Epilogue

Abstract

The epilogue compares Donald Trump’s attempt to build a border wall with Mexico and an earlier attempt by Montana Congressman Joseph M. Dixon in 1903 to build a barbed wire fence along much of Canada’s border with the United States. Stepping back, the epilogue provides an overview of the impacts of 9/11, the development of new technologies, and the ways contemporary problems in art, politics, and business often have historic roots. The epilogue returns to the ways Indigenous people conceptualize land, territory, and belonging and how this has shifted over time. It argues that if the border today is a more prominent impediment to movement than it was even twenty years earlier, it has not succeeded in shaking its past. It remains one border among many: a border built on Indigenous lands with all the ambiguity and complexity that such a venture creates.