Living with Strangers: The Nineteenth-Century Sioux and the Canadian-American Borderlands

1. Introduction: Partitioning Sioux History

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 37 [First Page] [1], (1) Lines: 0 to 17 ——— 8.82pt PgV ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [1], (1) 1. INTRODUCTION: PARTITIONING SIOUX HISTORY The Sioux are generally conceived of as “American” Indians. The feather-bonneted , tipi-dwelling, horse-riding, buffalo-hunting Sioux warrior is, for many people around the world, the image of the American Indian. By the 1870s, most Sioux had entered into treaty relationships with the American government— northern Lakota bands under Sitting Bull and other leaders being major exceptions . In so doing, the Sioux became American Indians in the eyes of the American government and in the eyes of subsequent scholars and the general public. This designation has determined, in many ways, how the history of Sioux peoples has been written. In the United States, the history of the nineteenth-century Sioux has been largely the history of their opposition to American encroachment onto their lands. Sioux opposition to the reduction of their reservations in Minnesota produced the Dakota Conflict of 1862. Their opposition to army posts constructed to protect American travelers on the Bozeman Trail to the Montana goldfields culminated in Red Cloud’s War in the 1860s. Opposition to gold miners in the Black Hills and to railroads in the Yellowstone Valley led to the Great Sioux War of 1876–77. The Ghost Dancers were massacred at Wounded Knee in 1890, thus putting an end to any further Sioux resistance. By the end of the century, the Sioux had been exiled to reservations. The Sioux appear more briefly in Canadian history as refugees from warfare in the United States in the 1860s and 1870s. Once across the border they generally disappear from the pages of American history, where, often, little more than a sentence or two acknowledges their activities in Canada. They are simply no longer subjects for American history. Canadian historians pick up the history of the Sioux once they appear in Canada—only after they have become subjects of Canadian history. The result is the creation of two separate histories—the first ending at the Forty-ninth Parallel, the second beginning there. That the 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 37 [2], (2) Lines: 17 ——— 0.0pt ——— Normal PgEnds: [2], (2) boundary itself and the opportunities that its presence created might be an important issue in Sioux history is missed by both. The overwhelming popular and academic interest in the Sioux, their place in the history of the American West and in Sioux-American conflict (the Custer battle in particular), makes any conception of them as anything other than American Indians seem absurd. Yet the writing of Sioux history does profit when we recognize the Sioux, not as American Indians, but as a people of the “borderlands.” Borderlands can be an ambiguous concept. Historians and other scholars use the word in different contexts and for their own purposes, and the term can be and is used to cover more than one concept. The evolving literature on the nature of borderlands is also complicated by references to frontiers and boundaries, also seemingly straightforward on the surface but elusive when probed. Borderlands is used here in two different but related contexts. In the first instance, it is used to suggest a social, cultural, and economic interface between aboriginal peoples and others. In the eighteenth century and for much of the nineteenth, notwithstanding European treaties indicating so-called Spanish, French, British, and, later, American and Canadian territorial boundaries that cartographers dutifully superimposed on their maps, no physical trace of these boundaries existed on the ground. Instead, foci of European settlement were separated by vast hinterlands—really the heartlands of aboriginal nations— in which European and aboriginal traders, soldiers, families, and others came face-to-face and forged relationships spanning the continuum from hostility to trade, accommodation to intermarriage and community. There was a geographic dimension to every borderland, but it might range from the immense Ohio Valley to the more localized environs of a trading post on the shores of Hudson Bay. All cultural encounters have an element of borderlands within them.1 Great Britain...