Straddling Boundaries: Culture and the Canada-US Border

On Monday March 16th 2015, Canadian Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney and US Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson signed an agreement that will pave the way for the long-awaited expansion of pre-clearance customs procedures at the Canada-US border, the latest in a series of proposals designed to protect domestic security, preserve international trade, and maintain strong diplomatic relations between Canada and the US in the wake of 9/11. Presented under the general banner of Beyond the Border, an initiative established in February 2011 through the jointly issued Beyond the Border: A Shared Vision for Perimeter Security and Economic Competitiveness, pre-clearance has been just one of a number of measures under debate in efforts to ‘pursue a perimeter approach to security, working together within, at, and away from the borders of our two countries to enhance our security and accelerate the legitimate flow of people, goods, and services between our two countries’ (Government of Canada, 2011: 34). To date, while pre-clearance has been in operation at a number of airports in the US and Canada, the same has not been true for those entering either country via land and seaports. Increasing delays at such locations following the major increases in security since 9/11 have contributed to a significant decline in cross-border traffic of up to 34%: while factors such as currency fluctuations also come into play, waiting times and added bureaucracy at the border have clearly played their part.¹ In terms of car vehicle passengers alone, the US Department of Transportation (2015) accounts for a drop of over 30 million annually between 2000 (90,046,948) and 2014 (59,664,192). Such figures offer a salutary reminder of the significant changes that the 21st century has so far seen in diplomatic and security relations between the two countries that share what was once the longest undefended border in the world. The figures speak to the ready flow of goods and people associated with this border; they illustrate the barrier the border has become for many, whether literally or psychologically; and they make palpable the sense of urgency for a return to those days of free flow that the pre-clearance measures, though not yet adapted to freight, promise.

Of course, announcements such as the above, in shining the spotlight on flows and blockages at the Canada-US border, illuminate something only too familiar to communities at and around the border at various sites along its length: namely, that the border, while long considered a bridge between two essentially liberal democracies, which, although markedly separate in their political make-up and economic clout, are generally perceived as more similar than different, also historically has been a barrier for some. Similarly, while notable largely for its perceived irrelevance in the US, the border has long figured for Canadians as a site of cultural self-protection, a line of defence from US cultural imperialism. In other, often relatively invisible, ways, close cooperation between the Canadian and US authorities in cross-border regions long precedes anti-terrorism initiatives. Environmental issues, such as monitoring the movement of waste materials, maintaining the quality of waterways (such as through the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909 and the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement of 1978), and general sustainability matters, require close cooperation. Trade and law enforcement agendas also have demanded collaborative efforts that, similarly, produce both cooperative closeness and occasion for conflict. And, in still other instances, it has figured in more nuanced ways as both bridge and barrier, contact zone and zone of resistance, and a means of maintaining cultural and political identities and escaping their imposition by external forces.

Border studies of course long has demonstrated the ways in which cultural representation and production can effect, at least metaphorically, the deconstruction of the binary structures implied by a border ‘set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them’ (Anzaldúa, 1987: 25). More specifically, long scrutiny of the borderlands has illuminated the ‘overlap’ of the transitional space that belies the nominal rigidity of the border. The international boundary is, inevitably, highly porous, none more so than the Canada-US border — particularly in comparison to the Mexico-US border; cultural production repeatedly (if not consistently, and certainly not permanently) effects its erasure; and close scrutiny reveals the differential power dynamics among those communities which live in close proximity, illuminating the ways in which the line on the map functions in very different ways for different constituents — with its very obvious symbolic differences for Canadians and Americans. Perhaps more surprising then are those examples of the hard border, a boundary line against which movement is hindered. While border crossing has become increasingly time-consuming in the aftermath of 9/11, its impact is far from evenly felt by all who cross it. Historically complex for First Nations peoples, for instance, for whom it is theoretically invisible, it has figured in highly visible ways in articulations of tribal sovereignty for a number of tribal nations living on either side. The events of 9/11 and subsequent security and surveillance operations have done nothing to diminish its impositions. This is not to say that it has a singular implication for indigenous peoples in North America, however. As Katja Sarkowsky notes, insofar as national borders represent the nations they circumscribe, indigenous peoples on both sides of the Canada-US and Mexico-US borders have become adept at turning these sites of imposed ‘restrictions on and legal definitions of Indigeneity’ into the repositories of ‘alternative or supplementary identifications’ (2014: 86). Echoing this double sense of the border as a phenomenon that can both circumscribe and be taken up in the resistance to circumscription, the editors of Across Cultures/Across Borders: Canadian Aboriginal and Native American Literatures concede that they were initially resistant to the cross-border remit suggested by their publisher, on the basis that ‘scholars south of the border, even Native American literary scholars, rarely paid attention to Canadian Aboriginal issues’ (DePasquale, et al., 2010: 11). Such a complaint, one that we will return to towards the end of this introduction, doubtless will feel familiar to scholars of Canadian studies more generally. Nevertheless, the editors go on to acknowledge that ‘the Canada-US border itself is often perceived by Aboriginal people as an arbitrary, foreign imposition’, making it ‘reason enough to include US material’, because such inclusions could ‘offer some implicit or explicit commentary on questions of nation, nationhood, national identity, and borders more generally’ (DePasquale, et al., 2010: 12). Reasonable and familiar expectations, these scenarios are all reflective of the embordered aspect of institutional contexts for study of the Canada-US border that persist even the best part of thirty years after the formative development of the highly interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and cross-border humanities-based border studies.

