Undocumented Indians: Northern Plains Borders and the People in Between
Focusing on mixed, mobile indigenous groups of the Northern Plains borderlands, Undocumented Indians reveals the hidden legal and material consequences of Canadian and American settler colonialism. After 1860, as the United States and Canada invaded the region, both empires divided people and places into categories of race, nation, tribe and band—like American or Canadian, Sioux or Cree, Metis, Indian, citizen, and alien. Each category conveyed rights, and over time status and rights were tied to specific places, like homesteads, or nations, or Indian reservations. By linking categories of race, place, tribe, and band to land and property, legal status had direct material consequences. But ultimately, the interaction of settler-colonial classifications excluded many borderlands indigenes, leaving them without state status. With each passing decade, borders multiplied, and in doing so reduced the commons. Into the 1940s, statelessness had increasing, critical, physical consequences. Stateless indigenes were not just landless, but worse—their very presence was everywhere forbidden. By looking at their interaction, Hagen shows how state categories constituted a form a violence to indigenous people. Viewed from a Plains perspective, these diverse legal developments were not separate events affecting different populations: they were the connected structure of a coherent settler colonial invasion.
Undocumented Indians uncovers the crucial interaction of U.S. and Canadian colonialisms by following the persistent efforts of the mixed, mobile indigenous people who were caught between their many borders. The story begins in the mid-19th century, when the Northern Plains was a fluid indigenous world. After 1860, the U.S. and then Canada invaded. Borderlands indigenes mounted a sustained campaign to secure status and rights under the new regimes: their ongoing, everyday organizing linked Northern Plains Indian conflicts of the 1860s-1880s, connecting events like the 1862 Dakota Conflict and the 1876 Battle of the Little Big Horn with the violence that convulsed the Canadian Plains in 1885. But after 1885, as allotment brought formalized tribal membership, many indigenous people became stateless. Relentless physical displacement and violent persecution increasingly followed. Nonetheless, into the 1940s, mixed, mobile indigenous people pressed for rights, and continued to claim and occupy their territory. Hagen reconstructs these enduring indigenous geographies—people’s ongoing presence and struggle—revealing how they together constituted massive appropriation of resources, and massive non-compliance with the colonial order.
Through its interdisciplinary, methodologically eclectic approach to questions of space, power, violence, law and the state, Undocumented Indians re-thinks the historical relationship of the Canadian and American Wests, as well as the relationship of borders, borderlands, frontiers, imperialism, indigenous people, immigration and race.
Portions of this research serve as the basis of:
An essay, titled “Nations, Migration, and Métis Subsistence Possibilities, 1860-1940,” in the collected volume Race and Displacement: Nation, Migration and Identity in the 21st Century (University of Alabama Press, 2013).
A series of atlas plates in Opitimsuak Atlas (University of Saskatchewan Press, forthcoming).
Numerous presentations and invited lectures.
Undocumented Indians uncovers the crucial interaction of U.S. and Canadian colonialisms by following the persistent efforts of the mixed, mobile indigenous people who were caught between their many borders. The story begins in the mid-19th century, when the Northern Plains was a fluid indigenous world. After 1860, the U.S. and then Canada invaded. Borderlands indigenes mounted a sustained campaign to secure status and rights under the new regimes: their ongoing, everyday organizing linked Northern Plains Indian conflicts of the 1860s-1880s, connecting events like the 1862 Dakota Conflict and the 1876 Battle of the Little Big Horn with the violence that convulsed the Canadian Plains in 1885. But after 1885, as allotment brought formalized tribal membership, many indigenous people became stateless. Relentless physical displacement and violent persecution increasingly followed. Nonetheless, into the 1940s, mixed, mobile indigenous people pressed for rights, and continued to claim and occupy their territory. Hagen reconstructs these enduring indigenous geographies—people’s ongoing presence and struggle—revealing how they together constituted massive appropriation of resources, and massive non-compliance with the colonial order.
Through its interdisciplinary, methodologically eclectic approach to questions of space, power, violence, law and the state, Undocumented Indians re-thinks the historical relationship of the Canadian and American Wests, as well as the relationship of borders, borderlands, frontiers, imperialism, indigenous people, immigration and race.
Portions of this research serve as the basis of:
An essay, titled “Nations, Migration, and Métis Subsistence Possibilities, 1860-1940,” in the collected volume Race and Displacement: Nation, Migration and Identity in the 21st Century (University of Alabama Press, 2013).
A series of atlas plates in Opitimsuak Atlas (University of Saskatchewan Press, forthcoming).
Numerous presentations and invited lectures.