Discrepant Parallels: Cultural Implications of the Canada-US Border 9780773583924

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DISCR E PANT PAR ALLE L S

Cultural I m p l ic a t i o n s of the C a n a d a - US Border

Gillian Roberts

d i s c r e pa n t pa r a l l e l s

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Discrepant Parallels Cultural Implications of the Canada-US Border

gillian roberts

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2015 isb n isb n isb n isb n

978-0-7735-4505-2 (cloth) 978-0-7735-4506-9 (paper) 978-0-7735-8392-4 (eP DF) 978-0-7735-8396-2 (eP UB)

Legal deposit second quarter 2015 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Roberts, Gillian, 1976–, author Discrepant parallels: cultural implications of the Canada-US border /  Gillian Roberts. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isb n 978-0-7735-4505-2 (bound). – is bn 978-0-7735-4506-9 (pbk.). – isb n 978-0-7735-8392-4 (eP DF). – is bn 978-0-7735-8396-2 (eP U B) 1. Canada – Civilization – American influences.  2. Canada – Boundaries – United States – Social aspects.  3. United States – Boundaries – Canada – Social aspects.  4. Canada – Relations – United States.  5. United States – Relations – Canada.  I. Title. FC 95.5.R62 2015   303.48'271073   C 2015-900312-1  C2015-900313-X

This book was typeset by Interscript in 10.5/13 Sabon.

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For Matt

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 3   1 Navigating the “International Dots and Dashes”: Travelling the Canada-US Border  25   2 Securing Canadianness: Canada’s Border Policing Dramas  64   3 Strategic Parallels: Indigenous Border Crossings  111   4 The “Strait Razorous Border”: African-Canadian Perspectives  149   5 “Somos Todos Americanos”: Hemispheric Canada  191 Conclusion 228 Notes 239 Index 275

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks, first and foremost, to Lynette Hunter, who lent me her copy of David McFadden’s Trip around Lake Erie and Trip around Lake Huron, with a suggestion that they might cure my hay fever. They didn’t, alas, but prompted me to think more carefully about the Canada-US border, thus providing the genesis for this book. Thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for its funding of my postdoctoral research fellowship in 2005–06, when this project began in earnest. I am grateful to Diana Brydon, my postdoc supervisor, and to other colleagues in the Department of English at the University of Western Ontario, especially Manina Jones, Wendy Pearson, Jessica Schagerl, Heather Snell, and Helene Strauss, for their support during this period. I wish to acknowledge the support of the School of Cultural Studies at Leeds Metropolitan University, where I worked from ­ 2006 to 2008, particularly my colleagues Sue Chaplin, Mary Eagleton, Ruth Robbins, and Susan Watkins. Thanks to the British Academy for the Overseas Conference Grant that allowed me to present some of this work at the 2007 A C L A L S conference in Vancouver. At my present institution, the University of Nottingham, thank you to colleagues in the Department of American and Canadian Studies, especially Celeste-Marie Bernier, Susan Billingham, Stephanie Lewthwaite, Ruth Maxey, Vivien Miller, Judie Newman, Maria Ryan, ­Graham Thompson, and Robin Vandome, and to former Nottingham colleagues Sinéad Moynihan and Luke Robinson. I am grateful to the Faculty of Arts’ Dean’s Fund, which granted me an additional semester of teaching relief, enabling me to complete this manuscript. Thanks also to the Foundation for Canadian Studies in the United

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Kingdom for their support for my research from 2008 to 2013, and to the Eccles Centre’s Visiting North American Fellowship, which enabled me to research intensively in the British Library in 2011. It was a pleasure and a privilege to work alongside María del Pilar Blanco and David James during this period, brilliant scholars and wonderful people both. To friends and colleagues who have read parts of the book’s manuscript in draft form, I cannot express enough gratitude: thanks to Celeste-Marie Bernier, Caroline Herbert, Eric Langley, Stephanie Lewthwaite, David Stirrup, and especially Susan Rudy, my fellow expatriate, who read and commented so generously on several chapters. I am enormously grateful to the Culture and the Canada-US Border international research network’s members, especially David Stirrup, for their intelligence, enthusiasm, and dedication to this field of inquiry, and I thank the Leverhulme Trust for funding our activities and enabling us to assemble and keep our conversations going. Thank you to Jacqueline Mason at McGill-Queen’s University Press, and to the three anonymous readers for their careful and generous reading and their sound advice. Some material in this book was published in a different form in the following: “Navigating the ‘International Dots and Dashes’: David W. McFadden’s Great Lakes Suite and the Canada-US Border” in American Review of Canadian Studies 41, 1 (2011); and “Strategic Parallels: Invoking the Border in  Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water and Drew Hayden Taylor’s In a World Created by a Drunken God” in Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada-US Border (ed. Roberts and Stirrup), ­Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013 (http://www.­wlupress.wlu.ca/ press/Catalog/roberts-stirrup.shtml). Thanks to the publishers for permission to include this material here. Thanks also to the following for permission to quote material in this book: Jeannette Armstrong, for permission to quote from her novel Slash; Arsenal Pulp Press, for permission to quote from Wayde Compton’s work; George Bowering, for permission to quote from his At War with the US; Hal Leonard Publishing, for permission to quote from the Crash Test Dummies’ “Superman’s Song”: words and music by Brad Roberts, copyright 1991 Dummies Prod., Inc., all rights administered by ­Universal-Polygram International Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved, used by permission, reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation; and Talonbooks, for permission to quote from David W. McFadden’s Great Lakes Suite.

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To friends who have kept me on an even keel in recent years, e­ specially Catherine Bates, Lee Carruthers, Anna Greenwood-Lee, Helena Hawthorn, Caroline Herbert, Kaley Kramer, Nasser Hussain, Edel Porter, Charles Tepperman, Mark T. Thomson, Darrelle Villa, and Abigail Ward: I would have ceased functioning long ago without you. Thank you for your support, your generosity, and your good humour. Thanks to my family – Delia, Jack, and Jonathan Roberts – at many borders’ remove. And finally, thank you to the loveliest Matthew Welton.

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Introduction

When I was an undergraduate student at the University of Victoria (UVic), I planned a visit with a friend who lived in Bellingham, Washington. We arranged that I would take the ferry from Sidney, north of Victoria, to Anacortes, Washington, where my friend would collect me in her car. I was aware that the ferry would cross the Canada-US border on the water, the line on the map that curves under Vancouver Island, dipping below the 49th parallel. What I did not anticipate, however, was that upon arrival at the ferry terminal in Sidney, once I stepped behind a chain-link fence, I was considered to have crossed into US territory – without having left Vancouver Island. I was perplexed at the lengthy list of questions I was asked at the gate, including what subject I was majoring in at UVic, while Americans who had been visiting Victoria were waved past me without any requests for information about their stay. I’d never before been subject to more than a question or two at the border; and I’d never before experienced crossing the border while still, as far as I could tell, standing in Canada. Of course, it has become commonplace for Canadians to clear US Customs at Canadian airports that are located nowhere near the Canada-US border, presenting the peculiar situation for Canadians of crossing into someone else’s territory without having left our own. And yet, as confused as I felt at the ferry terminal in Sidney, completely unprepared for this manifestation of border crossing away from the actual border, I recognized the power relations at play. It seemed unfair that the United States would claim jurisdiction over what was patently Canada to me, that the US citizens should not be subject to questioning either at this end of the ferry’s journey

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or when we disembarked in Anacortes, while I was asked a similarly lengthy list of questions on both ends – both, ostensibly, in US territory. How could the Sidney ferry terminal not be Canada when it was in Canada? I felt cheated at being given a harder time than US travellers, both in Sidney and in Anacortes. Looking back on this experience more than a decade and a half later, I see that I felt usurped in Sidney and that I wasn’t given the impression that I was particularly welcome, either on the boat or on land on the other side (my friend’s personal welcome in Anacortes notwithstanding). US citizens were welcomed home in front of me; I was a guest, having crossed the border successfully, but not one whose presence was particularly desired. Years later, this border-crossing experience of mine (as a white Anglo-Canadian) would no longer appear to be a particularly difficult one. In 2006, after 9/11 but before the implementation of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, I crossed the Canada-US border by train with only my (non-enhanced) driver’s licence for I D. A man sitting across from me, offering his Canadian passport for documentation and speaking with a Canadian accent, was repeatedly pulled off the train for questioning. When we were finally moving again, some two hours after our arrival at the border, I could hear him call a friend or relative in New York, advising him or her that the train was delayed. “This always happens,” he said wearily, and I wondered what information his passport contained that made him “suspect,” what discrepancies the border guards decided meant he didn’t get to be Canadian “enough” to entitle him to easy passage across the 49th parallel. The presence of US Customs checks in Canadian airports is often justified by the desire to minimize travel delays of the sort experienced at the border on the train. But it is clear that not all travellers will “enjoy” the “benefit” of US Customs’ presence. At what has traditionally been referred to as “the world’s longest undefended border,”1 an invisible line between two countries that appear, for most of the border’s length, linguistically and culturally similar, we might expect easy passage, especially given the explanation Canadians are sold for the presence of US Customs on Canadian soil in the first place. But clearly, cross-border passage is not easy for everyone, even if our Canadian passports suggest we should all be treated equally. Further, the ease of travel promised in relation to clearing US Customs in Canada coincides with a geopolitical disjunction: as I experienced as a teenager, although I felt I

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ought to be a host in Sidney, British Columbia, I discovered that the chain-link fence determined that someone else’s country would be assuming the position of host instead. Despite the language of friendship and neighbourliness that characterizes the official discourse of Canada-US relations, then, Canadian citizens are positioned in multiple and often contradictory ways at the Canada-US border, with even the border itself seemingly migrating further north into Canadian territory. Canadian cultural texts that examine the Canada-US border frequently touch on issues of hospitality, with border guards policing the passage of travellers, officially welcoming citizens of each other’s countries across the line, or refusing entry. Such texts often demonstrate that relations of cross-border hospitality and hostility also operate on a national scale, where Canada struggles to assert the power of host in relation to the United States, reflecting concerns about Canada’s political, economic, and cultural sovereignty. In Bruce McDonald’s 1991 film Highway 61, the protagonists Pokey Jones (Don McKellar) and Jackie Bangs (Valerie Buhagiar) travel from Thunder Bay to New Orleans along the eponymous highway, a coffin with a dead body strapped to the roof of Pokey’s car. “I’ll feel better when we’re across the border,” Jackie says, applying lipstick, as they head south.2 An acquaintance of only a few days, Jackie has claimed to Pokey that the dead body is her brother and that they need to take him to New Orleans for the funeral; in reality, the dead man is entirely unknown to Jackie, and she is using him as a receptacle to smuggle drugs into the US. Pokey and Jackie are interrogated separately at the border, the innocent Pokey aggressively challenged by a humourless female US border guard, while Jackie, with a lengthy criminal record, has a comparatively easy experience with the male US border guard. The female guard views Pokey’s camera and trumpet with suspicion, and suggests that the border functions to police sexuality when she demands to know why he is neither married nor a father: “You like girls, don’t you, Mr.  Jones?” Meanwhile, the male border guard goes through the details of Jackie’s criminal record: “Possession of marijuana, creating a public nuisance, riding a motorcycle without proper headgear … assault on a police officer, shoplifting, indecent exposure – twice.” The male border guard articulates the possibility of Jackie’s perpetrating similar crimes and misdemeanours south of the border in personal terms: “The United States of America is my home. It’s

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where I live. Now why should I invite you into my home? Would you invite someone into your house if you knew they had been arrested for indecent exposure?” “Depends on the guy,” Jackie replies, but the guard is undeterred: b or der gua r d: Do you promise never to do these things while you are a guest in the United States of America? Jac k ie: Sure. b or der gua r d: Do I have your word? Jac k ie: Yeah, sure, I’ll be a good girl. b or der gua r d: I don’t care what you do in Canada. You can do anything you like in the privacy of your own home. But not in my house. The border guard’s invocation of hospitality equates the nation with the home, and he seeks to underscore Jackie’s responsibilities as a guest in his country. As a border guard, he polices the threshold between Canada and the United States, working not only to identify returning hosts from entering guests but also to assess who is worthy of being a guest in his home. He allows Jackie into the country – “Welcome to America,” he says – although there is some suggestion that Jackie’s performance of conventional femininity eases her passage, while Pokey’s failure to embody conventional masculinity makes him a target of the female border guard’s suspicion, even as she lets him cross into the US. Highway 61’s explicit invocation of hospitality resonates with numerous other Canadian cultural texts focused on the Canada-US border and not simply those as relatively recent as McDonald’s film. John Richardson’s 1840 novel The Canadian Brothers is replete with the language of Canada-US hospitality, despite its focus on the War of 1812. As Douglas Ivison notes, prior to the war, “the inhabitants of both towns [Amherstburg and Detroit] participated in the same social circles – attending balls and visiting friends and lovers – with seeming disregard for the border.”3 Yet hospitality remains a  concern even in the midst of war. When a group of Americans, including Major Montgomerie and his niece Matilda, has been captured by the Canadian side, General Brock declares, “I am sorry we do not meet exactly on the terms to which we have so long been accustomed; but, although the fortune of war has made you rather unwilling guests in the present instance, the rites of hospitality shall

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not be the less observed.”4 This concern for cross-border hospitality persists throughout the text, with Brock apologizing for the “indifferent accomodation [sic]” he has to offer Matilda, the Canadian colonel D’Egville offering her “a home until she finally departs for the opposite coast” of Lake Erie, and a battle scene appearing, from a distance, as a cross-border celebration: A spectator who, in utter ignorance of events, might have been suddenly placed on the Canadian bank, would have been led to imagine, that a fête, not a battle, was intended … [F]or as the volumes of smoke, vomited from the opposing batteries, met and wreathed themselves together in the centre of the stream, leaving at intervals the gay colours of England and America, brightly ­displayed to the view, the impression, to a spectator, would have been that of one who witnesses the exchange of military honors [sic] between two brave and friendly powers, preparing the one to confer, the other to receive all the becoming courtesies of a chivalrous hospitality.5 Richardson depicts the war as an unfortunate rupture in which “many who have long been friends will meet as enemies.”6 Focusing primarily upon the officer class, and endorsing “the civility of the officer code,”7 the novel highlights cross-border hospitality as part of – indeed, as central to – a gentlemen’s agreement between officers of the opposing sides. Enemy status does not supersede the responsibilities of hospitality. The contrast between McDonald’s film and Richardson’s novel is striking in their depictions of Canada-US relations and, particularly, in their representation of cross-border hospitality. Despite the context of warfare between the territories on either side of it, the border appears to be of relatively little importance in The Canadian Brothers, which, to a great extent, sees more differences between classes than it does between national identities. In contrast, Highway 61’s representation of the so-called longest undefended border in the world demonstrates the possibility of hostility at the threshold between nation-states, despite the several generations that have elapsed since the last military struggle between them. At the time of The Canadian Brothers’ composition and publication, the Canada-US border as we now know it had not yet been fully established or surveyed: the border between Maine and New Brunswick had yet to be

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negotiated in 1842’s Webster-Ashburton Treaty; the border along the 49th parallel would not extend to the Pacific until 1846’s Oregon Treaty; and the Alaska Boundary Tribunal would not finalize the border between the Yukon and Alaska until 1903. By the time of Highway 61’s production in the late twentieth century, the Canada-US border, and the point of latitude that provides the metonymy by which it is popularly known in Canada, had come to occupy a prominent position within the Anglo-Canadian national imaginary. “To write, present or reflect in Canada,” as Jody Berland claims, “is to write to, about, against and sometimes across the border.”8 Discrepant Parallels examines the implications of the Canada-US border in Canadian cultural texts from the 1980s to the present. Such a time frame encompasses significant points of both negotiation and crisis in Canada’s relationship to the United States, namely, the Free Trade Agreement (f t a , ratified in 1989), the North American Free Trade Agreement (n a f t a , ratified in 1994), and the events of 11 September 2001 and their fallout as it affected Canada-US relations. At each of these points, particularly the f ta and 9/11, concerns were raised about Canadian sovereignty in the face of continental economic integration and demands for harmonization of immigration and border control policies from the United States. The lead-up to the fta’s ratification (including 1988’s “free trade” election) encompassed a period in which the implications of Canada’s relationship with the United States – economically, politically, and culturally – were hotly debated in Canada.9 For political philosopher Ian Angus, the ratification of the f ta represents the end of the tradition of English Canadian left-nationalism, compromising the effectiveness of “the border that allows our existence in North America.”10 From Angus’s perspective, “Canada is this making of a border separating us from the United States”;11 that is, Canada only exists as an alternative to the United States by  marking itself as different, and it persists in being Canada by continuing to mark and produce that difference. Of course, just what constitutes the difference between Canada, particularly AngloCanada, and the United States has long underpinned the anxiety about Anglo-Canadian identity, given “the impression of the fundamental likeness of both countries.”12 As philosopher Lorraine Code argues, even the attempt to discuss Canada-US differences is fraught, for “calling attention to them invites an impatient insistence that the similarities are so overwhelming as to erase the differences; that

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casting them as ‘cross-cultural’ is equally excessive. Often they are mere variations in cultural timbre, inflection, intonation; at other times they invoke deep divisions in the histories that have made each of these two nations what they are, both locally and globally.”13 Crucially, Code notes that, as a Canadian, she is “a member of a culture and society that often, to the world outside North America, appears indistinguishable from the United States of America”;14 Canadianness is therefore invisible to most of the world. Thus, we return to Angus’s claim about the need to mark out difference, to draw a border between Canada and the United States, both metaphorically and geographically, depending upon the kind of sovereignty in question. The “physical border” itself, “both arbitrary and nondifferentiating,”15 accrues symbolic value by producing differentiation. In Canadian culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, cross-border sameness carries with it the threat of erasure, and not simply from the perspective of the world outside North America, where Canadianness appears indistinguishable, but also from that of the United States. Contemporary Canadian culture contrasts sharply with Richardson’s The Canadian Brothers, in which cross-border hospitality posits a relationship of equality between men who occupy different national positions but the same class position; the chivalrous sameness of the soldiers on either side of the border renders the border virtually inconsequential, certainly an unfortunate obstacle to friendly relations ruptured by the hostilities of the War of 1812. Examining representations of the Canada-US border through the lens of hospitality enables us to probe the circulations of power at and beyond the border, portrayed more acutely in more recent Canadian cultural texts. As the scene from Highway 61 suggests, the border operates as a threshold where hosts and guests are distinguished from each other, where an invitation or a welcome might be extended, but where entry might also be refused. As Jackie illustrates, there are particular expectations of guests, and she effectively plays the coquette in order to facilitate her passage into the United States, masking her true intentions in crossing the border by correctly assuming she needs to project herself as a different kind of guest in order to be welcomed across the line. Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace has been central in theorizations of hospitality. For Kant, hospitality is a “cosmopolitan right” that guarantees “the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility

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when he arrives on someone else’s territory.”16 Hospitality, he argues, is not a matter of “philanthropy, but [of] right.”17 In Jackie’s case, of course, the border guard invokes the language of hospitality in order to demonstrate that he is doing her a favour by allowing her into the country given the lengthy criminal record trailing in her wake. Yet the border guard’s conditions match Kant’s directive to the guest: a guest “must not be treated with hostility, so long as he [sic] behaves in a peaceable manner in the place he happens to be in.”18 Kant’s notion of hospitality includes conditions that limit hospitality itself, conditions that, according to Jacques Derrida, undermine hospitality. Derrida distinguishes between “absolute hospitality” and “the law of hospitality as right or duty” on the grounds that the latter underscores the power of the host, meaning that the host does not genuinely “give place” to the stranger who remains a guest, bound by the conditions outlined by Kant.19 As Derrida explains, “Anyone who encroaches on my ‘at home,’ on my ipseity, on my power of hospitality, on my sovereignty as host, I start to regard as an undesirable foreigner, and virtually as an enemy.”20 To infringe on the host’s power is to turn hospitality into hostility, belying the casual phrase one might utter to one’s guest, “Make yourself at home,” which is not meant to be taken literally, to the point of usurping the host’s claim to the host position itself. As soon as the host, “who is master in his house, in his household, in his state, in his nation, in his city, in his town, who remains master in his house … defines the conditions of hospitality or welcome[,] … there can be no unconditional welcome, no unconditional passage through the door.”21 Derrida usefully exposes the contradictions of claims to hospitality in ways that are particularly fruitful for putting the nation’s hospitality under scrutiny insofar as the bestowing of hospitality in itself actually withholds hospitality through the reassertion of the host’s power. When the male border guard in Highway 61 welcomes Jackie into the United States, he reminds her that he is the host, in the position of power; the female guard lets Pokey through but does so with the caveat, “If I find out you’re lying, I’m going to make it my personal business to go down to Louisiana and haul your butt back up here.” In larger, national terms, in Anglo-Canada’s relationship to the United States, hospitality becomes further complicated given the unsettling impression of cultural and linguistic sameness alongside the significant imbalance of power between the two

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countries. The influence of US power on Canada and the erosion of Canadian cultural, economic, and political sovereignties clearly indicate that Canada does not maintain the host’s power as it is outlined by Derrida; rather, the neighbour to the south, with the ambitions of Manifest Destiny hovering in the background, is taken to be a bad guest by failing to act as a guest in the first place (from the Canadian nationalist point of view) by regarding Canadian territory as an extension of the United States. If “every Canadian has heard a visiting American saying that Canada is ‘just like home,’ congratulating his or her listeners for their apparent sameness,” Canadians’ “at home” appears to be at risk: “Canadians live and write as though the border is everywhere, shadowing everything we contemplate and fear; Americans as though there is no border at all.”22 Derrida’s notion of the “at home” might offer an analogy with George Grant’s “one’s own”: “this particular body, this family, these friends, … this part of the world, this set of traditions, this country, this civilisation.”23 In a national(ist) context, Canada’s “at home” and “one’s own” are vulnerable to loss of the host position through a lack of reciprocity between the host’s power on either side of the border that, as Angus argues, is central to Canada’s very existence. But in Canada-US relations, Canada’s “loss” of the host position is perhaps inaccurate: it is always already lost, given the reach and extent of US power. In this sense, Derrida’s concept of “hostipitality” is potentially the most appropriate to characterizing the Canada-US relationship, through its palimpsest of hospitality and hostility born of their shared etymology: Derrida uses “hostipitality” to foreground the “troubled and troubling origin” of hospitality, “a word which carries its own contradiction incorporated into it, a Latin word which allows itself to be parasitized by its opposite, ‘hostility,’ the undesirable guest … which it harbors as the self-contradiction in its  own body.”24 The Canada-US border as the site that connects the two countries that officially relate to each other as neighbours, friends, and allies who welcome each other across the 49th parallel functions through the hostipitality that encompasses both such a  welcome and the imbalance of power that threatens to erode Canada’s sovereignty. But ongoing concerns for sovereignty at the 49th parallel remind us of other, competing claims to sovereignty. If theorizations of hospitality focus on the treatment of strangers, we might argue that the relationship of neighbours that characterizes the official rhetoric of

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Canada-US relations places the Canada-US context beyond the purview of hospitality. As Sara Ahmed writes, “techniques [of reading bodies] allow us to differentiate between those who are strangers and those who belong in a given space (such as neighbours or fellow inhabitants).”25 First, however, I would argue that neighbourliness is not the same as sameness, for either literal (domestic) or figurative (international) neighbourhoods, and that the Canada-US border offers a threshold at which imbalances of nation-state power are emphasized and enacted. Second, it is essential that we examine the power of the host position within Canada and how its construction often operates to manage, exclude, and efface difference. Not only is “the assumption that strangers only populate the borders of the nation … in danger of reifying those borders” but the question of “who is the [we] of the nation if ‘they’ are here to stay” also requires us to revisit Canada’s claims to hospitality and to scrutinize the ethics of the nation-state’s practices.26 Eli Mandel asserted in 1979 that “the border between America and Canada is of enormous importance in the imaginative life of any Canadian,”27 leaving Canadianness unqualified and seemingly homogenous. In contrast, when Angus expresses concern for “the border that allows our existence in North America,” crucially, his “we” is that of an Anglo-Canada. If, as he claims, “all concern with English Canadian identity, formulated abstractly, is engaged in maintaining a border between us and the United States,”28 in examining the period from the 1980s to the present, it is essential to emphasize that Canada’s cultural identity was becoming increasingly complicated, and explicitly so, in relation to Indigenous and ethnic-minority groups. This study therefore seeks to examine Canadian culture’s engagement with the border both from the Anglo-Canadian nationalist position and from Indigenous and ethnic-minority positions that puncture, temper, supplement, or contradict the culturally dominant view of the border’s significance to Canada. In foregrounding the linguistic question of English Canada, Angus acknowledges that not every group in Canada feels vulnerable to being subsumed into US culture through sameness. As Robert Schwartzwald notes, “many Québécois feel they are held hostage by English Canada which, unsure of its identity, ‘needs’ Québec to prove its difference” from the United States.29 Given that Anglo-Canada presents the most prominent threat to Québécois sovereignty, the idea of the Canada-US border as a necessary buffer is particular to the Anglo-Canadian

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national imaginary. In the case of Quebec, the nation is both claimed by the larger Canadian nation-state as part of the host position and denied its own sovereignty, hence the “hostage” of Schwartzwald’s analysis as Quebec is recruited by Canada to draw a border between itself and the United States in an attempt to shore up the Canadian nation-state’s own cultural power through a detectable linguistic difference. For Indigenous peoples in North America, particularly those nations whose territory straddles the border, international boundaries are relatively recent Euro-North American impositions on the land. Given that, as Georges Erasmus and Joe Sanders assert, “before the arrival of Europeans, [the] First Nations exercised absolute sovereignty over what is now called the North American continent,”30 marking out territory claimed by Canada and the United States constitutes the bad behaviour of Euro-North American guests who have usurped the position of hosts. Even Kant, who subscribed to an explicitly racist hierarchy of peoples that located Indigenous peoples of the Americas “at the lowest point” in his schema, “condemned colonialism on the grounds that this was occupation without permission.”31 His outlining of hospitality inherent in cosmopolitan right includes the admonition of “the inhospitable conduct” of European imperial powers who behave as bad guests in relation to the people they colonize, their “visiting foreign countries and peoples” appearing to be interchangeable with “conquering them”: America and other locations “were looked upon at the time of their discovery as ownerless territories; for the native inhabitants were counting as nothing.”32 In the histories of colonial encounter in the  Americas, “Europeans were uninvited guests par excellence.33 As  Rauna Kuokkanen notes, “Typically, the hosts welcomed the ­arrivants, the guests, and treated them according to their laws of hospitality, without which many newcomers would not have survived and prospered,” but this hospitality extended by Indigenous peoples to Europeans “was ultimately abused and exploited by the guests” seeking to expropriate Indigenous lands.34 If, centuries after the colonizers’ arrival, n a f ta has figured as an increment in the loss of the Canadian nation-state’s economic sovereignty, as Donald Grinde Jr notes, the agreement has had other implications for the struggle over Indigenous peoples’ border-­ crossings rights, which “have gained further urgency” since its ratification: “Expanding the long history of the two North American

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nation-states’ assaults on treaty rights, this agreement codifies the lack of corporate interest in enabling the free passage of Native peoples across international borders.”35 Indigenous peoples of the continent, whose presence in North America long predates the border, ought to be considered hosts regardless of what side of the 49th parallel they might find themselves on at any point, but limitations of Indigenous border crossing persists despite the provisions outlined in the Jay Treaty (1794). In her discussion of hospitality in relation to French culture, Mireille Rosello characterizes France as “a country whose idealized mythic identity has long been associated with willingness to welcome strangers.”36 This claim could be equally made of Canada, if over a shorter period of history. Canada’s official multicultural policy, first introduced in 1971, provides an example of what Ahmed identifies as “the act of ‘welcoming the stranger’ serv[ing] to constitute the nation.”37 Although Ahmed bases her analysis of multiculturalism on Australia, rather than Canada, the Canadian Multiculturalism Act, ratified in 1988, corroborates her claim in its assertion that “multiculturalism is a fundamental characteristic of the Canadian heritage and identity.”38 Canada’s claim to hospitality also includes the cultural currency awarded to the offer of sanctuary across the Canada-US border, from the Loyalists to the Underground Railroad to Vietnam War draft resisters. As Rosello points out, there is often a disjunction between an ethics of hospitality (or indeed a mythic hospitality upon which the nation might desire to pin its identity) and “[a] politics of hospitality, … [which] involves limits and borders: calculations and the management of finite resources, finite numbers of people, national borders and state sovereignty.”39 Similarly, as much as the Canadian nation-state might point to moments in its history when it claims to be hospitable as part of its “myths of … benevolence,”40 offering a home to refugees and freedom to escaped slaves, the mere act of permitting “guests” to cross the border into Canadian territory has not always been genuinely hospitable. Moreover, despite Canada’s claims to have offered sanctuary to border-crossers, it is not always the case that the 49th parallel has resonated for ethnic-minority groups in the same way that it has for the white, Anglo, dominant group. Hospitality, as a concern, does not end at the border, the moment of  crossing the nation’s threshold; rather, if “guests” remain guests, consistently marked as different, and, indeed, if even their

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Canadian-born descendants are taken to be guests by the dominant national imaginary, then the nation’s hospitality is radically called into question through the failure to expand the configuration of the host, as Rosello explores in her discussion of “the postcolonial guest’s point of view: that of the subject who can never become the host.”41 If “the definition of the nation as a space, body, or house requires the proximity of ‘strangers’ within that place,” then the nation fails to enact an ethical hospitality by refusing the status of host to those who continue to be figured as strangers: “the outsiders are all inside now,” yet it does not follow that they have been granted the status of insiders.42 If Indigenous peoples are denied the host position usurped by Euro-North Americans, the figuring of Canadianness as whiteness places even the descendants of those who arrived in Canada via the Underground Railroad as perpetual guests according to a racist logic of who gets to belong to the nation. Thus, although the Canadian nation-state invokes the Underground Railroad to attest to its historical sense of justice, it does so in such a way that denies both the history of slavery in Canada and Canadian racism in the present. More recent manifestations of Canada’s sense of itself as safe sanctuary include the permission to enter for Latin American refugees, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s. Given the complicity of the United States in many of the regimes from which such refugees were escaping, this Canadian hospitality both offered a difference between the two countries on either side of the 49th parallel and masked Canada’s own complicity in many of the United States’ interventions. It also indicated a stark contrast between North America’s northern and southern borders. The much-studied Mexico-US border, where, as Chicana poet and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa writes, “the Third World grates against the first and bleeds,”43 appears to find its remedy in the sanctuary offered north of the 49th parallel. The militarized zone of the Mexico-US border seems to be a long way, in terms of both geography and ethos, from the “longest undefended border in the world.”44 For most Americans, “the border” signifies the boundary between Mexico and the United States, so prominent are the political debates that coalesce at that site; in contrast, “in ordinary Canadian speech, the word ‘border’ resonates to mean primarily one thing: the crossing-point to the continental usa.”45 Yet, despite its contrast to North America’s southern border, the Canada-US border is nevertheless a site of policing racialized

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bodies, and, in the fallout from 9/11, the Safe Third Country Agreement severely limited the possibilities for Latin Americans to claim refugee status in Canada. Kent Roach argues that Canada’s refugee policy, distinct from that of the United States in a pre-9/11 context, was not simply an “abstract matte[r] of sovereignty, but [an] important matte[r] that lie[s] near the core of Canada’s identity.”46 Further, given that, previously, “over a third of all refugee applicants to Canada land[ed] first in the United States from the country they [were] fleeing,”47 the Safe Third Country Agreement concretely reduced Canada’s capacity to act as the sanctuary it so long claimed to be, refusing the permission of such guests to enter. A focus on nation-state borders may seem out of step with the post-national trajectory of globalization. In his study of post-­ centennial Canadian literature, Frank Davey declares that such Canadian literary texts of this period “inhabit a post-national space, in which sites are as interchangeable as postcards, in which discourses are transnational, and in which political issues are constructed on non-national (and often ahistorical) ideological grounds.”48 For Angus, globalization consists of “a genuinely transnational economic environment dominated by large corporations that are increasingly gaining leverage over nation-states and whose influence cannot therefore be theorized as the influence of one nation-state over another.”49 Yet many border texts produced in Canada do not quite corroborate these portraits of the post-national. In the novels Davey examines, “despite the extensive travels of many of the characters in these novels they rarely encounter any sign of international order; none ever applies for a passport, passes through a customs check, or has significant official contacts in the countries visited.”50 In Canadian border texts, in contrast, the prominence of international order is in evidence through scenes of border crossing, interrogations, and concerns with documentation and identification. And while globalization should, theoretically, make all nation-states less relevant in relation to the global economy, many contemporary Canadian border texts gesture nevertheless to the imbalance of power that persists between the Canadian and American nation-states. Further, as Jennifer Andrews and Priscilla L. Walton observe, Indigenous peoples’ land claims attest to a “simultaneous need for and undermining of nationstate structures,” given that “stable notions of the nation-state … would allow such negotiations to take place.”51

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Just as border texts can contradict the logic of globalization, so has the discipline of border studies played a role in the reinvention of American studies. The emergence of Mexico-US border studies and Chicano studies, in particular, has been instrumental in attempts to reconfigure American studies, which has undergone a variety of shifts in terminology in recent decades from “new” to “post-national” to “transnational” to “hemispheric.”52 These shifts attempt to reflect a growing desire for comparative, inter-American approaches that seek to engage with the Americas beyond the borders of the United States. Largely absent from these discussions, Canada has often sat somewhat awkwardly or as kind of afterthought. John Carlos Rowe, for instance, strains to accommodate Canada when he argues that American studies scholars “must take into account at the very least the different nationalities, cultures, and languages of the Western hemisphere, including Canada.”53 He also proposes that the “new interest in border studies should include investigations of how the many different Americas and Canada have historically influenced and interpreted each other,”54 suggesting that Canada is somehow situated outside these “many different Americas.” Although Rowe is prepared to embrace Canada in his field, the country remains, somehow, separate from the continent, a sign that Rowe’s “North American capaciousness is not without conceptual difficulty.”55 However well intentioned such capaciousness, then, the recurrent failure to imagine Canada as integral to the Western hemisphere within the reconfigured American studies agenda feeds the perception that “the hemispheric turn is itself an imperializing move.”56 Nevertheless, Canadianist scholars have begun to engage with the possibilities of the hemispheric paradigm, although not without reservations and qualifications. Winfried Siemerling and Sarah Phillips Casteel emphasize the importance of “the need to attend carefully to national and regional specificities even as we engage with transnational contexts,”57 and Bryce Traister warns against “simply wanting to move the grasp of American Studies scholarship beyond US borders,” arguing that “national difference remains a crucial register not only of culture and identity critique, but also of disciplinary relevance.”58 Certainly, the fear of the hemispheric paradigm as imperializing surfaces in Herby Wyile’s suggestion that the paradigm itself functions as a kind of “scholarly n a f ta ,” in which “a continental or hemispheric literary critical orientation will simply

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reinforce the centralizing of power that has accompanied the reorientation to an economic hemispheric regime.”59 Yet for its proponents in Canadian cultural criticism, the hemispheric framework holds the possibility of “decentring … US-based models” in a way that will be beneficial to Canada as well as the rest of the Americas beyond the United States.60 It is becoming clear, however, that examining Canada through the hemispheric paradigm is a strikingly different enterprise depending on whether one does it from a Canadian or an American perspective – hemispheric or otherwise. Although some US-based Americanist scholars have been keen to put the hemispheric approach into practice and to include Canada among their inter-American studies of literature and culture, these studies, despite their attention to Canada and its culture within their hemispheric remit, tend to sidestep Canadian studies and its long-standing engagement with the Canada-US border. As a result, despite calls for “the United States’ neighboring geographies and the fields that study them [to be] protagonists rather than mere recipient sites of US policies and of US-based theoretical perspectives and comparative paradigms,”61 such examples of hemispheric American studies often produce expanded objects, rather than methods, of study, and dialogue between the disciplines of Canadian and American studies is absent.62 Claudia Sadowski-Smith’s description of the Canada-US border as “a border like no other,”63 notwithstanding the fact that every nation-state border has its own specific context and concerns, implicitly acknowledges that this border is being engaged from a US-based perspective: it is the only border that Canadians have and is therefore our template, as it were, for borders in the first place. Rachel Adams’s use of the first person plural in relation to a discipline newly inspired to look beyond territorial borders, including the addition of Canada, demonstrates that “our” new attention to Canada within the Americas belongs to scholars based in the United States, not Canada.64 Welcome though these hemispheric forays are, one hopes that, as the paradigm develops, Canada might be taken on its own terms, and Canadian studies might be valued for the part it has to play in discussing Canada’s relation to the Americas in order to enact genuine disciplinary reconfigurations and to facilitate transformative dialogue. Conversely, Canadianists need not only to prioritize the potential for a hemispheric American studies that engages with Canada to “alter current understandings of the Americas and

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remap the contours of a hemispheric American Studies”65 but also to embrace the possibility that reading America as a continent instead of the nation-state south of the 49th parallel might alter our perspective on Canada and its culture – that is, our current understandings of Canada and how we might map it in relation to the Americas. In its focus on discrepant parallels, this book seeks to offer what Traister calls “a critical borderlands practice” by accounting for the sense of continuing power imbalance between Canada and the United States as well as the challenges from within Canada to the nationalist position that complicate any straightforward equation of the Canada-US border as a guarantor of sanctuary and justice.66 If Canada more often than not fails to assert the power of the host in its dealings with the United States, the dominant configuration of the Canadian host is also subject to scrutiny and challenge from minority communities north of the border. Discrepant Parallels grapples with the mythic status that the 49th parallel has accrued in the dominant Canadian national imaginary and complicates – if not ruptures – that status from Indigenous, African-Canadian, and Latin American perspectives. As much as the Canadian nationalist position would contend that the border operates to defend us from the logical conclusion of neocolonialism, the border is more productively viewed as the primary site of examining Canada’s overlapping relationships to colonialism, postcolonialism, and neocolonialism. Indigenous perspectives of the border as an unnatural, imposed boundary undermine the Canadian nationalism that requires the border to distinguish Canadianness from Americanness. African-Canadian perspectives often temper the nationalist celebration of the Underground Railroad border crossing by exposing Canada’s own racism and demonstrating connections with African-American culture. Canada’s relationship to Latin America foregrounds a contrast not only between North American borders but also between imbalances of power in the Americas, reconfiguring Canada as a site of privilege and power rather than its nationalist sense of disempowerment vis-à-vis the United States. The texts examined in the chapters that follow were all produced from the 1980s to the present, in keeping with my focus on the period of Canada-US relations that includes the lead-up to the ratification of the fta , na f ta , and the fallout from 9/11. As individual chapters address, this period also encompasses significant political

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events and legislation within Canada, such as the repatriation of the Constitution in 1982, the Canadian Multiculturalism Act (1988), the failed Meech Lake Accord (1990) and Charlottetown Agreement (1992), the so-called Oka Crisis (1990), and the second Quebec sovereignty referendum (1995). All of these developments contribute to the composition of the Canadian host position in this period. I also focus on Anglo-Canadian texts. Although Quebec is addressed in the analyses of texts that include Anglo-Canadian /Quebec relations within their representation of Canada-US border concerns, the purpose of this study is to examine Anglo-Canada’s representation of its  relationship to the United States, not a comparison of AngloCanadian and Québécois perspectives. Although I do not wish to minimize either the significance of “l’américanité au Québec” or “l’ambivalence” towards the United States “[qui] est toujours là” from Quebec’s perspective, “la culture québécoise comme francophonie de type nord-américain” operates within a different – and distinct – linguistic culture, with national and transnational contexts that generate important divergences from Anglo-Canada’s relationship to the United States.67 Nor does this study provide a comparison of Canadian and US American representations of the border, which is beyond the scope of this project. Rather, Discrepant Parallels focuses on cultural production in Canada, the country with the greater cultural investment in the Canada-US border, examining both Canadian nationalist positions on the border as represented in Canadian border texts and challenges to that position from other constituent communities on the northern side of the 49th parallel in order to hold those nationalist positions – and the hospitality they claim on behalf of the nation – to account. I have not restricted my analysis exclusively to well-known, canonical, or highbrow texts, combining literary genres of varying cultural authority with popular television. This constellation of different cultural forms testifies to the pervasiveness of the Canada-US border in Canadian culture. Taken together, these texts offer a number of insights into and negotiations of the function and significance of the border, often invoking as well as challenging the  dominant Canadian nationalist position, from a variety of perspectives. In selecting texts that depict Indigenous, African-Canadian, and Latin American border crossings, I do not posit an essentialized version of such identities (which already include within them a multitude of different national identities). There is no “singular” Indigenous, African-Canadian, or Latin

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American experience of engaging with the Canada-US border, as the texts under discussion demonstrate with their immense range of ­narratives and formal devices, even as they each invoke the 49th parallel. The first two chapters of this book examine the Canadian nationalist investment in the 49th parallel. Chapter 1 focuses on crossborder travel writing, particularly Canadian poet David W. McFadden’s Great Lakes Suite (1997), a compilation of his earlier A Trip around Lake Erie books (1980), A Trip around Lake Huron (1980), and A Trip around Lake Ontario (1988). McFadden’s fictionalized travels around these three Great Lakes consistently probe the power imbalance between Canada and the United States and often engage explicitly with a fraught cross-border hospitality. Great Lakes Suite demonstrates how host and guest are often difficult to determine at the Canada-US border, given the slippage between cultural sameness and difference and the Canadian host’s lack of power. Clearly investing in the border and its function to protect Canadian sovereignty, McFadden both corroborates Daniel Coleman’s reading of Anglo-Canadianness as based on a “white civility” and articulates his nationalism through an ironic humour,68 one that attempts to chip away at US cultural power, undermining it with assertions of Canadian cultural power. The changes McFadden makes between the original and updated editions of these volumes allow us to trace the cultural impact of increasing continental economic integration, offering a particularly effective lens through which to examine the Canada-US cultural power imbalance over the course of nearly two decades. Chapter 2 turns to televisual texts in its examination of crossborder policing dramas Bordertown (ct v, 1989–91), Due South (c tv, 1994–99), and The Border (c bc, 2008–10). These programs each emerged in the context of points of crisis or significant reconfigurations of the relationship between Canada and the United States, encompassing the f ta , na f ta, and post-9/11 Canada-US relations. These Canadian policing dramas foreground security not only in terms of surveilling the “longest undefended border in the world” but also with regard to Canada-US cultural relations and Canadian cultural sovereignty in the midst of potential blows to Canadian economic and political sovereignty. That such anxieties should be played out in these policing dramas indicates a desire to infuse the Canadian state apparatus (and, in the context of border

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policing, the Canadian repressive state apparatus) with a meaningful, discernible, and essential national identity as the programs strategically deploy national stereotypes in their dramatizations of cross-border tension and cooperation. Chapter 3 foregrounds the challenging of the Canadian nationalist position on the border by addressing Indigenous writing, specifically works by Jeannette Armstrong, Thomas King, and Drew Hayden Taylor. This chapter demonstrates the problem of assigning the position of host in an invader-settler colony such as Canada as the border continues to manifest colonial domination of Indigenous peoples. These texts remind us that, for some peoples within the territory claimed by Canada, free trade and 9/11 may not resonate as powerfully as struggles over the Canadian Constitution (1982), debates over the Meech Lake Accord (1990) and Charlottetown Agreement (1992), and the events at Kanehsatake (1990). In addition to probing these writers’ assertions of the invalidity of the boundary drawn by colonizers who usurped the host position in North America, this chapter also examines the simultaneous expressions of Indigenous and Canadian identities in Armstrong’s, King’s, and Taylor’s texts as they are strategically deployed in relation to US dominance, demonstrating a negotiation between Indigenous identification and nation-state citizenship. Chapter 4 grapples with the Canadian nation-state’s oft-invoked Underground Railroad myth in its focus on African-Canadian border crossings. Examining fiction, drama, and poetry by Lawrence Hill, Djanet Sears, and Wayde Compton, this chapter explores the Canada-US border as a more problematic site for black North Americans, much less straightforward than the hallowed Underground Railroad narrative would suggest. The United States does not simply figure as a threat held at bay by the 49th parallel given that, “in the case of black folks, a diasporic connectedness and intimacy is at stake” in cross-border relations.69 Hill, Sears, and Compton call Canadian hospitality to account by insisting upon expanding the Canadian host position to include African-­ Canadians, historically and in the present, and exposing Canada’s history of inhospitality, which has been obfuscated by the nationstate’s self-congratulation for offering sanctuary to escaped slaves. Finally, chapter 5 probes the relationship between Canada and Latin America as it has been represented in novels by Janette Turner Hospital and Jane Urquhart and plays by Joan MacLeod and

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Guillermo Verdecchia. This discussion redraws the boundaries of Canada-US border study by engaging in a disciplinary contact zone through dialogue with Mexico-US border studies and the new hemispheric paradigm for American studies. As Siemerling and Casteel argue, “Canadian culture and criticism are frequently marginalized in hemispheric comparative work, in borderlands criticism, and even in North American studies.”70 However, this chapter does not simply seek to assert Canada’s position within the hemisphere but, rather, to challenge Canada’s position from a hemispheric perspective. In these texts by Hospital, MacLeod, Verdecchia, and Urquhart, cherished notions of Canada as a safe haven for Latin Americans undergo reconfiguration, and North America’s borders, usually contrasted to each other, are overlaid with one another, interrogating host and guest positions from a larger continental point of view. In February of 2011, Canadians learned of a proposal by US president Barack Obama to charge Canadians and Mexicans US$5.50 each if entering the United States at airports or marine ports. Protesting the proposal, Birgit Matthiesen, spokesperson for the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters Association, declared: “It’s just yet another demonstration that crossing the border from Canada to the US is going to be costing us more and that the border is a real border. This will stymie not only tourism across our borders but also the travel of our business people.”71 Matthiesen’s outrage at the notion that the Canada-US border is “a real border” is somewhat curious, betraying the fact that Canadian business has long relied upon the border as a fiction – arguably rendered more fictional, or ineffective, by the free trade agreements signed in the 1980s and 1990s between Canada and the United States. This new, “real” border suggests that a neighbourly hospitality is no longer a possibility, given the price of admission. And while Matthiesen’s word choice resonates with observations that the 49th parallel cuts across a uniform landscape, an imposition designed by colonial cartographers, the border and its checkpoints are no less real for their arbitrary location. In the nationalist imagination, the symbolic power of the border to protect Canadian identity and values (problematically universalized for all groups within the nation-state) exceeds the precise location and mechanism of the border. Yet laws and social policies differ on either side of it; different rights are ascribed to individuals depending on which side of the line they live. That these differences do not resonate in the same way for all communities north of the

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border is crucial to effecting a critical borderlands practice. Discrepant Parallels explores the diverging, often contradictory, investments in the border – both its metaphors and its checkpoints – in cultural texts from different positions on and around the 49th parallel, probing what is at stake, and for whom, in this imaginary line by examining how it has been imagined.

