Returning Lipan Apache women's laws, lands, & power in El Calaboz Rancheria, Texas-Mexico border

"Nadasi'ne' nde' isdzane begoz'aahi' shimaa shini' gokal gowa goshjaa ha''ana'idili texas-nakaiye godesdzog," [Translation: Returning Lipan Apache Women's Laws, Lands, & Power in El Calaboz Rancheria, Texas-Mexico Border], documents nineteen generations (1546-2009) of Nde (Lipan Apache), Tlaxcalteca, Nahuatl Noble, and Basque colonials in the Indigenous-Texas-Mexico borderlands. Indigenous women's genealogies are traced, exposing the intersections of colonization, governmentality, legal challenges, slavery, exploitative labor, militarization and resistances. This dissertation re-imagines a critical interdisciplinary dialogue between Native American Studies, Indigenous Studies, American Studies, History, Critical Legal Studies, Gender Studies, and Border Studies.;In 2007, Indigenous peoples in El Calaboz Rancheria challenged the U.S. border wall along the Texas-Mexico border as a violation of human rights and constitutional law. The community's resistance to the state's will to dispossess them of ancestral lands, owned communally through aboriginal and Crown Land Grant title, inspired the investigations by Indigenous women to untangle their community's legal, social, economic and political histories in land-tenure along the Lower Rio Grande Valley. Their challenges to the state's use of sovereignty and militarization exposed how the government naturalized the border wall within the discourse of development. However, their legal investigation unburied centuries of legal disputations between Indigenous peoples and more than one sovereign. Indigenous women's analysis of the border wall excavated a longer history of sovereignty and state violence as interlocking tools to normalize dispossession. Drawing from colonial archives, genealogical records, community documents, photographs, government documents, and interviews of El Calaboz Rancheria, from the clans of Lipan Apaches and their kinship relationships, this dissertation recovers Indigenous perspectives and principles related to dispossession and genocide resistance against four governments, across five centuries: Spain, Mexico, Texas and the U.S. This project is both historical and critical memory recovery which challenge normative conceptions of Native American and Indigenous genocide history.