Margo Tamez
From NativeWiki
Nde'(Lipan Apache & Jumano-Apache) Advocate, Scholar, Author, Organizer. Indigenous Social Movements in the United States, Mexico. Borders and International Law. Human Rights and Indigenous Peoples
[Margo Tamez] was born in Austin, Texas. Her parents, Eloisa Garcia Tamez (Lipan-Nde'Apache & Basque [Land Grant], El Calaboz, Texas) and Luis Carrasco Tamez, Jr. (Suma/Nde'(Lipan and Jumano-Apache)Apache) were born and raised in the Texas Rio Grande Valley,near the Mexico-U.S. Border.
Tamez is recognized across the U.S., in sectors of Canada and Mexico, and internationally for advocacy, organizing, and grass-roots empowerment in Indigenous communities in the traditional land-base of the multiplural Nde' and Nnee' Indigenous communities currently bifurcated by the Mexico-U.S. international boundary and border wall. Between 1994-2006, Tamez' community work with Indigenous migrants, Indigenous midwives, and Indigenous women challenging work place injustice, environmental injustice, and violations of Indigenous migrants' human rights in Sonora, Mexico, Arizona, Texas and the Lower Rio Grande Valley, prepared her to enter the regional-national-international arena.
In August 2007, the United States government, U.S.-based corporations and local authorities constructed the border wall across her ancestral community of El Calaboz Rancheria (Texas-Mexico border). Along with her mother, she emerged as a key leader and spokesperson with her community's consent to launch national and international legal cases against the U.S. government on the issues of dispossession and human rights violations.
Orality and Writing as Decolonial Re-Taking of Indigenous Place
Her writing has been a force in elevating and recovering the undergrounded experiences, histories, and archival materials of marginalized, dispossessed and statelessness Lipan Apaches in South Texas. Tamez sustained firm pressure on analyzing and articulating Indigenous knowledge which is a paradigmatic consciousness of Indigenous cultural, social, political, and economic self-determination and is critical of colonialist, settler state formations founded on centuries of violent subjugation of Indigenous people. Her production--whether oral, poetry, history, testimony, legal briefs, or critical scholarship--traces resistance movements of multiplural Indigenous communities who are the Indigenous peoples of the Texas-Mexico border region. Tamez's contributions within and across decolonization movements raises critical consciousness and awareness about the on-going challenges and resistances of settler societies to Indigenous peoples' self-determination movements along the Texas-Mexico and U.S.-Mexico borders.
Tamez sustains critiques of normative sovereignty, identifying these as key foundations of the necropolitics which fuel and maintain oligarchic and violent governance patterns in the Texas-Mexico border. Tamez states, "Indigenous self-determination, nationalism, and liberatory struggles are entangled and distorted by and through normative and outmoded state and nation democratic structures, across 'left'-'right' streams of corrupt and bankrupt democratic capitalist systems." Tamez' sustained focus on Indigenous women's historical and contemporary governance systems and solutions emerging from grassroots initiatives against violence challenges the stereotypes of traditional Indigenous women as mute, servile, third-class citizens, domestically powerless, violable, marginalized, and unintelligible. Tamez critiques the many ways in which the regimental systems of the settler stateand settler consciousness contribute to the mass consumption of the "Invisible Native Woman Worker."
For Tamez, 'dissidence' is mapped onto Indigenous peoples' bodies, minds, spirits, lands, and knowledge systems through mainstreamed settler institutions and consumption. In her writings, she articulates the numerous intimate spheres where relationships between the colonizer are normalized as sites of predation on Indigenous women's knowledge, intellect, sexuality, and labor and attempt to assimilate her through manipulaton, coercion, and violence. Tamez' poetry and scholarly work demonstrates the negative consequences of multiple oppression confronting Indigenous women, and her years of activism and advocacy in court rooms, agriculture fields, urban wastelands, and classrooms intersecting Indigenous spaces and colonial authority have manifested onto the page where she confronts physical spaces of poverty, illness, despair, and Indigenous peoples' rage. The state-enforced and institutionalized marginalization of Indigenous elders', families', workers', and women's voices is a site of both crisis and transformation, Tamez argues, where "Indigenous peoples have constructed multiplural Indigenous kinship, community and resistance through Indigenous-led 'mapping' of the historical power relations between settlers, capital, violence, and subjugation."
