Scar Tissue
Border violence and Indigeneity
United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Article 26
Indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired.
Indigenous peoples have the right to own, use, develop and control the lands, territories and resources that they possess by reason of traditional ownership or other traditional occupation or use, as well as those which they have otherwise acquired.
States shall give legal recognition and protection to these lands, territories and resources. Such recognition shall be conducted with due respect to the customs, traditions and land tenure systems of the indigenous peoples concerned.
“Indigenous nations are sovereign, but technically, we are no longer truly sovereign entities. Border crossings make this clear, as we cannot practice our rights freely.” – Autry Johnson
Borders without
Borders can only be violent because they were created to enforce empire. Borders are completely artificial constructions and have created deep scars.
These are the scars on the land I grew up with. I grew up on the borderlands. The Blackfeet nation state occupied what is now most of Montana, Southern Alberta, and parts of Saskatchewan. Our sacred sites, our origin stories, where important supernatural beings live, our histories, are spread across this vast region and across two contemporary settler colonies. So when we learn from the land, gather medicine, see family, visit historical sights – the land is on both sides of this false border.
The Southern Piegan, my people, now reside on the southside of the border in the U.S. Our reservation is beautiful, where the “backbone of the earth” – The Rocky Mountains – meet the windswept great plains. Like our relatives and ancestors, we visit Canada a lot. Sometimes my family would go for a day trip to buy some sarvis berry pie for a community event, other times to go back to school shopping or hit up IKEA. But often, we’d just go for a drive to learn about and spend time on our ancestral lands – like Okotok, where a three-story tall rock standing stark on the Alberta plains was split in two after chasing Napi (Blackfeet trickster) to get his bison robe back. Or Writing-on-Stone, a UNESCO World Heritage site along the Milk River with 10,000 year old Blackfoot petroglyphs, tipi rings, and bison jumps. There is no separation between our land in the U.S. and our land in Canada: the border is completely arbitrary, recent, and violent.
The ease of crossing the border depends on the border agent and the direction. Per the Jay Treaty of 1794, we only need a tribal ID to pass between tribal lands. As children, we usually drove with my mom, a Native woman with a different last name than her white passing daughters. This frequently caused trouble with border agents. Once, we were held for hours until my white dad could come prove we hadn’t been kidnapped. From then on, our trips became more planned: before we left, my dad would write and sign a letter affirming he knew we were crossing the border with our mom – his wife – and have it professionally notarized. This allowed us to pass through our lands, on both sides of this false border, with more ease.
Even when we’re not crossing, the border follows us. My great-great grandfather Aims Back was allotted land fourteen miles from the Canada border. Despite being our legal land, our ancestral land, and on a sovereign reservation, border patrol has ultimate authority; they have essentially free reign within 100 miles of the Canadian or Mexican borders. My uncle once installed a locked gate across our dirt road entry that was torn down. If we had fences, they’d be allowed to tear them down. If we had a small cabin, they’d be allowed to search it. Instead, the land stays undeveloped and dotted with the muddy tire marks of border patrol trucks.
Borders within
Colonial borders both created the U.S. and are within the U.S. There are over 300 reservations in the U.S. which are separate sovereign nations within a colonial state – an arrangement Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall aptly called “domestic dependent nations.” Yet these borders don’t represent the historic territory of tribes. Many tribal nations were forcibly relocated, sometimes hundreds or thousands of miles from their traditional territories, while others, like my own, had their homelands drastically shrunk. Historian Justin Gage writes: “US officials were afraid of ideas that might diminish the government’s power over tribal nations….For the US government, the solution to the so-called Indian Problem depended on geographic isolation.”
The formation of reservations was an extreme form of violence. Indigenous peoples were forced onto small plots of land and separated their homes, their sources of food and medicine, and their religious sites. Their freedom of movement was restricted, as they needed to request permission to leave the reservation from the federal Indian agents. Tribal nations became forcibly dependent on the federal government for food, which often arrived late and rotten. In many ways, it parallels what people in Palestine are experiencing today.
Though Native people are legally allowed to leave reservations today, reservation borders are still maintained by violence. It’s well known in Native communities that border towns are sites of violence and discrimination against people from the reservations. This has been highlighted, in particular, in Gallup, New Mexico, a small town bordering the Navajo Reservation, where activists have long called attention to violence against and murder of Diné people. As Diné writer Jennifer Nez Dentedale writes: “We are contained in spaces and seen as problems. Our presence reminds settlers that we are the rightful occupants of these lands.”
The idea of territories themselves is not inherently violent. Historically, tribes knew where their territories ended and others began (and warred over territory). Today, being recognized as a nation with its own territory is critical to Indigenous assertion of sovereignty and self-determination. But Indigenous homeland maintenance is very, very different than contemporary militarization of colonial borders. White nationalism created an “imagined community” (to borrow a term from Benedict Anderson) to maintain via borders. Both forms of border violence – forcibly relocating people to smaller territories and making it illegal for Indigenous people to freely cross colonial borders – intentionally separates Indigenous peoples from their homelands, medicines, foods, and sources of political power and community connection. Empires are created and enforced by borders.
