"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"--
In Unsettled Borders Felicity Amaya Schaeffer examines the ongoing settler colonial war over the US-Mexico border from the perspective of Apache, Tohono O’odham, and Maya who fight to protect their sacred land. Schaeffer traces the scientific and technological development of militarized border surveillance across time and space from Spanish colonial lookout points in Arizona and Mexico to the Indian wars, when the US cavalry hired Native scouts to track Apache fleeing into Mexico, to the occupation of the Tohono O’odham reservation and the recent launch of robotic bee swarms. Labeled “Optics Valley,” Arizona builds on a global history of violent dispossession and containment of Native peoples and migrants by branding itself as a profitable hub for surveillance. Schaeffer reverses the logic of borders by turning to Indigenous sacredsciences: ancestral land-based practices that are critical to reversing the ecological and social violence of surveillance, extraction, and occupation.
Felicity Amaya Schaeffer traces the scientific and technological development of militarized surveillance at the US-Mexico border across time and space as well as the efforts of Native peoples to continue ancestral practices in the face of ecological and social violence.