The genomic research on ancient Americans speaks to population-level relationships and deep ancestry.

It does not speak to the distinctive histories of specific nations.

The Cherokee, the Lakota, the Haudenosaunee, the Pueblo peoples, the Tlingit, the Anishinaabe, the Quechua, and the hundreds of other nations with distinct identities, languages, territories, and histories are not simply “descendants of the first Americans” in a way that reduces them to a shared biological origin story.

They are nations with their own histories — histories that include the period covered by ancient genomic research but extend far beyond what that research can illuminate.

Treating the Anzick genome as the definitive story of where Native Americans “came from” risks replicating a form of colonialism in which the diversity and specificity of Indigenous histories are erased in favor of a single narrative that happens to be generated by Western science rather than by Western mythology — but that is equally reductive.