Latest / Tales From Aztlantis / Episode 104: Who Owns Our DNA? W/ Joseph Yracheta! Pt. 1

Transcript

Episode 104: Who Owns Our DNA? W/ Joseph Yracheta! Pt. 1 · Tales From Aztlantis

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: You must excuse me.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: You learn the lesson.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Lesson in honesty.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Honesty to your stuff.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Honesty to other.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: I think we've all learned a good lesson.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: I've always heard that honesty is the best policy.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm catching on to why that's so why that's subno, why that's so good.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_02: Greetings, dear listeners, and welcome to Tales from Ostlantis, where we take you on a journey through Chicano, Mexicano, and Mesoamerican history and archaeology, and along the way, we challenge pseudo-historical distortions and we confront the disinformation that too often surrounds these very topics.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_02: We are your hosts, Curly Tlapoyawa.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_02: And Ruben Ariano Tlakatekat.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_02: How are you doing today, Dr.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_02: Tlakatekat?
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: How am I doing?
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, it's uh we're in the middle of the dog days of summer.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: So over here in Dallas, we're hitting the triple digits, 100 plus.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: Man.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: And uh so just enjoying every single minute of it.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: About to go to the to the pool here in a little bit and uh try to get freshened up.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you guys ran into uh some weather on your way home, right?
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we did.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah from Albuquerque.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: So we had um we had an interesting trip.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: We uh, as you mentioned, we were in Albuquerque recently.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: We spent uh the 4th of July over with you and your family, and so thank you for uh having us over and for letting us uh spend some good times with you in in a good way as and uh visiting the the Pueblo Center in downtown and going to the uh families' uh homes and uh just uh having a good time.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: And but yeah, on the way back, we experienced some some very severe downpours coming through the panhandle and uh a little bit of hail, and it looked like we were gonna get a maybe a uh tornado in the distance, but it it dissipated, so it was just uh uh uh you know, just some good rain, you know, because Tlalog provides.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so yeah, it's a welcome.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's a welcome rain.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_02: Speaking of welcome, we want to welcome our guest today, right?
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, absolutely.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_02: Today, dear listeners, we are joined by Joseph M.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_02: Iracheta.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_02: Joseph is an Amer indigenous scientist of Purepacha and Raramuri at the native biodata consortium, which exists within the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation of South Dakota.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_02: Mr.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_02: Iracheta has been a scientist since 1990, where he has started as a bench biotechnician and worked across many biomedical disciplines.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_02: Mr.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_02: Iracheta believes that all data and resources must be seen as unforeseen futures where their value will constantly change.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_02: He feels this data must be secured for indigenous economic and cultural sustainability.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_02: So welcome, Joe.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_02: Do we call you Joe or Joseph?
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_02: What do you, or Iracheta?
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_02: What do you ask for her?
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_03: Just don't call me Ley for tamales.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_02: And uh I left this out because I wanted to make it its own little separate thing, but you are with the Native Biodata Consortium, which uh does a lot of good work.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_02: I'm looking at the website right now, and it says that Native Bio is dedicated to improving indigenous health through research while building capacity in data science and genomics for native communities.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_02: The organization ensures that all genetic and health data is collected and stored with full respect for tribal ownership and control, which I think is extremely important, especially these days where everybody's fishing for our data.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: Used to be they were just fishing for uh data points online, right?
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_02: And now they're just they're getting into our very blood and uh trying to extract that resource from us.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_02: So thank you for all the work you do, and I'm super stoked to have you on the show, man.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_03: Welcome.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I'm really glad to be here, you guys.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_03: Uh Joe's fine.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_03: And uh I just want to make sure before we start that you guys are both uh Mexica, Nawat Chicanos.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_03: I'm a pure ba.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_03: I hope that you don't like scalp me or anything like that.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_02: Fights are gonna fights are gonna break out.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: Don't forget the Kuabultecan.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, Kuabultecan, and uh you and I probably connect through our uh Raramuri heritage Joe.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_02: So we're all good.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_02: We're all gonna kumbayat.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_02: Here.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_03: We'll do pan-Indianism.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_02: We're gonna practice some pan-Indianism here on Tales from Ostlantis.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_02: Somebody's gonna clip just that part and they're gonna be like these fucking guys.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_03: Well, so so that's an interesting thing because I I, you know, I've been following you guys for a while, and Curly, especially when he wrote the book We Rise, way back in the 90s.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, but then we have this uh other connection through Dr.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_03: Jennifer Raff and her book.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_03: Um I didn't know you guys, I didn't know you guys were editors.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I was asked to be an editor on that book, and I didn't find out till after the book was published that you guys were part of that too.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, it was cool when that book came out to see uh your name listed in there as well.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, they got this dude in there?
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: Oh man.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_02: So shout out, uh Jennifer Rath.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_02: Shout out.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_02: She needs to put out another book, man, because her fill the filled, your guys' filled, changes so quickly.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: Does she have new research out that needs to be published?
