Like Israel in the Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) region, in the Americas the United States is a European colonial outpost. The United States’ and Israel's statuses as colonial outposts are made evident by both nations’ claims to uphold, protect, and disseminate “Western civilization” in supposedly “uncivilized” areas (while of course amassing wealth), a project that the United States has made not only hemispheric but global. They are invaders, foreign entities violently imposing a Western liberal humanist order that seeks to replace the Indigenous modes of governance, relations, and being that have been the order for millennia. This is in part why the US and Israeli settler projects cannot be disentangled (beyond their tight material connections). The preeminent figure of their civilizationist logic is the white Western liberal human: political, legal, economic, proprietary, educational, and other social technologies center and reinforce this figure.
One of the major mechanisms for development of imperial state power is the use of borders. Borders determine the relational structure of the state as the expression of the Western liberal human and its ontological hierarchy (determining who and what is animate and has value, and who and what isn't and doesn't and therefore deserves death or debilitation). In the context of satellite European settler states, the border is conscripted in an ongoing war against “savages” and their worlds, which are rendered illegible and dangerous by the terms of the Western hierarchy. In the Western humanist order, borders are instruments of war, sovereign forms of violence through which faux “nations” are built and colonial orders are reproduced through the image of the human, its unfettered agency and access to resources and bodies, and its capacity to determine who and what is kept/allowed in or out and how.
Settler borders are also reality-making devices. They are a significant part of the imperial project to remake the land, people, and global order according to the Western figure of the human and through categorical divisions in the order of the Western ontological hierarchy. Materially and discursively, the humanizing project seeks to violently mold relations by making only one viewpoint available—its own. Reality materializes through an epistemological closure that assumes the need for military-style surveillance as settler surveillance, which produces only one way of seeing the land, as the property of the rational humanist state. The border as the site of colonial warfare produces humanist fantasies of savagery and death that uphold a fiction and allows the state to control and target peoples and worlds. The border thereby forgets its metaphysical nature and seeks to become reality: the site of creation of the “reality” of citizenship as a historical “achievement.” With reference to the US-Mexico border, following Felicity Amaya Schaeffer's call to “orient our understanding of the border from the autonomous perspective of Native peoples, or the Indigenous borderlands,” if we shift the angle of perception in order to begin from the incommensurate relations that Native Americans and Latinx and Maya migrants have to borderlands—if we reinstate difference, relation, and plurality—what becomes visible?1 What other ways of understanding and relating become available? What modes of resistance against the violent metaphysics of the humanist border appear?
Such questions make clear that the failure of the humanizing system is baked into it. Borders don't keep people and other beings out or keep those supposedly protected by them safe; instead, they violently impose an order of death and torture on certain peoples and their worlds, peoples and worlds that nonetheless persist. The current controversy over the use of razor wire and floating borders2 by the state of Texas is only the outward manifestation of the border's spiritual and material reality-making force: it rends flesh and tears relations. European Americans’ attempts to disappear into whiteness and forge ersatz national identity are tied to this trail of blood and flesh, the blade drawn across the land, water, and nonwhite bodies, which indicates its own failed bid to be “human.” Border abolition is a call to reconfigure these violent conditions away from the Western liberal human and its order; hence the illogic of US mainstream discourses on border abolition that cannot imagine an “open border” policy because they cannot imagine the other world that already exists alongside the settler one. An “open border” is illogical in a world forged by borders.
Native Americans haunt the settler nation's borders. This haunting manifests in the international collaboration between the United States and Mexico to eradicate “savage” nations, particularly those who refuse borders, as evidenced by scalp bounties on the Apache and Comanche,3 and in more complex ways such as the existence of the Shadow Wolves, “the Department of Homeland Security's only Native American tracking unit specifically utilized for targeted interdiction operations,” a form of Indigenous technology weaponized by the settler state.4 It also manifests in the confluence of border policies that intersect with the logics of inclusion of Indigenous people into the US as enfranchised individuals5 and in the Indigenous spatial practices that persist despite borders. Even the epicenters of the enhancement and the proliferation of border surveillance and US military interventions for “security” (such as those created in the wake of 9/11) are haunted by Indigeneity (Osama Bin Laden, for example, was coded as Geronimo). An Indigenous understanding of borders and settler violence not only offers a framework for resistance to the settler border regime but also puts into greater context the more well-known installments of border and carceral logics (such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, 1882), which find their precedents in the entanglements of land expropriation, slavery, genocide, and surveillance as founding forces of the settler state.
