Border Art with guest David Stirrup

David mentioned "pretendians," a term used to refer to individuals who falsely claim Indigenous heritage.

David mentioned work by Eric Gansworth (Onondaga). Read more about Gansworth’s work here.

Find a map of Anishinaabe territory here.

Find a map of Mohawk territory here.

The Jay Treaty (1794), a treaty between the United States and Great Britain (and now Canada) signed after the Revolutionary War, guarantees the rights of Indigenous people to cross the border "without hindrance." Read the Treaty here.

Find a map of Tohono O'odham territory here. 

Maquiladoras are assembly plants for international corporations that proliferate at the US-Mexico border, especially after the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994).

Unsurprisingly, we talked about a lot of artwork:

• Alberto Caro's Border Coffins (1994): see it and read more about US-Mexico border art here.
• Ursula Biemann’s Performing the Border (1999).
• Zalfa mentioned art on billboards in Texas; they were actually in New Mexico. A series of ten billboards erected along Interstate 10 in southern New Mexico by the art organization Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND).
• Postcommodity’s Repellent Fence (2015) can be seen here.
• David mentioned Christo, who with his late wife Jeanne-Claude wrapped landmarks.
• Ana Teresa Fernández’s 2011 (and ongoing) project Borrando La Frontera (Erasing the Sky). Hear the artist speak about the project here.
• Javier Tellez’s One Flew over the Void (Bala Perdida) from 2005. You can watch it here.
• Richard Lou’s The Border Door (1988). See it and read more about it here. 
• David continues to be inspired by Alan Michelson’s Third Bank of the River (2009).
• Read more about the Two Row Wampum Belt here
• David mentioned Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas' work Copper from the Hood (2011).

The material in this podcast is for informational purposes only. The personal views expressed by the hosts and their guests on the Borders Talk podcast do not constitute an endorsement from associated organisations.

Thanks to the School of Arts, Media and Communication at the University of Leicester for the use of recording equipment, and to the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Nottingham for financial support.

Music: “Corrupted” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com

Transcript

Zalfa Feghali: Welcome to Borders Talk: Dots, Dashes, and the Stories They Tell. We are Zalfa Feghali

Gillian Roberts: and Gillian Roberts, two border studies academics in England's East Midlands from different countries with multiple passports. Welcome to this episode, which is focusing on border art. Our guest today is David Stirrup, Professor in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, which he joined in 2023 after nearly two decades at the University of Kent. He has published two monographs (Louise Erdrich, 2010; and Visuality and Visual Sovereignty in Contemporary Anishinaabe Literature, 2020). He’s co-edited Tribal Fantasies: Native Americans in the European Imaginary, 1900-2010 (with James Mackay, Palgrave, 2013), Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada-US Border (with a very shady co-editor, aka Gillian Roberts, 2014), Enduring Critical Poses, Beyond Nation and History (with Gordon Henry, Jr. and Margaret Noodin, 2021), and The Canada-US Border: Culture and Theory (with Jeffrey Orr, which came out just a few months ago).

From 2012-2015, David was Principal Investigator on the Leverhulme-Trust funded network “Culture and the Canada-US Border” with yours truly as Co-Investigator, and a number of collaborators from the UK, US, and Canada. Since 2017 he has been PI on the AHRC-funded “Beyond the Spectacle: Native North American Presence in Britain” with Prof. Jacqueline Fear-Segal (UEA) and Prof. Coll Thrush (UBC). In 2022-23 he was UK PI on the AHRC-NEH grant “Indigenous Knowledges: a Digital Exchange and Best Practice Pilot” with Jennifer Jenkins (University of Arizona), Rhiannon Sorrell (Diné College), and partners at the Wellcome Collection). As of 2023 he is Co-PI with Chris Andersen (University of Alberta) on the AHRC-funded project “The Métis: a Global Indigenous People.”

