Thomas King explores one of the many challenges of living in a world where his race has been marginalized in “Borders.” It is challenging to uphold culture and self-identity in a nation as diverse as America. The dilemma in King’s short story “Borders” is one that concerns the issue of identity, gender, and power imbalances. In “Borders,” the mother wants to protect her race and the history of her people. The mother, who is an Aboriginal, successfully preserves her identity, which many people fail to do due to environmental pressure. In “Borders,” King explores the construct of identity and power imbalance between different genders as the mother protects her identity as an Aboriginal when she crosses the border.
The mother who enjoys speaking Blackfoot and rejects the notion that she had to be American or Canadian when entering the United States is the subject of the author’s story “Borders,” which serves as an illustration of this concept. At the border, she faces a power imbalance between her and the state officers, and she has to convince them that her Aboriginal culture is a separate entity because she does not want to identify as American (King, 2014). The social construction of gender identity, however, pressures her to conform to an image of a Canadian woman. Due to the power imbalance between different genders, the mother struggles when explaining her heritage and wanting to preserve it. In contrast to this, her teenage daughter follows the norms that society has set for women and rejects her mother’s view of heritage and social roles (King, 2014). Thus, this text makes a comment on the social construct of gender and power imbalance as something that destroys the Aboriginal ethnicities and discriminates against the minorities.
Reference
King, T. Borders. (2014). Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers. Dover Publications.