The Science of Settler Colonialism: A Canadian History of the Thrifty Gene Hypothesis

This dissertation interrogates the history of the thrifty gene hypothesis, or the idea that Indigenous bodies are genetically predisposed to type-II diabetes. Though the hypothesis has been rejected by the scientific community at large as well as the very scientists who invented it, it continues to inform Canadian state literature and clinical guidelines in 2018. Thus, in an attempt to historicize (rather than debunk) the failed but long-lived hypothesis, I trace its origins through four successive chapters focused singularly on major figures in its production. All of these figures are white male scientists who travelled to Indigenous communities, made scientific observations, and contributed to a colonialist discourse of Indigenous disappearance by suggesting that Indians or Aboriginal people were biologically unfit to survive contact with (settler) colonial societies despite centuries of evidence to the contrary. Thus, while my main critique in this dissertation concerns the reproduction of a baseless and racist hypothesis within the registers of Canadian healthcare administration, I am also heavily exercised with documenting a history wherein southern settler scientists have travelled to northern Indigenous communities, extracted blood, bone marrow, and other biological materials, and used their scientific observations to cast Indigenous bodies rather than settler structures as the root cause of high-rates of chronic disease across the Canadian north. Troublingly, I note that the University of Torontos Sioux Lookout Project was deeply embedded in these histories of settler colonial science. Thus, on the basis of the history reviewed in this dissertation, I argue that the post-war professionalization of Canadian genetics, endocrinology, epidemiology, as well as nutritional and metabolic sciences has as a historical condition of possibility the settler colonial creation of the reserve system and the production of an isolated Indigenous population that faces chronically high rates of nutrition-related diseases.