“The Meaning of This Boundary Line”: Indigenous Communities and the Canada-United States Border on the Columbia Plateau, 1850s-1930s

Abstract

This dissertation explores the experiences of indigenous peoples with nation-state borders. On the Columbia Plateau, in the interior Pacific Northwest, the Canada-United States border ran through the aboriginal territories of the Ktunaxa, Sinixt, and Okanagan Nations. Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these Native nations resisted, undermined, negotiated, and accommodated the border’s presence in their homelands. The activities, relationships, and movements of these indigenous communities across the forty-ninth parallel made the region into a borderlands. In lieu of a formal border patrol apparatus, Canada and the United States used federal Indian policy, situational violence, and land settlement practices to enforce the border among these Native nations. The international boundary served as a tool of settler colonialism, and vice versa. Native peoples relocated to reserves in British Columbia and reservations in Montana, Idaho, and Washington as a means of retaining political sovereignty and a land base. Their political reorientation towards the reserve or reservation and towards a relationship with one or the other nation-state in effect reified the border’s meaning as a marker of national domain. However, Ktunaxa, Sinixt, and Okanagan bands and families continued to engage in cultural and spiritual practices and kin-based relationships across the boundary line well into the twentieth century. These transborder activities disrupted Canada and the United States’ efforts to control the movement of indigenous bodies and maintain the separation of Native homelands at the line. A focus on the activities of Native communities in the Canada-United States borderlands reveals the contingent nature of border enforcement and the nation-states’ struggle to control national peripheries. This perspective also shows how indigenous nationhood endured colonial institutions of division, isolation, and assimilation delineated by the international boundary.