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4 / Borders and Identities among Italian Immigrants in the Pacific Northwest, 1880–1938 patricia k. wood When we discuss Canadian-American relations, we make several assumptions: we recognize the existence of two political nation-states, Canada and the United States, whose governments and citizens “relate” or “related” to each other and thus recognized each other as “Canadians” and “Americans.” We also assume the existence and recognition of a border that separates the nations and the peoples, that they relate to each other from specific and di¤erent places that are divided by an important line. Such assumptions are quite basic and we make them comfortably, but they are located in a specific understanding of North American political geography, one that was not shared by all those living in the Pacific Northwest around the turn of the century. My research into the development of national and ethnic identities among Italian immigrants in western Canada led me to new considerations of the border and its implications in identity formation. The American border was not a meaningful line to Italian immigrants nor, I suspect , to other immigrant groups and perhaps Natives as well, for reasons I shall make clear in this chapter. It is and has been principally English Canadians who have viewed the border as significant and indicative of di¤erence. In his work A Border Within: National Identity, Cultural Plurality, and Wilderness, the sociologist Ian Angus argues that “the philosophical theme of the border” is “the core of the issue of English Canadian identity.”1 Indeed, Angus theorizes that other distinctions in English-Canadian thought are rooted in the preoccupation with 104 the forty-ninth parallel. He writes: “All concern with English Canadian identity , formulated abstractly, is engaged in maintaining a border between us and the United States. I thus take the border as the leading metaphor for this work and suggest that it can also be seen as a border between self and other and between humanity and nature.”2 Frequently described as simply “Canadian,” the Anglo-Canadian image of the United States has been central to the creation of the dominant nationalist ideology. Historically, politicians, scholars , and citizens alike have underscored those characteristics that distinguish two nations and emphasized tensions between them. The scholarship on Canadian-American relations has largely been predicated on the understanding of Canada and the border that Angus describes. In the introduction and chapter overviews of his collection Partners Nevertheless : Canadian-American Relations in the Twentieth Century, Norman Hillmer frequently employs blanket statements such as “A legacy of distrust and suspicion of the United States was every Canadian’s inheritance,” asserting even that “history has made Canada and the United States anything but friends.” Hillmer’s concern with power relationships begins and ends with the discrepancy between the two nations’ governments in relation to one another.3 Similarly, in J.L. Granatstein and Robert Cu¤’s The Ties That Bind: Canadian-AmericanRelationsfromtheGreatWartotheColdWarandGranatstein and Hillmer’s For Better or For Worse: Canada and the United States to the 1990s, the emphasis is placed on the tensions between the two governmentsoverboundaries ,trade,fishingrights,andthelike,andthewaysinwhich Canadian government and business have been disadvantaged by their more powerful U.S. counterparts.4 The historians John Herd Thompson and Stephen J. Randall’s recent Canada and the United States: Ambivalent Allies is more nuanced, however. The authors attempt to look beyond the large-scale political and economic relations and to incorporate other aspects and levels of Canadian-American relations, such as the cultural and the local. In particular, these two scholars do the best job of addressing the constructed nature of nations and their degrees of relevance to di¤erent people. In their discussion of the West in the late nineteenth century, Thompson and Randall make the point clearly that there were di¤erent ways of understanding the border: “But this western boundary [between Canada and the United States] existed only in a diplomatic sense; in terms of human and economic geography, national perimeters remained undefined. The Great Plains and the mountain ranges were oblivious to the political ambitions of men and women.”5 Unfortunately for my Borders and Identities among Italian Immigrants, 1880–1938 105 purposes here, Thompson and Randall stop at this point, providing no details of these women and men nor their perceptions of the border and the nations it delineated. There is now a strong consensus regarding the constructed nature of nations: there is no such thing as an objective “Canada” that exists independently of our...

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