“The most bombed nation on Earth”: Western Shoshone resistance to the Nevada National Security Site

This article explores a set of protests challenging U.S. occupation of the Nevada Nuclear Test Site as a means of understanding the deployment of bordering rhetorics in colonial expansion and indigenous resistance. The protests have used a variety of strategies that appropriate artifacts historically controlled by colonial powers such as passports and No Trespassing signs to assert their own sovereignty and demand a change to the material conditions of U.S. occupation of land recognized as belonging to the Western Shoshone in the Treaty of Ruby Valley. These protests offer a chance to complicate current scholarly understandings of decolonial protest. This article analyzes the verbal, visual, and performative elements of these protests and argues that indigenous citizenship and border protests can coopt and reappropriate traditionally hegemonic rhetorics as a means of challenging naturalized assumptions about nationhood, borders, and sovereignty.