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_03: She's working on a second book, yeah.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: Is she?
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_03: Is she?
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_02: Nice.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_03: We also know each other through Patricia Gonzalez and Roberto Rodriguez.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_03: Really?
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_03: Because uh he was he was at the UW Madison when I was there, and so uh when they were still married, they were our friends.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_02: We are all connected, as as the ancestors would say.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: Is it is it uh what is it hunaku?
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: Is it hunaku or no inlakech, right?
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: Inlakech, mitakuyoyasin, right?
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: This is gonna be a show about just nothing but uh Indian uh indigenous sayings.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: What's your favorite?
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: What is your favorite one, Joe?
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: What's your go-to?
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: Is it is it a who?
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think you were saying a ho.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_03: Well, the the one I've been fighting with lately, uh with friends on social media is they're like meshikayot.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm like, no, it's huchari it's huchari we napika.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_03: That's what it's supposed to be.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_02: That's fired.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_02: So for our audience, Joe, uh, tell us a little bit about yourself, like your story, where you came from.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_02: What got you into the work that you're doing right now?
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_02: You know, because it's fascinating work.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_02: Like, what was the path that uh led you, led you to this point in your life?
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I was born a little poor brown child.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_03: Uh far, far away from from Mexico.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_03: So I I'm I don't know, depending on how you count.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm either third or second generation American, I don't know.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_03: Because my family came over in 1910 during the the Mexican Revolution uh because the uh people don't know this, that um they were recruited from the Altiplano uh to break the strikes in the Midwest.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_03: So Chicago, Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan, Indiana, uh, that's all where my family came to in 1910.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_03: And uh we were there to break up the Union strikes and work at the stockyards and the steel mills and the uh bird's eye packaging plants, all that kind of stuff.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_03: Um and uh I guess that's kind of where my story starts, is because my mom, even though she only had an eighth-grade education and my dad wasn't much more educated than her, were all very much proud about being who they were.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_03: And so she's like, if anybody ever asks you uh at school what you are, tell them you're American.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_03: If they ask a second time, tell them you're American.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_03: If they ask a third time, say you're Mexican American.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_03: If they ask a fourth time, say you're Mexican.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_03: If they ask a fifth time, just say we were here first.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_03: So my and our neighborhood was mostly black and Puerto Rican, and so uh and Puerto Ricans and other Latinos didn't like us Mexicans because we look like this, and uh so we had to fight that as well, the into sort of lateral violence with the other Latinos.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_03: So that just kind of translated into my later education when I went to college, and uh I was trying to be uh MD, a physician, but I decided I didn't like that, so I got into research and um did that for a while, all kinds of research, and then I had an accident in the lab where I couldn't be there anymore because I'd have really bad asthma and allergies.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_03: So uh I taught high school on reservations for a while, and then I got back into science through genetics because most of that stuff is just water-based, so I didn't have to deal with any bad chemicals or anything like that.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_03: And so uh I went to UW Seattle and got a master's in pharmacogenomics, came back here to the res.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_03: And um I don't know if you guys know UW Seattle very well, but back in uh 2009 through 2014, it was like this indigenous renaissance.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_03: It didn't matter where you were if you were from New Zealand or or Hawaii or Alaska or Latin America, everybody was just like, we need to do something.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_03: Like, we need to do something together.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_03: So it didn't matter what discipline they were in.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, they were all like, we're gonna we're gonna help these urban kids, whether they're Latino or Hawaiian or Mexican, we're gonna help them.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_03: Uh we're gonna go around and spread all this policy stuff.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_03: We worked from British Columbia all the way down to Northern California as trying to spread this message of indigenous data sovereignty.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_03: And so when I came back to the res, I'm like, we need a uh physical location, we need a brick and mortar place, and I start working on it when I got back here in 2014, and that's how native bio was born.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_02: It's an actual physical location uh that that you have.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_02: And what is the main work that that uh your organization does?
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_03: Now uh we are a safe harbor.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_03: We store samples and data uh within the tribe's legal jurisdiction and geographic border.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_03: So Shine River is about the size of Connecticut, it's 5,500 square miles or so.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_03: And we are smack dab in the middle.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_03: So if they start coming, we're gonna have at least an hour to 90 minutes notice if they're coming, and we'll just burn the place down.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_02: When you talk about biodata, right?
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: This is uh a word that you see a lot in the news and social media.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_02: But for a lay person, if you had to tell them, like, how would you define biodata exactly?
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_03: So biodata is anything uh because of you guys probably know because you're an academia since 1941, the publisher perish, anything that can be commercially applicable, right?
