Framing Borders

Framing Borders is the first book-length ethnography looking at interactions between border officers and Indigenous cross-border travellers in North America.

Ian Kalman is a founding faculty member at Fulbright University Vietnam.

"Ian Kalman has done an admirable job of capturing the complexities of the local situation at the Akwesasne border with an emphasis on flexibility, framing, and one-mindedness. Framing Borders makes a convincing case for its fundamental claim that border scholarship needs to interrogate more closely the ways in which various border actors organize their activities and interactions around their respective conceptual constructions of what constitutes a border."

Ronald Niezen, Professor of Anthropology, McGill University:

"Settler colonialism is often understood in grand terms through structures, identities, and ideologies of power. Ian Kalman, in his granular study of borders and border crossing, offers a thoughtful reappraisal of Indigenous peoples’ justice claims and contests, one based on ‘ordinary’ interaction and improvisation. As the account unfolds, his realism takes on another quality: a rich, nuanced account of power and resistance, with ambitious themes drawn out by close attention to the everyday."