Northeastern Borderlands Research Articles

“A Dragon, Bog-Spawned, Is Now Stretched O’er This Land”: The Ku Klux Klan’s PatrioticProtestantism in the Northeastern Borderlands During the 1920s and 1930s

“A Dragon, Bog-Spawned, Is Now Stretched O’er This Land”: The Ku Klux Klan’s PatrioticProtestantism in the Northeastern Borderlands During the 1920s and 1930s

Denouncing Sovereignty: Claims to Liberty in Northeastern Central African Republic

AbstractThis essay focuses on the northeastern borderlands of the Central African Republic (CAR), an area that though formally part of a state is mostly left to its own devices. It has no single sovereign, but many people participate in the sovereign prerogative of enacting violence in such a way as to claim a right to determine how to live. These dynamics are particularly visible in the area's contests over armed conservation, my ethnographic and historical topic here. These sovereign claims take the form of denunciation: rallying people to take extreme measures against another whose egregious acts threaten fundamental values. In northeastern CAR, the value frequently fought for through denunciation is negative liberty—freedom from molestation for those who carve space for themselves by denouncing. In addition to excavating denunciation as a dynamics of sovereignty, this paper shows that the values motivating sovereign struggles can include not just autonomy—whether devoted to a principle of order or anarchy, as others have explored—but can also be devoted to creating exceptions for those who denounce, such that they are able to participate in projects and access terrains that extend beyond their place of residence without having to consistently abide by others’ rules. Denunciation is thus a dynamics of sovereign claim-making that can shape and mobilize solidarities that are in flux, rather than those calcified by the violent, exceptional decision of a unitary sovereign. Denunciation foregrounds relational and processual aspects of sovereignty and in so doing invites new comparisons.

“Orangeism, A Great Protestant Crusade”: The Nativist Legacy of the Orange Order in the Northeastern Borderlands

ABSTRACTThe Orange Order was central to Canadian nativism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Formed in 1795 by Protestants who feared the specter of Catholic influence and political involvement in Irish society, the Order protected British authority in Ireland. Its advocacy for British loyalism and Protestant hegemony made it attractive to the growing populace in Anglophone British North America following the American Revolution. The chronological focus of this article will be in the 1920s and 1930s, a period of nativist upsurge decades after the violent heyday of the Order documented in works like Scott See’s Riots in New Brunswick: Orange Nativism and Social Violence in the 1840s. It will explore the Orange Order’s legacy in New Brunswick, demonstrating its longevity as an anti-Catholic organization and its role in fostering the social acceptance of nativist ideology in the Northeastern borderlands long after the violent 1840s. It will present the Order as an ideological advocate for an ethno-religious strain of identity that espoused Anglo-Saxon Protestant hegemony across the Northeast and collaborated with establishment politicians and fellow nativist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan to enforce this hegemonic worldview in New Brunswick.

Życie polityczne mniejszości żydowskiej na Kresach Północno-Wschodnich Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej w okresie międzywojennym. Zarys problematyki

During the interwar period in the North-eastern Borderlands of the Republic of Poland, there were numerous Jewish groups, representing various political and ideological directions: from orthodox to Zionist and so-called “folkists”, socialists ending. The Jewish communities were active in the Borderlands. The common feature of all Jewish groups was to oppose the attempts to discriminate against national and religious motives. Jewish activists were actively involved in interventions among the Jewish community for local authorities, participated in the work of local governments, and expressed their demands in the parliamentary forum.