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_03: So it could be plant medicine, it could be agricultural products, it could be um things that produce antibiotics like fungi, slime molds, bacteria, whatever that's in the soil or found someplace else.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_03: It's human DNA, it's uh animal DNA, it's all kinds of stuff.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_03: And so at least since 2007 with the America Competes Act, um data has been on the radar for the United States in terms of uh sort of bioproperty.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_03: And so the difference in how research has been conducted uh since, say, 1995 or so, is that almost all of the legislation and funding is tied to commercial applicability.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_03: And so this whole open data thing that began the conversation late 90s, got codified in 2013, and then got uh mandated in 2023 under the Biden administration, has all been working up towards taking these new technologies uh where we can extract different biomolecules and DNA from things and turning it into products.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_02: And does this include weaponization or is it all medical purposes?
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_03: The weaponization thing was hidden for a long time, but now they're just it's just out in the open.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_03: It's just whether it's biosurveillance, biometrics, tracking people across space and time, or trying to make some sort of uh gene-edited bomb.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_03: Um I don't know if you guys back in the uh G.W.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_03: Bush thing with the Center for a New American Century or whatever it was called, do you remember that?
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_03: They don't remember that.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, Donald Rumsfeld, they had this whole like Project 2025 booklet.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_03: It was online and everybody is reading it.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_03: They took it off, but it said in there, it's like the only way the United States is gonna be able to compete is to start collecting all of this DNA and starting preparing and being the first ones to make these weapons because we know other people are gonna do it.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_02: God damn.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's very bleak, it's very dystopian um children of men type shit right there.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_02: So when it comes to indigenous DNA in particular, right?
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_02: Why is it important that we as native people protect our DNA specifically?
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_02: And what is the obsession with collecting this DNA from these outside forces?
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_03: Well, that's what you know, you guys are are smart academics too, so I kind of want your take on it, especially with this whole mestizahe thing that that we're always kind of embedded in uh and fighting for our our indigeneity.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_03: Uh so if we go back uh to colonial times, um a friend of mine uh tested all the turkeys on the planet, and guess where they come from?
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_03: They come from Mexico.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_03: So even though uh even though indigenous people domesticated turkeys more than once or utilized them more than once, the ones that are valuable and commercially available are the Mexican turkeys, the ones that our ancestors domesticated.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_03: So that's trackable through time and space.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_03: We got nothing for it, right?
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_03: And you can do that for anything.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_03: You can do that for corn, you can do that for chocolate, tomatoes, avocados, especially chocolate, because chocolate uh doesn't grow well in the Americas anymore because it's uh attacked by all these European viruses and bacteria and stuff.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_03: So they had to move it to Africa and Southeast Asia.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_03: But the way that they propagated is not through seed, but through cuttings.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_03: But now those cuttings are you know just so many cuttings over centuries, they're just not viable anymore.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_03: And they're getting attacked.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_03: So they've come back to Latin America to look for uh wild varieties of varieties that have been only used by indigenous people.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_03: So in that context, we've always been utilized by uh European colonialism um to feed the world.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_03: Like we didn't directly do that.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_03: They they took it from us, and then they used it like the Irish potato famine, uh corn in in Africa and and uh other products in Southeast Asia.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_03: They were able to the way they say is we raised all boats.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_03: We took the the world out of poverty, but the world was doing fine before they came.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_03: Then they impoverished them.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_03: They're like, oh, well, now how are we going to feed them because we need them to do work for us?
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, we have all of these crops from the Americas that grow anywhere.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_03: So now we can make this army of slaves.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_03: And then so anyway, that's where we're at right now, is the same thing is they're looking for these new products from us that have not yet been described or commercialized.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_03: And um, because this is a unique space for humans, right?
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_03: If you believe the out of Africa theory, there was no humans here, and then we came in very small populations, we were bottlenecked, so we adapted crazily, crazily fast to this place.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and to the should have died.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: Speaking of the the bottleneck, so that creates this uh diversity, right, within like phenotypically as well, with amongst indigenous people and genetically there's all this variation because of these bottlenecks of of populations or the the Beringian standstill, right?
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_02: Where people were kind of isolated up there by uh what would it be Alaska today, uh, for this enough long of a time that their DNA, you know, that they evolved as as people.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_02: And then when they finally come in to what is now the Americas proper, the people who were already there who had come in like through the coastlines, they were they were diverse.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_02: They were different enough from each other that it's distinguishable, right?
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_02: Is am I getting that right?
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_03: So the that's the thing is that um the things that were popular, say in the 90s when DNA first was being used were people with Mendelian diseases like Taysax disease or sickle cell disease or brittle bone disease or hemophilia, right?
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_03: They're like, oh, we can we can take these uh very you know tragic and odd people and turn them into money.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_03: But that didn't happen.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_03: It was too hard to do that because those mutations are lethal, right?
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_03: They're they're really hard to to turn into money.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_03: And uh so then they started going to people like the Amish and island populations in the Pacific and say, oh, this is where we can like turn stuff into money.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_03: Um or even Scandinavia, like Scandinavia has a specific cholesterol variant that allows them not to be infected by HIV, right?
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_03: And so yeah, um, I think it's like 18% of the population has it.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_03: But the the way that that is it's a lipid, and so they couldn't turn it into anything.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_03: So now they're like, where can we get a lot of people that are different, genetically homogenous over two continents over 40,000 years?
