A Border Story Re-discovered

Benjamin Hoy uses metaphor to describe the complex history of the border. The border, he argues, was less a static line and more a living creature. By 1874, Canada and the United States had established “a cohesive skeleton,” but “the border needed more than just bones. It required blood and muscle: revenue and personnel” (142). Metaphors are powerful writing devices because they give a name to a thing that belongs to somethings else. Even as they allow us to see things from a new perspective they create space for ambiguity. As Hoy writes, “The border had acquired more flesh and bone by the late nineteenth century, but it had never settled on a single face” (144). Such wordsmithing is the result of long reflection on rough historical terrain, one full of contradiction and complexity. This short essay reflects on how A Line of Blood and Dirt has the metaphors to transport us; and, as we are transported, how we ought to be attuned to the politics of what Michel de Certeau called “putting language into effect.” In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau reflects on how metaphorai are vehicles of mass transit in modern Athens. “To go to work, or come home, one takes a metaphor — a bus or a train.” He argues that narratives or stories are like metaphors’ spatial trajectories. They traverse and organize places; they link them together. But they are more than simple descriptions, as they also have a distributive and performative force. What kind of analysis can be applied to these proliferating metaphors? Applied to Benjamin Hoy’s project, we might ask: how shall we examine the complex syntax that he deploys to describe and represent the border between the United States and Canada? The argument about the Canada-US border is comprised of three elements: first, its difference from the US-Mexico border — due to American perceptions of cultural similarity and military prowess when looking north. Second, it is inseparable from the history of colonialism, hunger, dispossession and Indigenous politics. And third, the border was not simply a wall, but rather a prism of control, refracting movement across the line into different stratifications as a prism would to a beam of light. These histories are woven together by the thread of the Indigenous experience. Like Ned Blackhawk’s recent book, The Rediscovery of America, Hoy’s book “unmakes” national mythology. A Line of Blood and Dirt sits within and complements a trend I see in recent histories of the modern state: Indigenous experiences simultaneously unmake and rediscover national histories. Certainly, revising the history of the state in Canada by re-centring Indigenous experiences has been going on for some time. I was reading Sarah Carter’s work as an impressionable grad student. Numerous influential works now tell the history of the state by highlighting Indigenous histories. And, for years now (as Hoy points out), local historians and communities have been working hard to produce narratives, especially oral histories, that challenge the way history has been told. Over the past decade, Indigenous histories and perspectives have radically transformed the history of the state. This book thus offers an opportunity to reflect on the performative and redistributive power of Indigenous history on the histories of the state. It also matches the theme of this year’s Canadian Historical Association conference, Difficult Histories in a Global Context. As Grace Peña Delgado points out in her essay, the framework of settler colonialism offers promise for understanding border histories, particularly where Indigenous populations are involved. When I began my PhD in 2011, the reading group for my comprehensive exams discussed the first issue …