Sketch by David L. Jones. Photo by author. Permission to publish courtesy of Miriam Davidson. Located in Miriam Davidson Papers, Box 2, File 11, Special Collections, University of Arizona.
Laura Madokoro
For the past few weeks, I have been deep into records relating to the 1980s sanctuary movement in the United States. This movement, which has been recalled in recent years as a result of renewed efforts to protect refugees and present-day undocumented migrants, consisted of a loose coalition of churches that offered refuge to arriving migrants from Central America (largely Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador) in the face of the Reagan administration’s ruthless foreign policy and its related refusal to consider people fleeing from the region as refugees.
As I research, I have been thinking about the significance of time to the refugee experience. Depending on the number of days spent in refuge, the experience of sanctuary can become almost carceral.[1] At the same time (no pun intended), refugees need time to prepare asylum claims and convince adjudicating authorities of their need for refuge.
Using the concept of time as a signifier of a particular kind of experience, I would like to use this post to consider the significance of doodles I came across while exploring the Miriam Davidson Papers held in Special Collections at the University of Arizona. Davidson was both a reporting journalist and a participant in the sanctuary movement of the 1980s. Her research notes, which I have been mining, informed the writing of Convictions of the Heart: Jim Corbett and the Sanctuary Movement (University of Arizona Press, 1988) that details the background, unfolding, and impact of the federal prosecution of the sanctuary movement.
In recent years, there has been no shortage of news stories on opioids and 
n the past two years, 7 provinces and territories have held elections, with 
In its final report, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission included several 
On February 24, 1884, Louie Sam, a Stó:lo teenager, was accused by an angry mob of starting a fire that killed James Bell, a shopkeeper in the settler community Nooksack, in what is now Whatcom County, Washington, which borders British Columbia. Without any evidence, the assembled mob determined that Sam was responsible and, despite him being arrested by Canadian authorities, crossed the border, took him by force, and hanged him. Nobody was ever arrested for Sam’s death, which simultaneously stands a rare documented lynching in Canada as well as a powerful example of the violence associated with colonialism.