Zalfa Feghali: David launched Europe's first Centre for Indigenous and Settler Colonial Studies at Kent, drawing on a broad network of institutions in the UK, US and Canada. The hub of the Centre has come to York with him, with co-directors at Kent, Alberta and the London College of Communication. Alongside research activity, the Centre collaborates with non-University groups, including the Indigenous Rights-focused NGO, Incomindios UK, the Greenham Common-Shoshone Nuclear Colonialism project, and the Scottish-Métis Cultural Alliance. 

David is a very busy man, and we are thrilled to welcome him to the podcast. Because this is an academic podcast, we've leaned in really hard on listing David's many professional achievements, but it's worth saying that they don't tell the whole story, and we want to say out loud, and for our hardcore and non-hardcore listeners, of course, that other than being very clever and very accomplished and very modest, David is a fundamentally generous person who in, I will take your name in vain, Gillian, in our experience, wears his kindness lightly. He is also a very cool dude with a legendary beard.

Gillian Roberts: Indeed. Fun fact about David: he has been known to live on a boat. So David, welcome.

David Stirrup: Thank you.

Gillian Roberts: How did you get interested in border studies?

David Stirrup: That's a great question. I'm not sure is the first answer. I may have been working on Indigenous North American literary contexts, at least for 25 years, I suppose, from the end of my undergraduate degree onwards. And I think one of the most striking things for me in doing that work was always the lack of cross-border conversation. So the vast majority of people in the field that I was associating with were working on either Native American literatures or they were working on Indigenous literatures from Canada, and there was very little comparative work. There was very little, there was very little communication even, like between writers, between critics. So I think in that sense, my introduction to border studies was just that desire to cross that border and to think more about how relationships kind of transcend it, ignore it, and so on. And that just led me into, very reluctantly, into border studies territories. 

Gillian Roberts: Reluctantly?

David Stirrup: I say reluctantly just because, and I think it's changed massively, and I think you two have contributed to that change in very significant ways, but I was deeply resistant to the ways border theory itself has tended to be sort of picked up and dropped in locations other than those. I've always been the same. I don't know whether I'm just, whether it's a kind of suppressed conservatism or what, but like I always, the same about magical realism, the way it kind of gets stripped out of its Latin American context and thrown around the world as if the politics of that context don't matter. And I'm kind of like, no, keep it local. So my reluctance was I wasn't finding any conversation about Indigeneity and the Canada-US border that helped to theorise the stuff I was looking at. But I was really reluctant to just start looking to the southern border. And actually, I think that was probably an aspect of my conservatism, because I think some great work has been done in recent years doing just that, but still with attention to the kind of political specificity of that southern border theory as well. So that was my way in. And I'm still here to a degree. I still have on my laptop all of the ideas for a book I was going to write when we were working on Culture and the Canada-U.S. Border. And one day I might actually write it, although I suspect most of my ideas are pretty obsolete now. So yeah, the main, the Métis work, well, the work of the last few years, that exhausting list has taken me away a little bit from border studies, but it's still, it's still very much there in my thinking.

Gillian Roberts: I'm very curious to hear about this, this list of ideas, which I'm sure are phenomenal. Do you want to say any more at this point about where you were provisionally headed?

David Stirrup: It's kind of interesting, actually, in the sense that the sort of central premise that I was interested in exploring is something that we're looking at very closely in the Métis project. But it wasn't me who suggested it for the Métis project. It was my Co-I, Chris. I wanted to think about – this isn't revelatory in any sense whatsoever – but I wanted to think about Indigeneity in the Canada-US borderlands through a kind of Cliffordian lens of roots and routes. And I just think there's so much literature that offers itself to that kind of conceptual framework because I'm really interested in the way Indigeneity itself gets figured at different moments in history as either kind of entirely static and place-bound or highly mobile and nomadic. And of course, in current terms of settler colonialism, the static place-bound model is the one that is foregrounded. But as we all know, the border was not something that was part of Indigenous life and experience until fairly recently. And so thinking about how writers who do engage with that border figure both movement across it and the way it prevents movement is kind of what interests me.

Gillian Roberts: I definitely think there's something in there for when you have loads of free time.