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, the Americas.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_02: And not through some altruistic purpose, right?
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_02: Because they have dollar signs in their eyes and they're like, where can we go looking for the next uh gold mine of information that we can monetize?
• 20:56
  unknown: Yeah.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_03: And so with the Amish, that that story, um, the University of Maryland in Regenera and the pharma company, they did something groundbreaking.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_03: In two years, they genetically sequenced all 450 members at the Amish community in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_03: They got from them uh genetic variants in a specific gene that helped them create three different blockbuster anti-cholesterol drugs, and each drug is gonna make anywhere between 10 to 20 million dollars a year for the next 10 years, and they're giving the Amish nothing.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: So that's fucking pulled.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'm trying to understand how a community like the Amish, like what how do the these companies come in and convince them to participate in these kinds of things?
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: Or is it done through nefarious uh means where the community doesn't really know what what's happening, or it's done behind their back where they have no knowledge of this happening?
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: And because we're just looking at the Amish, that's just kind of a microcosm of what's also happening to indigenous communities throughout the Americas, right?
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: Even though the Amish aren't indigenous, they're treated like an indigenous group because they're so isolated and so insular, right?
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: So they kind of form a perfect example of what a European uh quote-unquote native community might look like, right?
• 22:17
  unknown: Yeah.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: So so what's going on there?
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_03: There's two things.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_03: One, um, Curly already mentioned is this altruistic intent, right?
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_03: They go after some sort of sentimental hook, right?
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_03: You have cancer, you have type 2 diabetes, you have uh congenital malformations when your babies are born, you have rare rare diseases, whatever.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_03: And that's usually where they go in, and that's how they convince people like we're gonna help you, right?
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_03: And they don't really explain the legal landscape or the uh informed consent landscape very well.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_03: And and so people just hear, we're gonna get help, we're poor, we need a hospital, you guys are gonna help, right?
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_03: And then they usually don't deliver on those things because it that's not their job to deliver on those things.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_03: They're like, well, we're gonna collect the data and then the US will catch up and give you something, right?
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_03: Uh so that's how that that's how that swindle works.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_03: Um but the other thing is unfortunately, people in your profession, archaeology and history, they know where to go looking, right?
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_03: So with the Amish, they already knew that this particular gene had um variation in northeastern Germany.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_03: But it had because they evolved and they're different now than they were way back then, it wasn't in high frequency.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_03: And they're like, where can we find people who are from there but are sort of stuck in time?
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, the uh the Amish, because the Amish came over here 325 years ago from Germany, and because of their religion, they only mate with each other, nobody else, right?
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_03: So they're stuck in time, and you're gonna have this uh in Enhancement of that gene because they're only mating with each other.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_03: So it's people now, scientists have learned it's like, oh, archaeologists and historians can help us search for these things because they know the history, they know the culture, they know they can tell us where we can start looking, right?
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_03: And that's the old way.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_03: Now with AI, you could breadcrumb like that.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_05: Mm-hmm.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_03: That's disappointing.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_02: That's disheartening, too.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_02: I mean disheartening.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_02: That's the word I was looking for.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_02: That's disheartening.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_02: God damn.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you'd spoken about chocolate, right?
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_02: And it made me think I'm sure they're not only going to try to take the material item, right, in an extractive sense, but then they're also going to be extracting the labor of all the people because I don't know if you've been around a lot of chocolate cacao farmers, but that is some freaking intense labor.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_02: When I was working in Belize, uh there was this point where we were out in the middle of the jungle and we're hiking, and they have these uh constructions, they call them ranchos, right?
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like one of the few Spanish words I've ever heard in said in Belize because they all speak English there, or they speak Wopan or Kechchi or Yucateco in the north.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_02: But they have these structures, they're there, these outdoor structures, they're open structures, so it's got like a thatch, roof, and then some poles, and that's called the rancho.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_02: So we saw this rancho in the distance and my crew was like, hey, can we take a break under there?
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_02: You know, because it's it's hot as hell, I'm believed.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_02: And so we take a little break, and I'm looking around, and you could tell it's it's being utilized as a storage place for cacao.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_02: And so we take off and we just come across these men with uh they call them burden baskets here.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, the the basket that you you use with like a head strap.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_02: And these men just come out of the jungle carrying pounds and pounds and pounds of cacao on their backs and their machetes.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_02: And that's how they get like the chocolate that that you're eating if it comes from Belize, it's because these Maya men throw on a burden basket and grab their machete and go hiking into the mountain and work all damn day just physically removing these cacao pods and then processing the pods and pulling out the seeds and then putting the seeds in their basket.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, the seeds are only like this big, a few centimeters, but these they're these baskets are huge and they're they're packed to the gills.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm sure that these companies like Nestle isn't going out and doing that themselves, they're gonna uh you know exploit the labor of these indigenous peoples to extract an indigenous technology and then spread that around the world to enrich themselves.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm sure that the the people in those communities aren't getting much out of.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I don't even know what they got paid for each, I should have asked, like what they get paid for each uh basket that they bring in, but I didn't think of it at the time.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and then going back to the colonial period, I'm like, there's always a narrative that goes with that, right?