On 4 February 2015, The Decolonial Atlas — an open-source, online-mapping project launched in 2014 — published a map of Othorè:ke tsi tkarahkwíneken’s nonkwá:ti ne A’nó:wara tsi kawè:note, or Northeast Turtle Island. Charting an area ‘roughly equivalent to the extent of Haudenosaunee territory during the Beaver Wars of the 16th [sic] century’,² the mapmakers pointedly draw attention to the absence of ‘Tsi tekaristì:seron (Where the tracks are dragged)’, referring to the state, provincial, and of course international borders that carve up conventional political maps (Delaronde & Engel, 2015). Most significant in its absence, the colonial border, established a little under a century after the Beaver Wars, would bisect the territories of the wider Haudenosaunee confederacy and leave present-day communities such as the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne straddling both provincial and nation-state boundaries, and the Six Nations of the confederacy navigating and negotiating the legislative practices of two separate settler-colonial powers. The differences in those practices are not inconsiderable, albeit their outcomes have tended to produce similar impacts on the sovereign rights and practices of the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island.

Those impacts are highly visible, for instance, in the context of indigenous border crossing, involving pre-existing rights commonly understood to have been acknowledged in Article III of the Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation between His Britannic Majesty and the United States of America (Jay’s Treaty, 1794), which states:

It is agreed that it shall at all Times be free to His Majesty’s Subjects, and to the Citizens of the United States, and also to the Indians dwelling on either side of the said Boundary Line freely to pass and repass by Land, or Inland Navigation, into the respective Territories and Countries of the Two Parties on the Continent of America (the Country within the Limits of the Hudson’s Bay Company only excepted) and to navigate all the Lakes, Rivers, and waters thereof, and freely to carry on trade and commerce with each other. (The Avalon Project [1794])

The ‘Indians dwelling on either side’ are entitled to transport their ‘own proper goods’, which are defined only in the negative as excluding ‘Goods in Bales, or other large Packages unusual among Indians’, which ‘shall not be considered as Goods belonging bona fide to Indians’. The nebulous terms of Article III, then, which neither define the geographical extent of ‘dwelling’ either side of the border (border communities only, or First Nations more generally?), nor delineate the specific nature of acceptable Indian trade items, have necessitated differential interpretation, upholding, and withholding of indigenous border crossing rights in US and Canadian legal, political, and cultural contexts at different moments of the two nations’ development.

Articulating the ways in which the border thus becomes a site of contestation, Kahnawà:ke Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson notes that the ‘explicit right to pass’ included in Jay’s Treaty and confirmed by the later Treaty of Ghent (1814) ‘implicitly leaves the legal regimes of Canada and the United States with the power to define who those Indian nations are and how that right to pass shall be rendered and respected’ (quoted in Goeman, 2014: 254). Somewhat counter to the tacit notion that Jay’s Treaty simply guarantees free passage to Native Americans and First Nations peoples, Simpson also observes that ‘very critically, the regimes of the United States and Canada were bequeathed the power to choose whom they would recognize as members of these communities’ (2008: 202). In keeping with status, enrolment, and citizenship regulations on both sides of the border, the right to cross depends not on the fact of indigeneity, but on its recognition within specific settler-colonially determined legislative frameworks. Examining the processes of effectively confronting the state and the concomitant effort involved in actuating and maintaining what she calls ‘nested sovereignty’, Simpson goes on to ‘analyze how an Iroquois location within political regimes (the United States, Quebec, and Canada) agitates notions of separateness and difference that cause us to ask several questions of citizenship and the exigencies that are posed by border crossing’ (2014: 116).

In her chapter ‘Disrupting a Settler-Colonial Grammar of Place’, Mishuana Goeman recalls Simpson’s evocation of the border as ‘a place of deep power struggle and enunciation — a moment that crosses time and various conceptions of territories and ultimately affects subjecthood’ (2014: 254). Elucidating the co-implications of indigenous rights with settler-colonial logics, Simpson argues: ‘the border acts as a site […] for the activation and articulation of [Haudenosaunee] rights as members of reserve nations’ (2014: 116). Meanwhile, describing the annual parade across the International Bridge at Niagara Falls every 14 July by members and supporters of the Indian Defense League of America, Kevin Bruyneel asserts: ‘The literal and explicit practice of boundary-crossing represents the political position of those indigenous people who do not accept the notion that the presence of settler-states and nations deprives them of their rights of citizenship in their own nations’ (2007: 119). The specific contexts Simpson engages in Mohawk Interruptus, which produce the border as that paradoxical ‘place of deep power struggle and enunciation’ (Goeman, 2014: 254), differ fundamentally from the contexts most commonly associated with border studies, and with the generative locus of the Mexico-US borderlands. As a number of commentators have noted (for instance see Roberts & Stirrup, 2014 and Sadowski-Smith, 2008), while the Mexico-US border is the site at which ‘the third world grates against the first and bleeds’ (Anzaldúa, 1987: 25), those same politico-economic conditions are not mirrored at the 49th parallel, meaning that the site-derived theoretical model is not easily transported north.³ Simpson renders this same point with particular emphasis on the misplaced logic of what one might imagine to be the commensurate struggles of indigenous and Mexican border crossers:

The study of borders within North America is dominated and imagined almost exclusively within the Chicano studies literature. In that literature the act of crossing borders is an occasion for transgression, a means of decentering the national narrative of a culturally homogeneous and monolithic nation-state. Unlike Chicanos, who move through juridical identities and designations as they cross the border […] for Iroquois peoples the border acts as a site not of transgression but for the activation and articulation of their rights as members of reserve nations, or Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois Confederacy peoples. (Simpson, 2014: 116)

Indeed, with an ironic flourish, Simpson wryly observes that ‘the geopolitical boundary of the United States-Canada border actually transgresses them’ (2014: 124).

Whether the echo of the Chicano/a protest ‘We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us’ is intentional in Simpson’s words or not, the circumstantial differences between the southwestern US and northern Mexico compared to Haudenosaunee territories in the northeastern US, Ontario, and Quebec relate again to structural impositions by different colonial powers. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo ceded the northern half of the territory then understood as Mexico to the US. Those already resident in that ceded territory were given a simple choice between remaining Mexican citizens and leaving, or staying (as most chose) and either becoming US citizens or risking acquiring illegal status. Native Americans in the area were almost incidental to the specific terms of this nation-state to nation-state exchange, featuring in Article XI first as ‘savage tribes’ who the US will police, then as ‘Indians’ from whom kidnapped captives and stolen livestock must not be bought, before finally being guaranteed — in weasel words — their right to remain:

And, finally, the sacredness of this obligation [to protect the rights of the new citizens in the region] shall never be lost sight of by the [United States] Government, when providing for the removal of the Indians from any portion of the said territories, or for its being settled by citizens of the United States; but, on the contrary, special care shall then be taken not to place its Indian occupants under the necessity of seeking new homes, by committing those invasions which the United States have solemnly obliged themselves to restrain. (The Avalon Project [1848])

The right of free passage in the northeastern US was not legislated in the same way in the southwest, where the Tohono O’odham also have exercised their sovereign right to move freely through their landbase since the 1853 Gadsen Purchase saw the redrawing of the Mexico-US border through the middle of their traditional territory. Although for much of the subsequent time period Tohono O’odham moved freely between southern Arizona, where the Tohono O’odham Nation’s reservation is located, and Sonora in Mexico, the freedom of movement was seriously curtailed with the implementation of increased border surveillance and control in the early 1990s. Aimed at the deterrence of illegal immigration and drug trafficking, heightened border security led to the effective prevention of movement, particularly for the 1,400 or so enrolled Tohono O’odham who reside in Mexico, in spite of their right to access medical facilities on the Nation’s reservation. Post 9/11, in the eyes of many Tohono O’odham, those same security services have increasingly treated the Nation’s citizens as illegal immigrants on their own land.

Although this comparison neither diminishes nor mitigates the ongoing claims and contests over land use and treaty rights engaged in by the Haudenosaunee and others at the Canada-US border, it ironically mirrors general conceptions of the two borders’ key difference for many US citizens, wherein the Canada-US border represents a bureaucratic obstacle in comparison to the Mexico-US’s status as a necessary barrier. The historical differentiation inferred there has, of course, altered significantly since 9/11, after which the ‘longest undefended border in the world’ has become increasingly heavily militarized with additional border posts and general refurbishing and expanding of existing ones. Nevertheless, the narratives that pertain to that difference, in the US cultural imaginary at least, persist, while the legal-political foundations of the respective borders continue to constitute indigenous rights, or at least their recognition in law, differently at the intersections between the US and Canada and the US and Mexico.