David Stirrup: I think there is. What I really need to do, though, is persuade a few more Indigenous writers to write about the border, because that's the other thing that I know you both know as well, that there's some brilliant work. But there's not as much as you might think, particularly when you compare it to the volume of writing about the US-Mexico border, which for very obvious reasons has attracted a huge amount of critical and creative attention. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack sometimes, looking for specifically Indigenous writing about Canada-US border.

Zalfa Feghali: That is about it rather than us reading the border into it, you know?

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, into it. Yeah.

David Stirrup: That's genuinely about the site. Because that's the thing I'm interested in, is the concrete site. There's lots of great work about conceptual, you know, kind of conceptual, psychological borders, all of that. But I am interested in representations of the actual space itself, the site of the border and the borderlands. And yeah, they're hard to come by. I really want to write about Eric Gansworth's work. So Eric is an Onondaga writer who lives on Tuscarora Reservation in upper New York State. And he's written a few things about the border that are really interesting, but he's not, for whatever reason, he's not that widely written on at this point. And his work's really interesting. So I've got him in mind. And yeah, there are others. Louise Erdrich has done a bit of border crossing. And others who we probably shouldn’t get into because of the politics of pretendianism at this moment in history.

Zalfa Feghali: Well, indeed.

David Stirrup: But yeah, sitting there and waiting at some point, I'll either go to it or it'll be gotten to by someone else and then I can move on.

Gillian Roberts: You've written a book about Anishinaabe culture, and you've worked a lot with Anishinaabe collaborators. To what extent is your interest in the border fuelled by the fact that the Anishinaabe straddle the Canada-US border, or is that straddling part of your interest in the Anishinaabe? Obviously, you just mentioned the Onondaga as well, from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, but can you say a little bit more about that?

David Stirrup: Absolutely. I think it's probably been a big driver, again, because there's a disconnect, right? So the Anishinaabe traditional territory is huge, absolutely gargantuan, and it spans the border and from the eastern edge of the Great Lakes, all the way across to the plains. It's an absolutely massive territory within which bands and families and so on would have been kind of regularly circulating. It's very much split in two by the imposition of the border. But unlike nations like, or confederacies like the Haudenosaunee, it didn't kind of bifurcate a community in quite the same way. So there's lots of communities along the border who still move within cross-border territories, but there isn't a kind of single community that's kind of very visibly, markedly cut into like the Mohawk at Akwesasne were. And I think as a result of that, the border doesn't kind of feature as distinctively in Anishinaabe literary or cultural studies as you might expect it to. And a lot of my friends from north and south of the border, who, they very much talk of one another as family, but they also see themselves as quite distinct from one another. And there are very clear linguistic distinctions between Ojibwe dialects in Canada and the US, for instance. So that is all, I think, really interesting. Both the way the border just disrupts the kind of flows of trade and stuff in the Great Lakes, you know, the Michigan Peninsula is one point where additional kind of trade and hunting territories get sliced in two. But at the same time, there are so many continuities that kind of erase the border among the Anishinaabe that those aspects definitely drew me in.

Gillian Roberts: So those distinctions between North and South, to what extent is that just due to geographical distance? And to what extent is it down to that border precisely?

David Stirrup: So I think it's both the geographical distance has meant that there are northern communities who are perhaps more autonomous, certainly more, if I think of the right word here, have been able to stay more removed from the state, shall we say. 

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. 

David Stirrup: Than more southerly communities, so that makes a difference. But also, I think the differential impacts of Canadian and US settler colonialism has made a big difference. So yeah, I mean, my friends from Canada are definitely Canadian and friends from the US are definitely American, like the cultural distinctions we might make between the two nation-states are definitely there in their kind of cultural outlook. I think the imposition of the border is very much part of that difference.

Gillian Roberts: Thank you. That's really fascinating. In terms of border art, we've been talking a lot about literature, but what about border art has specifically caught your interest?

David Stirrup: As a little preamble, I have no training in art history whatsoever.

Gillian Roberts: That's okay, neither do we.

