Participants:
john powell, Al McFarlane, Matthew Little, Kenneth Garnier

john powell:
These issues present wonderful opportunities and serious questions. We must be seriously involved in these questions. We should participate in how this information is used, who has access to this information, and how this information is interpreted. Culture is mainly about meaning, and we have to participate in giving this information meaning so that it informs who we are and who we are becoming. It is probably impossible, and not even desirable, to say, "let's just put the lid on this and not go forward." At the same time, it is problematic to say we need to get all this information out, unfiltered, as quickly as possible to everyone. The issues for the African American community are also faced by other communities.

As radical and as significant as this is, 10 or 15 years from now, we'll look back at this time and say, 'we know so much more.' The most important aspect of these questions is not scientific, it is the ethical questions, the deeply spiritual questions, and the religious questions. Who are we? What does it mean to even be human? For example, if someone has a genetic predisposition to mental illness, what does this mean in terms of their employment or surveillance?

These are not just scientific questions. These are deeply political questions. They are ethical questions and I believe that we must stay involved and hold this information accountable to us. Knowledge is politics so we have to be involved in the knowledge of politics and make sure it isn't used for some nefarious purpose. We have good reason to be nervous. There's a history of pseudo-science and science being used to do all kinds of destructive things. This does not mean that scientists are necessarily destructive, although some of them may be naïve in lending their work toward nefarious ends.

We want to think about how we use this information, and what does it mean to us collectively? What does it mean to us personally? What does it mean to us, not just for our past, but also for our future?

With that, what I am going to do is ask each one of the panelists to introduce themselves. and then to pose any questions that they may have that they want the presenters to deal with. We will start with Al McFarlane who's the publisher of Insight News.

Al McFarlane:
I own Insight News. It's a community newspaper in Minneapolis. I work with other black newspaper owners in the country and in the region, a group called the Midwest Black Publishers Coalition. I am active with the Ethnic Press in Minnesota, the Minnesota Multicultural Media Consortium - black Asian, Latino and Native ethnic newspapers.

I saw two things in this conference. The first is the value that more information always can mean more possiblity for individuals. Like everybody else, I am a person who would like to know from whence he came, so I am personally curious to know who my father's father, and father's father, and father's father, etc. are. I am curious, because I have this idea, and it may be a misinformed idea, that a lot of my African brothers and sisters feel and say that they have a greater sense of self because in their own mind, they carry a genealogy that may date back to the beginning, whatever the beginning means to them. I wonder if that mix of difference in how a person operates, and I say that I feel there's a void, if I don't have the connection, and will my acquisition of information fulfill that void, make me be different?

Secondly, I look at the commercial application. I think that black people need to own and to develop the tools and the proprietary responsibility for marketing, to ourselves and to the world, these tools about who we are. Many people will not want to talk about the business of who we are, but it's important for us to talk about the economics of who we are and what we are, and what this path of understanding can do economically for entrepreneurs, but also economically for the sense of a global economy or a national economy. I am interested in us talking about where does the money happen around the question of our identity.

Matthew Little:
I am a senior of this area of civil and human rights. I've been on the battle lines for more than a half century. This idea of DNA is a new entry and I think it's very important that we, as a people, keep abreast of it and measure it as it moves forward. Over the years, as different things show up, there has been a tendency in this country to use them to the detriment of people of color and those on the lower scale of things. So, it is very important that we keep abreast. When I was first asked, what interested me the us most was not the scientific aspect, but the community aspect. DNA is going to go forth anyway, so we must make sure that we try, from the community aspect, to get in on the bottom line.

The right-wing talk show media define an awful lot of things. I am sure that they are not going to define it in the comprehensive manner that we would like to see. It is very important that we keep abreast, and to have representatives of the minorities keep us abreast of what happens as it develops, so that we can keep the community abreast and make sure that it does not become something that is diametrically opposed to our best interests.

Kenneth Garnier:
I am the minister of Minneapolis Central Church of Christ and have served this community for approximately 20 years. My focus is ecclesiastical and with the church community. I believe, particularly against the backdrop of what has happened to our people-since many blacks in the country do espouse Christian thought and because it was used to enslave and colonize and to negate our own consciousness, that it is important that people who serve individuals in the religious community, take this information in a sensible, logical and practical way, and incorporate it into the broader systems of faith.

