Restoring Lipan Apache Womens Laws, Lands, and Strength in El Calaboz Rancheria at the Texas-Mexico Border more

558 ❙ Symposium: Indigenous Feminisms address indigenous women’s concerns and to fight for their interests as part of the continuing struggles of toiling women around the world. Institute of Management University of the Philippines Baguio References Carino, Jill. 2000. “The Peasant Women of the Cordillera.” CHANEG 9(2):4–9, ˜ 19–22. CWEARC (Cordillera Women’s Education Action Research Center). 2007. “Messages: CWEARC; Onward with the Women’s Struggle.” Northern Dispatch Weekly, October 15. http://www.nordis.net/blog/?pp1649. National Economic Development Authority. 2000. “Annual Report.” NEDA, Pasig City, Philippines. Palaganas, Erlinda Castro. 2003. Health Care Practice in the Community. Manila: Jade Educational Publishing House. Yocogan-Diano, Vernie. 2008. “Globalization: Sham Development for Filipino Women.” Paper presented at the Asia-Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD) All-Task Forces and Governance Meeting, Siem Reap, April 6–7. ❙ Restoring Lipan Apache Women’s Laws, Lands, and Strength in El ´ Calaboz Rancherıa at the Texas-Mexico Border Margo Tamez ´ N (Lipan Apache families or clan relations) produce a significant portion of indigenous alliances and resistances to imperialism, colonization, industrialization, and militarization in the Lower Rio Grande Valley in south Texas. Against the academic whitewashing of our people, we are beginning to witness resistance from the first generation of critical Nde scholars to disrupt the militarized anthro´ pologies that both institutionalized and systematically routinized violent distortion, disfigurement, and objectification of Nde families, women, ´ men, and culture. Lipan Apache women, in the poorest county in the de gowa goshjaa ´ ˛ [Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2010, vol. 35, no. 3] 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2010/3503-0004$10.00 S I G N S Spring 2010 ❙ 559 United States, have managed to build social and cultural networks to stimulate and organize indigenous peoples against racism, white supremacy, sexism, casta, class violence, corporate greed, militarism, and the makings of a genocide that echoes prior genocides against the Nde in the ´ nineteenth and twentieth centuries.1 The critical roles of Nde women in ´ anticolonial actions and in war zones are beginning to resurface and are raising questions that address numerous local, regional, international, and global actors, institutions, and systems. The visibility of Nde isdzane (Lipan Apache women) in the Lower Rio ´ ´ ´ Grande Valley changed radically after the passage of the Secure Fence Act ´ ˛ ´ in 2006.2 The Nde gowa goshjaa in the small rancherıa of El Calaboz—a site where Nde, Tlaxcalteca, Carrizo, and Nahua peoples have made al´ liances across the Rio Grande since the early 1400s—were invaded by armed U.S. Customs Border Patrol (CBP) agents, U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents, and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers members who demanded that unarmed indigenous civilian landowners sign waivers giving up their rights to the land forever. Elderly members of poor indigenous communities, whose ancestors had held lands in collective title, were targeted by the DHS in significantly higher proportions (see Wilson et al. 2008). Many indigenous landowners do not speak English and were not provided with information in their native language or Spanish to properly inform them of the implications of signing waivers to their lands, which resulted in many of them signing the waivers without understanding that they were effectively surrendering coveted lands. What followed became an intensely fought battle for self-determination and autonomy of indigenous women’s societies and the renewal of a long historical pattern of Nde women facing down an empire on the grounds ´ of indigenous rights. My mother, Dr. Eloisa Garcıa Tamez, who is seventy-three years old, ´ ´ has raised five children and is the grandmother to many. She has been a career nurse, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, and a professor of nursing. She refused to sign the waiver numerous times. The Cameron County, Texas, occupies the first, second, and third positions in poverty indicators across the United States in numerous studies. See U.S. Census Bureau (2004, 2008) and Shapleigh (2009). On genocides against the Nde, see Maestas (2003), Maestas ´ and Castro Romero (2004), and Kiernan (2007, 334–39). 