David Stirrup: I am married to an artist, to a painter who has educated me over the years in a way that I don't think any university course could have done. So I started writing about art. I mean, I write about art in the way a literature person would write about art. So if there are any art historians listening to this, don't worry about reading it. It's just going to annoy you. But I started writing about art with that background. And I think I came to border art with the same kind of desire to think about the space and the site, as I mentioned before, in relation to the literature. So the relationship between art and its location, particularly in sites where that location itself is provocative. I like political art, which annoys the heck out of my wife (“Is there anything political about this?” and she says, “Shut up.”). I think that border art just drew me in immediately because it is inherently political, regardless of the subject matter, because of its location. And like, I suspect most people who are interested in border art, it was really the stuff at the US-Mexico border [that] got me intrigued and then I started looking for examples on the Canada-US border to see what's happening up there. And it just so happened that some of the most interesting examples were by Indigenous artists. So that's where that interest started.

Zalfa Feghali: Maybe for listeners who don't really have a sense of what border art looks like, either at the US-Mexico border or at other border sites, including the Canada-US border, is there something that you feel is emblematic or that you found is emblematic, or are those differentiations that you identify in the literature sort of there as well?

David Stirrup: I think there are differences, not least because the two borders themselves are so unbelievably different, or at least have been in recent history. Canada-US border, long known as the longest undefended border in the world, the US-Mexico border, as I'm sure everybody is ultimately familiar [with] since the Donald Trump era began, a site of major conflict and contestation in the last several decades at least. The art of the US-Mexico border has often tended to focus on that site as a site of friction, of tension, of conflict, of trauma. Whereas the Canada-US border has tended to, I don't know, it's kind of a lighter touch. So one of the interesting things about the Canada-US border is that the border significantly increased after 9/11 and the increase of security on that border. So at that point you start to see more work that focuses on things like surveillance and the difficulty of crossing rather than, prior to that, I think a lot of the work at Canada-US border was more kind of environmentalist in its concerns, interested in that space as a set of kind of geographical features, geopolitical aspects to it. But it's really since 9/11 that the politics has come to the fore, I think. Whereas in the US-Mexico border, the politics has long been there. So the first piece of artwork that got me interested in the US-Mexico border was Alberto Caro's Border Coffins from 1994. So this is a series of painted coffins that were attached to the border fence. And each of them represented a year and he painted on each coffin the number of people who died trying to cross the border that year. So it was not a subtle piece of art, but hugely impactful. Yeah. So I think for me, that's one of the emblematic pieces of border art.

Gillian Roberts: 1994 as well. I mean, that's the year NAFTA comes into effect, which may well have been part of the prompt.

Zalfa Feghali: Probably not an accident.

David Stirrup: Definitely. And I mean, border art in the US-Mexico border, I think, goes back at least to the early ’70s and ties in with the labor movement with protest more broadly in Latin American countries against the impact of the state.

Gillian Roberts: Zalfa has been nodding vigorously. So I'm going to put you on the spot and ask if there's any kind of iconic, for you, examples of Mexico-US border art?

Zalfa Feghali: I really enjoyed work by Ursula Biemann, probably from around the same period, lots of video art around the maquiladoras. I mean, in particular, and it's stuff that I'm interested in at the moment, border art that is responding to or engaging with feminicide at around the US-Mexico border. But yeah, I think Ursula Biemann is the person who got me into thinking about US-Mexico border art, and there's lots of stuff in relation to that. But I do remember sometime after 9/11, there was a series of billboards that sort of appeared in South Texas, I think. It was in gibberish writing and they got reported, didn't they? Because lots of people thought it was Arabic and “the terrorists were talking to each other.” You can always rely on me to come up with like an Arabic story and the border, but... 

Gillian Roberts: It's your USP. 

Zalfa Feghali: Well, yes, indeed. My OSP, my Only. And so I think just sort of the border as this side of it, I think that's emblematic of the border is different understandings of vulnerability. You know, who is vulnerable at and because of the border and how is it actually designed to and destined to create those affective experiences of vulnerability and fear. Whereas my limited, granted, experience of thinking about border art at the Canada-US border is that it has the luxury in a way of being a little bit more conceptual. It doesn't have to be in your face all the time because it doesn't have that very storied – it is nonetheless violent – but it doesn't have that very kind of storied history of violence and militarization, as it plays out in militarization. Does that gel with what you've seen, David?

