August 8, 2002

Plains Folk: Borderlands

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

They say that the Canada-United States boundary is the longest undefended border in the world. That depends on what you mean by "undefended." Because since the late 19th century the border has been peaceful and porous, both nations have felt compelled to do certain things to reserve what they hold most dear.

National identity, for instance, is a self-conscious labor of love in Canada. Northern Americans can hear the work in progress every day on the CBC. It may be surprising, but I run into it all the time doing prairie history and folklore.

I remember years ago I was at a reception for the Canadian learned societies and got to talking with a scholar from middle Canada. When he learned I was studying the Canadian prairies, he turned purple as a Zane Gray sunset. He believed, simply and finally, that because I was an American, I could not understand anything about Canada and should just get out.

"None of that Matt Dillon stuff here!" he exploded. "Everything is completely different."

And of course many things are. My old friend Paul Sharp (president emeritus of the University of Oklahoma, and before that a heck of a historian) wrote about them a half-century ago in a book called "Whoop-Up Country." He tells the story how in the mid-19th century the area that is now western Canada was attached to the U.S. by trade out of Fort Benton, head of navigation on the Missouri River.

Canada, though, led by Prime Minister John A. McDonald, asserted its control over the west, first by dispatching the Northwest Mounted Police and then by building the Canadian Pacific Railroad. That made the Canadian west unmistakably Canadian.

In the 20th century, particularly in Cold War days, it became incorrect even to think about kinships between the prairies of Canada and those of the U.S. The University of Toronto pretty well saw to that, making sure that teaching and writing across the country stuck to east-west lines.

Now, though, something peculiar is happening. I have in hand two new books, one by a Canadian and the other by an American. The first is "Common and Contested Ground," by Theodore Binnema (University of Oklahoma Press). The other is "The Medicine Line," by Beth LaDow (Routledge).

Binnema writes of what he calls the "northwestern plains" (Montana, Alberta, Saskatchewan) up to 1806. His subject is the occupation of this land by native societies, the alliances and conflicts between them, and the role of Europeans in the story. The book is not popular-reader friendly--it reads like a dissertation, but a good dissertation. It makes no one a victim, but treats all as human beings with agency, doing logical things (which sometimes included killing one another wholesale).

The notable thing is that Binnema sees fit to consider British and American territory in common as a region of study. Hey, I know that seems obvious, but believe me, it would not have been done a few years ago.

Even more striking is LaDow's work, which explores the "borderland" along the Forty-Ninth Parallel. To visualize her study area, draw a weather box (you know, like TV weather men do) stretching from Chinook, Mont., to Maple Creek, Sask. Studying Indian relations, ranching, and settlement here, she concludes that "nationalist feelings along the border proved neither divisive nor long-lived."

More important along the Medicine Line are local and regional identities, formed by the land itself--by things like grass, and drought and toughing it out. I'm not sure how much this proves, because LaDow's border area is about the most un-national anywhere in North America. (Maybe that's why border guards around there seem grumpy, because people won't take them seriously.) I do know that "Medicine Line" is a fine read, recommended for any Canadian or American with an interest in our long line of commonality and division.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, tom@plainsfolk.com 
Editor: Tom Jirik, (701) 231-9629, tjirik@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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