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In this column, please share any websites, articles, databases, or ideas that you think others might find useful!

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Layer it into an existing unit!

Consider what you already do, and find places to expand on that or add context

Provide a bit of context for what you are already teaching

Add a brief example of who, where, what this skill came from? Try to reach beyond the Western canon for these examples.

Find examples and context of contemporaries rather than just histories

Focus on celebration rather than victimization

Add a person of interest to experience, learn about, research, close read

Add career connections to provide an extension for what you are already teaching

Add a real world application to practice the skill / transfer learning

Open up an opportunity for students to bring in their own life experiences and knowledge

Provide opportunities for students to share their experiences with each other

Find ways to decenter your voice, and amplify BIPOC and Queer voices

To find a “text” to use for close reading:

Essay, book, paper, article

Comic, political cartoon, artwork

Film, video, documentary, etc

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Below, please share what you are going to do to incorporate a "mirror" in your next unit.

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Below, please share what you are going to do to incorporate a "window" in your next unit.

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Feel free to add anything that is coming up for you in this column. Questions, comments, concerns, worries, encouragements, ideas, whatever!

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Google Arts & Culture features content from over 2000 leading museums and archives who have partnered with the Google Cultural Institute to bring the world's treasures online.

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A required part of this site couldn’t load. This may be due to a browser extension, network issues, or browser settings. Please check your connection, disable any ad blockers, or try using a different browser.

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Young learners, ages 2 and up, can play and learn with 3,500+ interactive books, educational games, puzzles and other learning activities.

U.S. and U.K. census records and indexes, the Social Security Death Index, World War I draft registration cards, Civil War service records, immigration records and many more sources for genealogical research.

Ancestry is generously providing remote access to this site to CPL patrons through March 31, 2021.

Find eBooks from publishers including:

Arcadia Publishing/The History Press: Local history publishers exploring community identity through publications such as the Images of America series.

Chicago Review Press, an independent publisher that gives voice to new ideas.

Lawrence Hill Books, the Chicago Review Press imprint dedicated to publishing nonfiction on progressive politics, civil and human rights, feminism, and topics of interest to African Americans and other underrepresented groups.

Provided for Illinois residents by RAILS, Reaching Across Illinois Library System.

Biographies of more than half a million people from all periods of history and from every geographical region. Search for a specific person by name or use the Person Search to create lists of people based on nationality, ethnicity, occupation, gender or date of birth or death. Recommended for grades six and up.

Get help with your homework online from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily. Available in English and Spanish for early elementary through advanced college prep students in core subjects.

Get expert help with:

Writing assignments

Spanish homework

English as a second language lessons

Use test prep tools for the ACT/SAT.

Get personal feedback on your resume within 24 hours from an online writing coach.

Get help with Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint and Word, including resume templates.

Prep for the high school equivalency exam and the U.S. citizenship test.

Find information about City of Chicago services, request non-emergency services or report non-emergency issues.

ChiBizHub connects new and existing Chicago businesses to business resource providers.

Full text of the Chicago Examiner from 1908 to 1918.

Photographs from Chicago Public Library's special collections. View photos of Civil War artifacts, Millennium Park's construction, Mayor Harold Washington and Chicago neighborhoods. Search the Chicago Examiner newspaper and playbills from Chicago's early theaters.

Full text of more than 500 U.S. newspapers from 1836 to 1922. Chicago-area papers are The Broad Ax, an African American newspaper digitized from 1895 to 1922; The Day Book, E.W. Scripps' experiment in advertisement-free newspaper publishing digitized from 1911 to 1917 and The Chicago Eagle, a publication with a strong focus on municipal political affairs digitized from 1894 to 1920.

Information on countries and territories including customs, lifestyles and social conditions. Elementary school students, try the Kids Edition (which covers 78 countries), States Edition (which covers the 50 states) and Provinces Edition (which covers Canada's 13 provinces and territories). Find recipes from all countries as well as biographies of famous citizens. Photographs are available for some countries.

Encyclopedia articles in Spanish for teens and adults.

Encyclopædia Britannica is generously providing access to this site to CPL patrons through June 30, 2021.

Read current and back issues of over 25 magazines, including The Atlantic, Better Homes & Gardens, Bloomberg Businessweek, Ebony, Entertainment Weekly, Essence, Forbes, Fortune, Parents, People, Real Simple, Scientific American, Shape, Sports Illustrated and Time.

Find encyclopedia articles in a variety of subject areas from more than two hundred reference titles.

Access five resources on specific aspects of history:

Search all five at once or browse them individually. Each includes articles from reference works, primary sources, biographies, timelines, images, and maps, charts and tables. Recommended for grades six and up.

Access audiobooks, music, movies, television and eBooks.

Images for educational use.