David Stirrup: I, it does. Yeah. And I think so, so, you know, essentially both there, you know, central kind of thematic at both borders is, is the question of movement. But historically at one border site that movement has been contested and certainly psychically violent when it comes to Indigenous people crossing the Canada-US border. But it hasn't been a kind of military site in the way that the US-Mexico border has. Kind of going back to actually one of Gillian's earlier questions, there have been two aspects that I've not actually properly thought about yet, but that definitely interest me. And the first of them is that one of the things that has long attracted a lot of scholarly attention at the Canada-US border is Akwesasne, is the way the Mohawk are split in, you know, the Mohawk community is split in two by that border. The way the Mohawk have used that border as a site of political contest, have continued to trade and then being caught up in all sorts of accusations of smuggling and that, you know, there's lots of tobacco crossing that border that Mohawk traders argued was conducted under the terms of their own treaty and the Jay Treaty, which theoretically at least allows Native people free passage within the terrain that that treaty was written in. So that attracts lots of attention as a border site, as a site of protest and contest and so on. But the same hasn't been true of the Tohono O'odham on the southern border, on the US-Mexico border, which again is entirely split in two by that border, and in some respects, I think it's actually more, I don't want to use the word, I feel I'm being all anthropological today, saying “this is interesting, look at what the impact on this community has been.” Still what I mean, but in the US, the Tohono O'odham are recognized, they have a reservation, sits right on that border. In Mexico: nothing. They are still there, and they're very much still connected to the community north of the border. But they weren't given land in the same way. They weren't given state protection in the same way. But that site has just not been seen as interesting in quite the same way as the Akwesasne border crossing, even though that, you know, it has increasingly gained attention as being an obvious gateway through the US-Mexico border. So that was one thing. And then I think the other thing kind of coming back to Zalfa's comment about the US-Mexico border and our relating to maquiladora factories and things is the fact that, again, there's a kind of coterminous story on the northern border around people trafficking, particularly of Indigenous women and girls in the Great Lakes area. That doesn't have half the attention paid to it as what's happened at the US-Mexico. But I know it's just, I can't at this point in time have nothing more interesting to say than that it is interesting, frustrating, enraging, that there are these kinds of differences in terms of attention paid and the ways in which the liberal discourse around the Canada-US border can sometimes obscure some of these incredibly traumatic and violent stories.

Gillian Roberts: I feel like that is Canadian settler colonialism all over, isn't it?

David Stirrup: It is to an extent, yeah. But then I think I'm still puzzled as to why the Tohono O'odham story doesn't get the kind of attention that, you know, I'm talking in scholarly terms here. I think there's plenty of news stories about what happens at that border site.

Zalfa Feghali: And certainly folks there care. 

David Stirrup: Oh, absolutely, yeah. 

Zalfa Feghali: It's about a different group, isn't it?

David Stirrup: Yeah, yeah. There's a fantastic historian, I think he's at the University of Arizona, called David Martinez. He's Tohono O'odham, and I'm pretty sure he's just becoming the director of a border studies centrer or something at U of A. And he's one of the few people who does scholarly thinking about Tohono O'odham as a community member. So I think there will be kind of more attention. Another person who does a little bit of that work is a woman called Fantasia Lynn Painter, who's also, I think she's a community member, but she's at UC Riverside. So I think, you know, there are shifts, there are changes, but if you look back at the kind of scholarship historically, it's just a kind of curious gap.

Gillian Roberts: Can you give us some examples? We've been talking about U.S.-Mexico border art. Can you give us some examples, David, of Canada-U.S. border art that has piqued your interest?

