New Borderlands Perspectives on the US-Canada Border

New Borderlands Perspectives on the US-Canada Border Jay L. Lalonde (bio) BETWEEN SPRING 2020 AND FALL 2022, Canada's and many other states' borders were closed to most travellers and border entry requirements were enforced on a scale unprecedented in North America since 9/11. This strengthened border control included the controversial use of Title 42 in the United States to block arrivants from applying for asylum at the USMexico border. This increased border enforcement has been defended as necessary because of the COVID-19 pandemic. While many Canadian and American citizens struggled to adapt to the new-found barriers to border crossings – intimately familiar to most people worldwide – two remarkable works were published. Benjamin Hoy's 2021 A Line of Blood and Dirt1 and Sheila McManus's 2022 Both Sides Now2 are persuasive histories of two of the borders in North America (McManus) and of the US-Canada border (Hoy), examining in detail the colonial processes that created them, the development of border control and border enforcement policies and practices, and, no less importantly, the many ways in which the borders divided (and frequently failed to do so) borderlands communities. These works show the relevance of borderlands studies, and they enrich transnational history by focusing on its manifestations in borders, borderlands, and "borderlanders" (as McManus terms the people who live there). The two works demonstrate a new wave of interest in borderlands studies in Canadian and American history in the 21st century, well represented over the last 20 years by books such as Bruno Ramirez and Yves Otis's 2001 Crossing the 49th Parallel, Stephen Hornsby and John Reid's 2005 edited collection New England and the Maritime Provinces: Connections and Comparisons, Jean Barman's 2014 French Canadians, Furs, and Indigenous Women in the Making of the Pacific Northwest, and Béatrice Craig's 2009 Backwoods Consumers and Homespun Capitalists as well as, with Maxime Dagenais, the 2009 The Land in [End Page 107] Between.3 These works by Ramirez and Otis, Barman, Hornsby and Reid, Craig, and Craig and Dagenais represent examples of using the border/borderlands focus to illustrate different elements of Canadian-US history: migration and immigration, community and nation building, and local political economies respectively. While Hoy and McManus differ in their methodologies and focus, both of their books tell the stories of national borders and of their uneven impacts on and meanings for communities and individuals. Between them, the authors demonstrate the centrality of the border-making and border-enforcement processes to the three North American nation-states as well as the importance of analyzing gender, mobility, and Indigenous, national, and local identities in understanding the fluidity and variability inherent to borders and borderlands. Sheila McManus's book, Both Sides Now, is the wider-reaching and more methodologically focused of the two. McManus is currently a professor of history at the University of Lethbridge, whose research focuses on the borderlands of the North American West. Their first book, in 2005, The Line Which Separates: Race, Gender and the Making of the Alberta-Montana Borderlands, compares American and Canadian policies that were designed to make and maintain the Montana-Alberta portion of the border, focusing on the importance of the often-problematic gendered and racialized categories. In their new book, McManus expands on this comparative borderlands framework and examines it within a much larger study encompassing both North American national borders and looking for potentially universal borderlands characteristics that would apply beyond narrow local and national contexts.4 In six chapters, McManus frames their "comparative borderlands methodology" by focusing on select features of the border-making process as it has played out on both the US-Canada border and the US-Mexico border. These essential features include borderlands as the territories of Indigenous [End Page 108] nations as well as the ways Indigenous borderlands have generally been spaces of inclusion rather than exclusion. The author also emphasizes the binary constructions of "us" versus "them," border enforcement that restricts the movement of certain people (and not others), and the importance of capitalism that generally undermines these efforts to control the border. McManus also calls attention to the borderlands as a site of complex...

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