Encyclopædia Britannica is generously providing access to this site to CPL patrons through June 30, 2021.

Lessons in 70+ languages, including English.

Find answers to health questions, including overviews of conditions and diseases, information on staying healthy, drug information and the latest news from the world of medicine. MedlinePlus in Spanish is also available.

Online version of the Physicians' Desk Reference, a drug information source for physicians and others who write prescriptions. For articles written for consumers/patients, consult the articles in the Drugs & Supplements section of MedlinePlus.

Read the latest issues of more than a hundred popular magazines, including Chicago Magazine, Cosmopolitan; The Economist; Good Housekeeping; National Geographic; O, The Oprah Magazine; Prevention; Reader's Digest and Vanidades.

Company directory and financial and investment information from numerous Standard & Poor's publications, including the Bond Guide, Industry Surveys, Register of Corporations, Directors and Executives, Security Dealers of North America and Stock Reports.

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Young learners, ages 2 and up, can play and learn with 3,500+ interactive books, educational games, puzzles and other learning activities. U.S. and U.K. census records and indexes, the Social Security Death Index, World War I draft registration cards, Civil War service records, immigration records and many more sources for genealogical research.

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A fully integrated database for high school containing thousands of curriculum-targeted primary documents, biographies, essays, critical analyses, full-text coverage of over 1,000 magazines, newspapers, photographs, illustrations, and audio.Teacher resource: Using Gale databases

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A fully integrated database for high school containing thousands of curriculum-targeted primary documents, biographies, essays, critical analyses, full-text coverage of over 1,000 magazines, newspapers, photographs, illustrations, and audio.Teacher resource: Using Gale databases

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* Bonds of Brass by Emily Skrutskie
* The Abyss Surrounds Us, also by Emily Skrutskie
* Blanca & Roja by Anne-Marie McLemore
* Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas
* Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi
* We Hunt the Flame by Hafsah Faizal
* Descendant of the Crane by Joan He
* Nocturna by Maya Montayne
* Wicked Fox by Kat Cho
* Son of the Storm by Suyi Davies Okungbowa
* The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin (but also anything by N.K. Jemisin)
And so many more!

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In chem, our students will look/collect data on lead in water samples in Chicago and compare the lead levels in different Chicago neighborhoods. After reviewing data, students will write a letter to Mayor Lightfoot voicing their concerns.

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We begin the unit looking at Flint, MI and Milwaukee, WI to problematize the gravity of lead contamination. This engages students to learn about mismanagement of water quality and its effects on black/brown communities.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/23/magazine/the-way-we-live-now-2-23-03-crash-course-ethnomathematics.html

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THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 2-23-03: CRASH COURSE

Mathematics is one academic subject that would seem to reside in a world of universality, protected from competing opinions by the objectivity of its laws. But the real universal law is that everything is relative, even in math. The release last month of a new math curriculum for New York City schools by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has elicited something just short of vituperation. Back-to-basics advocates denounce as ''fuzzy math'' its inclusion of so-called constructivist teaching techniques. Critics complain that those approaches encourage self-discovery and collaborative problem-solving at the expense of proved practices like memorization, repetition and mastery of algorithm.

It's all the latest in a century of American math wars. The previous generation can remember the struggle over ''new math'' during the 1950's and 60's. (''Hooray for new math,/New-hoo-hoo math!'' Tom Lehrer sang. ''It won't do you a bit of good to review math./It's so simple,/So very simple./That only a child can do it!'') Battles flared even earlier in the century over ''progressive'' agendas for math education of the type pushed by John Dewey.

How tame those struggles seem, however, when compared to the rising vanguard of self-described ethnomathematicians. For some, the new discipline just means studying the anthropology of various measurement methods; they merely want to supplement the accepted canon -- from Pythagoras to Euclid to Newton -- with mind-expanding explorations of mathematical ideas from other cultures. For others, however, ethnomathematics is an effort to supplant the tyranny of Western mathematical standards.

The Postulates

Ethnomathematics has a few parents, but most observers trace its formal birth to a speech given by the Brazilian mathematician Ubiratan D'Ambrosio in the mid-1980's. Now an emeritus professor of math at the State University of Campinas outside S-o Paulo, he explained his thinking a couple of years ago to The Chronicle of Higher Education: ''Mathematics is absolutely integrated with Western civilization, which conquered and dominated the entire world. The only possibility of building up a planetary civilization depends on restoring the dignity of the losers.'' Robert N. Proctor, who teaches the history of science at Pennsylvania State University, says he wants to counter the notion ''that the West is the be all and end all'' when it comes to mathematical studies. ''After all,'' he adds, ''all math is ethnomath -- not just African kinship numerics or Peruvian bead counting, but also the C.I.A.'s number-crunching cryptology and Reaganomics.''

