Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands (Connecting the Greater West Series) - Hardcover

Rensink, Brenden W.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1623496551 ISBN 13: 9781623496555

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press, 2018

Synopsis

Winner of the 2019 Spur Award for Best Historical Nonfiction Book from Western Writers of America.

In Native but Foreign, historian Brenden W. Rensink presents an innovative comparison of indigenous peoples who traversed North American borders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, examining Crees and Chippewas, who crossed the border from Canada into Montana, and Yaquis from Mexico who migrated into Arizona. The resulting history questions how opposing national borders affect and react differently to Native identity and offers new insights into what it has meant to be "indigenous" or an "immigrant."

Rensink's findings counter a prevailing theme in histories of the American West--namely, that the East was the center that dictated policy to the western periphery. On the contrary, Rensink employs experiences of the Yaquis, Crees, and Chippewas to depict Arizona and Montana as an active and mercurial blend of local political, economic, and social interests pushing back against and even reshaping broader federal policy. Rensink argues that as immediate forces in the borderlands molded the formation of federal policy, these Native groups moved from being categorized as political refugees to being cast as illegal immigrants, subject to deportation or segregation; in both cases, this legal transition was turbulent. Despite continued staunch opposition, Crees, Chippewas, and Yaquis gained legal and permanent settlements in the United States and successfully broke free of imposed transnational identities.

Accompanying the thought-provoking text, a vast guide to archival sources across states, provinces, and countries is included to aid future scholarship. Native but Foreign is an essential work for scholars of immigration, indigenous peoples, and borderlands studies.

• Winner, 2019 Spur Award for Best Historical Nonfiction Book, Western Writers of America
• January 2019 Great Plains Book of the Month, Center for Great Plains Studies

About this title

About the Author

Brenden W. Rensink (Ph.D., 2010) is 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 (Connecting the Greater West Series, TexasA&M University Press, 2018), won the 2019 Spur Award for Best Historical Nonfiction Book.

He is also the co-editor of the anthology, Essays on American Indian and Mormon History (University of Utah Press, 2019), co-editor of Documents Vol. 4, and Documents Vol.6 of the award-winning Joseph Smith Papers project (Church Historians Press, 2016, 2017), co-author of the Historical Dictionary of the American Frontier (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), and author multiple articles, book chapters,and reviews.

Rensink helps manage events, programming, awards, and research at the BYU Redd Center. He created and directs two ongoing public history initiatives for the Redd Center: serving as 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. His current research projects include consulting with the Native American Rights Fund, editing a collection of essays on 21st Century West History, writing new cultural and environmental history of Western American wilderness experience, articles on transnational immigration and Indigenous peoples, and multiple local environmental and photography projects in the San Rafael Swell, broader Great Basin, and along the Wasatch Front.

Edition details

• Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1623496551
• ISBN 13: 9781623496555
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304