June 11 – Transnational Indigenous Histories in the North American Borderlands 🗓

Drawing from his recent award-winning book, Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands, historian Brenden W. Rensink will compare the histories of indigenous peoples who traversed North American borders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Crees who crossed the border from Canada into Montana and Yaquis who migrated across the border into Arizona from Mexico provide unique examples of Native peoples crossing into the United States as laborers, immigrants, and refugees. These histories question how opposing national borders affect and react differently to Native identity, offer new insights into what it has meant to be “indigenous” or an “immigrant,” and complicate familiar narratives in Native American, American West, and Borderlands histories. Rensink’s presentation will hopefully generate as many questions as it answers and urge scholars to reexamine their own research from new angles.

Brenden W. Rensink (Ph.D., 2010) is the Associate Director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies and an Associate Professor of History at Brigham Young University. His most recent book, Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands won the 2019 Spur Award for Best Historical Nonfiction Book. He is also the co-editor and co-author of four additional books, and author multiple articles, book chapters, and reviews. Rensink is the Project Manager and General Editor of the Intermountain Histories digital public history project and as the Host and Producer of the Writing Westward Podcast.