ABSTRACT
The bordertown violence work arose after the murders of Cowboy and Rabbit, or Allison Gorman and Kee Thompson, in Albuquerque in July 2014.2 The murders brought attention to a lot of issues our Navajo and Pueblo relatives face on the streets. “Traditional Indigenous territories encompass up to 22 percent of the world’s land surface and they coincide with areas that hold 80 percent of the planet’s biodiversity,” according to a report published in 2008. Multispecies caretaking is what has brought us back together as Indigenous peoples in this moment in history. The original meetings we had for The Red Nation began around our kitchen table, which actually is that kitchen table over there. And it wasn’t just students. The affirmative aspect of The Red Nation is looking at Indigenous experiences in a holistic way and saying that there is no separation between off-reservation and on-reservation Indigenous folks. That is a completely colonial construct that has bifurcated and divided our communities.
