Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands

Connecting the Greater West Series

by Brenden W. Rensink

In Native but Foreign, historian Brenden W. Rensink presents an innovative comparison of indigenous peoples who traversed North American borders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, examining Crees and Chippewas, who crossed the border from Canada into Montana, and Yaquis from Mexico who migrated into Arizona. The resulting history questions how opposing national borders affect and react differently to Native identity and offers new insights into what it has meant to be “indigenous” or an “immigrant.”

Rensink’s findings counter a prevailing theme in histories of the American West—namely, that the East was the center that dictated policy to the western periphery. On the contrary, Rensink employs experiences of the Yaquis, Crees, and Chippewas to depict Arizona and Montana as an active and mercurial blend of local political, economic, and social interests pushing back against and even reshaping broader federal policy. Rensink argues that as immediate forces in the borderlands molded the formation of federal policy, these Native groups moved from being categorized as political refugees to being cast as illegal immigrants, subject to deportation or segregation; in both cases, this legal transition was turbulent. Despite continued staunch opposition, Crees, Chippewas, and Yaquis gained legal and permanent settlements in the United States and successfully broke free of imposed transnational identities.

Accompanying the thought-provoking text, a vast guide to archival sources across states, provinces, and countries is included to aid future scholarship. Native but Foreign is an essential work for scholars of immigration, indigenous peoples, and borderlands studies.


- Winner, 2019 Spur Award for Best Historical Nonfiction Book, Western Writers of America

Genres: Nonfiction

304 pages, Hardcover

First published June 27, 2018

About the author

Brenden W. Rensink (Ph.D., 2010) is Associate Director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies and Professor of History at Brigham Young University.

His monograph, Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands (Connecting the Greater West Series, Texas A&M University Press, 2018), won the 2019 Spur Award for Best Historical Nonfiction Book. In 2022 he published an edited collection entitled, The North American West in the Twenty-First Century, (University of Nebraska Press, 2022). His co-edited anthology, Essays on American Indian and Mormon History (University of Utah Press, 2019) won the 2019 Metcalfe Best Anthology Book Award from the John Whitmer Historical Association. Rensink was also co-editor of Documents Vol. 4, and Documents Vol. 6 of the award-winning Joseph Smith Papers project (Church Historians Press, 2016, 2017), co-author of the Historical Dictionary of the American Frontier (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), and author multiple articles, book chapters, and reviews. Rensink helps manage events, programming, awards, and research at the BYU Redd Center. He created and directs two ongoing public history initiatives for the Redd Center: serving as the Project Manager and General Editor of the Intermountain Histories digital public history project and as the Host and Producer of the Writing Westward Podcast. He is currently writing new cultural and environmental history how Western American wilderness and landscapes have been experienced, perceived, and utilized for adventure and recreation, and a rephotography project in the San Rafael Swell.

Reviews

[Julie Greene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent work that examines Native American groups at both south and north borders of the US, as their lives became caught up in US power relations in complex ways. Beautifully written--a great book to teach in a graduate immigration history seminar.

[Caitlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

comparative history can sometimes be tricky, but this really broadened my thinking about borderlands as a concept and made me aware of embarrassing gaps in my historiography about indigenous people on this continent

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting book. Information of Indians being screwed over be the government settlers and other tribes .