In her decolonial, ethnohistorical poetics and legal advocacy across national and international arenas, Tamez interrogates the violent marginalization of Indigenous women, girls, and women-led families specifically in the Sonora-Arizona and Texas-Mexico industrial complex, stating these sites are "colossal zones of horrifying rupture for Indigenous communities." Tamez writes "Indigenous futures are deeply impacted by on-going repression and oppression of our women's continuous struggles to survive and to repair the accumulating damage we incur daily as a result of theft of our knowledge, lands, and rights. The multiple zones where Indigenous women are assaulted by chilling disregard for life are brutal sites of crisis in our lands." However, Tamez calculates that Indigenous women leadership--driven underground through violent repression by oligarchical formations across the mainstream and social movements-- are creating "new sites where Indigenous futures are being transformed from within, where our elders, our families, our kinship circles and our holy societies gather to give deep consideration to bringing forth positive solutions and alternatives to the militarized walls and injustice imposed upon us."
Her lens applies firm pressure upon the "open wounds" within Native communities at the household,clan and extended kinship level, asserting that Indigenous women's status within communities at local, regional and international spheres must be interrogated through diverse strategies which must not give a 'pass' to 'Native traditionalism,' nationalism, nation-within-nation power structures which can mirror the colonial and corrupt systems which institutionalized the capacity to violate civil, constitutional, and international laws against particular Indigenous communities.
Since her first book-length publication, Alleys & Allies, (1990), Tamez' writings and contributions locate her work within the community's experiences--at the intersections of 'Southern Apaches', U.S.-Mexico border peoples', 'stateless peoples', 'land-grant societies', 'treaty-Indians', 'women', 'children', 'elders', 'rights', 'mining', 'militarization', 'international law', 'human rights', 'environmental justice', 'biocolonialism', 'gender violence', 'genocide', 'anti-colonial movements', 'the state' and 'world-systems.'
Indigenous Peoples, Memory, Reconstruction, and the Law
In 2007, during the U.S. government's armed and forced taking of community lands in El Calaboz Rancheria, Tamez and her mother co-founded the Lipan Apache Women Defense, (LAW-Defense), an Indigenous Peoples' Organization registered at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. LAW-Defense constructed a human rights and Indigenous rights based upon Indigenous peoples' rights to consent, consultation, participation, and governance over Traditional Knowledge, Indigenous Ecological Knowledge, Indigenous Governance, and human rights. Since 2007, Tamez' writing broke new ground into elevating the Nde' traditional knowledge and oral history, and the Indigenous peoples' experiences, memories, and documentation of resisting Lipan Apaches, Tlaxcaltecas, and Nahua peoples against the violent effects of Texan and U.S. colonization.
LAW-Defense and Tamez' new directions in advocating for Nde' governance, laws, agriculture, textiles, pastoral and agrarian trade systems and ceremonial knowledges, and Nde' women's role and status within traditional Nde' governance systems, has had significant impact in transnational and international critical views of emerging Southern Apache, Jumano Apache, Chiricahua Apache, and Tlaxcalteca alliances of the Texas-Mexico and Arizona-Sonora border sectors.
Tamez' larger body of published work is situated firmly within Indigenous peoples' 20th and 21st century autonomy and self-determination struggles examined from Indigenous peoples' lenses of local-regional-international industrial complex of silver mining in northeastern Mexico and South Texas. Her contributions to the arenas of Indigenous women's resistances against violent hegemonic movements and militarization, has impacted civil law, civil society, international law, feminist theory, gender theory, and binational/international Indigenous movements.
International Indigenous Politics
Acknowledged internationally as a social movement analyst and catalyst, Tamez bridges Indigenous activism and organization, law, research, documentation and public engagement from bordered communities to human rights spheres. She has contributed to theorization of colonization, settler states, Nde'-Tlaxcalteca-Nahua multiplural kinship, Indigenous cartographies, gender, indigeneities, peripheries, militarization, and imperialism as interlocking categories of analysis within a matrix of Indigenous political thought, intellectual traditions, and institutions along the U.S.-Mexico occupied zones.