2 Secure Fence Act of 2006, HR 6061, 109th Cong., 2nd sess., 2006, http://news .findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/immigration/securefenceact2006.html. The Lipan Apache peoples of the Lower Rio Grande are specifically affected as First People by section 3 of this act, titled “Construction of Fencing and Security Improvements in Border Area from Pacific Ocean to Gulf of Mexico.” See also EagleWoman (2008), Gilman (2008), and Tamez (2009). ´ 1 560 ❙ Symposium: Indigenous Feminisms U.S. government sent armed DHS agents to her private office at the university, monitored her phone lines at her office, and accessed private information to reach her home and cellular telephones at all hours of the night and day. They followed her as she drove from her rural village to town and when she walked for her spiritual, sacred, and recreational personal time on the levee—the location where the United States intended to build the wall. My mother’s refusal stirred brewing popular resistances to U.S. state and nationalist violence along the border. Her class action lawsuit against the DHS, CBP, and U.S. Army sent up flares throughout the region and renewed alliances to stop the construction of the eighteenfoot-high steel and cement barrier wall in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. In this essay, I will speak from my position as one of the cofounders of the Lipan Apache Women Defense and as the third-born daughter of ´ ´ ´ vocal and consistent leaders of the reemergent Nde isdzane in the traditional territories of the Nde. My analysis is not meant to substitute for ´ the important analysis of local matrilineal leaders nor to be static. Rather, as an Nde isdzane scholar, I must make and allow the space to know the ´ ´ ´ people, politics, histories, events, and meanings as they continue to unfold. There is no word for feminism in the Nde indigenous language ´ The Nde and other societies aboriginal to the area are generally matrilineal, ´ matrifocal, and matrilocal; they engender families, clans, and tribal relations based on kinship, service, leadership, trade, spiritual strength, healing powers, and shared power rooted not only in blood ties but also in social and political alliances. In our home communities, we position ourselves first and foremost with respect to Nde isdzane and Isdzan shimaa—very ´ ´ ´ roughly translated as “the People-Women” and “Woman Earth,” respectively—which automatically implies the close and extended family, clans, kinship, and relationships that include a strong intergenerational and kinnetwork concern about all human beings and our mental, physical, and spiritual wellness. Indigenous women’s traditional roles as key decision makers and as stewards of water, lands, minerals, botanicals, textiles, agronomy, family wellness, and selection of leaders has an ancient foundation in the region. A complex combination of these and other aspects has allowed Nde women and girls to hold high status in traditional ´ communities. But there is no word for feminism in the Nde language. The English ´ word feminism and the Spanish feminismo are not terms used in everyday conversation among our family, clans, and community in our antiviolence work. Feminism is generally a foreign (meaning gringo/white/academic/ S I G N S Spring 2010 ❙ 561 intellectual) concept. Feminist and gender theories are strategically used at specific moments by younger generations of indigenous women activists and scholars who have had access to liberal education or access to forums in which feminist theory and methods are discussed, taught, modeled, advocated, challenged, and practiced. At the same time, local systems, practices, and strategies for challenging colonialism and confronting the normative violence of white, Christian, and male power structures are both internally and externally present in mediums and modes of indigenous women, their families, and their networks and are largely unexamined and actively negated by the academy and the mainstream. I am, by virtue of my academic training, part of a larger network of indigenous scholar-activists who are deeply connected to the work of indigenous feminist scholars.3 However, as a result of many complex histories and experiences on the ground, I do not consider myself or refer to myself as a feminist, a Native feminist, an Apache feminist, or an indigenous feminist. Nde isdzane is not an appendage or a branch, nor is ´ ´ ´ it a division or a category of a Euro-American theory, knowledge, or discipline. Feminism—both the concept and the stereotypes of it—wedges uncomfortably between my intimate clan mothers, sisters, daughters, nieces, and me and our male kin, who are integral, desired, and needed partners in our work to decolonize and to heal Nde families. Nde families ´ ´ are the central unit of our gowa—the extended clusters and on-the-ground ˛ configurations of hearths and homes belonging to related women kin, their children, and dependents that are considered a woman’s inherent right. This is the most fundamental governing structure known to the ´ Nde peoples. The theories and practices of feminism in a U.S. context have roots in Western thought systems, hierarchically formed relationships of power, and violence against indigenous peoples. Feminism—the trail of thought, ideas, theories, and practice—displaces Nde peoplehood and women’s ´ actions in our own spheres as legitimate, place-connected restorers of our rights to peoplehood, where Nde women, by the very perspectives and ´ principles of our culture, legitimately exercise a central social-economicSee Jaimes (1997), Mihesuah (2000), and Smith (2008). These three critiques and analyses of feminisms are from the perspective of prominent indigenous scholars located in the English-dominant U.S. academy. Note in these essays the absence of critical reflection on contemporary struggles of indigenous women (Native American, American Indian, Pueblos Indigenas) along U.S. international borders with Mexico, the negation of material realities affecting indigenous women’s movements, and the lack of acknowledgment of locally innovated practices and perspectives of indigenous women in occupied and militarized regions of North America. 