Indigenous Bodies, Cells, and Genes

Joanna Ziarkowska is a Native American Studies scholar at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, Poland, where she teaches courses devoted to Native American literature, Literature and Medicine, and Film Studies.

Introduction – Indigenizing biomedicalization: community, relationality, and embodied resistance in Native American literature

Part I: TUBERCULOSIS

Chapter 1: Virgin soil theory, boarding schools, and medical experimentation: a history of tuberculosis among Native Americans

Chapter 2: Tuberculosis, biopower, and embodied resistance in Madonna Swan: A Lakota Woman’s Story, as told through Mark S. Pierre and Louise Erdrich’s LaRose

Part II: DIABETES

Chapter 3: Developing Indigenous models of diabetes: from genetic fatalism to community-based approaches

Chapter 4: Beyond the biomedical model of diabetes: settler colonialism, traditional foodways, and historical trauma in Sherman Alexie’s selected works and LeAnne Howe’s Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story

Part III: BLOOD AND GENES

Chapter 5: From blood memory to genetic memory, and the emergence of Native American DNA: a story of biocolonialism at the turn of the millennium

Chapter 6: "We remember our ancestors and their lives deep in our bodily cells": mapping history in space and genes in Linda Hogan’s autobiographical writing

Part IV: INDIGENIZING BIOMEDICALIZATION

Chapter 7: The traffic of cells and ideas: Heid E. Erdrich’s biotechnological poetry

Chapter 8: Biomedical psychiatry, Native American identity, and the politics of visibility in Elissa Washuta’s My Body Is a Book of Rules

Coda