Abstract Summary
The Alaska Area Specimen Bank (AASB), a large biobank located in Anchorage, holds nearly half a million samples of blood, plasma, tissue, serum, and bacterial cultures. The samples, more than ninety-percent of which were collected from Alaska Native individuals, are the cumulative result of nearly sixty years of biomedical research. Since 2004, the AASB has been co-managed by a working group consisting of representatives from Alaska Native tribal health organizations, the Alaska Area Institutional Review Board, and the Centers for Disease Control. Their collective role is to ensure that all research involving biospecimens meets ethical standards and has the potential to serve the health needs of Alaska Native peoples. This paper tracks the historical processes that shaped this co-management strategy. In particular, it focuses on moments when Alaska Native activists drew attention to the extractive and exploitative nature of Cold War biomedical research. In response to such research, they pushed for the creation of participatory modes of knowledge production and insisted upon a seat at the table when biomedical research agendas were being set. By the end of the Cold War, Alaska Native tribal health organizations — a product of decades of Indigenous activism — were increasingly in positions to produce biomedical knowledge and manage biomedical resources on their own terms. However, they also began to reproduce some of the same problematic research dynamics that a generation of activists had critiqued. This paper, then, suggests that Alaska Native sovereignty has been both expressed through and limited by biomedicine.