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1 Navigating the “International Dots and Dashes”: Travelling the Canada-US Border Travel literature about the Canada-US border and the concomitant attempt to identify distinguishing features between the two countries begin at least as far back as Anna Brownell Jameson’s Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, published in London in 1838. Travelling in the Great Lakes region, Jameson repeatedly observes the differences between American and Canadian shores, consistently identifying the American side as more developed and more credibly defended. Of Sault Ste Marie, she comments, “Here, as everywhere else, I am struck by the difference between the two shores.”1 Further south, she notes that “at the entrance of the river St. Clair the Americans have a fort and a garrison, (Fort Gratiot,) [sic] and a lighthouse, which we passed in the night. On the opposite side we have no station; so that, in case of any misunderstanding between the two nations, it would be in the power of the Americans to shut the entrance of Lake Huron upon us.”2 Writing only a generation after the War of 1812, Jameson is aware that such “misunderstandings” not only can occur but have also, in fact, materialized. The coupling of “misunderstandings” and warfare between Canada and the United States has yet to be repeated in North American history, but anxieties about the imbalance of power persist. Jameson prefigures Canada-US border travel writing from the 1980s onwards in tying national distinctions to an imbalance in power, prompting anxieties about Canadian sovereignty. By the late twentieth century, debates about Canadian sovereignty in the midst of deepening economic integration, signalled by the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (fta , 1989) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (n af ta , 1994) between Canada, the United States, and Mexico, would focus

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predominantly on questions of economic and cultural sovereignty rather than on the overtly military anxiety suggested by Jameson. But “our sleepy Canadian shore[s]” nonetheless require some vigilance,3 as indicated by writers in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries. Where Jameson bases her possessive pronoun on her British identity and Canada’s pre-Confederation status within British North America, later Canadian writers have more at stake in defending Canadian sovereignty and a distinct Canadian identity from threats from south of the 49th parallel. In the midst of much discourse of neighbourliness between Canada and the United States, travel writers probe the hospitality between the two countries, alert to the possibility of hostilities that, while substantially different from those of the War of 1812, nonetheless threaten Canada’s host position in cultural, economic, and political senses. Examining travel writing from the 1980s to the present involves tracing the impact of high-profile negotiation between Canada and the United States, often in the context of free trade agreements, on the desire to distinguish Canada from its powerful neighbour. For instance, journalist Marian Botsford Fraser’s Walking the Line: Travels along the American / Canadian Border, based on a series of cbc Ideas documentaries originally aired in 1986 and 1987, was published in 1989, the year that the fta came into effect. Fraser mentions free trade only once, in a list of topics of conversation that also includes “herring, the weather, … and the ferry schedule” on a ferry to Grand Manan Island,4 which lies on the border between New Brunswick and Maine. Given the timing of Walking the Line’s composition and publication, Fraser’s tracing of historical border disputes at a variety of locations along the border, most of which were resolved in the United States’ favour, and her insistence that “I know Canadians who would happily fold up the boundary line and became part of the United States; I did not meet these people living close to the line,”5 clearly invoke anxieties about Canadian sovereignty and Canada’s power to occupy the host position in the midst of continental economic integration. For political scientist James Laxer, whose travel writing in The Border: Canada, the US and Dispatches from the 49th Parallel (2003) is primarily concerned with the fallout of 9/11 on Canada’s ability to maintain its own policies on immigration and border policing, “today’s border debate is the successor to the free trade debate of the 1980s”;6 in both cases, Laxer argues, the preservation of Canadian values where they diverge from the

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political consensus south of the border has been at stake. Although Laxer echoes Jameson in his observation that “the Canadian and American shores of Lake Superior are two different worlds,” with the Canadian side “rugged” and the American “more tamed by settlement,” Laxer underpins his cross-border comparison with the contrasting national policies on “guns and capital punishment, the environment and health care, war and peace” that have developed in the intervening 170 years since Jameson’s travels.7 Cross-border differences, as they are observed, constructed, and presented in Canadian travel writing, particularly in the period leading up to the ratification of the fta and the two decades since, are embedded in attempts to defend Canadian cultural sovereignty. The most sustained and nuanced study of Canada-US distinctions across the border emerges in Canadian poet David W. McFadden’s travel writing about the Great Lakes region, originally published in the Coach House Press books A Trip around Lake Erie (1980), A Trip around Lake Huron (1980), and A Trip around Lake Ontario (1988) and updated and republished by Talonbooks as Great Lakes Suite (1997). McFadden fictionalizes his travels around three lakes bisected by the Canada-US border, allowing him to probe the distinctions between the two nation-states. The assessment of sameness and difference between Canada and the United States frequently involves McFadden’s playful deployment of generalizations and stereotypes, but McFadden also subverts these tactics: the text destabilizes categories of sameness and difference, thereby claiming an unsettled and unsettling Canada-US relationship. Throughout Great Lakes Suite, McFadden demonstrates that the “hospitable” relations often claimed to characterize Canada-US relations are rife with power imbalances: the positions of host and guest, and relations of  hospitality and hostility, do not remain fixed, undermining the Canadian host position in particular and throwing its power into question. Originally written in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, at the time of US intervention in Central America, and leading up to the ratification of the free trade agreement between Canada and the United States, the three volumes of Great Lakes Suite effectively illustrate that the power discrepancies that characterize their relationship also form the clearest distinction between these countries. In the midst of these struggles for political and economic power, McFadden concerns himself with issues of cultural power, using irony and humour

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to reclaim power for Canadian culture, and arguing in favour of maintaining the border. McFadden is a prolific Canadian poet and travel writer whose career has spanned from the late 1960s until the present and whose recent recognitions – including a nomination for the Governor General’s Award for English-language poetry in 2009 and both a Griffin Prize nomination in 2008 and a win in 2012 – contrast sharply with his almost wholesale neglect by scholars of Canadian literature. Although one reason for this neglect might be his consistent use of humour in his work, this humour often has serious implications, particularly in his treatment of Canada’s cultural relationship to the United States. McFadden is essential to this study in his embodiment of a late twentieth-century incarnation of what Daniel Coleman identifies as English-Canada’s “white civility.”8 For Coleman, Anglo-Canadian identity rests on a “conflation of whiteness with civility.”9 In the cross-border context of Great Lakes Suite, it is clear that civility and Canadianness are conflated. Yet McFadden’s own whiteness as a (civil) Anglo-Canadian is crucial to his positioning. McFadden’s nationalism is both fuelled by and reflected in his attempts to distinguish Canada from the United States, and it is clearly positioned in relation to Canada’s growing self-definition during that period as a multicultural nation-state (a policy that itself was partly designed to distinguish Canada from the United States).10 Further, McFadden’s updating and republication of the Trips in a post-f ta and postn a fta context both testifies to continuing concerns about Canada’s cultural relationship to the US and foregrounds the anxieties for Canadian culture that surrounded the debates about greater continental economic integration. Through the timing of McFadden’s text’s original publication as well as its updating and republication, Great Lakes Suite offers a fascinating example of an Anglo-Canadian nationalist perspective on the Canada-US border, one that diverges from other, more canonical nationalist texts both in its representational strategies and in its attempts to forge a critical nationalism. t r av e l w r i t i n g , d i f f e r e n c e , a n d s a m e n e s s

Given that the Great Lakes basin not only “represent[s] a tenth of the population of the United States [and] a third of the population of Canada”11 but also incorporates “the most active trading points along the US-Canadian border and function[s] as a key segment in

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the expanding continental North American economy,”12 McFadden’s travels provide an effective location for Canada-US cultural comparisons leading up to and during the fallout of continental free trade agreements. The location of the lakes themselves also lends much to McFadden’s treatment of the border and the relationship between Canada and the United States, given the contradiction that it embodies: on the one hand, the Great Lakes appear to constitute a “natural” boundary between Canada and the United States;13 on the other hand, this “natural” barrier is belied by the fact that an international boundary is supposed to bisect four of the five Great Lakes, even while “there can be no cut line on water.”14 The intangibility of the border between Canada and the US becomes accentuated at this location: like the border that wraps around the south of Vancouver Island, the boundary that divides the Great Lakes is “a meandering hypothesis traced in water.”15 Joking at one point that “you could almost pick out the dots and dashes of the international boundary glistening in the waves” of Lake Huron, McFadden is sensitive to the natural features of the lakes as he attempts to “to paint” them as  “life-size map[s]” and establish “the lakes’ totally different character[s],” as his travel writing about and around the lakes grapples with the national implications of the border that runs through them.16 In much of Great Lakes Suite, McFadden’s narrator is a guest as a Canadian travelling in the United States.17 Although, like other travel narratives, it is “addressed to the home culture,”18 McFadden’s text nevertheless occupies a curious position as a piece of travel writing. Whereas travel writing often demonstrates that “in journeys outward – away from home – other landscapes, countries, and cultures are often viewed in terms of how they compare to one’s home,” the fact that “home and away are not very far apart for McFadden” complicates the text’s status as travel writing.19 Great Lakes Suite does not occupy the position upon which much writing about travel writing focuses. As Alison Russell notes, “scholarship on colonialist and imperialist discourse frequently cites nineteenth-century travel writing to illustrate the ‘othering’ effects of travel writing, often a result of the knowing gaze or privileged point of view that simultaneously colonizes the landscape and its indigenous population.”20 Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan argue that contemporary travel writing often continues this cultural dynamic, “frequently provid[ing] an effective alibi for the perpetuation or reinstalment of

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ethnocentrically superior attitudes to ‘other’ cultures, peoples, and places.”21 But McFadden’s narrator does not travel very far, and the crossing of the Canada-US border does not produce the experiences of remarkable difference generally associated with both classic and contemporary travel writing; further, he does not represent a more powerful nation in relation to the locations he visits. Given the geographical and cultural relationships between Canada and the United States, McFadden’s travel writing about the US suggests a hazy contact zone. Mary Louise Pratt defines the contact zone as a “social spac[e] where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination.”22 There is no doubt that power relations between Canada and the United States are asymmetrical, though not as obviously or violently as Pratt’s examples of “colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today.”23 The rhetoric of hospitality, neighbourliness, and friendship that characterizes the official line often obscures the neocolonial aspects of the Canada-US relationship. Further, Canadian and American cultures, partly but not entirely because of neocolonialism, are not as “disparate” as are the cultures included in Pratt’s analysis (namely, those of Europe and the Indigenous cultures of the Americas from the mid-eighteenth century forward). But neither are Canadian and American culture the same – not quite – and it is this slippage of difference and sameness, circumscribed by the hospitality that belies cultural, economic, and political domination, that provides the focus of McFadden’s exploration and critique. Elements of travel writing combine with long-debated questions about Canadian identity in the narrator’s desire to establish differences between Canada and the United States. Although Anglo-Canadian identity has also been projected as “a Britishness … purified in North America,” or an “invader-settler” postcolonial identity, comparisons with the United States have long dominated popular debates about Anglo-Canadian identity.24 As Ian Angus argues, “The existence of English Canada has been predicated on distinguishing ourselves from Americans”;25 and indeed, even Coleman’s notion of a  British-descended “white civility” project for English Canada includes this cross-border distinction, for “independence from the British parent was matched in Canadian maturation rhetoric with moral superiority to the American sibling” in early twentieth-­century assertions of Canadian identity.26

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In Great Lakes Suite, the narrator justifies both his engagement with the travel writing genre and the uniqueness of Canadian identity by declaring, “For a Canadian the United States is an exotic country” (50). McFadden’s use of the word “exotic” to describe the United States implies a greater degree of difference between Canada and the US than what might usually be claimed. Laurie Ricou describes Vancouver and Seattle’s relationship to each other as one between “comfortable exotics,”27 but McFadden does not temper his cross-border use of “exotic” here. Definitions of exoticism that examine the role of empire help to clarify the implications of McFadden’s invocation of exoticism. As Graham Huggan writes, exoticism, having “proved over time to be a highly effective instrument of imperial power,” is “a political as much as an aesthetic practice.”28 If exoticism may be “reversible,” and generated within any culture, “dominant or not, whether colony or ‘métropole,’ peripheral territory or imperial center,” we conventionally expect “‘strong,’ recognizable differences between cultures and subjects” in the assignation of the exotic,29 certainly greater differences than those readily detectible between Canada and the United States. Tzvetan Todorov argues that exoticism does not arise between “well-known neighbors” because we view as exotic “the peoples and cultures that are most remote from us and least known to us.”30 In declaring the United States to be exotic from a Canadian perspective, McFadden therefore enacts what Huggan describes as “manufactur[ing] otherness,”31 a crucial attempt to divide Canada and the United States both aesthetically and politically. As Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin argue, the exotic presents “stimulating or exciting difference, something with which the domestic [can] be (safely) spiced.”32 But significantly, McFadden associates the United States with both exoticism and “an overpowering sense of boredom” (50), as though American boredom forms part of what makes the country exotic in the first place, undermining a basic assumption about the idea of the exotic. In so doing, McFadden also subverts the travel genre he employs as well as the cultural allure of the United States even as he gives it his attention. Michael Kowalewski claims that “a postcolonial legacy of cultural ignorance or wilful distortion has simply made it more difficult to indulge in the sort of breezy generalities (or even outright bigotry) that characterizes much nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century travel narratives.”33 Not only does Kowalewski’s statement refer to

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a time period earlier than McFadden’s, but it also applies “especially” to travel writing about “non-Western cultures.”34 In contrast, Great Lakes Suite, as a Canadian text about the United States, presents Americans as fair game for the narrator’s own “breezy generalities.” Despite the narrator’s claim that he “generally speaking dislike[s] generalities” (214), Great Lakes Suite, particularly the first volume, is replete with overt generalizations about Americans: “Americans are friendly people” (44); but they “always seem to be hurrying home to watch television” (50); there are “a lot of fat people … [e]verywhere you turn” (62) because “in the u sa everyone tries to get as fat as possible” (98). Such generalizations suggest the necessity of identifying concrete distinctions between Canadians and Americans. Despite the regional specificities of McFadden’s text, his terms are almost exclusively national rather than provincial or statebased. For instance, McFadden’s claim that “everyone” in the US attempts to gain weight contrasts with the assertion that “in Canada everyone tries to keep as slim as possible”: “That’s one of the many (subtle?) differences between the two countries. Vive le difference [sic]!” (98).35 The text’s obsession with American obesity might be read as a substitution for the identification of ethnic difference between Canada and the United States. As Claudia Sadowski-Smith writes, “Canada’s majority population appears to be ethnically similar to the majority of US society,” feeding what she identifies as “the impression of the fundamental likeness of both countries.”36 McFadden’s depiction of weight attempts to contradict this apparent “fundamental likeness.” In the original edition of A Trip around Lake Erie, McFadden simply describes diverging attitudes to weight as “the big difference” between Canada and the US.37 In the later version, however, McFadden’s interjection of “(subtle?)” not only functions as an ironic comment on his projection of American obesity but also raises doubts about the status of international difference. Is the difference subtle, or is it not, as indicated by the question mark? If this difference is so readily visible (“everywhere you turn”), surely subtlety can hardly be one of its characteristics. The question mark suggests an uncertainty as to whether this particular difference actually makes a difference, or one “big” enough to speak for these countries. Concerned with Ontario geography and its counterpart in American states across the border, Great Lakes Suite has little to say

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about the role of Quebec in establishing Canada-US difference. The conclusion of McFadden’s meditation on obesity distinguishing the United States from Canada with the (grammatically incorrect) French phrase suggests that Quebec, or perhaps French Canadianness generally, contributes to producing difference between the two countries. As Angus notes, “the inclusion of Quebec within the federal state guaranteed a difference from the United States that was none of our [English Canada’s] making.”38 McFadden’s omission of the acute accent and application of the masculine rather than the feminine article signals his anglophone position, writing over the Frenchlanguage difference Canada presents in relation to the United States with English-language dominant sameness between the two countries. The addition of the French phrase for the 1997 republication, just two years after the narrow defeat of the second referendum on Quebec sovereignty, further positions McFadden as a constituent of an accommodating Anglo-Canada happy to celebrate difference within the nation-state. As Eva Mackey notes, throughout Canadian history, difference has been valued “especially, as in the case of [Quebec], if it helped to construct Canada as different from the usa.”39 Thus, the “difference” McFadden exhorts to “vive” is that of the linguistic and cultural diversity guaranteed by the presence of Quebec within Confederation as well as the Canada-US difference he perceives, through generalization, regarding obesity. The narrator does not simply generalize about Americans, however, as he also includes Canadians under the umbrella of his generalizations. For instance, he attributes his and his wife’s taste for tea to the fact of their “being Canadians” (70). But McFadden undermines his generalizations about both Canadians and Americans through his admission of the faultiness of generalizations themselves: “Whenever you make any generality about a race the opposite becomes equally true” (50). McFadden’s recognition of the personal basis for his statements begins to unravel a projected uniformity of experience. His truism about generalizations gives way to the following shuttling back and forth between personal and collective experience: All I know is that there is an overpowering sense of boredom in the American air. You feel it, at least I do, as soon as you cross the border. I remember feeling it on my first trip to the United States when I was twelve. For a Canadian the United States is an

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exotic country and any Canadian travelling through the United States is bound to have a sense of déja vù about many of the things he sees, as if they were seen before in old Hollywood movies. It’s as if all the beauty and excitement one would expect has been harvested by the American film industry, leaving nothing but emptiness and despair. Canada is a much more exciting country in every way. At least that’s the way I felt in the summer of 1977. (50) The passage’s constant shifting of pronouns reveals not only a discomfort with generalizations about the narrator’s personal experiences but also a desire to claim that his experiences can be extended to more conclusive statements about the Canada-US relationship. This pronoun slippage (from “I” to “you” to “he” to “one”) throughout the passage offers both a sense of play with the author / itative position and an acknowledgment of the impossibility of the travel writing project’s representativeness: in constantly shifting his pronouns, McFadden owns up to the fact that as he writes towards the Home culture, he cannot claim to speak for it unproblematically. McFadden also acknowledges, plays with, and complicates his generalizations through self-reflexive commentary. Blaming the fact that the Bay City State Park does not allow tents in its campsite on “the average middle-class American family’s dislike, jealousy, envy of adolescents and adolescence,” in the later edition McFadden draws attention to his strategy by commenting in parentheses, “oh how he loves to generalise on the wing!” (138). In demonstrating “how [he] imposes subjectivity” on his descriptions, McFadden “plays on … notions of authenticity,” claimed by Holland and Huggan to be characteristic of postmodern travel writing.40 McFadden recognizes his tendency to generalize, acknowledges the limitations and faultiness of generalizations, yet continues to use them and, in fact, to seek them out as part of his determination of international difference. His family’s attempt at the end of its the trip around Lake Erie to name “Things Distinctively Canadian” is patently unsatisfying: its the McFaddens’ answers are the “maple leaf on the McDonald’s sign,”41 a Canadian licence plate, and the Dominion Store (108). These differences are not substantially different or “authentically” Canadian: McDonald’s is an American corporation, with the maple leaf only a  small concession to its Canadian market; Americans also have licence plates, with only cosmetic differences between them and their

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Canadian counterparts; and the Dominion supermarket, despite its reference to Canada in its name, is essentially one example of capitalist business, which can equally be found in the United States. As such, McFadden’s persistent invocation of generalization seeks to improve upon these “distinctive” traits by drawing sharper distinctions between the two nation-states, but the recognition of the faultiness of generalization frustrates this process. McFadden’s treatment of difference between Canada and the United States is further complicated by the undeniable sameness between the two countries. The idea of the Canada-US border as “both arbitrary and nondifferentiating” surfaces in McFadden’s text,42 as the narrator’s exchange with his daughters at a MichiganOntario border crossing indicates: From the International Bridge we looked down and saw the ­rapids far below. “Now we’re in Canada,” I said. “It looks just like the United States,” said Alison. “It does?” “Yeah. It’s the same kind of concrete on the bridge.” “Can’t you feel a difference in the air?” “Yeah, I guess you can. A little.” (177–8) Whereas Canada-US sameness is not only palpable but also quite literally concrete, difference is willed into belief, remaining intangible, minute, and only to be “guessed” at. Great Lakes Suite also invokes Canada-US sameness through its pattern of cross-border doubling, specifically with regard to names. For instance, we learn not only of a car accident reported between a “Henry Sloorz, aged 47, of Toronto” and a “Henry Sloorz, aged 47, of Akron, Ohio” (308) but also of a US border guard, Claude Beausoleil, who bears the same name as the Québécois poet (334). The most extended and dramatic treatment of this cross-border doubling occurs in A Trip around Lake Erie, when the McFaddens are invited to the home of another McFadden family in Ohio. In response to Joan’s hesitation to enter the home of a complete stranger, the narrator insists, “They’re an average family just like us” (71). Likeness between these two families transforms into sameness when they discover that not only is the Ohio family named McFadden but also that the father is named David (in the original publication, however, his name is Donald). This remarkable coincidence raises

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questions as to the veracity of McFadden’s narrator, fitting for the travel-writing genre and its “long history – a license – of entertaining fraud.”43 But whereas elsewhere McFadden overtly sends up the genre’s association with exaggeration in his narrator’s claims that the trip around Lake Erie concludes with a return to a house full of dead fish (112), that the narrator and his wife go back in time to 1967 while travelling around Lake Huron (154), and that the narrator returns to an apartment full of rose petals, complete with a computer destroyed by an axe following his Lake Ontario trip (413), the example of the two David McFaddens both seems plausible (if unlikely – and more so for the reader who notices the change in name between editions) and contributes to the discussion of determining Canada-US difference. The narrator’s experience of sameness through naming ultimately leads him to draw distinctions between himself and his American counterpart on the grounds that the narrator is less authentic. When he orders pizza for both “the American McFaddens” and “the Canadian McFaddens” and is asked for his name, he claims to “fee[l] naked in a foreign country”: “Did he know I was a Canadian? I felt as if I weren’t a real McFadden, but a counterfeit. The real McFadden was in the driver’s seat in the van” (84). By national implication, the narrator also feels like a counterfeit American, tapping into Canada’s cultural inferiority complex in relation to the United States: the Canadian McFadden is the same as, but only insofar as he is a lesser copy of, the American McFadden. McFadden’s alteration of the first name of the father from the original edition to the updated republication in 1997 accentuates the sameness of the two families, suggesting an enhanced anxiety about the ability to distinguish Canadianness from Americanness in a postfta and post-na f ta context. Operating in tension with this manifestation of troubled sameness, however, are the differences that arise between the two families, ­particularly during their discussions of race. The American David McFadden downplays the white supremacist assumptions behind slavery in the US by claiming, “We were all slaves at one time” and declaring that African-American slaves were less oppressed than his Scottish ancestors were by the Romans (79). He also endorses racist stereotypes of African Americans as violent by stating that the narrator was lucky not to have been killed by an African-American family who had laughed at him a few days previously: “A Canadian is easy picking for them. They’d take you for all you’re worth and if that

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wasn’t enough they’d take your life” (79). Chloris, the American McFadden’s wife, unabashedly admits she has “little tolerance for people of other racial origins” (87) and refers to one of her neighbours as a “greasy little wop” (79). In this manner, McFadden “unsettles” Canada-US sameness in more than one capacity, both through the difference in the narrator’s attitude to race as compared to his American namesake and the discomfort produced by these exchanges. Although McFadden does not mention Canada’s official multicultural policy, first articulated in 1971, entrenched in the 1982 Constitution, and enshrined in legislation through the Canadian Multiculturalism Act, 1988, his drawing of distinctions between himself and the American McFaddens, between Canada and the United States, invokes official multiculturalism as a key difference between the two countries; the explicit racism of the American McFaddens throws Canadian civility into relief through the implication that Canadians are more tolerant of, and hospitable to, difference. h o s p i ta l i t y , h o s t i l i t y , a n d q u e s t i o n s o f t e r r i to ry

Although McFadden’s narrator is constantly aware of being in a different country and worrying about his “foreignness,” the text also reveals that, to a certain extent, the border does not function as a border, at least when approaching it from the south: it does not successfully distinguish Canadian from American territory. Recounting a “preliminary exploration of the shore of Lake Erie” (19), McFadden describes cottages owned by American families that appear to write over land marked as Canadian territory by nation-state boundaries. The privately owned cottages infringe on public beach access, and when the narrator unsuccessfully attempts to find a rare access point and must pull into a cottage driveway, the result reveals competing claims to territory: “A woman came running out of her cottage and stood on the verandah screaming at us. There was an American flag flying from her roof” (19). Although the cottage may be on land enclosed by the Canadian border, its owners claim it as American territory; private ownership supersedes public access to the water. This competition of nationally circumscribed territory confuses relations of hospitality and undercuts the power of the Canadian host. Within her personal property, the American woman becomes

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the host who wields the power to refuse hospitality. McFadden shares concerns about this undermining of Canadian power with key Canadian nationalist texts of the 1970s. For instance, McFadden’s illustration that American presence undermines Canadians’ “athome-ness” in Canada, suggesting, “I think it’s natural for a Canadian to feel more out of place in a part of Canada which has been taken over by American than he would say in the u sa per se” (183), echoes Dennis Lee’s diagnosis of Canada as a “space which is radically in question” for its citizens.44 According to Lee, Canada “as a public space … has become an American colony,” resulting in a situation whereby “if you are Canadian, home is a place that is not home to you.”45 In McFadden’s text, this lack of “at-home-ness” manifests itself in the failure of Americans to recognize that they have crossed a national boundary. At one point on St Joseph Island, the narrator meets Elmer Trump, an American navy bean farmer who complains about Canadian farmers undercutting the American industry: “I just don’t feel like going to Canada any more.” “But you’re in Canada right now.” “Well, yes. But this is different. This isn’t the part where they grow things. This is just a place for…” “Americans to fish?” (186) The notion of Canada as a preserve for American leisure intersects with Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972), whose narrator characterizes Americans as dangerous bullies. She states, “We used to think they were harmless and funny and inept,” but Americans have become synonymous with unthinking, casual violence, as in the description of a “big powerboat” with “an American flag on the front and another at the back”: “The engine cuts and it skids in beside us, its wash rocking us sharply.”46 In Atwood’s novel, not all “Americans” are actually American, as the arrival of Ontarians mistaken for Americans indicates. But where Atwood’s novel detaches Americanness from Americans on the grounds that Canadians can be “Americans” too by associating themselves with “technology, violence, and destruction,”47 McFadden’s narratives of Americans who do not acknowledge they are in Canada illustrates a discrepancy between himself and these figures as cross-border travellers. When Trump insists, “this is different,” “this” is different from other parts

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of Canada, not from the United States; the narrator has to remind Trump that he is in Canada in the first place. A similar conversation takes place between the narrator and Caribou Jack, who claims that he was given his nickname “way up in Canada”: “Like Elmer Trump, Caribou Jack seemed to have forgotten we were in Canada” (187). The narrator refers to these Americans as “guests in [his] own country,” thereby positioning himself as host, but the fact that he has to inform his “guests” that “this is Canada we’re in” (187) unsettles his host position. By refusing to recognize their current location as Canada, Trump and Caribou Jack resist interpellation as guests. This failure by the American “guests” to recognize their location signals an apparent failure of the border to fulfill its function. Gloria Anzaldúa writes that borders work “to distinguish us from them,”48 but perhaps this is more palpable at the Mexico-US border, the source of Anzaldúa’s observation, than it is at North America’s northern border. The narrator makes an allowance for Trump and Caribou Jack when he concedes, “Then again we were only a few miles from the border” (187). But this excuse raises further questions: Does a border fail to “kick in” until a certain distance? If so, how large is that distance? If Trump and Caribou Jack simply forget having crossed the border, what are the implications of a “forgettable” border? Perhaps the lack of “defence” of the Canada-US border encourages this blurring of the two countries on the part of Trump and Caribou Jack, this “forgetting” re-emphasizing the border’s “arbitrary and nondifferentiating” character. Nevertheless, the fact that “the border has held sharply different meanings for Canadians and Americans” is evident in McFadden’s text;49 the narrator never forgets which side of the border he is on. We might read the characters of Trump and Caribou Jack as having failed to recognize that they have crossed a threshold and that their position has subsequently shifted. However, we might also read their lack of recognition through Derrida’s concept of hostipitality and its illustration of the links between hospitality and hostility. The host position is based on “the master of the household,” whose hospitality depends upon his “maintain[ing] his own authority in his own home”: “in one’s own home, one is master of the household, master of the city, or master of the nation, the language, or the state, places from which one bids the other welcome.”50 Derrida argues that hospitality is compromised by hostility because “perhaps no one welcomed is ever completely welcome”;51 given that the power

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position of the host must remain intact for the conditions of hospitality to exist, hospitality becomes conditional. In Canada-US relations, the undermining of Canada’s power as host in the first place presents another manifestation of hostility, a refusal on the part of US power to relinquish the host position even within the boundaries of another nation-state. In Great Lakes Suite, the refusal to acknowledge the (Canadian) narrator’s host status, precisely by failing to recognize that it is the narrator who is in his own home, and the behaviour of the American cottage owner who shouts at the McFadden family illustrate the slippage of hospitality into hostility. McFadden aptly demonstrates the overwriting of Canadianness with Americanness in his recounting of the launching of breakfast meals at McDonald’s and the accompanying “great huge billboard on the Mountain in Hamilton, Ontario. It said g o o d m o r n i n g , a m e r i c a . There were a couple of complaints and the manager of Canadian operations apologised publicly, saying it had been a human error. So they blocked out America and wrote in Canada” (141). Recognition of Canadian location has also been “blocked out,” the same “human error” as that committed by Elmer Trump and Caribou Jack. The McDonald’s case suggests not a Canadian branch of an American corporation but, rather, an Americanization of a Canadian location by the corporation and its attempt to interpellate the citizens (particularly in their status as consumers) of Hamilton into Americanness. Although the drive for corporate profit knows no borders, particularly since the proliferation of free trade agreements, McDonald’s is “an American corporation whose economic interests are largely indistinguishable from the  political interests of the United States and its market-driven politicians.”52 The narrator’s experiences in the United States present different facets of Canada-US hospitality and hostility. The ease with which the McFaddens cross the border in A Trip around Lake Huron is the exception rather than the rule: “I wanted to complain. Where’s your respect for tradition?” (133). In A Trip around Lake Erie, a “rather sarcastic” customs official gives the impression they are “going to be turned back” (41) for lack of documentation; and in A Trip around Lake Ontario, the narrator and film crew are not granted entry until the customs officers conduct inspections of the film equipment and consult with other authorities: “They didn’t want to let us in if we were going to be taking work away from US-born filmmakers”

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(333–4). Ironically, Claude Beausoleil, the customs officer, describes his involvement in “a group of American history buffs” who travel “to Toronto periodically to put on historical reenactments”: They would take their uniforms and old muskets, and they would go up in buses and drink bourbon and Budweiser all the way, yelling and screaming. And when they got there they would soberly reenact the sacking of York for the tourists. Did they get into arguments with the Canadian history buffs about their particular interpretation of history? “Oh yeah, we argue about all that stuff all the time,” he said. “We thought in those days that if we came up to Canada that Canadians would be glad to join us, throw off British rule.” (335) The customs officer who assesses the threat that the narrator and film crew pose to the United States also “periodically” performs US military action against Canada, contradicting the host’s version of history. He has been a bad guest, one who forgets whose house he is in, who makes himself too much at home without “respecting the being-at-home” of the Canadians he encounters,53 whose version of history he seeks to override. These concerns with at-home-ness, host and guest positions, and competing versions of history raise questions about where the Indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes region fit into McFadden’s examination of cross-border power relations. Where McFadden might worry about the efficacy of the border, the “lines drawn upon the water by colonial states” do not hold the same significance for Indigenous peoples.54 As Donald A. Grinde Jr insists, “The border is a clear manifestation of colonialism and of the continuing domination of Native peoples.”55 Great Lakes Suite, like Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies, employs a discourse of indigeneity to accentuate the position of Euro-Canadians in relation to the United States. Just as Lee laments the fact that Canadians are “never at / home in native space,”56 McFadden’s narrator criticizes St Joseph Island’s proAmerican stance: It was in the Canadian air that night – a sense of commercial smugness, a sense of commercial enthrallment to the Americans. No one wanted to waste time with Canadians who weren’t

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lugging big boats and who obviously didn’t have buckets of money to spend. The natives wanted to be ordered around by the Americans with dune buggies and cabin cruisers and huge Winnebagos with television sets and air conditioners. They wanted to grovel in front of them. What would the original settlers have had to say about the way their grandchildren were conducting their lives?” (31) McFadden resembles Atwood here in simultaneously conflating commercialism with US culture and demonstrating how Canadians themselves can be complicit in “American” values. However, McFadden’s use of “natives” linked to “original settlers” is problematic, given that “natives” here are not First Nations people but white people who invite a neocolonial power imbalance by catering to American customers (signalled, ironically, by the presence of “huge Winnebagos,” invoking Indigenous peoples through the recreational vehicle brand). Thus, “original settlers” is paradoxical, given that invader-settlers were not “original” in Canada but, rather, colonizers who find their new incarnations in the Americans. McFadden does gesture towards the arbitrariness of the border when he claims that “you couldn’t see the dotted line separating Canada from the usa” (133). Indigenous peoples are mentioned infrequently in Great Lakes Suite, and an earlier acknowledgment of the disjunction between Euro- and Native North American senses of history, McFadden’s response to the fact that it is “the 201st birthday of the United States of America” (47) with “Ta-ta! Tell that to the Indians,”57 does not make the cut in the later edition. But driving over the Garden River, “which flows down through the Garden River Indian Reserve,” the narrator notes that “on the abutment of a train bridge someone had painted this is indian territory and indian power” (179). McFadden offers no comment, but his inclusion of these signs does destabilize the position of EuroCanadians. As Karl S. Hele notes, “the Great Lakes region prior to contact … was home to hundreds of thousands of Aboriginal Nations living both in direct proximity to the lakes and their watershed or regularly making seasonal use of the region.”58 McFadden’s text implicitly concedes that everywhere the narrator travels is “indian territory,” the capital letters asserting Indigenous claims and forcefully protesting the distinctions Euro-North American politics have drawn. McFadden thereby both troubles the relationship

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between “native” and “Native” and positions his narrator, albeit briefly, as a Euro-Canadian guest on both sides of the border. Nevertheless, McFadden is primarily concerned with EuroCanadian, particularly Anglo-Canadian, cultural sovereignty. He overtly addresses issues of national hospitality in the doubled David McFadden narrative. The Canadian McFaddens are invited to the American McFaddens’ house even before the sameness of names has been established. What appears to be an excessive hospitality is punctured by a lack of hospitality when the American McFaddens lock their Canadian guests out of the house overnight: “I was awakened by the alarm clock in my bladder. I slipped out of the van and tried to get into the house. But all the doors were locked. That didn’t seem right. When you have guests sleeping in a van in your driveway it’s only common courtesy to leave a door open. But then I remembered this was the United States” (80–1). The narrator suggests that the “rules” of hospitality differ on the other side of the border, explaining that “suburban paranoia really prevail[s]” (81) in the United States. This “paranoia” compromises hospitality, rendering what seems an even excessive hospitality somewhat hostile. The locked door breaks the illusion of opportunity to the Canadian McFaddens to make themselves at home, suggesting that the “being-at-home” of the American McFaddens depends on securing this threshold of the door,59 even against invited guests. What begins as excessive hospitality resolves as a limited hospitality, whose conditions are “controlled” by those who possess the key to the locked door.60 Other instances in the text display an excessive American hospitality to Canadian cultural figures, so much so that they are claimed as American, their cultural guest status being exchanged for that of the position of host. In A Trip around Lake Erie, the McFaddens come across a First World War memorial for Erie County soldiers. Although “the plaque also [bears] the words of the famous poem, ‘In Flanders Fields,’” and identifies the poem’s author as John McCrae, “there [is] no indication that McCrae was a Canadian, from the city of Guelph, Ontario, and had served in the Canadian Army. There was no indication the poem was anything but American” (57–8). The implied Americanness of McCrae is outdone by the overtly declared Americanness of Bliss Carman in A Trip around Lake Huron: “Bombing out of Cheboygan we passed a roadside park dedicated ‘in honour of the great American poet, Bliss Carman (1861–1929).’ There was a little plaque telling about Bliss and his

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work but it didn’t mention that he was born and educated in Canada and is known in Canada as a Canadian poet, though it is true that he spent many years in the u sa” (159). Carman was clearly granted entry and welcomed into the United States, but the celebration of Carman within the United States as a “great American poet” translates him into one of the hosts and insists upon his contribution to  the American host culture. Nick Mount’s study of expatriate Canadian writers demonstrates both the permeability of the Canada-US border for earlier generations of Canadian writers in search of a market and the anxieties this “brain drain” caused at home. Carman’s retention of his Canadian citizenship is somewhat undone by his “irritating decision to die on the American side of the border,” which made “reclaiming [him] more of a challenge” for Canadians.61 McFadden acknowledges Carman’s residence in the US, thus drawing attention to the cross-border flow of what has come to be considered “Canadian” literature; however, he also suggests that, in exclusively Americanizing Carman, the monument’s seeming hospitality functions aggressively and fails to account for the cross-border features of North American literary culture. The American appropriation of McCrae and Carman illustrates the power dynamic McFadden has earlier described between Windsor and Detroit: in Windsor, “no matter where you are in town you can look up and see the huge Ambassador Bridge to Detroit rainbowing through the air like a cultural and economic siphon” (39).62 McFadden attempts to reciprocate later with his own cultural siphoning when he describes Mackinac Island, “where the Canadian poet Hart Crane spent so many summers as a child. The incredible summer homes of rich Americans, the Governor’s Mansion, the Grand Hotel with its mile-long porch shimmering in the haze. I know Hart Crane wasn’t really a Canadian just as John McCrae and Bliss Carman weren’t really Americans. Mind you, a Canadian, like a Mexican or a Bolivian and so on, is always an American, while an American is very seldom a Canadian” (161). The act of declaring Crane a Canadian is one of retaliation; however, it cannot stand up to the Americanization of McCrae and Carman. First, McFadden admits his lie only two sentences later. Second, whereas McFadden can find many (Canadian) people to support his claim for McCrae’s and Carman’s Canadianness, no such support will exist for his rewriting Crane’s national identity. McFadden undermines his own “hospitality” towards Crane by “welcoming”

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him as a Canadian with the retaliatory hostility that underlies his claim. But he also alters the terms of Americanness, unravelling its equation with the United States in a way that allows him to consent to the Americanization of McCrae and Carman: they are American insofar as they are of the Americas. McFadden rearticulates American territory and citizenship to elude the boundaries of the United States, but whereas the boundaries of Americanness dissolve, Canadian borders remain intact within a larger hemispheric identity in the Americas. Great Lakes Suite thereby attempts to exercise some cultural power of its own. In his essay “Canada: The Borderline Case,” Marshall McLuhan argues that the undefended border “has the effect of keeping Canadians in a perpetual philosophic mood which nourishes flexibility in the absence of strong commitments or definite goals,” in contrast to the United States, which, with its “heavy commitments and sharply defined objectives, is not in a good position to be philosophic, or cool, or flexible.”63 McLuhan celebrates Canada’s “low-profile identity” and concludes that “Canada’s borderline encourages the expenditure on communication of what might otherwise be present on armament and fortification,” and that “the majority of Canadians are very grateful for the free use of American news and entertainment on the air and for the princely hospitality and neighborly dialogue on the ground.”64 The “free use” of American culture would end in the literal sense with the f ta’s Article 2006, which “required Canadian cable companies to pay royalties for the use of US broadcast signals they had previously taken off the air gratis.”65 Further, the case of the Canadian film industry and attempts to introduce quotas to combat the US domination of film distribution in Canada illustrates the cost of free trade: “To make room for a Canadian cultural industry to emerge or grow, they would have to reduce the space occupied by the existing American industry, whose wrath would expose Canada to US sanctions.”66 As Stephen Clarkson argues, Canadian culture as a whole was made vulnerable to both the f ta and n af ta. Despite the “much-touted ‘cultural exemption’” for Canada in the f ta , “the simple act of an economic treaty’s mentioning culture – even in order to exempt it from the treaty’s provisions – established the premise that culture is an industrial sector subject to the potential discipline of trade rules,” a premise that was “entrenched” in n af ta.67 The fta also stipulated that the United States could “tak[e] measures ‘of

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equivalent commercial effect’ in any field it pleased against any new Canadian cultural policy that might hurt the interests of an American corporation … Far from being exempt, culture had been directly targeted” by the fta .68 Culture is a site of cross-border struggle, as both free trade and Great Lakes Suite make evident. As McFadden is aware, and as has become patently clear post-f ta and postn a fta, even so-called “free” cultural products come at a cultural price, and neighbours are not always hospitable. i r o n y , h u m o u r , a n d s t r at e g i e s o f c u lt u r a l p ow e r

Great Lakes Suite seeks to retake Canadian cultural power, largely through McFadden’s use of irony and humour. Although many of Great Lakes Suite’s humorous moments have nothing to do with the imbalance of nation-state power across the border, particularly those dealing with his family and his dog in the first two volumes and the film crew in the third, McFadden’s humour develops a particularly critical edge in his exploration of Canada-US relations. As Linda Hutcheon argues, irony and humour should not be considered synonymous: “Not all ironies are amusing … – though some are. Not all humor is ironic – though some is. Yet both involve complex power relations and both depend upon social and situational context for their very coming into being.”69 Not all of McFadden’s humour is ironic, and not all of his irony is amusing, but in their treatment of  Canada-US relations, and in McFadden’s implicit address to a Canadian audience, they bear out the fact that “just as irony comes into play because discursive communities exist, so humor too … reinforce[s] already existing connections within a community.”70 Although Holland and Huggan claim that travel writing “often does its best to persuade its readers not to take it seriously,”71 McFadden’s use of irony and humour deserves some “serious” investigation and incorporates a cultural critique that demands to be taken seriously. The appropriateness of irony as a tool for McFadden’s engagement with the Canada-US border perhaps lies in what Hutcheon identifies as irony’s liminality. Taking her cue from anthropologist Victor Turner and his examination of rites of passage, Hutcheon argues that irony “opens new space, literally between opposing meanings, where new things can happen.”72 For Turner, liminality is “the state and process of midtransition,” of being located in or on

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the limen, the threshold.73 But we might also consider the limen in spatial and national terms, for “the border is a liminal space that can be used to secure difference or reinforce similarity according to … social, political, and cultural concerns.”74 Thus the nation-state border, too, figures as a site of transition, of being neither one thing nor the other. McFadden’s oscillation between meanings in his ironic approach to the border and the relationship between the countries on either side of it operates analogously to the border’s position. Hutcheon identifies liminality as the characteristic of “constructive” irony, irony that “works to assert difference as a positive and does so through double-talking, doubled discourses.”75 She contrasts this constructive irony with a deconstructive irony, “a kind of critical ironic stance that works to distance, undermine, unmask, relativize, destabilize.”76 McFadden’s irony encompasses both of these efforts: he deconstructs by undermining some aspects of unthinking US patriotism, for example, but also works to “assert (Canadian) difference as a positive.” The slippage between McFadden as author and McFadden as narrator forms a key element of the text’s irony. “I love to pretend I’m even more naive than I really am” (64), the narrator reveals in A Trip around Lake Erie. The protagonist’s naïveté, admitted or otherwise, works as part of the author’s ironic strategy. As D.C. Muecke explains, the ironist may cultivate “a fictitious voice and persona, still speaking, however, as the ironist”; further, “the relationship of the persona to the author is a combination of … the degree of transparency or opacity of the mask, and the degree to which it resembles or ‘dissembles’ the face behind it.”77 McFadden as author plays with this relationship: “I give my narrator my name but he is merely an invention” (413), McFadden writes; he also bestows upon his narrator his profession, family life, and personal history. Narrator and author collude in the text’s ironic strategy, where McFadden as narrator refrains from commentary in order to allow the author, and the text, tacitly to critique. In this sense, McFadden as narrator engages in a kind of Socratic irony, as he does not overtly critique the racists he encounters, allowing them to condemn themselves in the eyes of the reader. McFadden thus produces an ironic civility where these racist Americans are concerned, seemingly allowing the racists to speak without censure while embedding a critique in his writing. For example, the narrator offers a lengthy narrative of witnessing racist power imbalances in North Carolina to the American David

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McFadden, presumably with the expectation that the American McFadden will provide some sort of analysis of racial politics in his country. But to the narrator’s recounting of a white shop-owner’s humiliation and mistreatment of a black employee, followed by the owner’s self-congratulation for having “as many nigger friends as white friends … Of course[,] … [w]e would never let them in our living rooms” (83), the American McFadden responds, “the blacks up here are really sour,” and “the South is really progressing” (84). The self-congratulation of the shop-owner in North Carolina figures him as an alazon of sorts, given his “imperception or ignorance of there being anything in the situation beyond what he sees” and his “confident unawareness.”78 McFadden the narrator’s lack of commentary on both the North Carolina shop-owner and the American McFadden grant him a kind of protective guard through a performed naïveté, yet McFadden the author, juxtaposing the narrator’s story of the incident to the racist responses, renders the respondents victims of his critique. Performing an ironic civility, the narrator also appears to be a “good” guest to these Americans by not confronting them about their views while the writer criticizes them through his framing of the incident. Elsewhere, McFadden as author attributes an internal commentary to McFadden the narrator, and it is here, perhaps, that the gap between the two McFaddens is at its most undetectable. In the following example, the ironic response to a racist utterance is demonstrated through silence, not protesting within the action of the narrative itself but articulated through an irony that undercuts the cultural power of the racist. In A Trip around Lake Ontario, Casey, tending bar at the fire hall in Sackett’s Harbour, declares, “I was born and raised in Buffalo – that is now all niggers,” to which McFadden adds, “This last was uttered in a deeply ominous tone, like the British complaining about Saxon encroachments in the sixth century” (366). McFadden thereby fractures the basis of Casey’s own (presumed) racial identity, implicitly foregrounding the hyphen between Anglo and Saxon and ridiculing Casey’s anxiety about racial invasion by comparing it to the attempted maintenance of distinctions that no longer exist and have not done so for more than a millennium. US racism thus figures as a backwardness that implicitly contrasts with Canadian society. As Coleman argues, “for many Canadians, multiculturalism represents Canadian

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progressiveness.”79 A Trip around Lake Ontario’s original publication the year of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act’s ratification (1988) suggests a more progressive Canada in contrast to the United States, with the official multicultural policy an “‘evolution’ of nationhood” for Canada that diverges sharply from McFadden the author’s posited retention of ancient hostilities in the United States.80 The author and narrator also seem to converge in the efforts to retake Canadian cultural power. Although McFadden protests the loss of Canadian cultural power through the US appropriation of John McCrae, he proceeds to counteract this loss with humorous cultural strikes of his own, not just through his momentary claiming of Hart Crane as a Canadian poet but also through counter-strikes against the US appropriation of Canadian poets. He explains that the Call of the Wild gift shop includes “a poetry nook where you could buy cheaply printed pamphlets of nature verse by such American poets as Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, and so on” (160).81 As Hutcheon argues, “irony is a wonderfully covert way for repressed Canadians to express either aggression or enthusiasm.”82 Although we have no way of knowing whether Carman and Lampman are even carried by the shop, much less identified as Americans, McFadden’s ironized US appropriation of Canadian culture is clear. The fact that McFadden includes Lampman here increases the ironic gap between what he writes and what he means, for, whereas Canadian-born Carman was based in the United States for much of his adult writing life, Lampman remained in Canada (as McFadden has already reminded us in A Trip around Lake Erie’s chapter about “Canada’s first postal-employee poet” [23]); there is therefore no conceivable basis upon which he could be appropriated by American literature. McFadden continues to build the momentum of cultural power as retaliation against US cultural appropriation when he describes a Mackinac Straits State Park employee as “look[ing] vaguely Canadian, like Bliss Carman” (164). This joke works on several levels: the idea that anyone can “look Canadian” in the first place, especially in comparison with Americans, seems a ridiculous and humorous claim; however, it also operates as an attempted distinction of Canadians, insisting upon a separate and identifiable identity. Robert Kroetsch has examined this idea of “visible” Canadianness, particularly in the context of joking:

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There was a cartoon in The New Yorker of two men in business suits shaking hands. And one says to the other, “Gee, you don’t look like a Canadian.” Behind that joke is a fundamental Canadian problem.83 The joke betrays, as Kroetsch argues, a “scepticism about our [Canadian] existence.”84 Atwood’s Surfacing invokes this anxiety in the narrator’s own misrecognition of Canadians as Americans, and she herself has been misrecognized: “‘We’re not from the States,’ I said, annoyed that he’d mistaken me for one of them”; “I was furious with them, they’d disguised themselves.”85 McFadden’s insistence upon visible Canadianness therefore reverses the New Yorker cartoon. Although the qualification of “vaguely Canadian” partly undoes the distinction suggested in the possibility of “looking Canadian,” underscoring the text’s demonstration of a slippage between sameness and difference between Canada and the United States, the punch line of “like Bliss Carman” reinforces a distinct Canadianness: because McFadden has already been at pains to assert Carman’s Canadian identity, he ultimately appropriates the US appropriation of Carman, poking fun at what he considers a cultural theft as part of a reclamation of Carman for Canada. The power dynamics inherent in joking are essential to McFadden’s negotiation of cultural power through humour. In Comedy: The Mastery of Discourse, Susan Purdie examines the circulation of power in joking, arguing that “jokers form an excluding relationship with their object” and that Butts of jokes are “de-graded from a perceived position of power.”86 The exclusion of the object, or the Butt, creates a collusion “between the joke’s Teller and its Audience”: “This generates a delicious intimacy, which is pleasurable and powerful in itself.”87 We might read this intimacy as a relationship of hospitality, in which the Audience who gets the joke is welcomed by the Teller to the exclusion of the Butt. In order for a “collusive discursive empowerment” for Teller and Audience to occur, the Butt of the joke must “first [be] accorded power – Butts are precisely degraded from the power to construct and define us, within their language-making.”88 Purdie’s model assumes that the Butt of a joke is an individual human being whose subjectivity is denied by the collusive discursive relationship between Teller and Audience. In many instances of Great Lakes Suite, the Butt of McFadden’s jokes goes beyond a single individual and encompasses what he perceives to be

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prevailing national attitudes or reactionary ideologies. However, McFadden can also both figure an individual as the Butt of his joking and then subvert the power relationship described by Purdie precisely by according the Butt a subjectivity that speaks back to his own author / ity. In A Trip around Lake Erie, he describes Luna Pier as follows: Women in sausage pincurls were standing in the middle of the road talking. I don’t know what they were talking about. Maybe they were talking about us. “Yes, there’s a family of Canadians coming through in a yellow van. Here they come now. They’re very superior, they think they own the entire rights to Lake Erie. They think we’re unusual, somnambulistic, ignorant and jingoistic, living out our dull lives like meaningless androids incapable of self-reflection or compassion.” “How do you know all this?” “I’m picking it up on my sausage pincurls.” (44–5) McFadden subverts the judgment implied by his description of “a strange-looking place with a series of scum-covered canals heading nowhere” (44) by catching his narrator out through the woman’s perception of his generalizations about the United States, puncturing his impression of civility towards Americans. The fact that the narrator then describes the women as “smil[ing] mechanically” with “the blank eyes of extra-terrestrials” (45) shifts the position of the Butt back to the women; however, the implied fear of these women on the narrator’s part nevertheless accords them some power. But the woman with the sausage pincurls correctly identifies some of the Butts of McFadden’s joking throughout the text: ignorance and jingoism particularly appear as targets of McFadden’s humour, sometimes located within a particular individual but oftentimes not.  For instance, when the McFaddens travel around Lake Erie in  the first weekend of July, encompassing both Canada Day and Independence Day, the narrator’s declaration, “It was the 201st birthday of the universe, at least that’s what you’d almost think as we drove into Fairport Harbour on the Lake Erie shore” (66), clearly separates Canada from the United States insofar as Canada Day has not figured as the 110th birthday of the universe. McFadden thereby distinguishes between modes of national celebration on either side

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of the border, clearly demonstrating a preference for the Canadian celebration and the apparent lack of “patriotic embalming fluid” (67) circulating through the veins of Canada’s citizens. In this sense, McFadden does not set up any particular individuals as the Butt of the joke but, rather, what he takes to be an unthinking patriotic fervour that appears to eclipse any knowledge of, concern for, or interest in what occurs beyond the boundaries of the United States. The contrast between Canada Day and Independence Day also appeals particularly to Canadian readers, interpellating them as the Audience of McFadden’s joke telling and colluding with them in his attempt to defuse the power of the American patriotic machine by subverting it through irony. And although non-Canadians are unlikely to miss McFadden’s irony in this instance, I think McFadden writes much of his humorous irony, throughout the text, for a Canadian audience, providing them with the position of host within his ironic discourse. Whereas some ironologists write of the “victims” of irony – “a victim is confidently unaware of the very possibility of there being an upper level or point of view that invalidates his own”89 – others, such as Wayne C. Booth, argue that focusing on irony’s “victims” can misinterpret some of the fundamental functions of irony: “the building of amiable communities is often far more important than the exclusion of naive victims. Often the predominant emotion when reading stable ironies is that of joining, of finding and communing with kindred spirits.”90 Hutcheon contends that, in fact, community functions as a necessary precursor that allows irony to “happen”: “It is not so much that irony creates communities or in-groups”; rather, “irony happens because what could be called ‘discursive communities’ already exist and provide the context for both the deployment and attribution of irony.”91 For Hutcheon, these discursive communities have both “restrictive” and “enabling communication conventions,” and she points to her national identity as a Canadian as one that includes her in a nationbased discursive community but restricts her from access to the discursive communities of other nations.92 In McFadden’s case, both Hutcheon’s and Booth’s analyses are apt. Great Lakes Suite clearly demonstrates Hutcheon’s argument that irony is “a culturally shaped process,” and that community “enables the irony to happen.”93 Who but Canadians (and perhaps, more specifically, Canadians familiar with BC politics) would appreciate his joke in A Trip around Lake Ontario, “Is Bill Vander Zalm

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still out of jail?” (282);94 as Jennifer Andrews writes, “without a community there is no context for the interpretation and reception of humour and irony.”95 But the reader’s recognition of irony (what Hutcheon would consider the “making” of irony) also forges a connection between reader and writer,96 and between reader and other readers who also “get” or “make” or perhaps even more importantly appreciate and take pleasure in the irony. McFadden’s description of Independence Day as the 201st birthday of the universe both depends upon his audience already possessing an idea of Americans as excessively patriotic and brings pleasure to his audience through their recognition of his matching the hyperbolic patriotism with his own ironic use of hyperbole. In terms of a national audience, Canadianness is reinforced by response to McFadden’s irony, thereby renewing and sustaining the nation-based discursive community in which, in contrast to the physical location of St Joseph Island, Canadians feel at home, as hosts. McFadden’s irony allows him both to criticize dominant US ­values and implicitly to construct Canadian values in the process. In A Trip around Lake Huron, the McFaddens feel uncomfortable even on the Canadian side of the border, “out of place” (183) and conspicuous due to their being surrounded by Americans. Reading Rabelais’s chapter “How Grandgousier Realised Gargantua’s Marvellous Intelligence by His Invention of an Arse-Wipe” aloud to his children, the narrator notices “a very sophisticated and lovely little group” of “wives of recreational fishermen,” whose reaction to the reading is to “suddenly loo[k] horrified and star[e] at the four-member McFadden family sitting around the roaring campfire”: “I guess they must have heard me read a nasty word. The kids were laughing their heads off at the story and the women must have been shocked that a father would read such garbage to his children. Let’s face it there’s something sort of communistic and unamerican about sitting around a campfire reading a book to your children in the first place – unless the book was the Holy Bible (modern American translation)” (184). The Cold War context of the original Trips publication is clearly invoked in McFadden’s frequent invocations of “unamericanness.” In A Trip around Lake Erie, he describes an American trying to mount on his motor home a US flag “so heavy it looked as if the motor home would tip over” (51). Ironizing this display of patriotism, McFadden declares: “No one would be able to accuse this man of being unamerican. He was proud of his country and cherished the

