The Border Crossed Us: Enhancing Indigenous International Mobility Rights

ABSTRACT

In North America, a major impediment to Indigenous sovereignty and treaty rights to free movement involves the reticence of the Canadian government on the U.S.-Canada border, and the U.S. government on the U.S.-Mexico border, to allow Indigenous people the right to travel to live and work on both sides of a frontier imposed by settler states. In this article, I argue for enhanced mobility rights for all members of Indigenous polities in North America across the borders that divide their ancestral homelands, with the option to acquire citizenship in each country that has jurisdiction over their nation’s territory. This policy intervention would facilitate interaction, cultural exchange, and trade across militarized frontiers. Enhanced mobility rights across settler state borders for Indigenous peoples would serve as a form of rectification for past treatment that coercively constituted the identities of the affected tribes, without forcing them to accept another settler state’s sovereignty claims.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous
• sovereignty
• citizenship
• crossing
• borders
• United States

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Canada Border Services Agency is involved in a pilot project to provide a dedicated domestic crossing lane for residents of the Akwesasne reservation on Cornwall Island (in Canada, but outside the border screening area), but residents still complain that they face constant discrimination while crossing from their homes within Canada’s international borders to the Canadian mainland in Cornwall, Ontario (Richardson 2020).

2 The Canadian government views issues of its own “international sovereignty and security” to be paramount and non-negotiable as part of any “workable and sustainable solutions that facilitate the ability of First Nation community members to cross the U.S.-Canada border” (Bennett, Goodale, and McCallum 2016).

3 Article 46 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples provides a limit on indigenous human rights claims, providing that “nothing in this declaration may be … construed as authorizing or encouraging any action which would dismember or impair, totally or in part, the territorial integrity or political unity of sovereign and independent States.” This is not the basis for an objection to indigenous mobility rights across settler state boundaries, which does not alter the territorial integrity or seek to undermine the integrity of the settler states that would be affected, even if we accept that these changes might prove politically controversial.

4 U.S. elections have consequences for the members of the Tohono O’Odham nation and other Indigenous polities under U.S. jurisdiction, as shown by the halt to the construction of the border wall upon the inauguration of President Joseph Biden on January 20 2021 (Biden 2021).