Polish School Motherland in the Northeastern Borderlands of the Second Republic of Poland

One of the socio-educational organizations operating from the end of the 19th century in the Kingdom of Poland was the Polish School Motherland (Polska Macierz Szkolna, hereinafter: PMS). Initially illegal, work focused the attention of activists on the issues of teaching in Polish, which was addressed to various age groups of listeners. In 1916, the first Statute of the Motherland was developed, which presented the goals and directions of work and in which the promotion of and support for education in the Christian and national spirit constituted the main determinant of activity. During the First World War, PMS turned its interest to the Northeastern Borderlands. When assessing the state of Polish education in these lands, it was obvious to take appropriate measures in the area of the former Russian Partition. However, the issue of nationality of these lands has not yet been resolved. After 1918, PMS tried to organize appropriate educational institutions, but it should be emphasized that Warsaw activists encountered a number of difficulties which resulted, among others, from ignorance of the peculiarities of these lands. Finally, in September 1919, the Polish School Motherland of Eastern Lands was established and started developing intensive work in the field of organizing: daycare centers, public schools and secondary schools (few), courses for illiterate adults, libraries and reading rooms. The Motherland was also active in the field of material help for those in need.

Camouflage: the hunting origins of worlding in Africa

ABSTRACTMuch recent literature has explored the vibrancy of African urban life, and how, despite the pervasive uncertainty, people develop means of operating on the scale of the world (to ‘world’ themselves). To what extent, however, are the exigencies of worlding from Africa determined by urbanity? This article provides comparative material, focusing on worlding in one of the continent’s most remote locales, the northeastern borderlands of the Central African Republic (CAR). Through the case of armed conservation, I show that worlding requires camouflage, a hunting skill that entails learning about your surroundings and orienting yourself so you do not stick out. Surroundings in this sense are not just material/geographic, but also social and regulatory. I argue thus that hunting practices underlie worlding, and that doings in remote spaces, as much as in cities, have been a source of creativity as regards the furtherance of careers across scales.

Participation of the Society for the Support of the Construction of State Schools in the Realisation of Construction Projects in the North-eastern Borderlands of the Second Republic of Poland

In the Second Republic of Poland the actions undertaken in state schooling called for intensive efforts in the realisation of the school duty and the organisation of new schools. The difficulties related with the setting up of the network of schools which would allow children to fulfil their school duty would arise in, among others, the north-eastern borderlands of the reborn Republic. The aforementioned tasks required major financial contributions connected with the construction of schools. These needs were too high for the State Treasury. Likewise, the local government, especially in villages, did not have sufficient funds. In 1933 the Society for the Support of the Construction of State Schools was founded. It was a charity organisation that would undertake a number of different actions to use even small funds to provide significant financial support in construction of schools.

Locating Kickemuit: Springs, Stone Memorials, and Contested Placemaking in the Northeastern Borderlands

Water surrounded Algonquian peoples of the Northeast, and they highly valued it for sustenance, medicine, travel, spirituality, and other purposes. When English settlers in Plymouth Colony and surroundings areas attempted to claim territorial rights in the seventeenth century, they also sought water sources, including freshwater springs, to support colonization projects. Native/colonial tensions escalated in mid-century, and when the indigenous uprising known as King Philip’s War broke out in 1675, a place called Kickemuit Spring seemed to have been a vital locale. Situated in Wampanoag homelands, near an especially protected and fertile peninsula of vital cornlands, the spring appeared in various records as a meeting-place, a boundary-marker, and grounds of deliberate pushback against English troops by Native parties. In the conflict’s devastating aftermath, both Natives and colonists transformed such springs into sites of memory, which attempted to convey their respective—and frequently divergent—understandings of historical violence. Tracking the material and symbolic evolutions of Kickemuit, as well as other environmental features linked to memory, demonstrates the sharply contested character of “placemaking” in the Northeast. It also highlights the ongoing pressures of settler colonialism in the region, where enduring Native communities continue to challenge entrenched Euro-American convictions of place-ownership.

