Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation

Description

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 separates 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. Contents: Foreword by Radmilla Cody and Brandon Benallie 1. "I Can't Fucking Breathe!" "I Can't Breathe" From the Plantation to the Bordertown The Upside-Down Places Settlers Need Indian Killers Off the Reservation From Larry Casuse to The Red Nation 2. Anti-Indianism Anti-Indian Common Sense Off the Reservation Indian Country Drunk Indian Urban Indian Relocation Savage/Savagery Church Nature Poverty Public Education 3. Indian Killers Indian Rolling Vigilante Police Violence Indian Expert Drunk Tank Forced Sterilization Gender Violence MMIWG2S: Missing and Murdered Native Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People Militarization White Supremacy Exposure Homelessness Pandemic Public Health 4. Looting Settler Colonialism Rape Man Camp Treaty Law Alcohol Capitalism Bordertown Political Economy Class Exploitation Resource Colonization Structural Violence 5. Counterinsurgency Criminalization Boarding Schools Race Charity Civil Rights Report Gender Hate Crime History 6. Settler Scams Property Nonprofit Sacred Sites Peace and Healing Police Brutality Human Rights Liberalism Tourism Tradition 7. Burn the Village Abolition Kinship Solidarity/Alliance Land LGBTQl2S Sovereignty Decolonization Liberation 8. Don't Go Back to the Reservation: A Bordertown Manifesto I. The future is Native. II. All land is Native, and all settler towns and cities are bordertowns. III. The values that govern life in all settler nations competition, aggression, self-interest, exclusion, violence, exploitation are values learned, practiced, and perfected in the bordertown. IV. Settler colonialism and capitalism go hand in hand. V. Native death is the raw material that built the bordertown. VI. The bordertown cannot be reformed. Settler society cannot be redeemed. VII. Private property mediates all expressions of settler kinship. VIII. There is no Native liberation in a heteropatriarchal world. IX. Settler colonialism is the disease. Decolonization and abolition are the cure. X. Native liberation will be won in the bordertown.