To redress their pedagogical grievances, these ethnomathematicians want math curriculums that place greater emphasis on the systems of previous civilizations and certain traditional cultures. Studies of state civilizations might focus on Chinese or Arabic math concepts. One study, for example, has shown how the Chinese Chu Shih-chieh triangle anticipated by more than three centuries the highly similar arrangement of numerals by Pascal that holds sway in many Western teachings of probability theory.

In her seminal books ''Ethnomathematics'' and ''Mathematics Elsewhere,'' Marcia Ascher, emerita professor of mathematics at Ithaca College, chronicles the astonishingly complex data-storage systems embedded in quipu, bundles of cotton cord knotted by Incans according to a sophisticated base-10 numeration system. At a more quotidian level, Ron Eglash of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has written and taught extensively about the nuances of fractals, or repeating patterns, that can be found in certain African craft work. (Eglash stresses a distinction between simple-minded multicultural math -- ''which merely replaces Dick and Jane counting marbles with Tatuk and Esteban counting coconuts'' -- and what he calls the ''deep design themes'' that represent mature, developed mathematical systems too often ignored in the study of many societies.)

What Its Critics Fear

Some of this is just fine, says David Klein, a professor of mathematics with California State University at Northridge. Klein (a self-described liberal who insists on separating his academic critique from any connection to a conservative political agenda) says the danger lies in allowing such precepts to crowd out fundaments on which modernity is based. He argues that the statistically lower achievements of some female and minority math students have resulted in an overreaction that doesn't serve their interests. ''The practical effect,'' Klein says, ''has been watered-down math books that overemphasize inductive reasoning (like continuing visual patterns), because this is supposed to be good for women and minorities, and de-emphasizing deductive reasoning and mathematical proofs, which is the heart of mathematics, because that supposedly favors white males.

''But mathematics is a worldwide monoculture. Look at the chalkboards in math departments at universities all around the world -- in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America. You will see the same symbols everywhere you go on this planet, except perhaps in colleges of education where fads reign supreme.'' Klein says he does spend some class time discussing the math of Mayans, Egyptians and other early civilizations. ''But ancient techniques and early discoveries in math will not take students very far who want to do something in the modern world with mathematics,'' he says.

Will It Pass?

Some proponents argue that whatever the freestanding authenticity of the cross-discipline, it is useful as a carrot to attract indifferent students. Philip Straffin, who has been teaching the popular ''Cultural Approaches to Mathematics'' at Beloit College for about 10 years, says that the lectures lure a mix of teachers in training and art students: ''Every time we give this course, there are twice as many students who want to take it as we have room for.'' As long as such developments complement and enhance rather than take time from and substitute for other mathematics learning, Judith Grabiner, who teaches at Pitzer College, says they are a plus. ''I don't want people teaching students that Mohammed ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi gave a systematic treatment of quadratic equations in the 10th century instead of learning how to solve quadratic equations,'' she says. ''But that's a false choice. Putting the math in its cultural context helps teach the mathematics and makes it more meaningful to students, since it has a human context.''

Indeed, those who think this threatens to spawn a brave new world of mathematical correctness might search their memories to recall if they didn't have a fourth- or fifth-grade teacher who brought an abacus to class.

Calculating Cultural Impact

From 'Ethnomathematics: A Multicultural View of Mathematical Ideas,' by Marcia Ascher

For mathematics, however, there has been a long philosophical debate on the reality of the objects it studies. Is a square something that has external reality or is it something only in our minds? . . . The relationship between the length of the hypotenuse and lengths of the sides of a right triangle is an eternal truth, but that does not mean that any other culture need share the categories triangle, right triangle, hypotenuse. . . . A critical issue is that, as it stands, much of mathematics education depends upon assumptions of Western culture and carries with it Western values. Those with other traditions are, as a result, often turned away by the subject or unsuccessful in learning it. And, for them, the process of learning mathematics, particularly when unsuccessful -- but even when successful -- can be personally debilitating as it detracts from and conflicts with their own cultural traditions. . . . [In] the United States, the concern has been stimulated by the realization that our educational approaches have yet to come to grips with the fact that we ourselves are a multicultural society.''

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THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 2-23-03: CRASH COURSE; Ethnomathematics (Published 2003)

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Dirk Olin article explores culture clash surrounding teaching of mathematics, as New York City's new curriculum comes under fire; ethnomathematics is study of various measurement methods, supplementing accepted canon of Pythagoras and Euclid with explorations from other cultures; critics say it is effort to supplant Western mathematical standards; photos; list of bibliographical resources (M)

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In economics, the students submitted their personal questions revolving around taxes which I am using the guide the content of the course.

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In economics, the students final project will be completing a tax return for their own personal situation both by hand and by using tax software and comparing their results.