In some respects, naturally, it renders disputes over indigenous passage across the 49th parallel all the more intense, precisely because that border is supposed to be invisible. Yet they have a ubiquity that spills into considerations of Canada-US difference with alarming regularity, whether it be the Kahnawà:ke Mohawk delegation returning to Toronto from the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Bolivia in 2010, who were refused entry on their Haudenosaunee passports; or Lorraine Mayer who recounts a humiliating experience at the hands of an inexperienced border guard when crossing into the US with sacred items (2010: 97); or Louise Erdrich’s (2003) account of being questioned over the maternity of her youngest daughter as she returned home from a sojourn in Canada in her second memoir Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country; or in Onondaga author-artist Eric Gansworth’s (2008) short story ‘Patriot Act’, in which a Tuscarora woman, under the auspices of the US Patriot Act, is submitted to interrogation on her return to the US from Canada. In each of these cases, the act of crossing the border is figured as a shift between explicitly different cultural, historical, or jurisdictional spaces. That is, in spite of the historico-cultural continuity encoded in their border-crossing rights as members of historically continuous border-straddling nations, these stories of asserting sovereignty through border crossing illuminate the differential experience of settler colonialism on either side. It is, ultimately, in juridical interpretations of Jay’s Treaty that this difference is most clearly codified for Simpson — in the shifts in the early to mid-twentieth century to raced markers of identities in the US (blood quantum) in comparison to genealogical and cultural markers in Canada. ‘The racialization of Indian identity in the United States’, Simpson writes, ‘correlates to […] conceptions of recognition that moved Indian tribes (as they are known in the United States) away from the semisovereign status of “domestic and dependent nations” and into the conceptual and legal ambit of racialized minorities’ (2014: 138). The politics of recognition in Canada, meanwhile, defers to ‘especially static and culturalist methodology’ that ‘apply to collectives that are recognizable to the state based on that state’s criteria for Indigenous difference […] constructed as “recognizable” as cultural practices affixed in a certain moment in time’ (Simpson, 2014: 140). At its most basic level, then, assertions of indigenous rights intervene positively in contests over the very definition and means of recognition of indigeneity itself through the sovereign practices of trade, travel, and intercultural interaction, in ways anterior to and in spite of settler colonial conceptions of land and a ‘grammar of settler space’ (see Goeman, 2014: 237).

The urgent questions attendant to the Canada-US border are not, of course, solely concerned with indigenous rights, but this special issue of Comparative American Studies has its inception, at least partly, in a particularly unusual space. Algoma University, located in Sault Ste Marie (‘the Soo’ locally), played host to the Leverhulme Trust-funded ‘Culture and the Canada-US Border’ network (CCUSB) in May 2013. Sault Ste Marie, Ontario, sits along the foreshore of the St Mary’s River, which connects Lake Superior to Lake Huron, gazing across to its twin city, Sault Ste Marie, Michigan. Known by the local Anishinaabe as Baawitigong (‘Place of the Rapids’) who used the area for fall whitefish harvesting, Sault Ste Marie, a single Jesuit settlement that came to straddle the St Mary’s Rapids, was once the cultural and economic heart of the Great Lakes’ most significant colonial economy: the fur trade. The Soo’s American twin, Sault Ste Marie, Michigan, was home to Jane Johnston Schoolcraft. A daughter of a fur-trade family with an Ulster-Scots father and Anishinaabe mother, and eventual wife of the Indian Agent, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Jane was significantly the first Native American poet in print, the first Native poet to publish in her native language, and a major contributor to Henry’s ethnographic endeavours. Through the course of her family’s association with the fur trade, they would have seen the area politically and economically dominated by the Anishinaabeg, while trade rights were handed between French and English traders and the tribe itself went from being a dominant power, to being subject to European authority, and further shifts besides. As Robert Dale Parker explains: ‘[i]n their lifetimes, the Johnston family saw their world shift not only from Ojibwe and French-Canadian cultural dominance to the dominance of the encroaching United States, but also from British rule to US federal rule’ (2007: 4), where the territory in which they lived went from being part of the Northwest Territory to becoming Michigan Territory itself before admission to statehood roughly five years before Jane’s death in 1842. These transitions also entailed ‘changes in language and religion as well as shifts in the sense of centering cultural identity from Ojibwe and French to English and from Montreal to Washington and New York City’ (Parker, 2007: 4).

The settlement through trade, cartographic carving of the territory, and Schoolcraft’s efforts to ‘comprehend’ the Anishinaabe arguably actively combined in the colonization of the area. Both driven and self-servingly justified by those changes, the stock myth of inevitable Native disappearance also finds its most celebrated commemoration in this geographical and cultural terrain. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote his ‘national epic’ The Song of Hiawatha using a variety of sources, including Henry’s documentation of the Anishinaabe cultural hero Nanabozho, cultural histories of the Haudenosaunee diplomat Hiawatha, and inspiration from Gaagigegaabaw, or George Copway, a Mississauga Ojibwe minister, orator, poet, and historian who relocated from Canada to the US in the hope of better securing his, and his people’s, future. Having befriended Longfellow in 1849, Copway is reported to have spent some of his later years performing the role of Hiawatha in the drawing rooms of wealthy urbanites, capitalizing on the massive popularity of the poem in the late-nineteenth century. As Brad Fruhauff notes, Hiawatha was ‘issued in multiple editions, translated into many languages, anthologized widely and adapted for — among other things — songs, operas, musicals, symphonies, paintings, cartoons, and films’ (2007: 79). One such adaptation, a Hiawatha pageant, took place at the Garden River First Nation in Sault Ste Marie, Ontario, regularly between 1900 and 1968.⁴