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freedoms guaranteed to him by the American constitution. But the enemies of the American way of life were many. Their motivation was not easy to understand but it probably had something to do with satanic envy” (51). To reading Rabelais aloud and failing to produce excessive displays of patriotism, McFadden also adds picking mushrooms (150) and “talking quietly” (148) to the list of things “considered unamerican”: “Turncoats, saboteurs, conspirators and Communists talk quietly. If you don’t bellow you must be yellow” (148). In each of these cases, no American in the text declares these actions to be un-American; McFadden bases both his conjectures largely on his expectations of American attitudes, which he then exaggerates, and the behaviour of his own Canadian family. He thereby reads both Americanness and its inverse into the situations he describes. Although Canada was a clear ally of the United States during the Cold War, “if the Cold War was part of an ideology which was seeking to preserve a national identity in the face of a foreign threat, then for Canada that threat was coming from south of the border rather than from the Soviet Union.”97 McFadden’s imagined charges of un-Americanness are humorous, particularly that regarding reading aloud to one’s children, largely because of the gross exaggeration involved in the paranoid accusation of “communistic” and “satanic” elements seeking to undermine US values, in spite of the fact that, as Reg Whitaker notes, “despite popular belief to the contrary, there is good evidence that Canadians were just as ready as Americans to show intolerance toward communists, or alleged communists, or those associated with communists, or those considered sufficiently left-wing to be labelled pro-communists or ‘fellow travellers’ or communist ‘sympathizers.’”98 Regardless, there are some significant implications to McFadden’s joking. First, his decision not to capitalize American in “unamerican” might be read as a doubled subversion of the imagined claim: not only does he undercut the idea of accusing someone or something of being un-American but he also reduces the importance of being or appearing American by refusing it the significance of the capital letter. The echoes of McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee are both encouraged and played with through the lack of capitalization. Second, McFadden appears also to be playing with the idea that “to be Canadian means to be ‘not American,’” and although political theorist Melissa S. Williams attaches this notion to frequent “laments over a lack of distinctive

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Canadian identity,”99 McFadden’s use of ironic exaggeration makes this status of not American / unamerican a virtue rather than grounds for suspicion and accusation. m o u n t i n g a c u lt u r a l d e f e n c e

There comes a time when we must take measures George Bowering, At War with the US100

McFadden is not as naïve as his “unamerican” jokes might suggest: indeed, the idea of reading as transgression arises in A Trip around Lake Huron as both an American and a Canadian phenomenon: “A guy waving a Bible got up in a meeting in a school gym in Clinton, Ontario[,] … and said, ‘All the English literature anyone needs is right in this book’” (210). Further, the white American racists certainly find Canadian counterparts, as demonstrated in A Trip around Lake Ontario when Chesley Yarn (a fictionalized Al Purdy) details some of the Southern Ontario racism directed at Jamaican agricultural labourers (307), in a clear failure of national hospitality. Given the latter volume’s original publication in 1988, the same year that the Canadian Multiculturalism Act was ratified, McFadden’s highlighting of Canadian racism undermines the nation’s claims to racial justice. If Canadians have been taught the United States’ history of racism, McFadden points out the gaps in our own nation’s racial construction and historiography. The first two volumes of Great Lakes Suite position black North American communities as a US phenomenon – assuming, for instance, at the beginning of A Trip around Lake Erie, while still on the Canadian side of the border, that they have driven “past black families from Detroit fishing in roadside pools” (36), their blackness apparently immediately marking them as American in contrast to the unspoken equation of whiteness and Canadianness in McFadden’s own position. However, A Trip around Lake Ontario undermines this immediate association of blackness with Americanness when, for example, the narrator meets George S. Peabody Sr and Jr, AfricanCanadian men who are “taking a trip around Lake Ontario but the other way, counter-clockwise” (357), both acknowledging the presence of African Canadians and presenting them as doubles for the

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narrator. On the one hand, we might read this recognition as a reflection of the growing prominence of multicultural discourse in Canada at the time of the volume’s original publication, given the timing of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act. On the other hand, the text does not present a self-congratulatory Canadian multiculturalism, as evidenced by McFadden’s explicit critique of dominant Canadian historiography. The narrator visits the United Empire Loyalist ­cemetery and describes it as “a learning experience,” but one that is  somehow unsatisfying: “something was bothering me” (318). McFadden repeats the facts disseminated by official history about the number of Loyalists, dates of arrival, and the names and dates of individual Loyalists who are included in Walter S. Herrington’s History of the County of Lennox and Addington. McFadden quotes Herrington at length, very nearly allowing Herrington to speak for McFadden’s text, only to pull back with his own critique: But when Mr. Herrington mentions, briefly, very briefly indeed, that there were a “number of negro slaves” who came along with the Van Alstin expedition, I realised that’s what had been bothering me. I must have heard that before, but there was no evidence of it in the graveyard, or in the historical plaques erected all over the area. Had the figure of 250 Loyalists included the slaves, or were the slaves extra? Did the slaves have their own part of town, their own homes? What became of them? Where were they buried? (319–20) The absence of “evidence” in Great Lakes Suite’s first two volumes of African-Canadian presence is both suggested and implicitly critiqued in McFadden’s complaint about official, documented, and memorialized history. As such, A Trip around Lake Ontario bears witness to the perpetuation of Canadian ignorance about Canada’s own history of race relations, even in an era of state-sponsored celebration of Canadian diversity. Given that McFadden’s generalizations about Canadians and the Americans are fragile, as he both explicitly and implicitly demonstrates, the most stable distinctions between the two countries are those surrounding questions of international power. These distinctions are most concretely attached to the functions of the state, which, as Max Weber notes, “(successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”101 If

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Canadian and American national characteristics often slide into each other, this use of force on a global scale, as illustrated by references to the context in which these books were written, can be directly attributed to the exercising of power by the American state in territories other than its own. This context of the use of US force in the 1970s and 1980s not only echoes Anna Jameson’s concern for a Canada inadequately defended against its neighbour across the Great Lakes but also helps to clarify McFadden’s use of irony as an act of cultural power. About to embark upon the first Great Lakes trip, in a chapter that parodies the travel genre through its title “What to Wear When You Visit the United States” (39), the narrator glances at suits of armour decorating a Windsor restaurant “and shudder[s]”: “Maybe we should get four of these for our trip through the States, I thought” (40). This unease, emphasized by the narrator’s question, “Was I doing the right thing in taking my kids to the United States again?” (40) comes across as humorous exaggeration, as though they are about to venture into a more unknown and dangerous territory than we might expect, given the geographical and cultural proximity of Canada and the US. The narrator castigates himself for being “a philistine” but then reinforces his fears by ordering himself to “learn to disregard [his] paranoid feelings about this monstrous country” (40). Although the idea of a Canadian family donning suits of armour to enter the United States for a brief holiday seems ridiculous, McFadden couples the humour with a serious consideration of the United States’ global power and an awareness of the ways in which an “undefended border” might play out. Although by no means foregrounded in the text, the issue of Vietnam does emerge at various moments, and the date of the travels of the first two volumes – 1977 – places the narrative within the aftermath of the war, just two years after the fall of Saigon. The spectre of the Vietnam War forms part of McFadden’s reading of hostility in the United States. As he recounts of an earlier trip to the US that predates the Great Lakes excursions, “I’ll never forget the car-wash attendant in Brunswick, Georgia, who glared hatefully at me for an astounding five seconds because I hadn’t put on my brakes at exactly the moment he dropped his hand. I could imagine squadrons of goons like him breaking into tiny Vietnamese villages and hacking away at the screaming men, women and children. But we’re supposed to forget all that now” (32). A slippage in national

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context precedes this description, for it is the rudeness of a Canadian woman at the Point Pelee gatehouse that prompts the narrator’s recollection of another example of “[a] human being [who] will not hesitate to make another human being feel uncomfortable if there is any advantage at all to be gained” (32). Yet this universalized observation about human behaviour ultimately produces concrete distinctions in the form of nation-state context: the “advantage” for the Georgian car-wash attendant extrapolates into the global power advantage of the United States, as signified by US interference in Vietnam. The Canada-US distinction that pivots around the Vietnam War becomes clearest in A Trip around Lake Erie when the two David McFaddens meet, the American McFadden having seen “a lot of good men killed in that war” (73), the Canadian McFadden’s state not having sent him to fight. However, in McFadden’s deployment of the Vietnam War as a key distinction between the United States and Canada, he does not acknowledge Canada’s “satellitic compliance” with the United States through “export[ing] … military equipment that supported the American war effort.”102 This complicity perhaps signals the limits of Canada’s white civility: despite Lester B. Pearson’s vocal criticism of developments in the Vietnam War during the Johnson administration, the economic cost of withdrawing those military exports was deemed too high by the Canadian government.103 McFadden addresses neither this complicity nor the economics that underpin it. Despite this complicity on the part of the Canadian state, however, the Vietnam War prompted “a public questioning in Canada about the convergence of Canadian and American foreign policy values.”104 Further, despite Canada’s status as a US ally in the Cold War, the invocation of the Vietnam War does pose a kind of threat to Canada in this text through McFadden’s jokes about things being “unamerican” and “communistic.” The original publication of  the first two volumes coincides with the first election victory of Ronald Reagan, whose administration reintroduced a “hard line against international Communism.”105 While Canadians may have been safe from the Vietnam War,106 the intermittent association of Canada with Communism in the text suggests an anxiety that Canada, on the other side of the undefended border, might be vulnerable to the US military machine. For example, in A Trip around Lake Huron, the “wife-beater,” whom the narrator attempts to keep from killing his wife, declares, “Pretty soon it’ll be as bad down here

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as what you’ve got up there in Canada. What’s that guy’s name – Trudeau? – that son-of-a-bitch Commie?” (171). Readers know very little about the man who utters these statements, or the extent of his knowledge about Canada, but his feelings about the then-Canadian prime minister may well stem from Trudeau’s “declar[ing] Canada ‘a refuge from militarism’ and open[ing] the border to some 50,000 Americans refusing to fight in Vietnam.”107 Although the narrator pokes fun at stereotypes of Canada in A Trip around Lake Ontario when he declares, “It’s not all Commies and Mounties you know” (370), soon afterwards he is nevertheless attacked on the grounds of an assumed association between Canada and Communism. A man sitting next to him in a bar in Woolcott nonsensically accuses the narrator of having a stolen computer: “You and all those fuckin’ Commies up in that stupid fuckin’ country Canada” (379). The temporal context of A Trip around Lake Ontario has shifted from the earlier aftermath of the Vietnam War to a period of highprofile US interventions in Central America, although, as William M. Leogrande notes with regard to the latter conflicts, “the debate over Central America was, in large measure, an extension of the debate over Vietnam.”108 McFadden’s humour wields its sharpest ironic bite in A Trip around Lake Ontario in its references to Nicaragua, which produce a slippage between Canada and Latin America in relation to the United States. To US Customs officer Claude Beausoleil’s description of re-enacting the sack of York in Toronto from an American perspective and the assumption “that if we came up to Canada the Canadians would be glad to join us,” the narrator responds, “Something like Nicaragua, right?” (335). The narrator’s irony invokes the claims of Manifest Destiny and highlights a hemispheric connection between Canada and Nicaragua. The narrator also worries about the possibility of getting into a car accident, but he articulates this concern through a joke that foregrounds ideology and again figures the narrator (and, by extension, Canadians) as a potential target of the US military machine: “the best thing to do before anything was to get the car off the Interstate before somebody ploughed into it in the mist and rain, squashing that little Spitfire like a Sandinista first-aid station” (337). In A Trip around Lake Erie, the narrator vents his anger at the US “refus[al] to put in an adequate medicare system” (107). Given that Canada’s health care policy should be one of the most upheld distinctions between Canada and the United States, the likening of the narrator’s

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car to the Nicaraguan first-aid station once again interpolates Canada into a larger context of the Americas and invokes an anxiety about Manifest Destiny in a Cold War context – and the urgency of the question about keeping the border intact. McFadden’s initial exploration of these anxieties in the 1980s and his updating of Great Lakes Suite in the late 1990s testify to the ongoing cultural significance of the border for Anglo-Canadians, and the Trips’ update and republication expands the terms of the original writings by bringing more recent Canada-US history to bear on the material. McFadden’s accentuation of sameness through rewriting the American McFadden narrative to include an exact copy of his name operates alongside more pointed national distinctions in the updated text, examples of which include a reference to the “light at the end of the tunnel” joining Windsor and Detroit being accompanied in the second version by the phrase “as if one has to die a little death before entering the u sa” (41) in A Trip around Lake Erie; Canadian actors Brent Carver and Rebecca Jenkins replacing Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward for the imagined film version of A Trip around Lake Huron (122); and new comments regarding “Curtis LeMay, the air force general in charge of bombing Japan, [who] admitted that he would have been hanged as a war criminal if the US had been on the losing side” (397) and “US tourists [who] don’t bother changing their money when they visit other countries” (327). In his criticism of US tourists, the travelling McFadden does more than simply demonstrate a concern with being a good guest: his usage of “US” as an adjective, as opposed to “American,” reflects his more explicitly articulated awareness of and protest against the conflation of the continent with the United States, “the country so terrific it doesn’t even need a real name” (36), as McFadden adds in the updated edition. McFadden’s hemispheric understanding of “America” combines with his cultural defence of Canada as he seeks both to keep the border intact in political and cultural terms and to unsettle US dominance. Just as, as Lynette Hunter writes, “people with irony always know there is another story,”109 so too McFadden uses irony to construct a Canadian alternative to the dominant US narrative of North America. Further, as James Doyle notes, nineteenth-century American travel writers in their representations of Canada turn with a reluctance to a national entity that appears to call [US] beliefs into question. Canada seems to present to them a

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particularly disconcerting comparison, in its superficial similarities to the United States and its close geographical and historical ties, both of which seem at odds with a perverse determination to continue on a course different in certain essential details from that of the United States. Thus Canada repeatedly appears to nineteenth-century Americans as a reminder of alternatives, some of which seem wrong, but many of which too often present disturbing possibilities of United States error and failure.110 As a Canadian travel writer in the United States a century later, McFadden probes the “superficial similarities” and “disconcerting comparison” offered by the juxtaposition of the two nation-states and, ultimately, reinscribes this alternative vision of North America in his ironic reading of the US states through which he travels, insisting upon his Anglo-nationalist version of Canada as “the other story” that undermines official US narratives. McFadden often demonstrates a relief at returning to Canada, even after a period of only a few days. “Yay!” say the narrator’s daughters in A Trip around Lake Erie when they cross the border and return to “Canadian soil” (108). At the end of A Trip around Lake Huron, the narrator confesses, “It was so nice to be back in Canada. How embarrassing! But you have to be truthful about these things” (178). This unabashed love for Canada is, however, coupled with frank acknowledgment of the country’s own participation in injustice, creating a critical and conflicted nationalism. McFadden acknowledges that he cannot draw hard and fast distinctions between Canadians and Americans, and that Canada, too, is guilty of racist acts that “we’ll never be able to atone for, in not allowing the Jewish refugees to enter Canada before the war, as well as a whole list of other blunders involving Japanese Canadians and indigenous Canadians” (276). McFadden condemns the hypocrisy of the Canadian state’s self-congratulation for doing “one heckuva good job in helping get rid of those blood-sucking Nazis” (276) while both refusing hospitality to Jewish refugees and interning Japanese Canadians, in addition to Canada’s own genocidal history with respect to the First Nations. With these examples, McFadden punctures Canada’s “myth of national tolerance,”111 and does so in a manner that resembles Coleman’s notion of “wry civility.” If AngloCanada’s civility depends upon “many instances of outright brutality,” including “the history of genocide against and cultural decimation of Indigenous people,” being “repeatedly forgotten”

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through “nationalism’s determined disavowal,”112 McFadden’s own nationalism ruptures this forgetting by drawing attention the nation’s history of brutality. Coleman connects wry civility to irony, given the  latter’s status as “a form of double speech,”113 a fitting link for  McFadden’s text in both its subversion of self-congratulatory Canadian mythologies and its use of irony throughout. On the one hand, McFadden’s concern with US power over Canada somewhat impedes the possibility of the “self-aware, selfcritical engagement with the project of civility” that a “wry civility” requires.114 On the other, despite the fact that he tries out nationalism’s “kind of ‘strategic essentialism’ based on particular images of Canada as victim,”115 McFadden both undermines this essentialism through periodic acknowledgment of Canada’s own injustices and gestures towards state-produced materialities. If the side of the border you find yourself on makes a difference, McFadden suggests, it does so largely because of the state. That he should originally produce the Trips’ narratives in the lead-up to the ratification of the f ta aligns Canada with North America’s “alternative, more civil modernity than that which [is associated with] the United States,”116 or, in other words, a different kind of capitalism, his concern about medicare aligns itself with and invokes aspects of Canadian left-nationalism’s emphasis on “the social protective power of the nation-state.”117 At the time of the composition of these books, McFadden identified not just the American military interventions and interferences in Vietnam and Central America but also the absence of medicare in the United States as policies that distinguished the US American from the Canadian nation-state. Although McFadden begins A Trip around Lake Erie with a discussion of his imagined but never realized boycott of US culture and the dissolution of the Canadian Liberation Movement (19), Great Lakes Suite as a whole attempts a cultural defence of “the border that allows our existence in North America.”118 Particularly significant is the fact that A Trip around Lake Ontario was originally published in 1988, the year of the “free trade election” and the year prior the implementation of the fta , around which cultural issues were hotly debated, and which ultimately failed either to protect or to improve the status of Canadian cultural industries. McFadden’s focus on US culture acknowledges that, in many ways, the United States does not need to invade Canada: it is already here, both culturally and economically. Although McFadden declares in A Trip

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around Lake Erie that it is “obvious to everyone that Canada [is] heading inevitably for total union with the United States” (36), he nevertheless attempts to counteract this annexation through his textual production of cultural power, his ironizing of the United States. He offers alternative stories to those offered from dominant positions, fissuring their attempts at seamless narratives. As George Bowering acknowledges, “poetry / doesnt [sic] hurt all that much, not / whom we would hurt it with,”119 and McFadden fears his book might attract “all [of] twelve” (161) readers, make all of “$133.31” (112). But in seeking out a retaking of cultural rather than military or economic power, Great Lakes Suite both resists and contests US  cultural domination. Ultimately, McFadden’s Canadian civility invests in the border, insisting it reflects nation-state differences that signify enough to make the border worth defending.

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2 Securing Canadianness: Canada’s Border Policing Dramas

In 1995, the Disney Corporation won the contract to licence the  iconic Mountie image, “spark[ing] considerable comment” in Canada.1 Some concern focused on the commodification of the Mountie; as one Globe and Mail editorial argued: “Canada’s symbols are not commodities. The country’s identity is not something that can be packaged and sold at Wal-Mart.”2 Bearing in mind that the Mountie image was not only “a popular fabrication”3 but had long been commodified in tourist souvenirs and in visual culture,4 it is important to recognize the unease with which many Canadians regarded “the buyer”: “Walt Disney, wonderful as it is, is as American as handguns.”5 And it was not simply that a non-­Canadian company had won the licencing contract but also that it was a powerful US company, generating another example among many of Canadian culture’s position “in the maw of the great US cultural machine.”6 Defending Disney’s winning of the contract, an rc m p staff sergeant claimed that the Force had “looked to Canadian companies, but Disney seemed by far the most competent”; according to the c b c , however, “Canadian companies did not have a chance to bid on the contract.”7 In addition to the sense of debasement of a Canadian cultural symbol through an acknowledgment and attempted enhancement of its commodification, then, the licencing contract also prompted a nationalist response: a mixture of disbelief and horror that the Mountie image, iconic Canadian symbol, would be licenced only by Disney, iconic American symbol. News reports that the rc m p had sold “exclusive, worldwide marketing rights to its likeness and image to the Walt Disney Co. of Burbank, Calif.” were unnecessarily explanatory about Disney’s location,8 clearly seeking

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to underscore Disney’s incompatibility with Canadian culture. Disney’s operation on Canadian territory, as it were, was considered by many to be culturally illegitimate. And the rc m p ’s rejection of Canadian companies as contenders for the licence appeared to be an excessive hospitality to US corporatism, one that easily relinquished the Canadian power of the host position to a company based south of the border. The licencing controversy provides an effective introduction to this chapter on Canadian television’s border-policing dramas because of the attention it drew to the commodification of the Mountie figure, the sense of the rc mp as “one of the nation’s most cherished institutions,”9 and the cultural stereotypes attributed to the countries on either side of the 49th parallel. Canadians, it would seem, are not a commercial, materialist people, and our “few existing national symbols” do not lend themselves to commodification – except that they clearly do.10 The United States is associated with violence (Disney is “as American as handguns”) and a mass culture that cannot adequately represent Canadian culture. These assumptions surface both implicitly and explicitly in the Canadian borderpolicing dramas Bordertown, Due South, and The Border. Each of these series emerged in the context of points of crisis or significant reconfigurations of the relationship between Canada and the United States: c t v’s Bordertown (1989–91) began airing the year of the ratification of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement; ct v ’s Due South (1994–99) first appeared the year of the ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement; and cbc ’s The Border (2008–10) clearly reflects on Canada-US relations in a post-9/11 context. As the response to Disney’s licencing of the Mountie image indicates, Canadian law enforcement constitutes a potent symbol of Canadianness, one that has been undermined by the Mounties’ complicity with colonialism and racism throughout Canada’s history. These programs’ projections of Canadian law enforcement, produced in the midst of threats to Canadian economic and political sovereignty, often demonstrate attempts to infuse the Canadian repressive state apparatus with an essential, and essentialist, national identity. This essential(ist) national identity most frequently rests on stereotypical cultural associations. As Sarah Matheson writes, “Series such as Bordertown … and Due South … were based on the premise of US-Canadian partnerships, self-consciously engaged with national

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stereotypes in storylines that routinely dealt with how national differences frustrated and interfered with cooperation.”11 Bordertown, Due South, and The Border each bears out, to varying degrees, George Grant’s encapsulation of Canada-US differences as emerging from a Loyalist conservatism: “It was an inchoate desire to build, in these cold and forbidding regions, a society with a greater sense of order and restraint than freedom-loving republicanism would allow. It was no better defined than a kind of suspicion that we in Canada could be less lawless and have a greater sense of propriety than the United States … English-speaking Canadians have been called a dull, stodgy, and indeed costive lot … Yet our stodginess has made us a society of greater simplicity, formality, and perhaps even innocence than the people to the south.”12 It is precisely through the policing of the border that Canadianness is defended in these television programs, for the “Canadian” way and the “American” way (almost always singularized) contrast and clash. The peace, order, and good government of the British North America Act, 1867, subsequently “associated with figures such as the North West Mounted Police and later the Mounties,”13 are consistently invoked in Canadian policing in these dramas, and they are embodied by the Canadian law enforcement officer – be that Bordertown’s North-West Mounted Police corporal Clive Bennett, Due South’s rc m p constable Benton Fraser, or The Border’s Major Mike Kessler of the fictional Immigration and Customs Security Agency – whose partnership with an American counterpart provides both the dramatic tension and the opportunity to define and defend Canadianness. Through the figures of Bennett, Fraser, and Kessler, the three series dramatize Anglo-Canadian “white civility,” albeit in different historical and political contexts, as reflected in the programs’ settings and moments of production. Further, Bordertown, Due South, and The Border explore the parameters of the “myth [of] ‘Canada as America’s best friend’” through the cross-border partnership between Canadian and American characters,14 while gesturing towards Canada and the United States’ history of “cooperative law enforcement” and “integration … [in] security and defence.”15 In staging and exploring the nature of Canada-US policing cooperation, these partnerships exemplify Canada-US hospitality as friendships between Canadian and American law enforcement personnel coexist with national and / or personal rivalries, mutual trust as well as distrust, and disagreements over protocols and best practice. Questions of territory, particularly

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in Bordertown and The Border, seek to determine who has the authority of the host, although the threat of the guest overpowering the host is, unsurprisingly, virtually always envisioned as the United States overriding Canada regardless of the location in question. In representing Canada and the United States working together on policing and security, these programs invoke (and sometimes explicitly address) the trade agreements that bind the two countries together; however, the Canadian nationalist anxiety about sovereignty in the midst of such agreements resonates through the crossborder imbalances of power depicted. b o r d e rtow n : h o m o s o c i a l h o s t i p i ta l i t y

Of the three series examined in this chapter, ct v ’s Bordertown is the only historical drama. Set in the late nineteenth century, the program features a Canadian North-West Mounted Police officer, Corporal Clive Bennett (John H. Brennan), and a US marshal, Jack Craddock (Richard Comar), who together police “Bordertown” – a town divided in two by the international boundary between Canada and the United States. Bennett and Craddock share an office that straddles the 49th parallel (the border post positioned prominently outside the building), with the Canadian half on one side and the American half on the other. Bennett and Craddock are explicitly referred to as “partners” in the series, and they assist each other in fighting crime regardless of which side of the border they happen to be on. However, much is made of the distinctions between Canada and the United States through diverging approaches to law enforcement, as embodied in the two men. Bennett, as the Canadian, is consistently identified as policing more by the book than his American counterpart, who claims to be more “flexible” in his law enforcement methods.16 Bordertown perpetuates further familiar stereotypical binary oppositions between Canada and the United States: Bennett is more straight-laced, formal, and well-spoken than Craddock, who has minimal literacy skills and rarely bathes;17 where Bennett is seemingly hard-wired into the project of peace, order, and good government, Craddock battles inner demons as a result of his family having been murdered by an evil Mexican, Don Carlos. When Craddock consents to a gunfight between himself and the grown-up children of a man he has accidentally killed, Bennett insists, “This isn’t the way

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to solve this.”18 In the episode in which Don Carlos comes to Bordertown, Bennett, embodying Canadian civility, attempts to dissuade Craddock from avenging his family’s deaths: “Have him tried! Use the law!”19 Whose method of policing will prevail depends upon the location of the border. In the episode “Field of Honour,” in which two Frenchmen with a long-standing antagonism dating back to the Paris Commune clash in Bordertown, Craddock suggests they settle the matter with a duel: B en n et t: Are you out of your mind? C r a ddoc k: Look, I know a gunfight ain’t exactly the best answer, but it sure does settle things, don’t it? B en n et t: Not in my town. C r a ddoc k: Fine, we’ll have it on my side of the line. All you gotta do is keep your people out of the way of the bullets, all right?20 In the above exchange, a distinction is made between Bennett’s town and Craddock’s town, even though it is, of course, the same town. A solution emerges through Craddock’s offer to host the duel on the US side of the border: as Craddock says to one of the Frenchmen, “Out here we gotta thing we call the Code of the West. And I figure if us Americans can choose to shoot one another, then you foreigners can too.” It is an odd hospitality, the offer of opportunity for the Frenchmen to try to kill each other, but one that Bennett does not contest (despite his disapproval) once it moves outside “his” town and becomes Craddock’s responsibility. Bordertown was a Canada-France co-production, and several French characters pass through Bordertown throughout the series. The most prominent French character is one of the program’s protagonists, the town’s doctor Marie Dumont (Sophie Barjac), with whom both Craddock and Bennett are in love. Craddock and Bennett are thus not only partners and (begrudging) friends but also rivals for Marie’s affection. The apex of the love triangle, Marie consolidates a homosocial connection between the two policemen. In the series finale episode, “Under Western Skies,” in which both Craddock and Bennett risk death while Marie takes shelter with a seriously wounded Craddock, Craddock asks Marie to marry him. Recovering later from their wounds, Craddock tells Bennett, “I’ve

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got a proposal for you”21 – namely, that the two men should take turns to court Marie in order to help her choose between them. However, Craddock’s language, and his doubled “proposal” to Marie and Bennett, underscores the homosocial structure of the triangular relationship. Thus, Craddock and Bennett are divided by the border and their national identities as well as by their romantic rivalry, but this rivalry also links them together and forges a likeness between them. Even as they work together and frequently save each other’s life, Craddock and Bennett freely criticize each other’s methods and each other’s country. In “Field of Honour,” set at the beginning of July, both men buy fireworks to celebrate their respective nation’s birthdays. Craddock sneers, “You know, I wouldn’t have thought the birth of Canada would be much to celebrate. I mean, what’d you boys do – sign a piece of paper? We fight for our independence”; Bennett replies, “How civilized. Diplomacy created our country, not bloodshed.” If Bennett attempts to argue that Canada boasts a more civil and more sophisticated history than its neighbour, Craddock’s response is to belittle Canada’s claims altogether: “Country? You ain’t much more than a colony, Clive.” A relationship of hostipitality between Canada and the United States is clear throughout the series, particularly through the relationship of Craddock and Bennett. But significantly, the most serious examples of challenging Canada’s host position from a US perspective come from American criminals. In “Nebraska Lightning,” one such criminal asks Bennett, in Bordertown’s saloon, if he is “some kind of deputy boy”; Bennett responds he is a North-West Mounted Policeman, only to have the criminal state, “Never heard of that.”22 When Bennett explains, “It’s what they call a lawman in Canada,” the criminal responds, “Never heard of that neither,” undercutting not only Bennett’s authority but also his country. In “Marshal Law,” US marshal Lee Ford, a former mentor of Craddock’s, not only undermines Bennett’s authority over Canadian territory but also turns out to have become a criminal. Tracking a man in Canada, Ford neglects to contact Canadian authorities, much to Bennett’s chagrin: “If he wanted to cross into Canada, he should have asked permission.”23 Prior to discovering Ford’s culpability, Craddock defends Ford to Bennett, claiming, “Lee Ford’s been a Marshal for over 20 years. He don’t need no permission from some wet-behind-the-ears Mountie.” Ford certainly agrees with this statement, as his exchange with Bennett indicates:

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B en n et t: Mr. Ford, I have to remind you that you need permission before crossing into Canadian territory. For d: Is this Canada? Well, it surely looks just like America to me – sorry ’bout that. Ford has usurped the position of host and fails to recognize Canadian territory in a way that would be literal if it were not also strategic: Ford needs to claim that he believes he is still on US territory in order to operate as he wishes. If Bennett is positioned by the two US marshals as being overly concerned with protocols, the program ultimately supports his demands for the Canadian host position to be respected, particularly when Ford’s criminality comes to light and Craddock endorses Bennett’s position: “I don’t believe it,” says Ford, “Jack Craddock hiding behind the rules, like some Mountie.” As these examples demonstrate, although a larger Canada-US hostipitality might be said to be at work in the Craddock-Bennett /  Bennett-Craddock relationship, more prominent instances of US hostility towards Canada and Canada’s claims to authority over its own territory are associated with US criminality. The Americans who fail to recognize Canadian jurisdiction contradict what is presented as the common sense of children. When Ford stumbles across the Bordertown children Lucy Walker and Willie Haddon in the company of a suspect he seeks, Lucy tells Ford he needs to take the suspect to Bennett: “Sir, shouldn’t you take him to Corporal Bennett? This is Canada.” Away from Bordertown, in an open field, the children have no trouble identifying the border’s location, even as Ford contends that what Bennett claims as Canada looks just like the United States. But if Bordertown presents a common-sense acceptance of a meaningful Canada-US border that clearly marks out Canadian territory and sovereignty, it also posits an inextricable connection between Mounties and “the rules,” as indicated by Ford’s attempt to insult Craddock. The assumption that Mounties always follow the rules is both affirmed and contested in various episodes of Bordertown, particularly where the policing of racial minorities is concerned. It is in these contexts that the program most clearly attempts to infuse the repressive state apparatus with an essential Canadianness that is defined by a commitment to justice. Of the three border-policing dramas discussed in this chapter, Bordertown most regularly returns to Indigenous peoples in its narratives. Bordertown’s representation

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of Indigenous peoples both exposes Canadian injustice while reasserting Canadian law enforcement as just, even if, at times, only through the figure of Bennett. Thus, the program both disrupts and reinforces the deployment of “images of Aboriginal people … to help differentiate Canada from the United States because through them British Canada can construct itself as gentle, tolerant, just and impartial.”24 On the whole, Bordertown addresses historical injustices perpetrated against Indigenous peoples by the Canadian nation-state, but it does so in a fashion that detracts from any attempt to redress those injustices through decolonization. For instance, in “Medicine Woman,” Marie discovers that the Indian agent Erskine has been stealing rations intended for a Blackfoot community and selling them cheaply to white invader-settlers. Bennett is slow to believe Marie, on the grounds that “Erskine was appointed by the government. There’s no reason for me to disbelieve him.”25 When one of the Blackfoot women, Ekalaka, tells Marie that Erskine killed the Blackfoot man Howling Dog, Marie’s law enforcement friends fail to contest the state’s systemic racism: C r a dd oc k: Indian witnesses don’t count Marie, not against a white. Ma r ie: This is madness! B en n et t: That’s the way the law is, Marie … What we need are white witnesses. Ultimately, Marie tricks the white townspeople who have bought Blackfoot rations from Erskine into admitting their complicity, and Erskine is caught and arrested. Ekalaka recognizes that the punishment of Erskine does not translate into justice and redress for her people, but her fears are discounted by Marie, Bennett, and Craddock: Ek a la k a: Another Erskine will come. Another. We have land but we have no voice. No one will listen or believe. B en n et t: There will be no more Erskines. I promise you. C r a dd oc k: Your people will be taken care of. Ma r ie: Petit à petit, Ekalaka. It means little by little. You have friends now – at least three – who will listen and who will remember.

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Daniel Coleman argues that “a major antidote to nationalism’s determined disavowal … comes in a refusal to forget the history of genocide and cultural decimation of Indigenous peoples in Canada that is disavowed by the image of the peaceful settler.”26 As such, Marie’s insistence upon remembering might begin to redress the limits of Canada’s “white civility.” However, Ekalaka’s assertion that no one will listen is immediately borne out in the responses of her white interlocutors, who render the Blackfoot passive (they will be “taken care of”), make promises that cannot possibly be kept (Erskine will not be the last Indian agent), and advocate gradual change without clarifying the nature of this change or how it will come about. Ekalaka, expressionless throughout the episode, smiles and nods at Marie’s line, leaving the white woman with the last word on the subject of injustice done to Indigenous peoples. It would seem, then, that Bennett has at least learned not to immediately trust government-appointed officials, given Erskine’s criminality. Bordertown does also position the Canadian nation-state’s attitude towards Indigenous peoples as more just than its southern neighbour’s through Bennett’s and Craddock’s diverging attitudes towards the recurring character Gabriel Couteau. Although Bordertown’s status as a Canadian-French co-production often appears to produce unlikely episodes involving a fairly constant stream of visitors from France (rather than from Quebec), the historical setting of the program and the history between the French and Indigenous peoples is invoked through Couteau. A Métis, Couteau is positioned by the program as an in-between figure in a variety of ways. The son of a French trapper and a Cree woman, Couteau claims, “I can be an Indian as easily as I can be a white man,”27 but he is consistently coded through the program as “Indian” through his long hair and buckskin clothing. He also operates as an intermediary between the Bordertown policemen and criminal suspects, working as an informant for Bennett and Craddock. When Couteau is falsely accused of murder, Craddock tells Bennett, You could take a lesson from all this, you know, start trusting my instincts. I mean, who warned you about Couteau the first time he poked his head in town anyhow. B en n et t: Couteau’s not a murderer. C r a ddoc k: You just don’t want to see it is all. Fellow like him attracts trouble.28

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The program clearly undermines Craddock’s distrust of “fellows like Couteau” even as it endorses Bennett’s trust in the Métis man, and, ultimately, Craddock will apologize to Couteau for failing to believe in him. Implicitly, the program suggests that Canada is better positioned to engage with Indigenous peoples, given Bennett’s correct reading of Couteau’s character in contrast with Craddock’s failure, thus problematically corroborating the long-standing view that “nothing indicated the differences between Canada and the United States better than the record of their respective dealings with the western native peoples.”29 Although, as Roger L. Nichols notes, “by the last half of the twentieth century, the Mounties had developed a reputation that depicted them as dealing fairly with all groups in the West,” and “Canadian officials liked to contrast American failures with their own self-perceived competence [and] enlightened policy,” in fact, “each national government fastened its respective political, legal, and administrative control over the Indians’ lives and property” in their drive to wrest “the land and its resources from the native groups while also hoping to erase native peoples’ separate identity by incorporating them into the two societies.”30 In Bordertown, the Canadian nation-state ultimately comes under the most criticism from Bennett himself in “Conduct Becoming,” an episode in which a Cree lawyer, John Jay, comes to Bordertown claiming the land belongs to the Wood Creek Band, which never ceded its territory. The slippage of hospitality and hostility in Canada-US relations that provides the central focus of Bordertown as a whole is supplanted in this episode by the hostility with which John Jay is treated. If the program tends to dramatize a usurpation of the host position as Americans denying Canadian sovereignty, “Conduct Becoming” diverges from this tendency by positioning white North American invader-settlers as usurping hosts who deny and fear Indigenous sovereignty. Several Bordertown men take it upon themselves to police the town’s borders when they impede Jay’s arrival. Approaching the town with a horse and wagon, Jay is referred to by one of the men as “an uppity one” and is issued the order: “State your business, Redskin.”31 Not content with claiming the land that belongs to the Cree, the white men also attempt to steal Jay’s wagon, with Walt asserting, “It’s mine, now.” Jay is only allowed to pass when Bennett arrives and intercedes, his authority over policing Bordertown writing over the other men’s inhospitality. Later, in Bordertown’s saloon, inhospitality to Jay

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continues when Zach, the bartender, refuses to serve Jay the red wine he has ordered. In contrast to his immediate assumption in “Medicine Woman” that the Canadian government and its representatives must be on the right side of the law, in this episode, Bennett refuses to pass judgment either way on Jay’s claim until he has studied the documents. Although the Cree lawyer shares his name with the British chief negotiator of the Jay Treaty (1794), which “has become something of a focal point as regards tribal claims about free passage across the Canada-US border,”32 in “Conduct Becoming” the lawyer works primarily to challenge the Canadian state in particular. Bennett is persuaded by Jay’s case but must deal not only with the violence erupting from the white townspeople afraid of losing what they consider to be their land but also with a superior officer, Commissioner Alexander Stewart, who comes to Bordertown to offer a financial settlement to the Wood Creek Band. Jay sneers at the offer of “25,000 dollars for land half the size of Alberta” but has not anticipated that the government will forge documentation to claim his band was represented at negotiations in order to ensure both “that the whole of the Western territories won’t come under the American flag” and that “a rail line … will span this country, a rail line that will tie the Dominion together” – even though, as Bennett points out, the rail line “just happens to run straight through land that rightfully belongs to the Wood Creek Indians.” As Joshua D. Miner writes, railways form a part of “colonial cartography” as they function alongside nationstate borders, “carv[ing] up the continent with sociospatial demarcations” that “wr[i]te the transgressive indigenous body into being.”33 If the “Royal Canadian Mounted Police … and the transnational railway are central and revered symbols of Canada, resonating with romantic notions of national progress and expansion,”34 this episode of Bordertown highlights the colonial injustice behind them. Curiously, although throughout Bordertown Marie frequently figures as a more sympathetic character to Indigenous causes, often criticizing individual white racists and Canada’s larger colonial history, she displays no support for Jay’s claim. Rather, upset by the violence prompted by the invader-settlers’ response to Jay, and having to tend the wounds that result, Marie tells Bennett, “This will have to stop soon,” and argues that the Canadian government is “sacrificing a little to save a lot.” Similarly, Craddock tells Bennett that if he does not force Jay out of town, he will do so himself. For

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Marie and Craddock, then, keeping the peace in Bordertown is the priority (and, ultimately, Marie consoles Bennett by praising him for having done so), positioning Jay as the scapegoat who is held responsible for disturbing the peace (despite his only resorting to violence in self-defence) and who must ultimately be cast out in order to keep the white invader-settler, cross-border community intact. Bennett does echo the program’s usual arguments about gradual change as a solution to Indigenous peoples’ treatment by the colonizers. In response to Jay’s assertion that “the time of the Cree giving in is over,” Bennett suggests: “The world changes, John. Why not learn to live together?” Bennett invokes a discourse of multiculturalism more representative of Bordertown’s moment of production than the temporal setting of the program. But, although the Canadian government framed the Canadian Multiculturalism Act, 1988, as expanding the remit of official multiculturalism to combat racism, “the Act, despite these changes, is still primarily concerned with mobilising diversity for the project of nation-building, as well as ­limiting that diversity to symbolic rather than political forms.”35 In “Conduct Becoming,” Jay echoes critics of the limits of official ­multiculturalism by pointing out that white racism interferes with Bennett’s vision of coexistence, noting how long it has taken them to be served in the saloon: Jay: How long does it usually take you to get a meal in here? … B en n et t: That will change. Jay: Perhaps. If we give away our lands, and our culture, you may allow us to buy a drink in a white man’s saloon. I don’t consider that a fair exchange, Clive, do you? B en n et t: It’s not for me to decide. Jay: I know. But do you think it’s fair? Bennett refuses to answer Jay’s question and demands of Zach that they be served. Positioning himself as a government representative only, Bennett will not entertain Jay’s questions of justice in the company of Jay himself. To his friends and colleagues, however, Bennett expresses disgust with the government’s actions and his own complicity with them. Bennett tells Marie: “I was brought up to believe in the government. And that if I did its work, my hands would stay clean. Well, they’re filthy … What kind of country is built on lies and  dishonesty?” If “for over two hundred years one of the most

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consistent Canadian refrains has been the assertion that American society is fundamentally violent, corrupt, and immoral,”36 Bennett struggles to come to terms with Canada’s own corruption here. Later, Bennett targets his criticism more specifically at the police force that employs him. Staring at his red serge uniform, folded on the table, he mutters: Maintien le droit. Ma r ie: What did you say? B en n et t: To maintain the right. It’s the Mountie motto. It’s funny how you can do your job without being true to it … Commissioner Stewart’s recommending me for a commendation. He said I displayed conduct becoming an officer. What’s that supposed to mean, Marie? At this point, the camera tilts down to the uniform, and the episode ends. Although Marie has attempted to convince Bennett to let the matter go on the grounds that he “did the only thing [he] could do,” and should “accept it, and go on” because he “won’t change the world,” the episode’s closing on the folded uniform suggests a greater discomfort with the government’s actions on the part of the program. At the same time, however, Bennett will go on and continue his work as a Mountie. On the one hand, “Conduct Becoming” confronts the mythology of Canada’s having treated Indigenous peoples better than the United States has done, exemplified in Craddock’s observation, “So, the superior Canadians cheated.” On the other hand, the episode’s underscoring of the sullying of the Mountie uniform operates alongside Bennett’s worthiness as a representative of the Mountie ideal. He has, after all, done his best to maintien le droit and to hold both his police force and his country to account. In this sense, although the episode disturbs the association of Canada with greater racial justice than its neighbour across the border, it ultimately rehabilitates that association through the figure of Bennett. Although the policing of racialized bodies in Bordertown tends to focus on Indigenous peoples, a handful of episodes also features black North American characters on both the “right” and “wrong” side of the law. Given Bordertown’s 1880s setting, the spectre of slavery in the United States figures prominently in these episodes, as  both white and black characters remember race relations

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circumscribed by slavery. In “Wild Horses,” Jackson Clay, a black horse trader, comes to Bordertown, only to have a gang of white criminals claim he has stolen the horses from them. When a fight ensues, Clay kills one of the white criminals in self-defence, and Bennett locks him up in Bordertown’s jail cell. “Sure ain’t the way I’d do it,” Craddock states, to which Bennett replies, “Consider it protective custody.”37 Bennett implies that jailing a black man is somehow an act of hospitality, keeping him safe from the white criminals while the policemen (with Couteau’s help) attempt to prove Clay’s claim to the horses. While in the jail cell, however, Clay surmises that Craddock fought on the Confederate side in the Civil War, referring to Craddock as “Captain.” Craddock replies: All right, I fought for the Confederacy. But it had nothing to do with slavery. How would you like a foreign army in your front yard? C lay: That foreign army was fighting for my rights. Remember? C r a dd oc k: I was fightin’ to protect my home. I was no slave owner. Their argument remains unresolved, and this invocation of US slavery appears both to contrast Canada with the United States, implicitly, on the grounds of slavery (with no acknowledgment of Canada’s own history of slavery) and to rehabilitate Confederate history through Craddock’s character. When Clay informs Craddock that he was shot at on his way into Bordertown, Craddock contradicts his earlier questioning of Bennett’s methods and states, “Then I guess it’s just as well you’re locked up until Corporal Bennett gets home, then, right?” Ultimately, Clay tells Bennett he is “much obliged for your help, Corporal,” to which Bennett responds, “Thank you, Clay. I was just doing my job.” As such, the policing of the black body in this episode appears to be a friendly, helpful incarceration, one enacted by the sensible and trustworthy Mountie. If Clay exposes Craddock’s Confederate history, this history is seemingly further rehabilitated in “Hired Hand,” in which Isaac West, a black man and old friend of Craddock’s, comes to Bordertown. The episode focuses on the mistreatment of another black man, Jake Carlton, who has refused a poor offer to buy his land, and the episode begins with the white Talon brothers violently attacking him. When Carlton threatens the Talons by saying,

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“Marshal Craddock ain’t gonna stand for this, Mr Talon,” Hank Talon replies, “You think he cares what happens to the likes of you? He knows your kind was meant to work the land, not own it.”38 Crucial to the program’s positioning of Craddock, of course, is that the viewer understand that Talon is mistaken and that, despite Craddock’s Confederate history, he would never endorse the Talons’ racism; indeed, he later throws Hank Talon against a wall and says, “Scum like you … gives Dixie a bad name, you know that?” “Hired Hand” further underscores Craddock’s liberal thinking where race is concerned by suggesting that his friend Isaac might be made his deputy and that Craddock will make some “enquiries.” The episode offers the Canadian and American policemen as open-minded liberals, with Bennett asking West why he never joined the rangers, as Craddock had. “How many black Mounties do you know?” West asks him, which both critiques the systemic racism of the police force and elevates Bennett as a man interested in racial justice. In conversation with Jake Carlton’s son, who is disappointed that his father will not put up a fight against the Talons (Carlton does not even own a gun, as Bennett later observes), West describes teaching himself to shoot after watching his master kill his father, but he claims that he never killed his master because he “grew up” and “lost the anger.” Ultimately, however, the episode constructs a black man’s anger as persistent and dangerous when West kills the Talons, ostensibly for Jake Carlton’s benefit, but really for himself, as Carlton points out. For prior to shooting Hank Talon, West demands of him: “Repeat after me. I am a worthless man, and Isaac West is my master.” When Talon repeats the line, West laughs and says, “That was beautiful! You know something? I think you and I can be friends now.” Talon attempts to fire on West, who then kills him and says, “You never knew my pappy, but you just died for him.” Despite the Talons’ racist violence, Craddock considers West’s actions an affront: “This is my town; this is my territory.” West’s reply – “Yes suh, Marshal!” – deviates from his usual diction, positing an interpellation of West by Craddock as an inferior black man. Craddock does not understand or condone West’s anger, which West explains is the product of “twenty years of shovelling manure while you white boys just rode the plains.” When Craddock claims, “I gave you a chance – you let me down,” West replies: “I let you down? … You people, you let me down all my life. I’ve had to swallow my pride so many times I’m beginning to gag on the taste.” West’s

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narrative echoes other storylines in Bordertown that give space to racial-minority characters to articulate their resistance to injustice, but, as with all other such storylines, the trustworthiness of the individual lawman is paramount in the program’s own political position. West’s mistake, according to Bordertown’s logic, is to conflate Craddock (his Confederate past notwithstanding) with systemic racism. From the program’s point of view, Craddock cannot be fairly conflated with “you people,” however vicious “Hired Hand” demonstrates white racism to be. As a guest in Craddock’s town, West has misbehaved and, as such, is no longer welcome. Significantly, Carlton, having finally received a fair offer for his land, will also leave Bordertown’s environs, deciding to look for a city job. Although this choice clearly stems from the racist violence he has experienced, it seems that even with the noble guardians Bennett and Craddock, Bordertown has no place for black citizens, limiting their capacity to act as hosts. Further, the decades-long friendship between the black West and the white Craddock ultimately collapses, preserving the priority of the white, cross-border relationship between Craddock and Bennett. For all the program works to present Canada and the  United States as different through the figures of Bennett and Craddock, racial likeness trumps national difference in the construction of partnership. due south: indigenizing the mountie

Like Bordertown, Due South was also a co-production, at least in its inception, in which c t v partnered with the American network cbs, which “provided two-thirds of [the program’s] financing.”39 Produced in Canada, with Toronto standing in for the series’ Chicago setting, Due South “was the first Canadian-made television programme ever to play on American prime-time” and attracted large audiences in Canada,40 the United States, and elsewhere.41 Due South both echoes and magnifies the cross-border national stereotypes presented by Bordertown and, as Michael Dawson argues, presents the late-twentieth-century figure of the Mountie as the inheritor of Mountie mythology established by popular early ­twentieth-century fictions in his “discomfort around women,” his apparent respect for “traditional hierarchies,” and his embodiment of a “Victorian manliness” that modernity threatened to extinguish.42 Moving from the Northwest Territories to Chicago after his

