Red Nation Rising is the first book ever to investigate and
explain the violent dynamics of bordertowns. Bordertowns are
white-dominated towns and cities that operate according to the same
political and spatial logics as all other American towns and cities.
The difference is that these settlements get their name from their
location at the borders of current-day reservation boundaries, which
separate the territory of sovereign Native nations from lands claimed
by the United States.
Bordertowns came
into existence when the first US military forts and trading posts
were strategically placed along expanding imperial frontiers to
extinguish indigenous resistance and incorporate captured indigenous
territories into the burgeoning nation-state. To this day, the US
settler state continues to wage violence on Native life and land in
these spaces out of desperation to eliminate the threat of Native
presence and complete its vision of national consolidation “from
sea to shining sea.” This explains why some of the most important
Native-led rebellions in US history originated in bordertowns and why
they are zones of ongoing confrontation between Native nations and
their colonial occupier, the United States.
Despite this rich
and important history of political and material struggle, little has
been written about bordertowns. Red Nation Rising marks the
first effort to tell these entangled histories and inspire a new
generation of Native freedom fighters to return to bordertowns as key
front lines in the long struggle for Native liberation from US
colonial control. This book is a manual for navigating the extreme
violence that Native people experience in reservation bordertowns and
a manifesto for indigenous liberation that builds on long traditions
of Native resistance to bordertown violence.