David Stirrup: Yeah, I can. But before I do, I want to give you another example of US-Mexico, because I think... I 100% agree with Zalfa that the work at the Canada-US border has tended to be more conceptual. But there's a lovely piece from 2015, Repellent Fence, it's called, by Post Commodity. And it's still as hard-hitting in the same way that Border Coffins was, but it is more conceptual. They basically suspended these massive helium balloons at intervals across a long stretch of the US-Mexico border. big yellow helium balloons with what looks like a kind of target painted on them. They're supposed to be reminiscent of things that they put up to scare birds away. Yeah, obviously, it's, you know, aimed at people rather than birds. It's an interesting piece because it's so, they're not targets, but because they look like targets that kind of invokes a certain understanding of the US-Mexico border as violent, but they couldn't stop you physically because they're spaced apart, there's no fence, but they're there to deter passage through that space, or at least they represent the deterrence of passage through that space. So they're very clear and clearly political, but somewhat more conceptual.

Gillian Roberts: It's an interesting combination of the tangible and the ephemeral, right? In the gaps between the balloons, which are sizable, right? They're huge gaps. But then this sort of insistent straight line of these balloons with, as you say, the visible target-like markings on them. You can't forget about it.

David Stirrup: No, you can't. You can't. I mean, they are huge. And I think there's a two-mile stretch of border that there was like, you know, visible for miles and miles and miles. And I like that big kind of monumental thing. I'm a fan, although I've discovered I might be the only one these days, but I'm a fan of Christo, Jean Christo, the guy who used to wrap buildings and islands and things in brightly colored fabrics. I think there's something about the kind of dramatic visual impact of that, big, monumental, site-based work.

Zalfa Feghali: Well, that's reminding me of, is it Ana Teresa Fernández and the Blue Sky?

Gillian Roberts: I was just about to say that!

Zlafa Feghali: Literally kind of art on the monument in that sense, yeah, and erasing the fence. What was it called? Blue Sky? 

Gillian Roberts: I can't remember the title. 

Zalfa Feghali: Anyway, she painted the border fence blue to match the sky. I think it was in Tijuana, right? It was sort of extending into the point at which the fence extends into the sea. That's extremely arresting. It's arresting in that it stops you even while the image erases the line that stops it. It's really, really interesting. And then the artist, I forget their name now, who cannonballed themselves across.

David Stirrup: That was Javier Téllez.

Zalfa Feghali: There you go. Yeah. I should have written this stuff down. 

David Stirrup: That was brilliant. It's brilliant. Yeah.

Gillian Roberts: I really love Richard Lou’s The Border Door, outside Tijuana, and, you know, the sense of the potential border crossers, you know, and there's the users of the door, then there's the spectators of the door. But all of these ways of kind of, sort of erasing or trying to find ways through what is a very forbidding, even more than the Sharpie, which we keep coming back to. It's a lot bigger than the Sharpie line. Now, definitely let's segue into the Canada-US border. What sort of examples have resonated for you, David?

David Stirrup: So the first piece that I wrote about, and that is still the one that dominates my thinking, is a piece called Third Bank of the River by Alan Michelson, who's a Mohawk artist from upper New York state. And I think, again, so there are various aspects of it that appeal. It is inherently political. It can't be anything other than political. It's sited at one of the post-9/11 border sites at Massena. It's sited inside the main hall, so anyone who has to walk in to passport control is confronted by this piece of work. And it's monumental as well. I think it's about 30 feet long and 10 feet high, something like that. So it's a big piece of artwork. You can't not see it. You can see it through the glass frontage of the border station as you drive through the border. And I'm still, it's one of those pieces of work where I've written about it and I still feel like I don't fully appreciate the work it's doing. So to describe it to anyone who doesn't know it, it's a glass and light installation. It's made up of dozens and dozens of photographs of a stretch of the river along the border between New York, Cornwall Island, which is part of Akwesasne, and then–it is Ontario still, not Quebec, yeah. At that point. 

Gillian Roberts: I think so. 

