Thread by @JessicaMDeWitt

“For Walking Earth, Red Dog, and others like them, the border did not exist as an abstract line. It operated instead as a challenge to the land uses of the Cree, Dakota, Lakota, Nimiipuu (Nez Perce), Métis, Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), Anishinaabe, and Coast Salish.” - B. Hoy

“The conflicting claims emphasized a basic truth about territory. Borders, whether national or otherwise, are not created in isolation. They are drawn on top of a territorial tapestry already established, the new form never vivid enough to block out what came before.” - B. Hoy

“This book helps to explain... the hidden history of a border built in conflict that learned to hide its past.” - Benjamin Hoy

“This book argues that the history of the Canada-US border, and each nation more broadly, are inseparable from histories of colonialism, hunger, dispossession, and Indigenous politics.” - Benjamin Hoy

“The border agreements that European politicians constructed created only ripples at first compared with the monumental waves of change sweeping across North America.” - Benjamin Hoy

“Early treaties anticipated a desired future more so than the present. They applied across a geography none of the signatories understood and where Indigenous people, not colonial settlers, held power.” - Benjamin Hoy

“For Britain and the United States, these early territorial agreements held particular importance because both countries saw border creation as a process of erasure, not simply construction.” - Benjamin Hoy

“Early treaties mattered because they unlocked each government to engage in a parallel treaty process. In their eyes, it allowed them to extinguish Indigenous title and to build their nations across Indigenous land.” - Benjamin Hoy

“Creating a border required more than treaties and map-making. It required changing the beliefs and behaviors of settlers and Indigenous people alike on a grand scale.” - Benjamin Hoy

“The border outlined the limits of federal power better than it constrained the social and economic connections that crossed it.”

“In the aftermath of the Civil War and Canadian Confederation, the United States and Canada reimagined who belonged within their respective nation-states,” - Benjamin Hoy

“Cultural practices, residency, tribal belonging, and a perceived ability to create families served as important strands that politicians wove together into a tapestry of belonging. The threads built on one another, but they also tangled.” - Benjamin Hoy

“Prone to exaggeration and legal slights of hand, the architects of national belonging wished for a simplicity that rarely manifested itself in the world around them.” - Benjamin Hoy

“Crisis, at least in the beginning, provided the encouragement necessary for each country to invest in the legal, administrative, and philosophical work necessary to create a functional border.” - Benjamin Hoy

“The Canada-US border was born in blood. Violence served as both a motivation and a tool for federal control.” - Benjamin Hoy

“Britain, Canada, & the US drew their borders as if Cree, Lakota, Siksikaitsiitapi... & Métis borders did not exist. Even the most obtuse observers recognized the challenges of maintaining this kind of willful ignorance.” - Benjamin Hoy

“Indigenous borders structured the land and shaped the resources available to colonial officers.” - Benjamin Hoy

“While Canada and the United States expanded their knowledge of and control across the Prairies throughout the 1870s, Indigenous boundaries remained the dominant organizing principle on the Plains.” - Benjamin Hoy

“For all the power that Canada and the United States gained as they stationed troops, signed treaties, and encouraged settlement, they struggled to disrupt or erase Indigenous boundaries. Their power to do that only came with starvation and disease.” - Benjamin Hoy

“As the Cree, Lakota, Dakota, Métis, & Siksikaitsiitapi adjusted to the decline of the buffalo, movement across traditional territories & across the borderlands became harder to maintain.” - Benjamin Hoy

“In this context, the growth of a meaningful international border had as much to do with bison, violence, and disease as it did with clerks, border guards, and boundary stones.” - Benjamin Hoy

“While Canada and the United States did not create all of the conditions necessary for the bison’s demise, they made no apologies for the ways they exploited the circumstances.” - Benjamin Hoy

“Indian policy in Canada and the United States looked similar. Both governments used treaties, land surrenders, annuities, and coercion to exert their control and make their borders matter.” - Benjamin Hoy

“By the 1880s, both countries had forced Indigenous people onto reserves & reservations and guarded those boundaries with military & civilian personnel. In doing so, they gained a tremendous capacity to control movement in indirect ways.” - Benjamin Hoy

“Indigenous people continued to leave reserves & reservations to cross the international line, but both governments ensured that those who did suffered tremendous deprivation. They cut off access to food & created a specter of uncertainty that stretched 100s of miles... “

“The kind of border Canada & the US had created was capable of punishing specific kinds of mobility 100s of miles from the boundary line & often years after the crossing had taken place.” - Benjamin Hoy

“That kind of border was far more powerful than the thin & singular line that stretched across colonial maps.” - Benjamin Hoy

“Although Indigenous and Europeans worked alongside each other in the wage markets, they disagreed on fundamental questions regarding the ownership of natural resources.” - Benjamin Hoy

“For settlers, the salmon were one of the many resources that could be exploited. For many coastal communities, the salmon had a spiritual significance. Failure to follow the appropriate protocol could result in bad catches and discourage the salmon from returning.”

“Across the Pacific Coast, geologic features presented formidable obstacles to nation-building... In this context, building a border along the Pacific required more than boundary markers & surveyors... “

“It required that both governments find ways to overcome the natural thoroughfares & barriers that already existed in the region.” - Benjamin Hoy

“Chinese Restriction took an old practice & charted new territory. It created wide-reaching prohibitions against a single racial group for the first time & used the customs agency to police citizenship & race in ways that it had not in the past.”

“In a wry flourish, officials on the coast justified the need to exclude Chinese immigrants as a matter of compassion to Indigenous people. Debased and dishonest Chinese would influence impressionable Indians and disrupt their path to civilization.” - Benjamin Hoy

“The Chinese became a stand-in for a generic kind of foreignness from which federal agents could extrapolate. Indian policy, centred around historic ties to the land, seemed far harder to graft onto border control when considered on a far greater scale.” - Benjamin Hoy

“Once the United States and Canada no longer required Indigenous labor to maintain Pacific economies, neither country had much interest maintaining Indigenous rights.” - Benjamin Hoy

“Power came in two forms. Direct power aimed to control people as they crossed the border itself. Indirect power attempted to stop movements before they began by undercutting the motivations that led to undesired crossings.” - Benjamin Hoy

“Immigration & costums officials aimed to make the border everywhere. By extending their jurisdiction into the center of each country, civil servants gave up on the idea that the border would ever be a wall...”

“Instead, it would operate as a specter of fear that hovered across the entire country.” - Benjamin Hoy

“They aimed to make nationality visible on paper in a way it could never be made visible on the body itself. To do so both countries created passports, immigration records, and other systems of paperwork to stabilize identities in ways that could be tracked & recorded.” - B. Hoy

“Federal maps portrayed the border as an unbroken line, but in reality thousands of overlapping policies and personnel dictated its shape, creating a patchwork from one end of the continent to the other.” - Benjamin Hoy

“By the middle of the 20th Century, Canada & the US had achieved a far more subtle kind of victory. Belonging increasingly ran across national lines. Insults carried a national tone. The border closed possibilities at a distance. It restricted imagination.” - Benjamin Hoy

“When this kind of border worked, it operated far better as a border of discouragement than one of debarment. The absence of a border-crossing attempt signaled the line’s effectiveness far more often than did a prohibition of entry.” - Benjamin Hoy

“Border guards still mattered, but their impact extended beyond their presence. They helped project fear, uncertainty, & a commonality of belonging into the interior. They served as catalysts for a growing sense of national identity...” - Benjamin Hoy

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