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https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/the-text-disrupters

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The #DisruptTexts Twitter chat isn't afraid to put classic texts in the hot seat. The titles addressed would ring familiar to most students, past and present: Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Crucible. As educators discuss how best to teach (or not teach) these books in week-long Twitter chats, one title at a time, they call out the perils of a K-12 literary curriculum long set in stone.

All children deserve to see themselves and their experiences reflected in books, but too many students, especially students of color, are denied such opportunities. White-authored "classics" still dominate the top 10 most-read lists for high schoolers, according to research from assessment company Renaissance Learning. What's more, diverse literary perspectives face a multitude of challenges to exposure. Of the 416 books flagged for questionable content in schools and libraries in 2017, the American Library Association's Top Ten Most Challenged Books list includes titles by black authors (Angie Thomas's The Hate U Give) and books that discuss Islam ( The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini) and LGBTQ experiences ( George by Alex Gino).

For decades, scholars have decried the harmful disconnect between young, diverse readers and the mostly white, middle-class, straight, and able-bodied characters and storytellers they engage with in the classroom. In her 1990s essay "Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors," scholar Rudine Sims Bishop wrote that when students see images of themselves that are absent, negative, or distorted, "they learn a powerful lesson about how they are devalued in the society."

Decolonize the Curriculum

The founders of the #DisruptTexts movement-English educators Tricia Ebarvia, Lorena Germán, Kim Parker, and Julia Torres-offer a new set of tools to create a more equitable ELA curriculum through recurring chats and a crowdsourced website of resources. They started the hashtag in 2018 to center perspectives of marginalized voices, especially people of color, in student literature. They now present on #DisruptTexts at gatherings such as the National Council of Teachers of English conference and Teachers College's Social Justice Saturday.

"We have a lot of power over what and who we bring into the classroom," said Ebarvia. "Collectively, we have an opportunity to make real change."

The benefits of disruption are wide-ranging: Research has shown that diverse literature reduces stereotypes and increases empathy, global awareness, and academic performance among all students. Absent districtwide shifts in curriculum, teachers can choose which books to highlight and how to frame literary discussions to better reflect the needs and experiences of every student.

Individual awareness is the first step to challenge traditional, whitewashed pedagogy and prevent damaging experiences for readers of color. The #DisruptTexts model asks teachers to audit their personal and classroom reading experiences:

What experiences have shaped and limited your ideas about race, culture, gender, and power?

How inclusive are the books and media you consume personally and professionally?

How inclusive are your class discussions and curricula?

Teachers can then employ two main levers of disruption: the diversity of the texts they choose and the critical pedagogy they use to guide students' engagement with the texts. That might mean using pairings and counternarratives to champion missing voices or replacing texts with alternative titles. Last year's #DisruptTexts chat about The Great Gatsby suggested teaching the text alongside Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me, Harlem Renaissance poetry, and the film Beasts of the Southern Wild.

Empower Students

Any text is prime for disruption, but the movement's founders caution that it isn't just about replacing older texts with newer ones-it's a professional responsibility to both focus on marginalized voices and develop students' critical literacy skills to question the status quo.

Parker works with preservice teachers in Massachusetts to design inclusive units, thinking critically about how to teach about Christopher Columbus using voices of American Indian scholars like Debbie Reese. Ebarvia, who teaches at Conestoga High School near Philadelphia, asks her students to examine national identity in novels like The Things They Carried. In an account of the Vietnam War, why do they hear military voices but not Vietnamese or civilian ones?

To frame discussions of any book, educators should think about the following questions alongside students:

In what ways might a text present problems related to equity and representation?

How do the disruptive texts and multimedia stand with or against the traditionally taught text?

Whether her students devour The Poet X or Othello, Torres-who teaches in a predominantly black public high school in Denver with majority-white colleagues-always keeps in mind: How is this story empowering or disenfranchising students?

"As educators of color, this work is something we do as a means of survival," said Torres, a teacher librarian. "All of us teach in different environments, but all of us have the experience of going to school and not reading stories that reflected our cultural and linguistic realities and beliefs. It was very natural for us to want to create a better experience for our students-helping them reclaim what has been stolen from them."

Lean into Discomfort

#DisruptTexts isn't the only social media movement working to address holes in ELA curricula. Joel Garza, the cofounder of #THEBOOKCHAT, uses his chats to create "units in a box" for titles like There There by Tommy Orange, a novel that investigates American Indian identity.

"Whether it's #DisruptTexts or #APLitChat or #TeachLivingPoets, these self-selecting groups are reading deliberately and tweeting naked," said Garza. "You don't recognize how siloed you've been until you reach out on social media."