David Stirrup: Yeah. So the photos themselves have kind of been sepia-ed out into an off-white and purple, and then pieced together to echo the two-row wampum, which is a belt, a covenant, made of wampum shells. It's like five stripes, basically. A white, purple, white, purple, white. And the two purple lines in it: this was a covenant that was, or belt, sorry, made to represent a covenant between Mohawk and other, or Haudenosaunee and other peoples in that area and the Dutch in particular in 1613. And the two purple stripes are intended to represent a European ship and an Indigenous canoe, both travelling separate, independent paths, but sharing the same space. So they're connected by the white strips. And, you know, the principle of that agreement underpins treaty-making for Indigenous peoples in that part of Canada and the US from that point onwards, which is that the space can be shared, but neither party has the right to interfere in the self-governance and self-determination of the other. So you can share resources, you can share living space, but you remain independent, you remain separate, and you remain self-governing. So having said it can't be anything but political because of where it's sited, there's obviously a very clear kind of politics in its content as well, in its subject matter.

Gillian Roberts: And it's composed of photos, isn't it, that are taken from the water, which when you're looking at all of these shorelines from the water, I think that's so evocative of this whole idea of artificial borders, which seem even more artificial on water, even though they're artificial on land as well. And I think one of the interesting things about this piece, Third Bank of the River, is precisely where it is sited, you know, in this very US government building. And it's hard to imagine a kind of equivalent at the Mexico-US border, but other people may have more intel than me. But something that continues to be something that you grapple with, you know, the state siting of this piece.

David Stirrup: No, it really is. Not least because it was a commission. I think that's the other thing that like, man, actually that another distinction that we've not made that we might, that border art has often been a kind of form of guerrilla art, right? It's protest, it's subversive, it's done without permission and so on. And so, yeah, for a piece like this, that is so inherently political to have actually been actively commissioned is interesting in all sorts of ways. So on the one hand, I mean, my sense of this piece is probably profoundly more political than Alan himself would describe it as. When you read the official descriptions of it, it's a rumination on the geography of the river there. It's a rumination on the long history of cooperation and collaboration between the various communities that live there, Indigenous and non-Indigenous. So there's a celebration as well as much as anything else. And it speaks of welcoming people through that space. All of which, yeah, fine, that's definitely happening. But it's also, it cannot help but remind you that that space is Indigenous space. And being reminded that say, because you have this crossing at the Messina crossing, you cross first onto Cornwall Island, which is Akwesasne land, and then cross again because the river goes around Cornwall Island on both sides. So briefly, Cornwall Island, you are an uninvited guest on Akwesasne territory. And the contests out of that site, you know, between police and Mohawk people moving freely, and more recently between the Mohawk and the US's desire in particular to place armed border patrols on the island itself, have been really significant. There have been a number of occasions where Haudenosaunee people have blocked that crossing for precisely that reason. So this piece of work does a lot of subtle political work that's not necessarily written about in its kind of official framing. I don't think Alan would ever accept, just from conversations I've had with him, I don't think he would necessarily accept that this is the case, but it reminds me of a piece of work in the British Museum. I can't remember the artist's name now, but it's a copper, right, so this is Northwest Coast artwork. Coppers were significant and highly prized objects that were held by chiefs. So the copper in the British Museum was made fairly recently, and it's made to look like the bonnet of a car and on this copper is etched a formline sketch, that the official narrative of the British Museum, what the artist told the British Museum, represents a traditional story about a bug that eats through the roots of a forest and causes the forest to fall. What the artist told everybody else was that it represents a bug eating through the foundations of the British Museum, causing the British Museum to collapse. 

Gillian Roberts: Excellent work!

David Stirrup: And so there's like, there's a part of me that's desperate to project this kind of thinking onto Third Bank of the River. They're like, whatever the official story is about what this is doing, actually what it's really doing is, is insisting.

Gillian Roberts: This border crossing is going down.