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father’s murder, Constable Benton Fraser (Paul Gross) has previously found a posting in Moose Jaw to be too difficult to adapt to, given his uneasiness with an “urban lifestyle.”43 If Fraser has had trouble working in a small Saskatchewan city of fewer than thirtyfive thousand people,44 in Chicago, Fraser is clearly out of his ­element, allowing the program to enhance the divisions between Canadianness and Americanness through the contrast Fraser presents to his American partner, Detective Ray Vecchio (David Marciano) of the Chicago Police Department. Where Bordertown presents the Mountie and the US Marshal as having mutual claims to the town and mutual responsibilities to police it, in Due South, the Chicago setting, away from the border, dictates that Fraser is not on his home turf: he is a guest in Chicago, works at the Canadian Consulate as deputy liaison officer, and sometimes brings cases to Ray. South of the 49th parallel, outside of his jurisdiction (apart from within the confines of the Consulate), Fraser is not licenced to carry a loaded gun, prompting Ray to wisecrack during the pilot episode, “What do they shoot people with in Canada, serviettes?”45 Fraser’s inability to carry a loaded gun in the United States means his policing methods must necessarily differ from Ray’s, but, as with Bordertown, Fraser’s methods are also posited as being more Canadian through a lesser degree of violence – emphasizing Canadian civility – and their association with attention to nature and a reliance “not on technology, but on [Fraser’s own] senses.”46 These senses merge with the common-sense attitude to the Canada-US border articulated through the children in Bordertown in the second part of Due South’s “Mountie on the Bounty” episode, when Fraser, below deck, instinctively knows the second that the ship he is on crosses the Canada-US border in Lake Superior and fires his weapon legally in order to stop a criminal. Fittingly, however, Fraser does not shoot a person in this instance but, rather, an explosive device that assists with the criminal’s apprehension.47 The Canada-US rivalry and hostipitality of Bordertown is recalibrated in Due South. Although Vecchio consistently ridicules Canada and posits Fraser’s eccentricities to be the product of his Canadian identity, Fraser, unlike Bennett, does not rise to his American friend’s bait. Fraser is nothing if not polite, to such a ludicrous extent that when he first arrives in Chicago, in a near-caricature of civility, he is so busy offering empty taxis at the airport to those behind him in the line-up that he ends up having to walk all the way into the city.48 If

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Fraser is the ultimate good guest in Chicago through his politeness, in many ways his most frequent undermining of the American host is to insist upon courtesy’s virtue: “Only takes an extra second to be courteous,” he tells Vecchio as he lets another person enter the elevator before them; the next shot reveals Fraser and Vecchio walking up a lengthy set of stairs.49 Unlike Bordertown’s Bennett and Craddock, Fraser and Vecchio are never romantic rivals and, indeed, are generally less interested in romance – particularly in Fraser’s case – than either Bennett or Craddock. Without any serious competition from other characters for Fraser’s and Vecchio’s attention, they become the most significant figure in each other’s lives, with Vecchio taking priority even over the often-present ghost of Fraser’s father (Gordon Pinsent). With Fraser as a representative for Canada, the nation is clearly lacking in firepower (as the unloaded gun attests), a suggestive feminization in the context of both the Canada-US and the Fraser-Vecchio relationships; indeed, Fraser even cross-dresses on one undercover assignment.50 Despite this feminization, however, Canada accrues a stoic, sensible, and earthy dignity through Fraser’s worldview and policing methods. As individuals, Fraser and Vecchio are equals and partners, with Vecchio, during one episode in which Fraser has temporarily lost his memory, insisting that they are better together than as individuals, suggesting a national post-f ta and post-n a f ta allegory.51 That Due South, despite initial criticisms from the rcm p, should have ultimately received the Force’s stamp of approval on the grounds that “the values portrayed in the show are excellent” is hardly surprising, given the program’s intersection with the Mountie’s projection of “what many English-Canadians considered to be the ideal: in confirming Anglo-Saxon superiority and the righteousness of Imperial destiny, he appeared impartial, always successful, and unfailingly polite.”52 As Dawson notes, however, early mythologies surrounding the rc mp had to be translated for the late-twentiethcentury ideal Mountie in the form of Benton Fraser, given the historical police force’s relationship with, and the early Mountie fictions’ portrayal of, Indigenous peoples. Whereas “the classic tale of the Force did not have room for Aboriginal allies,”53 the incorporation of indigeneity is crucial to Due South’s representation of Fraser as the just Mountie. Unlike Bordertown, Due South does not demonstrate the Canada-US border as a Euro-North American imposition on Indigenous lands; however, indigeneity is crucial to

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how both Fraser in particular and Canada in general are positioned in the program. Fraser was raised by his grandparents in the Northwest Territories, he speaks Inuktitut, and his conversation with Vecchio is full of allusions to Inuit storytelling and culture, much to the latter’s exasperation. Christopher Gittings argues that, through the figure of Fraser, Due South “creates a new image of the Mountie as a preserver and facilitator of First Nations’ difference”;54 but, in many ways, Fraser himself is indigenized, particularly through the details of his northern upbringing. In this way, Due South offers Fraser as the product of “indigenization,” through which white people in invader-settler societies attempt to resolve “their need to become ‘native,’ to belong here.”55 But many of the episodes of the program are also framed to suggest an indigeneity on behalf of Due South. Several episodes feature a kind of Indigenous chant performed by a male voice: three notes, with the first two repeated before dropping an interval of a minor third. These notes usually accompany an establishing shot of the setting (most often Chicago but sometimes the Northwest Territories). Although this sound often features at the beginning of the episode, at times it emerges midway through, or at the end of an episode as the closing credits begin. This method of framing the episodes suggests that the perspective being offered by this Canadian program is, in fact, an Indigenous perspective, as though the proceedings are being watched by an Indigenous presence. In terms of the association of Canada with indigeneity, it is notable that Indigenous peoples in North America are only ever identified with the territory within the Canadian nation-state. There are no episodes that feature Native Americans in Chicago, only patient explanations by Fraser to his American partner that the infamous Atlanta Braves’ tomahawk chop could be construed as offensive to Native peoples, and a quotation of Geronimo by Fraser at a Chicago City Council meeting where he tries to resist the demolition of the tenement building in which he lives; but with Fraser ventriloquizing Geronimo and his reference to “It is my land, my home, … to which I now ask to be allowed to return,” Fraser once again appears aligned with an indigenous position.56 Thus, Fraser is both a representative of a police force traditionally deployed as a part of an invader-settler nation-building process that enacted “a globally British and locally Canadian imperialism”57 and a representative of North American indigeneity (complete with a fondness for pemmican, a piece of

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which he cheerfully donates to some bewildered fund-raising nuns at the airport in Chicago who request help to feed the hungry).58 In the pilot episode, Fraser in some ways appears more indigenous than the Indigenous: he travels by dog sled while the Inuit hunter he encounters periodically, who tips Fraser off to the problems with the dam project in the area, travels by snowmobile. In this respect, Due South threatens to “disqualif[y] living Aboriginal people from being authentically [Indigenous].”59 However, at times the program disturbs this equation of Fraser with indigeneity during the few episodes that include Indigenous characters. In the pilot episode, the Inuit hunter offers cryptic information about the circumstances of Fraser’s father’s death, and ultimately saves Fraser’s life, but pointedly keeps himself at a distance from Fraser, referring to him only as “Mountie,” forcing Fraser to represent only the repressive state apparatus. In “The Mask,” it is revealed that Fraser speaks Tsimshian, but it is never disclosed how he came to learn it, apart from the fact that Eric, his Tsimshian friend who has come to town at the same time as an exhibit of Tsimshian masks, once saved his life; thus the presentation of Fraser’s linguistic skills has the effect of naturalizing his ability to speak an Indigenous language.60 In this episode, claims are made on the Tsimshian masks by the Canadian and French governments as well as by the Tsimshian themselves (represented by Eric and his family). Fraser’s preference for trusting in the system (much like Corporal Bennett in Bordertown advises the Blackfoot to do) is put to the test. After the masks have gone missing, both Fraser and Eric assert that they will each return the masks; neither says to whom he will return them (Fraser, presumably to the governments who lay claim to them; Eric, presumably to his people). When it transpires that the Canadian government official has attempted to steal the masks, Fraser admonishes her, “I’m afraid these masks don’t belong to you.”61 The masks – fakes, it turns out – appear to have been returned. “You win, Mountie,” Fraser’s friend Eric says before running off, recoding their friendship as a tension between invader-settler state and Native; given that both American and Canadian law enforcement officials have referred to the Tsimshian as Canadian citizens, Eric’s interpellation of Fraser as Mountie presents a key division between them. Vecchio tells Fraser, “At least you got your masks back.” Fraser replies, “Yes. It would seem that everything’s where it should be,” at which point, we hear the sound of Raven’s wings, a signal that the trickster has been

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at work (and we later see the authentic masks in the company of the Tsimshian). On the one hand, as Rhiannon Bury suggests, “The Trickster is ultimately dependent on the good will of the Mountie”; further, as Gittings notes, this episode of the program “attempts to translate the Mountie from racial gatekeeper and reproducer of Anglo-Saxon Canadian culture to a Tsimshian speaker on intimate terms with First Nations people and their cultural practices, elid[ing] the racist origins of the police force.”62 On the other hand, the slippage of Fraser’s dialogue is significant: it would seem that everything’s where it should be. Due South appears both to claim Fraser’s indigenization (and, in his knowledge of the land, an authentic North American) and, when it puts Fraser in contact with Indigenous peoples, suggests it has overstepped in this positioning of the “Mountie.” But in a late episode entitled “Easy Money,” Fraser’s mentor Quinn, who taught him how to shoot a caribou and how to recognize substances by tasting them – the latter especially key to his policework – arrives in Chicago to contest the building of a hydroelectric dam that will threaten his northern community. But Quinn cannot fight his corporate enemies effectively, and he steals a stash of already stolen jewels in order to help finance his cause. Fraser says of Quinn in Chicago that “very few of his considerable skills are of any use to him” in this environment.63 Fraser appears to embody the model of an adaptable indigene in colonial terms: he may not belong in Chicago, but unlike his mentor, he can navigate new challenges successfully. Ultimately, Quinn asks, “Will you be my guide?” and Fraser responds, “I will be your guide,” leading the way for his Indigenous mentor. Crucially, then, in Due South, not only is the indigenization of Fraser a rehabilitation of the rc mp ’s historical relations with Indigenous peoples, but it also becomes conflated with Canadianness. Indigeneity appears to be a northern phenomenon virtually unrelated to the territory south of the 49th parallel, and Fraser’s clear attachment to the North underscores the program’s indigenizing of his character: indeed, when he first arrives at the Chicago Police Department, the clerk barely looks up from his desk when he mutters, “Here’s Nanook of the North.”64 Although the knee-jerk association of a Canadian with the Arctic constitutes a stereotypically American stereotype of Canada – one ascribed to by Vecchio in “The Man Who Knew Too Little” when he curses himself for failing to

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bring snow chains just to cross the border into Windsor65 – the desk clerk’s conflation of Fraser with an Inuit hunter does not stray far from the program’s own representation of the details of Fraser’s upbringing and preferred lifestyle. Further, as Julia V. Emberley notes, Nanook of the North’s construction of the Arctic reveals “geopolitical realities of a feminization of space,”66 which resonates in Due South’s depiction of Canada, in relation to the United States, through Fraser. Indigeneity does not correspond to a continental, cross-border integrity in Due South but, rather, to identifiable ways in which Canada differs from the United States, how its difference is marked and its foreignness construed as Other. If indigeneity serves in Due South to divide North America’s two northern nation-states from each other, this nafta-era program occasionally invokes the trade agreement that provides the continental economic and cultural context for the series’ production. At times, these invocations emerge fleetingly in dialogue, such as Fraser’s comment in “Dead Men Don’t Throw Rice” upon competing Chicago P D and federal agents’ claims to a case: “This is just a jurisdictional issue. I’m sure it can be sorted out with an appropriate dispute resolution mechanism much like the recent Canadian softwood lumber dispute.” The failure of such dispute resolution mechanisms will not have been  lost on the Canadian audience, of course, and, as with David McFadden’s humour in Great Lakes Suite, Fraser’s seemingly helpful suggestion appears to underscore the Canadian audience’s status as host, insiders who can appreciate the irony of Fraser’s choice of analogy. But the episode “The Edge” explicitly grapples with trilateral relations in North America in its narrative focus on a nafta summit, for which Fraser, Vecchio, and Anita Cortez, their Mexican counterpart, must provide security. The three characters, as representatives of Canada, the United States, and Mexico, exemplify relations between their countries and the fractures in the posited North American community that nafta gestured towards but did not succeed in forging: “there has been little effort to create a collective sense of North American community.”67 A failed North American community resonates in Vecchio’s complaint about Anita to Lieutenant Welsh: “I don’t think we’re really bonding.”68 nafta’s creation of North America as an economic entity, rather than any other kind of partnership, is evident in Vecchio’s undercutting of Fraser’s superior, Inspector Meg Thatcher, and her lofty discourse about the summit’s importance:

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It is imperative that the North American Free Trade Summit operates without incident. This conference is a milestone in the relationship between our three countries. It’s about cooperation. It’s about growth. It’s about – V ec c hi o: Money? While Vecchio and Cortez fail, at least initially, to “bond,” Cortez also questions the nature of the relationship between Vecchio and Fraser after Vecchio shoots Fraser (though not with real bullets) in a training exercise. “This entire situation was my fault,” Fraser says, in an attempt to intervene in an argument between Vecchio and Cortez. Cortez is nonplussed: “The American shot him – why is he apologizing?” “He’s Canadian,” Welsh responds in a stereotype of Canadian civility; yet Cortez’s question appears to gesture less to perceived national behavioural traits and more to what she sees as a US failure to own up to wrongdoing. The lack of cooperation between Fraser, Vecchio, and Cortez, particularly the latter two characters, projects a North America in which Canada and the US feel they have more in common and work better together than they do with Mexico. Interestingly, however, although the summit takes place on US soil, Fraser takes on the role of host, to a certain degree, in his attempt to include Cortez. Attempting to track an ex-infantry man, Lacroix, who has been sending threatening letters regarding the summit, Fraser and Vecchio leave without Cortez, which troubles Fraser: “Shouldn’t we invite Ms. Cortez?” “Ah, she’s busy. She’ll only slow us down,” Vecchio replies, while Cortez in fact follows behind, unseen. Fraser’s concern for inviting Cortez not only demonstrates him to be hospitable (and, of course, polite) but also tellingly positions him as a Canadian in the US working with an American partner: he does not, in fact, invite Cortez but implicitly asks for permission to do so from Vecchio. Vecchio himself explicitly deploys the discourse of hospitality in order to critique Cortez. Discussing an earlier incident in which Fraser believes he saw someone with a gun at the airport, but no gunman was found, Vecchio resents Cortez’s questioning of Fraser: V ec c hi o: Read the report. There’s a Spanish translation. C ortez: You believe your friend – very touching. Also very American.

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V ec c h i o: You know I’m getting a little sick and tired of your disrespect. You are a visitor in this country. C orte z: Ah, thank you, Vecchio. I had forgotten the Alamo. V ec c h i o: Is that a slam against Davey Crockett? Vecchio invokes hospitality in order to put Cortez in what he perceives to be her proper place: grateful and deferent to the powerful American host. His offer of a Spanish translation might masquerade as hospitable, but this offer also casts aspersions on Cortez’s (completely fluent) grasp of English. But if the faltering cooperation of Fraser, Vecchio, and Cortez spells trouble for North American unity, their respective superiors cooperate even less with each other. Each country has a plan for getting its trade delegates off the plane that involves deliberate delays and / or doubles, plans they insist to Fraser, Vecchio, and Cortez that they must keep secret from the other two countries. If Vecchio has slighted Cortez’s flawless English in order to enact inhospitality, language becomes crucial in the exchanges between the three characters and their superiors in terms of how North America is configured and characterized by the episode. While Fraser and Vecchio both hear of their countries’ secret plans in English, Cortez is informed by the Mexican official in Spanish. Although the Spanish is subtitled (a reversal of the report translation Vecchio has offered), the translation itself is significant. The subtitles read as follows: Mex ica n O f f i c i a l: Our man will stay for 5 more minutes in the plane. The Canadian comes in the back; the American is a double. C orte z: How do you know this? Mex ica n O f f i c i a l : That’s the advantage of being Mexican. They always think we’re sleeping, but don’t tell the Americans or the Canadians. However, the Mexican official does not use the word “estadounidense” to refer to the Americans; crucially, he uses “gringo” instead, which the program translates in both instances as “American” for the Anglo audience. Cortez has also used the word “gringo” in an earlier confrontation with Vecchio. During the training exercise that goes awry, she has bitten the stand-in for the assassin.

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V ec c hi o: In what manual does it say you bite the assassin. C ortez: Well I had to do something – you weren’t going to. V ec c hi o: But you’re the hostage. C ortez: Oh, so we are just a third world country, we are not supposed to fight back? Gringo baboso. Fr aser: That’s Spanish explorer. V ec c hi o: That’s not what she said. I know what she said. I know what you said, and that’s not what she said. You did not say Spanish explorer. “Gringo” becomes the untranslatable adjective in this episode (although “baboso,” or “idiot,” is hardly complimentary either). Unlike Vecchio, the Anglo audience focusing on English subtitles rather than the spoken Spanish may be “fooled” in Cortez’s exchange with the official insofar as “American” appears neutral where “gringo” clearly is not. Although “gringo” can mean simply “an Anglo person,” or, more generally, “foreigner” or “stranger,” it is usually associated with “English-speaking Americans,” and further, although it may be used as a neutral adjective, it “does have a pejorative sound.”69 Despite the fact that an Anglo-Canadian would ­certainly be included in the “foreigner” or “stranger” category in relation to Latin America, an Anglo-Canadian audience would readily identify the word “gringo” as not only signifying a US American but also as a derogatory term. Significantly for the trilateral relations projected in the episode, the “Canadienses,” as spoken by the official, are exempt from the category of “gringos” and, therefore, from the critique that accompanies the Spanish epithet. Ultimately, Fraser, Vecchio, and Cortez do work together to save the summit, their unity signified through language. The rapprochement between Vecchio and Cortez occurs when Cortez accidentally steps on a home-made landmine, and Vecchio attempts to free her without setting off the explosive. Using a rock to replace Cortez’s foot on the mine, Vecchio begins counting in Spanish, beginning “uno,” followed by Cortez’s “dos,” and completed with Vecchio’s “tres.” This exchange repeats itself with a variation during the summit reception, when Fraser, Vecchio, and Cortez work together to stop Lacroix. Again, Vecchio begins the counting in Spanish, followed by Cortez with Fraser completing with “tres.” The use of Spanish numbers constitutes a crude signification of the countries’ cooperation through these three characters. That Vecchio should

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initiate the counting in Spanish in both instances in the episode apparently undoes his earlier inhospitality to Cortez, especially his suggestion that her English needs improvement. The Spanish language’s deployment in their final, successful attempt to save the summit seemingly underscores North America’s linguistic diversity, although, given that any Anglo child familiar with Sesame Street would understand the Spanish numbers, the tokenism of the gesture is clear. Ultimately, what is perhaps most telling about the episode is that, although the United States is in the most powerful position of the three na f ta partners, both inside and outside the trade agreement, as Vecchio states, “In my country nobody knows what n af ta is or cares,” whereas Fraser’s and Cortez’s fellow citizens presumably do not have the luxury of such ignorance. If Fraser only has a tenuous claim to the position of host during the n a f ta summit through his closer personal ties to Vecchio and his country’s greater likeness to the United States, the Canadian Consulate offers Fraser the position of host insofar as it is officially Canadian soil, complicating the geography of the Canada-US border. This micro-border, as it were, becomes especially significant in terms of hospitality in “Asylum,” when Vecchio (Callum Keith Rennie) comes to after a shooting beside the murder weapon with no recollection of what has happened.70 Vecchio runs to the Canadian Consulate, throws open the doors and collapses on his knees, filmed from a high-angle shot that emphasizes his prostration, as he shouts, “Fraser!”71 Echoing Bennett’s incarceration of Jackson Clay in Bordertown, Fraser arrests Vecchio, which turns out to be  integral to Vecchio’s protection. In custody in the Canadian Consulate, Vecchio experiences a conflation of sanctuary and incarceration. Also as in Bordertown, American characters are less certain of Fraser’s jurisdiction, although, given the distance between Chicago and the 49th parallel, this uncertainty should not come as a surprise. Vecchio’s Chicago PD colleagues Huey and Dewey have difficulty comprehending the status of the Consulate: Hu ey: Fraser, you’re a Mountie. You can’t arrest anybody unless you’re in Canada.  Fr ase r: I am in Canada.  Hu ey: No, see, this is Chicago.  Fr ase r: Well, you would think so, wouldn’t you, but you would be wrong. 

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Dewey: Are we in the Twilight Zone? Fr aser: You see, under the terms of the Vienna Convention 1964, this Consulate and the grounds upon which it sits is Canadian territory … So technically, you see, Ray is in Canada. Now if you wish to arrest him, I’m afraid you will have to extradite him. These are the necessary forms to be completed in triplicate and filed with the American Embassy in Ottawa. Dewey: We are in the Twilight Zone. With his colleagues attempting to arrest him, Vecchio is only protected until “the moment [he] step[s] from this building,” outside the safe haven of the Consulate. The operation of the Consulate as border zone (if not twilight zone) allows Vecchio to be welcomed to Canada, where Fraser’s colleague Turnbull offers to teach him the rules of curling: “This is not a sport: it’s housework,” Vecchio insists, behaving as an inhospitable guest. But the shift in cultural context across the threshold of the Consulate is paired with a shift in legal context, as signalled not only by Vecchio’s ability to take refuge in another country down the road from the crime scene he has fled but also by the conflict between Fraser and Assistant State’s Attorney Cahill, who arrives at the Consulate and demands that Vecchio be arrested by American authorities: C a hill: The city of Chicago demands your cooperation!  Fr aser: And you shall have it, sir, to the full extent of the law.  C a hill: Are you mocking me? Are you mocking this city, this administration? Fr aser: Certainly not, sir. No. We greatly appreciate the generosity shown to us by the people of Chicago, and I assure you, should you ever find yourself in Nunavut, you will not be wanting for a meal. C a hill: Come here. Come here. You know, this Marquis of Queensbury thing and your grammar and all, it’s very quaint. But I just want to remind you that we took Grenada, we beat the snot out of Haiti, we knocked Panama on its ass, and if needs be, we can take this little piss pot, too! Have a nice evening. Fr aser: Oh dear. Fraser extends hospitality through the projection of Cahill visiting Nunavut, only to have Cahill respond as a violent, threatening guest.

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Cahill posits that Fraser usurps the position of host on what Cahill considers US territory, and he invokes a history of hemispheric violence in order to intimidate the Mountie. Cahill’s people will fall further afoul of Canadian law when they arrive with extradition papers for Vecchio, only to discover their progress slowed by the fact that “firearms are not permitted on the premises.” As Fraser explains to his disbelieving audience: “We have very strict gun laws here in Canada. Now, I don’t make the rules, I simply enforce them. But I took an oath very similar to the one you gentlemen took, I should imagine, without the references to the Queen of course.” As with Bordertown, the most vociferous contesting of Canada’s sovereignty emerges from US criminals, which becomes clear when it transpires that Cahill himself is behind the murder for which he has attempted to arrest Vecchio. Questioning of Canadian culture and jurisdiction may come from Vecchio’s insulting of curling, or the pizza deliveryman demanding he be paid in US currency, despite his delivery to the Consulate, but the most serious challenges to Canada’s position must come from those on the “wrong” side of both the law and the border.  Cahill is not the only example of corruption in Due South, of course. Indeed, the pilot episode of the series attracted criticism from the rc mp for the way in which it represented Fraser as being cast out of Canada for turning in the corrupt Gerrard, the rcm p officer responsible for Fraser’s father’s death.72 Thus, the program began with isolating Fraser as an upstanding lawman, underappreciated and misunderstood by his rc mp colleagues in a way that might disturb Fraser’s ability to stand in for Canadianness, much less the rc mp. One rc mp officer, following Gerrard’s sentencing, tells Fraser that he is “the last of a breed,”73 or, in other words, the only embodiment of the Mountie ideal. This embodiment echoes an earlier scene of the pilot, which shows Fraser reading his father’s journal in a diner while the Crash Test Dummies’ “Superman’s Song” plays on the soundtrack.74 Although the song itself is a playful rumination on the differences between Superman and Tarzan, the sombre tone of the scene over which the song plays, interspersing the Crash Test Dummies’ singing with the dead Fraser Sr’s voice-over, suggests the program treats the song seriously here. The episode aligns Fraser with Superman, as the lines about Superman “stay[ing] in the city” resonate with Fraser’s lingering in Chicago despite his desire to be elsewhere, and the fact that “Superman never made any money” intersects with the modest living of both Fraser and his father;

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ultimately, as “the last of a breed,” Fraser fuses with Superman through the song lyrics, “Sometimes I despair the world will never see another man like him.” In Bordertown, Bennett’s crisis of faith in the Mounties and the government accompanies a focus on the Mountie uniform and what it is meant to symbolize. In Due South, much is made of the Mountie uniform, but not in order to criticize the rcm p ; rather, through Fraser’s character and his own reverence for the uniform, Due South would seem both to rehabilitate the rcm p for historical injustices and, in some senses, resist the idea that Fraser is the “new” Mountie that Dawson envisions.75 In “Free Willie,” Fraser finds it difficult to comprehend the fact that a criminal has shot his hat, the iconic Mountie Stetson.76 Although Fraser at times is self-reflexive about Due South’s tendency to dress him in the ceremonial red serge, explaining at one stage, “Well you know, the red uniform [is] really mostly for special occasions. Although they do seem to insist that I wear mine more often,”77  he most often refers to the uniform in terms of the history he reveres. In “Vault,” Fraser is temporarily fired from his position at the Consulate for refusing to wearing a new, navy blue uniform: “I have worn this uniform with pride my entire career, as my father wore his and many before him. To me it is much more than just a… a piece of cloth. It is a tradition that links me to every officer who has ever worn it and acquitted himself with honour and integrity. While it is not the current fashion, I would be hard pressed to change it without feeling that I had, in some way, betrayed that tradition.”78 When Vecchio’s sister, Francesca, muses about wanting to wear a uniform and asks Fraser, “Is the hat really necessary?” Fraser responds, “Absolutely essential.”79 Given the controversy surrounding the Baltej Dhillon case in 1988, the year of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act’s ratification, when those arguing against Dhillon’s right to wear a turban with his Mountie uniform posited a historical tradition the Mountie uniform must follow, it is difficult to read Fraser’s attachment to the uniform and its “essential” components as an example of the rcm p embodying a contemporary, multicultural Canadianness. Fraser’s defence of the uniform underscores his whiteness as well as the conflation of civility and whiteness that underpins Anglo-Canadian civility. In both the program’s characterizing and framing of Fraser and Fraser’s attachment to the symbol of the rcm p uniform, Due South demonstrates a nostalgia for a more traditional, conservative

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Canada, one in keeping with the white Mountie and his pet wolf tellingly named “Diefenbaker.” Although this conservatism and inflexibility would seem to operate at odds with the indigenizing of Fraser, it appears as though the program yokes together the white invader-settler tradition of the rc mp with traditions it selects and appropriates from Indigenous culture in order to forge a model Canadianness that can compete with the Americanness that dominates the cross-border relationship. Like Bennett, Fraser as an individual Mountie represents both the police force and the larger nation. Unlike Bennett, for the most part, Fraser is not at home, not even attempting to claim the authority of the host. In this way, it would seem, the internationally popular Due South appears to suggest that Canadianness is effective, and perhaps most palatable, when occupying the position of guest in the neighbour’s house south of the border. t h e b o r d e r : p o s t - 9/ 11 p o l i c i n g

c b c’s The Border unfolds in a post-9/11 context, therefore presenting a border that looks very different from that present in the program’s predecessors. In the fallout of 9/11, the notion of “longest undefended border in the world” has been eclipsed by “uniformed guards with badges and guns. There are immigration and customs facilities, posts or pillars, fences, barriers, gates, X-ray scanners, Geiger counters, drug- and bomb-sniffing dogs, and fleets of s u vs.”80 Canada’s most recent border policing drama brings the action closer to the actual border itself, with various individual episodes focusing on border communities and the activities of the fictional agency, Immigration and Customs Security (i cs), frequently involving border checkpoints. But i c s does not – and cannot – act alone, given the interests and presence of representatives of US Homeland Security. The activities of this fictional agency and its collaboration with US Homeland Security gesture towards, but never acknowledge, the Integrated Border Enforcement Teams (i be ts) that began to develop in 1996 to address local border policing issues (such as smuggling) but were expanded and “advanced in the Smart Border accords” in the wake of 9/11.81 Whereas i be ts are “joint US-Canada groups made up of representatives from six agencies: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Canada Border Services Agency (c sba), the US Border Patrol, the US Coast Guard, the US Bureau of

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Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and US Customs and Border Protection,”82 The Border focuses almost exclusively on the activities of i c s and Homeland Security, each agency acting as ­representative for its respective nation-state’s values, interests, and methods. The headquarters of i c s are located in Toronto, and, as Joanne C. Elvy and Luis René Fernández Tabío note, The Border’s visual representation of Toronto and “strongly Canadian spaces” constitutes a “reclaiming [of] space from American productions that Canadians so often watc[h] on television.”83 Due South’s own use of Toronto to stand in for Chicago finds a response in The Border’s re-Canadianization of its location. The Border also differs from Bordertown and Due South not only in its projection of a fictional agency but also in its movement away from the earlier programs’ structure of individual Canadian and American policemen paired together in cross-­ border partnership. Rather, as Yasmin Jiwani notes, “The Border tends to veer toward an institutionally structured team approach,”84 certainly in its depiction of i c s. Headed by Major Mike Kessler (James McGowan), the i c s team also consists of former Canadian Security Intelligence Service (c si s) , rcm p, and Customs and Revenue employees, including Superintendent Maggie Norton (Catherine Disher), Detective Sergeant Gray Jackson (Graham Abbey), Detective Sergeant Al “Moose” Lepinsky (Mark Wilson), Sergeant Layla Hourani (Nazneen Contractor),85 Inspector Darnell Williams (Jim Codrington), and their IT expert, Heironymous Slade (Jonas Chernick). When US Homeland Security agent Bianca LaGarda (Sofia Milos) appears in the second episode of the first season to begin “running [the] new integrated cross-border initiative,”86 there is no sense that she has a similar team working with her. She deals most directly with Kessler, and their clashes over procedure echo those of the earlier border-policing programs, especially the disagreements between Bordertown’s Bennett and Craddock, but with much higher stakes in a post-9/11 context. If the rcm p describes i b e ts in the real world as working to “secure the shared border between Canada and the United States, while respecting the laws and jurisdiction of each nation,”87 The Border frequently depicts questions of jurisdiction as particularly fraught in efforts to police the border jointly. As Jiwani notes, “in the post-9/11 landscape of North American televisual culture, crises and threats have assumed an added potency.”88 Against this landscape, The Border,

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like its predecessors, attempts to distinguish Canadian from American values, but this proves far more complicated in the contemporary context. First airing in 2008, The Border is an inheritor not only of Bordertown and Due South but also, as critics have noted, of the Fox series 24. Indeed, not only has The Border been described as “a dilute, Canadian version” of the Fox program,89 but the Border’s creators also explicitly made this connection by describing their ­program as “24 with a conscience.”90 The interchangeability of “Canadian” and “conscience,” a conflation that presumably testifies to Canadian civility, is clear in the program’s pitting of the Canadian Kessler and his crew against the American LaGarda and its projection of “the Canadian agents’ consistent ‘education’ of the archetypical American militant officer in matters of tolerance to cultural difference and respect for jurisdictional differences”;91 yet The Border also blurs the boundaries between Canadian and American values. To begin with, LaGarda as the American foil to the Canadian Kessler diverges from earlier border policing programs’ depictions of representative Americanness: not only is she a significant departure from Bordertown and Due South’s representation of US law enforcement, but she is also Cuban-American, having arrived in Florida via the boatlift as a child. This feminization of US power is not without its ideological problems, of course, given the exoticizing and eroticizing of LaGarda and the sexual tension between her and Kessler. But in the granting of representative Canadian status to Kessler, the white Anglo male, while LaGarda is the representative American, The Border implicitly undermines Canada’s tendency towards self-congratulation for being more progressive and multicultural than its southern neighbour, even as that neighbour appears to behave badly on Canadian soil. LaGarda’s arrival in “Gray Zone,” the second episode of the first season, clearly identifies her as a bad guest on Canadian territory. Before discovering her identity (and most especially her gender), Kessler demands of the US Coast Guard, following a botched operation in the St Lawrence Seaway, “to speak to the cowboy who breached our waters, opened fire on our target, and sank our contraband.” Upon meeting LaGarda, Kessler wonders whether the “crossborder initiative” she invokes is called “Operation Piss Off the Canadians.” The following dialogue demonstrates clear affinities with exchanges between Canadians and Americans in Bordertown,

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only here, it is US law enforcement, rather than American criminals, that disregards Canada’s territorial sovereignty: K essle r: You are aware that, technically, you invaded Canada out there. La G a r da : Don’t be a hard-ass, Major. K essle r: You crossed the border without permission. La G a r da : It was dark. The gp s has a margin of error. K essle r: You opened fire without warning! La G a r da : The target was escaping. K essle r: We had this situation under control. La G a r da : In our new spirit of cooperation, “we” includes us. US law enforcement has arrived uninvited on the Canadian side of the border, but LaGarda invokes a new political context in which the Canadian host position is no longer valid in theory, let alone in practice: for “‘we’ includes us,” and Canadians can no longer expect to have their sovereignty respected (if they ever did). When the deputy minister overrides Kessler’s assertion that the prisoner apprehended on the Canadian side of the border should be kept in Canadian custody, LaGarda asserts: “Mine’s bigger than yours. Get used to it, Major.” LaGarda’s phallic joke, on one level, serves to counteract her femininity and attest to the fact that she is one of the boys. However, it also invokes a familiar might-is-right argument that Canadians expect from the United States. “There you have it,” Kessler observes wryly, “the voice of American diplomacy.” Although Kessler implicitly critiques an absence of American civility, what he is also telling is that, despite LaGarda’s insistence that “‘we’ includes us,” throughout The Border, “this would appear to depend on which side of the border LaGarda finds herself on”;92 for instance, in “Gray Zone” she refuses to tell Kessler where they will be taking the prisoner. “That’s classified,” she says. LaGarda often knows more than Kessler about operations on Canadian soil. When a secret rendition flight crashes in rural Quebec in “Bodies on the Ground,” LaGarda has clearly been informed but is reluctant to share information with her Canadian counterpart. K essle r: Was this a rendition flight? Tell me you had clearance to overfly Canada.

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La G a r da : You really wanna talk territorial sovereignty? Or can we talk about how to get these guys back?93 Kessler wants to know whether the flight was intended to take what LaGarda refers to as “enemy combatants” to “Albania, Serbia, somewhere where the gloves can come off.” His question, along with his relationship with a human rights lawyer, Yvonne Castle, and the fact that his ex-wife runs a refugee centre, identify both Kessler himself and Canada as a whole as having a greater concern for human rights than the United States. “Who do you think provides the muscle for your fine ideals?” LaGarda asks Kessler in “Gray Zone.” But while Kessler appears to be the repository of such fine ideals, he is happy to make use of US “muscle” where it suits him in a manner that undermines Canada’s association with social justice and human rights. In the conclusion to “Gray Zone,” following LaGarda’s presentation of extradition papers for the Albanian criminals they apprehended, Kessler informs an exasperated LaGarda: “We can’t extradite for murder. Not to a death penalty state.” However, he counsels LaGarda on how to get around Canada’s “fine ideals” by “suggest[ing] [she] apply for extradition on a lesser charge, like conspiracy to kidnap”: “You can upgrade to murder stateside.” ­ Curiously, then, Kessler appears to embody Canadian values while simultaneously facilitating capital punishment south of the border, thus undermining the program’s suggestion of “the more ethical and conciliatory nature of Canadian approaches to national security in contrast to American methods and attitudes.”94 In this instance, Kessler is the helpful host to the American guest, regardless of the threat she poses to his authority in his own country. Canadian hospitality is both emphasized and undermined in the ­program in a variety of contexts. In “Family Affairs,” the granting of a temporary visa to the movie star Amira’s adopted son, a Sudanese refugee with no papers, prompts the ics agents to underscore Canada’s hospitality to the celebrity and her family. That the agents repeatedly remind Amira of this hospitality, of course, lessens its hospitable nature. In Amira’s hotel room, Gray Jackson tells her and her entourage: “Look, here’s how this goes. You guys are here as guests of the Canadian government. Now one of your party, the boy Ali, has a special visa, and we’re not leaving here till we explain the terms.”95 Keen to impress upon Amira the significance of “what we did for

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you” in “a huge exception to Canadian law,” the members of the ics team consider Amira a bad guest when they realize Ali, her adopted son, is a former child soldier. According to Kessler, “You had a responsibility to disclose that information when you wanted to come into Canada with him.” Amira’s response both questions the limits of Canadian hospitality and lessens distinctions between Canada and the United States, particularly – and pointedly – where racial justice is concerned: “Because North America gives young black men so many second chances.” At this point, the national hospitality ics keeps gesturing towards appears to be both meaningless and an ineffectual means of distinguishing Canada from the United States. Other episodes dealing with non-Canadian children probe the limits of Canadian hospitality in terms of literal accommodation. In “Enemy Contact,” a terrorist suspect’s baby is brought into ics headquarters, much to Maggie Norton’s dismay. When Kessler suggests the baby be sent to “that shelter for unaccompanied minors coming into the country illegally,” Norton’s response, “It’s not set up for infants and by the way have you ever been in that place? It’s a prison – I wouldn’t send a stray cat there,” hardly upholds Canada as a sanctuary for children.96 In “The Sweep,” Norton also features significantly in the struggle to hold Canada accountable for its treatment of non-Canadian children. The episode’s title refers to the government’s attempt to find forty-one thousand missing deportees. Norton goes to a school in order to find parents of foreign children whose refugee claims have been rejected. When the teacher asserts, “Even illegal children need an education,” Norton replies, “I don’t disagree,” but she also informs the teacher that the children will be “returned to their countries of origin.” “And you can live with yourself?” the teacher asks.97 Later, in response to the news that the Airport Road detention centre is being reopened, Slade’s characterization of this accommodation effectively damns the nation-state: “Heartbreak hotel? Isn’t that slated for demolition? … Why not just use those cool cages from Children of Men? Put one on every corner. That’ll serve ’em right for trying to escape their war-torn, poverty-ravaged lives.” Ultimately, Norton takes the responsibilities of the nation-state upon herself by becoming a foster-mother to a Filipino child whose sister has been murdered, which both indicts the nation-state and reinscribes Canada’s reputed virtues through an individual figure. The Border is littered with references to how Canada is supposed to be a peaceful, just nation; the many ways in which it fails to live

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up to this image surprise several characters, particularly visitors, immigrants, or refugees who appear in isolated episodes. These examples vary from the minor reference in “Family Affairs,” in which Amira, after her son’s luggage goes missing at Pearson, asks, “Who knew Canada was so lawless?” when informed of the racket involving luggage handlers and taxi drivers, to “Spoils of War,” in which an African woman who identifies a criminal from the Congo says she cannot believe this could happen in Canada, to the series’ cliff-hanger finale, “No Refuge,” in which the Mexican journalist who is Kessler’s ex-wife’s new partner is astonished to find that the Mexican drug ring MS13 has arrived even in “this peaceful country.”98 But other narratives offered by the program more clearly identify the nation-state as an agent in the unravelling of Canada’s image. The series’ first episode, “Pockets of Vulnerability,” features a narrative clearly modelled on the Maher Arar case, in which a Syrian-Canadian, Nizar Karim, is suspected of being associated with an embassy bomber after merely having sat next to him on a plane from Damascus. Removed from i c s custody by cs i s, at which point Kessler et al. lose track of him, Karim is presumed to have been taken to Syria to be tortured. As Yvonne Castle, Kessler’s onagain, off-again lover and Karim’s lawyer says to Kessler, “You know, Mike, until this morning, I didn’t realize this country used the word ‘disappear’ as a transitive verb.”99 Thus, Canada’s reputation for peace, order, and good government is both continually invoked in the program and challenged by The Border’s narratives. Particularly significant, however, is that the program posits c si s as the “bad guy” of Canadian law enforcement, especially through the unsympathetic Agent Andrew Mannering who is constantly at odds with Kessler. As Jiwani notes, The Border consistently highlights c si s’s “arrogance and deference (to the US).”100 In “Pockets of Vulnerability,” i c s figures express their concern for Karim’s welfare while Mannering has no interest in the prisoner’s status. Kessler argues that c si s is lacking in “accountability” and that “an innocent man [is] being tortured in prison while people like [Mannering] cover their asses while they sit there to rot.” This characterization both allows the program to displace the more unsavoury aspects of Canadian security away from the i cs protagonists with whom we are encouraged to sympathize and implicitly condemns the Canadian nation-state, suggesting more of a “mythic” construction of a just Canadianness than the program’s producers

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perhaps intend, given that i c s is fictional whereas cs i s is Canada’s actual intelligence agency. It would seem, then, that The Border might falter when it comes to establishing meaningful Canada-US difference, although the clashes between Kessler and LaGarda repeatedly stage nation-state differences in the abstract. LaGarda often invokes stereotypes about Canadians – “You people are so naïve”101 – and frequently complains that Canada is too hospitable and, therefore, an indirect threat to her nation. In “Gross Deceptions,” convinced that i cs’s attempt to find the person responsible for stealing arms from cf b Petawawa is too obvious a strategy, LaGarda wonders, “Why don’t you just send out engraved invitations?”102 In “Nothing to Declare,” an episode that features the bordertowns of Town’s End, Quebec, and Hopkins Hollow, Vermont, when increased border patrol delays the crossing of a fire engine from the US to the Canadian side, prompting an official complaint, LaGarda says, “Now don’t get me wrong: it makes for a nice change of pace, Canadians actually turning someone away”; later in the episode, she asks whether “someone [got] in trouble for saying sorry too much,”103 suggesting that civility is conflated with weakness from an American perspective. If LaGarda has ample military and political power at her disposal in order to undermine Canadian sovereignty whenever it suits her country’s security demands, she also deploys these stereotypes to wield cultural power. These reminders of how Canada is perceived outside its borders might help the Canadian audience to maintain its sympathy for i cs, despite the often hazy values the agency espouses, by clearly positioning Canada and the United States as antagonists even as they are supposed to work together in a cross-border partnership. This antagonism is also revealed to be necessary as part of cross-border difference. Minister Suzanne Fleischer complains to Kessler: “The Americans want a unified border. I can’t even get to standardize photo ID cards … If we can’t fix our border, the Americans will. Don’t be surprised if you end up sharing a cubicle with LaGarda.”104 “Fixing” the border, in this instance, means the opposite from an American point of view: erasing rather than confirming it. As with both Bordertown and Due South, race becomes a significant means through which The Border seeks meaningfully to separate Canada from the United States. Significantly, “Gray Zone,” LaGarda’s first episode in the program, focuses on the Mohawk Seaway Reserve. Thus, the beginning stages of Kessler and ­

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LaGarda’s hostipitality (one that features more hostility than the Bennett-­Craddock and Fraser-Vecchio partnerships) are played out against an Indigenous backdrop, and Kessler must articulate his insistence upon Canadian sovereignty at the same time as he invokes Indigenous sovereignty. LaGarda’s protest that “it was dark,” which she uses to defend the US’s “technical” invasion of Canada, parodies Indigenous perspectives on the Canada-US border that invalidate the border’s legitimacy. But “Gray Zone” projects a Canada, through Kessler, that understands, appreciates, and supports Indigenous selfgovernment in ways that the United States, through LaGarda, clearly does not. Kessler and LaGarda clash over the best approach to the case on Mohawk territory. “This stretch of the river is a black hole of border policing,” LaGarda complains, only to have Kessler inform her: “Jurisdiction is complicated. We’re trespassing on Mohawk land now.” Mohawk territory straddles the Canada-US border, but Kessler and his crew have to educate LaGarda on how to treat the Mohawk respectfully. Significantly, Kessler positions both himself and his US colleague as trespassers, implicitly according the Mohawk the status of hosts and acknowledging that they may well not be welcome guests. Kessler advises members of his team to ensure that they behave as good guests on Mohawk territory, as evidenced by his order to Maggie Norton prior to her departure for the reserve: “Police chief is Frank Arthur. He’s a good cop: he helped us put away some cigarette smugglers. Show him respect, you’ll be fine.”105 Granted, this advice demonstrates a somewhat superficial solution to Indigenous / invader-settler relations, but Kessler’s invocation of respect diverges sharply from LaGarda’s approach. When she claims, “It’s bad enough the Natives run contraband with impunity,” LaGarda finds herself speaking in the wrong discourse, correcting herself in front of the Canadians, “OK… exercise their cross-border treaty rights.” That LaGarda should, albeit sarcastically, re-articulate Native cross-border activity in front of her Canadian company (none of whom is Indigenous) suggests that the distinction between contraband and treaty rights is something that, unlike the United States, Canada respects. After all, Canadians have had to learn the hard way, the spectre of the so-called Oka Crisis shadowing Kessler’s threat to LaGarda, following her announcement that she will send US federal agents onto the Seaway Reserve: “If you wanna piss off  the Mohawks,” Kessler warns, “You do it on your side of the border. You can deal with the armed warriors and the blockaded

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expressway.” According to the rc mp, i be ts’ operations include “collaborat[ing] with municipal, provincial, state, federal and First Nation law enforcement agencies.”106 It is notable that in The Border’s fictional cross-border policing initiative, only the Canadian half of the partnership is interesting in collaborating with Indigenous law enforcement. But if “Gray Zone” intimates that the Canadian nation-state is more just in its dealings with First Nations, the episode also furnishes another example of the limitations of Kessler’s sense of justice and his implication in the nation-state. It is only a problem for LaGarda to “piss off the Mohawks” on the Canadian side of the border; that he should articulate his caution to LaGarda in relation to the border at all demonstrates the divergence of his position from that of the Mohawks. Further, the episode reveals that Kessler bases his insistence upon showing respect to the Mohawks on appearing to show them respect, rather than supporting that respect – and, indeed, supporting their sovereignty – in any structural or systemic way. Kessler orders Slade to “dig around on the reserve: check the band council’s finances.” “Mohawks won’t like that,” Slade responds, to which LaGarda retorts, “So don’t tell them.” “Is that an order?” Slade asks, “Can she give me orders?” The ethics of Kessler’s order to investigate the Mohawk recede as a priority in an exchange that returns to questions of Canadian sovereignty and Canada-US hostipitality. Although LaGarda and Kessler appear united here, Slade’s concern prioritizes LaGarda’s use of the imperative, contesting whether she can occupy the position of host within i cs headquarters and the performativity of her utterance. Slade’s question about whether LaGarda can give him orders goes unanswered. In a sense, Kessler, standing in for the Canadian host, must consent (even if tacitly) to the US usurpation of the host position (a quintessentially Canadian surrender, nationalists would argue). Thus, both Canadian and Mohawk sovereignty are undermined here, although Slade’s attempt to “dig around” (electronically) on the reserve is foiled by Sally, the reserve’s computer expert who sets up a defence of the reserve’s website that spreads, virus-like, to all ic s computers. However, if Sally’s computer work operates to protect Mohawk sovereignty in an electronic sense, the episode reveals that Sally is the informant who involved i cs and Homeland Security by tipping them off to the illegal exchange in the St Lawrence. Frank Arthur, the Mohawk police chief, expresses his disbelief: “So you

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warned ics and Homeland Security, but not me.” But Sally tells Maggie Norton, “Most of the time he won’t even wear his gun.” Sally’s bypassing of her own police chief in favour of the Canadian and US nation-state security agencies suggests that Indigenous ­sovereignty requires nation-state muscle and the deployment of the nation-state’s methods to navigate the security threats of modern life. At this point, it almost does not matter that Canada offers a supposedly kinder, gentler form of nation-state power in relation to Indigenous nations than does the United States, for Sally has enlisted both countries to help defend her own nation from a foreign threat (in the form of unscrupulous Albanian investors in the reserve casino). Indigeneity features much less in The Border than it does in either Bordertown or Due South. However, the episode “Shifting Waters” comes closest to aligning Canada itself with indigeneity in its positing of an alliance between the invader-settler population and the Inuit in opposition to US corporate interests. In this episode, Shani Aariuk, an Inuit activist, protests that plans for securing Canadian sovereignty in the Northwest Passage have been negotiated without the Inuit at the table and, further, that “a secret deal already exists between Canada and the United States” in which Canada would be promised Arctic sovereignty in exchange for drilling rights for US oil companies.107 LaGarda’s successor Agent Carver (Grace Parker) ­dismisses Aariuk’s statement as “your standard Canadian conspiracy theory.”108 And while the activist is proven correct, it appears as though there is nothing to separate her from standard Canadianness: her interests, and the interests of her community, become aligned with the nation-state, with all of the Canadians who, if they got “one whiff of this … [would] turn against the deal.” In this sense, not only are Inuit concerns not genuinely aired but, as with Fraser in Due South, Canada as a whole also becomes Indigenous, at risk of being colonized by the imperial power to the south. The Border’s storylines tend to feature Canada’s engagement with “foreign” criminals, whether they are actually from outside the country or are ethnic-minority Canadians. But the program’s own racialization of criminality operates alongside, and in contradiction to, its positing of Canada as a haven for racial justice. The episode “Stop Loss” reminds viewers of Canada’s role as sanctuary for escaped slaves when three US soldiers, seeking asylum in Canada, prepare to swim across the Niagara River. As the African-American private first class Gordon Harvey wryly mutters, “Well, I’m sure I

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won’t be the first black man to drown in this river.”109 In “Enemy Contact,” Canada’s position as sanctuary is both reasserted and contested in the argument between the African-Canadian inspector Darnell Williams and Sorraya, the intransigent wife of a suspected Afghan terrorist (who later turns out to be the terrorist herself): Sor r aya: Don’t you find it ironic, that you, African man, are interrogating me, a Muslim woman, while white men are watching us through a one-way mirror. Willia ms: Actually, I’m a Canadian man. Sor r aya: Your ancestors were African. Willia ms: Everybody’s ancestors were something. Sor r aya: They were dragged here in chains. Willia ms: To America. They came to Canada to be free. Sor r aya: They were treated like shit here. Willia ms (laughing) : Everybody was treated like shit – read your Canadian history. The Natives, the Chinese, hell, even the Irish. That’s what history is: people treating each other like shit. Sor r aya: In Afghanistan, the past is all we have. Even in the most primitive villages, we know our history. 1000 years back. Willia ms: Picking at it like a sore that never gets to heal. Who can live like that? Who can sustain being that pissed off every single day? Why are you so angry? What did we do to you?110 Like the strategies deployed in Bordertown, The Border accommodates the critique of the nation-state for its injustice but also serves to defuse that critique, largely through privileging civility in this case as Williams posits that Sorraya’s problem is that she is both too angry and lacking a proper target for that anger. In his distinction of Canadian from American history, Williams fails to mention Canada’s own history of slavery in his insistence that people of African descent came to Canada to be free. In this sense, neither Williams nor Sorraya appears to have “read their Canadian history” as Canadian slavery goes entirely unmentioned. Sorraya invokes the nation-state’s inhospitality to black North Americans, but Williams’s laughter undermines her point. Further, as Jiwani argues, “The equivalence between the Natives, Chinese, and Irish is revealing insofar as it levels differences between those who were directly colonized, and those who were used as agents of colonization.”111 Williams implies that the nation-state’s inhospitality does not constitute a problem, certainly

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not evidence of injustice or a lack of sanctuary, because history simply is “people treating each other like shit.” Williams’s suggestion that oppressed groups or countries should simply get over their anger, rather than demand justice, echoes the ideological position espoused in Bordertown whereby Indigenous nations should embrace a gradual process of gaining equality that does not threaten the invader-settler population, and black North Americans should shed their anger to ease their assimilation into a white-dominated society. The difference between Bordertown and The Border in this respect is that white characters espouse this perspective in Bordertown, whereas Williams himself as an African-Canadian man employed by the nation-state to defend it (both literally, through law enforcement, and ideologically, in conversation) appears to absolve the nation-state of its legacies of injustice.112 The “Enemy Contact” episode is also an example of The Border’s dramatizing of Canada’s relationship to geopolitical sites at a great distance from the 49th parallel. Sorraya not only contests Williams’s view of Canada as a hospitable space but also argues with Moose Lepinsky about the role Canada plays in Afghanistan. In an attempt to get Sorraya to talk, Lepinsky chooses to play “bad cop”: Lepin sk y: Do you people like living in a hell-hole, is that it? Because you got Canadian kids coming over there helping you out, and you’re sending them home in boxes. Sor r aya: Help us? Lepin sk y: Yeah, build roads, set up clinics. Sor r aya: They’re soldiers, they’re not aid workers. Lepin sk y: They’re nation-builders, lady. Sor r aya: They are killers! You don’t get it. Your soldiers are killing our people. Lepin sk y: They’re defending themselves! [People are] all ­gun-crazy! They got 10-year-olds running around with AK-47s. What’s the matter with you people? … Sor r aya: Did you wake up in a soft bed? You had a nice breakfast, you drove yourself to work in your nice car. How could you understand? You’ve never been hungry. You’ve never felt your tongue swell and crack from thirst; you’ve never seen a child’s leg blown off by an American cluster bomb. Lepin sk y: Yeah, an American bomb.

