This book provides a history of the Canada-United States border from 1775 until 1939, highlighting the formation of each nation state, the role Indigenous people had in the development of the international boundary, and the impact the border had on Indigenous people, European settlers, Chinese migrants, and African Americans.
The untold history of the multiracial making of the border between Canada and the United States. Often described as the longest undefended border in the world, the Canada-US border was born in blood, conflict, and uncertainty. At the end of the American Revolution, Britain and the United States imagined a future for each of their nations that stretched across a continent. They signed treaties with one another dividing lands neither country could map, much less control. A century and a half later, Canada and the United States had largely fulfilled those earlier ambitions. Both countries had built nations that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific and had made an expansive international border that restricted movement. The vision that seemed so clear in the minds of diplomats and politicians never behaved as such on the ground. Both countries built their border across Indigenous lands using hunger, violence, and coercion to displace existing communities and to disrupt their ideas of territory and belonging. The border's length undermined each nation's attempts at control. Unable to prevent movement at the border's physical location for over a century, Canada and the United States instead found ways to project fear across international lines They aimed to stop journeys before they even began.
A marvellous easy-to-follow examination of the Canadian-American borderlands from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean from the 1870s to the 1930s. It is a well-written and enjoyable narrative of how Canada and the United States created an international border across a landscape already filled with Indigenous borders....Throughout its history, the border comes more clearly into focus through its inconsistencies, impositions, contestations, and inequalities. What is clear is the centrality of Indigenous peoples to the development of the border. A Line of Blood and Dirt is...a must-read for anyone wanting to understand the stretch and limit of state power along a border and its impact on peoples.