This haunting of the humanizing process indexes the fraught nature of US settlement as necessarily incomplete. Settlers seek to self-indigenize by claiming an inheritance of Indigenous relations to the land. This occurs through the abstraction of Indigenous relations, what Glen Coulthard calls “grounded normativity,”6 into culture as a knowable unit, separating Indigenous people from their worlds and more-than-human social relations by imposing a narrow definition of politics onto them as an affair of humans only on an ontological hierarchical scale. Separated from their robust social worlds, Indigenous people are then located in this civilizationist hierarchy based on Western conceptions of advancement as settlers install themselves into the position of most advanced on a linear line of development and therefore inheritors of “previous” epochs and their accomplishments and relations (spatial relations to place are thereby uprooted and temporalized). Even supposedly more egalitarian conceptions of Indigenous culture see such cultures as resources for developing the unique formation of an upstart settler society. This occurs through knowledge-production about Indigenous peoples together with evaluative modes of governance and social control in lockstep with genocidal logics of elimination.7 In other words, Indigenous people and worlds are decimated until they no longer pose a threat, all while Indigeneity is rendered into a resource to sustain and reproduce setter society. And this because Indigenous peoples threaten the very foundations of settler society while also acting as a necessary source for its grounding. The figure of the human, then, operates as the threshing machine through which Indigenous people and others must pass to be either included or violently eliminated. However, to fully include Indigenous peoples in the figure of the human (which would entail inclusion of a full interrelational, more-than-human politicality) and thereby include them in the settler state would mean an end of the settler state form and the death of the Western liberal human. Indigenous people are therefore humanized by the state, separated out from Indigenous worlds as narrowly “political” subjects with no claim to the plurality and difference of Indigenous worlds and modes of relating, now rendered safe as a “cultural” (private) identity, belief, or past.
The border is the Western liberal human's weakness, its insecurity. It is an instrumental condition that seeks to violently uphold this settler human order against the spatial practices and modes of interrelationality practiced by Indigenous peoples that threaten settler property claims. The persistent narratives of crisis at the border produced by settler politicians and the mainstream media are signs of its inherent failure and cruelty; they expose not only the cracks in the border but the border itself as crack in the settler humanist facade. The human produces violence in its name; there is no Western liberal human without this violence. The border is both a mechanism of control and a site where everything is out of control. The border is the site of the inhuman, the condition and failure of the production of the human and its order against the forces of “nature,” the simplified expression for all that lies outside of human control. Different from dehumanization, which affirms the Western liberal figure of the human before conflating it with categories understood to be less free or in some way abject (and thereby upholding the humanist ontological schema and the category of the human as a site of desire for inclusion), the inhuman is a more ambiguous category. It marks both the violent limits of the human (the technologies that spin out of control, such as systems of exploitation) and the overcoming of the figure of the human (by what has been violently expelled in its production, such as Indigenous modes of interrelation and an altered position for the human in these formations through a sense of Indigenous antihumanism). In this indetermination, the inhuman is both danger and potential for another world. The borderlands, which mark a definite limit of the humanist system and are an opening onto the realm of the inhuman, become permanent frontiers from the perspective of the humanist state, inhabited by “savages,” an inhuman world devoid of Westphalian sovereignty, a boundary onto the stateless. It is the site for a struggle over the inhuman realm. The ontological catastrophe that is the imposed humanist settler order is paradoxically a resource for anticolonialism at the site of the inhuman border, prompting the coalitional possibility between Indigenous and other antistate and stateless peoples who seek the death of the Western liberal human and its colonial outposts. A turn to the inhuman offers a different direction for anticolonial work, as the violence of the inhuman border cannot be contested with a “greater humanism.” We must never expect such a brutal, paradoxical system to be anything other than it is, on either its human or inhuman faces. This is why border abolition is a necessary component of decolonization. Appropriately, this turn to the inhuman for abolition and decolonization ambiguously operates through the refusal/failure of the system itself and toward its neutralization.
