Boundaries Exercise Power: Comparing Culture in the Keweenaw and Nickel Belt

Abstract

Examination of the Keweenaw peninsula, Michigan, and the Sudbury Basin, Ontario, offers an opportunity to assess the impact of the Canadian-American border. Both sites hosted various cultural activities shaped by ethnic heterogeneity, corporate influence, cultural elements challenging corporate influence, and isolation from major centres. Popular culture, in both cases, included standard spiritual and political institutions, music, dance, writing, and a growing sentiment of being ‘northern’. Examining these two northern, resource-industrial hinterlands reveals parallel roles as outliers of established culture and inflectors as outliers. This case study also examines linkages between two nations sharing a long boundary.

Keywords:

• border
• culture
• ethnicity
• resource hinterlands
• northern
• corporate control
• identity/isolation

Notes

1. Work funded by Western and Michigan Technological Universities.

2. My focus here on settler society precludes in-depth study of the Atikameksheng, Wahnapitaeping, and Keweenaw Bay Anishnabek.

3. On Keweenaw history see the work of Lankton (1991, 1997, 2007, 2010) and Hoagland (2010). On the Nickel Belt: Saarinen (2013) and Krats (1988).