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

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.

From Native Sovereignty to an Oilman’s State: Land, Race, and Petroleum in Indian Territory and Oklahoma

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Indian Territory and the State of Oklahoma experienced one of the world’s largest petroleum booms, with much of the oil extracted from the territory and state produced on land owned by Indigenous, Black, and mixed-race peoples. White settlers, backed by governing institutions and cultures rooted in settler colonialism, anti-Black racism, and anti-monopolism, struggled to seize control of oil-rich land amid the allotment of Native-owned property. These latter elements insisted that non-whites could not grasp the value of petroleum nor be trusted with the control of such a vital resource, especially in the shadow of ever-looming oil monopolies. Settlers and wildcat prospectors built a white-supremacist oil-field politics that elevated the rights of small-scale, proprietary "independent" oilmen and worked to ensure that the latter controlled flows of crude vis-à-vis non-white property holders and “outside” corporations. For white settlers in Indian Territory and Oklahoma, oil rose to the top of collective imaginaries about race, property, and wealth, encouraging the creation of both legal and often violent extralegal strategies for dispossessing unworthy landowners of their hydrocarbon inheritance.

Gender, Sovereignty, and the Discourse of Rights in Native Women’s Activism

Drawing from Native feminist theories and sovereignty studies, this essay examines the 1983 and 1985 amendments and the activism that led to their development and passage as an instance of the co-constitutive relationship of gender and sovereignty. By looking at how the discourse of rights was mobilized from very different contexts to very different ends by various constituencies of Indian men, women, and their allies, this essay modestly opens the conflicts surrounding gender politics and women’s rights in Native sovereignty movements. I hope to provide a forum for thinking about the kinds of social reformations that are needed to bring about social equity between and for men and women in Indian communities—an equity that is an essential aspect of decolonization and social justice for Native peoples in North America.

Indian Princely States and the 19th-century Transformation of the Law of Nations

The role of the roughly 600 Indian princely kingdoms in the transformation of the law of nations into international law during the 19th century is an overlooked episode of international legal history. The Indian princely states effected a gradual end of the Mughal and the Maratha confederacies while appropriating international legal language. The Privy Council—before and after 1858—sanctified within common law as the acts of state, both, the seizure of territories from Indian kings and the ossification of encumbrances attached to the annexed territories. After the Crown takeover of the East India Company in 1858, the British India Government carefully rebooted, even mimicked, the native polyandric relationship of the tribal chiefs, petty states and semi-sovereigns with the Mughal–Maratha complex using multi-normative legal texts. Put down in the British stationery as engagements, sunnuds and treaties, these colonial texts projected an imperially layered nature of the native sovereignty. I challenge the metropole's claims of a one-way export to the colonies of the assumed normative surpluses. I argue that the periphery while responding to a ‘jurisdictional imperialism' upended interational law's civilisation-giving thesis by exporting law to the metropole.

Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met

During the late eighteenth century, Portugal and Spain sent joint mapping expeditions to draw a nearly 10,000-mile border between Brazil and Spanish South America. These boundary commissions were the largest ever sent to the Americas and coincided with broader imperial reforms enacted throughout the hemisphere. Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met considers what these efforts meant to Indigenous peoples whose lands the border crossed. Moving beyond common frameworks that assess mapped borders strictly via colonial law or Native sovereignty, it examines the interplay between imperial and Indigenous spatial imaginaries. What results is an intricate spatial history of border making in southeastern South America (present-day Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay) with global implications. Drawing upon manuscripts from over two dozen archives in seven countries, Jeffrey Erbig traces on-the-ground interactions between Ibero-American colonists, Jesuit and Guaraní mission-dwellers, and autonomous Indigenous peoples as they responded to ever-changing notions of territorial possession. It reveals that Native agents shaped when and where the border was drawn, and fused it to their own territorial claims. While mapmakers' assertions of Indigenous disappearance or subjugation shaped historiographical imaginaries thereafter, Erbig reveals that the formation of a border was contingent upon Native engagement and authority.

Poetic Resistances and the Indian Occupation of Alcatraz

This essay examines the literary writings produced by Native activists during the 1969–71 Indian Occupation of Alcatraz. Analyzing the contentious historiography of the Occupation, I argue that the activists on the island (who collectively called themselves the Indians of All Tribes) deftly invested in media forms that could contest false narrative accounts reported from the mainland. I follow the circulation of poetry written on the island through its print life in the Indians of All Tribes Newsletter, a literary and informational bulletin composed on Alcatraz, in which activists articulated plans to expand Native-controlled literary and art markets as a financial basis for self-determination. Reading through two archival collections from the Indians of All Tribes in relation to ongoing Native community-building in the Bay Area, I argue that, then and now, the Bay Area Native community has strategically and suspiciously engaged with a consumer base marked by a seemingly bottomless appetite for Native media and a disregard for Native sovereignty.

Self-Determination Begins in the Womb

This chapter explores Native women’s quest for reproductive self-determination from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. The chapter documents Native women’s diverse attitudes toward and engagement with federal family planning services, while dedicating particular attention to growing concerns regarding unethical and even coercive sterilizations in the 1970s. Native nurses, community health representatives, and other activists struggled in various ways for women’s reproductive autonomy, collectively ensuring the centrality of reproduction to Red Power politics and the ongoing struggle for Native sovereignty. By the end of the decade, activist pressure resulted in the adoption of new federal regulations that provided some protections for Native and other women. Native women also founded grassroots organizations that pursued reproduction-related agendas such as a return to Native midwifery.