Additionally, her international work has elevated the transnational and international knowledges of contemporary U.S.-Mexico border Indigenous peoples from the Lower Rio Grande, Texas; Sonora,Mexico; and Southern Arizona, because she has connected Indigenous peoples' knowledge, actions, and refelctions about these to the circumstances of Indigenous peoples from the bordered regions of Mexico-Guatemala, North and South Korea, North and South Vietnam, Okinawa-Japan, and Palestine-Israel militarized zones.
Border to Border Indigenous Social Movements
Tamez contributes to social movement political literacy and legibility "by and with Indigenous peoples." As a Co-Founder of Lipan Apache Women (El Calaboz) Defense/Strength, an Indigenous People's Organization of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous People she has bridged gendered, digital, physical, intergenerational and cultural borders with Indigenous elders, youth, GLBTQ and Two Spirit community, Indigenous migrant families, teachers, non-profits, NGOs, institutions, and human rights defenders globally.
Digital Social Movements & Indigenous Pedagogies (Digital Indigenous Humanities)
Tamez is an innovator in Indigenous peoples' digital knowledge initiatives, innovations, and documentations. She has worked towards greater emphasis on collapsing divides between and across social sectors, as well as increasing Indigenous community-based access and engagement with sites actively indigenizing and democratizing the WWW. Local to global Indigenous historical, cultural, and legal recovery as well as archive reconstruction are new spaces which Tamez refers to as "Indigenous cartographic mappings of memory on-line" which have been key to Tamez' production since 1990.
Her work is increasingly recognized in a transnational arena for her Web constructions of Indigenous counter-memory, counter-texts, contexts, and making new knowledges and processes more transparent, accessible,respected and protected.
EL CALABOZ NDE' BORDER WALL DIGITAL PORTFOLIO
NATIVE WOMEN IN TRADITIONAL & CONTEMPORARY SOCIETIES
Awards
Washington State University Woman of Distinction Award, Poetry Fellowship from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, First Place Literary Award from Frontera Literary Review, Environmental Leadership Fellowship Award, Distinguished Achievement Award, International Exchange Award from the Tucson Pima Arts Council and others.
RAVEN EYE (Arizona 2007) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry by the University of Arizona Press.
RAVEN EYE is the winner of the 2009 Willa Award in Poetry, named for the American author, Willa Cather.
Writing Available Online
Open Letter to Cameron County Commission
Miscellaneous Work By and About
Pinal County, Arizona: Multiplying Damages, in Wild Thoughts
Books
Poetry
2 poems and a review of both Naked Wanting and Raven Eye in La Bloga
- Naked Wanting
- Review of Naked Wanting in the Tucson Weekly
- Review of Naked Wanting in the Albuquerque Alibi
- Alleys and allies, Saddle Tramp Pr.
Work in Edited Volumes
(Selected)
- Dance the Guns to Silence: 100 Poems Inspired by Ken Saro-Wiwa,
- Nii Ayikwei Parkes & Kadija George (Editors), Flipped Eye Publishing.
- Entre Guadalupe y Malinche: A Tejana Anthology of Literature and Art, Inez Hernandez-Avila (Editor), Univ. Texas Pr.
- Storycircle: Women Write Project,
- Sister Nations, Heid Erdrich and Laura Tohe (Editors), New Rivers Press.
- Stories from Where We Live: The Gulf Coast, Sara St. Antoine (Editor), Milkweed Editions.
- Feathers, Fins & Fur: Animal Stories, Outrider Pr.
- Southwestern Women: New Voices, Caitlin L. Gannon (Editor), Javelina Pr.
See Also
Interview with Censored News and Earth Cycles
Interview by Kehaulani Kauanui Indigenous Politics From Native New England]
Interview by Jaggi Singh No One Is Illegal Radio
Faculty page at Washington State University
Environmental Leadership Fellow, 2001-2003
Interview by Lisa Alvarez: "Conspiring with Poet Margo Tamez"
A short biography on the Internet Public Library's Native American Authors Project
Lipan Apache Women (El Calaboz) Defense Nde' Shimaa Hi'taa Shinii'
Lipan Apache Women Land Struggles
Apaches, Concise Historiography
This page is part of the Storytellers: Native American Authors Online project.
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