When I study a religious text, whether it is the Bible, the Book of the Dead, or the Book of the Coming Forth, or the Koran, I don't know what other disciplines I am not studying. When I study religious texts, I am forced to study geography, history, mathematics, numerology, astrology, psychology, sociology, and science. When I study a religious text, I see myself studying everything, and I believe that is because God is everything.

I believe that it is theologically and practically impossible to study a religious text without studying all those things that we identify as culture, those things that make people people. So my interest is in using this information, against the backdrop of what has happened to us and continues to happen to us, not just in the form of Euro-centric icons, but bodies of information; how we can take facts related to genealogy and genetics and use those facts to raise the level of consciousness of our people within the context of spirituality.

I must add that I believe a real issue facing our people is not scientific, psychological, or sociological it is ethical. Until we look at the real moral issues that are facing our people, I don't believe science or any other field can salvage us.

Bill Davis:
Matt Little and I both serve with the NAACP. I also serve on the board for the National Forum for Black Public Administrators and a number of other social and just causes. I current am head of Community Action in Minneapolis, which is a nonprofit that works with low-income individuals, senior citizens and people with disabilities.

We now have a framework to talk about. Sankofa is the symbol of this conference. It is the bird which looks and moves forward. We have all heard the proverb that it's important to know where you came from, in order for you to know where you're going. I have had the opportunity to travel to Africa on several occasions. It's always a very warm experience when you walk down the street in Johannesburg and you're greeted by, 'welcome home, brother.' The opportunity to go to Abuja and to go to Durban and to a number of the other African communities, makes you realize that this is a much larger community. There's a lot to learn and understand. It is important that we gain control over the information.

I am curious to know Dr. Duster and Dr. Kittles' thinking about whether this knowledge of our clans or tribal groups will create divisions or problems? I am also very much interested in knowing, what are some of the things that we need to be doing in positioning ourselves and preparing ourselves when addressing these issues with non-African-Americans or people from other cultures, who will be challenging us on the things that we say and do.

Rick Kittles:
Ever since high school, I was interested in why different groups look different, different phenotypic differences - skin color, hair color, and eye color. That led me to genetics. I remember as an undergrad, I was in a class with an instructor in my first genetics course. He was a Jewish guy and I expected some sensitivity on issues of races. But, the first thing he did was put racial differences in IQ on the board. I shut down.

I came back to genetics because my first love was a genetics problem. When I went to graduate school, I was still interested in why we look differently. I wanted also to place my identity somewhere, so I started building this database. This was back in 1995. Then I came to Howard University, after I got my PhD at George Washington in DC. I was involved with the African burial ground project which was a multi-disciplinary project led by Dr. Michael Blakey who was interested in understanding the history, culture and biology of slaver but also the genetics of this burial ground of enslaved Africans that was uncovered in lower Manhattan, in New York City. My task was to determine the genetic ancestry of the bone samples that were uncovered. It became important to develop a database to place the ancestry of these bones. The project was abandoned because of the lack of funding from the federal government but I continued on with the database.

Many of the important issues should be placed in the context of trying to do something in America. As an African American, I am challenged a lot. There is a high importance to this work, but it's very difficult to maneuver through the years of oppression that cause people with ideas like I have to just throw their hands up.

It is also very exciting. I am energized when I interact with individuals such as this audience here. I get e-mails every day from people, who say things like, 'my grandmother is 85 years old. She's going to be dying soon. We want to be able to get some information on her ancestry. It's important.' These are real things.

john powell:
Bill Davis asked if there are some troubling aspects or positive aspects that we need to lift up more? I remember years ago talking to my children about the difference between information and knowledge and difference between knowledge and wisdom. One of my favorite quotes is by a philosopher who says, "everything that reveals also conceals" - so this idea that we're going to get knowledge about our identity. I've lived in Africa for a number of years. My oldest daughter was born in Africa. I believe there is something quite special about African-American identity. Having lived in Africa, obviously it's the motherland. Troy talked about this, about how identity is constructed. I am concerned that there's a false hope. When we go back 350 years, we are talking about getting information on 1 out of 16,000 ancestors. From this we are going to construct an identity?

When you think of Europeans, certainly a French person can say merci, but most people don't realized that when France became a country, most of the people living there were not French. In a sense they have the same issue that we do, but they haven't pathologized and problematized in the way that we have. We're not the only ones who came from clans; everybody came from clans. So when people say they're British, that still doesn't tell them what clan they came from. When people say they're German, it doesn't tell you what clan they came from.

