Participants respond to works by Ofelia Zepeda, University of Arizona, and Audra Simpson, Columbia, regarding Tohono O’odham and Mohawk, Haudenosenee, experiences of border crossing and documentation.
B/ordering Violence
Boundaries, Gender, Indigeneity in the Americas: The 2012-13 John E. Sawyer Seminar in Comparative Cultures
Thursday’s public lecture was excellent. Professor Zepeda’s presentation of her writing, “Birth Witness,” was personal and laden with the sensation of desert life. Professor Simpson’s presentation of personal ethnographies of experiences of border crossing at Vancouver and Montreal were sharp and funny. Both presentations reveal the absurdity of the border as a place where people are rendered citizen or non-citizen, Indian or non-Indian. This teaches me something about the languages that we use as Indigenous and borderlands scholars to write about the sometimes transgressive, sometimes reifying, but always divisive politics of the borderlands.