The inhuman force of derealization of Indigenous relations and worlds as condition of the Western liberal human is a key to our best tactics: we must understand and derealize border coloniality—as an improper apparatus of the Western human—in the service of decolonization. We must embrace the indetermination between refusing the Western liberal humanist order and weaponizing its own immanent failure toward its collapse, an indetermination that begins with the settler humanizing system's impossible attempts to manage indigeneity, on both fronts: its own self-indigenizing project and the Indigeneity of Native peoples who cannot be controlled. We must expose and let proliferate the cracks in the system. As with Audra Simpson's descriptions of Indigenous border crossers who refuse to consent to settler state sovereignty and its modes of recognition and Gilberto Rosas's descriptions of denizens of the Barrio Libre who operate in the difficult space of the borderlands and refuse the neoliberal enticements and impoverishments of the Western human, it is difficult to assert a humanist subject in these refusals of the states’ realities.8 Border abolition is decolonization. Indigenous people have long been living as if borders don't exist in a speculative sense, refusing to obey, continuing criminalized social relationships, being what Deborah Miranda calls “bad Indians,” failing to become human or to become good Indians.9 This is a mode of relating that is incredibly difficult and that crosses the state's borders in ways that often draws its violence but that risks the possibility of another world in the end of the colonial one. Refugees and migrants refusing the state's social and political order/failing to be incorporated as good citizens, Indigenous peoples refusing to consent to colonialism/failing to disappear, Black people refusing to die/failing to become part of Man: such refusals work within and against a humanizing colonial order, tapping into its inhuman conditions as profoundly difficult resources.
Notes
The US state of Texas has installed a floating border—a one-thousand-foot-long string of buoys and saw blades supporting a submerged mesh net—on the Rio Grande that puts the lives of those crossing the border at significant risk. A federal court ruled that the state must remove the border, though this ruling was reversed in appeal. Texas has also installed razor wire along parts of the border, and the US Supreme Court recently ruled that Border Patrol can cut the razor wire. This, however, is done to allow more efficient arrest and processing of border crossers.
See Saldaña-Portillo, Indian Given, chap. 3.
The US Border Patrol was created the same year that Native Americans became US citizens, in 1924; the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which brought an end to the Mexican-American War and created the current US-Mexico border, was signed in 1848, a year before the US federal government moved the Office of Indian Affairs from the War Department to the Department of the Interior in 1849; the Marshall trilogy, with its determination of Native tribes as “domestic dependent nations,” coincided with the Monroe Doctrine, which claims US hegemony over the Western Hemisphere, in 1923. Together these confluences indicate the difficult force of inclusion of Native Americans as “domestic subjects” and how this humanizing process became a laboratory for what Jodi Byrd calls the transit of empire, the replication of this process in imperial contexts and on other Indigenous and colonized populations.
“The modalities of Indigenous land-connected practices and long-standing experiential knowledge that inform and structure our ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with human and nonhuman others over time.” Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 13.
This itinerary is marked by the processes that Patrick Wolfe defined as elimination and absorption. These include removal, confinement, anticommunalism, removal of children through education and adoption, relocation for labor, indenture, allotment, termination, and eventually citizenship, moving confinement from reservations as open air prisons to the disciplinary and more contemporary policing and carceral systems that undergird what Dylan Rodríguez calls antiblack and racial-colonial “domestic warfare.” In this sense, Indigenous, Black, and Chicanx peoples mark the outer edges of legal violence, where it slides into “lawless” violence, both, of course, operating toward the same end of configuring the human while managing violence and amassing wealth.
