The Border-Crossing Fiction of Louise Erdrich, James Welch, Thomas King, and Tomson Highway: Creating Kinship Across Nations and Languages

This dissertation examines the border-crossing nature of contemporary Indigenous literatures through the example of four writers from Turtle Island/ North America: Anishinaabe author Louise Erdrich (1954-), Blackfeet-A’aninin (Gros Ventre) writer James Welch (1940-2003), Woods Cree storyteller Tomson Highway (1951-), and Thomas King (1943-). I demonstrate how their works challenge the spatial, temporal, legal, racial, and linguistic boundaries imposed by Euro-Western settler-colonial border regimes. Their fiction affirms kinship connections across national borders – pertaining to both nation-states and Indigenous Nations – and resists settler-colonial strategies of containment, dispossession, and erasure. It unveils the violent crossings of interpersonal boundaries, the assault against Indigenous languages, and the connection between Euro-Western settler-colonial border regimes and sexual violence against Indigenous people, especially women, girls, and LGBTQ2S+ people. My methodology relies on Nation-specific epistemologies by focusing on Indigenous stories as a source and expression of Indigenous legal orders. I investigate the transformative uses of Indigenous languages and their interconnections with Indigenous conceptions of sovereignty and kinship. Contemporary Indigenous literatures thus provide rich theoretical grounds for destabilizing and questioning the discursive and material violence of Euro-Western settler-colonial border regimes while offering examples of more expansive modes of care, kinship, and treaty rooted in Indigenous epistemologies. Addendum: In November 2025, it was publicly confirmed that Thomas King is not a Cherokee writer. Uncorroborated claims to Indigenous identity are a pervasive and deeply troubling border-crossing phenomenon that many Indigenous scholars have analyzed as the latest step in the continuously failing settler-colonial project of erasure and replacement.