Multiple layers of irony attach to the near-annual performances of Hiawatha at Kensington Point, on the shores of Lake Huron.⁵ As Margot Francis recounts (2011), the Anishinaabeg of Garden River (a source community for the subject matter of the poem) collaborated with Canada Pacific Railroad colonization agent Louis Oliver Armstrong to bring the national American epic to life in Canada in an intriguing bilingual co-production. While a narrator stood on shore narrating the poem in English to an assembled audience, the Anishinaabe troupe proceeded to act out traditional songs and stories in Anishinaabemowin on a floating stage a short way from shore. In such fashion the troupe both participated in a fantasy of Indian vanishing entirely undermined by the fact of their performance and, according to Francis, re-appropriated its sources, finding opportunity to both speak their language and publicly perform traditional practices in decades during which both were largely forbidden (2011: 132–34). In the case of language, the nearby Shingwauk Residential School, to which Native children were brought considerable distances by the school’s agents, forbade children to speak in their own languages (see Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre, n.d.). As such, the local performance of, and in, Anishinaabemowin had political significance, as ‘the play both preserved a space for the public use of an Indigenous vernacular and legitimated its currency in the circuits of international performance’ (Francis, 2011: 133).

Michael McNally reminds us: ‘It would ultimately contribute to the spectacular nature of the Ontario Hiawatha pageants that the poem was performed just downriver from the Sault, where Schoolcraft garnered the material in the first place. It was even reported that a number of players in the 1901 pageant were grandchildren of his informants’ (2006: 109). ‘Just down river’, of Sault Ste Marie, Michigan, of course, was another country. The ‘grandchildren of [Schoolcraft’s] informants’ resided in a different nation-state certainly to that of their grandparents’ interrogators, although said elders could well, naturally, have crossed the border on their route through the Johnston home. In spite of the increased interference described above, the Anishinaabeg of Sault Ste Marie continue to cross the border regularly for both work and leisure, as do many other citizens of the Soo and other borderlands communities. That movement to and fro characterizes many decades of Haudenosaunee mobility, too, as Mohawk ironworkers, for instance, using their tribally administered red cards, participated in the construction of North America’s economy. Beginning with the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway Bridge between Kahnawà:ke and Montreal in 1886, Mohawk ironworkers have been involved continuously in the building of many of the US’s major architectural icons. Although their relationship with the industry arguably has declined since the late 1960s, Kahnawà:ke-based ironworkers continue to play a significant role in major projects. At Akwesasne, border crossing is an essential daily activity for many.

Encompassing, accommodating, challenging, and complicating narratives of the formation of the nation-state in North America, these scenarios of indigenous survivance,⁶ and assertions of indigenous sovereignty, actively participate in and indeed generate the economic, political, and above all cultural flows across the Canada-US border, just as they illuminate some of the limitations that boundary imposes. This special issue begins (through the conference and this introduction) and ends (in Padraig Kirwan’s reflections from our 2012 workshop) with examinations of the discourse of sovereignty with regard to indigenous art and literature both literally and figuratively in the borderlands. Treatment of what are commonly thought to be the margins as heartlands, they focus considerations of the Canada-US border itself as a centre rather than an edge, which is of course a lived reality for those borderlands communities that abut and indeed straddle the line. These discussions bookend a selective range of work by CCUSB network participants which similarly illuminates the flows and blockages of the border as both centre and edge across a range of different constituencies and in relation to a variety of cultural and economic forms.

A crucial element of the CCUSB remit — very much a raison d’être of the network — has been to effect a rebalancing of sorts of the relationship between Canadian studies and the various iterations of the post-national American studies that have emanated from, and continued to centre on, the US over the last couple of decades. ‘Hemispheric’ American studies, as one of the primary frameworks for the transnational conversation, has offered the odd olive branch, but the fact remains that little attention has been paid by American studies scholars to the contributions of Canadian studies to burgeoning conversations around globalization, transnationalism, and the post-national. In ‘Hemispheric Studies or Scholarly NAFTA?’, Herb Wyile suggests that the concomitant wariness among Canadian studies scholars of the hemispheric conversation emanates from the possibility that it ‘threatens to relegate Canadian literature, which has spent roughly the past fifty years shedding its status as terra incognita, to where it once belonged’ (2010: 49). Although his essay appeared only one short year after Kit Dobson’s Transnational Canadas announced its interest in ‘seeing what happens when the transnational is taken to be the ground from which we begin discussions about literary production within a geopolitical space like Canada’ (2009: xvii), Wyile describes a kind of retrenchment into a case for nationally determined Canadian literary studies. Nevertheless, he poses a perfectly cogent conundrum. ‘[T]here are grounds for concern’, Wyile suggests, ‘that in a literary version of “the US and its Americas”, Canada, along with all the other “Americas”, will be lost in the shuffle’ (2010: 50).