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_03: When they're taking something.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_03: So like with corn or potatoes or whatever, it wasn't accepted in Europe, right?
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_03: They're like, oh, this is something from this these barbarians across the ocean, it's not worth anything.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_03: And then it goes through a different narrative.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_03: Once they get enough of the product in Europe, like turkeys, uh, it goes through another country and they're like, oh, it didn't come from the Americas, it came from this really sexy, trendy place called Turkey, and we're gonna sell you this corn and these potatoes, and they're they're wonderful.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_03: Like you've never seen anything like this before.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_03: And that's kind of what they're doing now with this stuff.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_03: It's like, oh, yeah, your your resource, whatever it is, your your uh, I don't know, name something in Mexico that people don't eat zapotes or something like that.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_03: Like nobody's gonna like those.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_03: It's just we're gonna just do some research on it.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_03: And they're like, oh, we're taking it over here because we know it has something, and now it's not yours anymore.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think that it would make a difference if um the communities themselves were profiting from this resource extraction?
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: Would you think that it would make it uh uh okay in a sense because there's a mutual benefit that is uh like an exchange that's taking place?
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_01: Or do you see it as even if the communities are benefiting in some way that is useful to them, do you still see it as as uh a problem because uh it's a kind of modern form of colonization in a sense?
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think we have to be smart about it, right?
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_03: Um I don't know if you guys know Devon Pena.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_03: He's he was one of my instructors at either.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I don't know personally, but yeah, I know I know of his work.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, he he's he said there was this trend.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_03: It's like so first we are honest with them, right?
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_03: And they didn't do well by us, and then we went through this phase of hiding in plain sight and lying to them.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_03: But now we're at the point where they're gonna get it.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_03: Like there's no strategy that we can have other than being transparent and claiming it that's gonna work for us, right?
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_03: Because they're a 1,200-bond gorilla.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_03: They got all the funding, they got all the research labs, they got all the the world banks, they got all the markets.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_03: So um there's this something called the Nagoya Protocol, which the United States, Canada, and Australia have not signed, but they've created this World Monetary Fund for Indigenous people.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_03: But again, the people who decide on that board where that money goes when you apply for it are not native, right?
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_03: So I was in uh Colombia and uh this Quetchal woman goes to the scientist, he's a German scientist at a German nonprofit and says, Oh, that plant no longer grows in our territory.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_03: Can I have some seeds from that so we can plant it?
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_03: And the guy said no.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_03: And she goes, What do you mean no?
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_03: Like that's why we're here is because of the Nagoya protocol.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_03: Like that we're supposed to get these things back.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_03: Like your company, you took it from us, you're supposed to share with us.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_03: He's like, No, we got these seeds before the Nagoya protocol, so they belong to us now.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_02: God damn.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_02: And that's not even like a big ask either.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_02: Like you you would think the common sense response to that would be, well, yes, of course.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_02: These are your seeds, these are like the ancestral property of your community.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_02: Why wouldn't you get them back?
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_03: And then they have this thing for the for the drawdown of the money, because I know a bunch of people in Ecuador and Peru who want to draw down the money.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_03: They have these mutually agreed terms that I don't think any indigenous community ever saw.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_03: They didn't see the terms.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_03: But one of the terms is they can only draw down the money for conservation or restoration, right?
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_03: And I said, in a room full of indigenous people, I said, so these people can't draw down this money to sue an oil company or sue an agricultural company or sue a mining company, and they're like, No, you can't draw down money for that.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_03: I'm like, so they can only draw down the money for what you say is a good thing, and they're like, Yes.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_02: So much for self-determination and autonomy.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, right.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_02: Well, if you even just look at what's happening now in Mexico with uh mezcal, um like that's that's a huge deal going on there.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_02: Or avocados.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_02: And and this these small communities, it's like, yeah, I and to the point that uh Ruben was making, some of these communities are signing on with the larger Mescal manufacturers because they're trying, they're like, well, shit, they're they're gonna come in and they're gonna take it all.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_02: You know, so at least if we kind of get our foot in the door.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_02: But and then with that, you you read about, well, that just creates this whole other set of problems, right?
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_02: Because who's benefiting more and whose land is being used and who signed that contract, and you know, whose Magay plants are going to be processed.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_02: Just the farming techniques to where now they're just planting the Magay plants that grow the fastest, which aren't the kind that were traditionally used for like the really good tasting mezcal, because mezcal was a very rare drink and it was used on very rare occasions.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_02: But now that it's blown up, they're just monoculture farming, right?
