Border control

If you’re new here, welcome to On the Commons! Here, we explore questions as varied as: Why are three little-known 15th-century papal bulls still being weaponized against Indigenous sovereignty (https://antonia.substack.com/p/reading-the-doctrine-of-discovery) today? How is the right to forage for food related to the Magna Carta (https://antonia.substack.com/p/reading-the-charter-of-the-forest) , freedom, and public lands? Or for something different: What Is Wrong With Russia? (https://antonia.substack.com/p/russia-and-culture) ✔️ Join a community of 6,800+ On the Commons readers. Upgrade here (https://antonia.substack.com/subscribe) . Messengers for Health (https://www.messengersforhealth.org/about-us) , founded “to improve the health of Apsáalooke (Crow Indian) men, women, and children using solutions that respect and honor Apsáalooke strengths, culture, stories, and language,” will receive 5% of On the Commons paid subscription revenue from now until the end of March. (Accountability: this page (https://antonia.substack.com/p/revenue-return) shows receipt of revenue return from each quarter.) I used to love crossing borders. When I was young, they smelled of adventure and exploration, of languages I hadn’t learned and could tune my ear to, of foods like a book to be tasted instead of read. I still remember the first time I managed to say “thank you” correctly in a small town in Turkey; and plunging my wrists one summer day under freezing cold fountain water on a hill outside of Budapest, where the heat felt like it might crush me and our friends woke us daily with tiny glasses of espresso and brandy. To hand my passport over to a border agent once brought a tiny thrill. To a person brought up in a small Montana town where daily rhythms were determined by the train howling nightly as it passed by the Con Agra grain tower and the church bells I sometimes got to pull after Sunday school, borders were to enter a world unknown, a world made large. Borders haven’t felt like that in a long time. When my spouse and I prepared to move to Australia from Austria, I was 22 years old. We spent exhausting hours at the Australian embassy in Vienna filling out forms and answering questions and submitting to lung X-rays to check for tuberculosis and compiling massive customs forms in two languages for our scant two boxes of belongings. We flew out on my 23rd birthday, which in Australia time had already passed. My spouse had a job in Sydney, which was why we were moving; my first three months in the country were a slog of employment applications and residency requirements and trying to find out how to get a birth control prescription. Living there had its wonderful moments—most of them spent in the ocean, though I maybe wouldn’t count the ocean moments trying to avoid bluebottle jellyfish—but those were wonderful despite the border and residency struggles, not because of them. Last year, I spent a few days in Canada cross-country skiing and cooking with some longtime friends. I have lived in proximity to this border, between America and Canada, for almost the whole of my life. The closest crossing to me is an hour’s drive from my home, and I’ve driven over it so many times it’s as familiar as the footbridge I usually take to walk into town. It wasn’t that long ago—only decades, and what is that in geological time? not even a fingernail’s worth—that other friends and I would get the idea to go to Canada at some stupid hour of the night just to jump into a lake we liked visiting. We didn’t need passports back then, and the border guards were mostly bored. Going to and coming back from Canada with my friends last year involved little stress. We presented our passports or passport cards. I, as the driver, answered questions about alcohol, drugs, tobacco, and weapons in the negative or semi-negative as not all of us were non-smokers. Our carful of mothers in their forties was waved through easily. And yet there was nothing about that interaction that didn’t put me on edge, nothing about it that didn’t remind me of threat, of what can be denied. If not denied to me personally, to plenty of other people who have just as much right to traverse this man-made barrier as I do. The entire interaction of crossing the border, beginning with the slowdown to the border gates and the scramble of finding passports, and through the questioning that brings up vivid memories of previous border crossings involving full-on stripped-out car searches and quizzes split between me and college boyfriends about what color our toothbrushes were, makes obvious the crushing power of borders. They are arbitrary yet all-powerful creations of nation-states, creations that have no recognition from water, air, rock, wildlife, or human relationship, yet maintain the say of life, death, and the birthright of wandering that belongs to every human being even if it’s denied. Borders have the power to strangle our travel, our relat...