American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The historic 1999 declaration signed by the leaders of the National Congress of American Indians from the United States and the Assembly of First Nations from Canada identified areas of common concern, including: “Protecting and promoting the right of our citizens to move freely across the borders of Canada and the United States while retaining full recognition of their status as members of indigenous cultures.” State borders continue to be the focus of conflict between Native peoples and dominant societies internationally. The fragmentation that the nation-state imposes on indigenous nations and peoples is a result of conflicting constructions of space, culture, and identity. The dominant discourse, as Michael J. Shapiro argues, has sought to take the legitimacy of the sovereignty of the nation-state for granted as a natural situation, even though the borders themselves may shift and prove to be unstable. But the idea of the national state is itself unstable once “the construction of national stories that legitimate the state boundaries of inclusion and exclusion” are identified for what they are-“a primary normalizing strategy.” Matthew Coon Come, grand chief of the Assembly of First Nations in Canada, explained how borders have functioned to fragment Native nations in Canada: Actually, most Aboriginal peoples have been artificially split by the imposition of Provincial and various other boundaries across this land, whether in the M‘est, the East, the Prairies or the North .... And where we were not split by boundaries, the provisions of the Indian Act have seen to it that our peoples were divided into hopelessly small, but conveniently manageable, local units the government calls “bands.”