The Line Which Separates: Race, Gender, and the Making of the Alberta-Montana Borderlands / Edition 1

by Sheila McManus

Overview

Nations are made and unmade at their borders, and the forty-ninth parallel separating Montana and Alberta in the late nineteenth century was a pivotal Western site for both the United States and Canada. Blackfoot country was a key site of Canadian and American efforts to shape their nations and national identities. The region's landscape, aboriginal people, newcomers, railroads, and ongoing cross-border ties all challenged the governments' efforts to create, colonize, and nationalize the Alberta-Montana borderlands. The Line Which Separates makes an important and useful comparison between American and Canadian government policies and attitudes regarding race, gender, and homesteading.

Federal visions of the West in general and the borderlands in particular rested on overlapping sets of assumptions about space, race, and gender; those same assumptions would be used to craft the policies that were supposed to turn national visions into local realities. The growth of a white female population in the region, which should have "whitened" and "easternized" the region, merely served to complicate emerging categories. Both governments worked hard to enforce the lines that were supposed to separate "good" land from "bad," whites from aboriginals, different groups of newcomers from each other, and women's roles from men's roles. The lines and categories they depended on were used to distinguish each West, and thus each nation, from the other. Drawing on a range of sources, from government maps and reports to oral testimony and personal papers, The Line Which Separates explores the uneven way in which the borderlands were superimposed on Blackfoot country in order to divide a previously cohesive region in the late nineteenth century.

Sheila McManus is an assistant professor of history at University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803283084
Publisher:	Nebraska Paperback
Publication date:	06/01/2005
Series:	Race and Ethnicity in the American West
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 6.00(d)

About the Author

Sheila McManus is an assistant professor of history at University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada.

Editorial Reviews

"McManus adds considerably to a growing literature emphasizing the complexity of creating national boundaries. The book is insightful and the research impressive."—Journal of the West

Journal of the West - Ted McCoy

“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.”—Mary Murphy, Western Historical Quarterly

Western Historical Quarterly

"McManus relies on two types of primary research materials. The first is government documentation, namely annual reports produced by the US Department of the Interior and the Canadian Department of Agriculture. McManus rightly recognizes the research value of the annual reports in that local agents of the state often provided perspectives on Native relations, ranching, and other issues that differed from official government policy. Second, McManus utilizes the journals and remembrances of a small number of white women settlers in the region. Limited in number, these materials nonetheless provide a greater insight into social identities in the region, and McManus's use of them is her strongest contribution." Michelle Rhodes, University College of the Fraser Valley, Left History, 12.1

"In this recent offering on the topic of borderlands, University of Lethbridge historian Sheila McManus argues that the establishment of the forty-ninth parallel separating Montana and Alberta was key to the development of distinct American and Canadian national identities during the nineteenth century. However, despite the desire of both nations to construct their own 'clear and unequivocal' notions of nationhood on either side of the border, policy-makers were often frustrated by the complex network of cross-border social and economic ties that hampered their efforts. The bulk of McManus's text sets out to explore the task of nation-building by examining the various processes undertaken by both governments to establish legal and ideological domination of the northern plains, a project which was completed during the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s..McManus's book is logically organized and her arguments are compelling. While one might take issue with her emphasis on the Montana Blackfeet at the expense of other nomadic indigenous groups (particularly the Cree and the Métis, who were affected profoundly by each country's differing political policies), this is a fine piece of work nonetheless." Heather Devine, University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 76, No. 1, Winter 2007

"Sheila McManus seeks to understand how the running of the 49th parallel, which constitutes the boundary between two nations (Canada and the United States) as well as a province and a state (Alberta and Montana), played out, insofar as it was part of a policy designed to nationalize a unified geographical region occupied by a common cultural group, the Blackfoot Confederacy. As the subtitle indicates, McManus filters the elements making up the stuff of the Alberta-Montana borderlands through two historical membranes: race and gender. The book isolates and examines several problems faced by the national governments in their attempts to divide and nationalize a common topographical, economic, social, and linguistic space.. This is one of an increasing number of border studies that, by employing the techniques of comparative history and knowledge of gendered relationships, have illuminated the inner recesses of Canadian-American relations, revealing subtleties and complexities unknown to traditional students of the field." John R. Abbott, Canadian Book Review Annual 2007

From the Publisher

"McManus adds considerably to a growing literature emphasizing the complexity of creating national boundaries. The book is insightful and the research impressive."—Journal of the West

— Ted McCoy

Journal of the West