ABSTRACT
Eric Gansworth’s If I Ever Get Out of Here follows Lewis “Shoe” Blake, who lives on the Tuscarora Indian reservation and attends a predominantly white school. Lewis’s navigation of the two contexts invites readers to consider a character’s struggles as he is proverbially “caught between two worlds.” This chapter is designed to offer opportunities for students to expand and interrogate notions of borders and borderlands and consider their application to political issues and critique socially constructed, traditional binaries and borders. Using the focal text, student readers are invited participate in classroom activities that allow them to evaluate how and why borders can be real and imagined, fragmenting and strengthening. Students then consider whether the construction of borders is a positive and/or negative force on conceptualizations of culture.
