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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 [155], (17) Lines: 152 to ——— 2.0pt PgV ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [155], (17) 9. Crossing the Line Race, Nationality, and the Deportation of the “Canadian” Crees in the Canada–U.S. Borderlands, 1890–1900 Michel Hogue On June 20, 1896, Montana District Court Judge C. H. Benton was handed a petition sworn by Buffalo Coat, a Cree man from Canada. Buffalo Coat claimed that forty soldiers from the Tenth U.S. Cavalry under the command of Lt. John J. Pershing had unlawfully and illegally detained him and thirty other Cree heads of family in a camp near Great Falls, Montana, in preparation for their deportation to Canada. In their petition, the men alleged they were residents of the United States, having been domiciled in the Montana Territory since 1885. They also noted that their group included about sixty children under the age of fifteen who were born on U.S. soil and others who had recently declared their intention to become U.S. citizens. They insisted that their confinement was done without due process of law, and they asked that Benton issue a writ of habeas corpus in order that they and their families could be set free. In response, Judge Benton ordered Pershing and Maj. J. M. J. Sanno to appear before him in the Cascade County Court House in Great Falls, along with those named in the petition. Pershing had arrived in Great Falls a few days earlier armed with orders from his superiors to oversee the deportation of this group of Crees to the Canadian border. The group camped on the outskirts of Great Falls was one of the many Cree camps located throughout Montana in June 1896. After a protracted series of negotiations involving local and federal officials in the United States and Canada, the U.S. government sent the 156 | Hogue 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 [156], Lines: ——— 0.0pt ——— Normal PgEnds: [156], army to force the Crees back into Canada. Without waiting for his day in court, Pershing and his troops loaded the ninety-six Crees, along with their horses and possessions, onto a train bound for the Canadian border. The attempt by Buffalo Coat to block the deportation by filing a writ of habeas corpus was unsuccessful. Without addressing the questions of citizenship and nationality that the petition raised, Judge Benton agreed to the reply filed by Pershing and Sanno’s attorney. He ruled that the deportation fell outside the court’s jurisdiction, since army officers were acting under the authority of an Act of Congress. The judge dissolved the writ, and the deportation continued.1 In the 1890s, hundreds of “Canadian Crees” lived in camps scattered across the state of Montana. These bands had first appeared in the territory in the months following the suppression of the North-West Rebellion in Canada in 1885, a conflict that arose out of disagreements between the region’s Métis population and the Canadian government over Métis land rights. Frustrated with government policy and local Indian Department officials, and facing desperate conditions after an especially severe winter, a large camp of Plains Crees became embroiled in the conflict when several Cree men from Big Bear’s band killed nine inhabitants of the Frog Lake settlement (near Edmonton) on April 2, 1885, taking the remainder of the white settlers captive. While most of those associated with Big Bear’s camp chose to surrender following subsequent clashes with Canadian troops, others followed Big Bear’s second son, Little Bear, who sought asylum in the United States. Although U.S. State Department officials had granted the Cree refugees de facto asylum, without a reservation and with few means of support, their attempts to eke out an existence repeatedly brought them into conflict with white Montanans who demanded their expulsion.2 During the agitation to expel the Crees, Montana settlers and American and Canadian officials presented restrictive notions of citizenship, race, and nationality as a means to further their case for expulsion. The Crees, meanwhile, relied on similar notions to bolster...

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