David Stirrup: Insisting that this is Indigenous space, that when you cross this space, you are reminded that the Two-Row Treaty, the Gaswéñdah, as it's called in Haudenosaunee, was an agreement that still stands for the Haudenosaunee people that this is not something that time, modernity, anything else has usurped. It still stands. You're still on Indigenous land. You are there as a guest only, as an uninvited guest, you should respect and honour the sovereignty of the people whose land it is. It does that work for me, whether that is intentional or not. And I think it does that work at the same time as it does the, you know, we've all managed to live together in this space for all these years, which of course, you know, we know isn't entirely true because there's been so much contest there. But yeah, there is no doubt with it having been commissioned by the state that, I don't know, there is a slight tension there.

Zalfa Feghali: And the containment/resistance tension, I think, is what makes it so good.

David Stirrup: Yeah. The other thing I love about that border site is that on the other side of it, in massive letters, they put “United States.” So the Canadians knew where they were going. And then they had to take the letters away after 9/11 because they realized it made it a very big target. It's always going to be interesting when a state as interested in the projection of power as the US chooses to commission something like this, which, you know, there are all sorts of ways in which there's intended to kind of interpolate Indigenous aesthetics into that state power machine going on in that commission. But I think just the nature of the piece of work itself resists that.

Gillian Roberts: That's an amazing, amazing example, David. Thank you for sharing that with us. 

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, absolutely. 

Gillian Roberts: It's now time for our final segment, which is “Borders I Have Known.” David, tell us about a border that you have known.

David Stirrup: I have known many. I mean, I could tell you all sorts of ridiculous stories about conversations with immigration officials at US airports, but I think I'm just going to humiliate myself with a different example from when I was 19. So my undergraduate degree was in English and German. I spent a year living in Vienna and working in a couple of schools there. And I used to regularly take trips to various different European cities with friends, and we all decided to go to Bratislava. We got to the border. At that point in time, this is pre-Schengen, so at that point in time, you know, when you get to borders, the train stops, border officials get on, check everyone's passports. 19-year-old David had entirely forgotten his passport, because he'd entirely forgotten that they were travelling through a border. It was a Sunday. The border town, I can't remember its name, but it was a very, very sleepy little place. And I was hoofed off the train. And I got to spend, I think it was four hours, lying on a bench in this tiny little train station in the middle of nowhere, waiting for a train back to Vienna. And that turned out to be the closest I ever got to Bratislava. But that's, I have a fondness for that spot now. It just, in so many ways, it feels like it sums me up.

Zalfa Feghali: Needing a lie down. 

David Stirrup: In the middle of nowhere because I stupidly forgot something.

Zalfa Feghali: Thank you for that.

David Stirrup: But as I say, I could regale you with all sorts of great conversations with immigration officials who were very reluctant to believe that anybody in Britain would work on American literature, because nobody in America would work on British literature. This was one conversation.

Zalfa Feghali: That's literally never happened, I agree. Not even one time. 

Gillian Roberts: Yeah.

David Stirrup: It wouldn't. Why would it?

Zalfa Feghali: Why would they even want to?

Gillian Roberts: I think we're going to have to have a future episode that is just completely based on, 

Zalfa Feghali: David’s border stories.

Gillian Roberts: Well, I was going to say questions that border guards have asked because they, it's a genre in and of itself.

David Stirrup: It really is!

Zalfa Feghali: So folks, if you're listening, submit your questions.

David Stirrup: Yeah. Assumptions they make as well. I had to wait in Vancouver airport once for a religious beard to come and pat me down after I failed the chemical swab test. There were five border guards around me, and none of them did anything. I was like, what's happening? And 20 minutes later, a Sikh man came and patted me down, at which point I realized they must have assumed that my beard was religious and that I needed someone similarly religious and bearded to pat me down.

Gillian Roberts: We did say that your beard was legendary. It is internationally 

David Stirrup: Recognised in Canada. 

Gillian Roberts: Well, thanks very much, David, for all of your stories and for telling us about all kinds of amazing artwork as well. 

Zalfa Feghlai: Thanks, David. 

Gillian Roberts: Thanks very much.

David Stirrup: Thank you.

Zalfa Feghali: What borders have you known? Tell us your stories.

Gillian Roberts: Until next time, we've been Zalfa and Gillian on the line. Thanks for listening.