The Border Crossed Us: Enhancing Indigenous International Mobility Rights

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.