Educators can use these online resources to track harmful patterns that might influence their approach to disruption, such as depictions of diverse characters only as victims of violence. Pernille Ripp, founder of Global Read Aloud, uses sources like #DisruptTexts, #WeNeedDiverseBooks, and Teaching Tolerance to consistently check in with her curricular choices. An audit of a book's themes and messages is just as important as title and author choices. Ripp once heard a 7th grader ask, "Why are the books that look like me always about slavery or civil rights?"

"If the only books we're sharing are about basketball and brutality, then it's no better, because those aren't the only stories out there," Ripp said. "Look at the small details: What kind of experiences are you creating for students?"

But challenging a school's literary choices can be uncomfortable for some educators. In a profession where 80 percent of teachers are white, it's easy to default to the dominant discourse. That's why long-term disruption, according to Torres, will require shifts throughout departments and in professional development, not just isolated action. Part of that work involves white educators confronting both their whiteness and schools' unequal balance of race and power.

"Educators are really good at having conversations and sometimes not as good about pushing back," said Torres. "This canon has been so calcified and white for so long and remains for a lot of reasons. What I will trust more than anything is when children say, 'My year was completely different.'"

Disrupt for the Next Generation

Germán, who works at Headwaters School in Austin, Tex., has seen disruptive literacy conversations begin to change school culture. Many of her high school students weren't used to talking about race, bias, and privilege. Now they call each other out on problematic behavior and language and bring up diversity issues at soccer practice, in student council, and in other classes.

That the school is undergoing an inclusive climate assessment and just hired a black male administrator isn't a coincidence, said Germán. She believes the changes correlate directly to the growth of students.

"If things proceed as they have been always, a lot of my students are going to be the folks in power," said Germán. "How do you continue to teach the same thing when our society and demographics have changed? This is where real life and fiction intersect."

This story has been updated to better reflect Headwaters School's efforts.

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The #DisruptTexts Twitter chat isn't afraid to put classic texts in the hot seat. The titles addressed would ring familiar to most students, past and present: Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Crucible.

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For the math Internal Assessment (IA), students will create their surveys to give to their fellow classmates and will collect their own data.

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For the math Internal Assessment (IA), students will create their surveys to give to their fellow classmates and will collect their own data.

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I'm going to incorporate more of the history behind the mathematical ideas/equations we'll be covering in our upcoming mathematics unit.

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This is a model of linear and quadratic functions but it takes place in Hawaii.

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Contemporary BIPOC scientists decolonizing DNA

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Contemporary BIPOC scientists decolonizing DNA

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In an upcoming genetics unit, I am going to include articles that feature Indigenous scientist voices.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/bioethics-crispr-indigenous-genome/

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When scientists set out to sequence the entire human genome in 1990, it was considered an undertaking on par with splitting the atom or landing on the Moon. They finished in 2003, two years ahead of schedule. Within another 10 years, researchers had harnessed a biological tool called CRISPR-Cas9 to "edit" human genes. And just three years after that, Chinese scientists deployed the same gene-editing tool in an experimental treatment for lung cancer.

Our understanding of human DNA has progressed at breakneck speed, revolutionizing forensics, revealing our ancestral connections, and launching the field of medical genetics. And with the advent of CRISPR, highly targeted gene editing has become possible. The implications are tremendous.

But as the science races forward, once-hypothetical ethical concerns are quickly becoming reality. In 2018, Chinese researcher He Jiankui shocked the world when he announced the birth of twin girls from embryos that had been gene edited in an attempt to make them immune to HIV. Though He and two of his colleagues were widely condemned and sentenced to prison, other "rogue" scientists could still follow suit.

"That should not have happened; it just shouldn't have," says geneticist-bioethicist Krystal Tsosie of Vanderbilt University. Like so many scientists, Tsosie advocates for a pause on germline editing-making genetic modifications that are passed on to a person's offspring-at least long enough for society to ask itself some essential questions. What are we aiming for when we seek to edit life? What makes a human being "normal," "healthy," or "ideal," and who gets to decide what that means?

NOVA spoke with Tsosie, who is an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation, about how Indigenous culture, gene editing, and bioethics converge, and what it might take to #DecolonizeDNA.
Alissa Greenberg: Were you always interested in science and genetics? What drew you to this area of study?
Krystal Tsosie: When you're Navajo in particular, there aren't that many Indigenous people or Native Americans in the education pipeline and higher education. So of the higher degrees that were encouraged from people like myself growing up, either you were encouraged to become a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, or an educator. And I was on the route of becoming a physician. I just loved understanding what it was that caused disease.

I was actually starting off in the cancer biology track, but there was a point in time where I realized if I wanted to pursue a career in cancer biology, that I would encounter the dilemma of, how do I innovate technologies that would not benefit my people? Because even if in my lifetime I were to develop something that could help somebody with cancer, chances are that...it wouldn't be applied in a rural tribal clinic setting. Like, how can I deal with the guilt of undergoing several years of education and research and not have it benefit my people?

