Transnational Indians in the North American West

Clarissa Confer · Andrae Marak · Laura Tuennerman

oct 2015 · Texas A&M University Press

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This collection of eleven original essays goes beyond traditional, border-driven studies to place the histories of Native Americans, indigenous peoples, and First Nation peoples in a larger context than merely that of the dominant nation.

As Transnational Indians in the North American West shows, transnationalism can be expressed in various ways. To some it can be based on dependency, so that the history of the indigenous people of the American Southwest can only be understood in the larger context of Mexico and Central America. Others focus on the importance of movement between Indian and non-Indian worlds as Indians left their (reserved) lands to work, hunt, fish, gather, pursue legal cases, or seek out education, to name but a few examples. Conversely, even natives who remained on reserved lands were nonetheless transnational inasmuch as the reserves did not fully “belong” to them but were administered by a nation-state.

Boundaries that scholars once viewed as impermeable, it turns out, can be quite porous. This book stands to be an important contribution to the scholarship that is increasingly breaking free of old boundaries.

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CLARISSA CONFER is associate professor of history at California University of Pennsylvania and the author of Daily Life in Pre-Columbian Native America. ANDRAE MARAK is chair of humanities and social sciences and professor of history and political science at Governors State University, University Park, Illinois, and the author of From Many, One: Indians, Peasants, Borders, and Education in Callista, Mexico, 1924–1935. LAURA TUENNERMAN is professor of history at California University of Pennsylvania and the coauthor of At the Border of Empires: The Tohono O'odham, Gender, and Assimilation, 1880–1934.