Borders

King’s work explores how identity and citizenship overlap with law, and this conflict is central in the mother and son’s trip to Salt Lake City. The story addresses the intersection of identity and policy on both an individual and a societal scale. This theme is the most overarching in the text and is explored through the conflict between individual characters and institutions. King weaves individual and societal experiences of identity throughout the text.

The individual scale of identity is represented in personal ideas of status and citizenship. For example, the mother’s sense of identity centers on her Blackfoot citizenship, and she does not consider herself to be attached to the nation of Canada. This view directly contradicts the societal identity upheld by law enforcement officers and other authority figures. On the societal scale of identity, Indigenous groups are forced to identify with colonial nations. The mother must specify whether she is Canadian or American because these are the identifiers the border patrol officers deem valid. The societal scale does not recognize the validity of Indigenous identity.

Some characters have a deeper understanding than others of the complexities of identity. For example,