We have an incredible history; we have constructed a powerful identity. I am concerned that we see this as this huge gap because we don't know who we are. I think we do know who we are. I am not saying that we shouldn't get more information, but I have some problems believing that that information is somehow going to make us whole.

Troy Duster:
Rick Kittles told the story about this person who came to his office and wanted to trace his lineage and then discovered that a few generations back, there was a white male and not an African on that Y-chromosome chain. That's a powerful story, in part because it's important to distinguish between the theoretical and what actually happens when you get the information. Of course all of us know that many, many blacks in America have a lineage back to a white male. That's a theoretical understanding. In someone's office, when they tell you that it during the fourth generation, the person was Polish, that changes things. The essentializing character of the DNA is a powerful thing. We're toying with something which is quite deeply embedded in our psyches and we're not quite prepared for it, unless we are, which is my response to Bill Davis. We must always insist on contextualization the information on the way in which a person is defined as coming from a different clan or different haplotype. It is dangerous to think of authenticity or essential character or that I really am or am not a real black person, unless I go back on that Y-chromosome, all the way back 20 generations.

In a larger context, we must begin to question the whole idea of the essential or embedded character of your identity. Rick was quite right to say that we can see this as one bit of information, as opposed to almost 16,000. It's important and useful for some purposes. There's a new book out called the Double Edged Helix, which I like. It's got a double side. There is a capacity to go back into your history and get important information but that same information can also unsettle you, unless there's someone to explain to you the larger frame.

Rick Kittles:
I completely agree. One of the major problems in Africa is what they call "ethnic tribalism." Agitation creates further conflict, and in some ways, the project we are discussing could contribute to potential uprisings. In certain West African communities, well off individuals in the community have house servants. Sometimes, certain communities go to another community to work in the houses and do housekeeping and cooking. Let's say that there are some genetics of African Americans that are connected with that group of house servants. There may be some negative stereotyped connotations associated with that. But this is seen everywhere, in the US, even within families, across all cultures.

Matthew Little:
What happened to the Africans that were found in Lower Manhattan?

Rick Kittles:
The project is on hold. The federal General Services Administration had agreed to provide a certain amount of funding to do a certain amount of work. The funding ceased and the work was incomplete. The bones were scheduled to be sent to New York for a memorialization and be placed back in the ground with a memorial at the site. That is on hold also.

Matthew Little:
What would have been the significance of that project if it had gone to its final conclusion?

Rick Kittles:
I think it would have been quite significant, because it would have illuminated a neglected piece of the historical, cultural and social role of the African American experience. Historians, archeologists, biological anthropologists and geneticists were working on that project. I didn't know that New York was one of the second largest ports of entry for enslaved Africans to the US. The culture in that region was quite rich. The African burial ground encompassed almost five New York City blocks. The story was getting bigger. As Wall Street expanded, it encroached on the cemetery. So it's a sad story in the end.

Al McFarlane:
john powell raised the question that this inquiry may fuel false hope. I question whether hope nonetheless has value. If so, what is our obligation and responsibility to deal with, and build on any kind of hope that comes out of our experience in our past. Often, African people, when they see us return, look at us a little sideways because we are motivated by this romanticized idea of being welcomed home. Sometimes we are welcomed home but often we feel that it's not quite it but at least it's a step in the right direction. We have got a fantasy that Africa will embrace us. I was in Ghana when they returned the remains of one of the men from that New York Burial ground and reinterred him and a woman who was excavated from Jamaica. There was a very moving ceremony, and they built a memorial at a place called Assin Manso to commemorate the return of these enslaved peoples.

The next question is about power. How does more information, more data, more knowledge, wisdom, all translate to our acquisition or utilization of power to live today in the world, in our relationship with each other as individuals, in our relationship with the culture, to power in the world? What will this research lead us to do, believe, think and know about our ability to act with power, reflecting our own sense of who we are, identity, and celebrating our culture in a world where these are competing with other powers at the same time?

john powell:
The reasons that it is important to distinguish between data, information, knowledge and wisdom and power is that the African American community has been pathologized. We don't see what we have because people focus on us not being like them. So we think that we have to become just like them, or gain knowledge just like them, or do just like them. This activity can yield knowledge, but in a sense, the structure of what's important has already been lost.

