This is a series of events from the Shannon Lectures - Fall 2023. There are in Canada, as in other countries, many stories about refuge. Some of this history has been used to create powerful nation-building myths, which in turn have facilitated the inclusion of some and the exclusion of others. This edition of the Shannon Lecture Series, “Rewriting Refuge” seeks to explore the history of sanctuary and protection in a new light; by considering the movements of Indigenous peoples, the activism of migrants themselves, the creation of borders, and transnational connections. Featuring scholars working in a range of geographic contexts and temporal periods, the Shannon Lecture Series, “Rewriting Refuge” promises to offer important critical insights into both the past and the present-day. Panelist include Aimee Villarreal.

Reading Indigenous and Chicanx histories of resistance alongside the 1980s sanctuary movements, Dr. Villarreal compares the sanctuary pursuits of two Civil Rights era radicals: Dennis Banks, co-founder of the American Indian Movement (AIM), and Francisco Martinez, a Chicano activist attorney affiliated with Crusade for Justice. Both men were accused of committing crimes related to their participation in ethnic nationalist movements in the 1970s that the U.S. government deemed subversive. Banks and Martinez were political dissidents made into fugitives, refugees, and exiles around the same time that hundreds of thousands of Central Americans fled revolutions tainted by U.S. military interventions. Their experiences of domestic refugeedom upend categories of national belonging and conventional notions of the “good sanctuary subject” while revealing unruly sanctuary/escapes across state lines, tribal territories, and national borders.