Symposium will examine border crossing solutions
November 1, 2022
Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Sam Truett, associate professor of History and director of the Center for the Southwest at The University of New Mexico, will present the Indigenous Borderlands in North America Symposium this week.
This symposium will bring together historians, scholars in other disciplines, and Indigenous community members to develop new borderland and border-crossing approaches to continental North America that center Indigenous peoples, homelands, political concerns, and related dynamics. The symposium will be held Wednesday-Saturday, Nov. 2 - 5 at the National Hispanic Cultural Center, Albuquerque. The event is free and open to the public.
As director of the Center for the Southwest, Truett is the PI for the project Indigenous Borderlands in North America and the World: Borders, Crossings, Histories, and Futures, which was awarded a Collaborative Research Grant of $50,000 from the NEH, one of 12 such grants nationwide.
“We live in an age of unprecedented social and environmental change in which borderlands-the world’s meeting places and crossing-over places, whether among nations, homelands, humans and more-than-human kin, or the social and ecological systems that sustain them-are shifting. What do our planetary entanglements hold in store, and what might we learn from histories of borderlands and their crossings as we look toward uncertain futures?” Truett said. “In this gathering of scholars and community members, we will anchor visions of past and future to a Native-centered approach to borderlands. Pushing against older habits of sequestering Native peoples to the margins or a remote past, we seek to put Indigenous pasts, presents, and futures at the center of our planetary view.”
Read More in the UNM Newsroom
