Our Lands, Your Lines: How Inter and Intra National Borders Try and Fail to Contain Indigenous Land

Keywords: Settler Colonialism, Jurisdiction, Indigeneity, US-Mexico Border
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

All borders require Indigenous land. In the southern Arizona—in what Anglo-Americans call the Sonoran Desert—they require O’odham land in particular. While the international border between the United States and Mexico is perhaps the most well-known border drawn through O’odham territory, the land has also been jurisdictionally parsed by various intra-national boundaries (reservations, the U.S. bombing range, the national park, the wildlife refuge). These intra-national borders and the jurisdictions they adumbrate conspicuously reify the US Mexico border both conceptually and materially. They are maintained as variously “empty,” perfect for the boundary between nations. And as federally owned parcels, they have historically facilitated the construction of the US-Mexico border wall.

This talk investigates how both intra- and inter- national line-drawing on O’odham land has been undergirded, supported, and compelled by the idea of the “desert.” In the first half of this talk, finding purchase in scholarship on settler colonialism, I discover how U.S. boundary-making wields “the desert” as a conceptual tool to border, delimit, and minimize Native space and to designate the majority of land as “other,” as “empty” or as “public.” In the second half, moving out from O’odham relationships with land, I argue that inherent in the idea of “the desert” is the undoing of the settler colonial bordering project. This is not a desert. This is O’odham land.