So I returned to Arizona State University and did a master's in bioethics. It was an interesting time because they were dealing with the aftereffects of the Havasupai case and that fiasco.

Havasu Falls, on the Havasupai Indian Reservation, near the Grand Canyon in Arizona. The Havasupai name means "people of the blue-green water." Image Credit: Frank Kehren, Flickr

AG: Can you say more about that case and what made it a fiasco?
KT: In the early 2000s an ASU researcher was doing work related to Type 2 diabetes markers in the Havasupai Nation. The Havasupai people are geographically isolated at the base of the Grand Canyon. And they collected blood samples from individuals and ended up using them to study other things besides diabetes, such as schizophrenia, which is a charged condition, and also started publishing their origins-stories that didn't quite match their own cultural stories because they themselves believe that they originated in the base of the Grand Canyon.

This was in combination with a lot of other discussions that were ongoing in global Indigenous communities. As of now, for instance, the Navajo Nation has a moratorium on genetic research, as do a number of tribes in the U.S. I'm not sure if you're familiar with UNDRIP, which is the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; it was a response to just the number of large-scale diversity genome projects that were ongoing in Indigenous communities, particularly in Central and South America. Over 600-plus tribal nations around the world went to the United Nations to ask them to stop these genome diversity projects.

In particular, the National Genographic Project was denounced as a "vampire project" because they would helicopter in, collect blood samples, promise medical interventions that would help these communities, but they hadn't really returned. So kind of like vampires in the night coming and taking the blood-that's where that imagery comes from.

And if you look at, for instance, the 1000 Genomes Projects or the Human Genome Diversity Project, these are two major large-scale diversity projects that have made their information openly accessible to researchers worldwide. It was an effort to sort of democratize research, but what has happened is that a number of major companies have utilized that information to develop commercial platforms such as AncestryDNA. There is a huge interest in collecting Indigenous biomarkers, and there's a profit component there. The fact is that non-Indigenous entities are deriving revenue from Indigenous biomarkers, and at this point that hasn't really translated to medical benefits to the people that have actually contributed that information.

There's a level of expertise that has needed to be developed locally for Indigenous peoples to make these decisions for themselves, to self-determine. And we're starting to get to that point because now we have more Indigenous scientists. But there still aren't that many of us.

AG: In your Twitter bio you use the phrase "Decolonize DNA." I'm curious what that phrase means to you. Is that related?

KT: To decolonize DNA is not anti-science, and it's not a rewriting of the fundamentals of DNA. One thing I always say is that Indigenous peoples are not anti-science; we're anti-exploitation. Science, as much as we like to idealize it, is not purely objective. There's subjectivity in the types of questions that we choose to pursue, the types of questions our agencies fund. And then also the decisions that we make in terms of who to include and who not to include in studies also creates subjectivity. And also how those results are interpreted. Because if they don't properly take into account all the historical societal factors at play, then we are ignoring some key, potentially colonial factors that relate to health.
AG: Do you have an example that might illustrate that idea?
KT: Not everything is genetically mediated that causes disease. But it's easy to think in those terms because that's probably the easiest bit of information to collect that relates to disease-the biological factors. But disease is complex. There's gene-environmental interactions that are at play. We know that socioeconomic factors play a huge role in disease.

Alcoholism is something that's really charged and is an example. There have been over 230-plus publications in PubMed alone that try to look to see why Native Americans are supposedly genetically at greater risk for alcoholism. But then that totally ignores the history of harm that has been perpetrated upon us, the lack of mental health and preventative-health measures, the lack of social programs for treatment of alcoholism. That's a perfect example of how skipping directly toward DNA as a cause for everything is potentially harmful and could lead to exacerbating negative stereotypes of a people.

CRISPR-Cas9 is a tool that lets scientists cut and insert small pieces of DNA at precise areas along a DNA strand. | Image Credit: Ernesto del Aguila III, National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH

Type 2 diabetes has been heavily studied in Indigenous peoples in the southwest and also in American Samoa. And a huge portion of this narrative for a long period of genetic history has been that we are genetically predisposed to this disease. But this disease didn't exist in our communities until very recently. So there's these other factors like a forced diet that was imposed upon us; forcible change to our ways of living and our ways of providing food for ourselves; a removal of our lands that doesn't allow us to pursue our traditional forms of agriculture; an imposition of a westernized form of diet. These are like actual contributors of health that are being overly conflated with genetics, when in reality there could be other social, cultural, colonial factors at play.
AG: How would you apply this idea of decolonizing DNA to CRISPR?
KT: We have to be really careful that we're not overly simplifying our narratives related to evolutionary adaptation and mutations. Like, the term "mutation" is one that's not really well understood. A mutation is meant to be a change in the genetic code that differs from normal. But then what exactly is normal? The term that a number of us use is "polymorphism," which is a common variation that's existent in at least 1% of the population. And even this is problematic because right now, even with our efforts to diversify genome studies, over 81% of participants in genome-wide association studies are of European descent. When we're talking about genome diversity, a mutation or a polymorphism might be an evolutionary adaptation for a certain group of people in response to certain environmental conditions, and it could be protective in some cases. We don't have enough information about whether or not it's adaptive in different conditions for different populations.

