Paper short abstract:

Transnationalism refers to people who traverse space. Is it only people who are mobile though? This paper explores the Coast Salish peoples as the settler state(s) recasts them as transnational. Following 9/11 they modified governance strategies to erase the border dividing them by re-imagining the nation.

Paper long abstract:

Transnationalism and mobility typically refer to a mobile group of people who travel from one place to another and includes immigrants, refugees, or migrant workers. Is it only people that are mobile though? What constitutes mobility? This paper explores an indigenous people who have occupied their territory for millennia – the Coast Salish First Nations who reside in Washington State and British Columbia - and the ways in which the configuration of the settler state has recast them as a “transnational” group. It takes as its point of departure the increased security concerns at the international border following 9/11 and how the settler state(s) redefined borders and mobility in its aftermath. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper investigates how the Coast Salish are changing their governance practices by re-imagining the nation in order to erase the border that divides them. The Coast Salish Gathering, a new transnational form of governance, is the focal point of this investigation as it demonstrates a new way of seeing the nation, the state, and politics. This Coast Salish ethno-nationalist movement does not demand a new state, political autonomy, or separatism. As a result, this case study challenges how anthropologists can conceptualize the state, forms of national belonging, and what it means to be transnational without mobility.