Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands, 1867–1945. By Andrea Geiger

Abstract

Andrea Geiger’s study is upfront about its subjects: Japanese immigrants in North America, Aboriginal law, and Indigenous communities on the North Pacific Coast. It is a penetrating story of shifting histories, places of crossing and instability where Indigenous groups outlawed from legal rights in British Columbia might relocate over a political border into Alaska and be under American jurisdiction—or vice versa. Likewise, it is a story of the North Pacific in which Japan is largely defined by its northern island Hokkaido through the incorporation of that Ainu Moshir Indigenous territory into Japan only in the nineteenth century. In this world of expanding imperial borders, Japanese immigrants transit the Pacific to become British subjects in Canada while being denied naturalization in the United States, all the while living, working, and building families and communities at the very frontiers of multiple worlds. A generation of scholarship on immigrant Japanese in Hawai‘i and the mainland United States is well established; the North Pacific Coast, less so. The year 1867 is a key framing as the date that Canada becomes a national confederation and Alaska is acquired by the United States from Russia. As a legal scholar, Geiger underscores how new states define identities to include and exclude. Thus, the dilemma and choices of the Metlakatlans, regarded as “Indian” but not Indigenous to Alaska and immigrant but not “White.” Or, Frank Yasuda, a Japanese hailed as an Inuit “king” or “chief,” married to an Inuit woman Nevelo, yet never quite Indigenous and also denied possibility of citizenship as an immigrant (pp. 64, 85).