Margo Tamez

From NativeWiki

1 Nde'(Lipan Apache & Jumano-Apache), Scholar, Author, and Poet, Indigenous Social Movements in the United States, Mexico, and Borders
2 Indigenous Peoples, Memory, Reconstruction, and the Law
3 International Indigenous Politics
4 Indigenous Social Movements
5 Digitalizing Social Movements & Indigenous Pedagogies
6 Awards
7 Writing Available Online
8 Books
- 8.1 Poetry
- 8.2 Work in Edited Volumes
9 See Also

Nde'(Lipan Apache & Jumano-Apache), Scholar, Author, and Poet, Indigenous Social Movements in the United States, Mexico, and Borders

Margo Tamez was born in Austin, Texas in 1962. 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., Canada and Mexico, as well as internationally for critical work among Indigenous peoples aboriginal to the lands currently bisected by the Mexico-U.S. border in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. Her work spans key domains of Indigenous peoples' local, national, international and hemispheric autonomy struggles. Since 1990, Tamez' writings and contributions locate her work and voice at the intersections of 'Apaches', 'women', 'children', 'elders', 'rights', 'borders', '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

Her writing explores the experiences, memories, and histories of colonized Indigenous peoples specific to the intersections of Indigenous governance, women's laws, transnational and international legal arenas of U.S.-Mexico border groups. Her published works interrogate myths, symbols, white/main-stream public memory and road-side military histories, bodies and settler ecologies as seen through Indigenous peoples' lenses.

Tamez' poetry, prose and scholarly lenses focus upon the structures and systems of colonization and Indigenous continuities of resistance practices. A significant contribution is her emphasis on the gendered ideological constructions and uses of 'Apache' by Euro-American states as applied to genocide societies and critical legal theories on diasporic Apache peoples throughout the U.S.-Mexico border region.

Tamez' larger body of published work examines Indigenous peoples' autonomy and self-determination struggles examined from the complex of silver mining in northeastern Mexico and South Texas. She has made substantial contributions to elevating the visibility and status of U.S.-Mexico border Indigenous women and their contemporary social movement theories and practices across four state systems and governmentalities: Spain, Mexico, Texas and the U.S.

International Indigenous Politics

Acknowledged internationally as a social movement analyst and catalyst, Tamez bridges Indigenous research, documentation and public engagement from bordered communities to human rights spheres. She has contributed to NGO and agency analysis of gender, indigeneities, peripheries, militarization, and imperialism as interlocking categories of historical analysis within a matrix of Indigenous political thought, intellectual traditions, and institutions. Her international work elevated the transnational and international relevance of U.S.-Mexico border Indigenous peoples from the Lower Rio Grande, Texas; Sonora,Mexico; and Southern Arizona, along the U.S.-Mexico Border and connected these understandings 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.

Indigenous Social Movements

Tamez researches and writes about Indigenous women's transnational, transborder and hemispheric social movements, 1546 - 2009, with interests in Indigenous women's theorizations and practices in Sonora-Arizona, South Texas, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, Chihuahua, and West Texas from the early to late colonial period, and between 1872-1935.

She is the Co-Founder of Lipan Apache Women (El Calaboz) Defense/Strength, an Indigenous People's Organization of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous People

Digitalizing Social Movements & Indigenous Pedagogies

Tamez is an innovator in Indigenous peoples' transnational digital knowledges movements. She has consistently worked towards the emphasis on collapsing divides between and across social sectors, as well as increasing community-based access and engagement across sites for democratization of the Internet by Indigenous peoples. Local to global Indigenous legal recovery and reconstruction of popular movement literacies and memory on-line have been key to Tamez' production.

Recognized in a transnational forum for her Web constructions of Indigenous counter-texts, contexts, and counter-sites, making knowledges and processes transparent continues to be a key objective of her pedagogical strategies.

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.