Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes how Kickapoos seeking refuge from the U.S. settler state became part of Mexico’s settler colonial project, revealing the long legacies of agrarian colonization projects and complicating the politics of citizenship and indigeneity at the heart of Mexican revolutionary rhetoric.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyzes how Native peoples seeking refuge from the U.S. settler state became part of Mexico’s own settler colonial project in its northern borderlands, arriving in the wake of decades of war against Yaquis and Apaches, among other Indigenous peoples of northern Mexico. In the late 1890s and early 1900s, traditionalist tribal leaders from Kickapoo, Cherokee, and Osage communities sought concessions from Porfirio Díaz’s administration to establish tribal colonies in Chihuahua and Sonora. This occurred in the context of the settler land rush and movement for statehood in Oklahoma. Ultimately, only the Kickapoos established a small colony in Sonora, but the story of all three tribes’ negotiations with the Mexican government and explorations of potential colony sites provides a unique window into transnational Indigenous history and land and resource sovereignty.

Tracing two distinct waves of Mexican agrarian colonization history, in Mexico’s pre- and post-revolutionary periods (1880-1910 and 1910-1950, respectively), I analyze how Kickapoos forged community and identity in northern Mexico and how they understood and enacted their colonization projects in relation to other communities in the region. Comparing the ways Kickapoos engaged with and were impacted by post-revolutionary reform shows how the Mexican government managed multiple stakeholders’ claims to land and natural resources and integrated various notions of property holding into revolutionary land reform. The Kickapoo case reveals the long legacies of agrarian colonization projects in Mexico and complicates the politics of citizenship, identity, and indigeneity at the heart of revolutionary rhetoric and scholarship on post-revolutionary land reform.