Lines Drawn upon the Water

First Nations and the Great Lakes Borders and Borderlands

Karl S. Hele

• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781554580972
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The First Nations who have lived in the Great Lakes watershed have been strongly influenced by the imposition of colonial and national boundaries there. The essays in Lines Drawn upon the Water examine the impact of the Canadian—American border on communities, with reference to national efforts to enforce the boundary and the determination of local groups to pursue their interests and define themselves. Although both governments regard the border as clearly defined, local communities continue to contest the artificial divisions imposed by the international boundary and define spatial and human relationships in the borderlands in their own terms.

The debate is often cast in terms of Canada's failure to recognize the 1794 Jay Treaty's confirmation of Native rights to transport goods into Canada, but ultimately the issue concerns the larger struggle of First Nations to force recognition of their people's rights to move freely across the border in search of economic and social independence.

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of Illustrations and Maps
• Acknowledgements
• "Drawing/Erasing the Border"
• Introduction
• 1. "We have no spirit to celebrate with you the great [1893] Columbian Fair": Aboriginal Peoples of the Great Lakes Respond to Canadian and United States Policies During the Nineteenth Century
• 2. Cross-border Treaty-signers: The Anishnaabeg of the Lake Huron Borderlands
• 3. From Intercolonial Messenger to "Christian Indian": The Flemish Bastard and the Mohawk Struggle for Independence from New France and Colonial New York in the Eastern Great Lakes Borderland, 1647–1687
• 4. The Anishinabeg and Métis in the Sault Ste. Marie Borderlands: Confronting a Line Drawn upon the Water
• 5. In the Shadow of the Thumping Drum: The Sault Métis—The People In-Between
• 6. "Those freebooters would shoot me like a dog": American Terrorists and Homeland Security in the Journals of Ezhaaswe (William A. Elias [1856–1929])
• 7. Shifting Boundaries and the Baldoon Mysteries
• 8. The Baldoon Settlement: Rethinking Sustainability
• 9. Nativism's Bastard: Neolin, Tenskwatawa, and the Anishinabeg Methodist Movement
• 10. Borders Within: Anthropology and the Six Nations of the Grand River
• 11. The Grand General Indian Council of Ontario and Indian Status Legislation
• 12. "This is a pipe and I know hash": Louise Erdrich and the Lines Drawn upon the Waters and the Lands
• Notes
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index