Inventing the Thrifty Gene: The Science of Settler Colonialism (book review)

By Samir Shaheen-Hussain

The “thrifty gene” has a decades-long history that can be traced back to James V. Neel, an American physician-scientist, considered by many in his field as the “father of modern human genetics” [90]. Neel expounded his hypothesis in 1962 by proposing that such a gene would have emerged in hunter-gatherer societies as an adaptive response to a feast-and-famine lifestyle [2], but that it would have detrimental effects if food scarcity was eliminated. His idea was based on the assumption that “Indigenous bodies were genetically predisposed to diabetes, obesity, and other metabolic syndromes because of the foodways of their ancestors” [1-2], and relied on the now widely discredited “myth of forager food insecurity” [14-15, 146]. Neel’s own quest to discover the thrifty gene led him to conduct questionable studies on Indigenous populations in Brazil and Venezuela throughout the 1960s [2, 86-97]. In 1989, Neel sought to bury his own idea, writing that “the data on which that (rather soft) hypothesis was based has now largely collapsed” [100].

Yet, in 1999, Canadian scientists working with the Sandy Lake First Nation to address increasing rates of diabetes-related complications in the northern Ontario community announced to great fanfare that they had identified a genetic variant that “certainly had all the earmarks of what a thrifty gene would be” [136, 141]. Critics, including Indigenous scholars [144-5], questioned the layers of flawed premises upon which their conclusions rested and highlighted how they diverted attention away from the impacts of decades of colonial policies on Indigenous food sovereignty and mobility. Several years later, the lead authors of the study backtracked on their findings: there was no thrifty gene to be found [145-6].

This is the history that Travis Hay compellingly develops in Inventing the Thrifty Gene: The Science of Settler Colonialism. The persistence of the thrifty gene hypothesis to this day is itself reflective of the enduring consequences of the science of settler colonialism [19, 137, 149, 152].

Central to Travis Hay’s book is the concept of the “science of settler colonialism”, which he breaks down into three steps [1, 135]:  

1. Indigenous people are subjected to traumatizing federal policies, oftentimes with the input or active involvement of settler scientists.
2. Settler scientists go on research trips to document the impacts of such interventions.
3. Settler scientists assemble and interpret the resulting data in ways that blame Indigenous peoples for the poor health outcomes that have been imposed on them.

This book is intended for a general audience, and Hay readily captures the reader’s attention in the introduction. The first four chapters are meant to historically contextualize the development of the thrifty gene hypothesis as an outgrowth of anti-Indigenous racist Victorian tropes. They analyze the lives and work of influential individuals who shaped how colonialism was deployed globally (e.g., Charles Darwin, James V. Neel) as well as in the Canadian context (e.g., Francis Bond Head, Peter H. Bryce, Duncan Campbell Scott, E. L. Stone, Percy E. Moore). The book’s last two chapters focus on resistance against colonial healthcare policies by Anishinaabe communities in northern Ontario and the “curious afterlife” of the thrifty gene in the 1990s stemming from research done by Canadian medical scientists.

While one can appreciate Hay’s motivation to subject scientists and medical professionals to “a similarly intensive and even invasive form of diagnostic analysis to which they subjected Indigenous peoples” [3], he occasionally overstates his case.

For example, Hay takes several pages to assert that Neel “was driven by a psyche shaped by symbolic separations from masculinity and a desire to reconnect with an elusive masculine essence” [97], and that this “neurotic need” could be explained by Neel’s father dying when he was still a child or Neel spending the Second World War as a private in medical school instead of armed combat [80, 105-6]. Hay’s focus on two life experiences, which he himself describes as “speculative and psychoanalytical” [79], unintentionally distracts the reader from the expansive life choices that were available to powerful white men in the service of colonialism through overarching systems of domination like patriarchy and white supremacy.

I agree, though, with Hay that “as the chief administrative overseer of the health services available to Status Indians between 1945 and 1965”, Ontario-born Percy E. Moore was “guilty of orchestrating a genocidal project” [71]. As director of Indian and Northern Health service programs [61], Moore played a key role in several initiatives, including nutritional experiments conducted on Indigenous children in several residential schools across Canada [65, 71] and the bureaucratization of the segregated Indian hospital system [63]. Hay’s comparisons, however, to Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele [71-72] are unnecessary. Moreover, making a parallel between Moore “arranging train schedules and shipments of rats in the midst of an ongoing genocide” [71] as part of rat-starvation experiments run in residential schools [67] and Eichmann organizing “train schedules, mass deportations, and other activities central to the genocide of Jewish peoples in Europe” [71] evokes a false equivalency.