For example, if I believe the only way for me to feel good is for me to be a completely autonomous individual, not connected to others, then that becomes my struggle in life. So I spend my whole life trying to figure out how to become this completely disembodied, separate individual. I believe that that tradition comes out of Western society, and I can follow that tradition, and there's a power in that tradition. However, there's another whole framework of tradition. It's not about independence or dependence but about interdependence. As our identity was pathologized in the sense that Orlando Patterson who says a slave experiences social death, we were given the language of the dominant culture to reconstruct ourselves.

I have a blended family. I have five children. One started a business, he was making a ton of money. His business went belly-up and now he's looking at "what did I do wrong?" I said to him that I thought he was trying to fill an emptiness in life with money. I am concerned that we may use science to try to fill a spiritual need. We may be looking in the wrong places. We may be misusing science. I am not saying don't do genetic mapping. I am saying that I am concerned if we tried to construct an identity out of that. I think our identity is much more intact than we realize, if we could take note of who we are right now. We've done an amazing thing in the world. When I go to Africa, people say, you're from the tribe of African Americans, and to some extent, they look to us to help lead them.

Kenneth Garnier:
I concur. I do not believe that Western culture as we know it can be characterized by the pathologies that are within it and also be the panacea. There is a sense of emptiness or a void that individuals and groups experience because of a longing for something that is of greater substance than things or bodies of information. You spoke to it, Dr. powell, when you talked about our not wanting to be dependent or independent, but rather interdependent. I believe that whether it is scientific information or anything that we incorporate into our person or people activity, that if it is intrinsically good, it will create within us a better means through which we can interact as people. It should not make us less humane; it should make us more humane.

john powell:
I invite comments or questions from the audience.

Audience Member:
Let's return to the man who came to Dr. Kittles' for testing to confirm a family story. Let's suppose that of the 16,000 ancestors of that man, 15,998 were of the particular Senegambia tribe that you were speaking of, but it so happened that there were two strategically placed people from Europe in his family line, such that they showed up on the Y and mitochondrial DNA. Is that not really an appropriation of his family story, a disproportionate exercise of power by the genetic testing? Would we not do better to use scan-type data, rather then Y and mitochondrial DNA?

Rick Kittles:
In that situation, the mitochondrial DNA, Y-chromosome would say nothing about the vast other proportion of his genome. But I explained to him how the markers were inherited. His story was that his paternal line, his father's, father's, father's line was Mandinka. In that situation, he expected to see that on his Y-chromosome. We know that thousands of people could contribute to your genome. It's very difficult to assess that in an individual with today's technology, but we can assess those two lineages. And as I mentioned before, when individuals are born, they get the paternal surname. That's quite significant in terms of that individual for the rest of their life and their children's lives, if they are males. That one name is one of many that contributed genetically to the individual, so we have to put that in perspective. Information about genetic ancestry is one component of many that helped to organize and shape an individual's identity. It is not the end of all, but just another ingredient, a very active and empirical estimate that helps you shape your identity. I don't think one should rely solely on genetics to determine an individual's identity because there are many lineages.

Audience member:
Dr. Kittles, how do you collect your data for your study from your African participants?

Rick Kittles:
30 to 40% of the database comes from published data on those lineages in Africa. The rest are from collaborations of investigators who do research in Africa or who have access to the samples from Africa and from my own studies in Africa. In those situations, the individuals have consented to participate in the study.

Audience member:
I am a Nigerian and I ask myself, what does that mean? Some years ago, the colonial masters came and created a geographical boundary. You see quite a few Nigerians now who would die to protect those boundaries. What does that mean to be a Nigerian? Rick said he identified himself to Nigeria, but if you go to Nigeria, it's full of tribal wars. The easiest way for a politician to win in Nigeria, for example, is to raise up tribalism or to raise up religion. Immediately, you've divided people in such a way that they don't even know that they are hungry any more, so what are we talking about here and what is the utility of this science? If you do find that genetics can define you in such a way that you know you are Yoruba or Benin, which I doubt very strongly, what you are doing to the people back home in Nigeria is dividing this group.

Apart from the interest of African Americans in trying to understand that, what is the implication of this science or this cultural phenomenon or this void we are trying to fill (which I very much doubt that science can fill for us) for the larger group? And, if indeed, all humans are from Africa, then who is not an African? We scientists are full of double-talk, and we confuse ourselves and we confuse the community in the process. These are very serious issues and we need to start talking about them and remove the emotions a little bit because I hear a lot of ahs when comments are being made. Those are the comments that suit us. Listen to the comments that don't suit you. Those may be the ones that you really need to pay attention to.