Indigenous sovereignty and border abolition
So what might border abolition look like? What would challenging colonial borders look like in practice? And how might centering Indigenous sovereignty compliment and support these efforts?
Like the Blackfeet, dozens of tribal nations reside on both sides of settler colonial borders of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Indigenous people always fought for freedom of movement; we didn’t passively accept restrictions placed by reservation borders or national colonial borders. The work is already happening if we pay attention.
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy has issued passports since 1923. Several countries have recognized them, including Ireland, Japan, and Bolivia. Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. still refuse. In 2010, the Haudenosaunee lacrosse team was unable to compete in the World Lacrosse Championship because the U.K., where the championship was held, refused to recognize their passport. The irony – the very people who created the sport of lacrosse — were unable to compete in the world championship because of the refusal of a colonial nation to recognize their sovereignty. Audra Simpson, who is Kahnawà:ke Mohawk, writes that border crossing as an assertion of sovereignty is “a site not of transgression but for the activation and articulation of their rights as members of reserve nations, or Haudenosaunee... Although crossers may perceive themselves as members of a sovereign nation, the state may not.” The Haudenosaunee elucidate why it's important to reckon with the contemporary tensions of Indigenous nationhood to understand how colonial borders aren’t just a historic decision, but are ongoing and constantly being negotiated, maintained, and pushed back against.
Individual tribal members have also challenged border crossings. In 2017, Maximino Rodriguez-Robles, who is Kumeyaay, a tribe now on both sides of the U.S. and Mexico, was arrested for crossing into the U.S. from Mexico, after having been previously deported. His case ended up going to federal court, where he pointed to treaties and legislation – like the Jay Treaty – allowing Indigenous peoples with land on both sides of U.S. borders to cross. At the time, the Kumeyaay Tribe was working with U.S. immigration officials to create an enhanced tribal ID allowing their members to cross the border without passports (the Pascua Yaqui Tribe was the first tribe to have such a card, in 2009). Though the judge affirmed in Rodriguez-Robles’s case that the tribe have “historical and moral claim” to the borderlands and they are sovereign, he still argued that there was no law relevant to his particular situation, and that Rodriguez-Robles could be criminally prosecuted. Immigration and citizenship scholar Leti Volp writes wrote of the situation: “Settler colonialism turns Indigenous people and peoples into immigrants; immigration's role in the settler state is to serve as the reason for Indigenous dispossession and as the alibi for that dispossession.” Despite being recognized as Indigenous to the literal land he was crossing on, Rodriguez-Robles was also rendered by the courts an immigrant to be criminalized.
In addition to challenging settler border themselves, Indigenous peoples have also opposed militarization of the border. The Tohono O'odham Tribe resides in the now borderlands in southern Arizona and northern Mexico. They have long lived on and used these lands as their homes, for religious ceremonies, to gather food and medicine – for everything people use the land for. Though the tribe does work with federal agencies on some border issues (in particular, drug trafficking), the Tohono O’odham tribe in the U.S. has long been against building a wall on the U.S./Mexico border. “A wall on the border we do not believe is the answer… We believe what is effective is continued cooperation and working together. When you talk about homeland protection and homeland security, these are our homelands,” said tribal Chairman Verlon Jose. More recently, the Miccosukee Tribe and several environmental organizations filed a lawsuit against construction of the immigration detention center “Alligator Al Catraz.” The construction in the everglades is in their traditional territory, and runoff from construction is impacting tribal members who live just miles from the facility. As a result of this lawsuit, a Florida judge issued a two-week restraining order on any new construction at the facility.
Movement and migration has always been a part of the human experience, and borders have long been sites of carceral control, displacement, and dehumanization. They do not represent the political, cultural history of the people, plants, and animals who have lived on these landscapes since time immemorial.
No matter how long colonial states like the U.S. or Canada or Mexico exist, Blackfeet homeland will always be Blackfeet homeland. Kumeyaay homeland will always be Kumeyaay homeland. Haudenosaunee homeland will always be Haudenosaunee homeland. Tohono O'odham homeland will always be Tohono O'odham homeland.
Indigenous people will continue to be at the forefront of defending our land and our rights to movement.
*In 2007, the UN passed a non-binding resolution on the rights of Indigenous peoples globally. When it passed, four countries voted against it: the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
Links!
A few books on U.S. borders (broadly defined) and Indigeneity that I’ve found helpful:
Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States by Audra Simpson
No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay by Julian Aguon
Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism by Noenoe K Silva
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa
you are so brilliant!