Lines Drawn upon the Water. First Nations and the Great Lakes Borders and Borderlands (review)

In his edited collection Lines Drawn upon the Water, Karl Hele has assembled a group of articles connected by their focus on Aboriginal peoples of the Great Lakes area. The book contains twelve articles whose themes and concerns range considerably, from Aboriginal–government interaction to Metis communities, from shifting tellings of the ‘Baldoon mysteries’ to Haudenosaunee negotiations with anthropologists and First Nations responses to Indian status legislation. The volume has a good deal of cogency, partly because the theme of borders is carried through quite consistently, and partly because the Great Lakes Anishinabeg feature in almost every chapter. Hele defines borders in broad terms, including in their scope ‘not only the line separating Canada and the United States but also the lines drawn between sovereign First Nations’ territories and settler societies, as well as those frontiers that we draw between ourselves based on perceived differences’ (xvi). As this quote suggests, he has expanded the borderlands concept to include conceptual, literary, and epistemological boundaries.

In the introduction, Hele states that the volume ‘emphasizes the idea that some boundaries are mere lines drawn upon the water, often disrupted or even erased altogether by the lived experiences of First Nations people’ (xvi). Referencing Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron’s influential article ‘From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in between in North American History,’ the collection adopts their definition of borderlands as ‘the contested boundaries between colonial domains’ and their ‘theory of borderlands that emphasizes how local history is shaped by imperial rivalries and Aboriginal attempts to exploit these differences’ (xvii). Yet the volume also takes issue with Adelman and Aron’s argument ‘that the Great Lakes borderlands ceased to have meaning after the War of 1812 with the confirmation of the border between British North America and the United States’ (xvii). Hele argues instead that the two states were unable to control their borders effectively for many years after the official territorial division. But this argument harks back to an older approach to borderlands, which investigates the ways that states and their border regions mutually constitute each other, as opposed to examining the peoples and lands situated where imperial claims overlap. In the ‘imperial’ borderlands approach advocated by Adelman and Aron, the existence of clearly defined borders spells the end of borderlands, because the imperial powers then cease to oppose each other’s claims and therefore to court and appease Indigenous groups.

Several chapters make excellent use of the ‘imperial’ borderlands approach. For instance, Phil Bellfy’s illuminating article documents the active participation in nineteenth-century land and treaty negotiations by Anishinabe leaders who resided on both sides of the newly imposed border. Mark Meuwese examines the intermediary role of a seventeenth-century mixed-descent Mohawk negotiator and messenger, known by various names and documented in distinct and fragmentary colonial record groups. Part of the reason for scholarly neglect of this individual has been ‘the ongoing tendency of historians to impose anachronistic international boundaries on colonial North America’ (44). Catherine Murton Stoehr uses the borderlands framework to investigate the factors that led Anishinabeg in nineteenth-century Upper Canada to adopt Methodism. Tracing Anishinabe participation in several major colonial battles over the Ohio Valley, she argues that this borderland interaction exposed the Anishinabeg to both us expansionism and anti-colonial Nativist ideas that helped shape an ‘apocalyptic spirituality’ in the 1820s.

In most of the chapters, the focus is really more on borders and border communities than on borderlands in the imperial sense. The latter approach, concerned as it is with peoples negotiating between rival empires, requires a fairly large geographic terrain for study. Yet as a group, the articles are characterized by a narrow geographic focus, often a single community. More importantly, the approach is predicated on the presence of competing empires that are unable to effectively control the territories they claim. In this volume...