Indigenous Borderlands: Refusal and Fugitivity

Amrah J. Salomon
English
UC Santa Barbara

Susy Zepeda
Chicano and Chicana Studies
UC Davis

This project brings together a range of interdisciplinary scholars who consider borders and borderlands from the intersections of Xicana and Indigenous feminisms. Given the theorizing of the borderlands that have emerged from the displacement and migration of decolonial Xicana feminists, how might we think critically about the conceptual frames that have shaped a range of disciplinary fields—from third space, to margins, to citizenship and belonging, to governance and the nation-state—from an Indigenous perspective? We argue that the perspective of Indigenous communities and tribal nations living across borders, or of Indigenous migrants and refugees crossing borders imposed on other Native American lands, demand new ways of understanding transborder and neocolonial logics of extraction, occupation, incarceration, and violence against the land and keepers of the land in locations at and far from nation-state borders. Indigenous sovereignties and autonomies encourage us to think with and beyond the normalization of the nation-state logic that continues to drive historical notions of time that incarcerate Indigeneity to the past. Thus, our work pushes against the boundaries of disciplines and colonial ideas about space that we have internalized and that orient Western territorial, racial, or legal definitions of belonging.