On a related note, in the section subtitled “Dr. Bryce and the ‘Final Solution’”, Hay reproduces a quotation, widely used over the last two decades by respected authors and journalists, attributed to Duncan Campbell Scott (appointed deputy superintendent general of Indian Affairs in 1913):

“But this does not justify a change in the policy of this Department, which is geared towards a final solution of our Indian Problem” [59].

Hay references a 2015 document that itself unfortunately provides no source for the quotation.[1]

When I was writing the manuscript for Fighting for A Hand to Hold: Confronting Medical Colonialism against Indigenous Children in Canada (MQUP, 2020) in 2019, I was able to trace back the original citation[2] to a self-published report by Kevin Annett in 2001.[3]

At the time, I had already been aware for many years that reliable sources have cast doubt on some of Annett’s assertions. Mark Abley, my acquisitions editor at McGill-Queen’s University Press, pointed me to the work of Jonathan Lainey, a Wendat archivist and historian who joined the McCord Museum as curator (Indigenous cultures) in 2020. In a reflection on objects in museum collections, Lainey concludes that the oft-cited quotation is indeed apocryphal – a fabrication by Annett.

As Lainey insightfully explains: “Indian Residential Schools are terrible enough and shameful; they do not need to be compared with the ‘final solution’ of the Holocaust to generate empathy and be understood as horrific. Whether it comes from a hero or a villain, an erroneous quote will always remain a false quote, and it will never help us to better understand our past”.[4]

While some parts of the book are not without their flaws, the last few chapters are captivating, with Hay relying heavily on the historical expertise of Anishinaabe Elder Teri Redsky Fiddler (who also contributes a moving afterword).

Indeed, Hay’s innovative archival work here allows him to deftly draw on the scholarship, knowledge and experiences of leaders and community members of the Sandy Lake First Nation. For example, in the mid-1970s, a group of Anishinaabe women (Edna Kakepetum, Esther Linklater, Hattie Fiddler, Nellie Goodman, Maida Meekis) created a volunteer community health collective called Pa-me-e-ti-win with the goal of improving the health and wellness of community members [128]. In 1988, a handful of Anishinaabe men (Allen Meekis, Luke Mamakeesic, Peter Goodman, Peter Fiddler, and Chief Josias Fiddler) undertook a hunger strike at the Sioux Lookout hospital with the goal of expanding and gaining more community control of healthcare services [108, 128, 131]. Such examples highlight how resistance to colonial policies and practices had been ongoing through grassroots organizing and political initiatives.

Along with other relatively recent trade books like Structures of Indifference (by Mary Jane Logan McCallum and Adele Perry), Country of Poxes (by Baijayanta Mukhopadhyay), and Inflamed (by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel), Travis Hay’s Inventing the Thrifty Gene fits into a contemporary historiography that not only exposes the violence of the science of settler colonialism, but importantly also simultaneously highlights narratives of resistance [152] by Indigenous Peoples.

Samir Shaheen-Hussain is an active member of the Caring for Social Justice Collective. He works as a pediatric emergency physician, and is an associate professor (Department of Pediatrics) and an associate member (Department of Global and Public Health), in the Faculty of Medicine & Health Sciences at McGill University. He is also an M.A. candidate in the Department of History at the Université de Montréal and author (with a foreword by Cindy Blackstock and an afterword by Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel) of the award-winning book, Fighting for A Hand to Hold: Confronting Medical Colonialism against Indigenous Children in Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020).

A French version of this review will appear in an upcoming issue of Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française.

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[1] BC Teachers’ Federation. 2015. Project of Heart: Illuminating the hidden history of Indian Residential Schools in BC. https://www.bctf.ca/classroom-resources/details/project-of-heart. The citation, without a verifiable source, can be found on page 8 of the document (https://issuu.com/teachernewsmag/docs/poh_ebook_for_issuu).

[2] George Erasmus, 2003. “Reparations: Theory, Practice and Education.” Paper presented at University of Windsor. The Aboriginal Healing Foundation, 13 June 2003. https://www.ahf.ca/files/clea-roundtable.pdf. The “final solution” quotation can be found on page 4; the (incomplete) source, in footnote 7, appears as follows: “Duncan Campbell Scott to D. MacKay. Quoted from secondary source, in Kevin Annett, Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust. Primary Source: DCS to BC Indian Agent Gen. Major D. MacKay. 12 Apr. 1910. DIA Archives RG 10 series”.

[3] The Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada. 2001. Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust. N.p.: self-published. http://www.canadiangenocide.nativeweb.org/genocide.pdf. See page 6 for the “final solution” quote attributed to Duncan Campbell Scott, as well as the original –– and incomplete –– source provided by Kevin Annett.

[4] Jonathan Lainey, 2022. “Telling the Stories of Objects in Museum Collections: Some Thoughts and Approaches.” In The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories in the United States and Canada, edited by Heather Igloliorte and Carla Taunton. Routledge, New York: 305.