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Sor r aya: Please. You fight alongside them. You hide behind their landmines, you send them your prisoners to be tortured. Lepin sky: You really do hate us, don’t you. Fine. Clam up, lady. But I know you got something to say. And you’re gonna say it.113 Sorraya has said plenty, but Lepinsky shows no interest in either the views she airs or her correct identification of the fact that, in Afghanistan, the Canadian military has “participated in American violations of international law in the treatment of captives.”114 Lepinsky’s aggression in this scene and his crass xenophobia in other episodes (particularly his reference to suspected terrorists as “camel jockeys,” for which he is criticized by his i cs colleague Maggie Norton) perhaps undermine his response to Sorraya’s contentions about the Canadian military in Afghanistan,115 although Sorraya’s own credibility collapses by the end of the episode when i cs discovers she is the terrorist whose anthrax attack they have been attempting to prevent. Lepinsky argues that Canadians should be considered welcome, helpful guests in Afghanistan, distinct from Americans whose cluster bombs destroy the limbs of Afghan children. Tellingly, however, he has no real response for Sorraya’s accusation of Canadian complicity with the US military, in terms of Canadian solidarity with the US, protection by US arms, and collusion with torture. The episode “Missing in Action,” which sees Kessler taken prisoner while he attempts to assist Afghanistan in the policing of its border with Pakistan, invokes part of Canada’s actual role of “supporting the Afghanistan Pakistan Cooperation Process … as a key mechanism for dialogue between Afghanistan and Pakistan on border management.”116 In the episode, Kessler tries to distinguish Canadian from American approaches to policing the Afghan border, insisting that “border security doesn’t have to disrupt traditional trade or farming … [W]e’re here to help Afghanistan, not impose our own agenda,” in contrast to his c i a counterpart who keeps asserting that Afghan border security is a priority for the US government.117 Yet Kessler also presents his attempted education of the Afghans in border policing as a joint effort between i c s and Homeland Security: “This is a joint nato mission,” one whose success, Kessler suggests, rests on Canada and the US sharing the “experience [of] managing 3,000 miles of borderland.” Kessler offers the Canada-US border as a template for border policing, a model that can be applied in different

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geopolitical contexts. And yet, as the contrast between Kessler and his c ia counterpart demonstrates, it is the Canadian half of this partnership that is most civil, most respectful of local histories, cultures, and sovereignties. Although Kessler appears to be an updated version of the Canadian law enforcement official who embodies white civility, the most recent incarnation of figures such as Bordertown’s Bennett and Due South’s Fraser, it is important to underscore that Kessler forms part of a team (albeit one led by him) and that The Border’s focus on a variety of i c s members complicates any reading of a singular, representative Canadian. If Darnell Williams shrugs off Canada’s history of racism, the character of Layla Hourani particularly qualifies Canadian civility through her negotiation of her own Muslim identity and her clashes with Kessler over procedure. Hourani, “[a] classic native informant,”118 both presents “insider” knowledge from ic s’s point of view when Muslim suspects are investigated and is positioned as an outsider. In “Pockets of Vulnerability,” the first ­episode of the series, Hourani covers her head to enter a Toronto mosque but is called a traitor and denied entry. Passing a female student wearing a hijab at the school where Nizar Karim teaches, Gray Jackson and Hourani have the following exchange: Jac k son: No girl should have to hide her head under a scarf. Hou r ani: Some girls prefer the hijab. It makes them feel protected. Jac k son: Oh yeah? Did you wear one? Hou r ani: Please. I was deep into grunge.119 Hourani therefore both defends the choice of Muslim girls and women to wear the hijab while disdaining any suggestion that she might have made that decision herself, implicitly claiming to have made more progressive choices. In “Enemy Contact,” Hourani is required to remove Sorraya’s niqab for identification purposes. Hourani later tells her psychiatrist: “I’m locking up other Muslims. It’s a religion of love. How did I get here?”120 When the psychiatrist comments, “It’s hard, reconciling all these contradictions,” Hourani’s insistence on the systemic injustice of her work suggests such a reconciliation is impossible: “This woman, today. It was my job to violate her religious beliefs. That was my job.” But the discovery that Sorraya is American, not Afghan, and a convert to Islam complicates

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the viewer’s – and other characters’ – sympathy for her and her arguments. If, as Wendy Brown argues, “we need fundamentalism … to present ourselves as free,”121 Hourani castigates herself for violating Sorraya’s beliefs but ultimately uses the discourse of Western freedom to punish Sorraya once her responsibility for the anthrax has been ascertained. Throughout the episode, Sorraya has criticized Canada’s role in Afghanistan and its history of racism as well as the culture of consumerism and what she views as a Western self-­ centredness. When Sorraya states, following her arrest, “Allah has not deserted me,” Hourani gets the last word of the episode, countering: “Everyone else has. The Western freedom you abandoned must look pretty good right now.” If Hourani has earlier not been able to countenance her policing of other Muslims, she ultimately cannot countenance Sorraya’s abandonment of Western values, conflated by Hourani with her criminal guilt. Hourani’s initial questioning of Sorraya in Pashto, Arabic, and Farsi (none of which Sorraya speaks or understands) rivals Benton Fraser’s linguistic multiplicity in Due South. Yet her character diverges significantly from the lineage of the white, civil Canadian law enforcement officials discussed in this chapter through her gender, race, and religion; indeed, The Border portrays the most multicultural vision of Canada of the three programs, projecting a racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse nation both inside and outside ic s. Hourani presents a challenge to the notion of Anglo-Canadian civility and testifies to the fact that “English Canada is no longer simply English, or even European, and this fact requires that we think through what a multicultural society may mean in a much more radical fashion than was necessary previously.”122 Further, her religious identity, and its implications for her role in policing the border, presents a particular significance in a post-9/11 context. If “for decades, the US-Canada border was, at best, a thin, relatively weak legal boundary,”123 The Border emerged from a very different political context than its televisual predecessors, one in which questions surrounding “the longest undefended border in the world” gave way to the much higher stakes of negotiating Canadian sovereignty in the midst of the United States’ perception of a security crisis following 9/11. As Jiwani notes of The Border, the program, “in some implicit and explicit ways, attempts to defuse US criticism of Canada’s porous borders.”124

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If jurisdiction and its implications for cross-border hospitality feature heavily in Bordertown, Due South, and The Border, these concerns are not merely products of televisual fictions. In July of 2013, the United States’ desire for its police officers to be exempt from Canadian law while working on the developing Next Generation joint border-policing project came to light. Although “traditionally, co-operative initiatives in cross-border law enforcement and border management have been based on the notion that the laws of the host country apply to illegal acts on its territory and that host-country courts would have jurisdiction,”125 the United States now seeks to diverge from this model. An rc mp memo from October 2012 on the subject of the project asserts, “Canadians place a high value on sovereignty and police accountability,”126 indicating that to acquiesce to the US demands would be read as a usurping of Canada’s own host position; indeed, if Canada’s laws would not apply to US police working in Canada, it is difficult to see how Canada would function as the “host country” at all. Just as the embordered relationships depicted in Bordertown, Due South, and The Border, respectively, have operated on one level to defend Canadian sovereignty against the political and economic backdrop provided by the f ta , na f ta , and the fallout of 9/11, so,  too, have they functioned both to defend and to promote Canadianness in contrast with the Americanness the programs posit in cross-border opposition. In his history of the rc m p, Keith Walden claims of Canadian attitudes to the Canada-US border that, “although it seemed at times artificial to outsiders, the boundary marked off a realm of peace and civility from a realm of anarchy and confusion. It demarcated a land where authority was honest, efficient, and respected, and where freedom flourished for all men.”127 Bordertown, Due South, and The Border each fills the signifier of Canadian law enforcement (whether North-West Mounted Police, rc mp, or i c s) with essential values made to stand in for a Canadianness we are meant to recognize and affirm. Although they present the values they attach to Canadianness in varying ways, these cross-border policing series consistently construct a Canada that is more accommodating of Indigenous sovereignty, more just in its relations with ethnic-minority citizens, and less prone to systemic abuses of power than the nation-state across the border. With these claims for Canada’s civility, such programs often minimize or efface

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the legacies of colonialism and state violence north of the 49th parallel, even when they endeavour to address those legacies. That the valorization of Canadianness should be articulated through these policing programs – however incoherently, particularly in the case of The Border – indicates a desire to infuse the nation-state itself with meaning, a faith not only in the functioning of the repressive state apparatus but also in its ability both to defend the longest undefended border in the world, where necessary, and to represent values Canadians have long considered as diverging from those of their American neighbours. Implicitly, the defence of the 49th parallel becomes the safeguard of those values, our reassurance that we are, as a nation, who we claim to be, identifiably different from the citizens across the border and at home in the territory the nation-state claims for us.

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3 Strategic Parallels: Indigenous Border Crossings

In The Border’s “Gray Zone” episode, which features a case involving the Mohawk Seaway Reserve, i c s head Major Mike Kessler and US Homeland Security’s Bianca LaGarda clash over how to approach both the case and the Mohawk. As the previous chapter notes, Kessler appears to have more respect for Indigenous sovereignty than his US counterpart, conceding, at least, that they are “trespassing on Mohawk land now.”1 LaGarda’s frustration with the Mohawk, and the Canadians’ seemingly more accommodating relationship to the Mohawk, demonstrates a desire on the part of the nation-state to manage Indigenous politics, specifically, in this case, in relation to the border. During a telephone conversation, Mohawk police chief Frank Arthur, consenting to the presence of two undercover agents on the reserve, listens as LaGarda undermines Kessler concerning the agents’ time of arrival. “Last I heard,” Arthur comments, “This was Canada.” LaGarda retorts: “Mohawks either recognize the border, or they don’t. You can’t have it both ways.” Although the Mohawk should not be taken as a kind of template for all Indigenous nations, and, as the previous chapter indicates, there is much to debate about The Border’s representation of both the Mohawk and the Canadian and American nation-states’ attitudes towards Indigenous peoples, LaGarda’s statement regarding the border – “You can’t have it both ways” – can be fruitfully assessed in relation to ongoing debates about Indigenous rights and the nation-state’s incorporation of Indigenous peoples into constitutional and citizenship discourses. If the events from the 1980s until the present, which frame the cultural products studied elsewhere in this book, comprise the negotiation and ratification of the

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Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (1989) and its successor the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994) as well as the impact of 9/11 on Canada-US relations, for Indigenous peoples, whose concerns for sovereignty grapple with the Canadian nation-state as a colonial oppressor, these decades are punctuated by different events: the Canadian Constitution (1982), the failure of the Meech Lake Accord (1990), the so-called Oka Crisis (1990), and the failure of the Charlottetown Agreement (1992). Where the struggle at Kanehsatake in 1990 saw a violent clash between Indigenous people and the invader-settler state, the others feature constitutional negotiations: all four cases, however, had enormous implications for the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples and acknowledgment of Indigenous rights. In relation to Indigenous self-government, Peter Kulchyski writes: “The State can be defined as a certain kind of writing. The State will not address Aboriginal people until they learn this writing, this form. Negotiation, indeed discussion, cannot proceed without it. But learning this form of writing means engaging in the logic of the dominant order: a paradox. A precondition for playing the game is surrender.”2 The “certain kind of writing” that is the state is manifest in both the Constitution Act, 1982, for which inclusion of the recognition of Indigenous rights was hotly debated, and in nation-state citizenship, which, like the Canada-US border, has not tended to signify as a protective entity for Indigenous peoples but, rather, as a colonial imposition that is both predicated on and symptomatic of the abrogation of Indigenous rights and the refusal to acknowledge ­ Indigenous nations. This chapter examines texts by Jeannette Armstrong, Thomas King, and Drew Hayden Taylor in light of how Indigenous characters belonging to the border-crossing Okanagan, Blackfoot, and Ojibway nations, respectively, are positioned – and position themselves – in relation to the Canadian nation-state. For many Indigenous peoples, particularly those whose territories straddle the international boundary, the Canada-US border is both arbitrary and invalid, given these peoples’ “original occupancy of nation-state lands and alternative notions of nation.”3 But at times in these narratives, particularly when encountering white Americans who pose some kind of physical threat, Indigenous characters strategically perform and insist upon Canadian identity, inserting the border as a buffer between themselves and American aggressors. For Armstrong, this

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momentary strategic performance seems to contradict a larger rejection of the Canadian nation-state and any attempt to subsume Indigenous peoples into the Constitution. For King’s and Taylor’s characters, movements between Indigenous and Canadian identities through more sustained multiple – and, from some perspectives, incommensurate – assertions of identity, LaGarda’s dismissal of “having it both ways” becomes a simplistic complaint as these characters attempt to navigate simultaneously through Euro-Canadian colonization of the First Nations and the United States’ neocolonization of Canada. If Canadian citizenship confers the status of host according to the state’s kind of writing, relations of hospitality in a Canada-US context are radically in question in relation to Indigenous history and presence. Not only does “the space between the borders of the nation-state and the lands that were historically occupied by Native North American tribes generat[e] gaps in conventional notions of nationhood,”4 but it also generates a gap in understandings of Canada-US hospitality. Usurped as hosts in North American territory by the colonizer, “a (bad) guest who becomes an enemy and who eventually imposes himself as a colonial guest-master,”5 and subsequently more often than not treated as unwelcome guests by the invader-settler population and its culture, Indigenous peoples undermine the Canadian citizen’s status as host north of the 49th parallel in more fundamental ways than does US power. Nonetheless, invader-settler nation-states, in their own claims to sovereignty, attempt to deny Indigenous peoples the position of hosts on the continent. As Elizabeth A. Povinelli argues in her discussion of “governance of the prior,” invader-settlers “claim and experience themselves as the prior occupants of the Americas” in their attempts to assert their legitimacy.6 Such a claim, of course, cannot be corroborated given the continued presence of Indigenous peoples; thus, the invader-settler state deploys expropriation and violence as well as a colonial reconception of the “prior” and its relation to Indigenous peoples. “In the British Americas,” as Povinelli observes, “the priority of the prior was acknowledged and then annulled through treaty, land seizure, and passive and active genocide”; in the invader-settler claim to host status, then, “the prior became the foreign without ever moving.”7 For the invader-settler nation-state to cast Indigenous people as “foreign” in their own territories usurps the host status for  the invader-settler, effacing the fact of Indigenous peoples’

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“longevity in their space as caretakers and sovereigns.”8 In “the translation from indigenous / aboriginal hospitality – the earth as host and table of plenty – to the hospitality of the nation-state requested by refugee, immigrant, and foreigner, [which] hinges on the Euro-American state and its self-proclaimed right to determine who will take up residency on a land that apparently belongs to no one but is a place of living for many,”9 this usurpation is evident. The Canadian nationalist concerns of maintaining the Canadian host position in relation to the United States, as detailed in the first two chapters of this book, are fundamentally unsettled when we acknowledge that Canadian host position as always already a usurpation. If some narratives of contact offer the possibilities of hospitable relations between Europeans and Indigenous peoples, insofar as “many of the colonies survived because of the assistance First Nations gave to the European settlers,”10 centuries of colonialism on either side of the Canada-US border (and, indeed, throughout the Americas) clearly constitute a break with hospitality. The denial of the position of the prior – or host – to Indigenous peoples, substituted by the position of the “foreign” so as to undergird the claims of the invader-settler nation-state, has not functioned to treat Indigenous nations within the framework of international relations between sovereign powers; rather, it has positioned Indigenous people as though they are “trespass[ers] in reverse.”11 But Indigenous resistance to the invader-settler claim of host position in North America is evident in reconceptualizations of the invader-settler state as a “visitor government” and invader-settlers as “outside people who claim it [the land] now as their own”; “Amer-Europeans,” who “will never truly be of this continent, never truly belong here, no matter how many generations they may dwell here”; and “neoAmerican[s],” who are “unguided by and disconnected from this continent.”12 These positionings of the invader-settler by Indigenous scholars undermine a colonial logic of ownership upon which the invader-settler claims to the host position are based. Through its own conception of citizenship, the invader-settler state has attempted to fix Indigenous peoples in its own framework of belonging, always in such a way that undermines the claims of Indigenous people to the position of hosts on the continent. Both Canada and the United States have imposed nation-state citizenship on Indigenous peoples; as Audra Simpson notes, “Indians on both side [sic] of the border contested the ‘gift’ and trappings of

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democracy itself, arguing (and still arguing…) that they are members of their own first nations, first. And for some, only.”13 In Armstrong’s, King’s and Taylor’s narratives, cross-border relations of hospitality prove to be crucial not simply to assign host and guest status to ­citizens of Canada and the United States but also, and in far more complicated ways, to negotiate hospitality and belonging in order to reclaim the host position for the Indigenous peoples of the continent. If nation-state borders “figure as occasions to imagine, often aggressively, fixed and unrelenting standards of citizenship and belonging,”14 the implications of both the Canada-US border and modes of recognition of Indigenous peoples by the state arise in all three of these writers’ texts. jeannette armstrong’s slash: f i r s t - c l a s s i n d i a n vs . s e c o n d - c l a s s c i t i z e n

First published in 1985, Okanagan writer Jeannette Armstrong’s novel Slash details the activities of Native North American resistance movements – primarily those of the American Indian Movement (a im) – up to and including the debates surrounding the inclusion of Indigenous peoples in the Canadian Constitution when it was repatriated in 1982. Through the perspective of the Okanagan Tommy Kelasket, renamed “Slash” over the course of the narrative by a fellow activist, Armstrong’s novel does much to erase the Canada-US border as a meaningful boundary for Native North American peoples, clearly illustrating that, whereas Canada’s sovereignty might be threatened by the neocolonial power south of the border, Canada continues to attempt to wield its own colonial power over the peoples indigenous to the land claimed by the nation-state. Suspicious of the “certain kind of writing” that constitutes the state, Slash resists inclusion in Canada’s constitutional discourse; yet, at strategic moments, the novel borrows the nation-state’s rhetoric in order to contest Euro-North American legitimacy. That both Armstrong and her protagonist should be Okanagan is crucial to the narrative’s disregard for the Canada-US border, for the Okanagan territory straddles the colonizers’ boundary. Stretching from what is now the B C interior into Washington, the Okanagan land that both transcends and disregards the 49th parallel provides the underlying logic of the novel’s “continental construction of Indians as ‘North Americans.’”15 Slash’s own family members serve

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as a synecdoche for the Okanagan nation through frequent crossing of the border: his aunt, Shu-li, “went to school a long time ago in the States”; his uncle, Joe, “came from a place to the south, in the States”; and a friend from another reserve “quit school to pick apples in Oroville, Washington.”16 Later, the border crossing of the Okanagan people in general and Slash’s family in particular is consolidated in his marriage to Maeg, an Okanagan “from south of the border” whose mother is “from up here but lives down there” (226). That Maeg speaks the Okanagan language underscores a cross-­ border unity for the Okanagan nation and its distinction from the invader-settler nation-states whose border cuts through Indigenous territory. By the time Slash hears the president of the National Indian Brotherhood speak in Denver, the president’s assertion that “Indians from Canada were no different and that there was really no border that was recognized by Indians. He said that we had the same objectives as US Indians” (92) has been prepared for and corroborated by Slash’s own border-crossing nation. Slash’s experiences at a white school further emphasize that there are more meaningful borders than the 49th parallel. For the young Tommy, the educational system’s assimilationist agenda manifests itself in, among other things, its culturally specific testing practice: “Mostly my wrong stuff was about things I couldn’t know because I lived on the reserve”; “I used to read the Reader’s Digest a lot so I could learn about town stuff and town people. I answered a lot of questions just from that” (39). Growing up on an Okanagan reserve, the more significant border for Tommy lies between the reserve and the town, where white culture provides an alien model. Thus, the genuine borders from Slash’s perspective have both more proximity – in relation to the white town – and more distance, insofar as the Okanagan Territory extends past the 49th parallel well into Washington State. The novel’s construction of Canada-US difference, where it exists, primarily relates to activism. Slash recounts hearing of “all them black people [who] were burning cities all over the United States. I guess black people had it almost worse than Indians” (31). The civil rights movement in the US operates both as a model and a cautionary tale for Indigenous people in the novel. When Slash’s Uncle Billy predicts that “someday, all the dark races will fight together against the white people for all what they do,” Slash comments, “It sounded ugly. I had seen pictures of dead Negroes” (31).17 Although Slash will become involved in a i m and related projects of resistance, he

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also meets Indigenous people in Canada who are “afraid that meeting together and talking about them things was going to stir up such trouble that it could lead to killing and rioting like the Negroes did in the States” (119–20). But for those involved in activism, the civil rights movement and Black Power offer templates of resistance. When Slash, still living on the reserve, first hears about “stuff like ‘Red Power,’” he notes: “We didn’t know anything about that stuff. We had heard about ‘Black Power’ because it was on the radio a lot. ‘Black Power’ was about people who had kind of organized to fight against discrimination” (40). As such, Slash uses his knowledge of the Black Power movement and its American context to translate the objectives of Indigenous resistance. Once he has become involved in activism, the struggle for African-American rights re-emerges as a template. Recounting his first demonstration in Vancouver, Slash notes that he “had watched a few by black people in the States. In those everybody seemed to be so smart. Like they represented something. At that Indian demonstration where young people talked about Red Power, lots of people acted the same” (54). The activism in which Slash engages consistently brings together Indigenous peoples from across North America. Slash finds himself in the company of “Indians from all over the u sa and Canada” (57). The National Indian Brotherhood president’s assertion that Indigenous peoples in Canada and the US share the same objectives is borne out in this continental participation in activism: “There were always guys or chicks that just came in from Seattle, LA, ­Minneapolis, Toronto, Winnipeg and other places where ‘the action was’” (76). For the most part, however, “the action” is located south of the border. Descriptions of activism in Canada, for much of the novel, appear to replicate Euro-American assumptions of Canada as unexciting – “a country where nothing seems ever to happen,” as Carol Shields’s ironic narrator encapsulates the American view of Canada in The Stone Diaries.18 Whereas Slash frequently travels to the United States to participate in protests, Slash often characterizes Canada through inactivity. After hearing a new chief now leads his home reserve, Slash “sure hope[s] that Chief was going to be strong and lead the people towards something like what was going on in the States” (93). Thus, not only do the civil rights and Black Power movements function as models for Indigenous resistance, but Indigenous resistance south of the border also provides a model for Indigenous peoples north of the 49th parallel. As Mardi, briefly

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reunited with Slash in the US, asks him: “How are things up in Canada? Still just as slow? I wish they’d get off their asses and start things moving. You know, like what’s happening here” (103). Given their similar objectives, Slash implicitly argues that Indigenous peoples in Canada and the US should deploy similar strategies of resistance. Slash both insists on cross-border Indigenous solidarity and shared colonial experiences in these two Euro-North American nation-states and distinguishes between the effects of different state apparatuses. Travelling between Montana and South Dakota, he observes: “The Indians on some of the large reserves we went through were really poor. I mean really poor. They lived in shacks and lived off commodities distributed by the government. No such thing as Social Assistance existed either, like up there where I came from. Band housing and things like that were available only through government regulated programs that were aimed at eventual control of the lands used as security” (90–1). Although, as Frank Davey notes, both Canada and the United States have appalling histories where their attempts to manage Indigenous peoples are concerned, with “the bureaucracy of the ‘b i a’ (the US Bureau of Indian Affairs) … as self-serving as that of the ‘d i a’ (Canada’s Department of Indian Affairs),”19 Slash distinguishes between the nation-states’ policies and their effects on Indigenous communities. However, despite the above comparison, Canada deserves no praise for its treatment of Indigenous peoples, for not only does Slash learn “that Canada’s Indians have as high an illiteracy rate as most of the third world countries” (123) but also that, for the most part, Canada and the US are interchangeable with respect to Indigenous peoples’ quality of life. Slash initially uses the word “reserve” to describe his home north of the 49th parallel, but he gradually begins to use “reserve” and “reservation” interchangeably, regardless of location in relation to the border. Thus, in the quotation above, “reserves” appears in the context of Indigenous peoples living on territory claimed by US states, and, later, Slash notes of travelling in Canada, “I got to see a lot of the same kinds of things all across this country on the reservations that I seen in the States” (119). Through the interchangeability of the terminology, Slash demonstrates that the two invader-settler nation-states are equally oppressive for Indigenous peoples. Towards the end of the novel, Slash becomes more involved in activist projects north of the border, and, consistent with the sense of the US as model for resistance built up over the course of the novel,

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Indigenous resistance in Canada often takes similar forms to that in the United States. For instance, on hearing of “a move to caravan across Canada. The idea of it was to demonstrate all across the country, to educate Indian and non-Indian alike about the grievances of Indian people,” Slash both states that “it was a good time for the caravan. The people needed something like that right then” and recalls the earlier “DC caravan. I thought of that caravan and wondered if there was going to be anything like it” (151). The second example of how Indigenous resistance in Canada ­harnesses tactics used earlier in the US arises through the occupation of d i a offices, echoing the occupation of the bi a premises in Washington, D C, earlier in the novel. The occupations, and the treatment of the protestors at these events, highlight the terrible irony of hospitality in relation to Indigenous peoples in Canada and the US. In Slash’s representation of the b i a occupation, inhospitality clearly underpins the treatment of the protestors who have travelled to Washington, D C, seeking an audience before which to air their grievances, for the activists have “been put in [a] rat-infested cellar” (102). Roles of hospitality reverse when the activists “evic[t]” (101) the guards; yet, in terms of continental history, the Indigenous peoples are the usurped hosts in the first place. Thus, the occupations of both the b i a offices in the United States and, later, the d i a offices in Canada, enact – however temporarily – a reclaiming of the host position from the colonizing “guests [who have] outstay[ed] their welcome” by the Indigenous activists.20 The b i a occupation foregrounds the inhospitality of the US government while simultaneously, as Kit Dobson notes, strategically deploying the rhetoric of Euro-North American nation-states to stake a claim. One of Slash’s fellow activists at the occupation insists: “When leaders from other countries come to Washington they get the red carpet. Us Indians, our leaders are no different, they are the spokesmen of our Nations, but we get the rat treatment and a bunch of people get pressured not to help out” (101). Dobson argues that the instances in the text in which Indigenous characters invoke the discourses of nationhood and sovereignty are carefully contextualized, for “using the[se] term[s] to insist upon the peoples’ legitimacy in the oppressors’ language is a strategic action” that is deployed in relation to Euro-North American nation-states and the U N.21 As Dale Turner writes: “It is no secret that for Aboriginal peoples to participate effectively in Canadian legal and political cultures, they

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must engage the normative discourses of the state. This means that their defences for their views, and their justifications for a place at the table, are articulated using the discourses of rights, sovereignty, and nationhood.”22 In Armstrong’s novel, the fact that the US government does not treat the occupiers as they would foreign dignitaries testifies to the Euro-North American nation-state’s refusal to recognize Indigenous citizens’ prior claim over the invader-settler population’s at the same time as it displays inhospitality. Perhaps one of the most strategic moments in the narrative – albeit not as public in its implications as the examples Dobson discusses – occurs when Slash travels with friends from Toronto to Wounded Knee. They fall afoul of the heavy policing of Indigenous peoples and the ad hoc construction of borders to suit the nationstate’s efforts to contain resistance. Stopped and questioned at a roadblock near Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Slash’s friend Wiser performs both ignorance and a lack of Indigenous cross-border solidarity when he “play[s] dumb”: “What’s going on? We’re just on our way back to B C ” (112). The police officer functions as a border guard here, asking, “What’s your business in the United States?”; further, the “lot of talk and hassle” indicates an inhospitality that Wiser notes and uses strategically to resist the US repressive state apparatus (112). Wiser informs the police officers at the roadblock “that [they will] be talking to the immigration officials about [their] treatment as visiting Canadians” (112). An inverse of the deployment of nationhood and sovereignty discourses with which to counter the nation-state, this tactic of invoking Canadian citizenship is equally strategic insofar as it attempts to hold the American police officers accountable for their inhospitality and forces them to see the Indigenous travellers as their equals, according to the officers’ racist worldview. As Stuart Christie notes, Wiser’s “invocation of Canadian national difference masks his real agenda and likely saves … the entire group further harassment” through his deployment of “plural sovereignties.”23 Indeed, to use Kevin Bruyneel’s term, Slash illustrates “a ‘third space of sovereignty’ that resides neither simply inside nor outside the [North] American political system but rather exists on these very boundaries.”24 Given the police’s creation of new borders internal to the nation-state, this scene in the novel suggests, Slash and his friends operate within this third space of sovereignty as they insist on using the rights allegedly guaranteed to them by the nation-state that claims their Indigenous territory.

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The novel demonstrates a disjunction between a continental Indigenous view of borders and territory and the means with which confrontations such as the one discussed above can be effectively navigated. Slash may wish to join the action at the Pine Ridge reservation out of solidarity with other Indigenous communities, and the sense that, as Wiser puts it, “if we needed their help here they’d be right up here” (110), but south of the border, under scrutiny by the repressive state apparatus, they are “easily spotted because of [their] foreign license plate” (113). These markers of nation-state difference rupture the cross-border sense of Indigeneity inherent in Slash’s worldview, one consistent with his border-crossing Okanagan ­community. As such, it comes as no surprise that Slash foregrounds, among other developments in Indigenous activism north of the border, the demand to “implemen[t] the Jay Treaty, an international agreement allowing Indians unrestricted passage across the border” (125) as well as “guarantee[ing] … the right to freely cross … without having to pay duties on trade goods.”25 Davey reads Slash’s return to Canada following the events at Wounded Knee as a desire for sanctuary offered by the border: “Slash and several Canadian-Indian companions flee, much like Sitting Bull before them, to the Canadian border for safety from US vigilantes and National Guard.”26 However, this return is not voluntary. Slash and his friends, having been “chased and shot at by an unmarked car” (118), are then attacked by police officers bearing firearms. Slash awakes, injured and in jail, and “after days without being charged for anything” is informed he must “leave the US immediately” (118). His journey is measured in borders: first “dumped at the state line,” he is told to “fend for [him]self from there to the Canadian border” (118). Although Slash does indeed worry about the threats vigilantes can pose to his safety, after meeting another Indigenous group from Manitoba, he recounts, “There wasn’t a hell of a lot we could do, so we went to Winnipeg” (118), more a statement of the repressive state apparatus’s power than an assumption that the nation-state to the north will offer welcome respite. Further, although Slash gives no information about his arrival or experiences in Winnipeg, he does note that “it was pretty dreary up there with people not being able to go across the US border without being harassed” (118), demonstrating the extent to which Slash privileges the ability to cross the border. The demand for implementation of the Jay Treaty and its recognition of Indigenous border-crossing rights clearly resonates with both

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Slash’s worldview and his experiences of activism in North America. However, the rights most explicitly discussed in the novel are constitutional rights, as the narrative moves towards to the repatriation of the Canadian Constitution in 1982. Maeg’s investment in agitating for constitutional recognition of Indigenous rights provides the opportunity for the novel to stage a debate about whether Indigenous peoples should participate in the state’s “certain kind of writing,” to which Slash strongly objects. For Slash, entering into constitutional negotiations with the Euro-North American nation-state is always already a capitulation insofar as a negotiation, or, indeed, a settlement, would extinguish “the right to not agree on their terms”: “It is our land, until we are defeated in war or sign any agreement such as a treaty with them, or we give them their right on it by selling it to them. That would be absurd without a Nation to Nation treaty, because we would not be guaranteed anything” (242). Slash’s own nation, the Okanagan, once again implicitly underpins his worldview, considering its location in what is now British Columbia, whose creation, “based as it was on a unilateral declaration of sovereignty by the Crown, has questionable legal consequences”;27 in most of the land claimed by the province, no treaty was ever signed. Maeg’s initial support for recognizing Indigenous rights in the Constitution both demonstrates a resistance to assimilation and acknowledges a certain degree of defeat. Arguing that “we can’t survive assimilation on such a large scale, and in so short a time, if we are forced to be treated equally with the rest of Canada. Equal rights is no rights, as you well know” (243), Maeg also indicates that taking the constitutional path is a compromise: Your way doesn’t guarantee anything but opposition and resistance, and a maybe that someday our descendants might be able to get a better deal. Your way guarantees years of bitter struggle. That is what them leaders do not want for our people. We have been beaten over the heads too much already. This way we will get some measure of control and not be left out in the cold. It may end the years of struggle and suffering. Canada is here to stay. All our leaders are trying to make sure of is that we join Canada in a way that is not too harsh for our people. (243) Whereas Slash does not want to relinquish the right to resistance, Maeg’s gesture towards “a way that is not too harsh for our people”

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already sounds defeated. Indeed, as Daniel Heath Justice contends, “Recognition in the service of the nation-state is a way of containing the range of Indigenous self-determination and concerns.”28 If Maeg believes that recognition through constitutional rights will be a safeguard against assimilation, Slash, in contrast, concerned about the implications of “acting within the political spheres of the settlerinvader culture,”29 argues that constitutional rights lead to assimilation: “We would truly be second class citizens instead of first class Indians” (249). The lengthy conversations between Slash and Maeg dramatize different positions on the implications of constitutional recognition for Indigenous peoples north of the border. Although some critics argue that “these tensions remain unresolved” in Armstrong’s novel,30 the fact that Maeg ultimately becomes disillusioned with the prospect of the constitutional rights that she has fought so hard to advocate suggests that the novel agrees with its protagonist’s position. Legal scholars reflecting on the Constitution Act, 1982, have pinpointed the difficulties of invoking the Constitution to protect Indigenous rights. Subsection 35(1) states that “existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the Aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed,” and, as Patrick Macklem notes, “the fact that Aboriginal and treaty rights are ‘recognized and affirmed,’ as opposed to created or conferred, implies that such rights owe their existence not to subsection 35(1) but to some other source of law.”31 In this sense, the “certain kind of writing” of the state that is the Constitution gestures here outside of the parameters of the state for  the pre-existence of Indigenous rights. But as Turner observes, “Attaching meaning and content to terms like ‘existing,’ ‘recognized,’ and ‘affirmed’ has been a difficult and complex road for all Canadians and especially for Aboriginal peoples in Canada.”32 John Borrows explains that “the problem was that no one was quite sure what Aboriginal rights were, and therefore what, if anything, was being protected. After the failure to define these rights through four highprofile First Ministers’ conferences and a nationally negotiated Charlottetown Accord [sic], the task of defining Aboriginal rights passed to the country’s highest court.”33 If the Supreme Court “has been attempting to add content to the meaning of section 35(1) for over twenty years,”34 its involvement raises further problems, for “the court has … viewed Aboriginal and treaty rights as creations of  the Canadian constitutional order that is subject to judicial

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interpretation and parliamentary supremacy.”35 As Kiera Ladner asks: “How can reconciliation between co-sovereigns be attained through judicial action when the court is a colonial institution that is charged with the responsibility of defending the Crown’s sovereignty?”36 Fundamentally, therefore, the Supreme Court, ruling on cases involving Indigenous rights, faces a conflict of interest. When Slash insists on the right to refuse the terms of the invadersettler culture and institutions, the state’s “certain kind of writing,” he suggests that this kind of writing cannot, or will not, engage with Indigenous terms. If Slash rejects interpellation as a “second class citizen,” preferring to be a “first class Indian” instead, he does so in resistance to the fact that “Aboriginal peoples in Canada are currently imagined in law to be Canadian subjects, or Canadian citizens.”37 Regardless of whether subsection 35(1) of the Constitution adequately acknowledges Indigenous rights, Slash counters the state’s writing with the Constitution song: “We don’t need your Constitution, B C is all Indian land. We don’t need your Constitution, hey yeah hey” (241). If the invader-settler institutions have acknowledged Indigenous rights only insofar as they do not infringe on the nation-state’s sovereignty, for the Okanagan Slash, whose nation never signed a treaty with the invader-settlers, whose territory crosses the Euro-North American border that is viewed by the invader-settlers north of it as a protective barrier, Canada’s sovereignty is of no concern. Similarly, Slash clearly has no interest in nation-state citizenship, as his preference for the position of “first class Indian” over “second class citizen” suggests. In Slash’s privileging “Indian” over “citizen” as an identification, Armstrong compresses a lengthy history of the Canadian state’s attempt to impose its “certain kind of writing” onto Indigenous peoples through citizenship as well as sustained Indigenous resistance to it. As Darlene Johnston writes, “The very word [citizenship] conjures up notions of freedom and autonomy, the right to participate, a sense of belonging”; but if “the Western political tradition regards the evolution of citizenship as its crowning democratic achievement[,] … for the First Nations over whom Canada asserts jurisdiction, the experience of Canadian citizenship has been somewhat less than ennobling.”38 The history of Canadian citizenship in relation to Indigenous peoples demonstrates how “citizenship can … function not only through the violence of exclusion, but by inclusion” as well.39 The Canadian state has historically

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attempted to employ citizenship to strip Indigenous people of their culture and community through enfranchisement, beginning with the Act to Encourage the Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes in This Province, 1857, which stipulates: “all enactments making any distinction between the legal rights and abilities of the Indians and those of Her Majesty’s other subjects, shall cease to apply to any Indian so declared to be enfranchised, who shall no longer be deemed an Indian within the meaning thereof.”40 Although “this is hardly a decision that the province was entitled to make[,] [it] was the price to pay for the ‘privilege’ of British colonial citizenship.”41 The next century saw a series of variations on the Canadian state’s policy regarding criteria for the enfranchisement of First Nations people and periods of time when enfranchisement was compulsory, especially for educated Native individuals like doctors, lawyers, or clergymen, betraying the government’s assumption that most Indigenous peoples were “socially, linguistically, and economically incompetent to exercise full citizenship rights and duties.”42 Although the Canadian state attempted to make enfranchisement easier and more attractive for Native men, between 1857 and 1920, there were only 102 cases of enfranchisement, confounding the government’s attempt to rid itself of what it called “the Indian problem.” Because “continued membership in their own communities was inconsistent with participation in Canadian society,” given that “they could only have a place in Canada if they renounced their heritage and denied their identity,”43 enfranchisement would never be appealing to the vast majority of First Nations people. Canadian citizenship, in this sense, represents an imposition of “the colonial paradigm” and an attack on First Nations sovereignty.44 As Turner notes, the colonial implications of Canadian citizenship continued as part of the liberal nation-state project through the Trudeau government’s White Paper (1969), which sought to dismantle Indian status in the government’s desire to “get out of the Indian business” by absolving itself of responsibility towards First Nations people.45 If the White Paper envisioned that “Indians were to be ‘welcomed’ into mainstream Canadian society, complete with all its opportunities and benefits of citizenship, and the federal government would facilitate (and celebrate) the necessary institutional processes to make that happen,”46 the imperatives of the liberal nation-state as regards its conception of equality represent a failure to account for group rights or to engage actively in decolonization.

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In “making individual citizenship the fundamental unit of political allegiance,” the White Paper attempted to ensure that “the problem of recognizing special group rights [would] not arise.”47 More than a decade after the White Paper’s defeat, the Constitution Act, 1982, would place “Aboriginal rights … outside of the Canadian Charter [of Rights and Freedoms]” in order “to shield collective Aboriginal rights from erosion due to its individualist orientation.”48 As Sam McKegney writes, “Within liberal rights discourse, responsibility for historical injustices like those emerging from colonialism cannot be levelled at the beneficiaries of colonial history because all citizens are essentially equal and therefore blameless – neither victims nor victors.”49 Thus, the White Paper’s notion of citizenship as a “fundamental unit of political allegiance” functions to erase distinctions between citizens in a way that impedes decolonization. The Canada-US border testifies to colonial history, cutting across tribal lands, and acts as a reminder that nation-state citizenship is not simply a straightforward guarantee of rights but also, in the context of Indigenous peoples, part of an imposed colonial political system in which “Aboriginal people have been forced to accept the ‘gift’ of Canadian citizenship at the same time that they are expected to relinquish their Aboriginal rights.”50 To be a Canadian “host” in the context of nation-state citizenship, then, entails a writing over prior claims to the host position, the “gift” a concession of the power of the host position vested in Aboriginal title – or, in Slash’s terms, the exchange of first-class Indianness for second-class citizenship. Where white Anglo-Canadians see a kind of cultural defence of the Canada-US border as paramount to their sovereignty, Indigenous sovereignty does not depend on the border; indeed, the border represents the nation-states against which Indigenous sovereignty must be exercised. As Donald A. Grinde Jr writes, “indigenous people’s disregard for national borders expresses itself in their continuing attachment to a nation that is rooted in a particular place and in struggles for sovereignty from the nation-state and its political boundaries.”51 In Armstrong’s novel, Slash’s rooted connection to the Okanagan nation – to which he returns periodically throughout his years of activism “in Indian country” on both sides of the 49th parallel,52 and to which he has returned for good by the close of the novel – testifies to the irrelevance of nation-state borders in the formation of home.

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thomas king:

“ yo u

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are a canadian”

In an interview with Hartmut Lutz, Thomas King, when asked how he responds to being labelled a “Canadian Native Author,” replies: “There’s only a problem in the sense that I am not originally from Canada, and the Cherokee certainly aren’t a Canadian tribe. Now that becomes a problem only if you recognize the particular political line which runs between Canada and the US, and if you agree with the assumptions that that line makes.”53 King’s work frequently engages with the border and its irrelevance to Native North American peoples, particularly in his short story “Borders” (1993) and his ­novels Green Grass, Running Water (1993) and Truth and Bright Water (1999). Through his unsettling of the border’s significance to the Canadian and American nation-states, King has articulated his opposition to “those ideological burdens placed on indigenous North Americans by a centric nationalism.”54 As with Slash’s focus on the Okanagan nation, King’s numerous representations of the Blackfoot, whose territory straddles the 49th parallel, set the stage for an interrogation of colonial nation-state boundaries. In “Borders,” for instance, which “can be read as paradigmatic for the complex ways in which [King] addresses the issues that the fortyninth parallel raises for Indigenous peoples,”55 the protagonist and his mother, on their way to visit his sister in Salt Lake City, Utah, become temporarily trapped in the border zone between Canada and the United States because the boy’s mother, when asked by the border guard to designate her citizenship as either American or Canadian, responds that she is Blackfoot.56 Although the boy’s sister, prior to moving to Utah, has claimed, “Dad’s American, … so I can go and come as I please” (124), her mother’s insistence on her Blackfoot identity – indeed, on a Blackfoot citizenship – enacts a “decolonizing border crossing,”57 which implicitly reminds readers of Indigenous border-crossing rights guaranteed by the Jay Treaty.58 The fact that Blackfoot territory crosses the border is particularly crucial here, for when, attempting to trick the mother into claiming affiliation with one of the Euro-North American nation-states, a US border guard asks, “Just so we can keep our records straight, what side do you come from?” the mother responds, “Blackfoot side” (138). Although the Canadian and American nation-states do not recognize a “Blackfoot side” of the border, the mother demonstrates

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that both sides of the border are in Blackfoot territory. Thus, the inspector’s explanation that declarations of citizenship “help … keep track of the visitors we get from the various countries” (138) indicates a refusal to appreciate the fact that at the border, a Blackfoot woman is still in her nation’s territory and not a visitor at all – a host, not a guest, regardless of what side of the 49th parallel she might be on at any given moment. The inspector’s verdict, that the boy and his mother “have to go back to where [they] came from” (137), equally misses this point. As Arnold E. Davidson, Priscilla L.  Walton, and Jennifer Andrews point out, in the late nineteenth century, the border was used deliberately to divide the Blackfoot community: Commissioner Steele of the North-West Mounted Police believed that the “Canadian Blackfoot … would be more manageable if they could not mingle freely with their American confederates, and so a strip of land on the southern side of the promised reserve … was confiscated and made available for non-Native settlement.”59 The mother in King’s story, therefore, refuses to be “manageable” and aligns herself with her own conception of nation, not with the Euro-North American nation-states that the border guards insist are her only legitimate options. “Borders” initially invites and then refuses the possibility of reading difference across the Canada-US border in relation to the invadersettler states on either side. Where the American border guards look “like two cowboys headed for a bar or a gunfight” (137), the Canadian border guard “seem[s] happy to see” (140) the boy and his mother and is impressed with their Blackfoot identity, going so far as to say, “I’d be proud of being Blackfoot if I were Blackfoot”; nonetheless, she declares, “But you have to be American or Canadian” (141). As Wendy Brown argues, “the subject of tolerance is tolerated only so long as it does not make a political claim, that is, so long as it lives and practices its ‘difference’ in a depoliticized or private fashion.”60 Although the Canadian border guard seems more in keeping with a celebratory version of Canadian multiculturalism, her implicit casting of Blackfoot as simply “like every other ethno-cultural group in Canada” of which one can be “proud” in an officially multicultural nation-state pre-empts the legitimacy of the mother’s claim to Blackfoot citizenship.61 In contrast, as Daniel Heath Justice asserts, “Indigenous is not ethnic difference; it is both cultural and political distinctiveness, defined by land-based genealogical connections and obligations to human and nonhuman bonds of kinship.”62 The

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Canadian border guard is happy to accommodate cultural but not political distinctiveness, in keeping with the discourse of Canadian multiculturalism that would argue that Indigenous people be “eligible for some form of recognition capable of accommodating their cultural distinctiveness” but cannot tolerate Indigenous political claims, as exemplified by her response to the Blackfoot woman’s insistence on a coherent Blackfoot territory.63 King returns to the border’s capacity to divide a community in his novel Truth and Bright Water. Although “Truth and Bright Water sit on opposite sides of the river, the railroad town on the American side, the reserve in Canada,”64 as the novel’s title suggests, the town and the reserve operate less in opposition to, and more in connection with, each other. Although the narrator Tecumseh and his mother live in Truth, the implication in much of the novel is that these two locations cannot be separated from each other, despite the border running between them. Indeed, King emphasizes a prehistoric coherence to this divided community when he states, “The whole area around Truth and Bright Water is full of dinosaur bones” (71). That more recent human history has ruptured this coherence becomes evident when the character Monroe Swimmer explicitly condemns the distinction drawn by the border. He “walks to the lip of the coulee and looks out across the river. ‘There’s Canada,’ he says. Then he turns and spreads his arms. ‘And this is the United States.’ He spins around in a full circle, stumbles, and goes down in a heap. ‘Ridiculous, isn’t it?’” (131). Even more ridiculous is the description of the border running through Waterton Lake, as King illustrates the incongruity of a static nation-state marker bisecting a dynamic element: The cruise around the lake was interesting, and if I hadn’t gone, I would never have known that the Canada / United States border ran right through the middle of the lake. When the guy driving the boat told us that, I expected to see a floating fence or inner tubes with barbed wire and lights, something to keep people from straying from one country into the other. There was a cutline in the trees along with border posts on opposite sides of the shore, and a small border station, to mark the line. (78) There may not be a floating fence, but border crossing presents difficulties for this community. Tecumseh and his mother, without a car to drive to the Prairie View crossing, use “Charlie Ron’s ferry, an old

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iron bucket suspended on a cable over the Shield” (42), bypassing the policed border altogether through direct crossing. There is also an unfinished bridge that was intended to connect Truth and Bright Water, though in its abandoned state it is only a fractured link, as attested to by “the deserted columns” and “the open planking and the rusting webs of iron mesh” (1). If the bridge’s description illustrates the border’s “porousness,” it is also “a barrier” and, further, a site of danger.65 One child gets caught in the bridge, requiring rescue; it is also the site of Tecumseh’s cousin Lum’s suicide when he runs off the end of the bridge. The bridge’s abandonment brings physical, and fatal, danger to the divided community; it is “nothing more than a skeleton, the carcass of an enormous animal, picked to the bone” (256). Although this metaphor suggests an aesthetic alliance between the bridge and the prehistoric dinosaur bones of the region, the bridge’s border location also signifies something more akin to the “open wound” of the Mexico-US border, as Gloria Anzaldúa describes it,66 than the standard image of peaceful, painless crossings at the 49th parallel. Emery Youngman discovers that crossing the bridge risks incurring injury when he “step[s] on the edge of a warped plank and [is] thrown off the bridge decking”: “Emery banged his head pretty good and he tore his shirt, but when he tried to get up and climb back onto the plywood, he discovered that his leg was jammed tight in the rebar and the wire” (41). Stuck on the bridge overnight, Emery is ultimately rescued by Truth’s fire department, following unsuccessful attempts by his father and other community members to pull him free. The notion of Truth and Bright Water as a single community – in evidence elsewhere in the text – ruptures at this moment as Truth’s fire department responds with hostility to having “to pull some fool kid from Bright Water off the bridge”: “Next time,” Gabriel told Sherman, “get your own damn fire department to help.” “Don’t have one.” “Then keep your kids on their side of the river.” (41) Where “Borders” draws attention to the 49th parallel’s artificiality and insists upon a “Blackfoot” side, in Truth and Bright Water, Truth’s fire department, “expressing their perception of the border as a natural division between two nationally and ethnically different,

