In September,  2013, The African Diaspora: Integrating Culture, Genomics and History was held at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in Washington DC.  Sadly, I had commitments elsewhere and could not attend.

The National Human Genome Research Institute, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the National Museum of Natural History held a full-day symposium that brought together scholars, scientists and practitioners from various disciplines who are exploring the African Diaspora throughout historical, cultural and genomic lenses with the purpose of understanding a person’s ancestry and how that impacts individual health and collective identity.

The symposium’s objectives were to foster interdisciplinary dialog on what we can learn about:

• Ancestral history from genomic information and historical records.
• Ethnic identity and cultural diversity from historical and genomic information.
• The arts and culture from ancestral information.

I was not able to attend, but reports from those who did were very positive.  Fortunately, the videos are now available to view, for free.

http://www.genome.gov/27555386

Furthermore, I’d like to mention that one of the papers I co-authored with Jack Goins, Janet Crain and Penny Ferguson, “Melungeons: A Multi-Ethnic Population” was cited  by Dr. Linda Heywood.

Dr. Linda Heywood is a Professor of African American Studies and History at Boston University.  I was impressed with her throughout this panel discussion.  At about 6:48 she discussed identity, and her comment, “History, it’s personal, it’s communal, it’s national, it’s identity.”

She mentions our paper at about 57:46.  At 22:54 she comments about various Africans being incorporated into the Portuguese settlements in Africa before being shipped out as slaves, something we also mentioned in our paper.  And finally at 1:15:00 she referred to the paper again as a resource.

I was also very impressed with Dr. Sarah Tiskoff and was disappointed to see that there were not any individual sessions by her.

I hope you’ll take an opportunity to watch a few of these videos, and a big thank you to the Smithsonian for making them available.