MARGO TAMEZ
EDUCATION:
B.A. (Classical Archaeology), UT Austin, 1984; B.A. (Art History), UT Austin, 1985; MFA (Poetry), ASU, 2007; PhD (American Studies), WSU, 2010.
BACKGROUND:
Research Focus: Ndé studies, Dene/‘Athapascan’/Lipan Apache).
Tribally enrolled Lipan Apache Band of Texas, (Non-BIA tribal community; independent).
Faculty member, University of British Columbia, (Okanagan campus), Indigenous Studies Program and MFA Creative Writing Program (Poetry).
PhD American Studies: History; Indigenous feminist historical methods; oral history; archives; memory; collective memory; Genocide; Necropower; Nde' herstory; Euro-imperialist and settler militarization; Nde’ (Lipan Apache) and international legal studies; 20th-21st c U.S. border militarization; anti-colonial and decolonial insurgency, Indigenous guerrilla resistance; dissidence; Indigenous herstorical methods; Nde’ movements, mobilizations, and self-determination struggles; human rights and international law.
Areas:
>>Poetry as Indigenous herstorical method, Indigenous herstory methodologies; archives; Indigenous anti-colonial feminism; necropower; poetics of genocide.
>>Herstory as Indigenous decolonial epistemological axiology of the past.
>>Law as a contested site of resistance and rebellion.
>>I engage Ndé resistance to genocide and self-determination struggles through historical and contemporary international lenses. My research is grounded in critical inquiry focusing on why and how Ndé resist colossal, multi-fronted assaults on Ndéness in all its complexity and contradictions. I ask: why, in Ndé' multi-generational lenses,, have Ndé been targeted--as a people, group, and individually--by empires, nations, and trans-national settlers, soldiers, nativists, and Natives--for necropolitical, extra-legal, and genocidal violence? What can Ndé memory, knowledge, archives, documents, visual collections, and oral histories contribute to understanding necro-colonial upsurgences today and why Ndé are targeted temporally and spatially? What are the rationales and explanations for multi-actor targeting of Ndé? What scholarship illuminates the sectarian, ideological, and necropolitical in boundary-making between settlers, Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, and persistent indigeneity in lands bifurcated by the US-Mexico border? How can close analysis of oral tradition, archives, literature, scholarship, herstory, and international law offer insights into inter-generational strategies of resistances enacted by Ndé to sustain Ndé worlding, and to resist, historical and ongoing, efforts to silence, erase, and decontextualize (erase) Ndé voices, resistance, and lives?
>>Dene Ndé ("Athapaskan language">>"Lipan Apache">>'k' dialect; sub-arctic >> hemispheric expansions); settler-colonial bordering, structuring, skewing Kónitsááíí gokíyaa peoples' linguistic, cultural, and existential deprivations in genocidal time-space intersecting hegemonic organized violence.
>>Dene-Nde worlding intersecting Uto-Aztekan-Axtecan/Uto-Nahuatl/Keresan/Kiowa Tanoan/Zuni anti-colonial rebellions; conflict theories specific to 1825-1919, 1950-1975, 1984-2000, 2003-2011, 2012-present.
>>Ndé shatter zones and ideological cycles of decontextualized denial and distortion; compulsory assimilations, eliminations, Nde persistence.
>>Hegemonic structures (historical and re-purposed): "Indios", "Apaches Lipanes", "Apaches", "Mexicans" (development/progress). Racial-biological deficit: mixed-race, mestizo, "Indians", "Savages", "Mexicans"; settler/nationalist denialist engineering: "non-Native", "non existent"; US 20th-21st c. low-intensity conflict ops, concurrent w/ wall engineering; post-wall engineering period; (re)deployments: (right/left) nationalist discourses "threats", "eliminate", "punish", "penalize"; concurrent w/ state-sanctioned suppression, dispossessions, arrests; right-wing cyber surveillance/information wars, post-2003 stages, counter-insurgency weaponized 'rights', hegemonic censure; stages re: engineering of virtual (propaganda, distortion); psy-ops and legalized suppression (laws, policies); procedural and physical abjectification (walls, detention, impunity zones, separation, apartheid, social death).
>>Ndé kinship and Ndé wmn's refusals; alignments of resistance.
Supervisors: Dr. Joni Adamson, Committee Member, Dr. Carmen Lugo-Lugo, Dr. El Heidenreich, Supervisor, Dr. Jeffrey Shepherd, Co-Supervisor, Dr. Rory Ong, Angelique EagleWoman, JD, and Dr. J. Kehaulani Kauanui
B.A. (Classical Archaeology), UT Austin, 1984; B.A. (Art History), UT Austin, 1985; MFA (Poetry), ASU, 2007; PhD (American Studies), WSU, 2010.