3 562 ❙ Symposium: Indigenous Feminisms political role as key influencers, shapers, and implanters of decisions affecting governance. Women traditionally take the lead in often life-threatening indigenous struggles against the military and economic global superpowers. The Nde isdzane praxis provides for our community and ´ ´ ´ our peoples the structures needed to restore and strengthen anticolonial collective-rights movements to disrupt and halt U.S. white-supremacist hegemony and invasion into our territories. Feminism may stand to gain profound lessons and understandings by witnessing, acknowledging, and examining the true indigenous roots of feminism in the United States and Mexico; by attending to the centurieslong histories of indigenous foremothers’ struggles, survivals, and resistances to empire, colonialism, capitalism, Jim Crow, militarism, casta, genocide, and the construction of a major militarized war zone. These histories have largely been unexamined, negated, and repressed by the academy until relatively recently. The current U.S. border-wall construction project is a manifestation of these processes festering over time and space within a specialized system of genocide perpetrated by genocide specialists—the United States’ and Mexico’s elites. Nde isdzane activism is rewriting linear history ´ ´ ´ Today, indigenous women in our region are experiencing levels of exclusion and marginalization, misogyny, reproductive violence, armed assault, land dispossession, forced displacement, communicable diseases directly related to climate change, environmental racism, and mortality that are unequaled in North America. Nde isdzane are associated inextricably with ´ ´ ´ the catastrophes that indigenous women here have been experiencing en masse since 1520. In the work of the defense against the wall, we track the historical disruption of our livelihoods and intrinsic relationship to the hemisphere, fragmented and disfigured identities, ruptured cultures, splintered relationships, invaded and co-opted trade systems, and ecological destruction. The knowledges of Nde women leaders were formed under diverse and ´ dynamic systems in collective relationships to governance different from the one touted in the Declaration of Independence and with invocation of “We the People” and principles of “democracy.” They were usurped, overtaken, and overthrown violently through the Spanish, French, and English fur trade, arms trade, and human trade societies and their subsidiaries, which stole thousands of Nde women for their superb handwork ´ in deer and buffalo skin. Abducting and enslaving ancestral indigenous mothers and grandmothers had and continues to have a devastating toll S I G N S Spring 2010 ❙ 563 on the Nde community. This violent form of enslavement of leaders, ´ healers, warriors, and resource managers radically altered the function and roles of Nde men, traditionally known for their peacefulness up to the ´ end of the eighteenth century. The vicious American cult of “the savage Apache” is largely based on a construction invented by the U.S. Department of War. Remove the women, the core of the social structure of Nde ´ society, imprison them and violate them, and that process will psychologically reconstruct indigenous men into killers of enemies. Rarely have indigenous peoples, specifically the Nde, had the access or ´ capacity to be scribes-on-paper of our own history, whether as independent and autonomous peoples or during our history as subjugated and enslaved peoples within colonial institutions—such as encomiendas, haciendas, presidios, missions, mines, and farms, to name just a few.4 At the same time, Nde have chronicled, in recent years, the millennia of ancestral literacies ´ that marked the landscape in sophisticated and sensitive ways. Our lands are rich in sacred sites that provide “volumes” of records inscribing their memories, rituals, celebrations, tragedies, and concerns about their daily lives and the future. As one example of women’s historical memory, during the late nineteenth century, a period of intensive U.S. and Mexican collaboration, in armed hunt-downs of Apaches in our territories (Texas, Tamaulipas, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, Chihuahua), many indigenous ancestors were massacred in killing fields. These sites are currently being reidentified and reinterpreted by living elders and Nde researchers. Indigenous women ´ throughout our customary lands worked together to protect and defend families, elders, children, and close male relatives. Throughout the killing periods, which lasted well into the 1910–15 purges and cleansings, over five thousand people were victims of mass crimes (lynchings, dismemberments, mutilations, body burnings, field burnings), and numerous indigenous families were persecuted and forced into exile along and across the river (Johnson 2003, 2–3, 108–43). My great-grandfather was lynched, and my great-grandmother died of pellagra (starvation of indigenous peoples dependent on maize as a primary food source) along with numerous other women, children, and elders as a result of bloody feuds against elite 4 An encomienda shares much in common with the colonial institution known as a slave plantation: the indigenous slaves of the encomienda were taken by force into captivity and were marketed in a vast complex of human trafficking networks organized by European governing elites. Precolonial indigenous peoples had held collective aboriginal title to the land and control over their labor to varying degrees. After conquest, European encomenderos who had assisted in the conquest of Tenochtitlan were “awarded” indigenous peoples, along with indigenous lands expropriated by the Spanish crown. See Keith (1971). 