Part 1 of Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation

American Indian Airwaves

Today we interview two contributing authors of Red Nation Rising, 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. 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. Tune in for more. Guests: Jennifer Nez Denetdale (Dine’ Nation), professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico and serves on the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission, and David Correia, associate professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico, and organizes with AbolishAPD, a research collective focused on confronting the violence of the Albuquerque Police Department and committed to the abolition of police as we know it.