distances from their homes, in order to be housed in institutions where they were not permitted to speak their own languages or participate in anything regarded as cultural practice (Carr 2013). Today, the residential schools, the last of which were closed down only in the 1990s, are regarded among First Nations and Inuit communities as the primary source of their current malaise. It recently came to light as part of the ongoing Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, that repeated sexual abuse took place in these schools, one of which was characterised by an investigating Supreme Court Justice as practising ‘institutionalised paedophilia’ (Carr 2013, 19). Systematic nutritional medical experimentation was also practised on some of the students resulting in malnutrition in many, and death for many more. TB was rampant, and few attempts were made to curb it. In one notorious school, the death rate of children was apparently 75 per cent in the first 16 years of the school’s operation (Carr 2013; Niezen 2013). The majority of individuals who grew up in these conditions, now middle-aged and older, have until very recently been unwilling to ruminate about their younger lives, but many freely admit to being unable to adequately parent their own children.
Despite major changes for the better in recent years, racism and discrimination continue to be blatantly evident against First Nations. Shocking poverty persists on many reservations, a good number of which have no running water and where toxic contamination is frequently present; schools on reservations are poorly provided for compared with schools elsewhere in Canada, the education gap has increased in recent years between First Nations children and other Canadians (Friesen 2013), and alcohol and drug abuse and violence against women and children is extraordinarily high.
Not all reservations exhibit high rates of illness and suicide. Some survivors report that they enjoyed school, and others became devout Christians – a conversion that apparently assisted in their survival. Clearly, differences among First Nations are of the utmost importance when attempting to account for malaise. Also, ongoing land claim settlements have improved the lot of some First Nation communities, but settlements have not been made with the majority of communities. Furthermore, the establishment of healing programmes and suicide prevention gatherings conducted by First Nations themselves, that make use of indigenous healing practices together with biomedicine, exist in certain communities and receive some government support. Such changes are regarded as a positive form of empowerment by many First Nations leaders, but are not as yet broadly entrenched (Niezen 2013).
First Nations received a formal apology from the Prime Minister of Canada two years ago but since that time the budgets of 12 government-funded programmes for First Nations have been cut, and nine of these programmes are now closed (Bennett 2013). And suicide rates, substance abuse, and the disappearance and death of young First Nation women continue to be extraordinarily high (Leblanc 2014). If the concept of ‘historical trauma’ is to be taken seriously, then a great deal more than an apology and a reconciliation commission are needed to counter the crudely racist attempts to obliterate the Indian – the effects of which are being played out among third and fourth post-colonial generations. It is not known if intergenerational transmission of DNA modifications has contributed to this situation. Very understandably, First Nations individuals are reluctant to donate tissue for post-mortem analysis; but obviously demonstration of epigenetic changes are not required to verify the extent and depth of this ongoing abuse that a good number of survivors of residential schools and their offspring describe as genocide (Niezen 2013).
Conclusions
The concept of ‘environment’ has taken centre stage in the era of the Anthropocene. It is recognised that genes rarely determine who we are, as was formerly believed to be the case but, rather, that the human genome ceaselessly responds to environmental stimuli that impinge on it, with a lifelong influence on individual development, health and wellbeing. This recognition is designated as the post-genomic era, and the molecular mechanisms that facilitate interactions among environments external and internal to the human body are steadily being elucidated in the burgeoning field of epigenetics. These molecular insights are of enormous significance, but the majority of epigeneticists, although they acknowledge the contributory effects of environment writ large on human bodies, nevertheless deliberately miniaturise the environment and delineate the target of investigation as proximal and/or internal to the body. This practice of scaling down the environment has been described by social scientists as neo-reductionistic.
The illustrative examples set out above make clear how social, political and economic variables impinge on the lived experience of individuals, families and communities, with profound effects on the incidence and distribution of health and illness. The effects of social isolation, extreme unremitting poverty and forced migration have particularly devastating effects on wellbeing, often with lasting intergenerational effects. The findings set out above suggest that investigative collaborations of epigeneticists working with social scientists, epidemiologists, public health researchers and historians could be very fruitful. In recent years, certain epidemiologists have entered into such collaborations (see, for example, Relton and Davey Smith 2012), and anthropologists are also becoming involved in both the design of research projects and the collection of data (Roberts 2016). The most effective of these projects are those in which ‘environment’ is explicitly delineated or contoured for the purposes of any given investigation, with full awareness that doing so is a device, with unavoidable limitations. Deductive thinking is not abandoned, but is greatly supplemented by attention given to interrelated, overlapping orbits that contain dense webs of partial knowledge, on the basis of which interpretive accounts can be readily discerned and explicated.
Notes
1. https://www.benefits.va.gov/compensation/claims-special-birth_defects.asp.
2. Marasmus and kwashiorkor are two common forms of serious protein-energy malnutrition.
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