I'm also really concerned about using germline editing as a solution for defining what constitutes a normal human being. These evaluating judgments ignore the rights of those with disabilities. It presents disability as something that must be corrected, when in reality, millions of people with a spectrum of conditions live healthy, fulfilling lives. That's something that I really am proud to see in the autism spectrum community, a cognizance that what we call "normal" should probably be changed. I also love and appreciate Down syndrome patients who are really advocating for their rights to live with their own agency and autonomy as adults. Like, what is this ideal that people are looking for? That is what I want to ask people who are such advocates of using this technology in living human beings. What is the ideal? Is there one?
AG: You write frequently about biocolonialism. Is this what you mean?
KT: I use it in the context of commercial exploitation of biomarkers. To other Indigenous studies scholars, biocolonialism can also mean the forcible introduction of genetic variation that negatively impacts us. So, for instance, this could be introducing diseases that didn't really exist in our communities. It could also mean changing our reproductive dynamics through genocidal acts.
AG: Can you explain that a little more?
KT: Basically a lot of population genetics is statistical. There's a lot of assumptions at play there; one of the assumptions is that humans meet randomly. But things like genocide are non-random events. There are some disorders that are recessive gene mutations that can be prevalent in Indigenous communities and are probably more so now, post-genocidal events, just because a huge portion of the population is now not reproducing. I'm trying not to say just "dead," but...yeah. Dead.

Researchers decoding the cassava genome. Scientists have used CRISPR-Cas9 to edit the genes of agricultural crops including tomatoes, citrus fruit, cacao, and more. Image Credit: 2013CIAT/NeilPalmer, Flickr

AG: So how do we do better? I read one of your papers in which you and your coauthors are talking about principles for ethical engagement in genomic research. Can you talk a little about those?

You want to be able to acknowledge that the participants involved in studies have knowledge and experiences that are informative and valuable and therefore should be included in the research process-particularly if there are risks and benefits that are going to be affecting them and not outside communities.

And this is just a way of stating that if you are going to be collecting biomarkers that not only identify an individual, but also have an effect on the community, then you really should be rethinking these ethical questions-not just at the individual level, but at the group level. In Western ethics, a lot of the questions of whether the benefits outweigh the risks are centered on the individual. But in reality, especially when it's related to DNA-and DNA is something that's inherited and shared by members of a similar group-then really that question should be applied to everyone in that community.
AG: You talk about the importance of cultural consistency in ethical genomics practice as well. What does that term mean? Why is it important?
KT: First, we have to acknowledge that there are thousands of Indigenous communities around the world and each one has their own cultural ethic. So what one community might decide is within their culture ethic may not be the same as a different community. And so when we work with Indigenous communities, one of the things we want to ensure is not only is this research beneficial to them, and potentially outweighs the risks-but also, are we ensuring that the research is a question that they're culturally comfortable with, that isn't going to impede or infringe on existing cultural beliefs?

I'll give the example of migration stories. Many tribes along the Pacific Coast might be more amenable toward looking at population evolution involving their community, because they already have a creation story that states that they came from peoples that traveled from a distance. So they might look to genetics as a possible means of bridging their cultural knowledge with this genetic knowledge. Whereas with other groups, like the Havasupai, who believe they originated at the base of the Grand Canyon, these other narratives might be culturally conflicting.

* There is no way to ethically procure a full picture of global migration based on DNA without the explicit consent of Indigenous communities....What we think we know about global migration from DNA is still informed by archaeological, cultural, and linguistic data that may be misinterpreted or siloed within Western constructs and biases of history-and may itself be subject to scrutiny for pilfering of sacred sites and knowledge that have venerated meaning for Indigenous communities and descendants today.
AG: What does it mean to you as an Indigenous geneticist that the foundations of this area of study, and of STEM in general, are so profoundly white and male? How do you balance giving this technological power to the people and keeping it for people who have been educated about it, when there's fundamental inequalities around who gets to be educated and what they learn?
KT: This notion of prioritizing wisdom is a colonial concept. In our communities, until very recently, we didn't have Ph.D.s. We revered our elders and the wisdom that they conferred to us, which was derived from their cultural teachings and also their lived experiences. And we can't discount that. We can't just come into a community and say, "Oh, I have this Ph.D." That's meaningless. And that's gonna require a humbling of the patriarchy that is in science currently.