Audience member:
One of the things that seems common sense to me is that human identity is a reoccuring theme. Job asked: who am I, where did I come from, to what am I bound? Even if I had not read Ashley Montague's magnificent, Man's Most Dangerous Myth: the Fallacy of Race, in college, I would have still discovered that race is nonsense, that history and culture makes sense to me. I am a product of history and culture and so is every human being. I am a product of a very time-space specific reality. You can call it Negro American, Black American, Afro American, change that all the time, but the fundamental reality is the same. The experience is what counts. That is what produced me, made me speak like I speak, made me a Baptist or a Methodist.

James Baldwin said it best, that the American Negro is a uniquely created American. He has no predecessor anywhere and no counterpart. Nobody ever talked like us before, sang like us before. We are still African by background. I want to say this about scientists. Scientists are human beings and some of them are good and have made magnificent contributions to human progress. Some of them are bad, on the border of being devils. I want to remind you that Adolph Hitler was surrounded by university professors, by medical doctors, by generals, by high-finance bankers. They ran Nazi Germany. They were not dumb people; they were very brilliant and evil, and we have some of those people among us in this society. There are some scientists who are very bad-spirited people and who don't mind hurting people. We must look at what this means in the political interface with society.

Audience member:
I am a community member. I wanted to comment on what you said earlier. I agree with you, but we all need a starting point. Today, so many of us are not involved. If you don't identify with something, you can't be an active member of humanity. So while knowing your genetic lineage or some small portion of your ancestry is not the end-all or be-all, it's certainly a starting point for some people who are not at all connected. If someone finds out that they're Nigerian in their lineage, perhaps that will stimulate that person to learn more about Nigeria, or to become more politically active, or to become more socially active, or more culturally active, in which case, that's a good thing.

Audience member:
A Nigerian defending that boundary should ask: is that what Africans should be spending their time doing? Is the boundary real? Is there any African American here who does not believe that he or she is from Africa? If you answer yes to that question, the only remaining issue is where in Africa. Now, you want to go to Africa, and you say you want to place yourself within some geopolitical boundaries: is that real? We know Yoruba goes past Nigeria, all the way down the west coast of Africa, so when you say you are Yoruba, and then you say you're a Nigerian, what are you doing? To me, that's a conflict. You're already in a state of confusion.

If you look at rural and urban blood pressure distribution in Nigeria, you see a greater difference between the person who lives in rural Nigeria and urban Nigeria than between black and white in this country. These are the same people, the same Yorubas. Is that genetic? I am a Nigerian married to an African American. My African American wife from Mississippi has many histories, Native Americans; her father is from Jamaica. I am Benin, but you know if you know the history of the Benins, the Yorubas are there. So, who are my children? What should they be worried about? Those are the questions we need to start to raise.

Bill Davis:
The whole confusion for me starts with trying to identify genes with culture. I think it's a huge mistake. The only thing our human genes give us the ability to do is have the capacity to form a culture. It doesn't say anything about what that culture is going to be. The rules of cultural evolution and genetic evolution are very different. When we start thinking that genealogies tell us something about our culture, I think it's a very serious mistake.

Secondly, I disagree with the theme about the uniqueness of the African or African American experience. It's unique within degrees, but most of the capacity for behavior that humans have, evolved in Africa before any humans left Africa, and the machine that produces culture really hasn't changed in a hundred and fifty thousand years. So most of the fundamental themes of human society are shared by all people in the world, although played out in different cultures in different ways. There are unique aspects to the African and African American experience, but they are within the context of the human experience. But, as soon as we start thinking that there's something so unique about any particular genetic lineage or genealogical lineage that makes them separate or different, in fundamental ways from the human condition, I think we're going down the wrong road.

Audience member:
Black people are different from other people in the way that Irish are different from Englishmen. That's all I was saying. It is not about race or the amount of pigment I have in my skin. I know I am different from black people in the Fiji Islands, so it's not genetic; I agree with you. But I am saying we are unique in this American experience. We've had some experiences that nobody else knows anything about. Nobody has been three-fifths of a man in this country. Nobody has been articles of merchandise, units of labor like we have. Nobody's women have been wholesale raped by the lust of brutes. I am talking about that. Nobody has created this incredible, endless stream of music like black people in the United States.

