Indigenous Peoples and Euro-American Frontiers, Borderlands, and Borders in North America

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brendan W. Rensink
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
North America ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
The United States ◽  
Boundary Line ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Indigenous Lands ◽  
River Region ◽  
Native Sovereignty

On July 27, 1882, a group of at least seventy-five “Turtle Mountain Indians from Canada” crossed the US–Canada border near Pembina, Dakota Territory, ordered white settlers off the land, and refused to pay customs duties assessed against them. “We recognize no boundary line, and shall pass as we please,” proclaimed their leader, Chief Little Shell. Native to the Red River region long before the Treaty of 1818 between the United States and Great Britain drew imaginary cartographies across the region or the 1872 International Boundary Survey left physical markers along the 49th parallel, Little Shell’s Chippewas and Métis navigated expansive homelands bounded by the natural environment and surrounding Native peoples, not arbitrary latitudinal coordinates. Over a century later, Indigenous leaders from the United States, Canada, and Mexico formed the Tribal Border Alliance and hosted a “Tribal Border Summit” in 2019 to assert that “Tribes divided by international borders” had natural inherent and treaty-bound rights to cross for various purposes. These Indigenous sentiments, expressed over centuries, reveal historic and ongoing conflicts born from the inherent incongruity between Native sovereignty and imposed non-Native boundaries and restrictions. Issues of land provide a figurative bedrock to nearly all discussion of interactions between and boundary making by non-Native and Native peoples in North America. Indigenous lands and competing relations to it, natural resources and contest over their control, geography and territoriality: these issues underpin all North American history. Adjacent to these more familiar topics are complex stories of boundaries and borders that were imposed, challenged, ignored, violated, or co-opted. Native histories and experiences at the geographic edges of European empires and nation-states uncover rough and untidy processes of empire-building and settler colonial aspirations. As non-Natives drew lines across maps, laying claim to distant Indigenous lands, they also divided the same in arbitrary manners. They rarely gave serious consideration to Native sovereignty or rights to traditional or evolving relationships to homelands and resources. It is a wonder, therefore, that centuries of non-Natives have been surprised when Indigenous peoples refused to recognize the authority of imposed borders or co-opted their jurisdictional “power” for their own uses. Surveying examples of Indigenous peoples and their histories across imposed boundaries in North America forces historians to ask new questions about intercultural exchange, geopolitical philosophies, and the histories of nations, regions, and peoples. This is a worthy, but complex, pursuit that promises to greatly enrich all intersecting topics and fields.

Intolerance toward Native American Religions

2020 ◽  
pp. 125-146
Author(s):  
John Corrigan ◽  
Lynn S. Neal
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
The United States ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Native American Religions

Settler colonialism was imbued with intolerance towards Indigenous peoples. In colonial North America brutal military force was applied to the subjection and conversion of Native Americans to Christianity. In the United States, that offense continued, joined with condemnations of Indian religious practice as savagery, or as no religion at all. The violence was legitimated by appeals to Christian scripture in which genocide was commanded by God. Forced conversion to Christianity and the outlawing of Native religious practices were central aspects of white intolerance.

Indigenous stewardship as a lifeway1

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Avalos
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
The World

As the decade closes, Indigenous peoples have re-emerged as a critical voice advocating not just for environmental justice but for an entirely different way of living and being with the world. As the descendants of the original inhabitants of lands now dominated by others, they are often entangled in ongoing struggles to protect their lands and sovereignty. Settler colonialism is now famously understood as a structure, not an event, meaning that colonial projects must be continually re-inscribed through discursive and juridical means in order to naturalize Indigenous dispossession. As a religious studies scholar, I am interested in the ways Native peoples in the United States operationalize religious action as an expression of refusal ‐ a refusal to acquiesce their religious lifeways and rights to their lands.