And just as a distinct statement, I really wish that as much money as we are pushing on precision medicine initiatives in this country, I wish we could just allocate some of that money to preventative health. There was an editorial cartoon in one of our tribal newspapers. It's a skeleton waiting in an Indian Health Services clinic. It just says "Waiting room, IHS." And it's true. Like, how can we talk about the next advances in precision medicine when we don't even have enough clinics in our tribal communities and also in our Black neighborhoods? If there's anything that COVID has shown us, it's that there are huge inequities in healthcare. These are huge structural barriers that exist relating to inequitable access to healthcare clinics and preventative health. As much as I find these questions related to new emerging technologies to be fascinating, we still have the fundamental challenge of just giving healthcare to people! I wish we could acknowledge that more.
AG: What would it take to use technologies like CRISPR ethically in your opinion?
KT: Personally, I think CRISPR can be a powerful tool as it exists in many laboratories. But there's a huge gap between the rate of technological advances and also how we discuss the ethical implication of those advances. We need to pause, is really my viewpoint. We need to really ask ourselves: What are the steps at which this technology can be exploited? And then how do we create guidelines to prevent that exploitation?

What I'm specifically talking about is germline editing. There's just so much we don't understand about the genome. There's concerns about off-target effects. That basically means that the CRISPR system could have an effect on other genetic locations than what we originally intended. That speaks to the fact that there are genetic repeats throughout the genome that could be very similar, that we don't quite have full information about.

There are also what's called "bystander effects," in which we don't fully understand how the body's normal base editing repair mechanisms act, because they don't always act in a perfect way; they're very error-prone. They can introduce mutations that we don't intend. They can introduce multiple mutations at the site that maybe we intended but might have a different effect. We don't know the effect on how those cell-repair mechanisms might affect the protein's overall function and how that change to the protein might have an effect on biological pathways, which are very complex. And then there's the simple fact that, even if it affects the one offspring, there's other future downstream changes and effects that future offspring have to contend with.

We haven't really spent the ethical time discussing those questions. And at this point in time, we still know very little about the genome. For instance, people who are of non-European descent, what their genomes might look like, or about gene-environment interactions. Until we have the full picture of what this could potentially look like in a live human being, I think we should pause.
AG: What do you think is missing from the conversations or ethical debates? Is there anything else that you feel like people aren't talking about that they should be talking about?
KT: What this means for communities that are historically left out of these conversations. What this means for individuals who have disabilities. What it means socially and culturally as a society when we make a standard of "normal."

It does lend itself to a eugenics discussion. It's not a slippery slope argument because that argument is kind of a fallacy. There are intermediary steps that get you from point A to point Z, but we have to account for all those intermediary steps.
AG: The "slippery slope argument" that you probably hear the most in this context is designer babies. What do you make of the people who say if we keep going the way we're going, that's going to become standard?
KT: This is why I advocate for a pause, anticipating these situations beforehand so that we can put regulations in place to prevent those situations.
AG: So that's the important thing, that if we're thoughtful enough about this, then it doesn't have to be a slippery slope? We can get some traction, basically?
KT: Exactly.

*Tsosie added later via email
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
An Indigenous bioethicist on CRISPR and decolonizing DNA

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When scientists set out to sequence the entire human genome in 1990, it was considered an undertaking on par with splitting the atom or landing on the Moon. They finished in 2003, two years ahead of schedule. Within another 10 years, researchers had harnessed a biological tool called CRISPR-Cas9 to "edit" human genes.

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Students will be doing a research project on their health triangle - social, mental, physical based on completing a health inventory. I will be sending students through the school website to the media center to do their research, rather than just telling them to Google stuff.

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Students discuss and identify issues in the community that are important and relevant to  themselves and their families (ie. gun violence, police reform, pollution, etc) to research policy.

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Electronic Music: Before moving to the next unit, we are having students self-identify items that they believed worked well for them and areas they would like to improve on in the next semester.

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Use Chicago maps instead of global maps to visually display economic gaps, public transit, life expectancy and allow students to make connections to development concepts and theories

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We'll check out other student exhibitions to glean ideas and make comparisions with our own interests and experiences

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Students look at US/Mexico recession data (2008 and/or 2020), and zero in on their own communities.

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Students explore various perspectives (and political bias) of their selected policy to understand impact and implications beyond their immediate community.

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Students look at Japan & Canada recession data (2008 and/or 2020), and compare/contrast.

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Choir: The ideal stance for a singer is different than posture used in day-to-day life. We are asking students how they hold themselves in different situations before having everyone model, and recognize, posture to use in choir.

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Students will identify an "issue" or subject matter relevant to their life that they feel like is not heard. Using found data to back up their claim, students will design a representation of the data to bring validity to their cause.