Unsettled Borders

The story of how the U.S.-Mexico border has become more dangerous for migrant crossing has preoccupied scholars across a range of fields. As necessary as this has been, the overwhelming focus on border crossers has eclipsed the consequences of military occupation on Native tribes whose land and bodies spill across the border, including mounting numbers of Maya refugees. Unsettled Borders follows the science and technological development of border surveillance back to military innovations tasked with seeing the invisible movements of Apache and Chiricahua warriors across the rugged terrain of the western frontier. Felicity Amaya Schaeffer follows a range of militarized surveillance innovations across time and space, recalling the Spanish lookout points erected to monitor Maya in the Yucatan, the superior eyes of Indian scouts, automated border avatars, and swarming bee drones. From the perspective of Native border inhabitants, a broader story emerges about how mechanized seeing attempts to eradicate Native sacred and animate relation with land. With an eye on the more-than-human world, Apache, O'odham and Maya teach us about the impossibility of borders in their sacred scientific worldviews that see relation where westerners impose segregated seeing and knowing. Unsettled Borders returns to ancestral practices-from beekeepers caring for the Melipona bees who bring back their forests to O'odham relations with saguaro peoplehood amputated by border walls. The border comes alive with a resurgent force of Native land defenders who refuse extraction, occupation, and surveillance by the futile attempts to build virtual and iron-cast walls that will ultimately fail to contain life and erect borders around the world--