Border History is Indigenous History

Abstract

Border History is Indigenous History Ryan Hall (bio) Benjamin Hoy, A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border across Indigenous Lands. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Notes and index. xv + 322pp. $35.00. In the desperate final months of 1862, some two thousand Dakota Sioux people trekked north through the cold Minnesota winter in search of safety. To these survivors, British lands north of the 49th parallel represented their last possible refuge, their last hope. Over the previous summer, the Dakota had launched a doomed resistance campaign against American settlers and government authorities, citing broken treaty promises that had left them on the brink of starvation. In the war's aftermath, soldiers quickly rounded up and arrested Dakota survivors. Those who remained unfettered were forced to flee, and danger stalked their every step. Some went west to the lands of their Lakota kin, but punitive U.S. Army expeditions followed them to the plains to hunt them down. Those who instead went north had to avoid packs of vigilantes who roamed the border hoping to capture stragglers for rewards. Even after they crossed, the Dakota refugees still had to evade illegal kidnapping parties; keep peace with Indigenous nations like the Crees and Métis, who resented their presence on fast-shrinking hunting grounds; mollify British officials who saw them as dangerous nuisances; and find ways to subsist and survive in the harsh northern prairies. Despite all this, they persevered. By the 1870s, the Dakota refugees secured a handful of small reserves in what is now central Manitoba and Saskatchewan, where descendants remain today. The border saved them. The Dakota were the first of many Indigenous peoples to cross the U.S.-Canadian border to escape violent death during the era of continental expansion. In January 1870, many Blackfoot people in Montana fled north after escalating violence with settlers culminated in the U.S. Army massacring nearly two hundred peaceful Blackfoot people encamped along the Marias River. Many of the Blackfoot survivors never returned to the southern portions of their homelands that lay in the United States. In 1877, the renowned Lakota chief Sitting Bull led three thousand of his people north into Saskatchewan to avoid certain retribution following victory over U.S. troops in the Battle of Little Big [End Page 160] Horn. Later that year, Nez Percé people in Idaho lashed out against an invasion of their homelands, then led the U.S. Cavalry on an epic, thousand-mile chase that ended with a frantic final dash towards the Canadian border. The Nez Percé leader Chief Joseph and most of his followers were ambushed and forced to surrender within sight of their destination, but several hundred still managed to slip away and join Lakota refugees in Canada. The border worked in both directions, and Indigenous people in Canada sometimes fled to the United States for the same reasons as their American counterparts. Following an 1870 resistance campaign against the Canadian government in Manitoba, the spiritual and political leader of the Métis people, Louis Riel, absconded to Montana to avoid prosecution. After he returned to Canada to wage another failed campaign in 1885, Riel was executed, but many of his fellow Métis resistors fled across the American border, as did several bands of Cree allies who had risen up alongside them. To Indigenous people in the North American West, the international border in the late nineteenth century meant something very different than it means today. To them, the border meant safety; it meant refuge; for many, it represented the only possible option for avoiding the marauding violence of what Americans called the "Indian wars" era. The experience of Indigenous people during the bloody decades of the late nineteenth century has inspired generations of public interest and often predictable strains of historical writing. Writers have used the Indian wars to tell moralistic stories of American avarice and doomed Indian heroism, the perils of industrialization, and the clash of irreconcilable worldviews. In Canada, a parallel tradition has belatedly unfolded around their (more limited) conflicts with Métis and Cree people. Like America's Indian wars, Canada's prairie conflicts have turned an uncomfortable mirror onto...