Wyile, perhaps inevitably, invokes US abuses of the 1994 North American Fair Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as a structural analogy for the kinds of liberties the Canadian literary establishment might find itself subject to in the hemispheric conversation. Certainly, the Canada-US border has long served a protective function in the Canadian imaginary, serving as a significant marker of cultural defence of Canadian identity against the pervasive spread of US cultural influence. We return, then, to the institutional concerns we mentioned earlier, in the sense, as Alyssa MacLean explains, that ‘[u]nderstanding Canada in relation to its hemispheric neighbors requires confronting the most persistent and most powerful assumptions that have grounded the formative concepts of National Area Studies and of Transnational Studies’ (2010: 401). The asymmetries of power and economy between the US and Canada resound in the dominance of American studies modelling of the transnational and hemispheric arguments. They are, we believe, rendered less all-encompassing through close scrutiny of the border site and its role in cultural production and cultural flow, where ‘Canada’s different perspective toward, and experiences with, national formations could construct a more informed understanding of the function of the nation-state and the meaning of the nation’ (MacLean, 2010: 400). As Sadowski-Smith notes, the Canada-US border is a latecomer to global border studies (2014: 21); the humanities, to continue in that vein, is a latecomer to studies of the Canada-US border, which have been dominated by political science and, to a lesser degree, the social sciences. The essays offered here thus make a valuable contribution to that developing conversation.

In ‘The Permeable Border: Examining Responses to North American Integration in Video Art’, Sarah Smith explores shifting views of Canada in its North American context through artworks that negotiate the Canada-US border. Comparing cultural representations of the Canada-US border with general perceptions of the Mexico-US border, Smith argues for the significance of cultural production — in this instance video artworks by Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak, Eva Manly, and Clive Robertson — in the redefining of the Canada-US borderlands in a period of perceived North American integration in the late-twentieth century. ‘[P]ositing the connection between the border’s permeable nature and its treatment by artists as a conceptual boundary rather than a physical one’, Smith examines the artists’ responses to the power dynamics between Canada and its trade partners in the context of the 1989 Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and the 1994 NAFTA. The border has received little artistic attention; ostensibly, Smith argues, as a result of its reputation as permeable, a status that has tended to render it ephemeral — a conceptual space rather than a physical site. Recent innovations, however, such as the three-exhibition ‘Border Cultures’ series at the Art Gallery of Windsor running between 2012 and 2015, attend to an ‘accelerated militarization’, and ‘politics of exclusion’ in the cross-border region. Looking at works spanning the decades since the 1980s which specifically address the impacts of the FTA and NAFTA, then, she ‘make[s] the case for video as a medium with a social conscience’ and charts shifting perceptions of how artwork focused on the border ‘articulates distinct and complex aesthetic and conceptual ideas about the relationship between Canada and the US, touching on issues of cultural dominance, indigenous histories, labour, and social justice’.

Continuing with the medium of the moving image, but taking a significant turn from high to popular culture, Richard Baker examines the pivotal role of the Canada-US border in Hollywood treatments of Canada in ‘“Nothing But Hill and Hollow”: The Canadian Border as American Frontier in the Hollywood Northern’. Demonstrating the ways in which emphasis on the border presents US audiences with a reconfiguration of the American frontier, Baker argues that these films present Canada and Canadian history as appendices to US self-understanding. Taking over from earlier representations of wilderness, Canada, he suggests, becomes the ground on which the American cowboy and his role in the Manichean epic maintain notional American virtues and exceptionalist understandings of American agency, absorbing Canada ‘as a subordinate element inside an American self-narrative’. Delineating and deliberating on the mirroring of key Western tropes in the form of the Northern, he explains that ‘Hollywood’s choice of the Northern as the primary vehicle for relating stories set in Canada has consequences for audiences’ understanding and interpretation of that country’, which in turn ‘encourages American audiences to relate to Canada not as an independent entity at all, but as a passive space whose role is inextricably interwoven as a subordinate component of American history, culture, and geography’. Reinscribing the border as a dividing line between ‘civilization’ and frontier in this fashion ultimately erases the authority and definition demanded of the mapped boundaries of a sovereign nation, implicitly placing Canada in a subordinate position to the US. Its result, Baker contends, suggests that ‘the Northern sub-genre both draws from and contributes to a particular cultural construction of Canada which enables […] fantasies’ of annexation, rendering US dominance a cultural, if not political, ‘claim’ on Canadian soil.

