Ethics in retrospect: Biomedical research, colonial violence, and Iñupiat sovereignty in the Alaskan Arctic

Abstract

Kaare Rodahl, a scientist with the US Air Force’s Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory, spent much of the 1950s traveling to villages in the Alaskan Arctic to conduct research on cold acclimatization. Four decades later, it was discovered that during one such study, he had administered radioactive isotopes of iodine-131 to over one hundred Alaska Native research subjects without their knowledge or consent. This news broke just as Alaska Native communities were attempting to recover from a series of revelations surrounding other instances of Cold War radiation exposure. In response, two major federal investigations attempted to determine whether Rodahl had adhered to ethical regulations and whether his actions could be expected to have a lasting health impact on former research subjects. The National Research Council, framing the study as a singular event in the Cold War past, found that research subjects had been ‘wronged, but not harmed’. The North Slope Borough, a powerful Alaska Native municipal government, countered this finding with their own investigation, which identified both the study and the subsequent federal inquiries as facets of the still-unfolding process of American settler colonialism in Alaska. In doing so, the North Slope Borough contested the authority of federal agencies to set the terms by which ethics could be retrospectively judged. This article argues that exploring how competing ethical regimes represent the relationship between violence and time can help us better understand how institutionalized bioethics reproduces settler colonial power relations.

Indigenous Elder-centered methodology: research that decolonizes and indigenizes

“…This is particularly salient for AN communities, who have been viewed as unique, given their broad diversity—229 of the 574 federally recognized tribes are within Alaska (National Congress of American Indians, 2020). A history of unethical research (Henry et al, 2018; Lanzarotta, 2020) among AN communities requires both reconciliation and reparation that are inclusive of Indigenous ontology and epistemology. Furthermore, the inclusion of AN Elders and the acknowledgment of their wisdom and guidance are central to the research process in its entirety (Braun et al, 2014).…”

The balance between critical thinking and paradigm thinking in the Arctic: Scientific cooperation across theoretical divides

“…Simultaneously, Arctic States engaged in cooperative scientific activities on projects that were mutually beneficial such as Space Exploration (Sagdeev, 2007). Globally, and in the Arctic, science and the military have had an uneasy relationship due to testing and violent actions based on the collaboration between science and the military on both human and non-human subjects (Lanzarotta, 2020). Harrison (2014) argues that the Cold War both propelled the rapid extraction of natural resources, including from Indigenous lands, and created Realist discourses that enforced a colonial attitude towards Indigenous peoples (IPs) including as valuable resources to be subjectified.…”

Rainey and the Russians: Arctic archaeology, ‘Eskimology’ and Cold War cultural diplomacy

“…Given the positivist leanings of American archaeology from the 1950s onwards, it is no surprise that the peopling of the Americas became a preoccupation. Research into origins tied neatly to other ideas of contact and ethnogenesis, and more troublingly to race science, especially involving physiognomy, adaptation and the physical characteristics of indigenous peoples, which is now rightly framed as a legacy of settler colonialism (Lanzarotta 2019(Lanzarotta , 2020; see also Lyons 2016). The results of cold science on indigenous bodies would later come to have defence and military implications for the United States.…”