U of A to Host Talk on Indigenous Homelands at the U.S.-Mexico Border

The University of Arkansas Sociology and Criminology Department will host a special lecture highlighting the voices of Indigenous communities whose ancestral lands have been impacted by immigration policy and the construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall in southern Arizona.

Titled "Our Home Is Not a Borderland: Indigenous Lands and the U.S.-Mexico Border Wall," the event is scheduled from 3:30 to 4:45 p.m. Monday, March 9, in Gearhart Room 26.

Fantasia Painter, a Salt River Pima-Maricopa enrolled citizen and assistant professor of global and international studies at the University of California-Irvine, is visiting the U of A as part of the Donald D. Sieger Speaker Series. Her talk examines how the borderlands of Southern Arizona have been influenced by state authority, law, and territorial control both historically and today.

By emphasizing O'odham Indigenous knowledge pathways and experiences, she challenges the notion of the border as a fixed boundary, instead highlighting it as a contested, ongoing process embedded with bureaucracies, legal frameworks, and settler-colonial practices. Painter's work shifts focus away from a Mexico-or-U.S. binary, instead amplifying Indigenous sovereignty and refusal practices, community-led approaches, and lived experiences, which are essential for understanding current conflicts and displacement over land, movement and identity that shape many Indigenous communities today.

This event is free and open to the public. All students, faculty, staff, and community members interested in Indigenous or Latin American studies, colonial histories, political science, law, or transborder legal policy are encouraged to attend.