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Margo Tamez
Associate Professor
Indigenous Knowledges, Indigenous Studies
Office: ART 250Email: margo.tamez@ubc.ca
Research Summary
Margo Tamez is a poet, historian, theorist, editor and the author of four poetry collections, including, Raven Eye, and FATHER | GENOCIDE. Her book, Gathering Together, We Decide: Archives of Dispossession, Resistance, and Memory in Ndé Homelands, (Critical Issues in Indigenous Studies, University of Arizona Press), intervenes at the intersection of Indigenous feminist theory, history, militarization, genocide, archives, memory, and Indigenous-led investigations.
Courses & Teaching
Dr. Tamez' courses, INDG 310: Indigenous Women’s Perspectives: Gender, Nation, State and Resistance and INDG 450: Indigenous Women, Activisms, Feminisms are sought by undergraduate students across the areas of Indigenous Studies, Gender, Women, Sexuality Studies, International Relations, Psychology, Nursing, Anthropology, Critical & Creative Studies, History, pre-Law, and by graduate students pursuing interdisciplinary studies.
Biography
Margo Tamez is a poet, historian, theorist, essayist, editor and the author of four poetry collections, Alleys and Allies, Naked Wanting, Raven Eye, and FATHER | GENOCIDE. Her most recent publication, Gathering Together, We Decide: Archives of Dispossession, Resistance, and Memory in Ndé Homelands, (Critical Issues in Indigenous Studies, University of Arizona Press, 2025), intervenes at the intersection of Indigenous feminist theory, history, borders, militarization, genocide, human rights, environmental injustice, archives, memory, oral and Indigenous community-led investigations. The collection offers fresh analytical lenses by, with and alongside Indigenous peoples of Kónitsááíí gokíyáá being ungrounded and resistance to erasure from historical memory through the processes of settler colonial place-making in Texas and northern Mexico.
Tamez’s poetry exemplifies dedicated study of the long form at the intersection of Indigenous oral tradition, historical perspectives, archives, and epistemic violence. Her work is recognized for expanding the possibilities of verse, meter, and form through decolonial methodologies. In her poetry and historical inquiry she enacts mixed creative and critical approaches to (re)examine and (re)think coloniality’s penetrating reach into Dene Nde’ peoples’ individual and collective experience, consciousness, thought, and resilience.
Dr. Tamez has a significant record of contributions to Indigenous rights and civil defense projects alongside, with and for Indigenous women and families resisting and refusing widespread, state-sanctioned and enforced displacement in the face of mega-project separation walls built on dispossessed Indigenous lands in customary villages along the Rio Grande River/Texas-Mexico border. She has led and co-led key international legal interventions defending Ndé Dene Indigenous rights in United Nations treaty bodies, including the UN Human Rights Committee for the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racism and Discrimination, as well as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Her interventions at the intersection of Indigenous women’s and girl’s human rights, has led to re-theorizing of indigeneity in Indigenous homelands violently ungrounded and re-shaped into industrial-militarized and bordered wastelands through settler place-making over generations. Through this lens, Tamez coined the analytical concept, “rivered remembering”, to theorize finer, more granular levels of transnational and transborder Indigenous resistances along the Rio Grande River as better understood through the documentation and study of Indigenous women’s oral herstories—active, dynamic epistemologies and ontologies of self-determination in walled homelands.
As a Nde’ poet, historian, and writer, Tamez’ writing and scholarship intervenes at the intersection of the following fields and areas: Indigenous studies, genocide studies, decolonial theory, diasporic studies, third-world critical race feminism, Indigenous feminism, and human rights. Throughout her academic career, she’s maintained critical engagement with the Nde’ Dene (Lipan Apache/Rio Grande River Mexican Indigenous) peoples’ well-being, challenges, frustrations, aspirations, decision-making, oral history, arts, philosophies, cultures and storytelling traditions. The U.S.-forced construction of the wall in her ancestral maternal community has shaped her critical inquiry and engagement with multiple areas, disciplines, and geographical regions globally.
Dr. Tamez’ teaching specialization spans contemporary poetry and poetics, Indigenous and Spanish colonial history in Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and northeastern Mexico, Indigenous feminist theory and methods, critical Indigenous historical perspectives and methodologies, Indigenous creative methodologies, and Indigenous rights journeys independent of and in the international systems.
Living in sqilxw community has offered her refuge and sanctuary to process a forced diasporic Ndé life and to re-imagine and formulate Ndé futures beyond borders, walls, occupation and destructive processes. Actively engaged in Indigenous liberation struggles locally, transnationally, and globally, her ongoing projects are mindful of how the land, memory, belonging, and embodied cosmologies inform Indigenous peoples’ principles, philosophies, social history and decolonial recovery processes.
Websites
Degrees
B.A., (Archaeological Studies) The University of Texas at Austin
B.A., (Art History) The University of Texas at Austin
MFA, (Poetry) Arizona State University
PhD, (American Studies | Indigenous History) Washington State University
Research Interests & Projects
Her current work includes archival research for a manuscript-in-progress, relating a social-cultural-legal history of Spanish, Texan, US colonial and settler dispossessions in the pluri-Indigenous Rio Grande River territory that traces how Dene Ndé, Penateka, Nahua, and Tlaxcalteca kinship bonds and alliances forged relationships and continuities to overcome crisis in the Big Water Country. This is a story of a small group of villages along the Rio Grande River whose people persist over centuries and whose resistances shape revolutionary identity and consciousness that stitched together inter-kinship and survival as a connected struggle and site of power with global and geopolitical repercussions.
Her new work-in-progress is investigating the many ways genocides are re-awakening and transmitting to new generations –on a global and collective scale—transgenerational grief, loss, illness, exhaustion, and new forms of wide-scale solidarity; are echoing the haunting of Indigenous ungrounding through dispossession, displacement, migration, urbanization; are re-inscribing the relationship of multi-ethnic-Indigenous kinship, belonging, bonding, attachment, and survivance in carceral enclosure and sites of crisis and mass death; are re-illuminating crucial expressions and assertions of beingness through Indigenous peoples’ defined lenses, concepts, resistances, achievements, and social justice processes.
Selected Publications & Presentations
Selected publications can be found on Google Scholar and Academia.
Selected Grants & Awards
Tamez, Margo. 2012-2014. Hampton Research Fund. $25,000.00
Tamez, Margo. 2012. Individual Internal Research Fund. $5,000.00
Tamez, Margo. 2015-2018. SSHRC Insight Development Grant. $74,974.00
Tamez, Margo. 2025-2026. UBC Scholarly Publication Fund. $7,000.00
Professional Services/Affiliations/Committees
Since 2013, Tamez has engaged in an advanced, 12-year protocol in relationship building, as an on-site Indigenous steward in service to a respected Sqilxw Elder in the Nk’malpqs community, located on approximately 2 acres on the Okanagan Indian Band Reserve. Her many responsibilities as the on-site, resident steward involve year-round, season-to-season land protection and all-weather management, wildfire, drought, and related environmental catastrophe and disaster safety preparation, range brush management, water management, building management and repairs, wildlife protection and safety, and reporting. When not engaged in service to the university, and in service to her research collaborators in the Rio Grande River valley, Tamez can be found immersed in Sqilxw place.