To connect environmentalism as it straddles the Canada-US border, Alice Ridout reflects in ‘Margaret Atwood’s Straddling Environmentalism’ on the fate of wolves crossing invisible boundaries in Canada and the US, back and forth between protected parkland and hunted spaces. Another icon of the wilderness, the wolf’s presence in the Canadian wild, as a target of American hunters, contrasts ironically with Canadian tourism in Yellowstone, where reintroduced and managed wolf packs are a key attraction. Ridout’s personal reflection on her encounter with both wolves and environmental activism leads smoothly into critical analysis of environmentalism in Margaret Atwood’s speculative fiction written across the 49th parallel, as she lives her life in Canada but sets her fiction in the US. Through this speculative fiction, Ridout traces Atwood’s interest in environmentalism to question meanings of being Canadian and being American, even both at the same time. While making frequent links to Surfacing, an early work set in an idealized Canadian setting, the focus of this essay is a comparison of The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake, both environmental fictions with dystopic visions in stark American settings. Ridout stresses the shift in scale from everyday concerns in The Handmaid’s Tale to more global ecological concerns in Oryx and Crake by linking everyday themes to contemporary political contexts. Ridout refers to Atwood’s fictional representation of the collapse of capitalism in these texts as a form of embodied ecocosmopolitanism. Through a careful reading of Atwood’s texts, Ridout stresses the importance of developing an environmental awareness that inevitably straddles borders, particularly the Canada-US border.

In ‘“A Floating Population”: The Niagara Corridor and Canadian/American Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century’, Art Redding takes us to that most familiar of bio-regions, the Niagara corridor. Well-known, too, for its tourism and long established as a commercial and transit hub, Redding nevertheless parts from the closely familiar to open out a number of stories that demonstrate its significance to radicalism in the nineteenth century. Reminding us of the site’s importance to the Underground Railroad, Redding also outlines its convenience to other fugitives and radicals, suggesting that ‘the Niagara corridor, while consolidating a modern and national social consensus, also generated anti-national, experimental, and often radical forms of social organization’. Most significantly, Redding describes the rise of ‘utopian, progressive, and radical forms of thought’ as both complementary and resistant to the ‘federalist and nationalist sentiments that would underwrite the emergence of the Republican Party’ in the context of the newly industrialized lake economy. Taking multiple forms, the ferment of radicalism makes Buffalo, in Redding’s account, a lively crucible, as ‘a constant stream of transients arriving from the east and departing for the West’ encounter a bustling waterfront city in the process of shaping a ‘uniquely radical and transnational republican culture’. The international border in this context takes on a double significance for Redding, who argues first that the ‘spatial production of legal borders to regulate and over-code the “middle ground” of the Niagara region, worked both to determine identity and to shape conscious subjectivity’; and second, that ‘mobility through and encounters in and across’ these borders ‘generate productive [deterritorializing] alternatives’ to that encoding and regulation. The result, as he richly illustrates, is a ‘peculiar constellation’ of overlapping and multivalent radicalisms in the Niagara corridor.

Moving from the industrial hub to specific resources in ‘Boundaries Exercise Power: Comparing Culture in the Keweenaw and Nickel Belt’, Peter Krats traces the social history of resource-industrial areas on different sides of the Canada-US border: the copper mining area of the Keweenaw peninsula of northern Michigan and, across the border, the mining area of the Nickel Belt around Sudbury in northern Ontario. These rural outliers in northern locations share similar geology and economic bases, and are also controlled by resource-extraction companies — Calumet & Hecla and Quincy Mining in Keweenaw, and Canadian Copper/International Nickel (INCO) and Mond Nickel around Sudbury. On the surface, the communities are both shaped by these companies that provide relatively stable employment and housing for workers and management. Below the surface, Krats traces the development of these communities to expose asymmetries of ethnic heterogeneity, corporate influence, and cultural elements. While success for European immigrant workers in the mining companies was often dependent on assimilation, it was expression of their ethnic heterogeneity that contributed to success in developing agricultural and local businesses, unique cultural institutions, and shared ethnic practices. Krats demonstrates how an unintended consequence of the melting pot model in the US was the active expression of cultural practices in immigrant communities. In contrast, an unintended consequence of the multicultural model in Canada was that many immigrant populations were encouraged to fit into English-Canadian cultural practices. During labour disputes in both mining areas the immigrant workers were often responsible, actually or assumed, for the union activism and strike actions in the early-twentieth century. In contrast, American citizens and Anglo-Canadians in better paid work were more likely to support the resource companies. Krats’ comparison of the Kewaanaw and Nickel Belt demonstrates that, despite distance and the Canada-US border separating them, both similar and different experiences and practices developed in these ethnically heterogeneous communities.

Focusing on a quite different ‘industry’, meanwhile, Paul Tyrell uncovers an intriguing history of the opportunity that the Canada-US border, and the Detroit River, offered for many layers of illegal activity at the Detroit-Windsor border during prohibition in the 1920s and 1930s. In ‘Utilizing a Border as a Local Economic Resource: The Example of the Prohibition-Era Detroit-Windsor Borderland (1920–33)’, the border is framed as an economic resource for borderland local communities based on economic, legal, and cultural asymmetries enabling a range of smuggling and border vice between Windsor and Detroit. Alcohol smuggling, more or less an export market, depended on legal loopholes such as when and where quality Canadian whiskey was produced and transported to the US. This whiskey was particularly popular among the respectable Detroit middle class which could afford this status symbol, while also avoiding the poorer quality of US liquor during prohibition. Important tensions are revealed as the Canadian government took advantage of alcohol transportation by gaining tax revenues until the public politics of prohibition meant increased enforcement must limit smuggling, thereby causing the loss of lucrative business. Another layer to this illegal activity at the border was captured in narratives and stories of the social ritual of the drinking culture and adventures of smuggling alcohol between Detroit and Windsor. These tales, as real and fictional elements of the local and national media, idealized smuggling during prohibition and became known as the Detroit-Windsor Funnel narrative. Tyrell’s focus is the consequences of alcohol prohibition for the local economies of the borderlands; however, he also shows how border vice in the form of roadhouse culture, racetrack gambling, and sex industries based on cultural asymmetries was woven into the fabric of prohibition. Interestingly, Tyrell suggests links between the recent casino culture and the earlier complex layers of illegal economic activities at the Detroit-Windsor border during prohibition.

