Title?

Working alongside indigenous Elders and historians along the Texas border wall, I seek to complicate and challenge the erasures of ‘Lipan Apaches’ as aggregated Others blended into Mexico’s, Texas’ and U.S.’ legal and historical fictions of ‘vanished’ enemies. In 2010, Ndé (Lipan Apaches) on the Texas-Mexico border launched a study of the U.S. dispossession relative to lands held in land grants and treaties, and taken for border wall construction.  Seeking redress, community members linked social memory, documents, and knowledge to challenge the U.S. claims to sovereignty. An important ‘aha!’ arose as we traced the lineage of legal discourse of ‘Lipan Apaches’ as ‘enemy’ in Spain’s, Mexico’s, Texas’ and U.S.’ colonial laws.  Ndé were deemed deportable domestic savages and assimilable peons in the background of economic development.  It is time to re-think the constructedness of ‘Lipan Apaches’ over time and space, and Ndé readings of land dispossession.  I link current-day Ndé challenges to dispossession in the shadow of the border wall to an extended Ndé anti-colonial social and legal experience with european economic aggression, development, destruction, sovereignty and law.  Looking closely at the 1777 Council of Monclova’s ’16 Questions’ I link the establishment of ‘scientific’ knowing, creating certitude, and certifying domestic indigenous ‘terrors’ within Ndé world view and experiences of resistance, adaptation, and resilience against violent settlement and occupation.  Unanswered questions about expropriation, dispossession and the codification of ‘Lipan Apache’ identity as disposable, have allowed for the creation of stateless and landless peoples with Aboriginal Title to Texas-Mexico lands.