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hierarchically organized, and antagonistic communities,”67 positions Emory as an unwelcome, misbehaving guest, a parasite sponging off another state, even though he has been caught – literally – on the border between the two countries. Where Truth and Bright Water offers only a painful division between nation-states for the community it portrays, King’s earlier novel Green Grass, Running Water offers a somewhat more complicated construction of the border, demonstrating “the Canada-US border [to be] a place of multiple, shifting contact zones, national and tribal, constantly subject to change.”68 On the one hand, the sense of the border’s irrelevance to Native North American peoples is clear when “Lionel Red Dog, Canadian citizen, government employee, and status Blackfoot Indian,” inadvertently gets caught up in a im’s activities south of the border.69 His somewhat hapless protest, “I’m from Canada” (59), repeatedly falls on deaf ears when he is in the company of Native American members of ai m. Margery Fee and Jane Flick argue that the border is to blame for Lionel’s ignorance: “Borders make us stupid and allow us to remain so if we let them”; Lionel’s insistence that he is Canadian in response to ai m members’ references to US history “is not so much an explanation of his ignorance as a defence of it.”70 Lionel’s response to ai m provides a stark contrast to Slash’s embracing of ai m’s activities and a continental view of Indigenous activism; and, like Slash, Lionel, as a Blackfoot, belongs to an Indigenous nation whose territory crosses the border, a further indication that, in Lionel’s case, the border has had the pacifying effect the state has desired in its strategic division of the Blackfoot people on either side of the border. Whereas ai m activists ignore Lionel’s invocation of his Canadianness, nation-state citizenship matters to the white judge at Lionel’s arraignment for his unpaid hotel bill (caused by his involuntary participation in ai m): “The judge gave Lionel thirty days … ‘Seeing as you’re Canadian, I’ll  reduce it to ten days,’ the judge told him” (63). Paradoxically, Lionel’s Canadianness seems to position him as a good guest in the US, despite the fact that he appears in court. Again, Lionel’s case contrasts sharply with Slash’s, given that Armstrong’s protagonist is essentially thrown out of the United States after being attacked by the police at the Pine Ridge reservation. But it is not just the judge who emphasizes Lionel’s Canadianness, for Lionel himself has used the border to distance himself from ai m, but much of Lionel’s narrative focuses on his willingness to be

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co-opted by white society. Where Slash is interpellated by Indigenous activism, Lionel is not hailed by the exhortation, “Red and proud!” (59); where Slash does want to unsettle the colonial nation-states who have claimed North American territory, Lionel does not want to view himself as a threat to the invader-settler occupiers. Not only has he held a government position but also, having lost his job after the mix-up with a i m, he then works in a dead-end job for an ignorant white character who sells electronics. That his bosses in these two positions are named Duncan Scott and Bill Bursum, respectively, underscores his submission to Euro-North American governments and their attempts to legislate Native assimilation into the dominant culture and to facilitate the appropriation of Native lands by invadersettlers. Lionel’s “defence” of himself as Canadian in the context of a im, then, comes across as part of his weakness and the fact that “he wants to be white.”71 The Canadian state itself is rendered suspect in the novel through references to the White Paper (271) and the narrative of Amos’s family being mistreated by US border guards, followed by the hypocrisy of Canada’s response regarding “the abuses that Canadian citizens had to suffer at the hands of Americans” and the insistence that “the government of Canada has always had the greatest respect for our Aboriginal peoples and will continue to provide them with the same protections that every Canadian enjoys” (281). But, in fact, Amos’s narrative both undermines the Canadian nation-state and its claims to civility, questioning its “greatest respect” for “our Aboriginal brothers and sisters” (281) alongside the simultaneous attempt to render them the same as the invadersettler population (“the same protections that every Canadian enjoys”), and positions US state power in particular as a threat to Indigenous peoples living north of the border. When Amos protests the confiscation of the outfits, he and his family are refused entry in a clear rejection of hospitality at the border: “Jail or home. What’s it going to be?” (257). Further, in a more sustained study of crossborder relations, the chapter focusing on the personal history of Lionel’s sister, Latisha, articulates Canadianness very differently than does her brother’s story, and in a more complicated context, through her marriage to the white American George Morningstar. As Davidson, Walton, and Andrews note, the relationship between Latisha and George (himself an incarnation of Custer [384]) “encompasses both cultural imperialism and sexual dominance,”72 as seen

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in George’s physical abuse of Latisha and his insistence upon American superiority in comparison to Canadians: “Americans are independent … Canadians are dependent.” Latisha told him she didn’t think that he could make such a sweeping statement, that those kinds of generalizations were almost always false. “It’s all observation, Country … The United States is an independent sovereign nation and Canada is a domestic dependent nation. Put fifty Canadians in a room with one American, and the American will be in charge in no time.” George didn’t say it with any pride, particularly. It was, for him, a statement of fact, an unassailable truth, a matter akin to genetics or instinct. (156) Spouting these views of Canada as the lesser entity, George inhabits the position of bad guest north of the border, a position made much more sinister by his violence towards Latisha. In assigning Canada the role of “domestic dependent nation,” he conflates Canada with Indigenous nations in relation to the United States, as declared in the ruling of Cherokee v. Georgia (1831), which denies that Indigenous nations are “sovereign, independent nations.”73 In this sense, George appears to conflate Canada with indigeneity for the purposes of stripping Canada of its sovereignty in relation to the United States. In keeping with this conflation, George uses the nickname “Country” for his wife, “a term of endearment that underlines his perception of her as the embodiment of a land mass that needs to be dominated”:74 for George, Latisha becomes Canada, the dependent, unconfident one in their “partnership.” After the birth of their first child, George’s comparisons between Canada and the United States accelerate, becoming increasingly “absurd”: not only does the United States have “more” of everything (e.g., doctors, lawyers, motels, highways, universities, wars) but George also insists that Americans liked adventure and challenge. Canadians liked order and guarantees. “When a cop pulls a Canadian over for speeding on an open road with no other car in sight, the Canadian is happy. I’ve even seen them thank the cop for being so alert …”

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In the end, simple avoidance proved to be the easiest course, and whenever George started to warm up, Latisha would take Christian into the bedroom and nurse him. There, in the warm darkness, she would stroke her son’s head and whisper ferociously over and over again until it became a chant, a mantra, “You are a Canadian. You are a Canadian. You are a Canadian.” (158) Katja Sarkowsky reads this scene as an example of “King humorously tak[ing] up the multiple affiliations of his characters and the potential contradictions inherent in these affiliations”;75 yet these exchanges between Latisha and George, and Latisha and Christian, have very serious implications. In keeping with his own stereotype about Americans, George privileges conflict by insisting upon US dominance, while Latisha’s tactic is “simple avoidance.” But where George valorizes the qualities he identifies as American, Latisha insists upon naming her child as a Canadian, which reverses George’s infusion of Americanness with value and Canadianness with a lack thereof: “You are Canadian” acts as a soothing promise, a private comfort to counteract George’s claims of dominance. As Davidson, Walton, and Andrews argue, however, “by situating her children within the recognized framework of the nation-state, Latisha may be in a better position to argue with George, but in doing so, she also systematically ignores a legitimate … alternative: aligning herself and her children with a tribal community.”76 Thus, Latisha reinforces the Canada-US border in the context of her marriage, privileging the nation-state as the basis of identity. She does not claim that, as a Blackfoot, she stands outside the logic of the nation-states that her husband seeks to differentiate. But it is unclear to what extent Latisha’s affiliation with Cana­ dianness rests on her interpellation as Canadian. On the one hand, Latisha seems to distance herself from Canadianness in the context of the Dead Dog Cafe, where she and her co-workers identify the nationality of tourists through their stereotypical behaviour: As the people got off the bus, Latisha could see that they all had name tags neatly pasted to their chests. They filed off the bus in an orderly line and stood in front of the restaurant and waited until they were all together. Then, in unison, they walked two

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abreast to the front door, each couple keeping pace with the couple in front of them. “Canadian,” Latisha shouted. (155) On the other hand, the descriptions of the cafe and Latisha’s interactions with customers (including “Polly” Johnson, who leaves Latisha a twenty-dollar tip under a copy of The Shagganappi [159]) are interspersed with the narrative of Latisha’s marriage. Perhaps Latisha responds to George as a Canadian precisely because he insists that she is Canadian, and his nickname for her, “Country,” makes this “hailing” explicit: for George, she is not allowed to conceive of herself outside the framework of the nation-state. Ironically, however, she will achieve an economic independence from him through the Dead Dog Cafe. If George has “lots of jobs[,] chang[ing] them four or five times a year” (190), the Canadian Latisha will ultimately be  better off without her American husband, in a reversal of the economic power relations between their two countries. During their marriage, Latisha resists George’s characterizations of Canada through both arguing against his generalizations and infusing Canadianness with value. Even as Canadian tourists feature as targets of ridicule at the Dead Dog Cafe, appearing as strange, foreign guests, their presence also accrues value for Latisha – a financial value in this context – in her independence from George. d r e w h ay d e n tay lo r : a poor canadian indian”

“just

Drew Hayden Taylor’s play In a World Created by a Drunken God (2006) features a similar dynamic in its portrayal of the relationship between an Indigenous character based in Canada and a white American character who poses a threat to him. Jason Pierce, packing up his Toronto apartment in order to move home to his Ojibway reserve, receives an unexpected guest in the form of Harry Dieter, a white man from Rhode Island claiming to be his half-brother, the son of a white father that Jason has never met. Compromised hospitality, based on both nation and race, infuses their interaction throughout the play. Harry’s uninvited presence demonstrates the behaviour of a bad guest, and certainly a parasitic one, as it turns out, for, as Harry explains, his / their father needs a kidney transplant,

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hence Harry’s impromptu visit across the border and, in response, Jason’s often inhospitable resistance to and rejection of him. Much of the play’s dramatic tension stems from the audacity of Harry’s request (as Jason sees it) and Jason’s refusal to entertain the possibility of saving his father’s life (as Harry sees it). Jason articulates his opposition to Harry through a number of binaries, including legitimate versus illegitimate and Indigenous versus white. Jason insists upon their differences partly in response to Harry’s ignorance, and partly, no doubt, to make those differences seem so unbridgeable in order to reduce Harry’s claim on him. Jason says, “You’ve taken our language, our land, our culture, but I’m not letting you have my kidney. An Indian has to draw the line somewhere.”77 Here, the “you” surely refers to Euro-North American invader-settlers, that “line” drawn on the basis of race. Hospitality has ruptured not only in this colonial relationship, in which Harry stands in for the aggressor-guest usurping the host position, but also in national terms, and Jason constructs the opposition between himself and his half-brother along national lines. But these national distinctions have been clear from the outset. Before Harry explains who he is and why he has arrived on Jason’s doorstep, Jason recognizes Harry as an American due to his “funny accent” (15). Suspicious of Harry’s knowledge of his family, Jason reads Harry as a stand-in for US power, demanding to know if Harry is “with one of those f bi , ci a, three-lettered organizations” (15) and wondering if he did “something wrong when [he] was in Michigan last year” (16). Throughout the play, Jason both evinces knowledge of the United States – in terms of Indigenous groups and invader-settler politics – and underscores differences between the US and Canada. In referring to Michigan, Jason invokes the border-crossing Anishinaabe territory, yet he also reinforces the border in his dealings with Harry: “What is it with you Americans?” (19). Just as Harry is positioned by Jason as a representative of US power, the narrative of Jason’s parents’ mixed-race relationship echoes a kind of double colonization, wherein Canada features as a feminized, disempowered partner in relation to the United States. That Jason’s father “met his mother when he was hunting up here in Ontario” (27) resonates with Edmund Wilson’s description of Canada as “a kind of vast hunting preserve convenient to the United States,”78 and Jason suggests that his father, a predatory guest, was not merely hunting game north of the border: “he bagged more than just deer” (42).79

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Jason works to assert some Canadian cultural power in response to his half-brother’s claims. Attempting to prove his family credentials to Jason, Harry recites the following details: “Your mother’s name is Harriet Pierce. She’d be almost sixty now. Your reservation is about three hours due north of here. And your father was not an Indian. He was an American,” to which Jason responds, after a pause, “First of all, Harry, Harry Dieter, it’s called a reserve up here in Canada. And we’re called First Nations, not Indians” (17). Here, Jason asserts his host position, demonstrating the extent to which he is at home (despite the fact that, in literal terms, he is about to move out of a rented apartment), in contrast to Harry, who is unfamiliar with Jason’s country yet claims a family resemblance between himself and Jason. In presenting a Canadian correction of Harry’s terms, Jason responds as both a Native man and a Canadian (echoing the play’s dramatis personae’s description of Jason as a “Canadian halfNative man” [8]), and positions himself as a Native Canadian by insisting that he is a First Nations person from a reserve. Jason’s self-positioning through terminology contrasts with Slash’s interchangeable use of “reserve” and “reservation” in Armstrong’s novel, and Slash’s implication that Indigenous standards of living across the continent are, precisely, a continental rather than a nation-state concern. Harry’s response, “That’s all you have to say?” (17), both expresses his incredulity at Jason’s failure or refusal to appreciate the significance of his visit (as well as disappointment about his halfbrother’s inhospitality) and gestures towards the troubling status of the differences between Canada and the United States, namely, whether they are different enough to sustain Canadian distinctiveness: “First Nations” and “reserve,” from Harry’s point of view, represent an exasperating case of what can appear to be “mere variations in cultural timbre, inflection, intonation” in distinctions between Canadian and US culture.80 Jason quickly, and quite literally, changes the terms of the discussion in his attempt to out-manoeuvre Harry: jason: The thing is, I’m kinda partial to my bodily organs, and I don’t just go around sharing them with strangers. I don’t know anything about him. Or about you. Or about the wonderful state of Rhode Island. I’m just a poor Canadian Indian. ha r ry: I thought you said you were called First Nations up here.

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jason: First thing to know about Canadian First Nations people is we hate being corrected. What I call myself is none of your business. (30) Jason’s rejoinder to Harry’s attempt to correct him functions, on one level, as an attempted assertion of cultural power, emphasizing difference in order to diminish Harry’s significance to him. In reserving the right to change his terms, Jason insists once more upon his host position and cultural authority. But Harry also misses Jason’s irony, and the extent to which Jason might be responding to Harry’s interpellation of him, hailing him as precisely “a poor Canadian Indian,” which Jason only ironically consents to by ventriloquizing his halfbrother and naming himself as such. Like David McFadden in Great Lakes Suite, Jason deploys irony as a means of defence against his American threat; but Jason’s Indigeneity, in contrast to McFadden’s whiteness, both throws McFadden’s relative privilege and power into relief and accentuates the difference between Jason and Harry. Jason identifies both colonial and neocolonial power imbalances in his exchanges with Harry, thus reconfiguring the Canada-US hostipitality that operates in McFadden’s work. The fact that Harry is a white man who shows up uninvited at Jason’s apartment carries colonial implications: “I’m not leaving. I refuse to,” Harry says (48), insisting on his determination to convince Jason to help their father while also unwittingly invoking the position of the invader-settler. Relations of hospitality in the play operate on multiple levels simultaneously through these individuals’ encounter and both the cross-border and Indigenous / invader-settler differences between them. Jason also gestures towards Indigenous hospitality specifically in his exchange with Harry. As Michael D. McNally notes, “Ojibwe narratives are shot through” with “the practice of hospitality,”81 and, although Jason does not refer directly to specific Ojibway narratives, he does underscore the gap in codes of hospitality between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. When Harry comments that Jason’s mother “sounds like a very nice woman,” Jason offers, “I’ll introduce you to her someday” (46). Harry’s response, “That won’t be necessary,” prompts Jason to outline the fracture of hospitality between communities: “Now you see, that’s a big difference between Native people and non-Native people. I’ve extended a courtesy to you. Of meeting my mother. Somehow I don’t expect you to return the invitation” (46). Jason moves

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between this articulation of difference between himself and Harry (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) to threatening Harry with the invader-settler state and border policing, threatening, at the end of the Act 1, “Now get the fuck out before I call Immigration” (74). Harry is not a wholly unsympathetic character, but the fact that he is a white American rather than a white Canadian is significant. Harry’s national identity positions Jason, like Green Grass, Running Water’s Latisha, as multiply colonized. Taylor has certainly represented the ignorance of white Canadian characters before, for example in alterNatives (2000), which indicts even the lack of knowledge of a white Canadian professor of Native literature; and, in his essays, he has responded to white Canadian ignorance and, indeed, to the problem of what constitutes Canada in the first place. In reference to debates about residential schools in Canada, Taylor writes: “David Frum, a columnist for the National Post, is quoted as saying he has some difficulty believing that ‘teaching native children to speak English and adapt to Canadian ways constituted an act of “cultural genocide.”’ It is if you’re not Canadian and speak a language far older and richer than English, and were here centuries before most columnist’s [sic] immigrant ancestors got lost trying to find China looking for oregano, paprika and pepper, and ended up bastardizing an Iroquoian word meaning ‘a small village or group of huts’ into a word called Canada which now has a popular ginger ale and beer named after it.”82 Here, Canada is a debased concept, commodified and irrelevant to Indigenous peoples; the invader-settler population’s “immigrant ancestors” become hapless guests, allied to the Eurocentric narratives of “discovery” that become comically deflated in Taylor’s description. Elsewhere, Taylor insists that Native North Americans “don’t recognize the imaginary dotted line that separates the Maple Leaf from the Stars and Stripes.”83 Yet Jason takes that imaginary dotted line and uses it to defend himself against the claims of his American halfbrother. Harry does gain some credibility by demonstrating knowledge of Canadian hockey history. For instance, he identifies Tim Horton as a former Toronto Maple Leafs player rather than with the coffee and doughnuts of the franchise that bears his name; “You know that?” Jason asks, “How do you know that? Most Canadians don’t remember that” (116), almost offering a concession to his American guest. But otherwise, Jason aligns Harry with aspects of the United States that most Canadians are determined to resist:

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“Manifest Destiny is your bag” (71). Jason threatens to throw Harry out of the apartment on a number of occasions during the play, and, at one point, says to him: “Go back to America. Maybe you can invade another third world country” (71–2). In response to Harry’s presentation of himself as a decent person on the grounds that he raises money for hospitals, Jason counters, “You can keep your American hospitals because, from what I hear, only the rich can afford to use a hospital down there” (116), invoking Canada’s universal health care policy, commonly identified within Canada as one of the most meaningful distinctions between us and our southern neighbour. Just as Latisha may self-identify as Canadian because of her interpellation as Canadian, although Jason’s self-identification fluctuates, his positioning as a Canadian also functions in relation to his American half-brother. To a certain extent, Latisha and Jason respond as Canadians because of their relationships to Americans, and the fact that both of these relationships, if for different reasons, pose threats to the Indigenous characters. Latisha attempts to prove George wrong about his stereotypical generalizations (and tells her employee, Billy, “You sound like George” [159], when he expresses relief that not all their customers are Canadian), and Jason attempts to underscore a stereotypically American ignorance about Canada in his half-brother. For instance, Harry mistakes a parodic Canadian flag bearing a cannabis leaf as the actual Canadian flag; Jason also emphasizes the linguistic difference between Canada and the US by saying, “c’est la vie … That’s French, we have two official languages in Canada.” When Jason tries to offer a translation of “c’est la vie,” Harry interrupts him with, “I’m familiar with the term” (35), potentially embarrassing Jason by pointing out that he has overestimated Harry’s ignorance, but, significantly, not admitting to knowing that Canada is officially bilingual. When Harry discovers that Jason has told Harry’s own mother about himself on the phone, when she had been deliberately kept in the dark by her husband and son, he tells Jason, “I should kick the living shit out of you,” to which Jason responds with another assertion of national stereotype: “How American” (81). Harry turns the tables on his half-brother when Jason concedes that, if their father is a hockey fan, “he can’t be all that bad then” (118), to which Harry replies, “Very Canadian of you” (119). If Canada and the United States might be said to have a relationship of hostipitality, which demonstrates the inextricable links

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between hospitality and hostility, Jason and Harry perform this hostipitality on personal and nation-state levels. Jason’s Indigeneity does not appear to contradict his Canadianness but, rather, operates in combination with it in his attempts to resist his American halfbrother. Jason’s strategy of distinction and division works for his purposes whether the border is drawn according to race or nationstate. Jason is perhaps most inhospitable when he tells Harry, “I don’t care why you’re here. You are not here” (19), a kind of inversion of the colonizer’s tactic of refusing to acknowledge Indigenous presence in the projection of terra nullius. If the concept of terra nullius “offers stark testimony to the differential power of one account over another in defining not only difference but establishing presence, by establishing the terms of even being seen: an historical perceptibility that empowered possibilities of self- and territorial possession in the present,”84 then Jason’s refusal of Harry’s presence acts both to refuse Harry’s narrative of their family bonds (and what these should mean to Jason) and to pre-empt Harry’s claim to their blood relationship and to Jason’s body as raw material to heal their father. Read another way, Jason’s assertion that Harry is “not here” also reverses a stereotypical US blindness towards its neighbour north of the 49th parallel. Through their blood relationship, Jason and Harry are both family – in biological terms – and not-family: they are not familiar to each other; they have only just met each other; they are radically dissimilar. If Harry declares that his father’s German-descended family “were on this continent way before either World War” (92), this claim on North America pales considerably to Jason’s: “Congratulations. So were my mother’s” (92). And yet, Jason says near the play’s end, “You know, from this angle, you sort of do look like me” (123), another hospitable concession, like his approval of Harry’s recognition of Tim Horton, to his uninvited guest. s t r at e g i c i d e n t i f i c at i o n s

Although Davidson, Walton, and Andrews argue that Green Grass, Running Water’s Latisha ultimately recalibrates her self-­identification in favour of Blackfoot over nation-state affiliation when she stands up to George at the Sun Dance, supported by her relatives and a larger Blackfoot community,85 it is difficult to return all the elements of nation-state differentiation to the idea of the border’s irrelevance to Indigenous peoples. When he resurfaces in the narrative at the

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Sun Dance, George continues to be a bad guest, not simply in relation to Canada but, more specifically, in relation to the Blackfoot at the Sun Dance, where he seeks to appropriate the host position and grant himself permission to take photos, on the grounds that the rules forbidding photography, as he sees it, are “for strangers. Not family” (380). George’s attempt to take photos of the Sun Dance (for financial gain) echoes Eli’s recollection of Michigan tourists, also uninvited, taking photos and resisting their confiscation. But whereas the protagonist of Slash suffers under the repressive state apparatus both north and south of the border, treated in Vancouver as an aggressor by police when he has been defending himself from racist whites and thrown in jail (57–9), and shot at by South Dakota police officers, both Latisha and Jason suffer primarily at the hands of Americans. Latisha might have had an abusive white Canadian husband; white Canadian tourists may have disrupted the Sun Dance with their forbidden photography; and, in Taylor’s text, Jason’s white half-brother asking for a kidney might have been Canadian – cultural dominance and colonial relationships would still be integral to the narratives. In King’s and Taylor’s texts, these American characters appear to add another layer of dominance because of the United States’ status as the world’s only superpower; but their Americanness also inserts Canadianness as a point of identification for both Latisha and Jason. It may be that Canadian readers and viewers of King’s novel and Taylor’s play are let off the hook to a certain extent, our recognition of US imperialism indulged through Latisha’s and Jason’s resistance to George and Harry. Ultimately, however, neither King’s nor Taylor’s text completely resolves the tension between nationstate and Indigenous identity. Rather, this lack of resolution may thematize debates about identity strategies, especially because, as in  Wiser’s invocation of Canadianness in his altercation with US police in Slash, Latisha and Jason’s articulations of Canadianness seem to be, precisely, strategic. In this sense, these texts invoke debates about citizenship – particularly given its explicit representation in King’s novel through Amos’s abuse while border-crossing – through their questions about the imposition of identity versus the potential claims that might be made on the nation-state through the status of citizenship. Many scholars have addressed the multiple affiliations that might be claimed by First Nations people, assessing the most effective

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strategies and most promising conceptions of citizenship. Just as some legal scholars see the letter of the Constitution Act, 1982, subsection 35(1) as affirming treaty rights in a positive way, so, too, citizenship has been interpreted by some as potentially workable for Indigenous peoples. Since the defeat of the White Paper, Aboriginal rights (rights that Trudeau stated in 1969, thirteen years prior to the repatriation of the constitution, “the federal government [was] not prepared to guarantee”) have often been framed in terms of a nationto-nation relationship, “especially since the Oka crisis in 1990.”86 The Assembly of First Nations has argued that First Nations people “are, first and foremost, citizens in their First Nations. Their primary relationship with the federal government, with Canada, is as part of these First Nations.”87 The report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996), established following the failure of Meech Lake and the events at Kanehsatake in 1990, also deploys a nation-to-nation framework, which has attracted the criticism of political scientist Alan C. Cairns: “the rcap reiteration of nation-tonation as the lens for viewing Aboriginal / non-Aboriginal relations inevitably conjures up images of a mini-international system and weakens the idea of a common citizenship.”88 Cairns views a common citizenship as a necessary link between Indigenous and nonIndigenous communities in Canada, and he advocates a “citizens plus” status for Indigenous peoples along the lines of the Hawthorn Report (1966–67), of which Cairns was one of the authors. Rejected by Trudeau in favour of the White Paper’s approach, the Hawthorn Report argued that a “citizens plus” status would encapsulate “ongoing entitlements, some of which flowed from existing treaties, while others were to be worked out in the political processes of the future, which would identify the Indian peoples as deserving possessors of an additional category of rights based on a historical priority”; in attempting “to preserve Indian ‘difference’ while simultaneously supporting a common citizenship as a basis for empathy and solidarity between the Indian people and the majority population,”89 the report’s authors sought to forge a “citizens plus” status for Indigenous people as a means of creating links between Indigenous and nonIndigenous Canadians. Alarmed by the political capital of the nation-to-nation framework, while also arguing against an assimilationist approach, Cairns argues that “what is missing, or inadequately represented, is analysis of the middle ground that simultaneously recognizes both

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Aboriginal difference and the need for connection to, involvement with, and participation in the Canadian community. How can Aboriginal peoples be Canadian, and how can Canadians be Aboriginal? The task is to recognize two overlapping communities and identities. At base, the issue is citizenship.”90 It is unclear, however, how Cairns’s concern for what Indigenous peoples and Canadians share as common citizens works effectively towards a just decolonization; rather, the implication of Cairns’s argument is that “common citizenship mysteriously trumps Canada’s colonial past,”91 particularly given that Cairns’s priority is to leave the state intact, with limited Indigenous self-government embedded within it, and its rights and powers bestowed and protected by the Canadian state. In this way, “the Citizens Plus view remains committed to the White Paper liberalism’s idea that the sovereignty of the Canadian state is non-negotiable, and therefore would silence Aboriginal voices that defend various forms of indigenous nationhood.”92 Cairns argues that, although “Aboriginal peoples seek nation-to-nation political relations, … these cannot be achieved simply by representation in Canadian political institutions.”93 But decolonization is never simple, and Cairns limits his analysis to what is possible under current state configurations. For this reason, Cairns’s “citizens plus” solution not only fails to address the question of “what is there in this polity that is supposed to attract the attention and loyalty of those whose values and ideals as embodied in culture it ruthlessly, relentlessly attacks?” but it is also, ultimately, “Eurocentric and unimaginative.”94 For the framework of “citizens plus” “signified to Indians an executive or settler fiat” in which “Indigenous governmental systems were not recognized; what was recognized was the differentiation of those systems according to criteria defined by first Britain, and then Canada.”95 If Cairns blames “the relative unwillingness of many status Indians to identify themselves as Canadian citizens” on the state’s “past policies when citizenship was equated with assimilation and the loss of Indian status,”96 suggesting that this resistance is now outdated, his adherence to the Hawthorn Report’s conception of citizenship does not address the fact that “citizens plus” has “since been surpassed by a more layered understanding of Aboriginal rights and citizenship.”97 In relation to the interpellation of Indigenous peoples as citizens, in Kulchyski’s terms, the state’s “certain kind of writing” is predicated upon their consent to the state and its power in the first place. If playing the game is always already to surrender, nation-state citizenship

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and Latisha’s and Jason’s strategies of identification with Canada might themselves be acts of surrender, in contrast to Slash’s steadfast refusal to consent to playing the state’s game through negotiation. But although there are clear reasons for “the ambivalence and resistance that First Nations display toward Canadian citizenship,”98 just as Slash dramatizes debates about whether to campaign for recognition of Indigenous rights in the Constitution, so there is no clear consensus among Indigenous scholars about the compatibility of Indigenous and Canadian allegiances. Taiaiake Alfred insists that nation-state citizenship is an example of “the state’s power … [that] must be eradicated from politics in Native communities” and, in the context of his own Kahnawake community, argues that they are “citizens of another nation.”99 However, Alfred acknowledges that not all Indigenous communities share this position and that, although it is based on a false consciousness in his view, “a lot of our Native people imagine themselves to be Canadians.”100 Turner argues, in response to Cairns’s advocacy of “citizens plus”: “No doubt, many if not most Aboriginal people see themselves as Canadian citizens, but many see themselves as citizens of an indigenous nation in addition to (and often prior to) being citizens of Canada. In other words, Aboriginal political identities are multinational.”101 Borrows, whom Cairns invokes for Indigenous support for Canadian citizenship, in fact envisions a very different kind of citizenship from what Cairns imagines. Less concerned with allegiances to nation-states “on both sides of the (comparatively newly created) US / Canadian border,”102 Borrows sees an Aboriginal citizenship as necessary for both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples alike. Current citizenship frameworks are insufficient as Indigenous peoples “struggle to fully identify themselves as citizens in Canada because they rarely see their primary perspectives and interests mirrored in the law, the expressed goals of the state, or the prevailing associations in society.”103 A new citizenship must be forged in order to remedy “current conceptions of citizenship [that] are deficient both because they fail to give socio-cultural recognition to Aboriginal peoples’ primary relationship and loyalties and because non-Aboriginal Canadians have not considered or made many of these allegiances, relationships, and obligations their own.”104 In contrast to the White Paper’s falsely hospitable attempt to “welcome” Indigenous peoples into Canadian citizenship and participation in mainstream Canadian society, Borrows argues in favour of a decolonizing justice that emphasizes a “citizenship with the land”:

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Citizenship under Aboriginal influence may generate a greater attentiveness to the land uses and cultural practices preferred by many Aboriginal peoples. Canadian notions of citizenship might not only develop to include greater scope for people’s involvement in sustenance activities, they might also reduce the tolerance for land uses that extirpate these pursuits. Recognition of the importance of these objectives could thus shield Aboriginal peoples from assimilation by ensuring sufficient space for the pursuit of preferred Aboriginal activities. Moreover, Canadian citizenship under Aboriginal influence may expand to recognize the land as citizen.105 Thus, Borrows seeks an Indigenous renovation of citizenship in which both non-Indigenous Canadians and the land must participate. Borrows’s conceptualizing of citizenship with the land, and the land as citizen, echoes Indigenous notions of community, which is, as Jace Weaver notes, “the highest value to Native peoples, and fidelity to it is a primary responsibility.”106 King explains that “community, in a Native sense, is not simply a place or a group of people, rather it is, as novelist Louise Erdrich describes it, a place that has been ‘inhabited for generations,’ where ‘the landscape becomes enlivened by a sense of group and family history.’”107 Thus, the value of land resides not just in belonging as manifest in claims to ownership of “a valuable commodity for settlers and government.”108 Joe Sheridan and Roronhiakewen “He Clears the Sky” Dan Longboat argue that “settler presence in North America has been little more than a passing enthrallment with place and time,” indicating a lack of both ­sustained connection to the continent and “the thick duties of spatial-temporal belonging.”109 Thus, Borrows’s proposal constitutes a radical revisioning of citizenship, one that would not only interpellate Indigenous peoples more successfully by addressing their communities’ concerns, and their concerns of community, but that might also “welcome” Canadian citizens into a more effective relationship with Indigenous peoples and with the land. The Idle No More movement presents one possibility of this revisioned citizenship. In addition to the global reach of the movement, with Indigenous peoples outside Canada’s borders standing in solidarity with Indigenous peoples in Canada, the movement has also forged alliances within Canada, with Indigenous people and “settler allies” forging “co-existence through co-resistance” to the threat that the

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omnibus bill (Bill C-45) poses through “mass destruction of our shared lands, waters, plants and animals in the name of resource development for export to foreign countries.”110 This alliance between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples could work towards the possibility of decolonization in Borrows’s revisioned citizenship, ­ which “welcomes” invader-settler citizens, recalibrating roles of hospitality by reinserting Indigenous peoples as the hosts. While it is clear that different thinkers conceive of both citizenship and the relationship between nation-state and Indigenous ­peoples in different ways, it is also clear that the category of citizenship itself does not signify in a straightforward manner for Indige­ nous peoples, even those who choose to affiliate themselves with Canada as well as their Indigenous nations. Drew Hayden Taylor weighs up the options of nation-state citizenship, on the one hand, and nation-to-nation negotiation, on the other, in a discussion of the right to vote: Some have argued that, maybe, as Native people we should just sit this and all other elections out. Because participating in the Canadian electoral process might compromise our status as independent First Nations. Canada made its treaties with sovereign autonomous Aboriginal Nations and we shouldn’t participate in their government anymore than they have a right to participate in ours. We are not Canadians. We are “insert your Nation here.” Personally, I don’t think it’s as cut and dry as that. Granted there is a reasonable amount of logic to the argument but on the other hand, I’ve met too many Native war veterans who fought for and lost friends defending Canada. I’d feel uncomfortable telling them they didn’t have the right to vote. … Politics, like many things in life, is not always “all or nothing.” I think you’re allowed to fudge the boundary lines occasionally.111 “We are not Canadians,” but “you’re allowed to fudge the boundary lines occasionally”: I would argue that both King and Taylor, much more than Armstrong, fudge boundary lines – by addressing them in the first place in their complication of nation-state and Indigenous identifications, by making that nation-state border, “a figment of someone else’s imagination,”112 signify at all. Originally from the United States, King, who “think[s] of [him]self as a Native writer and a Canadian writer,”113 actively took out citizenship in Canada.

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He also stood in the 2008 Canadian federal election for the New Democratic Party – he didn’t win, but, even in what Stuart Christie identifies as an attempt to “ge[t] the Indigenous word out,”114 his willingness to enter nation-state politics is clear. Similarly, in his essay on the vote, Taylor confesses to having voted for the n d p. Further, as Jennifer Andrews and Priscilla L. Walton remind us, “to erase all borders is to threaten the viability of First Nations’ claims to land and natural resources.”115 Thus, even as their writing often advocates a disregard of a nation-state border that is “artificial at best,” King and Taylor have also grappled with “the lived fact of multiple citizenships for indigenous peoples” and engaged in political processes that depend upon, and are generated by, the boundary they are keen to fudge.116 In terms of King’s and Taylor’s work, then, Latisha’s and Jason’s gestures towards Canadianness demonstrate that, however arbitrarily drawn the Canada-US border may be, it has nevertheless produced political and cultural consequences and engendered provisional identifications, offering a site of struggle and negotiation over citizenship and its implications for Indigenous peoples in North America. In contrast to Cairns’s hope that a “citizens plus” model will allow Canada to “have it both ways [in] that multiple identities are both possible and desirable, and that they can and should include one of several possible Aboriginal identities and an identity as a Canadian,”117 which does not offer a break with the presupposition of the Canadian state’s sovereignty taking precedence over that of Indigenous sovereignties, Armstrong’s, King’s, and Taylor’s texts suggest in different ways that the multiple interpellations of Indigenous individuals not only enable but also, in some cases, necessitate multiple, provisional, and strategic responses to the questions of whether, how, for whom, and when the border signifies.

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4 The “Strait Razorous Border”: African-Canadian Perspectives

Border crossings by black North Americans have figured almost exclusively in the dominant Canadian imaginary through the narrative of the Underground Railroad, the escaping of slaves from the United States to the sanctuary offered by Canada, particularly following the abolition of slavery by the British Empire in 1833. According to the dominant narrative, Canada epitomizes hospitality, a generous host that extended refuge to black slaves in the nineteenth century and whose generosity continues in the present day through its welcoming of immigrants and refugees into its multicultural society. The power of this narrative of hospitality, and the role it plays in establishing the Canadian nation-state’s sense of its social justice credentials, has functioned, as many critics have noted, to eclipse Canada’s own history of slavery and its own racism in the present. Canadian school children learn of the Underground Railroad but not of the fact that “the enslavement of Black people was institutionalised and practised for the better part of three centuries” in their country.1 If the Underground Railroad serves as the ultimate symbol of the nation’s hospitality, “slavery is Canada’s bestkept secret,”2 its manifestation differing from that which emerged from the plantation economy of the southern United States but nonetheless belying Canada’s self-projection as a hospitable space for black North Americans. Dominant Canadian historiography’s portrayal of the escape to freedom as a movement north across the Canada-US border also effaces crossings in the other direction, particularly of slaves brought to Canada from New England and New York who ran “back to these places … When going back to the thirteen colonies, escapees traversed a reverse Underground Railroad.”3

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The effacement of slavery in Canada from dominant historical narratives has implications for the present, in which, despite the fact that “black people date their presence in Canada from as early as the 1600s, Blackness is still considered a recent phenomenon within the nation.”4 The assumption that African Canadians constitute recent arrivals within the nation-state’s borders contradicts the hallowing of the Underground Railroad myth, wilfully forgetting that not all escaped slaves returned south following the American Civil War, and ignores not only the history of slavery in Canada but also earlier black migrations to Canada, including those of the Black Loyalists in 1783, the Maroons in 1796, and the Black Refugees following the War of 1812. Thus, the nation’s own narrative of hospitality is  inconsistent as it forgets these migrations. Granted, the racism embedded within Canada radically throws such instances of  hospitality into doubt, considering the hostile reception these migrants encountered, but dominant Underground Railroad narratives, “extremely significant in the production of Canada’s selfimage as a white settler nation that welcomes and accepts non-white subjects,”5 have recuperated the nation’s hospitality, largely by remaining silent about how these “guests” were treated by Canadians following their arrival across the border. Ignoring earlier migrations diminishes a substantial black Canadian history, colluding in the impression of blackness as a recent phenomenon in Canada, and – crucially – denying African Canadians the position of host in the present by assuming or, indeed, insisting that their “home” always lies elsewhere. The mythologizing of the Underground Railroad intersects with dominant Canadian nationalist assumptions about the Canada-US border in that it upholds the border as a line of defence, the boundary of the sanctuary for both Canadian sovereignty and escaped slaves’ own liberty. The two intertwine in the nation’s self-­projection, which depends upon Canada’s claim to be a more just society than its neighbour to the south. Many African-Canadian literary texts, however, unsettle both this larger national projection and its portrayal of the Canada-US border in particular, undermining the mythology of hospitality in the past and the present, and exposing the border as a site of policing racialized bodies rather than simply offering them sanctuary. The works of novelist Lawrence Hill, playwright Djanet Sears, and poet Wayde Compton contest the effacing of blackness in dominant Canadian history and test the limits of

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Canada’s preferred view of itself as exempt from accusations of racism more readily aimed at the United States. Although each of these writers examines Canada’s hospitality to black North Americans in both the present and the past and resists the dominant culture’s attempts to fix them as perpetual guests, their approaches to history, and their manner of invoking and rectifying gaps in dominant Canadian historical narrative, differ as widely as their generic and aesthetic modes. In Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada, Rinaldo Walcott cautions against “the rhetorical place of ‘Did you know?’” that “will both install and correct a lack of knowledge” in the articulation of black Canadian history and attempts to write it back into the national narrative.6 For Walcott, the rhetoric of “did you know” and its “underlying desire that ‘If you only knew’ then your conduct might be different” offer ineffective means for countering the exclusions of the nation-state, for “such a demand always unravels the violent imperatives that have sustained the normative myths of the nation”; ultimately, argues Walcott, “to insist on the ‘If you only knew’ is to reside in and inhabit the place of the melancholic, repeatedly listing facts and compulsively requesting admission.”7 Walcott’s identification of the modes of imparting historical knowledge through “did you know” and “if you only knew” alerts us not simply to the content of historical narratives that contest the nation’s dominant mythologies but also to the formal means of conveying that content, and, most significantly, how the audience is positioned in its knowledge or lack thereof. Hill, Sears, and Compton might each be said to “install and correct a lack of knowledge” through the counter-narratives they offer, but they do so through widely divergent means and radically different forms. Ultimately, however, through different modes of historical representation, all three writers interrogate the boundaries of the nation and the dominant narratives that sustain it by invoking the Canada-US border and unsettling the nationalist investment in the 49th parallel by complicating the sense of hospitality offered at the nation-state’s threshold and beyond. l aw r e n c e h i l l ’ s to h i s to r y ”

“responsibility

In Lawrence Hill’s Any Known Blood, Langston Cane IV tells his son, Langston Cane V – the novel’s protagonist – “What do I like

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about water? It offers itself up like a bridge for people to move between countries and continents. Water, my son, was an escape hatch for some of your own ancestors.”8 A long-time resident of Oakville, with a lengthy family history in the town that stretches back to the Underground Railroad, Langston IV invokes a water border, rather than a land border, in particular the division between Canada and the United States across Lake Ontario that has provided an “escape hatch” to the sanctuary north of the 49th parallel. Yet Langston IV does not speak for all border crossings in Hill’s three novels – Some Great Thing (1992), Any Known Blood (1997), and The Book of Negroes (2007) – as Hill’s oeuvre as a whole offers an ambivalent position on border crossing. Canada is consistently positioned as a site of promised hospitality, yet Hill is at pains throughout his work to identify instances throughout the nation’s history where this promise is not adequately fulfilled. At the same time, Hill’s work – and his characters – distinguish Canada from the United States, differentiating the forms that racism takes on either side of the border in a way that at times reinstalls Canada’s claims to hospitality to black North Americans in the past while asserting African-Canadian claims to the host position in the present. Although Hill’s first novel is less explicitly concerned with crossborder African-Canadian history than are the two that follow, Some Great Thing’s focus on the Grafton family in Winnipeg performs similar functions to the subsequent border-crossing narratives in Hill’s work. The spectre of difficult, or denied, crossing of the ­Canada-US border emerges several times through the novel, but until the very end, questions surrounding the border are largely attached to the policing of political affiliation, rather than to race, invoked through the subplot concerning whether Winnipeg’s Communist mayor, John Novak, has been barred entry into the US by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (i n s). Although published in 1992, Some Great Thing is set in the mid-1980s, a Cold War context that appears to distinguish Canada from the US through the fact that Winnipeg has elected (and has been able to elect) a Communist mayor, implying that Canada is a more politically hospitable space than the United States. Ultimately, it is not the mayor but Mahatma Grafton, the novel’s African-Canadian protagonist, who is prevented from entering the United States and making his connecting flight to Canada, following a trip to Cameroon with the mayor. Although neither we nor Mahatma ever discover the reason for his failed

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border crossing (although the possibility is raised that it is due to the fact that Mahatma’s “father was a socialist and labour activist in the 1950s”), the protagonist announces at a press conference in Winnipeg that “the measures were intended as harassment.”9 In light of the white mayor Novak’s actual Communist politics (versus Mahatma’s lack of any overt political allegiance), it is likely the intersection of perceived politics and race that has subjected Mahatma to surveillance and the policing of his movement. He is refused even a brief guest status in the United States, in the distance between two New York airports, on his way home to Canada. Some Great Thing’s engagement with African-Canadian border crossing is implied in its representation of the Grafton family and Mahatma’s and other black Winnipeggers’ subjection to what Hill elsewhere refers to as “The Question” (or “Where are you from really?”). As Hill explains, “The offence-causing kernel at the center of this line of argument is its implication: ‘You are not white, you don’t look like me, so you’re clearly not Canadian … Since you’re clearly not Canadian, and I am, I am within my rights to ask you just exactly where you’re from.’”10 The Question is both a form of border crossing, policed by the white Canadian who asks it, and a demand to hear the details of previous crossings (generally assumed to be recent). Mahatma’s father Ben, we learn, was born in Winnipeg in 1908, and his parents had moved there one year earlier – not from the United States but from Alberta. In conversation with the IrishCanadian Winnipeg police chief Patrick MacGrearicque, who says, “You’re telling me your goddamn grandfather was a Canadian?” Mahatma responds, “Naturalized, yes. So you’d better get used to it, Patrick MacGrearicque. My people have been here as long as yours” (62). Mahatma claims the host position in Canada, despite the fact that “nobody, not even in Winnipeg, believe[s] he [is] Canadian” (98). Some Great Thing embeds border-crossing history in a narrative that focuses on francophone-anglophone tensions in 1980s Winnipeg, alongside histories of black railroad porters (of whom Ben Grafton was one). These stories intersect through the figure of Mahatma, reluctant audience to his father’s lectures on black history and a reporter covering the conflict between Franco- and AngloManitobans. The narratives reveal how language and race are configured in relation to the national host position. Ben’s porter narratives testify both to black history in Canada and to the nation’s

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racist legacy, while Mahatma’s contact with the Franco-Manitoban community suggests a multiplicity of linguistic hosts, both literally and figuratively. Mahatma befriends Georges Goyette, who hosts a party at his house: “Georges liked a party with two languages, loud music and wild jokes” (71). His conviviality is not met by all his guests, however, particularly Chuck, one of Mahatma’s Anglo newspaper colleagues, who complains that too much French is spoken at the party. Mahatma is a better guest in the Franco-Manitoban community, able and willing to speak French, but still positioned as “truly … an anglais, even … one in a different skin” (63), language trumping race – indeed, all other identity categories – in this context. If the novel argues in favour of French-language rights in Manitoba, expanding the position of linguistic host, Mahatma retains a guest status in the francophone community because of his mother tongue, it is implied, rather than his racialized identity. The Cane family’s presence in Canada in Any Known Blood predates the Grafton’s by half a century. Any Known Blood traces five generations of Langston Canes across the Canada-US border, as its Oakville-born, present-day protagonist, Langston Cane V, seeks to  piece together and to write his family’s border-crossing history. Langston I, as previously mentioned, escapes to Canada via the Underground Railroad, fathers children (including Langston II) in Oakville, then returns to the United States following bigamy charges and accompanies American abolitionist John Brown in his raid on Harpers Ferry; Langston II moves with his abandoned mother and siblings back to the US and, following the death of his mother and disappearance of his brothers, is raised by a white Quaker and becomes an African Methodist Episcopal (am e ) minister; Langston III moves to Oakville as an a me minister in an effort to find a location suitably civilized for his wife, born into wealth and privilege; and Langston IV, born in Oakville but subsequently moving as a child to Baltimore, returns to Canada as an adult to study medicine and later moves into what was the Oakville home of the captain who ferried Langston I across Lake Ontario to freedom. Langston V, who loses his job as an Ontario government speechwriter at the beginning of the novel, travels to Baltimore to uncover more about these family histories and, presumably, needs this displacement: “It was time to move south and start to write” (56). The Cane family history suggests long-standing claims to host status on either side of the border, with Oakville and Baltimore twinned as ancestral homes.

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As Maureen Moynagh notes, Any Known Blood’s “transnational imaginary … offers an effective counter-narrative both to the Loyalist allegory and to what we might think of as the ‘Heritage Minute’ version of the Underground Railroad narrative.”11 It is precisely by recounting the experiences of the Cane family after crossing the Canada-US border that the “Heritage Minute” (invoking a simplistic and commodified form of Canadian history, appropriating a sentimental nationalism for the purposes of advertising Canada Post) is supplemented and challenged. Canada’s hospitality is qualified early in the family’s cross-border history, when Langston I’s wife refers to Oakville as “Nicefolksville … They’ll nice you to death” (445). In this “strange and lovely town[,] [n]obody beat up on you, or brought out a whip, or threatened to drag you back to slavery. But colored people were still made to feel like outsiders” (461). But these two poles – the “niceness” of Oakville (and, by extension, Canada, as it gets extrapolated in other parts of the novel), coupled with the alternative ways of Othering the black community – recur throughout the novel in different time periods, demonstrating Canada as an ambivalent home, with varying inflections and emphasis. Langston III’s narrative presents Canadian racism in the 1920s as flexible and navigable: in Toronto, in 1923, Langston III and his wife “sat, to their amazement, next to white folks in an Italian restaurant. They were assured, however, that not every restaurant and not every hotel would admit black people. You just had to know where to go” (192). Racist hospitality should be no hospitality at all, yet the novel seems to invert it into a hospitable racism precisely through its flexibility. On the one hand, this flexibility and navigability appears to evaporate once the Ku Klux Klan arrive at the Canes’ home in Oakville, when Aberdeen Williams, the Canes’ handyman / nanny, becomes engaged to a white woman. Ultimately, Oakville’s police chief dissuades the k k k from perpetrating further violence: “You’re gonna make a laughingstock out of Oakville. People are gonna talk about us across the country” (321). Following the Klansmen’s departure, the police chief assures the Canes: “This should not have happened to you. And I happen to know that ninety-nine people outa a hundred in Oakville would agree with me” (323). The white police chief thereby positions the k k k as a municipal as well as a national shame, a racist blight on the country’s sense of justice. But even this eruption of racist violence, in Canada, the shock of its presence, is positioned

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as a “nicer” version of its southern counterpart. Langston’s motherin-law asserts, “Down here, the k k k wouldn’t even give you time to open your mouth … In Oakville, we met their nice northern cousins. But in the States, they’d swing you from a branch and there’d be no talking before or after” (326). In this sense, although many critics have pointed out that Canada is not absolved of racism, in its history or in its present, it just tends to manifest itself as a more polite or civil racism,12 the novel suggests that polite (hospitable) racism is preferable. This is certainly corroborated by Langston IV, born in Oakville, raised in Baltimore, and choosing to return to Canada after the Second World War, “which he later said was enough to make any black soldier hate America” (62). Refused accommodation by a Toronto landlord, Langston IV thinks: “This wasn’t the United States. Nobody would swear at him, or wave a gun. Langston waited for the refusal, Canadian-style” (35). He resists accompanying his white wife to expose the racism of a Windsor restaurant on the grounds that: “If I were so desperate to experience segregation, I would have stayed in Baltimore. Down there, the only restaurants I can sit in are black-owned” (82). Not only does Langston IV associate explicit racism with the United States but, significantly, he also implicitly attaches Windsor to the US, as though the city’s proximity to the border affiliates it with the country on the other side of it. The novel does not always agree with its protagonist’s father, who, upon hearing Langston V’s plan to travel to Baltimore, insists, “You’ve got no more links to Baltimore, son, than I have to China” (57). The depth of the protagonist’s family history in Baltimore, which Langston V uncovers during his stay, undermines his father’s pronouncement. However, despite Moynagh’s identification of the novel’s “transnational imaginary,” in Langston V’s narrative, national differences are most starkly delineated and articulated as national differences between Canada and the US. This may be due, partly, to the fact that Canada and the US are represented, respectively, by the relatively affluent, “terminally pleasant” (53) Oakville and a lowincome Baltimore neighbourhood; but the novel’s characters do not qualify national comparisons with economics. Langston V is Othered in Baltimore, partly because he is mixed-race and light-skinned but also partly because he is Canadian. He is a “Canadian visitor” (233) in the church where his grandfather once preached; is cautioned, having paid his rent in cash, not to “walk the streets with that kind

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of money, son. This is Baltimore. This is not Canada” (106); and is told by his aunt Mill, “I guess people in Canada still go for walks” (221). Langston also reads himself as a Canadian in Baltimore: “I came to a red light. I stopped. We tend to do that in Canada” (93). Later, witnessing a drive-by shooting, he notices, verging on a parody of peace, order, and good government, “the light was plainly red and cars were coming from the other direction and still this car charged through, and for an instant I found that fact the most shocking of all” (216). Ultimately, despite her attempts to distance herself from her Canadian nephew (and his father, whose interracial marriage she has always rejected), Langston’s aunt Mill considers Canada her home, as documented by her citizenship papers, with which she crosses the border at the novel’s close. The border guard’s comment, “Have a safe trip home” (505), signals a performative power of the document at the site of the border, where it testifies to her Canadianness (despite her decades-long absence) and identifies her as a host. Throughout the novel, for various characters, Canada is both foreign and home; it is a radically different space, a refuge from the racist violence of the United States, yet it is not exempt from its own manifestation of racism; it is a different country, but, according to a young Langston IV, “it wasn’t really another country at all – it was just Canada” (67). This tension between Canada-US sameness and difference arises in nineteenth- and twentieth-century storylines in the novel, reaching back to a fictionalized conversation between two historic figures, Captain Wilson and John Brown. Wilson, working with the Underground Railroad, receives a visit from Brown, who claims that “the bondage of men … is a blight upon our great nation” (471). “Your great nation,” Wilson replies, “We are on British soil here,” only to have Brown remind him, “Canada West, after all, is  only a quarter century removed from slavery” (471). Wilson’s response, “I beg you not to patronize me in my own country and in my own home” (471), identifies Brown as a bad guest in Wilson’s house in particular and Canada in general, not only patronizing the captain but also minimizing differences between the two countries (as Brown’s phrase “our great nation” also does) and, therefore, reducing the power of Wilson’s host position. But perhaps Brown has also shown bad manners by emphasizing Canada’s own history of slavery, an uncomfortable reminder for both Wilson and the

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Canadian reader of “the absented presence of slavery in official national discourses” and the mendacity of “nation-state narratives which argue that Canada’s only relation to slavery was as a sanctuary for escaping African-Americans.”13 In The Book of Negroes, the troubling of Canada-US difference persists in an even earlier time period than that of the Underground Railroad. The novel’s protagonist, Aminata Diallo, migrates from New York City to Nova Scotia, which has been explicitly positioned as a “promised land” for Black Loyalists at the close of the American Revolutionary War.14 If Any Known Blood’s Mill explicitly gestures towards her citizenship papers as evidence of Canada as home for her, Aminata’s involvement in recording the historical document of the Book of Negroes foregrounds its status as a collective travel document of sorts, the evidence of the right to passage for black refugees – all of whom have been “inspected,” the movement of their bodies policed by British officials – from what is to become the United States to “Nova Scotia … a British colony, untouched and unsullied by the Americans” (285). But whatever the British promise, it is not enough that the land be “untouched” by Americans, for The Book of Negroes continues Hill’s reminders of the history of slavery in Canada, as documented in the historical Book of Negroes. As Aminata discovers to her profound disappointment and outrage, not all black passengers recorded in the Book of Negroes have been promised freedom in Canada, for some of them accompany white people who claim them as slaves or indentured servants. Later, in Nova Scotia, “I came to understand that if you had come to Nova Scotia free, you stayed free – although that didn’t prevent American slave owners from sailing into town and attempting to snatch back their property. However, if you came to Nova Scotia as a slave, you were bound just as fast as our brothers and sisters in the United States” (321). Canada therefore is not an equally hospitable space for all those documented in the Book of Negroes. Further, Aminata’s own experiences in Nova Scotia underscore a persistent inhospitality. Not only is Aminata refused hospitality at a coffee house following her disembarkation – “A big man took me by the arm and pulled me to the door. ‘We don’t serve niggers,’ he said … ‘Move along … Birchtown is the place for your kind’” (313) – but Birchtown itself is also ultimately torched by white racists, and the Black Loyalists live in extreme poverty, awaiting land grants that do not materialize. These reneged-on promises demonstrate the extent to which the Promised Land is not to be found north of the border.

