Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands, was published in 2018 by Brenden W. Rensink as a part of Texas A&M Press’s “Connecting the Greater West” series. It is the recipient of the 2019 Spur Award for Best Historical Nonfiction Book from the Western Writers of America. This study offers comparative analysis of indigenous peoples who crossed North American borders during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Read in tandem, the narratives of Crees and Chippewas from Canada who crossed into Montana, and Yaquis from Mexico who crossed into Arizona offer compelling dialog about the differences between the U.S.-Canadian and U.S.-Mexican borders, how the United States viewed indigenous peoples from Canada and Mexico differently, and how these differentials influenced the respective experiences of Crees, Chippewas and Yaquis who persisted in the United States as “foreign” Indians. This book examines both narratives in order to reveal their distinct struggles to secure stable and legal settlement in the United States. Bringing disparate historiographies into dialog, their comparative analysis reveals new understandings of the North American borderlands, indigenous experiences and transnational histories. Purchase Native but Foreign on Amazon or from TAMU Press.
At the book’s companion website, www.nativebutforeign.org, you can can access supplementary sources and discussion that had to be trimmed from the book, ask question in a Q&A forum, etc.
If you plan to assign the book in a course, the author is happy to try and schedule a way for a Skype discussion with the class, and always open to making campus visits to give public lectures on the research.
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The author, Brenden W. Rensink is Associate Director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies and Associate Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. He is the co-editor of Essays on American Indians and Mormons, published by University of Utah Press in 2019, co-editor of Documents Volume 4 and Volume 6 of the Joseph Smith Papers, published in 2016 and 2017, co-author of an Historical Dictionary of the American Frontier, published in 2015 by Rowman and Littlefield, and author of a number of articles and book chapters on Indigenous peoples in the North America Borderlands, Comparative Genocide Studies, and the North American West. Digital copies of many of these can be downloaded at www.bwrensink.org.
He is also the Project Manager and General Editor of the Intermountain Histories digital public history website and mobile app project, and host and producer of the Writing Westward Podcast.
Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands. Connecting the Great West Series. College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2018.