Indigenous Borderlands of North America

The concept of borderlands has influenced US historiography and other disciplines for decades. Once exclusively focused on the region, peoples, and boundary crossings between Mexico and the United States, borderlands scholars have now moved into the US-Canada region, the Pacific West, the Eurasian steppe, the fluvial interiors of South America, the terrestrial and marine crossroads of South and East Asia, and the trans-imperial Arctic. New scholarship on Indigenous borderlands opens the lens even wider.

By centering Native peoples, epistemologies, and relationships in cross-disciplinary and community-facing approaches, an Indigenous borderlands approach allows us to craft more accurate narratives of the past and keep open possibilities for Indigenous futures. Borderlands are construed broadly as crossing-over places and zones of entanglement among Indigenous homelands, Native nations, networks of kin (inclusive of other-than-human relations), jurisdictional realms, marine and terrestrial spaces, and ecosystems.

This one-credit graduate microseminar will help students critically explore and analyze new borderland and border-crossing approaches to continental North America that center Indigenous peoples, homelands, political concerns, and related dynamics – temporally and spatially expanding borderlands frameworks. The microseminar will be taught in conjunction with a workshop on Indigenous Borderlands in North America that will be held at the University of Washington on Apr. 20 & 21, 2023.

During the day of Apr. 21, we will engage with groups of authors workshopping new scholarship that explores myriad themes around the topic of Indigenous borderlands. On Saturday, Apr. 22, the microseminar will convene with three of the authors – Holly Guise (Iñupiaq), Fantasia Painter (Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community), and Tyla Betke – to more closely discuss their community-engaged scholarship on Indigenous borderlands. In preparation for the events on Apr. 20-22, the microseminar will meet in-person on Saturday, Apr. 8, to discuss some readings on the topic.

Attendance at and participation in all these events and the microseminar meetings on Apr. 8 & 22 will be mandatory. Students will read and offer feedback on both published and new unpublished scholarship about Indigenous borderlands. At the end of the microseminar, each student will submit a brief reflection on the topic.

Above image: "Pulling in the Strait." Photo by Debbie Ross Preston.