Introducing the Borderline Histories series
or "where'd that border come from, anyhow?"
I’m in the middle of reading Harsha Walia’s Undoing Border Imperialism, which came out in 2013 and helped expand the reach of the immigrant justice movement both through its analysis of how and why borders are maintained and become sites of violence, and in providing concrete examples of organizing projects that could challenge the violent deportation cycle (specifically the work of NOII, No One is Illegal).
I expect to do a longer dive into this book sometime in the near future (as well as Walia’s recent appearance on the For the Wild podcast). But today’s post is the result of realizing, about halfway through the book, that I had a very basic question, one which it felt like I should know the answer to, but for some reason did not. That question is: where did the U.S.-Canada border come from, anyhow?
NOII is based on Canada, and there are first-hand experiences in the book that share the difficulty of migrants trying to cross this border, which sparked this question for me. The majority of the discussion about migration issues in North America seems to focus on the U.S.-Mexico border. So much so that I’ve had discussions with Canadians excoriating U.S. immigration policies and detention centers who were completely unaware that Canada does much the same (though the numbers are perhaps not quite as drastic and it seems that Canada, unlike the U.S., has released detainees during the pandemic to prevent the spread of COVID-19).
I could feel embarrassed about not knowing what seems like a basic piece of information about where I live. But I’ve come to recognize that such gaps in knowledge, rather than resulting from individual negligence, more often than not smack of a broader, systemic obfuscation. A query of my partner about the matter delivered that they also didn’t know (we have rather different educational backgrounds, so this was telling). I can offer some quick guesses as to why such historical points might be systemically ignored. As socially constructed devices, borders are racialized (a point Walia notes in Undoing Border Imperialism). Canada is often inaccurately portrayed as entirely white in conversations in the U.S., which invisibilizes not only its First Nations but many other residents as well. This, in a country with a long history of racist immigration policies, attempts to render the border less ‘problematic’ than that with Mexico, and less worthy of comment. Furthermore, states (by which I mean nation-states), benefit by having certain borders seem natural, as though they had always existed, and were completely unremarkable pre-existing features of the landscape. To teach the history and negotiation of these borders risks de-naturalizing them, that is, making their existence one of curiosity and possibly open to questioning and contestation.
Since we’re about questioning here at Unsettling, and because know I’m not the only one whose knowledge on this is a little shaky, investigating the history of borders seems like a worthy task, and likely to offer us insight into the functioning of settler-colonialism. Hence I’ll be doing a regular feature called Borderline History. The goal here is to continue de-naturalizing borders many take for granted, to daylight the contests of power that shaped them, what was lost as a result, and what other configurations might be possible.
Some basics of the history of the U.S.-Canada border:
The treaty that ostensibly establishes what we know as this border happened at roughly the same time as the southern border of the U.S was also being forged. The Mexican-American War took place from 1846-1848; the United States and British North America signed the Oregon Treaty in June of 1846 to resolve disputes over territory jointly occupied since the Treaty of 1818 (which was one result of the War of 1812). But 1846 turns out to be quite a pivotal year.
While it’s Andrew Jackson I associate most with promoting the ideas of Manifest Destiny, it’s James Polk who presides over both these efforts at vast expansion. Polk was a pro-slavery Democrat who owned plantations in Tennessee and then Mississippi, from which he profited though he managed them largely absentee. (Absentee landlords allowing abuse of those who live on their land, while attempting to aggressively acquire even more real estate—does that sound familiar? If this were the modern era, Polk would have NUMTOT memes with his face on them. Also, always good to remember that the beliefs of the political parties have altered over time.)
The groundwork for the Oregon Treaty comes through earlier treaties signed in the era right after the Revolutionary War, including both 1793’s Treaty of Paris, and the Jay Treaty a year later which created the International Boundary Commission. The Commission was charged in 1908 to survey and mark the boundary more completely. This came five years after the border between Canada and Alaska was settled via arbitration.
This is the rather textbook-like history one can quickly glean by following a series of Wikipedia links. What’s missing from these articles is any accounting of why the U.S. and British governments felt a right to negotiate and determine that boundary in the first place. We’re past the stage of the cunning use of flags, as Eddie Izzard calls it:
There’s an unspoken choice of historians and school teachers alike in their storytelling here, to reduce the characters in that story to two colonial governments arguing with one another over whether the flags are in the right place, with no mention of all the others who might lay claim to the land. Of whom there are many, if we use the map from native-land.ca as a guide:
(This map has become a popular resource in recent years. As I’m sure I’ll be making lots of use of it on this site, I just went and made a small donation to support their work. If you’ve also been benefitting from their team, and recommending it to others, why not give your support as well?)
The choice to ignore other residents of the land would have registered as deliberate, not accidental, at the time, say, of the negotiation of the Jay Treaty. But do those writing Wikipedia summaries of the events experience it as such? This is the long-term effects of culture, and of the naturalization of concepts over time: what was once contested ceases to even be remarkable, and we fail to understand that there are choices we’re making in how we tell the stories, how we draw pictures of our world. This recognition that there are choices to be made in the way we represent the world to ourselves is one of the primary and ongoing practices one can take on if interested in challenging injustices or working to decolonize. Our implicit assumptions are often the result of past acts of power, and we can’t challenge that power if we don’t seek out the way it exists in our own heads.
As this pertains to borders, we can easily see how even a quick look at just one border (though true, it does happen to be the longest continuous border between two countries at present) opens up an almost endless number of routes for learning more and understanding the active struggle that went into structuring our world in a way that many take for granted today. Thus, with the U.S.-Canada border as a starting point, I’ll be using Borderline History to try and follow as many of those routes as I can, seeing if we can’t transform that long straight line many of us are accustomed to holding in our minds:
into something deliciously more complicated:
And while we’re taking a minute to try and flip our engrained visual associations and denaturalize unexamined assumptions, here’s another: as typically taught in school history, especially regarding the U.S. border, disputes about what belongs to whom are described as occurring only in the past, rather than in the present. Variations of U.S. exceptionalism treat the redrawing of borders as something that happens elsewhere — this despite the fact that new states have been formally incorporated into the United States within my own parents’ lifetimes. In fact, looking up the history of U.S.-Canada border negotiations led me to learn that the Alaska border has continued to be disputed during my own life. The two countries continued to argue over the exact ownership of what is known as the Dixon Entrance in order to control access to salmon runs there, and didn’t come to a resolution until 1985 with the Pacific Salmon Treaty, which is renegotiated every ten years. The BBC has a bit of a write-up on the situation if you want to learn more, which they did in late 2019 as the treaty was up for discussion yet again.
There’s another rabbit hole of inquiry right there, with questions about why nation-states think they are entitled to entire populations of species whose natural movements are inherently transnational. Not exactly self-evident, is it? Groups of people aren’t the only ones that have been excluded from the negotiating table, though the growing Rights of Nature movement seeks to change that. I’m excited to dig into some of that work in future posts as well.
I’ll be back with more soon,
Meg