve. This would not do, for the science of settler colonialism (at least in its Canadian iterations) appears to have emerged more fully from a British tradition of Victorian science that was present at the inception of Canadian federal Indian policy.4 For that categorical reason, I do not periodize the origins of settler colonial science within the French colonial project.

The Anglican cleric Robert Thomas Malthus was another potential candidate for locating the origins of the thrifty gene hypothesis and settler colonial science that measures Indigenous trauma and genocide as if they were inevitable manifestations of natural law. In 1798, he published Essay on the Principle of Population, as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers.5 This text was a major development in the history of scientific thought for two primary reasons. First, it included in its assessment of human social relations an arithmetical and geometrical logic that called into question the capacity of civilization to feed itself under observed conditions of population growth and agricultural development, thereby imbuing Malthus’s ideas with an authoritative or even “scientific” force not present in the works of natural theology that came before it. Second, Malthusian principles produced a worldview in which death, violence, and disharmony were natural and even divinely inspired aspects of the human condition. As Malthus wrote, “the power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work themselves.”6 One can see in this passage the posited connection between vice and depopulation in which famine and food-related health crises are understood to be the manifestation of a given race’s inability to follow the heavenly prescriptions of virtue and restraint. For Malthus, such a relationship between food consumption and civilization was not merely metaphorical but also existed as an iron law of human societies and their ability to attain civilizational goals. Within the Malthusian frame, a population that never had to struggle for its food was a population that was doomed to stagnation: “Had population and food increased in the same ratio,” Malthus wrote, “man might never have emerged from the savage state.”7 Again we see here food availability and civilizational capacity coming together to predict losses of life because of arguably scientific but certainly algorithmic systems of knowledge.

Even so, it is difficult to associate seriously the science of settler colonialism with Malthusian population theory. This is not least because Malthus’s somewhat scientific principles of population were articulated with reference to a Christian moral economy that cohered and grounded savagery as the absence of godly virtue. One can read this tension coming to the fore particularly when Malthus discusses the fall of the Roman Empire to “barbarians” or the rise of the Thirteen Colonies in the New World. Although I do not see science as a secular system of knowledge for reasons that will become more apparent as we proceed, it is nonetheless impossible to assign Malthusian population theory a scientific label given the Christian ontologies, categories, and concepts through which Malthus made it intelligible. Such an approach rings much more of eighteenth-century utilitarianism than of the proto-scientific debates of natural philosophers in the nineteenth century. More importantly, however, Malthus was no world traveller, and he did not study Indigenous peoples or write to any great extent on Indians. Although his study of population sizes was informed by travel through European nations, it did not involve the global power of imperial travel as a condition of possibility (a key historical condition of possibility for the emergence of the thrifty gene hypothesis).

Charles Darwin thus presented himself as the best candidate for tracing the origins of the relationship between European colonial travel and the scientific observation of Indigenous peoples. More specifically, Darwin’s famous voyage aboard the HMS Beagle—a ten-gun brig of the British Imperial Navy—seemed to be a useful starting point since it so neatly encapsulated the relationship among travel, power, violence, and knowledge production within the British Victorian setting. Like other travelling scientists, Darwin required a pre-existing military structure and colonial project in order to secure material access to the Indigenous lands and resources that made his theory of evolution possible. Of course, Darwin did not know about genetics. Nor can his contributions to evolutionary biology be called “scientific” without some anachronism. Nonetheless, the origins of settler colonial science and the nucleus of the thrifty gene hypothesis can be found in Darwin’s writings on Indians and his firsthand experiences of the colonial frontier. For that reason, a deep dive into his biographical history bears fruit.

Darwin’s Early Years: From Birth to the Voyage of the Beagle

Charles Robert Darwin was born on 12 February 1809 at the intersection of two rich and powerful families. His paternal grandfather was Erasmus Darwin, a well-respected physician and popular naturalist. As noted, his “powerfully argued ideas about the evolution of species mapped out much of the ground to be explored by his grandson Charles.”8 Erasmus was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and, as far back as 1771, was penning passages such as the following: “The final course of this contest among males seems to be, that [the] strongest and most active animal should propagate the species which should be improved.”9 In 1794, Erasmus published Zoonomia: Or, The Laws of Organic Life.10 Later in the same decade, he turned down a royal invitation from King George III to attend to him. Darwin’s maternal grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood, was an industrial potter who had amassed a great fortune during the rise of industrialization and mass production in England. Wedgwood could also boast of royal invitations, for he designed particular products known as “Queen’s Ware” and was even known to refer to himself as “Potter to her Majesty.”11 Both Erasmus and Josiah were members of the Lunar Society—a collection of prominent scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs that included the likes of James Watt, Joseph Priestley, and Benjamin Franklin.12 As Jonathan Howard wrote, Darwin’s biographers are certainly faced with “what amounts to an embarrassment of riches.”13

Writing of his early life in his autobiography, Darwin recalled (somewhat surprisingly) that he was considered by “[his] masters and by [his] father a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect.”14 For that reason, his father took him out of school in October 1825 to study the family business (medicine) alongside his brother at Edinburgh University; however, the extent of his privilege appeared to have prevented the young Darwin from taking seriously the study of medicine. As he reflected, “as I was doing no good at school, my father wisely took me away at a rather earlier age than usual, and sent me (October 1825) to Edinburgh University with my brother, where I stayed for two years or sessions. . . . But soon after this period I became convinced from various small circumstances that my father would leave me property enough to subsist on with some comfort, though I never imagined that I should be so rich a man as I am; but my belief was sufficient to check any strenuous effort to learn medicine.”15 Unsurprisingly, given this admission, Darwin was not successful during his studies in Edinburgh. He cultivated little scientific knowledge and developed few skills beyond an already strong penchant for shooting birds.16 Darwin recalled that, though in fact he “attended lectures on Geology and Zoology” while at Edinburgh University, he found them “incredibly dull,” to the extent that they “produced [i]n [him] the determination never as long as [he] lived to read a book on Geology, or in any way to study the science.”17 Similarly, the lectures of a “Dr. Munro” on human anatomy were, in Darwin’s words, “as dull as he was himself,” so he did not learn anatomical dissection and drawing (a rather serious shortcoming in a nineteenth-century naturalist).18 One biographer writes that when Darwin left for “Edinburgh to follow in the footsteps of his father (and grandfather) . . . [he] proved to be a lazy and a queasy student” who spent his time “mainly hunting and drinking.”19 Elsewhere in his autobiography, Darwin recalled that the entire academic experience in Edinburgh was “intolerably dull” and disclosed that he had his sisters do the hard work of telling his father that the young Charles did not want to be a physician.20

His father, Robert Darwin, was seriously concerned by this point that his son was going to become not a naturalist or physician but an “idle sporting man,” which Darwin admitted “then seemed [to be his] probable destination.”21 On that basis, his father famously insisted that his son was to study at Cambridge University and join the clergy as an Anglican priest. Charles recalled that his father the...