564 ❙ Symposium: Indigenous Feminisms ranching families and the violent repression of indigenous, collective land–based peoples’ resistance to the hostile takeovers by white southerners. The historical memories, snapshots, histories, and evidentiary materials of mass killings, purges, cleansings, and forced removals, from one decade to another, are clutched to women’s experiences and narratives of everyday, customary practices.5 Tellingly, current scholarship driving home the theme of genocide in a U.S. context, related to our community along the Texas-Mexico border, shies away from the indigenous, Apache experiences of the militia-based, masculine-dominated, industrial capitalist “disposal” of Lipan Apaches throughout our region. Yet despite the official state refusal to acknowledge or accept culpability for the crimes against Nde humanity, indigenous ´ women’s historical experiences instruct us to interrogate the “freedoms” and “liberties” of settler communities on the Texas-Mexico frontier. In the past, our elder foremothers provided us with specific ways to analyze the everyday ledgers—the imperial archives—revealing the management of Nde bodies, children, women, men, lands, economies, trade routes, ´ markets, and commerce in the industrial complex of ranching, large-scale agriculture, textile manufacturing, and labor more generally. The foremothers have provided each successive generation with detailed and subtle historiographies. These recollections of women provide important evidentiary material in contemporary historical memory recovery projects and steer us toward locating, accessing, uncovering, analyzing, and publishing the archives of indigenous women’s histories. Praxis and alliances In our praxis, we cannot separate the colonialist substructures from the low-intensity conflict methods that the twenty-first-century state legalizes for banks, corporate elites, soldiers, cartels, fraternal societies, and militant groups at the expense of indigenous peoples. I am mindful and appreciative of the extensive transborder work by indigenous Chicana, O’odham, ´ Opata, Mohawk, and Maya women activists and scholars whose radio, print, and Internet activisms are digging through multiple occupied zones across the U.S.-Mexico, Guatemala-Mexico, and Canada-U.S. militarized corridors. These provide necessary access, models, and feedback to the Lipan Apache Women Defense as we build a burgeoning movement, in indigenous languages, English, and Spanish, across the Americas. Activist5 Oral histories of Lydia Esparza, Eloisa Garcıa Tamez, Daniel Castro Romero Jr., Enrique ´ ´ Madrid, Ruby Madrid, the late Luis Carrasco Tamez, and others informed this analysis. ´ S I G N S Spring 2010 ❙ 565 scholars are needed to work together to disrupt the traditional linear, narrative histories of feminisms that are still taught and brought to the southern border region as a continual wave of the old-time colonialist mission to “enlighten” indigenous communities to “the truth” or to “the edge” of contemporary activism. We must pay heed to the work of indigenous women as some of the earliest examples in print of a feminist praxis, which emerged from the daughters and granddaughters of the militarized indigenous multitudes, who were invisible in plain sight. As far as I can tell, Chicanas, indigenous scholars from the U.S.-Mexico border region, indigenous scholars from the U.S.-Canada border region, indigenous scholars from Mexico, and indigenous women’s labor praxis in Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina have laid out critical identifiers of militarization that predate most U.S. white feminist printed ´ ´ analysis (Hernandez Castillo 2001; Speed, Hernandez Castillo, and Stephen 2006; Stephen 2007). I believe that Nde isdzane, as a basis for Nde activism (which includes ´ ´ ´ ´ supportive brothers) and as a category of analysis, furthers the work of feminism in U.S., North American, indigenous, and global indigenous human rights defense work. Investigating the histories of our indigenous foremothers—respecting and acknowledging community-based rights, wishes, aspirations—challenges us to reflect on contemporary indigenous women in militarized and state-occupied policing zones as political actors in extreme struggles against economic enslavement, dispossession, land theft, vital resource deprivation, environmental destruction, detention, rape, racialized sexism, indentured servitude, and casta. The level of apathy among mainstream U.S. and Mexican citizens