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_02: These same breeds of Magay plants that grow very quickly, and then they're harvesting them before they're done.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_02: They're manufacturing the mezcal and they're shipping it out as quickly as possible and getting that next crop going.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_02: And it's causing deforestation, it's destroying the uh diversity of the biology there, it's destroying the landscape, all just so these fucking rich white celebrities can say they own a mezcal brand.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_03: And de denutrifying good soils, but uh often, like in Mitro Khan for the avocados, they have them grow like the native people are like, they have this knowledge.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_03: Like, we don't grow avocados over there because that's bad soil, or we don't grow avocados over there because it it causes soil erosion, or we don't grow avocados over there because it wastes water.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_03: But the companies are like, no, you're gonna grow avocados over there because we told you to.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_03: And so not only does it mess up the good soil, but it messes up the bad soil even worse.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_03: And so And they don't listen.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_03: They're like, we want to listen to indigenous knowledge when we want to take something, but when the indigenous people actually know how to do this, they're like, nah, we're not listening.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_03: The story is old as time.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, I was I was looking at a paper that you co-wrote with several of your peers uh from 2024, and it was published in the Journal of Diabetia, what's it called?
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_01: Diabetologia.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_01: Diabetologia.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_01: And it's called Scientists and Scientific Journals Should Adhere to Ethical Standards for the Use and Reporting of Data from Indigenous People, which speaks directly to what we're just talking about, right?
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, and so there's many things, I don't know how many of these things we we can cover in in today's uh discussion, but I wanted to start off maybe if you could speak a little bit to this idea of like just checking a box, right?
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_01: An ethical checkbox.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_01: So the paper looks at research that was done through the lens of uh the truth and reconciliation uh philosophical idea, uh activist idea, right?
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_01: The truth means owning up to past harms and in the name of science and reconciliation means giving indigenous communities sovereign control over their own data, right?
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so what I was I was thinking about is in a more practical sense, in everyday sense, what does reconciliation mean and how what does that actually look like in terms of the research and the research lab?
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_01: How does that work?
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_01: And how do we make sure that partnering with an indigenous community, for instance, becomes a deep, meaningful collaboration rather than just a uh tokenistic checkbox, right, that someone ticks off uh so that they can exercise their own uh sovereignty and also for the ethic board to say, yeah, we've done something that is uh beneficial to indigenous people, right?
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_01: So, how do you how do we straddle that that line there?
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_03: Again, I'm gonna ask you brothers to help me out because I've this is the fight I've been fighting since 2007.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_03: Um let's step back to what uh Curly was just talking about.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so the same fight that we have as Chicano is trying to whatever, detribalized, whatever, disconnected indigenous people, whatever, that same fight is happening in this regard.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_03: So depending on how you count, I would say that Mexico had three major wars to get rid of the Spanish control, right?
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_03: But then the last one with uh Zapata and Ponto Villa, it only lasted two years before what happened.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_03: They sent in guns, lawyers, and money, right?
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_03: So whatever wins we have, we are always out foxed by more money, more guns, and more lawyers coming from someplace else, right?
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_03: And so with the legal agreement, like Curly was just talking about, they bury stuff in there that we don't know about.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_03: And so that's what Native Bio is trying to do is try to uncover all of those ways that they that they renege on their treaties or their contracts or whatever.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_03: And so the the latest one is if they do give you profit sharing, they bury the books so that there is no profit.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_03: They're like, it's all debt.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_03: We don't have any, we don't have anything to share with you.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_03: So now the new thing that we we've been clued into by other people is like, don't ask for profit sharing, ask for revenue sharing.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_03: Whatever their total income for the year, you get 10%.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_03: So they can't do that song and dance where, oh, we didn't make any profit.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_03: So with truth and reconciliation right now, uh Canada is trying to dance their way out of this.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_03: You know, they had the former Pope uh repudiate but not rescind the doctrine of discovery, right?
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_03: And so now with this truth and reconciliation stuff over these biological resources, they are trying to compete with the United States right now with their own version of the big beautiful bill called Bill C5.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_03: And they tried to pass it without uh First Nations consultation.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_03: So up there, it's a law.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_03: They have to consult, negotiate, and then tribes have to give consent before they move forward.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_03: They were trying to get out of it.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_03: The tribes got uh wind of it at the last minute and took that little piece out.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_03: But since then, which was like last September, the tribes have been trying to hold their feet to the fire.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_03: And now Alberta, I don't know if you've been paying attention, the Alberta premier has been fighting with the first indigenous premier of Manitoba.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_03: It's like she's like, we're gonna do this by referendum.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_03: We're gonna just say we don't have to listen to First Nations by referendum.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_03: He's like, that's not how the law works.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_03: This is a nation-to-nation consultation between First Nations and the federal government of Canada, not the province of Canada.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_03: You can't get the people to decide to neglect um First Nations authority over these resources, whether it's timber, water, human DNA.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_03: And uh, but you know, people do these things, they try them in the court of public opinion, and usually that's how they win these things because tribes don't have the legal or financial wherewithal to fight these battles.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_03: They just certainly don't have a program like this podcast to say, you know what's really going on?
