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In this paper, we challenge the ACL community to reckon with historical and ongoing colonialism by adopting a set of ethical obligations and best practices drawn from the Indigenous studies literature. While the vast majority of NLP research focuses on a very small number of very high resource languages (English, Chinese, etc), some work has begun to engage with Indigenous languages. No research involving Indigenous language data can be considered ethical without first acknowledging that Indigenous languages are not merely very low resource languages. The toxic legacy of colonialism permeates every aspect of interaction between Indigenous communities and outside researchers. To this end, we propose that the ACL draft and adopt an ethical framework for NLP researchers and computational linguists wishing to engage in research involving Indigenous languages.
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An ethical crisis in ancient DNA research: Insights from the Chaco Canyon controversy as a case study
In recent years, the field of paleogenomics has grown into an exciting and rapidly advancing area of scientific inquiry. However, scientific work in this field has far outpaced the discipline’s dialogue about research ethics. In particular, Indigenous peoples have argued that the paleogenomics revolution has produced a “vampire science” that perpetuates biocolonialist traditions of extracting Indigenous bodies and heritage without the consent of, or benefits to, the communities who are most affected by this research. In this article, we explore these ethical issues through the case study of a project that sequenced the ancient DNA (aDNA) of nine Ancestral Puebloan people from Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. By providing a “thick description” of this controversy, we are able to analyze its metanarratives, periodization, path dependency, and historical contingencies. We conclude that the paleogenomics revolution needs to include an ethical revolution that remakes the field’s values, relationships, forms of accountability, and practices.
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- PAR ID:
- 10297289
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Social Archaeology
- Volume:
- 21
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 1469-6053
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 157 to 178
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/1469605321991600