benefiting from the laboratory of war, industrialization, extermination, death camps, internment camps, and mass human rights violations along the current-day U.S.Mexico border region is unfathomable and untenable. I believe there are many productive alliances between indigenous and feminist activists and scholars, and by scholars I mean women who identify as both scholars (be they academic scholars, community scholars, traditional scholars, or indigenous scholars) and as feminists, provided that they are committed to radical, anticolonial, and antiviolence praxis. A commitment to anticolonialism, antiviolence, and Indigenous Peoples’ autonomy movements, as well as an insistence that the United States fully adopt the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), is a starting point for alliance building.6 With my mother, 6 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, General Assembly 566 ❙ Symposium: Indigenous Feminisms grandmother, grandaunt, daughters, and sisters-in-struggle, along with key male Nde brothers, uncles, and coworkers, I codirect and covision ´ the Lipan Apache Women Defense for the restoration and strengthening of Nde lands, laws, and life. I am clear who and what I work for: Nde ´ ´ gowa goshjaa. I am clear that my individual and collective path to restoring ˛ Apache women’s rightful status and place within Nde culture and to re´ storing community with many other indigenous and nonindigenous nations, cultures, and societies is founded on my families’, peoples’, and women’s societies’ principles as indigenous peoples. These principles intersect in complex ways and are each distinctly located in anticolonial struggles to restore the culture stolen from our ancestors in mass violence, atrocity, and horror. My work is to focus on identifying the allies who comprehend the deep and persistent resilience of my people’s quest to ´ restore our rights as Nde. To combat imperialism, state violence, gender violence, and the concretization of the Apaches as enemy combatants and constabularies (see Siegrist 2005), we must challenge and disrupt many forms of hegemonic identity that have displaced Nde isdzane over time and space. Lipan Apache ´ ´ ´ Women Defense is a mechanism—one of many among Nde and Nnee ´ (also known as Chiricahua Apaches) peoples across the length of the border region—to strengthen our local and regional ties to our diverse clan systems and to restructure opportunities for deep alliance building among our clans and other indigenous groups. In this growth process, we crisscross communities that work with us and for us toward the expressed needs, desires, and outcomes of Nde isdzane elder women and women ´ ´ ´ decision makers. Furthermore, where corporations, governments, state institutions, and their functionaries threaten our very existence as people—culturally, economically, socially, and politically—we must receive free and prior informed consent (FPIC) to determine for ourselves the direction we will take in the stewardship of our cultural, social, economic, and political resources. FPIC is a central theme in the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, and the Lipan Apache Women Defense is a registered Indigenous Peoples Organization of the United Nations, independent of state-formed tribal governments or Euro-American states. We are actively involved in the implementation of the UNDRIP to its fullest potential. I pray that feminist scholars and activists will visit the Lipan Apache Women Defense’s Web site, contact us, and collectively organize in supResolution 61/295, adopted September 13, 2007. The full declaration can be read at http:// www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/en/declaration.html. S I G N S Spring 2010 ❙ 567 port of the Lipan Apache Women Defense, indigenous women’s challenges to the U.S. will to empire, and our ongoing efforts to reclaim our traditional lands, sacred sites, burial grounds, archaeological resources, religious sacred traditions and ceremonies, and languages.7 The restoration of autonomy, respect, dignity, empowerment, and the sacredness of Nde ´ isdzane within both Apache cultures and nation-building processes pro´ ´ motes the restoration of indigenous women’s tribal law systems, where property and resources can be governed and protected in nonviolent and horizontal processes appropriate to local peoples. Within our traditional territories we are working toward restoring our traditional land base and customary use areas, which overlap both nations, on both sides of the international border, where the United States has been constructing a Berlin-style wall. As my mother says, “We will never stop fighting for these beliefs and the ways we were taught,” as the ancestors did not, and in this way we know we are alive and that our culture is still worth fighting for. When ´ we stop working for the Nde way of life, singing our prayers, collecting our traditional foods, feasting in a traditional manner, honoring the sacred elements, and dancing the sacred dances for the continuance of life, then our culture will be extinct. Living in Nde sacred ways is our resistance. ´ My mother says, “Our resistance is simple: we want to live in the way of our grandparents, which was a good