This workshop will examine the historical relationships between imperial, national, and Indigenous borderlands, focusing on the archival holding at UNM’s Center for Southwest Research. We will discuss the impact of empires, settler states, and their borders on Indigenous communities, while also asking how we can think about borderlands from Indigenous perspectives. We will engage new work on Indigenous borderlands—which places Indigenous sovereignty, spatial relations, and protocols of power at center—and critical border studies, which explores how empires, nation-states, and settler regimes mark out borders by marking others as “illegal,” “alien,” or “savage.” And we’ll also ask how we might extend these various borderlands and border-studies perspectives to those towns, cities, and other spaces that border (and entangle with) Indigenous nations.
Profs. Jennifer Denetdale (American Studies) and Samuel Truett (History) will lead discussion of foundational readings in the field and will work with colleagues in the UNM Center for Southwest Research and Indigenous Nations Library Program to introduce the participants to the unique rare-book, ephemera, and archival holdings on Native American history at the Center for Southwest Research. We will then work with archivists to guide the students through specific collections, with an eye to helping them develop critically-informed research projects.
After introducing participants to the broader questions and archives associated with Indigenous borderlands, we will take a half-day field trip to nearby Acoma Pueblo where members of the Acoma community will introduce students to a centuries-old “borderland” community, rooted in local soil but shaped profoundly by imperial violence and the borders and networks that locals negotiated with Indigenous neighbors, and Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. newcomers. We will finish things up on Saturday morning with student presentations of archival findings.
Workshop Participants:
Jenni Tifft-Ochoa, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Scott Doebler, Penn State University
Jessica Martin, University of Winnipeg
Kaitlyn Davis, University of Colorado
Kristen Simmons, University of Chicago
Courtney Lynn Whited, Oklahoma State University
Cecilia Idalen Frescas-Ortiz, University of New Mexico
Adrian Chavana, University of Minnesota
Aaron Luedtke, Michigan State University
John Paul Paniagua, Princeton University
Sebastian Lopez Vergara, University of Washington
Manon Gaudet, Yale University
Kendra Greendeer, University of Wisconsin
Nakai Flotte, Harvard University