BACKGROUND:
Research Focus: Ndé studies, Dene/‘Athapascan’/Lipan Apache).
Tribally enrolled Lipan Apache Band of Texas, (Non-BIA tribal community; independent).
Faculty member, University of British Columbia, (Okanagan campus), Indigenous Studies Program and MFA Creative Writing Program (Poetry).
PhD American Studies: History; Indigenous feminist historical methods; oral history; archives; memory; collective memory; Genocide; Necropower; Nde' herstory; Euro-imperialist and settler militarization; Nde’ (Lipan Apache) and international legal studies; 20th-21st c U.S. border militarization; anti-colonial and decolonial insurgency, Indigenous guerrilla resistance; dissidence; Indigenous herstorical methods; Nde’ movements, mobilizations, and self-determination struggles; human rights and international law.
Areas:
>>Poetry as Indigenous herstorical method, Indigenous herstory methodologies; archives; Indigenous anti-colonial feminism; necropower; poetics of genocide.
>>Herstory as Indigenous decolonial epistemological axiology of the past.
>>Law as a contested site of resistance and rebellion.
>>I engage Ndé resistance to genocide and self-determination struggles through historical and contemporary international lenses. My research is grounded in critical inquiry focusing on why and how Ndé resist colossal, multi-fronted assaults on Ndéness in all its complexity and contradictions. I ask: why, in Ndé' multi-generational lenses,, have Ndé been targeted--as a people, group, and individually--by empires, nations, and trans-national settlers, soldiers, nativists, and Natives--for necropolitical, extra-legal, and genocidal violence? What can Ndé memory, knowledge, archives, documents, visual collections, and oral histories contribute to understanding necro-colonial upsurgences today and why Ndé are targeted temporally and spatially? What are the rationales and explanations for multi-actor targeting of Ndé? What scholarship illuminates the sectarian, ideological, and necropolitical in boundary-making between settlers, Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, and persistent indigeneity in lands bifurcated by the US-Mexico border? How can close analysis of oral tradition, archives, literature, scholarship, herstory, and international law offer insights into inter-generational strategies of resistances enacted by Ndé to sustain Ndé worlding, and to resist, historical and ongoing, efforts to silence, erase, and decontextualize (erase) Ndé voices, resistance, and lives?
>>Dene Ndé ("Athapaskan language">>"Lipan Apache">>'k' dialect; sub-arctic >> hemispheric expansions); settler-colonial bordering, structuring, skewing Kónitsááíí gokíyaa peoples' linguistic, cultural, and existential deprivations in genocidal time-space intersecting hegemonic organized violence.
>>Dene-Nde worlding intersecting Uto-Aztekan-Axtecan/Uto-Nahuatl/Keresan/Kiowa Tanoan/Zuni anti-colonial rebellions; conflict theories specific to 1825-1919, 1950-1975, 1984-2000, 2003-2011, 2012-present.
>>Ndé shatter zones and ideological cycles of decontextualized denial and distortion; compulsory assimilations, eliminations, Nde persistence.
>>Hegemonic structures (historical and re-purposed): "Indios", "Apaches Lipanes", "Apaches", "Mexicans" (development/progress). Racial-biological deficit: mixed-race, mestizo, "Indians", "Savages", "Mexicans"; settler/nationalist denialist engineering: "non-Native", "non existent"; US 20th-21st c. low-intensity conflict ops, concurrent w/ wall engineering; post-wall engineering period; (re)deployments: (right/left) nationalist discourses "threats", "eliminate", "punish", "penalize"; concurrent w/ state-sanctioned suppression, dispossessions, arrests; right-wing cyber surveillance/information wars, post-2003 stages, counter-insurgency weaponized 'rights', hegemonic censure; stages re: engineering of virtual (propaganda, distortion); psy-ops and legalized suppression (laws, policies); procedural and physical abjectification (walls, detention, impunity zones, separation, apartheid, social death).
>>Ndé kinship and Ndé wmn's refusals; alignments of resistance.
Supervisors: Dr. Joni Adamson, Committee Member, Dr. Carmen Lugo-Lugo, Dr. El Heidenreich, Supervisor, Dr. Jeffrey Shepherd, Co-Supervisor, Dr. Rory Ong, Angelique EagleWoman, JD, and Dr. J. Kehaulani Kauanui
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Books by MARGO TAMEZ
https://bookshop.org/books/father-genocide/9781933527048
In 1996, on the night before he "walked on," Margo Tamez's father recorded two questions with a handheld cassette recorder: "Where did the good men go? Where did they go?"