Holding the Line

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel St. John
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Spatial Organization ◽  
The United States ◽  
Boundary Line ◽  
Territorial Sovereignty ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Line P

This chapter explores both the alternate versions of spatial organization and power that persisted and evolved in the borderlands and how the nation-states managed to suppress them in the first four decades of the border's existence. In order to establish military authority and make the boundary line a meaningful marker of territorial sovereignty, the Mexican and U.S. militaries had to defeat two very different threats—the first from filibusters from outside the region and the second from Apache people who had long lived in the borderlands. While both of these struggles revealed how far the United States and Mexico still had to go before they could claim to fully control the borderlands, they also provided evidence of the subtle ways in which the boundary line had already begun to change the landscape of power in the region.

Shaping Forces, Networks, and Local Influences

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Yunhwa Rao
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
North America ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Chinese Opera ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Chinese Theater ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Impact

This chapter surveys the historical context of the 1920s renaissance of Chinese opera theaters in the United States, including social, economic, cultural, and political forces of nation-states that helped shape the Chinese theater network linking China, the United States, Canada, and Cuba. It represents an important shift of the discourse of American musical history from the traditional focus of Atlantic World to that of the Pacific, presenting Chinatown theaters of North America as products of complex transnational forces. It also considers the symbolic significance of language and the impact of transnational network. The chapter therefore challenges the traditional characterization of the Chinese theater community as recalcitrant, demonstrating the many ways in which Chinese and Chinese American performers, owners, and patrons were active participants in the cultural milieu of North America in this period.

scholarly journals Editorial

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Aileen Moreton-Robinson ◽  
Maggie Walter
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Banking Sector ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
The United States ◽  
Special Edition ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Economic Position ◽  
Economic Upturn

This special edition of the International Critical Indigenous Studies Journal focuses on Indigenous people's engagement with the economy in Australia. Over the past two decades neo liberalism has shaped global economic activity. The international reach of the current economic crisis propelled by the subprime mortgage meltdown in the United States has affected Indigenous communities in different ways to those whose investments were depleted by the Wall Street activities of an unregulated corporate and banking sector. Throughout this roller coaster economic ride the low socio-economic position of Indigenous peoples continued in Canada, the United States of America, New Zealand, Hawaii and Australia. The logic, or illogic of capital, failed to extend the boom of the economic upturn to Indigenous peoples, but is poised to extend the repercussions of the current downturn deep into Indigenous lives. The consistency of the Indigenous socio-economic position across these countries, even where treaties exist, indicates that the phenomenon is based on a shared Indigenous reality. In this special edition, the commonality in the way in which Indigenous people are engaged in and positioned by market forces and regulation by their respective nation states is proposed as one of the foundation plates of that Indigenous positioning.

A New Map for North America

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel St. John
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
North America ◽  
Boundary Line ◽  
National Sovereignty ◽  
Nation States

This chapter details the diplomacy and warfare that led to the determination of the location of the boundary line and the trying process through which the Joint United States and Mexican Boundary Commission attempted to survey and mark the boundary on the ground. In delimiting the border, U.S. and Mexican officials imagined that they could easily separate sovereign space. However, the process of delimiting, or drawing, the boundary line on paper, simple as it may seem, was the culmination of decades of conflict and diplomatic negotiation. The difficulties faced by the boundary commission not only impeded the commissioners' work, but also fundamentally challenged the national sovereignty under which they operated. The discrepancy between the ability of the nation-states to delimit the boundary line in the treaty and to demarcate it on the ground marked the beginning of a long history in which the border would repeatedly reveal the divide between the states' aspirations and their actual power.

The Age of Imperial Expansion, 1763–1821

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudio Saunt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native American ◽  
North America ◽  
Population Growth ◽  
The United States ◽  
Native American History ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Atlantic Seaboard ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
Imperial Politics

Between 1763 and 1821, few Native peoples in North America remained untouched by the twin forces of imperial expansion and colonial population growth. Communities in once-remote California and Alaska struggled to adjust to the incursion of missionaries, traders, and soldiers into their lands. Along the Atlantic seaboard, Indians fought to avoid being swallowed up altogether by the United States. Depending on the regional context, indigenous experiences diverged widely. Some Native peoples profited enormously from the arrival of Europeans in their homeland, others underwent a period of painful readjustment and reinvention, and still others struggled merely to keep their communities and families intact. Geography, demography, epidemiology, and the contingencies of Native and imperial politics all shaped the course of Native American history during this tumultuous period.

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