The Genesis, Approach, and Shortcomings of A Line of Blood and Dirt

I am grateful to the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association for the opportunity to speak about the creation of A Line of Blood and Dirt and to provide a preliminary response to the thoughtful comments made by Sarah Carter, Max Hamon, and Grace Peña Delgado. I am also grateful to have the chance to speak to some of the questions that students raised during the in-person roundtable discussion about the writing process itself. As I grew older, I had an opportunity to see how different the archival record was from the Canada I had grown up learning about. Cree, Métis, Stó:lō, Mohawk, and other Indigenous actors who were absent from my early textbooks were everywhere in the archive. It was clear that the problem was a matter of focus, not a matter of material. That realization shaped a lot of what I ended up studying. While I grew up loving history, this book was not something I ever thought I would write. My parents were professors of English, women’s literature, and Indigenous literature. I was a stubborn kid. I vowed never to study Indigenous history, Canada, or anything else my parents were interested in. I am grateful for the patience and kindness of some of my early mentors who convinced me I was being dumb. Despite spending my whole life crossing back and forth across the Canada-US border, it was not until I had a chance to work with Kris Inwood and Michelle Hamilton at the University of Guelph that I began to consider the Canada-US border as a possible area of focus. After working for two summers with them on the 1891 Canadian Census Project, I decided I wanted to become a census historian. It was an odd realization. No career choice could possibly seem blander. No child ever aspires to such work. My time at Guelph, however, had helped me realize that even the driest of sources sometimes hold the keys to understanding the world we inherited. When I began my PhD, I proposed a dissertation that used the census to track mobility across the Canada-US border. I began by trying to answer two simple background questions: what does the Canada-US border look like, and how does it work? Despite reading many excellent books on the subject, I never got a great answer. Most of the literature I read focused on a single group, region, administrative group, or topic. Every time the focus shifted, I felt like I was reading about an entirely different border. I could not understand how each piece fit together. Months turned into years, and my work on the census never became more than a long appendix in my attempt to understand how the border worked. By the end of my dissertation, I had gotten a few preliminary answers but had failed to produce anything worth reading. My dissertation lacked human characters, visualizations, maps, and oral histories. It was repetitive and painful to read. I knew I could do better. I threw out most of what I had done and started again. I changed how I approached research, created maps and other visualizations to show what the border looked like, and rethought how I approached writing. Starting largely from scratch let me focus on using individual life stories to convey the complexity of the border. That worked far better than my previous attempt to use administrative descriptions to convey the same information. Starting again also helped me realize that I was not smart or strong enough to create the book I was envisioning on my own. I lacked the expertise, time, and ability …