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Although Aminata will later describe herself as a Nova Scotian, her time in Nova Scotia occupies only a part of the narrative. She joins the migration to Sierra Leone, despite being told, “Dangerous place, Africa is” – her reply, “So is Nova Scotia” (364). But despite the sales pitch presented by the British about Nova Scotia, migration simply for the purposes of escaping slavery has never been Aminata’s primary goal. During her enslavement on the indigo plantation in South Carolina, she claims, “I sought to find a way off the indigo plantation and to discover the route back to my homeland” (164); “I did not want to take the route of runaway slaves, escaping to the Indians or the Spanish in the south. Hiding in swamps and forests would get me no closer to Africa” (213). Although she will not find her homeland, and will end her days in London, Aminata’s explicit desire to return home (itself suggesting that hospitality cannot compensate for a lost home) and her criticism of the treatment of the black Nova Scotians intervene in what Jennifer Harris describes as the “national rhetorics that prefer to frame Canada as a refuge from, rather than a participant in, the African slave trade.”15 In this sense, it is clear that Hill seeks to dislodge conventional Canadian misunderstandings of the nation’s history. And indeed, much of the reception of Lawrence Hill’s work as a whole has foregrounded his filling in the gaps of official Canadian history, redressing the omission of African Canadians from the nation’s dominant narratives. Harris describes Hill’s work as “uncovering forgotten or dismissed history and disrupting the myth of an absented black presence in Canada,”16 and Hill himself has asserted both that “too few of us know our history in the first place” and that his “responsibility to history is to project it honestly.”17 Although Walcott both praises Hill’s Any Known Blood for its “making present the gaps and silences in official histories of the nation,” and joins a chorus of critics who read Hill’s work as “playful,” “irreverent,” as “historiographic metafiction,” and as undermining genre, I suggest that, alongside these elements, the “did-you-know” compulsion critiqued by Walcott persists throughout Hill’s novels as they attempt to tell stories that “books, school curricula, museums, and other repositories of national history have overlooked.”18 In Some Great Thing, Mahatma’s father tells some of his friend Harry’s family history to the mayor’s assistant, who responds: “You mean they were part of that migration before World War One?”

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Ben looked surprised. “Yes. From Oklahoma. They settled on the prairie with a lot of other blacks. But the whites were so afraid they demanded a head tax on Negroes.” “Right,” Sandra said. “So blacks stopped coming here.” (138) If the answer to the question “Did you know?” is “yes,” in Sandra’s case, clearly the anticipation is that the reader will say “no” and that Sandra’s knowledge is offered up for the reader’s benefit. In Any Known Blood, not only does Aberdeen Williams, following his visits to the library, begin a series of conversations with the phrase “Did you know – ” but we are also told that “he knew, from his reading, that Six Nations chief Joseph Brant had fought alongside Negroes and the British to drive the Americans back across the Niagara River in the War of 1812. He knew that Brant had allowed fugitive slaves to settle on his land and marry his women” (326–7). When Oakville is described by his future wife as “lily white,” Langston IV replies: “Oakville was by no means entirely white in 1850. First, the Mississagi Indians were in the area. Second, a group of fugitive slaves found work in the town” (79). And when the Klansmen arrive at their house when Langston IV is a child, his grandmother states: “What is the Klan doing here? You never told me they were here in Canada” (315). Hazel acts as mouthpiece here for Canadians who do not know their own history because they have never been told. If, for David McFadden, the historical plaque is a suspect token of  historical representation that can work to appropriate another nation’s culture or to efface the injustices of the nation-state, in Any Known Blood, Hill uses the figure of the commemorative plaque on two occasions as a method of imparting historical information to  the reader. The first plaque is at Langston V’s family home in Oakville: On display at the front of the house was an Oakville Historical Society plaque that said Robert Wilson, Ship Captain, 1815– 1869. Wilson was the first owner of my parents’ 180-year-old house. Sean and I heard about him many times in our childhood. Wilson made a good living ferrying timber and grain to New York State and returning with coal and manufactured goods. Clocks. Armoires. Horse carriage parts. But he ferried something else back with him – fugitive slaves. He hid them in his schooner and helped them get started in Oakville. (48)

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Growing up in a monument to the Underground Railroad, it is perhaps unsurprising that Langston V later decides that a bed and breakfast in Naples, New York, bearing a similarly informative plaque about the same period, is “the place for [him]”: “I … noticed a historical plaque describing the building as a safe house on the Underground Railroad in the 1840s and 1850s” (60). Historical information in Hill’s work often appears like commemorative plaques in the narrative, bits of history that can be deployed to supplement the standard national narrative and to fill in its missing pieces. In both Any Known Blood and The Book of Negroes, Hill includes paratexts entitled “A Word about History” that clarify the distinctions between fiction and fact, separating Hill’s embellishments from historical events for the purposes of educating the reader. Not surprisingly, the historical Book of Negroes features heavily in the “Word about History” of the novel that shares its name, where Hill emphasizes its importance as “the largest single document about black people in North America up until the end of the eighteenth century” (471). Hill’s desire to circulate knowledge about this “littleknown document,”19 coupled with his forging of a palimpsestic relationship between his novel and the document through their shared title, suggests that he has transformed the historical Book of Negroes into what Abigail Ward calls a “docu / monument,” whereby, in relation to “the transatlantic slave trade, … documents perhaps stand as unofficial monuments to the past.”20 In foregrounding the Book of Negroes’s significance to underacknowledged narratives of Canadian history, Hill offers “a corrective story” about black North American border crossings and Canada’s in / hospitality beyond the border,21 one that would appear to require a more visible monument to proliferate this corrective story. Further, The Book of Negroes’ “illustrated edition” (2009) particularly emphasizes the rhetoric of “did you know,” and assumes the answer is negative, by incorporating more than one hundred images as glosses, complete with captions, in the margins of the novel’s narrative, as though offering multiple plaques for the reader to stroll by throughout the narrative.22 At the end of The Book of Negroes, now resident in London, Aminata “beg[ins] to receive requests to speak to school children and to literary and historical societies” (461), and it seems that Hill and his novel have begun to perform a similar function in terms of the perceived pedagogical value of the text (as evidenced by the Historica-Dominion Institute’s new “Black History in Canada

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Education Guide,” which features The Book of Negroes).23 I do not wish to contest Hill’s assessment of Canadians’ ignorance about slavery and race relations in their own country, or the importance of redressing that ignorance, or the affirmation of the fact that “as he demonstrates in virtually all his writings there are stories about black Canadian history and lives to tell.”24 Although we can read Any Known Blood as historiographic metafiction, aware that the novel we are reading is Langston Cane V’s work, there is never a point at which the writing of history is in question, at which historiography itself – or the transparency of the plaque – is put under pressure, at which testimonies conflict with each other. The extraordinary circulation of the award-winning Book of Negroes in particular may result in a different answer to the question “did you know,” especially where the nation’s dominant myths of black North American border crossings are concerned, as “Hill obliges Canadians to remember – and in many cases discover – that slavery is part of the collective Canadian past.”25 In this sense, Hill’s novels primarily concern themselves with offering a supplementary – and at times contradictory – story to the one the nation prefers to tell about the hospitality it offers at its boundary and within.

“dusting

dja n e t s e a r s : o u t c a n a d i a n h i s to r y ”

In her plays Harlem Duet (1996) and The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God (2003), Djanet Sears presents AfricanCanadian characters in locations on either side of the 49th parallel as she grapples with both literary and African-Canadian history. The action of Harlem Duet, a kind of prequel to Shakespeare’s Othello, unfolds away from Canada, in three separate time periods, but Canada is invoked throughout the play as both the home country of the protagonist, Billie, and as a site of refuge for an enslaved couple in the nineteenth century in the American south. Conversely, Adventures focuses on an African-Canadian community in western Ontario, emphasizing the community’s long history in that location and its relationship to the land. In Harlem Duet, Sears inverts Canada’s role as promised land to black North Americans through Billie’s love for Harlem as a black sanctuary, but one that fails to keep Billie whole, just as Adventures underscores the Negro Creek community members’ historic claim to Canada as home and their

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right to be host while exposing white hostility to the community in the present. In Sears’s re-visioning of Othello, the action focuses on Billie, Othello’s first wife, a black woman left for the white Mona. Sears relocates the play’s events in temporal terms, offering three incarnations of the couple in the nineteenth century before abolition (when they are named “Him” and “Her”); in 1928, during the Harlem Renaissance (when they are named “He” and “She”); and the present-day. This temporal relocation accompanies the shift in geographical ­setting to the United States. In this American setting, Canada features as an absent presence, figuring as the imagined destination of the enslaved couple Him and Her. And while Billie celebrates her Harlem location, she herself was raised in Nova Scotia, where her father, whose name is “Canada,” still lives. Harlem Duet enacts many different kinds of border crossings, both cultural and national, as it appropriates Shakespeare’s narrative to tell a different story and maps black identity in North America. In Harlem Duet, Canada functions as the place that Him and Her intend to go but never do; the location of Billie’s childhood and where her father lives; the place Billie considers returning to following the break-up of her relationship with Othello but never does. We have very little information about her childhood in Nova Scotia, apart from the fact that her father is “the drunk of Dartmouth,” as she calls him, and the fact that she eats “some Canadian delicacy,” as her sister-in-law, Amah, refers to the “sausages, mashed potatoes, and corn” that Billie eats with her niece, Jenny.26 Although Amah says at one point, “I love that Nova Scotia was a haven for slaves way before the underground railroad” (45), as Ric Knowles puts it, “if Canada is romanticized by some of the characters … it is no Harlem.”27 Indeed, Billie’s haven is Harlem, her apartment located at the corner of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X boulevards: “I love seeing all these brown faces” (57); “I love Black … Black is beautiful … So beautiful. This Harlem sanctuary …… here. This respite … Like an ocean in the middle of a desert” (103). Sears’s setting of her play in Harlem, and Billie’s passion for Harlem, raises issues of African-Canadian identity and identification that have been mapped out from diverging perspectives by George Elliott Clarke and Rinaldo Walcott. Billie privileges blackness as an identification over Canadianness. If the play’s setting south of the 49th parallel “empowers” Billie “to reclaim a space for blackness in

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the Canadian national imagination … by drawing on African American culture,” Clarke writes of Harlem Duet that “the question of black identity (or consciousness) vis-à-vis Canadian or American identity is never raised”; however, the play “might appear to confirm … worries about the suspected Americanization of African Canadians, a fear that participates in white English-Canadian nationalism.”28 Clarke’s own work focuses on questions of African Canadianness (or what he terms “African-Canadianité”): “Tussling with our own ‘double consciousness,’ African Canadians question whether the ‘Canadian’ half of the epithet ‘African-Canadian’ is merely a convenience referring to our geographic residency, or whether it hints at an identity. Is it possible to think of the hyphen as an ampersand, or is it really a double-edged minus sign?”29 With respect to African-Canadian identification with African-American culture, however, he writes that, “despite its indisputable beauty, Black America offers no easy refuge, for it addresses AfricanCanadian culture with attitudes of either hegemonic dismissal or peremptory annexation (practising the same vigorous chauvinism that mainstream America enacts toward Canada).”30 Conversely, Walcott situates black Canadianness in the context of diaspora rather than the context of the nation: “Black Canadian is a counternarrative or utterance that calls into question the very conditions of nation-bound identity at the same time as national discourses attempt to render blackness outside the nation”; for Walcott, diaspora, and diasporic identification, is crucial, and, indeed, transnational links can be traced through “how porous the Canada-United States border remains for diasporic blacks and what kinds of political identifications and relationships are possible.”31 In Harlem Duet, Billie chooses a cross-border diasporic affiliation over the nation, making her home in the “international city” of Harlem, “where the African diaspora gathers.”32 But the Canadian nation is not explicitly called into question in this play, partly because Canada figures as a potential haven for the characters rather than a realized one. As Her says: “I’m so tired of pleasing White folks. Up in Canada, we won’t have to please no White folks no how. I hear they got sailing ships leaving for Africa every day. Canada freedom come … O? Othello? Are you coming?” (62–3). Him and Her do not make it to Canada, and the audience may or may not recognize that the utopia offered up does not correspond to reality, that even if Him and Her did reach the Canadian border, they would not reach

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the Canada they have imagined for themselves. As Margaret Jane Kidnie argues, the play’s “presentation of Nova Scotia as a Black homeland is complicated … by the actual, and troubling, history of the African-Canadian experience over the past three centuries,” particularly the treatment of Black Loyalists who, expecting “they would be granted the rights of British subjects, … soon learned that their treatment in Canada would not be appreciably different from life in slavery.”33 But although Amah gestures to African-Canadian history prior to the Underground Railroad, the history Kidnie invokes is information that we have to bring to the text; it is not offered by the text itself. Rather, the play only tacitly undermines Canada’s role as haven through Billie’s implicit privileging of Harlem over Nova Scotia. In terms of Harlem Duet’s engagement with the nation, it is crucial to consider the fact that Billie’s father is named “Canada,” that he arrives on the scene at the end of Act 1, in the midst of Billie’s and Othello’s debates about black identity and community, as well as Othello’s assertion, “I am an American” (74), his privileging of nation over race. Kidnie reads Canada’s appearance as a suggestion that geography has become, to a certain extent, beside the point: “in the aftermath of centuries of personal disappointments and frustrated ambitions, African hopes of freedom from suffering are no longer pinned on a geographical, but on a spiritual, destination … Billie, tellingly, never does flee to Canada – Canada comes to her.”34 For his part, Peter Dickinson argues that “the symbolic significance of Canada’s name in Harlem Duet” and other references to country north of the 49th parallel “serv[e] to remind both his daughter and the New York audiences that were among the first to view early versions of the play that there are other historically entrenched – if geographically marginal – Black communities in North America besides Harlem.”35 In this interpretation, both the character of Canada and his family’s connections to Nova Scotia correspond to “did-you-know” rhetoric. According to Dickinson, “did you know” operates in relation to African-American audiences of Sears’s play as a contestation of the notion that “African-American blackness has been and is a model blackness.”36 Clarke argues that this model is not adequate to African-Canadian experience. As such, perhaps Harlem Duet’s (however brief) inclusion of Nova Scotia does not suggest an African-Americanization of African Canadians but, rather, punctures assumptions of any unproblematized equation

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between the two. However, although this play was workshopped in New York, it was officially premiered by Nightwood Theatre at the Tarragon Extra Space in Toronto. The play’s earliest audiences, then, were both American and Canadian, so it is imperative to acknowledge what this play might be saying about the nation not only to an American audience but also to a Canadian one. The naming of Billie’s father as “Canada” is a more radical act, or, rather, an act with more radical implications than those offered by other critics, if we consider Harlem Duet specifically as a rewriting of a Shakespeare play. As audiences of Harlem Duet at both New York’s Joseph Papp Public Theater, where the play was workshopped before its premiere, and at the Stratford Festival, where the play was remounted in 2006, would be aware, given these venues’ privileging of Shakespearean productions, in Shakespeare’s corpus, place names frequently double as character’s names, mimicking the attribution of  identity among nobility.37 For instance, King Lear’s dramatis personae include such characters as “Albany,” “Kent,” “Gloucester,” and “France.” Whereas Dickinson seeks to read the character of “Canada” symbolically, I want to read him, and his name, metonymically. Shakespeare’s characters of “Albany,” “Kent,” “Gloucester,” and so on, are thus named because they stand in for, represent, the spaces for which they are named; they become indivisible, in terms of association, from these geographical spaces. Sears’s character of “Canada,” then, is truly radical, not simply in that he reminds us that there is a country north of the 49th parallel where black people live, and have done so for centuries, but also because he is a black man who stands in for, represents, the country as a whole through his name. As Barbadian-Canadian novelist Austin Clarke asks: “Do I look more African than Canadian? If I permit this reasoning, then I am saying Canadians are white and Africans are black. And if one is black, one cannot have been born here, one cannot be Canadian.”38 Sears’s choice of the name “Canada” for Billie’s father suggests an attempt to undo the assumption that “black Canada is simultaneously invisible and visibly non-Canadian,”39 asserting, rather, that not only can a person be black and Canadian but also that the definition of Canada, as a nation, is bound up in blackness. As such, Harlem Duet enters into the project of developing what Walcott terms “a grammar for black [that] will cement blackness to the nation and reconfigure the nation for the better.”40 The fact that Billie’s father is named Canada also contradicts the idea that

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blackness in Canada is a phenomenon of recent immigration, for the play traces a longer black presence, one that constitutes Billie’s origins; Canada becomes a place where black people come from, a point that might serve to educate not only American audiences but also white Canadian audiences, redrawing the very borders of how we define the nation itself. In her subsequent play, The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God, Sears moves back across the border, exploring the response of an African-Canadian community in western Ontario to attempts by a municipal government to “white out” black history in the area. Based on a real incident, the play dramatizes the community’s resistance to Holland Township Council’s decision to change the name of Negro Creek Road to Moggie Road, after “some white settler who hadn’t lived in this community but a few years.”41 As Walcott notes, this decision constituted “yet another paragraph in the continuing story of the ways in which Canadian state institutions and official narratives attempt to render blackness outside of those same narratives.”42 Although the council argues that “the word ‘Negro’ [is] politically incorrect” (45), the renaming of the road after a white settler effaces the black community’s two hundred-year-old presence, dating from the characters’ “forebears [being] granted this land by Sir Peregrine Maitland, Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, after fighting with Canada against the Americans” (45) in the War of 1812. Like Harlem Duet, The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God positions Canada as a sanctuary for black North Americans. But in its setting north of the border, Adventures both insists upon a substantial black Canadian history and demonstrates the persistence of various manifestations of racism in the present. Just as references to African-Canadian history in Harlem Duet might be characterized as corresponding to “did-you-know” rhetoric, so Adventures performs an educative function for a Canadian audience unaware of its own nation’s history and its “policies of erasure and misrepresentation.”43 Equally, however, Adventures also focuses on implications for Canadian race relations in the present as the Negro Creek community stakes its claim to place and to the host position through its multiple forms of activism. That the land grant to the characters’ ancestors should have followed from their contribution to the War of 1812 not only underscores the length of African-Canadian history in the area – no doubt predating the arrivals of many white audience members’ families

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– but also writes African-Canadian history back into the history of the nation as a whole. As Walcott argues, in Canada, “The problem of thinking Blackness as recent means that long-standing Black communities across the nation continually have their presence absented in the founding narrative of the nation.”44 In foregrounding the War of 1812, the play embeds African-Canadian history in one of the nation’s founding narratives and, significantly, in the defence of the nation against the United States. Thus, Adventures emphasizes the national debt owed to the black soldiers and their descendants, a debt seemingly paid through the land grant but symbolically reneged on through the township council’s attempt to erase the traces of black history. Grappling with this incident in recent Canadian history, Adventures “situates blackness within the nation’s settler history,”45 troubling dominant historiography’s equation of settlement and whiteness. The legacy of the hospitality bestowed upon the black soldiers by Upper Canada’s lieutenant-governor threatens to become invisible with the change of Negro Creek Road’s name, which would rewrite the nation’s history of hospitality. This gesture of erasure both contradicts the Canadian nation’s preferred projection of itself as the Promised Land for African Americans escaping slavery and is consistent with the nation’s failure to acknowledge its own black history – in this case, actively suppressing that history by writing over it with a white settler’s name that has only a temporary connection to the land. In seeking to remove Negro Creek Road from the community’s cartography, the township council also denies the community its host status, attempting to bestow it – inaccurately at that – on a white man instead, and implying that the AfricanCanadian community is composed of perpetual guests. In Walcott’s terms, Adventures does not make the case for “requesting admission”46 but, rather, reminds white Canada that admission was granted long ago. While the township council may invoke political correctness as justification for its decision, the implications of “divest[ing] Blacks of their lineage” and removing the trace of black history from the area are undeniably racist.47 Other forms of racism surface throughout the play, supplementing the portrait of the Canadian nation that emerges in Harlem Duet through Amah’s reference to the country as a haven for black slaves. In Adventures, Abendigo protests that, if “Negro” is now politically incorrect, “in truth most white folks call this Nigger Creek” (45). White racism is at its most obvious in the

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defacing of the church: “They’ve scrawled ‘Nigger’ and ‘Niggers Go Home’ all over it, everywhere” (81–2). Not only does the racist graffiti testify to the persistence of white supremacist ideologies, but, given the play’s careful tracing of the black community’s history to the early nineteenth century, it is also clear that Negro Creek is the  black characters’ home – and has been for two centuries. In Adventures, the members of the black community resist various forms of racism. Most publicly, they march to protest the change of the name of Negro Creek Road and the racist vandalism. But the community also resists in more clandestine ways, undermining more “acceptable” (to white society) articulations of racism, such as the perpetuation of black stereotypes through “little Black garden gnomes; [sic] Aunt Jemimas, little Black Sambos, Black watermelon eaters and other such artifacts” (40). According to Abendigo and his friends, these objects are “enslaved” (41), and it is their responsibility, in their guise as the Lotsa Soap – “Liberation of Thoroughly Seditious Artifacts Symbolizing (the) Oppression (of) African People” (43) – Cleaning Company, to “liberate” them. They effect this liberation (“stealing,” according to Abendigo’s daughter, Rainey [42]) not only through the appropriation of the objects but also through transformation: relocated to Abendigo’s basement, the objects become truly liberated when the Lotsa Soap members paint over the facial expressions, “restor[ing] them to dignity by refashioning the buffoonish grins into real-life, human smiles.”48 The collection of objects, stumbled upon accidentally by Rainey, constitutes an uncanny assemblage: “They give off the eerie appearance of being living souls trapped in clay or wooden sarcophaguses” (40), and, despite their object status, they return the gaze, “star[ing]” (41) back at the characters onstage. Ultimately, Michael refers to the collection as “the mausoleum of Black lawn jockeys” (114), a counterpoint to the museum, where the Lotsa Soap crew effects other forms of liberation, under the guise of expropriations and appropriations. Like the plot involving the change in name of Negro Creek Road, the museum plot also has a basis in recent Canadian history, namely, the infamous Into the Heart of Africa exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum (ro m), 1989–90, in which, as Sears explains, the exhibit “interpreted the artifacts through the voices of white missionaries … It was meant to be post-modern with a heavy sense of the ironic. The irony was lost on many members of the black community in Toronto”; and, as Linda Hutcheon argues, “for many,

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irony was … simply an inappropriate strategy to use.”49 Although the museum targeted by the Lotsa Soap crew members is not the rom but, rather, their own local museum, they nevertheless engage with some of the implications of the ro m exhibit by contesting dominant white discourse and the politics of museumification where race is concerned. Whereas the intention of the ro m exhibit was to produce a “critical examination of the Canadian missionary and military experience in turn-of-the-century Africa” through (ultimately unsuccessful) self-reflexive and ironic representational strategies,50 the Lotsa Soap crew members make direct interventions in their local museum exhibits. If the township council has sought to write over black history with the change in name of Negro Creek Road, Girlene literally writes over white discourse in her supplementing the information included in the caption accompanying the portrait of John A. MacDonald’s wife: g ir len e (reading) Our first prime minister’s second wife Josephine … g i r l e n e revises the caption, adding the appropriate corrections. (writing) Born in Jamaica, comma. … (reading) [sic] Lived with the Prime Minister in their Kingston, Ontario home. … (writing) And is of both European and African descent. (99) In supplementing the information provided by the museum, Girlene recalibrates the “our” meant to interpellate the Canadian museum visitor, harnessing MacDonald’s wife’s racial identity as additional evidence of a lengthy black Canadian history, alongside that of the Negro Creek community. Girlene is described by fellow Lotsa Soap activist Darese as “dusting out Canadian history” (98) in the museum. The museum scene therefore not only gestures towards the ro m exhibit and the debates it engendered but also disrupts another foundational narrative for the Canadian nation and demonstrates the extent to which Canadian historiography itself has become dusty, static in its refusal to admit black presence at foundational instances in the formation of the nation. The “dusting out” of history mirrors the “cleaning” enacted by the Lotsa Soap crew of racist symbols in contemporary Canadian society by removing their stereotypical features.

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If the museum is intended to put Canadian history on display, the incomplete details of MacDonald’s second wife are not the only form of whitewashing, as the uniform jacket of Juma Moore, Rainey and Abendigo’s ancestor who fought in the Coloured Militia in the War of 1812, resides in the museum but is not available to the viewing public. As Abendigo argues, the jacket is “part of the foundation of this land. It should be displayed with pride, not hidden away in a museum storage trunk” (108). The Lotsa Soap crew liberates the jacket, bringing it back into the community to be displayed at the church, which sits on land that Moore himself donated. The methods deployed by the Lotsa Soap crew also unsettle both dominant Canadian historiography and the myth of the nation as a non-racist space. Bert insists that his code name for their current mission is “Olivier Le Jeune” after “the first known Black resident of Canada: 1628” (34). While this information imparted to the audience in this manner is consistent with “did-you-know” rhetoric, the implications of how the Lotsa Soap crew navigates through its missions of liberation indict the Canadian nation in more subtle ways. The activists manage to infiltrate locations such as the museum, the pancake company, and a golf and country club by posing as kitchen staff and cleaners. They become invisible to the whites whose institutions they seek to undermine by posing as menial workers, masking their individual identities with ease as white Canadians pay them no attention; indeed, Abendigo’s reference to “the Invisible Man” (15), as Caroline De Wagter argues, invokes “the social invisibility of Ralph Ellison’s Narrator in Invisible Man.”51 Abendigo even manages to escape notice at the museum when a guard thinks he recognizes him but cannot remember why, whereas Abendigo, a retired judge, reflects, “I think I may have put him in jail a couple of decades ago” (106). According to dominant white society’s expectations, black men are expected to be cleaners rather than judges. Abendigo’s professional history is foregrounded in an argument between him and his daughter, Rainey, when he reveals that a white friend of twenty years announced at Abendigo’s retirement that he is “not like other Blacks. You’re a very special Black … I realized that all of it was for nothing. I was an anomaly to him. A freak. A talking monkey” (45). Rainey initially resists, before unwittingly getting caught up in, her father’s activism. Where her father argues that “we’re tokens” (44), Rainey insists that his activism is unnecessary north of the 49th parallel. She attempts to undermine her father’s

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activism by mapping US civil rights and black activism onto Canadian space, trying to undercut her father by invoking what seems to be incongruity: “So you’re the Black Panthers of western Ontario now?” (43). Rainey and Abendigo’s argument dramatizes David Sealy’s analysis of how dominant white Canadian society views the politicization of black Canadians: “‘Truly Canadian’ Black Canadians see racial considerations in Canada as irrelevant, as there is little if any racism in Canada to protest. Black Canadians, unlike their Black American counterparts, have little to worry about, since Black people and white people live in harmony in Canada.”52 What Rainey perceives as a radical incongruity between US and Canadian race relations becomes explicit when she insists: “This is not Detroit” (43). However, Rainey oscillates between location and historical moment in her argument, as she continues: “We’re not in the sixties anymore. The struggle is over. What you fought for back then worked, I’m a doctor, was a doctor. I have choices. Things have changed. This is Canada. This is Canaan Land” (43–4). Whereas in Hill’s Any Known Blood, Langston III and IV appear to experience a more flexible, hospitable (and perhaps palatable?) racism in Canada, Abendigo reminds his daughter that “right there in Ontario, in Dresden, Black tourists making pilgrimages to Josiah Henson’s grave, you know Uncle Tom, Black tourists would not be served in the restaurants there” (44). Yet Rainey sees a historical progress in Canada whereby racism is continually dwindling in the nation, noting that, while some white patients did not want to be treated by her, “that’s changing too” (44). Abendigo insists that the much-touted virtue of “tolerance” in Canada is inadequate, shouting, “to to l e rat e an d to acce p t a r e two c omp l e t e ly d i f f e r e nt t h i n g s” (45). As Wendy Brown observes, “tolerance signifies the limits on what foreign, erroneous, objectionable or dangerous element can be allowed to cohabit with the host without destroying the host … The very invocation [of tolerance] indicates that something contaminating or dangerous is at hand, or something foreign is at issue, and the limits of tolerance are determined by how much of this toxicity can be accommodated without destroying the object, value, claim, or body.”53 As Abendigo observes, therefore, “tolerance” of racialized communities within Canada continues to identify those communities as foreign and / or dangerous to the (implicitly white) Canadian body politic. But when

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the church in Adventures is vandalized, it is clear that little tolerance is in evidence, and Michael’s address to his congregation explodes distinctions across the 49th parallel: “‘This kind of thing never happens here.’ That’s what they think. That’s what we think. ‘Everything is so fine in this country.’ We’ve grown so comfortable that we believe racism, no, white supremacy is a phenomenon that only happens south of the border. Well folks, we live in the south of the north” (82). Michael simultaneously addresses his black congregation and a white audience, all of whom, he insists, mistakenly believe that Canada is inherently a non-racist nation. Michael undoes his estranged wife’s opposition between Negro Creek and Detroit by creating a geographical palimpsest. “South” signifies both as directly below the border (as in Detroit) and as the deep south of the US, transplanted to Canada, in his assertion that their community lies “in the south of the north.” With this line, Sears refuses to allow Canada to displace accusations of racism across the border, resembling George Elliott Clarke’s strategy in Whylah Falls, in which he describes Nova Scotia as “a snowy, northern Mississippi, with blood spattered, not on magnolias, but on pines, lilacs, and wild roses.”54 Thus, Sears and Clarke similarly correct Malcolm X’s assertion, “As far as I am concerned, Mississippi is anywhere south of the Canadian border,”55 by demonstrating the ways in which the nation north of the border intersects with racist practices commonly associated with locations further south, deploying the metonymy that would equate “south” with white supremacy and remapping it onto the nationstate located above the 49th parallel. Unlike Billie in Harlem Duet, however, Adventures’ characters do not seek another place as their Promised Land but, rather, insist upon their roots in Negro Creek, staking their claims based on their lengthy community history and, in the case of Rainey, even consuming the soil, demonstrating the extent to which her “identity is enmeshed in Negro Creek.”56 What begins as a furtive, pathologized action as part of Rainey’s grief for her dead daughter becomes a mutual, recognized gesture at the play’s close when both she and Michael put earth into their mouths, a sign not only of their emerging reconciliation but also of their connection to this particular place they claim as home. Through this gesture, the couple synecdochally enacts the Negro Creek community’s assertion of its own host position in the south of the north.

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way d e c o m p to n ’ s s t r a i t r a zo r

As a black B C poet, Wayde Compton writes, as he says, “at the outer rim of black centres.”57 Much of his work explores the construction of mixed-race identity (or “Halfrican,”58 as he puts it) far away from the established and recognized centres of black culture in North America. Compton also concerns himself with his BC location and what it means to be a black British Columbian. He engages with black B C history, focusing in 49th Parallel Psalm (1999) on a free black San Francisco community that, in the midst of an increasingly hostile legal climate in California “culminating in the proposal of a bill that would ban outright any further immigration of blacks” to that state,59 accepted an invitation by Governor James Douglas to immigrate to British Columbia. Like Hill and Sears, Compton might be said to be working to “correct a lack of knowledge,”60 in his case particularly about black B C history. But Compton’s innovative poetics demands an active reading that subverts “did-you-know” rhetoric, requiring additional work from the reader beyond filling in the gaps of dominant historiography. 49th Parallel Psalm attests to both the gesture of hospitality extended towards the San Francisco pioneers and their inhospitable reception in Canada. Disavowed upon their arrival by the mixedrace James Douglas, who “[holds] the keys / like a lesser Legba – laughing, shuffling passports,” the unfulfilled promise of full citizenship for the pioneers constitutes a “counter / conspiracy / to make a black northwest be” (18). Like Girlene’s supplementing of the museum’s discourse in Sears’s The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God, alerting the audience to Canada’s first prime minister’s mixed-race wife, Compton foregrounds Douglas’s racialized identity and goes further by exploring its complex implications for the nation’s foundational narratives. As Compton notes elsewhere, Douglas’s passing as white, and the investments in reading his “raced body” differently depending on who is doing the reading, “shows us how both race and culture are unstable concepts subject to shifting social trends.”61 Yet Douglas, black British Columbia’s “own quadroon Moses” (18), did not allow the scope of his own navigation of racialized politics to extend to the San Francisco pioneers. Arguing that “if the majority of immigrants be American, there will always be a hankering in their minds after annexation to the United States” (42), Douglas undermines Canada’s hospitality at the threshold by

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insisting that the black immigrants would prefer the border did not exist (this despite the fact that the black pioneers “established the colony’s first militia, formed to counter the threat of American annexation”).62 As such, Canada, in 49th Parallel Psalm, becomes “Xanada,” an “elusive” (66) promise broken once the “strait razorous border” (105) has been crossed. The violent – even suicidal – implications of this description of the Canada-US border unwrites the dominant Canadian nationalist narrative of hospitality to black North Americans seeking refuge: … used to believe the air was sweeter on the Brit side of the border, freer as of 1833, 49th degree, norther, nearer to God and the top of the world. Lord been here seven years. left everything renounced America. what I got to show for it? handful of magic beens. (73) Compton’s invocation of sweeter air engages directly with the historical pioneers’ articulations of what they hoped to find north of the border. These lines echo those of Priscilla Stewart, member of the San Francisco pioneer community, who wrote a poem in San Francisco about their imminent departure (which, Compton states, “in topic and telos … should be considered the first black British Columbian poem”).63 Stewart writes: Far better breathe Canadian air, Where all are free and well, Than live in slavery’s atmosphere And wear the chains of hell.64 By using and subverting Stewart’s image of Canadian air, Compton demonstrates that Canada, despite the outlawing of slavery in the British Empire, reneges on its hospitality to the black pioneers. Using

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the phrase “magic beens,” Compton again characterizes Canada as unfulfilled promise – what might have been – and demonstrates that “renounc[ing] America” for Canada means remaining within a North America founded on white supremacy. 49th Parallel Psalm begins with a treatment of the black pioneers in the first three sections, entitled “Cast,” “Their,” and “Xanada,” and concludes with sections focused on the mid- and late twentieth century in “The Cover,” “Diamond,” and “Hear.” Between the nineteenth- and twentieth-century sections of the collection, Compton inserts a prose section entitled “The Blue Road: A Fairy Tale,” a border-crossing narrative that both deploys and subverts the fairy­ tale genre. “The Blue Road” tells the story of Lacuna, a man evicted from the Great Swamp of Ink by Polaris, a ball of light: “This is my home and no one else’s,” says Polaris. “Surely you can understand the sanctity of one’s home?” (81). Lacuna decides to head north, following Polaris’s suggestion that “they say there is a Blue Road that leads to the Northern Kingdom. There you will find others like yourself, and you will certainly live a better life than living in my swamp” (82). On his way out of the swamp, Lacuna encounters the Thicket of Tickets, “consist[ing] of coil upon coil of paper tickets, little squares of every colour, each with the words Admit One stamped on its surface in a stern black font” (82). Finding it impossible to traverse the Thicket of Tickets, Lacuna sets fire to it to clear the way. After walking for days, he encounters a Border Guard who informs him that, without a ticket (which Lacuna does not possess, having set fire to the thicket without realizing its significance), he must limbo under the border, demarcated by a “rainbow painted across the Blue Road” (86). Here, Compton demonstrates the arbitrariness of the border when Lacuna does not understand why he cannot simply cross and wonders whether “the Border Guard ha[s] any real authority over the Blue Road”; “There are rules involved,” the Border Guard says without explanation (87). That the border is painted onto the road underscores the artificiality of borders in general and, in particular, the artificiality of the straight line that is the 49th parallel. Not only is the border arbitrary and artificial but it is also a site of violent policing, even of the natural world: the Border Guard wields a crutch in the shape of a “huge skeleton key” (86) that “double[s] as an axe” (88), and when a bird attempts to fly over the border, “the Board Guard le[aps] from his … stool, hop[s] …

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towards the bird, and chop[s] the bird in half in mid-flight with the edge of his skeleton key crutch” (88). Made desperate by the fact that he “need[s] to go to the Northern Kingdom [because he has] nowhere else to go” (87), Lacuna concocts an ingenious plan in which he spills blue ink over the road to coincide with a rainbow in the sky and, thereby, manages to limbo under the border. Having made a bet with the Border Guard that he will do so successfully, the stakes for which are the skeleton key / axe, Lacuna proceeds to the Northern Kingdom – all the while knowing that “kingdoms [are] not always good” (85). He discovers upon arrival that, without correct citizenship papers, he is condemned to be marked as different: despite the fact that the Northern Kingdom “welcome[s] new subjects” (92), as he is informed by a Gate Keeper, Lacuna, like other “citizens like yourself” (93), must “take possession of a special mirror, which [he is] to carry … at all times” (93). To fail to be looking at all times at a mirror causes excruciating pain, and ultimately death; Lacuna is told that, if he cannot adjust, he “can always go back where [he] came from” (93). Thus, the Northern Kingdom distinguishes between its citizens, and the difference is always marked; to unmark that difference is to be fatally punished. Even when Lacuna, with the aid of the sharp skeleton key / axe, fashions glasses that replace one lens with a small mirror, allowing “citizens like himself” to “see the world directly with at least one eye” (99), they are still mirror people; and, indeed, although Lacuna becomes rich from making glasses for the mirror people community, many cannot afford the cost of the mirror glasses. Lacuna’s working around the mirror law does not alter the law itself; and the state’s policing remains intact. “The Blue Road” functions as a key text within 49th Parallel Psalm in a number of ways. Compton’s appropriation of the fairy tale here clearly operates as an allegory of the Canada-US border, invoking yet rewriting dominant nationalist narratives about sanctuary offered to escaped slaves in particular and immigrants in general (as suggested by Polaris’s insistence to Lacuna that he “will certainly live a better life” in the Northern Kingdom). Substituting the Northern Kingdom for Canada not only provides a link to the fairy-tale genre, of course, but it also invokes the earlier reference to Canada as “Xanadu” (“Xanada,” in this instance); further, “kingdom” suggests Canada’s relationship to Britain, significant given

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that the British Empire outlawed slavery earlier than did the United States (although Upper Canada introduced the Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, 1793, decades before the empire-wide ban). Lacuna’s experience of being one of the mirror people exposes the  hypocrisy of second-class citizenship, precisely what the San Francisco pioneers encountered. The Northern Kingdom has “citizens” and “citizens like yourself” (as Lacuna is addressed) and, thus, not really citizens, for their rights are not equivalent. If the Northern Kingdom “welcome[s] new subjects” (92), clearly some citizens are more subject than others. That Compton concludes his fairy tale with an ambivalent ending is significant: economics, he insists, circumscribes the degree to which mirror people are subject. Although there remain “Mirror People who still h[o]ld the old, large mirrors – those who couldn’t afford to buy his new innovation,” Lacuna “generally avoid[s] looking at them” (99), the prosperity afforded by his new glasses becoming an obstacle to his vision, his capacity to witness injustice. And, of course, even with the glasses, Lacuna is subject to policing as a Mirror Person, despite the fact that his position is more comfortable than most. In this way, Compton underscores the extent to which immigrant contribution to the nation-state’s economy may be valued, and even rewarded, but this prosperity (for  the immigrant, for the nation) does not ultimately trump racialization. Thus, Compton denies the reader a fairy-tale ending for this fairy tale, just as the San Francisco pioneers discovered upon arrival in British Columbia that “counter to Douglas’s fairy stories, franchise in the colony was exclusive to British subjects, and only those with property. naturalized subjects faced a court of revision. eighteen blacks who voted in 1860 had their votes discounted, the only voters whose X’s were X’ed out” (62). These lines, from the poem “Numbers: Romans,” which precedes “The Blue Road” within the volume 49th Parallel Psalm, offer one example of how “The Blue Road” operates, half-way through the text, as a kind of mapping for the text as a whole: Douglas tells “fairy stories,” after all. Further connections within the book include references to The Mirror of the Times (34), the only black newspaper in San Francisco in the midnineteenth century, co-founded by Mifflin Gibbs, one of the black pioneers who immigrated to British Columbia, emphasizing the racialization of the “Mirror People” in “The Blue Road.” The poem “Legba, Landed,” positioned after “The Blue Road,” describes

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one Negro, liminal. limped a cross clutching a crutch … he reached for a me to be real … enough to re treat into a tree for the forests he could see he sought as he believed himself into the mirrorous glass a cross the border. (105–6) The “Mirror People” are further invoked later in the text with the short poem “The Unbroken Yellow,” printed backwards on the page (and therefore read most effectively through the use of a mirror, a rare moment of advantage for the Northern Kingdom’s second-class citizens). The subjection of the Mirror People (the Northern Kingdom’s “new subjects”) has already been prepared for in the earlier poem “Douglas’s Covenant,” which details seven regulations for property acquisition on the way to citizenship, concluding with VI holding land for IX months earns one the right to vote and sit on juries. VII after residing in the colony for VII years, one may take an oath to the Crown and become subject. (44) The play on “subject” “ambiguously marks the terms of citizenship” in British Columbia.65 Crucially, given the final line’s appearance on its own following a stanza break, the grammar requires us to read it as “subject,” without the indefinite article “a,” which might encourage us to think of subjecthood, a kind of citizenship in relation to the

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Crown, as opposed to subjection and disempowerment associated with second-class citizenship. The significance of “The Blue Road’s” Thicket of Tickets, with its endless coils of paper stamped with Admit One, resonates throughout 49th Parallel Psalm, with implications for the historical narratives presented as well as for the present-day policing of racialized bodies portrayed in the later sections of the collection. The thicket gestures both backward to one of two poems entitled “Evening at the Colonial” (this one appearing before “The Blue Road”) and forward to “The Book,” “Band,” and “Diamond,” all positioned after. “Evening at the Colonial,” set in Victoria, BC, in 1860, consists largely of dialogue in which a black man attempts to buy a ticket for the parquette at a segregated playhouse but is told he will have to settle for “coloured seating” (65); he will not be admitted unless he consents to “buy a ticket for the balcony” (66) rather than the parquette. We are told that “he was talking to Fortune when she came out of the thicket” (66). Throughout 49th Parallel Psalm, admission continues to signify as a border crossing, nation-state borders and music venues policing racialized bodies in analogous ways. In “The Book,” the speaker, who, elsewhere, Compton acknowledges is based on his father’s experiences in the 1950s,66 “think[s] it’s time / to turn this silver in my pocket in / to a ticket” (108), but is refused admission by a border guard named “Peter O’Something” (109), who dislikes the speaker’s manner of expression and insists, “You won’t be coming into my country today” (110). The speaker’s attempt at border crossing consists of “getting eyed. ID’ed. getting ?’ed. / getting searched” (109). The notion of passport control as “getting I D’d” links this poem to other texts focused on getting into clubs. The poem “Band” insists that you can get into any nightclub in Vancouver just by being black and at the back door claiming, I’m with the band. (119)

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Although this assertion describes a free passage, a smooth border crossing, the fact that this crossing occurs through the back door suggests a clandestine crossing as well as a subservient one; and, crucially, it depends upon a racist essentialism that equates black people with performance. In “Diamond,” a prose text in which the late-twentieth-century narrator has forgotten his I D, his friend D J Osiris facilitates his entry: “To the doorman, a simple ‘He’s with me’ even absolve[s] me of the cover” (139), the doorman here a border guard, a gate-keeper. Without D J Osiris, the narrator would presumably have failed to enter through the front door. Hospitality proves to be deeply compromised – not just in the past, for the San Francisco pioneers, but also in the mid-twentieth century and the present, for black British Columbians living in Vancouver. The title poem, “49th Parallel Psalm,” gestures towards the Lower Mainland’s population at the time of the collection’s publication – and the fabled thicket of tickets – in the lines “admit one point seven / million / boxed by these mountains” (169), the vast majority of these people immigrants or descended from immigrants, but “snow white screams of / back where you came from” (170) persist. Through the mechanism of the ambivalent fairy tale, Compton encourages an active reading that allows us to connect past injustices to black North American border crossers to the ways in which racialized bodies are policed, in the present, at thresholds presided over by dominant Canadian culture. Throughout his work, Compton’s border is suspect, the relationship between Canada and the United States much less clear than the dominant Canadian nationalist position allows. In “Declaration of the Halfrican Nation,” the opening poem in Performance Bond (2004), Compton writes: we number a dozen percent, in fact, south of the border; in Canada, I really couldn’t begin to guess our numbers crunching through the snow on shoes of woven koya.67 Thus, “we” constitutes a transnational, cross-border collective of black North Americans. “Is the mention / of bullets too american?” (16), Compton asks later in the poem, implying his own writing is

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subject to policing by those seeking to scrutinize his national identity. The violence of the “strait razorous border” in 49th Parallel Psalm finds a counterpart in Performance Bond’s “01001001” depiction of the border’s role in the repressive state apparatus: “The border and the cell … / mak[e] people bodies” (50); thus, the border does not appear as productive, protective, or conducive to identity construction in any positive way. In “The Reinventing Wheel,” Compton includes a section that explores what he elsewhere describes as “a list of false binaries that defy hard separation”:68 Lyrial / prosaic settler / native, American / North American, … ocean / border (105) Following the list of binary oppositions, this section of the poem continues with, as Compton himself describes, “a list of terms for mixed-race people,”69 each term taking up a line of its own: mulatto, mestizo, métis, cabra, Eurasian, creole, coloured, colored, split. (105) Accompanying the Performance Bond collection is a CD recording of “The Reinventing Wheel.” To read the poem is altogether a different experience from listening to Compton perform it: what sounds like the repetition of the line “coloured” is, on the page, two spellings of the same word and, crucially, spellings that signal two different national positionings across the 49th parallel: “coloured,” with a “u,” in accordance with Canadian spelling, followed by “colored,” without a “u,” in accordance with its spelling in the United States. Cross-border difference is marked here by the presence or absence of a vowel that cannot be heard, yet it is the same word. This repetition with a difference of “coloured” echoes the earlier binary in the poem

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“American / North American” in its nudging of the reader (and / or listener) to consider the relationship between Canada and the United States, particularly where matters of racialization are concerned, and to distrust the dominant nationalist narrative. Following “The Reinventing Wheel’s” list of terms for mixed-race people, Compton writes, “Those who have no history are doomed” (105). Many British Columbians mistakenly assume, as Compton writes in the title poem of his collection 49th Parallel Psalm (1999), that there “ain’t but ten black people in all of be see” (171). Compton knows better, however: a founding member of the Hogan’s Alley Memorial Project, which is dedicated to “memorializing Vancouver’s historic black neighbourhood and the wider Vancouver black experience,”70 Compton writes the black neighbourhood, demolished in 1970 to make way for a viaduct to connect to a freeway that was never built, back into British Columbian and particularly Vancouver history. His texts Performance Bond, Bluesprint, and After Canaan each feature the location of Hogan’s Alley and the implications of recovering its lost history for the black community in the present. As Compton explains in After Canaan, official histories of the city have tended to write out “Vancouver’s black community, many members of which, during the mid-twentieth century, lived in and around Hogan’s Alley, a sub-neighbourhood in the East End / Strathcona area that was destroyed.”71 Contradicting Canada’s self-projection as a champion of racial justice as compared to its neighbour south of the border, the fate of Hogan’s Alley demonstrates an intersection of Canadian and American civic policy insofar as “Vancouver’s black community suffered what their American cousins, punning on the term ‘urban renewal,’ called ‘Negro removal’ – the destruction of the politically weakest community of a city for large modernist planning schemes.”72 In this sense, Hogan’s Alley’s demolition forms an example of “the quasi-mirrorlike experiences of Blacks … on the Canadian side of the longest (formerly) unguarded border in the world.”73 Yet Hogan’s Alley is indeed quasi-mirrorlike in relation to the US, for following the destruction of Hogan’s Alley, Vancouver’s black community became more dispersed, diverging from many urban black Americans’ experiences by eschewing the nearby housing projects that had been built for them, and “[leaving] Strathcona altogether, integrating and ending their condition of pseudo-­ segregation for good.”74 As a result, “Vancouver has never had another centralized black community – a wholly unusual