way.” Only then will Nde struggles ´ for autonomy, self-reliance, and self-determination be fully recognized, side by side with the voices of our elders and medicine peoples, whose voices and experiences have too often been silenced and devalued. The elder women’s histories and experiences of being shamed, broken, abused, exploited, assaulted, and violated will be recognized and will become a foundation on which to build human rights cases. This is what my mother wants and what my grandaunts and grandmothers before me attempted to achieve: truth, justice, and reconciliation; their voices unsilenced; heal´ ing to begin for our community. Only with Nde women returned to their sacred, dignified, and respected roles as key decision makers, planners, ´ and strategists will Nde peoplehood be fully restored to gozhoo (beauty) on shi isdzan shimaa—our Mother, Earth. American Studies Program and Women’s Studies Department Washington State University 7 Lipan Apache Women Defense Web site, http://lipanapachecommunitydefense .blogspot.com/. 568 ❙ Symposium: Indigenous Feminisms References EagleWoman, Angelique (Wambdi A. WasteWin). 2008. “Fencing Off the Eagle and the Condor, Border Politics, and Indigenous Peoples.” Natural Resources and Environment 23(2):33–35. Gilman, Denise. 2008. “The Working Group on Human Rights and the Border Wall: Background and Context.” In Obstructing Human Rights: The TexasMexico Border Wall, ed. Working Group on Human Rights and the Border Wall, 2–15. Report, Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, School of Law, University of Texas at Austin. http://www .utexas.edu/law/academics/centers/humanrights/borderwall/analysis/brief ing-FULL-SET-OF-REPORTS.pdf. Hernandez Castillo, R. Aıda. 2001. Histories and Stories from Chiapas: Border ´ ´ Identities in Southern Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press. Jaimes, M. Annette. 1997. “American Indian Women: At the Center of Indigenous Resistance in Contemporary North America.” With Theresa Halsey. In Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat, 298–329. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Johnson, Benjamin Heber. 2003. Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Keith, Robert G. 1971. “Encomienda, Hacienda and Corregimiento in Spanish America: A Structural Analysis.” Hispanic American Historical Review 51(3): 431–46. Kiernan, Ben. 2007. Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Maestas, Enrique Gilbert-Michael. 2003. “Culture and History of Native American Peoples of South Texas.” PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin. Maestas, Enrique Gilbert-Michael, and Daniel Castro Romero Jr. 2004. Anthropological Report on the Cuelcahen Nde: Lipan Apache of Texas. Report, Bernard ´ ´ ´ and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, University of Texas at Austin. http://www.utexas.edu/law/academics/centers/humanrights/ borderwall/communities/indigenous-Anthropological-Report-on-the-Cuelca hen-Nde-Lipan-Apaches-of-Texas.pdf. Mihesuah, Devon A. 2000. “A Few Cautions at the Millennium on the Merging of Feminist Studies with American Indian Women’s Studies.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 25(4):1247–51. Shapleigh, Eliot. 2009. “Demographics of the Frontier of the Future.” In his Texas Borderlands: Frontier of the Future, 3–21. Report, Office of State Senator Eliot Shapleigh, El Paso, Texas. http://shapleigh.org/system/reporting_document/ file/237/Demographics_Chapter.pdf. Siegrist, Jeremy T. 2005. “Apache Wars: A Constabulary Perspective.” Report, Storming Media. http://www.stormingmedia.us/16/1626/A162634.html. S I G N S Spring 2010 ❙ 569 Smith, Andrea. 2008. “American Studies without America: Native Feminisms and the Nation-State.” American Quarterly 60(2):309–15. Speed, Shannon, R. Aıda Hernandez Castillo, and Lynn M. Stephen, eds. 2006. ´ ´ Dissident Women: Gender and Cultural Politics in Chiapas. Austin: University of Texas Press. Stephen, Lynn. 2007. Transborder Lives: Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico, California, and Oregon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tamez, Margo. 2009. “Open Letter to Cameron County Commission.” The Crit ´ 2(1):110–29. U.S. Census Bureau. 2004. “Income Stable, Poverty Up, Numbers of Americans with and without Health Insurance Rise, Census Bureau Reports.” Press release, August 26, U.S. Census Bureau News, Washington, DC. http://www.census .gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/income_wealth/002484.html. ———. 2008. “Household Income Rises, Poverty Rate Unchanged, Number of Uninsured Down.” Press release, August 26. U.S. Census Bureau News, Washington, DC. http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/ income_wealth/012528.html. Wilson, Jeff Gains, Jude Benavides, Anthony Reisinger, Joseph Lemen, Zachary Hurwitz, Jessica Spangler, and Karen Engle. 2008. “An Analysis of Demographic Disparities Associated with the Proposed U.S.-Mexico Border Fence in Cameron County, Texas.” Working group briefing paper, Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, School of Law, University of Texas at Austin. http://www.utexas.edu/law/academics/centers/humanrights/ borderwall/analysis/briefing-an-analysis-of-Demographic-Disparities.pdf. ❙