On a trip to visit his older sister, who has moved away from the family home on the reserve to Salt Lake City, a young boy and his mother are posed a simple question with a not-so-simple answer. Are you Canadian, the border guards ask, or American? "Blackfoot." And when border guards will not accept their citizenship, mother and son wind up trapped in an all-too-real limbo between nations that do not recognize who they are.

The text of Borders was previously published, in slightly different form, as the short story "Borders" in Thomas King's One Good Story, That One, originally published in 1993 by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.