Decades later, Tamez, an enrolled citizen of the Lipan Apache band of Texas, reconstructs her father's struggle to "be a man" under American domination while tracing the settler erasure, denial, and genocide that preceded his generation. Tamez reclaims stolen territory in the felt and known history of colonial Texas, looking unflinchingly at Ndé Dene [Lipan Apache] place, memory, and poetics of resistance. She refuses the qualifier "Native" in order to insist that all Americans come to terms with the roots of their identity: violence, fractured kinship, bitter lands, distorted memory, and haunted consciousness.
"I was raised up in American violence," Tamez writes, "and I have to explore all of its possibilities and lessons through art." She invites readers to experience those possibilities, "timebending" with a form that she calls "Indigenous fusionism"--pastpresent, bodyknowing, intertext, bent tradition, landguage, familial blood-knowing. Father / Genocide reveals why impunity on the Texas border is the key to understanding American identity violence, with a lightning poetry that strikes the nested seeds and unburies the truth of "these bitter lands."
Out of print. Remaining 1st edition copies in the author's private collection.
Book Chapters by MARGO TAMEZ
"As physical and psychosocial architecture, the border wall embodies
the US government’s use of carceral, or prison like, structures and systems
to enforce its sovereignty. The government’s heavy-fisted procedures for
exerting domination over Indigenous peoples reassert Americanization as
an authoritarian project along the Lower Rio Grande. Americanization operates to police non-assimilating Indigenous, poor, leftist, nonconforming,
and dissident communities resisting a weak democracy. A weak democracy
can be defined in many ways, but in this context it refers to a polity where
the US government, private corporations, and powerful interest groups
structure de jure and de facto immunity and impunity. Some of the effects
are to intensify race- and gender-based violence, atrocities, massacres, trafficking,
land dispossession, militarization, paramilitary activities, and official
repression. Survival of indigeneity depends on access to land, on human
rights protection, and on the ability to transmit knowledge. Indigenous
peoples must be able to produce, reproduce, and disseminate memory and
knowledge to future generations, and they must be free to exercise and
access justice. The rights to knowledge and to truth, and to name—actively
repressed in this region both before and after construction of the wall—are
being redefined by Indigenous peoples such as the Ndé."
Tamez, M. "SOVERYEMPTY: narrative DeneNde' poetics |||| in |||| walled |||| home |||| lands ||||", (209-242).
"In this essay, I make room for a decolonial, conceptual space for privileging the introspective understanding that emerges long after a time-specific study, event, or process. Certain introspection is difficult. Certain
understanding acquired in working with and alongside Indigenous women
confronting sanctioned violence, at times, does not find a place to be registered. This chapter has three sections. In the first, I establish concepts and contexts. I introduce the term soveryempty, which I developed in 2016 in a paper delivered at the Clark University symposium “Genocide of Native
Americans?” In the second, I share samples of a poetic intertextual form and pictorial language that I developed in 2018–19, motivated by an Indigenous poetics, history, and embodiment course I taught in 2017 aimed at investigating methodologies of difficult knowledge. Soveryempty is also informed by new insights on Indigenous trauma expressed in affidavits and testimonies included in the Early Warning / Urgent Action legal procedure utilized to alert the global human rights community of state enacted and sanctioned impunity actions taken up against Indigenous peoples in the village of El Calaboz, Lower Rio Grande Valley, Texas. These testimonies were addressed in partnership with Ariel Dulitzky in 2012–13 before the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. In the third and final section, I share insights on a new generation of Ndé women’s resistance, intergenerational and transnational epistemology, and a commitment to embodying dissident knowing in carceral spaces."