Closing out the issue, we return to the indigenous contexts with which we began this introduction. In ‘“Mind the Gap”: Journeys in Indigenous Sovereignty and Nationhood’, Padraig Kirwan addresses the most pressing concerns of contemporary Native North American politics: the exercise of tribal sovereignty, and its intricate relationship with the articulation of self-determination and tribal nationhood as distinct from European or Western conceptions of the nation-state. Kirwan argues that these same terms frame current debates in Native American studies, as he points to ‘the critical role that definitions of indigenous self-determination and authority play within the field today’. Teasing out the multivalent connotations of these terms in ‘Indian Country’, Kirwan compellingly argues for the adaptability of apparently immutable terms like sovereignty in the negotiation of tribal nation-specific needs in all their diversity and multiplicity across the continent. ‘[E]ven though there is certainly common ground between indigenous nationhood and European or international nationalism’, he explains, ‘it is nevertheless the case that indigenous definitions of sovereignty are uniquely formed, distinctively performed, ancestrally rooted in tribal stories, and materially enacted in the specific circumstances that exist in Indian Country today’. Unlike the other essays in this volume, Kirwan’s had its genesis in the very first CCUSB workshop, held at the Senate House in London, which specifically addressed questions of sovereignty and nation. In the course of the discussion, the terms of that debate came back to Ireland, or at least to the many similarities imputed to Irish and indigenous nationalisms, and to common experiences of British colonialism. To that end, Kirwan frames his discussion here with an anecdotal rumination on the political exigencies of colonially entangled sovereignties. In doing so, he asserts the need for mindful comparison, urging careful attention to historical and practical detail alongside the more abstract theorizations that enable such comparison. Such mindful comparison, he hopes, can offer the potential for meaningful alliances.

The small collection of essays included here comprises an overview of the range of topics and disciplinary approaches related to the Canada-US border.

Notes on contributors

Jan Clarke is an Associate Professor in Sociology at Algoma University in Sault Ste Marie, Canada. She was co-organizer of the 2013 CCUSB conference, Straddling Boundaries, hosted by Algoma University. Her CCUSB research interests include meanings of health across the Canada-US border linked to Canadian public and American privatized health care systems.

David Stirrup is a senior lecturer in American literature at the University of Kent, Canterbury, and Principal Investigator of the Leverhulme Trust International Network “Culture and the Canada-US Border” (CCUSB). He is author of Louise Erdrich (2010, Manchester UP) and co-editor of Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada-US (2014 with Gillian Roberts, Wilfrid Laurier UP) and Tribal Fantasies: Native Americans in the European Imaginary, 1900-2010 (2013 with James Mackay, Palgrave).

Notes

1. Figure cited in the National Post article, ‘New Cross-Border Deal Could Make Nightmare Lines when Travelling to the United States a Thing of the Past’.

2. Commonly known as the Iroquois Wars, the Beaver Wars effectively began in the 1620s and 1630s as the beaver population declined and the Iroquois began to aggressively expand their territory in order to maintain their role in the trade. They continued throughout the seventeenth century, until the rising threat of the English caused both parties to see the other increasingly as potential allies. The Great Peace of Montreal (1701) cemented that new political alliance.

3. We use the phrase 49th parallel here as a discursive shorthand, cognisant, of course, that significant stretches of the Canada-US border do not map onto the 49th parallel.

4. More recently, between roughly 2005 and 2008, ‘Batchewana and Garden River First Nations have been engaged in a research and performance project to “re-interpre[t] Henry Longfellow’s poem ‘The Song of Hiawatha’ from a contemporary Anishinaabe perspective”’ (Stewart, 2013: 172).

5. Francis (2011) says the location was Kensington Point on St Joseph’s Channel, near the northwestern end of Lake Huron. McNally (2006), more specifically, suggests Desbarats as the location, which is just to the east of Kensington Point. Garden River itself is further west than both locations, on Little Lake George, at the very northwestern end of Lake Huron.

6. ‘Survivance’, a term brought into active usage in Native American studies by Anishinaabe author Gerald Vizenor, connotes ‘an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, [which] are renunciations of dominance, tragedy and victimry’ (Vizenor, 1999: vii).