Lines Drawn upon the Water: First Nations and the Great Lakes Borders and Borderlands by Karl S. Hele

116 MichiganHistoricalReview By 1900 roughly three out of every five of the Scandinavians in Michigan were Swedes. This book's excellent maps show where the Scandinavians' descendants lived in the year 2000. They were concentrated in and around Detroit and from Grand Rapids northeastward intoKent and Montcalm counties, but they also lived in west Michigan cities like Muskegon, Ludington, and Traverse City, aswell as in theUpper Peninsula. Scandinavians in Michigan discusses each of the nationalities separately. The author begins his narrative by describing why these people immigrated and where they established early setdements inMichigan. Then he portrays their communities, discussing their religion and occupational patterns, as well as outstanding individuals and their achievements. Appendices summarize Scandinavian consulates and organizations in Michigan today, place names, newspapers, food customs, and folk humor. The four-page bibliography needs some updating, however. It fails to cite works by leading historians of Scandinavian America like H. Arnold Barton, Odd S. Lovoll, and Kristian Hvidt, nor does itmention the Danish American Heritage Society, the Norwegian-American Historical Association, or the Swedish-American Historical Society, all of which publish works on Scandinavian American history. Howard Sivertson's delightful illustrated storyofNorwegian fishing communities on Isle Royale, Once upon an Isle (Mount Horeb: Wisconsin Folk Museum, 1992), deserves to be mentioned as well. All in all, however, this concise, lively, and well-written account is a good place to start learning about the Scandinavians in Michigan. J.R. Christianson Luther College, Decorah, Iowa Karl S. Hele, ed. Lines Drawn upon the Water: First Nations and theGreat Lakes Borders and Borderlands. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008. Pp. 378. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Maps. Notes. Cloth, $85.00. This collection of twelve essays grew out of a 2005 conference held at the University ofWestern Ontario. The essays aim to examine the impact of theCanada-United States border on Indian communities in the Great Lakes basin and the effortsof FirstNations groups to deal with the Book Reviews 111 consequences of the arbitrarily imposed demarcation line. Resistance to the border (and its intended limitations)marks Native efforts. As one might expect, imposed boundaries led to divided communities, created economic hardships and/or obstacles to economic development, undermined political units, and hindered efforts at self government. But, given the inability of both the United States and Canada to fully enforce their rules/borders, it also led to the development of a culture of disregard for borders, and those who tried to enforce their limits, in borderlands groups. As well, many groups in the borderlands region learned to take advantage of situations created by rival Canadian and U.S. jurisdictions and jurisdictional squabbling to advance the goal of maintaining a measure of control over their socioeconomic and political aspirations. However, that is about all thatone can say ingeneral terms about the essays inUnes Drawn upon theWater. Beyond the central topic and geographic focus of the work there is litde that links the various contributions from anthropologists, historians, political scientists, and others. In discussing Indian attempts not to be defined by Euroamerican conventions, a theme that cuts across many essays, the role of treatiesQay's Treaty, 1794, in particular) and the struggle to get the rightspromised in those treaties together emerge as a subtheme. But as a rule the essays are remarkably disparate (from Mohawk strugglesvs. theFrench and English in the 1600s to the place/role of borders inworks of themodem novelist Louise Erdrich), and at times the connection to the volume's central theme appears more than tenuous and only the location of theNative group in question (somewhere in the Great Lakes basin) appears to account for its inclusion in this collection. Indeed, inmany cases the changes in First Nations communities, or the responses toEuroamerican intrusions, are no different from those inNative communities well outside theborderlands. Thus, one may wonder whether the international border in this region is anymore significanta factor in influencingpeople's lives than any other border/boundary (e.g., that of a reserve/reservation) created by non-Indians and imposed upon them. Certainly an international border comes with distinctive legal, and other, challenges but those seem to be the least important of the factors producing change in Indian communities. Instead, policies...

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