Kim TallBear, CPCS

In 1989, my mother, a planner for 30 years for various tribal governments and urban Indian organizations, left St. Paul, Minnesota for Cambridge for a year at MIT with Mel King’s Community Fellows Program. I decided to follow her. I had done urban studies coursework in my first year of undergraduate study, but I was not comfortable in a traditional student setting. My mother raised me around her various community causes and a typical undergraduate lifestyle seemed frivolous to me. Mom spoke highly of the innovative community planning and institu­tion-building work happening in the Boston metro area. While I was committed to working in “Indian Country” on tribal commu­nity issues, Boston sounded like an intellectually stimulating and inspiring place to learn how to be a planner.

Initially, it was a difficult move. Boston was big, expensive, and seemingly unfriendly. My first months here were lonely and difficult; I waited tables during the day and made plans to go back to school at night. But I had a gut feeling that Boston was where I should be. By January 1990, on the recommendation of Mel King, I found myself at CPCS in one of Marie Kennedy’s Community Planning classes. Over the next two years, until I left CPCS to do a Masters in City Planning at MIT, I built an important intellectual and community network. My fellow students—all older—welcomed and supported me, although I surely seemed young and naïve by comparison. Together, we took classes laden with planning theory, learned how to write as planners, and applied theory and improved writing skills in community-based research projects. Because of our focused community commitments, CPCS was the best choice for us as students; the classes and the research projects reinforced and improved our responsiveness to community needs, rather than pulling us away from community.

In particular, Marie Kennedy was instrumental in me finishing my degree at CPCS. Despite the busy and complicated life I was building in Boston, she firmly encouraged me to apply to graduate school in the Department of Urban Studies at MIT—even when I doubted I would get in. But I did get in. I even won the student writing prize in my second year for a paper on dioxin in Maine’s Penobscot River and the risks it posed for the Penobscot Nation. I went on to work for federal agencies, national tribal organizations, in private consulting, and for individual tribes across the country on various tribal community and environmental planning initiatives.

Planning and policy work took me to unexpected places; today, I no longer work chiefly as a tribal planner. In the 1990s, US tribes were increasingly faced with requests that they participate in various kinds of human genetic research. The genomes of indigenous peoples are considered unique and valuable. It struck me that genetic research could have serious and potentially adverse effects for tribes. Genetics is complicated. The legal and ethical structures that regulate genetic research are even more complicated, and they are playing catch-up with the science. Tribes are particularly ill-prepared to regulate the effects of genetic research for their communities. In order to intervene on behalf of tribal interests in the area of genomics, I needed to go back to school.

Armed with my planning background, I completed a Ph.D. and a dissertation on “Native American DNA” in four years. I am now an Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies at Arizona State University where I do research and write on various topics having to do with tribes and science: How can tribes participate more knowingly in scientific research in ways that are consistent with cultural practices, and that help them build rather than undermine community and regulatory structures? And when does scientific research threaten tribal political and cultural sovereignty?

CPCS was crucial to my success. It is where I first learned that theory and practice should build each other—that the kind of knowledge that will be good for the communities I care about is knowledge that is theoretically rigorous and builds on the cultures, histories, and desired futures of those communities. ASU, where I work today, is currently embracing the idea that the university should embed research in the needs and desires of the communities it serves. For me, community-embeddedness has long been an effective mode of learning and doing. At CPCS, I learned from professors who were both theoreticians and who centered community-based research. They were well ahead of their time.

Kim Tall Bear,

Assistant Professor, American Indian Studies, Arizona State University