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_03: You know what they're really trying to take from us.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_03: And so that's that's kind of what Native Bio is doing, is trying to uncover all of these little ways that they win these fights.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_02: So it's it's just like a really sick game to play, especially when you're doing it against indigenous communities and and native peoples in regards to their resources and their their ways of life.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_02: You know, like you're you're fucking with people, not it's not just dollars and cents.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_02: You're you're messing with people who were here way before your country was ever here and will be here way after these countries are are long gone, but they treat us with absolute zero fucking respect.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_03: And that's that's the other that's the other swindle, right?
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_03: So in Canada, they're getting by doing these emotional arguments, like you're saving these babies from this rare disease, or you're selling, saving your grandma from breast cancer.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_03: So now it's getting the tribes to fight.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_03: It's like, I don't want to participate because I could see what's going to happen.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_03: The other ones are like, I want to participate because I want the dollars, and I believe that to this promise they're gonna cure cancer or whatever.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_03: So now the tribes are fighting.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_03: And now with us in North America, they know that not only are our plant medicines pretty homogeneous across the continent, but our DNA, our human DNA, is pretty homogenous to cancer cards.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_03: So, like, okay, you guys say no, so we're gonna go get this from undocumented Mexicans because they're gonna get deported anyway.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_03: We'll take their DNA and then we have it forever.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_03: And we don't need First Nations or American Indian DNA because we got it from all these people in detention.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so they're doing that, they're collecting DNA from people that are being held in the detention centers.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_02: That's so fucked.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, in a related note, like, what do you do, for instance, like if you have a tribe that gave consent for something 30 years ago, whether it's some kind of data extraction, DNA genetics, uh, and now the technology has uh evolved, and so now we have the AI and you have new leadership in place uh that has and everything's changing, and it's it's not just like changing, like, and then it stops, like it's ongoing, it's a continuous change that that's evolving, right?
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_01: So if say a tribe that gave stuff away in some kind of agreement 30 years ago, do they have some kind of recourse now that the data uh and the technology has evolved?
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_01: And like shit, modern scientists, for instance, um have some kind of way to handle this as legacy data instead of saying, okay, this isn't this is new, but it's legacy, but we can grandfather it into the new and emerging uh policies and the new and emerging uh ways of of uh uh analyzing and extracting the data.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_01: So how how are tribes navigating this?
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_03: Not well.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_03: Um so there's there's three things there's hyper-individualization of consent, over reliance on informed consent, and this thing called secondary data use.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_03: So we've been me and my colleagues have been screaming about this since the 90s, um, especially with the tribes in the southwest, the the different OD nations, Pima, commonly known as Pima.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_03: Um, they started being sampled back in 1967 because they wanted to get recognized uh as a federally recognized tribe.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_03: And so anthropologists were down there and historians were down there, like, are these actually Mexicans?
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_03: Are these Indians?
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_03: Blah, blah, blah.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_03: And then it moved into um sort of the public health area, you know, testing for childhood diseases, influenza, measles, all that kind of stuff.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_03: And then it moved into the current uh sort of biomedical and genetic research.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_03: So it's like one of the biggest data sets for indigenous people in the Americas, right?
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_03: And they have such a high turnover rate in their tribal council and they don't remember what they consented to.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_03: And so, you know, back in the 90s, we're like, this is gonna be a problem.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_03: This is gonna be a problem in the future, real quick, because the tribe doesn't know that not only did they uh overrely on the informed consent of just the individuals and rather than tribal approval, but there's this secondary data use thing, which back before 2011 said you can only use data a second time if it's in line with the original consent and has to do with the original project.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_03: But after 2011, they changed all of that.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_03: The federal government said we can keep dead people in the data set.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_03: You used to have to get rid of dead people.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_03: You, if it's for an asthma study, you can use that same data for cancer.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_03: And now anybody can have access to it.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_03: Like all the rules changed in 2011.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_03: The tribe doesn't know that, tribes don't know that.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_03: So we knew that this was gonna be a problem a long time ago.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_03: But the United States, even now in the all of us program with Native American samples, say if they're on the reservation or they mention their tribal affiliation, we cannot collect their data.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_03: But if they come off to go to Chicago or Los Angeles or Oklahoma City, they're they're fair game because they're not in tribal jurisdiction anymore.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_03: And the only thing that we're going to do is not ask them what tribe they're from, and that'll make everything square.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_03: It doesn't because once you're in the program, they give you another form.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_03: It says a medical of release of information, so they can get all your medical records.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_03: And guess what it says in your medical records?
