Higher Than Sight Can Reach

Chapter 9 follows the Canada–US border’s development from 1900 until the 1930s. It surveys the Alaska Boundary Survey, World War I, Prohibition, the Great Depression, and Indigenous resistance to new immigration laws. In the 1920s, the Indian Citizenship Act and National Origins Act extended federal immigration law over Indigenous people, resulting in resistance. Deskaheh (Levi General) gave speeches in Europe to garner support for the Haudenosaunee rights to self-governance. Clinton Rickard helped found the Indian Defense League of America to increase pan-Indigenous resistance to federal policy. Paul Diabo’s legal challenge to the Immigration Service’s interpretation of the Jay Treaty helped entrench Indigenous mobility as a fundamental part of the Canada–US border. As battles over citizenship and prohibition attested, increases in federal personnel did not give either country the ability to ignore popular resistance.

New Countries, Old Problems

Chapter 3 focuses on the Great Lakes in the 1860s and 1870s to argue that the border’s importance shifted in response to Reconstruction and Confederation. National consolidation encouraged each nation to rethink how African Americans, Indigenous people, immigrants, and settlers fit into each country. By dividing those who constituted the nation from those who threatened it, battles over belonging helped to usher in new immigration laws and extradition provisions. Debates over suffrage required each country to outline the core tenants of the socieities they intended to create. This forced them to weigh the relative importance of cultural beliefs, gendered norms, contract freedom, racial background, and private property against one another. In this uncertain environment, sexual morality, suffrage rights, citizenship, and ideas about the family created the terrace that border control grew from.

Building Borders

This chapter traces the creation of the Canada–US border from the American Revolution until the beginning of the Civil War. It outlines the international agreements signed by European nations—the Treaty of Paris (1783), Treaty of 1818, Anglo-Russian Treaty (1825), and the Oregon Treaty (1846)—which established British, American, and Russian territorial claims on paper. By comparing this administrative history of the border to the stories of Tom Mutceheu (Cree), Feather (Assiniboine-Soto), and Joe Louie (Coast Salish), the chapter emphasizes the diverse ways that Indigenous people and colonial powers conceptualized and enforced territorial divisions. Finally, it looks at how violence, dispute, and the boundary survey process shaped how both countries approached their national boundaries and their relationships with Indigenous people.

Blood and Bones

By 1874, Canada and the United States had surveyed land and placed boundary stones over 6,000 kilometers of territory. They had established a cohesive skeleton for the border in every major region except the Arctic. Drawing on government correspondence, annual reports, and paylists, chapter 7 rebuilds the bureaucratic footprint of the Canada–US border at the end of the nineteenth century. It maps the positions and operations of the North-West Mounted Police and American soldiers as well as customs, immigration, and Indian Affairs personnel. In doing so, it shows how the border diverged across the East Coast, Great Lakes, Prairies, West Coast, and Artic, as well as differentiating the US approach to its border with Canada and Mexico.

Epilogue

The epilogue compares Donald Trump’s attempt to build a border wall with Mexico and an earlier attempt by Montana Congressman Joseph M. Dixon in 1903 to build a barbed wire fence along much of Canada’s border with the United States. Stepping back, the epilogue provides an overview of the impacts of 9/11, the development of new technologies, and the ways contemporary problems in art, politics, and business often have historic roots. The epilogue returns to the ways Indigenous people conceptualize land, territory, and belonging and how this has shifted over time. It argues that if the border today is a more prominent impediment to movement than it was even twenty years earlier, it has not succeeded in shaking its past. It remains one border among many: a border built on Indigenous lands with all the ambiguity and complexity that such a venture creates.

Borders of Salt and Rock

On the Pacific Coast, the transition from boundary survey to day-to-day control took half a century. Canadian and American dependence on Indigenous labor limited the restrictions they could implement. By the mid-1880s, the immigration of hundreds of thousands of settlers shifted the balance of power. Both governments drove the Coast Salish out of the work force and imposed a new geographic order on top of existing Indigenous ones. At the same time, Chinese immigration drove grassroots pressure to reform federal border controls. In the wake of riots, protest, and vigilante justice, the United States passed Chinese Exclusion Acts in 1882 and 1888 and Canada developed a head tax.

The Civil and Dakota Wars

Chapter 2 focuses on the American Civil War and the Dakota War of 1862 to suggest that crisis forced Britain, Canada, and the United States to reimagine how they understood territory, belonging, and control. Defectors, draft dodgers, smugglers, refugees, soldiers, and Confederate raiders all exploited the Canada–US border for their own purposes. In response, federal employees developed strategies to extend their reach beyond their respective jurisdiction. As many oral histories suggest, fear provided the American government with an ability to influence Dakota lives decades after their relocation to a foreign country. Finally, this chapter emphasizes the ambiguity of territory. As groups like the Dakota moved, they found themselves on lands claimed by the Métis, Oceti Sakowin (Sioux), Cree, and Ojibwe, as well as those claimed by Britain and the United States.

Where It All Went Wrong

Violence across the Prairies helped to develop new ideas about border control and made them possible. Canadian and American conceptions of territory required erasing all other pre-existing forms of territorial organization. That process relied on a kind of violence and suffering that occurred in parallel to warfare. Erasure of Lakota, Dakota, Cree, and Métis boundaries became possible as famine, drought, deprivation, and demographic disruption forged a new order across the West. In the span of only a few decades, the geopolitics of thousands of miles of territory shifted. In 1874, Canada and the United States had just finished surveying and placing boundary markers across the Plains. Less than two decades later, the Canada–US border had become one of the most significant boundaries in the region.

Borders of Stones, Guns, and Grass

Chapter 4 focuses on the Prairies to show how violence served as both a motivation and a tool for federal control. During the 1860s and 1870s, the Red River Resistance (1869), Fenian raids (1866–1871), the continuation of the whiskey trade, and the Cypress Hills Massacre (1873) provided a series of humiliating reminders of the limited power both countries maintained along their shared border. As the Métis resistance and Fenian movements suggested, the Canada–US border was home to more than just two national stories of self-determination and expansion. Securing land cessions, curtailing violence, and controlling space required colonial governments to either understand Indigenous boundaries or destroy them.

Introduction

The introduction uses the stories of Andrue Berding, Walking Earth, and Red Dog to showcase the diversity of experiences that surround the Canada–US border. These accounts highlight the principal historical issues this book addresses: the colonial nature of the border, its uneven application, and the expansiveness of its enforcement. The introduction also outlines how the Canada–US border grew over more than a century in response to regional concerns related to Indigenous power, Chinese immigration, political angling, and natural resources. If the Canada–US border is remembered today as the “world’s longest undefended border,” that outcome was not preordained. It required that both countries learned to hide more than a hundred years of violence, anxiety, and dispute in order to do so.