The Texas-Mexico Border Wall and Ndé Memory Confronting Genocide and State Criminality, beyond the Guise of “Impunity” margo tamez The imagination of genocide begins with a body count. Numbers are crucial in determining whether or not a group was killed “in whole or in part” to justify the term genocide. Yet this visceral reaction is only the beginning. . . . genocide does not end when the killing stops, but . . . it may echo in efforts at social mourning, repair, and reconciliation. Finally, genocide does not occur in a vacuum, but is embedded in an ambivalent international community that is quick to condemn mass killings but slow to mobilize into action. — antonius c. g. m. robben, “Epilogue: The Imagination of Genocide”
Introduction: Shi Ndé — I Am of/from the People Ha’shi? Shi Kónitsąąhįį dá’áášį gokíyaa, gòłgà’ Gònìcéi. I am Ndé from there, our homeland, along the Big Water, also known as the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande. I was born from Gochish (Lightning People), Gònìcéindé (Big Water People), Suma Ndé (Red Mud Painted People), Cúelcahén (Tall Grass People), and Cìšįįhííndé (Black Rock People). In this chapter, I use “Ndé Lipan Apache” and “Lipan Apache” interchangeably. Since the mid-to late eighteenth century, Ndé have interrelated in kinship, marriage, reciprocity, ceremony, governance, cosmology, justice, and land- based knowledge systems with Tlaxcaltecas, Nahuas, Coahuilas, Kickapoo, Jumano Apaches, and Mescalero Apaches. Inter- exchange and alliance building through inclusive kinship relations—rural to urban—are persistent features of Ndé forms of cultural resilience and adaptation , responses to ongoing threats to indigenous worldviews and rights.
I situate the Texas- Mexico border wall within Ndé oral history and narratives of genocide, colonization, carceral containment systems, and land- based struggles as an act of reclaiming the Ndé homeland, Kónitsąąhįį gokíyaa. This chapter challenges the state’s normative sovereignty and the uncritical acceptance of zones of impunity, such as the U.S. “constitution- free zone” identified by the American Civil Liberties Union.1 It is time for a radical rethinking of indigenous anticolonial movements along and traversing U.S. borders as a key nexus where indigenous revolutionary consciousness, resistances to state violence, and reclamations of indigenous rights are reshaping the governance of lands, territories, and communities. On and across the Texas- Mexico border, Ndé people’s memories of genocide point to sites where indigenous knowledge challenges Texas, the United States, and the Texas- Mexico border wall as constructions of “the state of exception, and the state of siege.”2
Situating the border wall within the Ndé genocide and social memory of the prison offers a counterhistory of indigenous narrative memory locked up in bodies, photographs, earth, and containment. This witnessing shatters the normative conception of European American history as predetermined, compartmentalized periods where indigenous peoples in the Texas- Mexico border region are merely shadows, dehumanized and dismembered figures.
I build upon Achille Mbembe’s analysis of necropolitics, and indigenize it to Ndé constructions of history wherein the wall is an architecture of necropower . Necropolitics creates a “new form of sovereignty [which] is no longer the body as such, but the dead body of the ‘civilian.’”3 Necropower—wielded by the United States, Texas, corporations, and a group of elite local actors—accumulates , consolidates, and reinscribes colonial and patriarchal power both horizontally and vertically, through exploitation, bribery, manipulation, coercion , blacklisting, and threats of extreme exclusion. I will focus on the narratives and analyses of indigenous peoples in resistance to death, what Mbembe refers to as “war machines,” where “severing power imagines itself and is deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of deathscapes, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.”4
The border wall is one of these war machines. Indigenous confrontations with settler colonialism defy the official public memory, which normalizes the Texas deathscape, the killing fields, the prisons, the internment camps, the mega-ranches, monoculture cotton and citrus fields, and oilfields. Ndé views, within enclosed and supervised spaces, continually narrate against forgetting the truth of what was witnessed, that “colonial occupation itself was a matter of seizing, delimiting, and asserting control over a physical geographical area—of writing on the ground a new set of social and spatial relations.”5 The Ndé extended kin—who ground resistance to the border...
Articles, single-authored by MARGO TAMEZ
Key terms: Native American dispossession; Indigenous epistemology; Apache; Memory; Oral tradition; Post-9/11; Borderlands
Dissertation by MARGO TAMEZ
MFA Thesis by MARGO TAMEZ
Poetry (Digital) by MARGO TAMEZ
https://poets.org/poem/father-replays-funeral-dream-28
Info:
“My father, Luis Carrasco Tamez, Jr., (1935-1996), visited me in dreams between November 1996 and September 2001. Lingering memories of what he said pressured me to (re)visit intimate familial places in Lipan Apache (Ndé) homelands, in South Texas, where he appeared. His spatial time-bending emplaced a pictorial language, helping me decipher historical violence felt by Ndé of Texas, and lingering impacts of historical trauma which saturate Ndé storied landscapes continually obscured by aggressive settler colonial erasure. Spirit memory as sentience, landguage, place, despair—the collective internalization of Indigenous spatial exile—influence my understanding of my father’s refusal. This poem, echoing post-memory of Ndé intergenerational genocide survivors, explores how historical memory of violence disturbs linear structures which have denied Indigenous peoples’ our lived experiences—even after death.”
Poetry (anthologies, collections) by MARGO TAMEZ
Poetry (Journals) by MARGO TAMEZ