By Michael Haederle
In 2017, archaeologist Dr. Michael Adler came upon a locked cabinet that had been shoved behind another cabinet in a storage area at Southern Methodist University’s (SMU) research campus at Fort Burgwin, outside Taos, New Mexico. Inside, he found ancestral remains that workers had excavated decades earlier at nearby Picuris Pueblo and had not returned. Adler, an associate professor of Anthropology at SMU and longtime executive director of the SMU-in-Taos program, knew he had to return the remains to the pueblo, with which he had longstanding professional relationships: “I go hat in hand to Richard Mermejo, who was governor at the time, to apologize and to return this stuff, and Craig Quanchello, who subsequently was governor, said, ‘Well, why don’t we do that DNA stuff on it?’”
Quanchello, it turned out, had read a news account of how an analysis of DNA isolated from a few strands of hair belonging to Sitting Bull had confirmed that a man living in South Dakota was the legendary Lakota leader’s great grandson. Now, he was suggesting that a genomic study might support the pueblo’s claim for standing in legal disputes about land use around Chaco Culture National Historical Park in northwestern New Mexico.
Picuris oral tradition holds that the pueblo’s people are descended from ancestors connected to Chaco. Quanchello and other tribal leaders saw genomic research as one additional piece of evidence that might carry weight in court. The idea, Adler said, was not to replace tribal knowledge but to deploy a scientific tool in a legal and political system that privileges Western forms of evidence. “Because, as they put it, ‘Can we use the white guy’s science to show them what we already know?’” It was the first step toward a 2025 study in Nature reporting genetic continuity between sampled Picuris tribal members and ancient individuals from Chaco Canyon (both Mermejo and Quanchello were listed as co-authors).
The Picuris research became a unique and closely watched example of a tribe shaping an ancestral DNA (aDNA) study on its own terms. But a number of other tribes, including the Hopi in Arizona, claim descent from ancient Chacoans and have also sought to have a voice in resource management in the region around the park, potentially creating conflicting opinions about whether to engage in genomic research. Further complicating matters, the existing aDNA data from Chaco were sequenced from remains excavated at Pueblo Bonito in the late 19th century and kept at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. After that study was published in Nature Communications in 2017, critics argued that tribes with Chacoan affiliation should have been consulted before the research was conducted—especially because ancestral DNA studies such as this one typically require the destruction of a small portion of human remains.
Quanchello, elected to a new term as Picuris governor early in 2026, says that from his pueblo’s perspective, engaging with cutting-edge science like genomic research is rooted in the principle of tribal sovereignty and self-determination. He casts the decision as part of a broader assertion of tribal control over tools long used on Native communities without their consent. “We can ignore it and be taken advantage of by it, or we can learn it and dominate,” he said. “That’s the difference. Now, Indians are getting smarter. They’re getting educated. Instead of talking, we’re picking up a pen. At the end of the day, exercise sovereignty applies to everything.”
This is an excerpt of ‘A Matter of Descent’ in American Archaeology, Summer 2026, Vol. 30, No. 2. Subscribe to read the full text.
