A Guide to Inter-Indigenous Co-Labbing

Northern Plains inter-Indigenous relations have been affected by racist, gendered, heteronormative colonial laws, policies, fantasies, discourses, and geopolitical borders. American and Canadian settler statecraft apparatuses, which include federal statutes and acts, have worked to codify Indigenous peoples into “monoethnic identities” (Vrooman 2012, 15) as grounds for defining indigeneity, questioning legitimacy, managing populations, severing relationalities, stealing lands and resources, and mitigating Indigenous resistances. While Nêhiyaw scholar Rob Alexander Innes and settler scholar Nicholas P. Vrooman argue that the Iron Alliance—an economic, military and social confederacy comprising Northern Plains Nêhiyaw, Nakoda, Métis, and Anishinaabe multicultural bands (Innes 2021, 94) active from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries—has been broadly “overlooked by US scholars” (Vrooman 2012, 6), we affirm that Indigenous women and gender-diverse voices have been historically unheard and unseen between the lines of published Iron Alliance historiographies. Our research seeks to activate gendered inter-Indigenous networks, to reconceptualize critical borderland studies, and to situate place (in particular, Winnipeg) as a constellation of kinscapes.