Unsettled Borders

“Offering key insights into our current moment’s militarized border zones, Felicity Amaya Schaeffer uncovers the multilayered structures of border control, where new technologies are utilized as nefarious forms of surveillance. Her attention to the power of theoretical language, Native histories, and the embodied experience of Indigeneity points to the powerful acts of resistance that are embedded in local struggles over representation and territory. Articulating an anticolonial vision of the border that decries the profound consequences of occupation and dispossession, Schaeffer shows why frontier history matters.” - Macarena Gómez-Barris, author of The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives

“In this innovative and transformative book, Felicity Amaya Schaeffer locates Indigenous studies within border studies in ways that are both timely and refreshing. By holding the complexities of indigeneity as the land-based practices, knowledges, and identities of those detained, policed, and displaced by borders, she offers a truly exciting reframing of conversations that are only too relevant to the new present of the United States and its dependence on technology, control, and borders.” - Jodi A. Byrd, author of The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism

“[Unsettled Borders] includes an impressively documented bibliography. The text ultimately succeeds in telling a story of violence against Indigenous peoples and their cultures, perpetrated in the name of border security, and documenting the use of surveillance technology, which has permanently altered the landscape. Recommended.” - G. Christensen, Choice

"Unsettled Borders makes an outstanding contribution to replacing some of the missing pieces while incorporating neocolonialism and interethnic borders into state border studies. Its author, Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, builds a great basis for a problem that is gaining greater visibility, exposing an equal criminalization of migrant people and indigenous communities." - Tania Porcaro, Journal of Borderlands Studies

"I loved the big picture and provocative ideas that expanded my own understanding of topics I have studied for many years. . . . The book centers Indigenous perspectives to demonstrate not only the contributions Indigenous science has made to (or rather, been appropriated by) the military-industrial/border-security complex, but also the ways that Indigenous scholarship contributes to our understanding of this dynamic from a critical thinking perspective. The primary focus of the book is U.S. borders and Arizona features prominently therein, but the lessons go well beyond this geography as approaches to border security have become globalized." - Kenneth D. Madsen, Indigenous Religious Traditions

"Unsettled Borders is a rich and skillful analysis of military discourse, settler technoscience, and ethnographic materials primarily devoted to events in the Arizona-Sonora borderlands, but with resonances across other settler colonial spaces (within and beyond the United States)." - Iván Chaar López, Postcolonial Studies

“Unsettled Borders successfully crafts new spaces of solidarity. It is theoretically nuanced, data-rich, and artfully executed.” - Fantasia Painter, American Indian Culture and Research Journal

“Unsettled Borders brings together an extraordinary range of disciplines to offer a refreshing new perspective on the histories and futures of surveillance and Indigenous exclusion in the U.S.– Mexico borderlands.” - Sheila McManus, Wicazo Sa Review

"Amaya Schaeffer reframes and widens the scope of analysis regarding borders, immigration, security, militarization, surveillance, and human rights. ... Unsettled Borders puts forth new ways of understanding and problem-solving that emerge from [the] unlikely interdisciplinarity." - Raquel Madrigal, American Ethnologist