Rick Kittles:
It is interesting when I hear criticism about what I should or shouldn't be doing as a scientist. I feel very passionate about what I am doing and I feel that it's right. I not only feel, but I want to make sure I do it right, which is why things have slowed down, and I've opened myself up to all kinds of discussions, criticism and debate.

The database I have is stratified or structured over three parameters: geography, ethnicity and language. So, the point about Yoruba not being Nigerian is accurate. There are Yoruba in Cameroon, and certain pockets of Yoruba in different areas of West Africa. The same thing with the Hausa, so they're not restricted to some geopolitical state that's been imposed by some colonist. So, the samples must be described not just by that imposed state, but by geography and by how and who they call themselves. For example, the Benin samples that we have, the Benin people call themselves Benin, so they are in the database as Benin. In some cases, they are in the database, as Benin City. They speak a Niger-Congo language, they are in the database as a Niger-Congo language. There are issues as we try to use terms to categorize people and their culture and language. But the best way to handle this is to ask the people themselves how they view themselves and what they call themselves and their culture.

I'll use the Hausa as an example. We have Hausa samples from Senegal, Northern Nigeria and Cameroon. Hausaland, before these countries were set up, expanded to a big portion of West Africa. To accurately reflect that, we have to look at not just geography, but we have to look at how they saw themselves. So Hausa are not just from Nigeria, or not just from Cameroon, or not just from Senegal.

Al McFarlane:
I want you to think, if you watched the Malcolm X movie, of the power of the image of the thousands and thousands of the faithful walking around the Kaaba in Mecca. When I saw that in the movie, it made me imagine how many thousands of people, and how much commerce, was associated with that act of faith. How do we realize commerce that supports our identity? What is the commercial application and who ought to have the equity and enjoy the benefit? Do we have an obligation to commercialize our own culture? What does that mean? Are we able to project ourselves into the world in ways that we benefit? Is there a commercial system or philosophy that under girds how we market Africa, Planet Africa, African people, Black people, in ways that make sense for us as a people, but also makes sense in terms of our values and how we relate to other people on the planet?

Matthew Little:
I can't help but wonder what is the ultimate, that we and the scientists hope to reach in that regard. Civilization started in Africa. Is this where we hope to go by following the trail along the DNA and mitochondria? What is the end product?

Kenneth Garnier:
I respectfully challenge some comments that were made about Africa. Africa is unique. If it is not unique, then why have so many people gone through the trouble of seeking to erase our history and to redefine us as a people? Even to indigenous Africans, whether you're from Nigeria or wherever, I am an African American, but I have a loyalty to Africa because I am a product of Africa. I take issue with those who are insensitive, even as Africans, concerning the continent. Everything that we have, everything that we know grew out from Africa, whether it's science or anything else, it all grew out from Africa. While we are all Africans in the sense that we as human beings have our origins in Africa, there are some things very peculiar about people indigenous to the continent.

We're not like everybody else. I believe this information should be used to take us back to those things that are peculiar to African people, where in we were able to be the movers and shakers, the framers of civilization. Economic empowerment has been mentioned, political empowerment has been mentioned, sociological empowerment has been mentioned. I believe, ultimately, this information needs to help us return to those values that allowed us to build pyramids without cranes, versus living in squatter camps or projects.

Troy Duster:
I think the leap between false hopes and wisdom and power is a mighty leap that has rarely been made. However, false hopes are the thin edge of a wedge and towards the potential for information, data and knowledge. Rather than casting false hopes into this dark place, we should perhaps see it as hope; whether it's false is to be determined. The hope that there can be some more information about one's lineage, genealogy, will produce an hour or so listening to Rick Kittles. If you came here at 9:00 without that information, you would leave after two hours, with not just a blurred vision, but the motion that there is so much more here than trying to get down from a particular line of the mitochondrial DNA or the Y-chromosome.

So I see the false hope as the thin edge of the wedge into the potential, and at the end of the few hours, or few weeks, or few months of study and engagement with the topic, one comes away with an understanding of the complexity of the pathways by which one gets to wisdom and power. I do not see this as closing the door on people who have false hopes, but to see it as a conduit into another way of understanding their situation.

Bill Davis:
One of the things that I am always interested in doing is identifying action steps that we can do once this conference is over. I heard one idea, that is to pursue legislation fund the African Burial Site project to its conclusion. I would hope we agree to push for legislation that would enable us to continue this type of research and development and spur perhaps some other dialogue with respect to this whole topic area.