Indigenous Borderlands Initiative
A scholarly and community-facing initiative grounded in a partnership between the Center for the Southwest at UNM, the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest at the University of Washington, and other institutional partners that seeks to entangle and rethink the frameworks of borderlands and Indigenous histories in western North American and global contexts.
About the Indigenous Borderlands Initiative
Borderlands histories tend to privilege Eurocentric tales of imperial expansion and nation-formation, but a growing cohort of scholars is engaging with Indigenous knowledges to explore the dynamics of sovereignty, border-making, mobility, entanglement, and cross-cultural power. Indigenous Borderlands views local, continental, and global spaces from the world-facing edges of Native communities, exploring how communities demarcated space, entangled, made kin, and changed shape over time within human and more-than-human contexts. The Indigenous Borderlands initiative is grounded in an institutional partnership with the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest at the University of Washington, and a scholarly collaboration led by Rani-Henrik Andersson (University of Helsinki), Boyd Cothran (York University), Elizabeth Ellis (New York University), Nakia D. Parker (Michigan State University), Joshua L. Reid (University of Washington), Rani-Henrik Andersson (University of Helsinki), and Samuel Truett (University of New Mexico).
We are projecting a multi-year series of workshops, conferences, and colloquia that will build a cohort of international scholars to explore new approaches to borderlands and their crossings with Indigenous histories, epistemologies, and politics at the center. We seek also to situate this project within the growing field of global Indigenous studies, demonstrating how work on the North American West can have larger transnational relevance.
The Indigenous Borderlands initiative will build upon the Center for the Southwest’s ongoing efforts to build graduate training at UNM in the Newberry Consortium in American Indian Studies, based at the Newberry Library, in which UNM has been a key partner since 2010.
- Current and Upcoming Events
- Indigenous Borderlands Podcasts and Webinars
- Scholarly and Teaching Resources
- Community Projects and Resources