The Long Way Home

The salience of home often comes into being in the wake of its loss. The loss of home for me was engendered by a physical departure from the place of my birth as well as the uncertainty of return posed by escalation of ethnic violence in the region. That loss became the impetus for my ethnographic journey engaging with issues of identity, belonging, conflict, and resistance in my home community—the Garo Hills region of Northeast India. In this article, I draw from my autoethnographic journeys to offer a more nuanced and discursively complex understanding of ethnic antagonisms in Northeast India. Challenging dominant security-driven perspectives, my article is foregrounded in the everyday experiences of ordinary citizens in the Northeastern borderlands. Dissolving strict boundaries between ethnography, oral history, testimonials, and storytelling, I open up discursive spaces to explore alternative framing of home and belonging for people located in Northeastern India.

The Act of Watching with One's Own Eyes

Contemporary cultural productions from India's northeastern borderlands, both in English and languages like Assamese and Meitelon, powerfully illustrate how subjects who inhabit states of dispossession continue to imagine potential forms of action and collectivity beyond the forms of ‘death’ and non-being that states of exception supposedly engender. Moreover, such works also show how relational forms of subjectivity herald renewed possibilities of being and existing in postcolonial ‘death-worlds.’ A good illustration is Siddhartha Deb's English novel An Outline of the Republic (2006), which shows how the psychological investments of a male mainland Indian narrator in the discourses of sovereignty are gradually rent asunder as he begins to identify with the existential predicament of a subject in a state of dispossession: a woman from the northeastern Indian state of Manipur who becomes a sacrificial pawn in the political endgames played between statist and non-statist authorities. I argue that the narrator's encounters with supposed forms of death-in-life in the borderlands, and the ‘strange’ recognitions that accrue from these, facilitate a subjective metamorphosis in two ways: ethically, it helps the narrator acknowledge the demands of dispossessed others; politically, he recognizes alternative modalities of being and existing beyond sovereign governmentality and autonomous subjectivity.

A Case Study of a Minority Language Maintenance Program in Italy: Students’ and Teachers’ Perspectives on the Slovene-medium School Network

A K-13 Slovene-medium school network devoted to the protection and promotion of the cultural and linguistic heritage of the Slovene national minority has been in existence in the Italian north-eastern borderlands since the end of WWII and as part of the national public school system since 1961. This study unveils Slovene teacher's and student's language ideologies and attitudes toward the role of mother-tongue education for (a) academic achievement in the minority and dominant language; and (b) minority language maintenance. These questions were explored in a Slovene-medium high school in Gorizia, Italy, in an attempt to contribute to the understanding of secondary language minority education.

Rodzina od kuchni

The family at the table. The culinary customs of the manor houses in the North-Eastern Borderlands of the 19th century
 By making reference to source materials of the period (cook books, household guides, good behaviour rule books), the author attempts to present the variety of Lithuanian borderland cuisine of the first half of the 19th century. She devotes special attention to peculiar vocabulary items (e.g. iushnik, blintz) and the most frequent products which appear in the menu (fish, venison). The preparation and serving of meals and social customs are presented in abundant measure.

Jesuit Missionaries, Indian Polities, and Environmental Transformation in the Lagoon March of Northeastern New Spain

The introduction of European agriculture and livestock transformed the natural and human landscape of the Americas profoundly. In the borderlands of the continent, it was often missionaries who introduced these practices to areas where mobile Indians groups had adapted their cultures to an environment that was irrevocably changed. Transforming a landscape usually doomed a mobile ethnic group to forced adaptation, migration or extinction, but could also prove a catalyst to an ethnogenesis that could not have occurred without the effects the Columbian Exchange brought about by the missionaries. The so-called Lagoon March (Comarca Lagunera) of the northeastern borderlands of New Spain experienced perhaps the most dramatic of these episodes in this story of Colonial North America. This region was home to the Lagunero Indians, the most populous pre-contact group in the borderlands, and as late as the last decade of the sixteenth century it was a lush lagoon environment surrounded by wooded mountains. The Jesuits founded the Parras mission there in 1598, and within two generations, the Laguneros had largely disappeared, and the area was transformed into an archipelago of highly productive oasis surrounded by scrub barely suitable for livestock. Viticulture made the area the richest non-mining region of the entire frontier, and a magnet for population. Tlaxcalan (Nahua) colonist that had lived in the mission and survived the Lagunero extinction became a borderlands community intrinsically attached to viticulture and communal rights to water from the region’s only major spring, giving them a legal status that distinguished them from other Indian groups (including other Tlaxcalans) and underlining a social cohesion that lasted until the Independence period. Thus, the unintended effects of the Jesuit presence transformed the Parras environment and the way Indian identity related to it.

