Reddit reviews Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science

Mods: I'm not Native but I found these books immensely helpful when I had the same questions over the years. Please delete if this if it's not allowed.

If you want to know about America's indigenous people, go to the source. I suggest avoiding books written by non-Natives, although there are of course special exceptions. This is because history, research, and literature by non-Natives tends to have an underlying motive heavy with inaccuracies or romanticism. It's also written from a Eurocentricm perspective where European culture is the standard against which difference is measured. There is an excellent post over on /r/AskHistorians that breaks the difference down at length, which illustrates why these texts are often not representative of the people they're discussing. In particular, an indigenous perspective "places the emphasis of understanding on the actual relationship between two things" whereas a non-Native emphasizes the "understanding on the actual object rather than the relationship." The distinction is important and, in my experience, it's been difficult not to see the faults in non-Native written information afterward.

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States for Young People is a really good place to start. Yes, it's written for young folks, however, it doesn't dress up American history and instead presents it as is. You can use this book as a springboard for other topics. A lot of American history books present a cleaned up narrative that glosses over the human atrocities in favor of "unity." You see this jargon time and time again, even recently. So You Want to Write About American Indians? is also excellent, even if you're not a writer because she breaks down many of the self serving reasons behind non-Natives' discussions of Native America. And Custer Died for Your Sins is a classic in this discussion. This book was probably the most instrumental in peeling the romanticism away from my worldview. The chapter Anthropologists and Other Friends is an honest, raw, and direct dressing-down of non-Natives "studying" Native populations. And Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science has been one of the foremost books I've read (aside from the first one I linked) that dismantled my understanding of history and colonized misconceptions we take as fact when it comes to the social and historical misrepresentations of cultural, racial, ethnic, and national ideas of America's indigenous peoples. All of these items were written by indigenous people, from varying different cultural backgrounds and tribes. There are over 560 different federally recognized tribes, and they all have their own cultural backgrounds, languages, and history. Everyone is different. Try and be mindful of that when it's otherwise easy to say, "Native Americans believe that/Native American beliefs say/etc/etc."

The critique is that science and society are mutually constitutive; science and technology are actively entangled with social norms and hierarchies, despite the dominant view of science as an objective field of study that's somehow removed from legacies of racist science and colonialism. Kim Tallbear breaks it down well in her intro to Native American DNA.