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_03: That was just your tribal affiliation.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_03: So there's all these little games they play, and and tribes, you know, that's why I keep saying, in terms of our movement, Indigenous data sovereignty or indigenous whatever, they the First Nations of Canada and the United States have a recognized sovereignty, their own legal jurisdiction, and all this immense power, but they don't have the numbers.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_03: We have the numbers.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_03: You know, depending on how you count, there's either 40, the official number is 45 million indigenous people left in Latin America.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_03: But if you go back to like 1996 or so, it's more like 250 million people left in Latin America.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_03: So there's only 638 million people in Latin America.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_03: I'm sure if you did a better count or census, the way that we would do it, where it's like, actually, there's 600 million indigenous people.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, but so that's what we need to we need to get the message out there.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_03: We need to say, like Curly said, we were here first, we're gonna be here after.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_03: All the stuff that you guys are making money on and have made money on in the past is ours.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_01: So so theoretically, if a tribe wanted to sue an entity, whether it's the government or it's some kind of company that's come in and extracted DNA or other resources, and you know, they say one thing, but then they end up doing something else, they could do so, but it's gonna take a lot of time and money and effort.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so most tribes don't have those kinds of resources.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not that they don't have a recourse to do so, it's just that it doesn't, it's not viable for any individual tribe to really do that.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_01: So uh, is it the case then that for instance?
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_01: Instance, I don't know if this is true, but that that your organization or something similar that exists out there could be like a a way, like a venue, uh of some kind of mechanism that can be employed for that purpose if necessary, given the funds and given the resources available.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so the last two or three weeks.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_03: So I was in, like I said, I was in Ottawa, Canada.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_03: I was in Cleveland for the Evolutionary Biology Conference, and then I had some uh non-native medical students here in person.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_03: In each of those cases, I made people cry.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_03: And this is what I keep telling them like, you can't do this through a legal mechanism, you can't do this through a treaty.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_03: What you have to do is have a bunch of scientists with the right ethos and mindset and heart not to do these things, right?
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_03: So if we're developing the technologies, whatever it is, nuclear power, uh genomic technology, AI, we're the ones building it.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_03: The scientists are, right?
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_03: Why do we have to submit to politicians and businessmen if we're the ones creating it?
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_03: We have to create an ethos in academia and scientists to say we're not gonna do crappy things to people.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_03: We're not gonna do that to people.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_03: And that's that's what I've been pitching the last month or so.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_03: It's like, you know, yeah, we can we can do something if we just kind of band together.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_03: But to your point, um, there are two stories, Havasupai versus uh border of regions of Arizona.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_03: Um and my opinion is that neither side wanted to give in, right?
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_03: They didn't want to lose that, so they settled out of court, right?
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_03: So the Havasupai were all sequenced for type 2 diabetes.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_03: Arizona State University's researchers and graduate students started doing Bering Strait stuff, they started doing schizophrenia, and they started doing inbreeding studies.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_03: The tribe found out they got mad, they sued for seven and a half million dollars.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_03: Took what?
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_03: 2004, 2010, six years to adjudicate that.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_03: They settled out of court for a tenth of that, like$750,000.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_03: It wasn't much.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_03: And the researchers and the researchers didn't really get punished at all.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_03: They complained that they got punished, but they all went off to go to different universities and have nice careers and are sitting on a beach right now.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_03: They weren't the but they complained, those Indians they ruined my career.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_03: I'm like, no, they didn't, you're fine.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_03: Anyway, they both sides, if so the things uh the way it works in the United States is if one tribe loses sovereignty, they all lose sovereign.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_03: So tribes are really careful when they do lawsuits because they know that if they lose, they lose it for all 573.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, 576 tribes.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_03: In the United States, it's the same thing.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_03: If we, if they if the tribe wins, that means we've given all of these tribes new sovereignty that we don't want to give them.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_03: So they settled out of court.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_03: But uh the Tulele tribe in Washington State back in 2022 did their own research on a biomolecule and they couldn't finish it, so they gave it to Stanford and said, here's$10 million, here's the molecule, finish it for us.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_03: And again, one of these wrinkles of legal language and policy is Stanford decided to take that molecule, create a synthetic version, and then use it under a synthetic patent license.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_03: The tribe found out about it and said, you can't do that.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_03: It's still our underhanded, man.
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_03: So they sued them.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, they had the right to sue them because it was the tribe, they're rich, right?
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_03: The tribe has a lot of money.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_03: We gave you$10 million to do this.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_03: You're a vendor.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_03: You are, you know, we're the customer, you're the vendor, you do it for us.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_03: We're in charge.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_03: Stanford's like, nah, we're not in charge, you're just a bunch of Indians.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_03: So they sued them and then they settled our courts of some undisclosed amount, but it's got to be a lot of money because uh everybody I know was trying to find out how much they settled for.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_03: And usually these things are public, like with Havasupai, but in this case, they're like, nobody say nothing.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_04: That's wild.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_02: That's really disheartening to hear all this.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for listening to part one of our interview with Joseph Iraceta.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_02: We hope you're enjoying it so far, and part two will be released next week, unless you are a Patreon supporter, in which case you already have access to the interview in its entirety.
• 51:37
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• 51:42
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• 51:51
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• 51:57
  SPEAKER_02: And until next time, remember the truth is like medicine.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't always taste good, but it is always good for you.