ANN M. LITTLE. Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England. (Early American Studies.) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2007. Pp. 262. $45.00

Ann M. Little has contributed an interesting and useful new volume to the growing scholarship on gender and warfare in early America. Her book also integrates recent insights from Native American historiography (heavily influenced by ethnography), and she takes a strong cue from scholars such as Daniel K. Richter (Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America [2001]) who argue that early history must integrate an assessment of events from the perspective of indigenous people. Little also draws from recent developments in western and borderlands history to analyze seventeenth and eighteenth-century warfare in what she calls the “northeastern borderlands,” an area of contact among English colonists, French colonists, and various Indian peoples. Little notes that important strands in each of the areas of historiography from which she draws have emphasized how colonists and Indians created visions of one another that emphasized difference and shaped their social relations accordingly. While recognizing the importance of this view, she wishes instead to emphasize how the “essential sameness” actually drove many of the conflicts among New Englanders, French, and Algonquin and Iroquois Indian actors. Little argues that ideas about gender were at the heart of this contention over similarity, since “perhaps the most important common touchstone of these cultures was the value they placed on masculinity and on men's performance in war and politics” (p. 7). Little explores how contests over masculinity, driven by some similar cultural understandings, influenced warfare during nearly a century of colonial military clashes.

Unlikely Imperialist: The Baron of Saint-Castin and the Transformation of the Northeastern Borderlands

Cet article emploie la vie d'un colon fran�ais d'Acadie, baron de Saint-Castin, pour repenser la transformation imp�riale de l'Am�rique du Nord vers la fin du XVIIe si�cle. Pendant les premi�res d�cennies de sa carri�re en tant que commer�ant dans les borderlands du nord-est, Saint-Castin agissait en tant qu'interm�diaire culturel, fournissant des liens �conomiques et culturels entre les communaut�s fran�aises, anglaises, et ab�naquis dans la r�gion. Cependant, quand la guerre imp�riale est arriv� � la r�gion en 1689, le baron ne pouvait plus maintenir sa neutralit�. Afin de maintenir sa puissance, Saint-Castin s'est r�invent� comme partisan fran�ais, gagnant l'approbation des fonctionnaires fran�ais m�me, pendant que les colons anglais commen�aient � l'apercevoir en tant qu'ennemi mauvais qui combinait une f�rocit� indienne avec les pr�tentions d'un aristocrate catholique. Apr�s sa mort, Saint-Castin est devenu une figure l�gendaire parmi les auteurs fran�ais et anglais, qui ont c�l�br� ses raccordements �troits aux Abenaki et sa r�sistance aux Anglais. Contrairement � ce portrait litt�raire, cependant, le vrai baron seulement est devenu un combattant dans la lutte imp�riale de force, puisqu'il comprenait que les interm�diaires ne pourraient plus prosp�rer dans un continent r�gn� par des puissances imp�riales rivales qui exigeaient l'all�geance absolue de leurs sujets. La transition douloureuse de Saint-Castin illustre la fa�on dont l'augmentation de puissance d'�tat en Am�rique coloniale touchait les vies de diff�rentes personnes et interrompait les raccordements interculturels qui ont pr�c�demment permis aux Am�ricains de communiquer � travers les march�s culturels.

Northeastern Borderlands of the Ross Sea: Glaciological Studies in King Edward VII Land and Northwestern Marie Byrd Land

Northeastern Borderlands of the Ross Sea: Glaciological Studies in King Edward VII Land and Northwestern Marie Byrd Land