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Book Review
| The Line Which Separates: Race, Gender, and the Making of the Alberta-Montana Borderlands. Race and Ethnicity in the American West Series. By Sheila McManus. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. xxiii + 236 pp. Maps, notes, bibliography, index. $60.95, £54.00, cloth; $29.95, £22.95, paper.)
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Most of the High Line of Montana, the east-west corridor of small towns established along the path of the Great Northern Railway, has been losing population for decades. Farm consolidation and the exodus of young people to bigger, brighter places have left a thinly fleshed skeleton of settlement east of the Rocky Mountains. In the wake of September 11, the most visible new settlers have been border patrol agents, assigned to beef up security along the 49th parallel, the dividing line between Canada and the United States. |
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Sheila McManus investigates the meaning this political demarcation had for the people who lived on the Alberta-Montana borderlands during the late-nineteenth century. She sets herself three tasks: to describe how Canada and the U. S. constructed the border and the meaning that national officials inscribed on it, to document the efforts of the two nations to control the three tribes of the Blackfoot Confederacy, whose lands spanned the border, and to explore the culture of non-Indian settlers in the region and understand how race and gender marked their communities. |
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McManus makes marvelous use of government documents to accomplish her first task. Nation-making turns out to have been about a whole lot of measuring. A wide array of government officials measured, mapped, and labeled the lands and peoples on either side of the line and used their findings to promote the settlement of their respective countries. Not surprisingly, Canadian officials concluded that the lands north of the border were superior to those to the south and hence would attract a better class of settlers; mirror-image conclusions filled the reports of U. S. officials. |
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In order to make room for and attract those desirable settlers, the Blackfoot had to be confined to reserves and reservations and made non-threatening. This proved frustrating for federal authorities as Indians, mostly men, continued to cross the border to hunt, capture horses, visit relatives, and elude respective American or Canadian authorities. McManus states that the border drastically reduced the mobility of aboriginal women. Her claim makes logical sense, but the dearth of sources from Blackfoot women turns the single paragraph devoted to this topic into a teaser rather than a well-supported argument (pp. 79–80). |
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When McManus moves to the culture and society created by non-aboriginal settlers, she has richer sources and milks them for all they are worth. The discussion of white women's experiences in the borderlands is based on a close and theoretically interesting reading of their letters and diaries. McManus argues persuasively that women paid little attention to the nation-building or nation-dividing aspects of the border, but were very attuned to the racial and class composition of their respective nations. |
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The Line Which Separates is a fine history of an understudied area and a reminder in tumultuous times of the difficult physical and imaginative work that goes into nation building. |
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| Mary Murphy
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| Montana State University |
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ISSN 1939-8603
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