|
|
|
Reviews
Parallel Destinies: Canadian-American Relations West of the Rockies
|
Edited by John M. Findlay and Ken S. Coates
|
University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2002. Maps, index. 328 pages. $22.95 paper.
|
Reviewed by Patricia E. Roy
University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia
|
|
|
| John M. Findlay and Ken S. Coates invited eleven scholars (eight from Canada and three from the United States) "to consider the historical significance and impact of the Canadian-American border on the lands and peoples west of the Rocky Mountains" (p. vii). Most of the papers emerged from a conference commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Oregon Treaty, but only Chad Reimer's analysis of how early American and British histories of the Oregon Territory "drew borders" and constructed "competing narratives to uphold their nation's claim to the region" deals with that event (p. 223). Otherwise, the focus is on British Columbia, Washington, and, to some extent, Alaska, because of an emphasis on borderlands. Examining borderlands rather than borders, the editors suggest, offers an opportunity to explore national identity by observing "those forces that are national and those that cross boundaries" (p. xi). |
1
|
|
In an overview that expands the editors' introduction, Coates contends that despite shared histories and many social and economic connections, national ideologies "remain the most powerful determinants of local identity"(p. 22). Similarly, Donald Worster concludes that in the United States "the two ideals of wilderness and personal freedom became fused into one by the frontier myth," whereas Canadians still seek a common identity (p. 260). Michael Fellman, however, claims that denying the Americanism in its core is part of the Canadian identity. |
2
|
|
Galen Perras's study of the defense of the Pacific Coast until 1942 shows that Canada's concern for sovereignty lead it to reject American calls for a unity of command while geography ensured that the American military would defend Canada. In a broad sweep of economic relations, Carl Abbott, using mainly American examples, suggests that bureaucratization made the forty-ninth parallel increasingly "more important" during the twentieth century (p. 206). |
3
|
|
The articles focusing on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, reveal a permeable border. In describing what he calls the "Fraser River War" between American miner-soldiers and the Nlaka'pamux peoples, Daniel P. Marshall asserts that the "defining influence" in British Columbia during its formative year of 1858 was "the extended reach of the American West" (p. 65). John Lutz shows that between 1854 and 1869 northern aboriginal peoples defied "law, army, and navy to work, raid, and cohabit with the people of Puget Sound with relative impunity" (pp. 94–5). Italian immigrants also did not think of Canada or the United States but of l'America. Drawing largely on British Columbian evidence, Patricia K. Wood demonstrates that family networks, mutual aid societies, and labor unions eased the trans-border moves of Italian immigrants who, as a marginal group, focused on neither the United States nor Canadian-American relations in negotiating "their Canadian identity" (p. 117). In contrast to these accounts of people, Jeremy Mouat traces the competition of two capitalist corporations, the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Great Northern Railroad, across a permeable border in southeastern British Columbia as he questions nationalist interpretations of Canadian history. Permeability was even truer at sea. Joseph E. Taylor III argues that diplomats who negotiated treaties to share the salmon catch between Canadian and American fishers "hopelessly confused the biological coherence of [fisheries] management" (p. 156). |
4
|
|
These fine essays achieve the editors' goal of exploring the impact of the border and invite more questions about borders, borderlands, and national identity. One hopes that this volume, as the editors intend, will encourage further investigation, especially by Americans, to determine whether the destinies of the Canadian West and the American Northwest are as parallel as the title of this book proposes. |
5
|
|
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|