Indigenous Borderlands in North America and the World: Borders, Crossings, Histories, and Futures

FAIN: RZ-286898-22

Regents of the University of New Mexico (Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001)
Samuel J. Truett (Project Director: November 2021 to present)

Planning and holding a conference centering Indigenous people and knowledge-making in the study of North America’s borderlands. (12 months) 

We seek funding to hold a conference on Indigenous borderlands in North America–the first in a series of international conferences on Indigenous borderlands, crossings, histories, and futures in both American and global contexts–and to prepare a volume of essays for publication. The goal is not only to Indigenize our approach to the world’s borderlands, but also to bring these spaces and their crossings to the fore in humanistic approaches to planetary change. We seek nothing less than to center Indigenous histories and interrelationships as a bedrock of world history and to use this foundation to envision new paths into the future. Bringing historians into a strategic conversation with scholars of other disciplines and with Indigenous community representatives, we ask how cross-disciplinary and community-facing dialogue can advance humanistic knowledge, developing new ways to envision borders, crossings, histories, and futures in contexts of social and environmental change.