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thing for a North American city of its size.”75 Although Compton acknowledges that members of the dispersed Hogan’s Alley community whom he has interviewed “sometimes remember [it] as a place they escaped from – a slum or, more gently, the humble origin out of which they happily ascended,” it is also important to acknowledge the systemic racism of the neighbourhood’s destruction, echoing as it does “the US urban renewal strategies that were executed throughout the 1950s: a black community was marked for clearance.”76 Further, in the absence of a recognized black neighbourhood in the city, blackness appears to have become invisible to most Vancouverites, and the city’s host position would appear to exclude black citizens. Compton’s work does not simply seek to inform the reader of Hogan’s Alley historical presence; rather, it self-reflexively engages with the impetus behind the desire to remember and memorialize the neighbourhood. Compton makes it clear that Hogan’s Alley needs to be re-membered in order to provide “a foundational narrative of presence” for black British Columbians, and black Vancouverites, in particular.77 Cross-border distinctions, particularly where socio-­ spatial and economic conditions are concerned, become crucial to the significance attributed to Hogan’s Alley: “Even if they were born in Canada, the elders of Hogan’s Alley and that generation often look to America, where most of their families were from, to its forms, to its music and heroes, maybe because they were from a time closer to the initial northward migrations; we, the younger ones, feel less American, and look to them and their little community in the East End / Strathcona as something that grounds us in Canada. We need Hogan’s Alley because Motown songs and Martin Luther King are  from another, different place.”78 In contrast, Hogan’s Alley “ran  between this and that side of right here,”79 securing black Vancouverites’ claim to the city, the province, and the nation, as home. Although Peter James Hudson contends that Hogan’s Alley “has become poetic and historical fodder for Compton and others whose attempts to recover the neighbourhood’s lost black history precariously skirt the line between critical memory and multicultural nostalgia,”80 Compton’s self-reflexive engagement with Hogan’s Alley militates against any uncritical nostalgia, as is clear in both his essays and his more overtly aesthetic engagements with the neighbourhood. His claim “to approach the problem of remembering Hogan’s

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Alley not through realistic representation but through more elliptical means” and through “the desire to remember”81 is borne out in the strategies he deploys in Performance Bond’s “Rune” section, which includes several “semi-hoaxes”82 in the form of fictionalized interviews, a newspaper article, and a staged “photo essay.”83 Although these “elements of the history that never were” are “based on an actual corollary,”84 the fictionalized aspects allow Compton to  acknowledge his investment in piecing the community together while underscoring the dramatic erasure of the neighbourhood that has left so little trace. The photographs that comprise the “LostFound Landmarks of Black Vancouver” section of Performance Bond all feature signs for local black institutions above or beside doorways: Strathcona Coloured People’s Benevolent Society of Vancouver, False Creek Moslem Temple, The Far Cry Weekly: Voice of the Negro Northwest since 1957, and Pacific Negro Working Men’s Association appear in documentary-like, black-and-white photographs, with addresses given on the facing page. These institutions constitute “lost-found” landmarks insofar as they appear to fill in the blanks that the demolition of Hogan’s Alley left behind; yet they cannot function as “found” landmarks because they do not actually exist (and did not exist in these particular forms, despite their basis on or analogies to historical premises).85 The fact that all the doors are closed further emphasizes the limits of the landmarks’ status as truly “found” insofar as the institutions appear somewhat inaccessible, both physically and figuratively, in terms of  cultural memory. Compton describes affixing the signs with “­industrial-strength double-sided tape,”86 attesting to the temporary, fleeting nature of the tribute they are capable of paying to the neighbourhood. As Compton explains, however, “temporary sites of memorialization” have come to seem most appropriate for Hogan’s Alley.87 He recounts the initial desire, in the early stages of the Hogan’s Alley Memorial Project (h a mp ), to display “at least … a plaque somewhere down there.”88 ha mp ultimately succeeded in this goal, in February 2013, but Compton’s account of this development makes it clear that the plaque was not the sole objective; rather, it operated alongside h a mp’s desire to “educate ourselves and others about the history.”89 As is clear from After Canaan, other forms of memorializing, more temporally located and performative, have been effectively interactive, through h a mp’s “path of information-gathering,

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exhibitions, informal archiving, interviewing, blogging, and consciousness-raising about the history.”90 This memorialization takes multiple forms, moving beyond the static nature of the plaque: “Speaking face-to-face with people, meeting folks and explaining to them that there was a history, and having them see the way we are drawn to the memory and turn it over and over in our mouths, speaking it alive again in these settings – all this is the ritual of memory.”91 Thus, although with the introduction of the plaque, “we leave behind a certain kind of civic silence about this city’s black community,”92 the history of the neighbourhood has not simply been left to be contained within a plaque that might be affixed, and then left to educate passers-by in a passive manner; rather, it is made active and interactive through these encounters. Compton’s description of h a mp’s activities forms part of his essay “Seven Routes to Hogan’s Alley” in After Canaan, an essay that itself takes on numerous forms as it describes the multiplicities of ha mp’s strategies. What we might initially approach as a formal essay based on an academic model quickly transforms into a variety of formal routes into the neighbourhood’s history and the possibilities of telling its story. Compton writes the seven sections with different emphases on demographic history, personal and family history, reflections on Compton’s own poetic engagement with Hogan’s Alley, forms of collective memory of the neighbourhood, a meditation on how the neighbourhood’s history might have been different with a more actively just agenda, a discussion of the legacies of city planning, and, in “A Coda,” a list of headlines from the Province and Vancouver Sun newspapers on the subject of black residents and Hogan’s Alley from 1900 to 2003. As the title of the essay indicates, these seven sections all offer different “routes” into the neighbourhood’s history. The word “route” in itself returns us to the justification behind the neighbourhood’s destruction, to make way for a viaduct for a never-built freeway. Compton’s essay includes a section dedicated to an installation below the Georgia Viaduct, where a floral text spelling “h o g a n ’ s a l l e y w e l c o m e s yo u ” was planted in July 2007 in order to memorialize, at its exact location, the neighbourhood that “now exists only on the periphery of public memory.”93 Planted by artist Lauren Marsden alongside members of h a mp, “ hoga n’s a l l ey w e l co m e s yo u” reinscribed the neighbourhood onto the site by mimicking the floral script of “the civic powers,”94 and yet in doing so drew attention to

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the neighbourhood’s absence. It also makes a claim for the neighbourhood’s power as host, with the authority to welcome passersby, undoing the erasure of the black community’s home in downtown Vancouver at the same time as the city’s hostility is clearly in evidence, for the flowers are planted in an expanse of grass where the alley used to be. Compton’s engagement with Hogan’s Alley and his multiple methods of presenting the neighbourhood in his texts serve “to illustrate how the black experience in B C can feel absurd, a place where the founding governor was one-quarter black, and yet few people know it.”95 Tellingly, the myth of black absence in British Columbia persists despite the fact that “there are more blacks in BC than in Nova Scotia, a place where Canada rightly perceives, to some degree, the contributions and presence of blacks.”96 The narrative of black history on Canada’s East Coast, invoked in both Hill’s The Book of Negroes and Sears’s Harlem Duet, finds its counterpart in Compton’s efforts to write black British Columbia back into visibility, in contrast to the wider recognition of Nova Scotia as historic “hub of Canada’s black citizenry.”97 If the razing of Africville in Halifax in the 1960s “is a well-known story – at least in eastern Canada,” the “landscaping [of] blackness out of the nation” that occurred with the destruction of Hogan’s Alley has not met with widespread public recognition, neither on the West Coast nor beyond.98 Yet Compton does not confine his project to promoting recognition of British Columbia’s black history. In “Seven Routes to Hogan’s Alley,” Compton includes four photos of the planting of “h o g a n ’ s a lley we l c o me s you,” including one of himself planting the letter “E.” Compton self-reflexively foregrounds his own participation in the production of memorialization, which, in this form, through the planted flowers, is as temporary as are the other strategies that ha mp deploys. In his own particular work, gesturing towards a location that no longer exists as an original founding ­narrative, and owning up to the desires invested in that narrative, Compton hopes, as he writes of the fictionalized texts in “Rune,” that “readers will experience the sensation of acquiring the knowledge of a particular history and then … subsequently feel[ing] that history disappear from them … – a process of reading that imitates the conditions of history itself, the sense of incredulity that our city seems to associate with its improbable black populace.”99 According to Compton’s poetics and activism, Hogan’s Alley’s history cannot

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simply be captured through a plaque but, rather, is better performed and enacted through multiple methods that resist fixity and reflect the experiences of black Vancouverites. If black British Columbia began with the border crossings of Sir James Douglas and the San Francisco pioneers, it continues today, with h am p consistently agitating for its visibility, its claim to home, in not just informative but also innovative ways that demonstrate engagement with the pragmatics, the politics, and the ethics of representing history. r o u t e s ac r o s s t h e b o r d e r

As acknowledged in Compton’s grappling with his own generation’s need for Hogan’s Alley to provide a foundational narrative, most of  the neighbourhood’s residents turned to the United States and African-American culture as points of reference for their own cultural origins. Elsewhere, Compton notes that, currently, the black population in British Columbia demonstrates “relatively even numerical balances of blacks from Canada, the US, the Caribbean, and Africa.”100 Throughout his poetic work, Compton consistently positions black Canadian experience within the context of a larger African diaspora, which Hill and Sears both do as well. Although Hill’s The Book of Negroes is most clearly located within the Black Atlantic in its narrative, following the border crossings of Aminata from West Africa to the southern United States, to Nova Scotia, back to Africa, and then to London, his earliest novel, Some Great Thing, implicitly engages with diaspora through the relationship between the novel’s protagonist, the African-Canadian Mahatma Grafton, and Yoyo, the visiting journalist from Cameroon, where Grafton later travels with Winnipeg’s mayor. Yoyo resurfaces in Any Known Blood in the midst of Langston Cane V’s endeavours to trace his family’s cross-border history, further underscoring the connections between black North America and Africa. Sears’s work focuses most closely on diaspora in her first play, Afrika Solo, which represents the character “Djanet,” a child of the diaspora, and her travels to  Africa.101 However, diasporic affiliation also proves significant in  Harlem Duet, with Billie’s “herbal medicines and Caribbean potions,” the play’s Shakespearean intertext, and the invocation in Him and Her’s story of “atrocities foisted upon blacks in the African diaspora,”102 including the display of Saartjie Baartman as the “Hottentot Venus” (34). The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of

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God particularly engages with diaspora through its staging as Sears explains that she was inspired after a visit to Benin to create “a living set” (iv) modelled on the African theatrical practices she witnessed. Thus, the rootedness of the Negro Creek community to that particular place and its soil is rendered dramatically via African dramatic convention. In his poem “Bluer Blues,” published in 49th Parallel Psalm, Compton writes: … I’m still ambiv alently coloured and liv ing in Xanada, trying to spell and accent Santeria and Aime Cesaire, [sic] trying to prounounce [sic] houngan (165–6) Compton’s work is replete with “transatlantic transubstantiation[s]” (Performance 61) that invoke and appropriate voodoo, hip hop, African-American and Caribbean literature and criticism, particularly the work of Kamau Brathwaite, and other elements of AfricanAmerican culture. In Odysseys Home, George Elliott Clarke invokes the notion of “transubstantiation” to explore how African Canadians appropriate African-American culture,103 indicating that AfricanAmerican culture is not consumed without alteration by African Canadians, whose locations and reading positions effect necessary changes to the cultural forms with which they come into contact. Similarly, Compton’s borrowings from the “diasporic archives and displacements” are recontextualized in the British Columbian space that forms his own point of reference:104 as he writes in “The Reinventing Wheel,” “James Brown never said, “Say it loud, / I’m mixed-race in a satellite of the US and proud” (106). All three writers engage not simply with the Canada-US border, then, but also with the multiple borders traversed by the diaspora. Through these diasporic engagements, “nation-borders are called into question, because they do not sufficiently speak to the ways in which black geographies in Canada are made and upheld.”105 These multiple crossings and cultural linkages both demonstrate a “diasporic connectedness” that incorporates but is not limited to African-American culture and testify to the multiplicities of black Canadian experiences and stories,106 the routes they have taken to arrive at the border. Taken together, these three writers, working in considerably different forms, demonstrate an enormous range of border crossings,

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far exceeding the “Heritage Minute” Underground Railroad narrative recruited by the nation-state to testify to its own hospitality by offering stories of failed border crossings, of cross-border migrations in the other direction, of ruptured hospitality north of the 49th parallel, of desires for home that Canada can never fulfill, and desires for home that Canada might spatially accommodate without honouring the cultural claim that accompanies that accommodation. The border, these writers demonstrate, is not simply “a reified demarcation between slavery and freedom” in North American history but,107 rather, a more complicated site where Canada’s claims to hospitality have been tested and contested, in the past and the present. Focusing on a range of different Canadian geographies, Hill, Sears, and Compton explore how African Canadians have lengthy histories in and claims to the spaces of Nova Scotia, Oakville, Negro Creek, and Vancouver, where black communities’ host status is both demonstrated in these texts and contested by a white society that persists in assigning African Canadians the “precarious status of guest” in Canada, regardless of how far into history their border crossings might have been, in “a perverse inheritance passed on through the generations.”108 In presenting African-Canadian histories and border crossings, Hill, Sears, and Compton each make different demands of their audiences, with Compton, in particular, moving beyond the corrective “did-you-know” impulse in a way that requires his readers to work actively to undo their own ignorance and participation (however unwitting) in the erasure of a “black northwest.” Ultimately, however, all three authors rewrite the nation’s narrative of hospitality and recode the border’s significance, unsettling to varying degrees the 49th parallel’s simplistic associations with a protective safeguard within Canadian nationalist culture and reminding us of the violent work the nation-state is capable of carrying out both at its threshold and within.

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5 “Somos Todos Americanos”: Hemispheric Canada

If the 49th parallel has been infused with symbolic meaning by and for Canadian nationalists as reified evidence of our distinction from Americans, reframing the Canada-US border in a continental context underscores the significance of other borders and, indeed, other Americas. As crucial as the Canada-US border may be to Canada’s (fragile) sense of its political, economic, and cultural sovereignty, it is the southern border within North America, the Mexico-US border, that has been accorded the status of the “birthplace” of border studies.1 The emergence of border theory out of the Mexico-US border, the “open wound” that divides poverty from wealth,2 disempowerment from power along nation-state lines, presents challenges as to how far the insights of this site-specific border studies can travel, even within the same continent. It also serves as a reminder that the imbalance of power many Canadians feel very keenly in relation to their southern neighbour is far greater between the United States and its southern neighbour. As the dominant Canadian nationalist position battles against perceived likenesses between Canada and the United States, such likenesses, when viewed through a continental lens, begin to resemble privileges not afforded by citizens of nation-states more routinely subject to cross-border policing. Although Bryce Traister rightly points out that the Mexico-US and Canada-US borders “presen[t] a different set of problems to be negotiated and articulated as a critical borderlands practice,”3 I suggest that examining the Canada-US border in relation to continental borders allows us to engage more comprehensively with a critical borderlands practice. A comparison of border sites within the Americas, particularly the Canada-US border and the Mexico-US border, offers

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an especially fruitful approach with which to contextualize Canadian privilege in relation to the Americas as a whole while maintaining the scrutiny of Canada-US power imbalances as well as the discrepancies in how different cultural constituencies north of the 49th parallel are welcomed at the border. In the 1960s and 1970s, Mexico-US border studies, concerned with the site of the border and the phenomenon of border crossing, initially focused on the legacy of the US invasion of Mexico and the experiences of Chicanos – “Mexicans remaining within the boundaries of the new United States territories” as “a conquered people” – and on “the experience of undocumented workers from Mexico crossing to the United States,”4 a world away from the impression of the lack of defence at the Canada-US border. Where Claire F. Fox examines the twin images of the fence and the river in relation to the Mexico-US border’s cultural representation, Peter Andreas notes that “the US-Canada border commonly has been described as a border with many gates and no fences.”5 Mexico-US border studies has evolved from its earlier focus to developing larger theoretical conceptualizations of the borderlands. In her landmark Borderlands / La Frontera, “something of an ur text in border studies,” Gloria Anzaldúa outlines a “new mestiza consciousness” emerging from the borderlands, one that “celebrates the potential of borders in opening new forms of understanding” by “constantly … shift[ing] out of habitual formations; from convergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality to move toward a single goal (a Western mode), to divergent thinking, characterized by movement away from set patterns and goals and toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes.”6 In much of Mexico-US border studies discourse, the in-between position of Chicano / a culture offers a “politically exciting hybridity, intellectual creativity, and moral possibility.”7 For José David Saldívar, the legacy of conquest in the borderlands produces cultural possibility for, in what he terms the transfrontera contact zone, “the Janus-faced border line in which peoples geopolitically forced to separate themselves now negotiate with one another and manufacture new relations, hybrid cultures, and multiple voiced aesthetics.”8 These possibilities of the Mexico-US border site have been shared by border studies theorists and artists, particularly those affiliated with the Border Arts Workshop, of whom Guillermo Gómez-Peña is perhaps the best known.9

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On the one hand, the Mexico-US border constitutes a site “where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds,” but, on the other hand, border theory has envisioned the Mexico-US borderlands as “the privileged locus of hope for a better world.”10 As Fox explains, through Mexico-US border studies’ construction of the borderlands as a Chicano / a homeland, “Chicano / a scholars and activists have, in distinct historical periods, imagined communities … which erased the border in the first instance, and valorized it as a liminal zone in the second.”11 As critics have noted, however, Mexico-US border studies’ emphasis on the possibilities of a hybrid identity can minimize the materiality of the border and attempts to cross it, particularly from the southern side: “it is not in fact clear that a hybrid identity or subjectivity is the happy result of meetings at the border … Many Mexican migrants, for example, are caught in a world where cultural play is the least of their worries and where their subjectivity remains strongly Mexican.”12 Further, as Pablo Vila notes, “fragmentation of experience can lead to reinforcement of borders instead of to an invitation to cross them,” and material realities diverge from the “utopia” of Anzaldúa’s conception of the border and advocacy of a new mestiza consciousness.13 Ethnographic work carried out in the borderlands and within border-crossing constituencies frequently demonstrates the gap between literal and metaphorical border crossing. In their study of Latina transnational motherhood, for instance, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Ernestine Avila note that, “just at the moment when free trade proponents and pundits celebrate globalization and transnationalism, and when ‘borderlands’ and ‘border crossings’ have become the metaphors of preference for describing a mind-boggling range of conditions, nation-state borders prove to be very real obstacles for many Mexican and Central American women who work in the United States and who, given the appropriate circumstances, wish to be with their children.”14 If Mexico-US border theory has contested the limitations of US nationalism by resignifying the borders of the nation-state, it increasingly does so in a manner that “is rarely site-specific.”15 It is difficult, however, to ignore the metaphorical dimensions of nation-state borders, given that “borders are always metaphors, since they are arbitrary constructions based on cultural convention.”16 Contrasts between the Canada-US and Mexico-US borders

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are evident not only in the material boundaries themselves and their differing degrees of “defence” – the gap between, for instance, “the giant ivory peace arch [sic] [standing] in the middle of the parkway” at a high-profile British Columbia-Washington State crossing and “the militarized bleakness of the San Ysidro / Tijuana border”17 – but also in the diverging metaphors that attach to these sites. Dominant conceptions of the Canada-US border do not encompass “the celebratory potential of the contact zone” because it is far less clear,18 in the dominant national imaginary, what differences come into contact at the 49th parallel. If, as Fox notes, part of the Mexico-US border studies project has had to do with conceptually erasing the boundary separating the two countries, a similar erasure would not have the same oppositional thrust in Canada in relation to the 49th parallel, at least not for the ethnic-majority population. This chapter seeks both to interrogate the representation of the Canada-US border site in the texts under examination and to engage with the theoretical implications of these representations, particularly as they relate to a hemispheric positioning of Canada and an attendant awareness of continental borders. Each of the texts on which this chapter focuses grapples with the workings of both the Canada-US border and the Americas as a whole in ways that do not minimize the cultural significance of the 49th parallel but, rather, place that significance in the context of a range of continental migrations, encompassing border crossings out of, and in some cases into, Central American, South American, and North American locations. Although Albert Braz posits that Canada’s invisibility in hemispheric American studies is due not only to “hemispheric studies hav[ing] become increasingly oriented along a US / Hispanic axis” but also to “Canada’s non-involvement in continental affairs, a disengagement likely caused by the country’s ambiguity about its spatial location,”19 these texts reveal Canada to be neither uninvolved nor ambiguously located in the Americas. Janette Turner Hospital’s novel Borderline (1985), Joan MacLeod’s play Amigo’s Blue Guitar (1990), Guillermo Verdecchia’s play Fronteras Americanas / American Borders (1993), and Jane Urquhart’s novel Sanctuary Line (2010) all confront Canada’s sense of itself as the Americas’ hospitable sanctuary in relation to Latin American migrants arriving as either refugees, immigrants, or seasonal labourers. These texts examine claims to hospitality at both national and domestic levels, in figurative as well as literal houses. Although the

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ratification of n a f ta has enhanced Canada’s economic connection to Latin America through Mexico, Canada’s engagement with the continent hardly begins in 1994. As a destination for refugees in the 1970s and 1980s, and the recipient of cheap, temporary agricultural labour from Mexico since 1974 through the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Programme, Canada has acted as a multifaceted, and not always ethical, host. As these texts demonstrate, even the seemingly more straightforwardly hospitable of these relations between Canada and Latin Americans requires interrogation and critique. In engaging with the Canada-US border alongside these continental concerns, these four texts not only complicate the Canadian nationalist position on the 49th parallel, but, in comparing the continent’s borders, they also offer new insights into America’s border studies. ja n e t t e t u r n e r h o s p i ta l : believing in the unpleasant

Janette Turner Hospital’s Borderline may prefigure the recent debates about Canada’s tenuous inclusion within hemispheric American studies, but this novel effectively conveys diverging positions on the Canada-US border and a rearticulation of the border’s significance by overlaying the 49th parallel with the Mexico-US border. The novel’s most significant characters consist of the cosmopolitan American gallery manager Felicity, who is based in Boston but has a cottage outside Montreal; the Anglo-Canadian insurance salesman Gus, who is married to a Québécoise and lives in Quebec; JeanMarc, the son of Felicity’s on-again, off-again lover Seymour and his former Québécoise wife; and Dolores Marquez, also known as La Magdalena, La Desconocida, and La Salvadora, the Salvadoran refugee helped across the Canada-US border by Felicity and Gus following the border guards’ investigation of a meat truck carrying among its animal carcasses a group of Salvadoran refugees. Although the novel does, as Claudia Sadowski-Smith argues, “emphasiz[e] the Canada-US border’s connection to the larger hemisphere by portraying the presence of Latin Americans in Canada,”20 its portrayal of Anglo-Canadians alongside Québécois and Americans offers a series of very different positions on the border that not only supplement but also subvert each other. Gus’s experiences and the presentation of his perspective consistently highlight his Canadianness and his

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distinctions from US Americans, but, ultimately, the novel questions the extent of hospitality Canada offers to, and the limits of ethical engagement with, Latin American refugees, highlighting Canada’s privilege and power in a hemispheric context. The novel is narrated by Jean-Marc, sometimes in the first and sometimes in the third person, who confesses that, a year following the disappearance of Felicity and Gus, he has to supplement and invent some events in the story. Felicity’s and Gus’s experiences leading up to the “incident at the border” are therefore actually (re) told,21 if not at least partly imagined, by Jean-Marc, but through free indirect discourse they appear to be narrated from the points of view of Felicity and Gus themselves. When focusing on Felicity’s story, the novel appears to diminish the significance of the Canada-US border. Having grown up in India and Australia, the orphan of American and Australian parents, and a regular international traveller due to her work for her Boston gallery, Felicity emerges as a cosmopolitan figure unfazed by borders: “Felicity had crossed more borders on more continents than anyone would want to keep a file on. She had the right documents, the right kind of charming smile, a knack for the smooth and non-detaining rite of passage” (11). Although Felicity claims to “fe[el] at ease in airports and in the hearts of great cities. Because, she said, they are full of other people who don’t belong” (14), it is clear that, with “the right documents,” Felicity is considered to belong by the legal authorities. In this narrative of desperate attempts to cross national borders for one’s own safety, Felicity’s appreciation of unbelonging becomes a luxury that contrasts starkly with Dolores Marquez and those affiliated with her. For this group in the United States, legal status is equally a luxury. As Angelo describes Sister Gabriel, who seeks to help him and Marquez, “She’s legal, an American citizen, which makes her omnipotent” (206). Despite her childhood abroad, Felicity is an American citizen, one of the hosts, and her sense of being a guest everywhere may resonate with her cosmopolitanism, but it cannot be equated with the dangerous unbelonging of the Salvadoran refugees. Felicity’s presence at the border during the investigation of the meat truck stems from her attempt to flee a complicated love affair with a married man in Boston, her flight to the cottage a desire for sanctuary. Her lengthy association with the cottage, dating back to the early stages of her relationship with Jean-Marc’s father, indicates a long familiarity with this part of Quebec and that crossing the

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Canada-US border is of little consequence to Felicity. In contrast, Gus, whom she meets at the border, consistently articulates himself as a Canadian in order to distinguish himself from Americanness. Although Gus possesses “the right documents” as a Canadian citizen, “border nervousness, habitual, drizzled into his thoughts. Not that he should expect trouble. After all, he was crossing north, he was coming back in. He expected any Canadian immigration officer to share his relief: home is the sailor, and the sheep to the fold, and the fellow citizen to safe haven; unscathed, unmugged, unseduced by kinder taxes south of the border” (28). Gus’s sense of virtue, rooted in his maintaining his Canadian residence despite lower taxation in the US, is likely an attempt to compensate for his one-night stand south of the border following a business convention in New York. Not only does he, like Felicity, anticipate that the border will lead to “safe haven,” but he also anticipates being punished for his sexual indiscretion, an anxiety he attributes to the fact he is both “Catholic and Canadian” (29). Where Felicity does not seem to read cross-border difference, Gus both imagines it as fundamental to his character and has been framed as different by other US Americans in ways that posit a dynamic of hostipitality between the two countries. At the convention, American insurance salesmen ridicule his home. Despite the fact that some of these cross-border colleagues came from even smaller and obscurely named townlets in remote upstate reaches, … they knew that everywhere south of the border was Significant Geography. Confident at the hub of the world, they would marvel at Canadians, affectionately incredulous, mocking: Do you insure against death by snow-job, then? How’s business among the Eskimos? Heard the one about the moose who got snow-goosed? You couldn’t help liking Americans, they were so guilelessly predictable. (71) Gus undermines (if only to himself) the American salesmen’s sense of superiority through knowledge of their regional locations, but, unlike the cosmopolitan Felicity, the salesmen are convinced that “Significant Geography” both encompasses everywhere south of the 49th parallel and only applies south of the border. Gus tolerates their jokes at Canada’s expense and ostensibly plays the role of good guest by reacting not with anger but with seeming appreciation, even

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as it is intertwined with a tacit declaration of Gus’s own superiority as a Canadian (who is, presumably, not guilelessly predictable). However, the joviality of this exchange is absent from a later scene of hostipitality, when Jean-Marc imagines Gus attempting to take Dolores to safety in New York City. At a gas station in Carthage, New York, Gus’s Canadian currency is refused: “‘Can’t take funny money. Got a Texaco card or a Visa?’ Gus folded away his Canadian bills with dignity. His look implied reproach. This between nations of goodwill? Between neighbors?” (272). Gus’s response implicitly reminds readers of the lack of reciprocity between Canada and the US in terms of accepting each other’s currency. The gas station attendant’s reference to the Canadian dollar as “funny money” devalues the currency by implying it is inauthentic, as though only suitable for board games. Gus recognizes that the discourse of neighbourliness between the two countries across their seemingly undefended border comes up against its limits when the imbalance of power becomes evident, with “goodwill” a mere political slogan. Routinely made aware of US power through such interactions, then, it is perhaps no surprise that Gus looks to the border as a safeguard. This sense is particularly enhanced following the discovery of the refugees in the meat truck, after which Gus, with his complicity in illegally transporting Dolores Marquez to safety across the border, will not “feel safe till [he’s] back on Canadian soil” (41). Gus spots concrete differences across the border that indicate he has made it “home”: “He thought he saw a road sign in French” (41). The novel meditates briefly on the nature of differences between Canada and the United States, some of them “immediate and obvious” and others “intangible” (42). The “obvious” differences include the shift from miles to kilometres in posted speed limits and, at the crossing where the meat truck is discovered, the shift from English to French names of towns. The Anglo Gus’s relief at seeing the French signs invokes the tension embedded within claims to Canada’s distinctiveness from the US on the grounds of its bilingualism, as though Canada requires Quebec to testify to its difference from its southern neighbour. But Hospital’s Québécois setting also works to interrogate the fairly standard Anglo-nationalist position on the border embodied by Gus. Clearer distinctions than those between Anglo-Canadians and Americans arise intermittently throughout the text between Québécois and Anglo-Canadians, for instance in Gus’s Québécoise sister-in-law’s assertion, “Show me un Anglais you can

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trust, and I’ll show you a man who’s taken French leave of his own history” (222), and the invocation of the f l q in Jean-Marc’s tuning a “piano in Outremont that survived a bomb blast … back at the time of the Québecois [sic] turmoils” (228). The novel refers explicitly to provincial borders that mark out linguistic difference when Gus drives out of Quebec and sees an “Au Revoir sign. Vous partez … it reminded him, and he flashed past it into English-speaking territory” (70). Ultimately, however, the text’s central narrative of the attempted crossing of the Canada-US border by the Salvadoran refugees reconfigures borders once again, this time in continental terms. Working together, however clumsily, to assist Dolores Marquez, Felicity and Gus are clearly united despite their national differences. In the novel’s overlaying of the Canada-US border with the Mexico-US border, the more familiar narrative of Mexicans trying to reach the US across the militarized border migrates north, implicating Canada in continental politics and economics in ways that the standard nationalist concern with distinguishing Canadianness from Americanness does not acknowledge.22 Throughout the novel, Hospital explores the apparent incongruity of the narrative events and the narrative location. Having witnessed the refugees emerging from the back of the meat van, “the blankets and shawls warding off refrigeration, the glitter of frost on raven hair. She thought of cave dwellers. Of refugees from another time and place – the Ice Age, or the age of myth,” Felicity finds it difficult to reconcile these images with their location “in front of her Datsun, within the chrome frame of her windshield” (31). She later uses this incongruity as a decoy in order to avoid having the border guard search her car, the Salvadoran woman lying on the floor in the back: “It doesn’t seem possible, so far from the Mexican border” (38). But if the novel “imports,” as it were, a narrative of “the Americas” it implicitly insists that Canada is equally the Americas. It does so partly through the assertions of the men claiming to be f b i agents at Felicity’s Boston apartment of “illegal aliens from Central America … reach[ing] epidemic proportions in New York and Boston and Montreal” (135), whereby a Canadian location is included in the litany of the “epidemic’s” targets. But also significant is the repeated attention to the apparent disjunction between location and incident. Having grown up amidst postcolonial political upheavals in India, Felicity, we are told, has “certainly seen more distressing sights” than the refugees climbing

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out of the van – “Or almost certainly. It was so difficult to be sure on a continent where no one believed in the unpleasant” (31). For Felicity, here, the continent is North America, or at least its two most northern countries, which encompass both her home in Boston and her cottage getaway in rural Quebec. Although Gus and Felicity help Dolores Marquez to Felicity’s cottage, Marquez disappears, leaving the two North Americans to worry and to attempt to forget her in equal measure. Trying to reassure themselves that Dolores (or La Magdalena, as Felicity has named her after a Perugino painting), Felicity and, especially, Gus depend upon notions of Canadian hospitality to convince themselves that Dolores has found safe haven. Felicity invokes earlier narratives of Canadian hospitality, as well as contemporary networks for assisting refugees,23 when she “offer[s]: Perhaps she had people waiting for her … [F]riends. Or relatives. I believe there are church groups in Montreal, something like the old Underground Railroad for runaway slaves” (126). Gus imagines at length a future for Dolores that is not only steeped in “the official Canadian rhetoric of immigrant success” but also presupposes Canadian hospitality as a given:24 “Wise men from the upper reaches of government would offer gifts[,] … includ[ing] a work permit. Certainly she would not be deported. New language would come to her, French and English both, and at nursing school she would win gold medals” (69). Yet the hospitality imagined by Gus is contradicted by the exchange at the border, in which the Canadian border guard evinces little sympathy, much less hospitality, for the refugees: “‘Nothing stops them,’ the officer said. ‘They’ll cross twenty states, God knows how, bribe their way out of anything … Fear of death, they try to tell you, but it’s green stuff they want … Not enough to go round down there, so they come to nibble at our pie. Tens of thousands in Boston and New York, and now it’s spreading to us’” (38). According to the border guard, the refugees appear to be a kind of infection, and they fail to meet the standards of Felicity’s imagined “Border Catechism No. 1,” which specifies that “a legitimate and acceptable human being” can only be somebody, “preferably of Anglo-Saxon stock, with the decency to have been born in a country familiar to the presiding official, and respectable in his eyes” (40). If hospitality cannot be extended to difference, it is no hospitality at all. As Sadowski-Smith points out, Borderline fails to acknowledge the clear differences in refugee policy between Canada and the

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United States in the 1980s in particular, when many Latin Americans made successful refugee claims in Canada.25 However, Hospital effectively conveys the extent to which an essentialized version of Canadianness that is based upon hospitality and the offer of safe haven north of the border is simplistic and addresses neither the “dependency of Canadian domestic and foreign politics on the United States” nor Canada’s own xenophobia and racism.26 Tellingly, in the novel distinctions between Canadian and American authorities disappear as inhospitality repeatedly arises in both national contexts. Felicity fumes about the fact that those seeking asylum must “be fleeing an approved dictatorship before [they] count as a refugee” and be considered to experience “the right kind of suffering” (95), presumably referring, in this instance, to the United States’ support for the El Salvador government, although this is nowhere stated explicitly. But Gus also worries about Dolores’s fate, knowing that “they … send them back where they came from. He visualized this: the face above the torn dress, pale as hard-chilled butter, in a Ziploc freezer bag, labelled, dated, returned to sender” (60). “They” have no particular national identity but, rather, stand in for the privileged northern two nations of North America and their policing of bodies attempting to reach sanctuary from the violence of their home countries, abetted, in the case of Dolores’s country, by the United States. Just as distinctions between American and Canadian disappear in terms of inhospitality, so, too, the spaces of North America and Latin America become blurred. In Jean-Marc’s retelling, different groups and authorities have been looking for the lost Salvadoran woman and attempting to glean information and gain assistance from Felicity; Gus stumbles across Dolores in Montreal and is counselled by Felicity to take her to New York for her safety. Felicity has been advised by Sister Gabriel in Boston that Dolores needs to leave Montreal, where there is not “a big enough legal Spanish community” (253) to allow her to hide successfully.27 This solution reverses the Underground Railroad, positing that a return south of the border, where Dolores could never have claimed asylum, is paradoxically safer for her. However, Gus’s car bursts into flames on the way to New York, while Felicity’s Boston apartment is destroyed; none of the bodies can be identified for certain. Towards the end of the novel, Jean-Marc and Gus’s daughter Kathleen discuss Gus’s and Felicity’s fates:

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The disappeared ones, we call them. Los desaparecidos … [W]e watch the news, we keep clippings. See, we tell each other, there are other stories stranger than ours, verified by the press each day … [I]t must be true, surreal through it seems: that for no more reason than a whiff of an echo of association at two removes with a person considered to be suspicious, people can disappear … without a trace. Still, Kathleen says doubtfully. This isn’t Latin America. Things happen in Latin America that couldn’t happen anywhere else. That’s true, I acknowledge. People are different down there. Our case is undeniably different. Any day now we’ll get a phone call. (283) That the novel concludes without such a phone call reveals that the assertion, “This isn’t Latin America,” is inadequate. The Latin American-North American border, “the locus of perhaps the darkest episodes of what we call ‘hemispheric American relations,’”28 has arrived at the Canada-US border; extradition back to the United States, from whence they will be deported, of the Salvadoran refugees who did not die of hypothermia is the result of their attempt to find asylum in Canada. Further, Felicity and Gus are, as Jean-Marc points out, the disappeared – a Canadian man going missing after crossing the US border is supposed to be an unlikely, impossible candidate for this status we associate with human rights violations in latitudes far south of the 49th parallel. In this way, Hospital reimagines North America’s borders to place Canada in a new continental context, one larger than mainstream Canadian conceptions of “the continent” as a North America composed exclusively of Canada and the United States. In tracing nationalist associations with the border through Gus as well as undermining this perspective through Felicity’s cosmopolitanism and Québécois resistance to the Canadian nation-state, Borderline holds the more exclusive border narratives to account and illustrates how Canada shares a privileged status with the United States in comparison to other nations within the hemisphere.

“learn

m y l a n g uag e ” : j oa n m ac l e o d ’ s a m i g o ’ s b lu e g u i ta r

In Borderline, Dolores Marquez is essentially a silent figure, reflecting Hospital’s desire not “to presume to find a voice for a refugee.”29

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The other names by which Dolores is known – La Salvadora, La Magdalena, and La Desconocida – demonstrate the limits of others’ knowledge of her as they reduce her identity to her nationality, her resemblance to a Renaissance painting, and her unknowability, respectively. In Jean-Marc’s reconstruction of Gus’s final days, travelling with Dolores south to New York, Dolores is imagined as speaking “in Spanish, a low monologue, exotic, like the sound of an Andean flute. He saw red dust and volcanoes, village churches, candles, an icon, an old woman’s face, young children. He saw a village square and adobe huts and soldiers” (270). Gus demonstrates his ignorance of Dolores and her context, exposing the limits of hemispheric connectedness in his ready associations with exoticized imagery that depends upon his construction of a primitive culture. In Joan MacLeod’s 1990 Amigo’s Blue Guitar, a Salvadoran refugee also figures as a main character; however, crucially, Elias not only speaks throughout the play but also does so in two languages, Spanish and English, and acts as a corrective to the Anglo-North American characters who know little more than does Gus about El Salvador. Hospitality in this play functions on a national scale, through Canada’s admittance of Elias as a refugee, and a domestic one, as Elias is sponsored by Sander and lives with Sander’s family on one of British Columbia’s Gulf Islands. That Elias fails to “conform to their stereotypical image of a defenceless political refugee” troubles the hospitality at work,30 for Elias is not the guest that Sander and his family anticipate, and their disappointment in him indicates a lack of genuine hospitality on their part. Like Hospital’s Borderline, Amigo’s Blue Guitar juxtaposes the Canada-US border to the North American-Latin American border, marking out distinctions between Canada and the United States but then reframing those distinctions by locating them within a hemispheric context. Owen, father of Sander and Callie, was a Vietnam draft resister who left the US for Canada. Describing his experience of crossing the border to Elias (in English, with Sander patchily translating into Spanish), Owen recounts: “It was a big deal. We wanted it to be a big deal. We’d just gone over the wall, under the wire, crawled out on our bellies and arrived at a safe place. We’re heroes, man. The great escape.”31 Owen’s admission, “We wanted it to be a big deal,” is telling, as his son points out: “C’mon, Dad. You drove up and they waved you through. You’re always making it sound like the Berlin Wall or something” (25). From Sander’s point

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of view, Canada was too hospitable for his father to claim the status of a hero. Further, Owen himself undermines his “great escape” narrative by recounting that he simply had to claim to be from a Lower Mainland location (which he mispronounced as “Chilly Whack!”) and the border guard “waved [them] through.” When Owen claims to feel an affinity with Elias, then, offering to “help [him] feel at home here” (26), he implicitly equates his own experience with the widespread disappearances, murder, and other human rights violations during El Salvador’s civil war. Although Sander is sceptical of the heroism of his father’s bordercrossing claims, he himself betrays a considerable ignorance about Latin America more generally and El Salvador specifically, despite the fact that he is Elias’s sponsor and at least makes some attempt to learn Spanish. Sander’s sense of hemispheric connectedness is deeply inadequate, as demonstrated by his musing that “right now I could take the 10:15 to Vancouver, Highway 99 to the States, then the I-5 all the way to Mexico then ba ng! We’re there – El Salvador, Guatemala. I think about that. I think about taking dad’s truck and his Esso card and driving right inside those places. There are these soldiers everywhere and these Indian women making tortillas or pounding silver or something. I talk to them in Spanish and they understand exactly what it is I’m saying” (15). In this declaration, Sander, to use Braz’s terms, is hardly ambiguous about Canada’s “spatial relation” to the American continent, but he is woefully ignorant. As Anne F. Nothof writes, Sander “has a very naive view of ‘border crossings,’ which assumes a rapid transition from one culture to another at someone else’s expense, and with no effort required to understand the distances or the differences.”32 While it might be physically possible, at least, for Sander to drive (once he gets off the ferry) into Central America, he conflates geographical continuity with his own privilege as a white Anglo-Canadian, holder of a Canadian passport, and assumes, based on that privilege, an ease of communication. Although he has studied some Spanish, his Spanish is also full of errors. His claim that “these Indian women making tortillas” will understand him perfectly only emphasizes that he ­cannot even conceive of the ways in which his unacknowledged Canadian privilege generates great cracks in his view of intra-­ American affiliation and understanding. Sander’s description of Central America echoes Gus’s in Borderline, particularly in their shared assumption of an underdeveloped culture. Sander later

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confesses to Elias, “I invented the place you were from: this little ­village in the mountains,” only to have Elias inform him that “San Salvador is big like Vancouver” (60). Like Gus, Sander cannot accommodate the urban in his invention of El Salvador. Elias’s discovery that Sander’s sponsorship of him has given him extra university credit both articulates the absurdity of this arrangement and demonstrates the gaps between Sander’s experience and that of Elias: “I am your homework?” (42). Sander’s sister, Callie, approaches Elias differently, from an exoticized but also eroticized perspective. Callie is particularly fascinated by Elias’s dangerous past, about which she constantly attempts to discover more. She reads his body as a record of torture, marked with evidence of a violent history that clearly excites her: “All the things that have happened to you…” (40). But Elias punctures her reading by informing her they are chicken pox scars instead. When Callie tells Elias that she loves him, he responds, “You love these terrible things that I remember” (53). Callie expends a good deal of effort trying to find out Elias’s story, but, as Elias indicates in the Prologue, his memories, his nightmares, are his own: “You let the dream come out and there is no place left for me” (11). Callie wants Elias’s story but will not meet Elias on his own terms. As he tells her repeatedly, “If you want to know my story, then you can learn my language” (36), but he says this in Spanish, leaving Sander to translate. Elias comes closest to telling his story when he begins a simulated torture roleplay with an unwitting Sander, without any warning or explanation of what he is doing: “You are sitting in a chair. The chair is wood and pretty … I hit you across the face” (35). Although Elias does not hit Sander, he does frighten him, ultimately alienating his sponsor. Although Sander has initially insisted, “You don’t owe us anything” (35), this reassurance proves to be untrue on a variety of levels. Sander’s response to Elias’s version of telling his story indicates that there is a right way for Elias to repay his hosts with the story they crave. As Felicity notes in Borderline, there is a “right kind of suffering,” and Elias clearly does not conform to it. Further, the play reveals that Elias does indeed owe his hosts in the form of the Canadian government. He stops taking subsidized English classes so that he can work instead to pay back the money for his airfare: “Guatemala City to Vancouver. It is a lot of money” (48). Clearly, even for refugees, hospitality comes at a price. The extent to which

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this hospitality is truly hospitable is additionally undermined when Elias informs Owen that the manager of Pizza-Pizza, where Elias has found a job, “is a chemist from Somalia” (48), ludicrously overqualified for his position and yet, as the all-too-common narrative goes, unable, in Canada, to find work appropriate to his qualifications. The inhospitality of government regulations is exacerbated by public hostility to refugees. As Elias notes: “I have read the paper. They are very angry here with the refugees. Go home Tamil! Go home Iran! I have read these things” (48). The play dramatizes the expectation of recognizable forms of gratitude from recipients of the nation’s (and the family’s) hospitality. After Elias’s arrival, Callie cannot understand why he isn’t “more excited” (27) to be there. But as Elias later reveals: “I do not come because I want to. I come because I have no place to go” (34), and he applied for asylum in “eleven countries … before Canada” (48). Callie attempts to file an application to sponsor Elias’s brother, but as Sander, disappointed by Elias, is keen to point out, Elias has altered the application so that it is for Marina, his Salvadoran girlfriend, instead. But Elias’s deception, Owen insists, is less important than the ethics of hospitality. Sander emphasizes the extent to which Elias’s name appealed to him when he was choosing a refugee to sponsor, as though some names are more worthy of being saved than others. As Owen declares: “This isn’t about making friends. It’s about saving lives” (59). Taken to the furthest extent of hospitality, in Derrida’s terms, it’s about “say[ing] yes to who or what turns up,”33 regardless of what nature of guest arrives. But working with Sander’s explanation, Elias attempts to infuse Marina’s name with meaning, as well as those of a litany of others whose lives are at risk (60–1). Callie claims that, “when [she] look[s] at [Elias] it’s like this chance to change the whole world” (45), but she fails to own up to her own investment in that possibility, privileging her imagined power to change the whole world over the offer of sanctuary to individual people. Elias has been welcomed, if deeply conditionally, into a national and domestic space with national priorities that confuse him. Owen invites him to work with him on the boat, tagging fish to “keep track of how many stay here, and how many make it down to Juan de Fuca, to the States,” to which Elias responds, “You wish to know the  nationality of a fish” (49). Canada-US distinctions appear so essential that they infiltrate the natural world, but Elias can only

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recommend, “You should kill the fish” (49) instead. The play gestures towards the inevitable links between Canada and the United States when Martha, Sander and Callie’s American grandmother, invokes the Peace Arch border crossing’s slogan: “Children of a common mother” (14). But Sander, acting out following his altercation with Elias, is determined to deny any commonality between his country and his grandmother’s. He accuses Martha: “It’s your government, Grandma! Yours. They’re behind everything down there. It’s the Americans who are responsible for his going to jail, his being tortured, his having to run away.” And he shouts that he “hate[s] Americans! They’re just such liars! They’re all overweight big-mouth right-wing fanatical religious nuts except they’re too stupid to even know it” (43). In response to his grandmother’s reminder of his ­parents’ national origins, Sander insists, “I am not, repeat not an American!” (44). And yet Elias, on whose behalf Sander claims to be carrying on this anti-American rant, is not impressed: “Do not yell at the grandma” (44). Sander’s disavowal of Americanness contradicts his family history while capitulating to the United States’ appropriation of the continental term for its own national territory. Further, if Sander is indeed so keen to distinguish his country from his visiting grandmother’s, his birthplace from hers, he is acting deeply inhospitably to her as an individual. In this sense, the play gestures towards the continental politics at play in Elias’s country, but these are framed by Sander’s desire to lash out. “You’re acting like a little dictator” (44), Callie accuses him, a suggestive simile considering the military dictatorships that have led Latin American refugees to seek asylum in Canada. Nearing the close of the play, Callie lists the Spanish names of several Gulf Islands (“Gabriola, Cortes, Galiano, Valdez” [87]) and wonders why “none of the Spanish explorers stuck around here” (88), before recalling Sander’s childhood dream “that once we were big enough we could walk and row and sail and follow the islands all the way to South America. He wanted to visit the people that lived underneath the world” (88). Spanish exploration on the West Coast demonstrates a distant shared history between present-day Canada and Latin America, but Callie’s meditation on the islands’ names also, as Nothof argues, “evoke[s] an aura of romance and exoticism, which she … transfers to Elias.”34 If Callie thinks the islands’ Spanish names are “fanc[y],” “lady-like,” “like a piece of lace dropped over the same old rocks and trees” (87, 88), she has not attempted to

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break through exoticism into understanding, as Elias’s references to her refusal to learn his language indicate. Ultimately, although the play is clear about cross-border distinctions between Canada and the United States – namely, those surrounding the Vietnam War and complicity in human rights abuses in Latin America in general and El Salvador in particular – it also rejects any simplified nationalist position that would see Canada as always occupying the moral high ground in relation to the US and a natural ally of Latin America through shared disempowerment. Callie’s recounting to Elias of her childhood understanding of the Canada-US border as a “big red rope like a bank line-up and when the draft dodgers were pardoned it had been let down forever” (39) both ­ acknowledges previous border-crossing difficulty for her father and the extent to which border crossings for Elias are that much more difficult. When Elias “uses her body as a map” to illustrate power relations in the Americas, with “North America. The head, the thinking. The strong part. This part of you is telling the other part what to do,” “South America. Underneath and working. Working for the top of you,” and “Central America. This is the asshole … Everybody very happy to screw Central America” (39–40), he not only offers a variation on the anthropomorphism of North America popularized “during the US militarization of the border at the time of the Mexican Revolution, … in which Mexico became the lower body joined to the United States as the upper body, while the borderline served as a geographical waistline,”35 but crucially, in his illustration of inter-American relationships for Callie, Elias also does not exempt Canada from the powerful North American position. Canada’s privilege is clear in this text, and its power to cure the ills of the Americas is both interrogated for its genuine hospitality (as in the financial burden redirected to the refugee) and, in some cases, undermined: the application to sponsor Marina is declined because “they can’t find her” (89), a far more horrific conclusion than Elias’s deception of Callie with regard to the application. Amigo’s Blue Guitar therefore holds Canada to account in its claims to offer hospitable sanctuary while insisting upon and complicating its relationship with other countries of the Americas. ta l k i n g to g r i n g o s : g u i l l e r m o v e r d e c c h i a ’ s fronteras americanas / american borders

Guillermo Verdecchia created the character of Elias and assisted MacLeod with the Spanish translations of Amigo’s Blue Guitar (9).

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Although Verdecchia’s acting and translation roles in Amigo’s Blue Guitar demonstrate more voicing of Latino experience and perspective than, for instance, does Dolores Marquez in Borderline, Verdecchia’s own play, Fronteras Americanas / American Borders, not only emerges from the perspective of its Latino author but also thematizes the encounter between Latino and dominant Anglo-Canadian cultures. Although Hugh Hazelton argues that Verdecchia’s “critical recognition” in Canada is due to his “writ[ing] in English specifically for an anglophone audience,”36 Fronteras Americanas’ use of Spanish destabilizes this assumption. The contrast between MacLeod’s and Verdecchia’s plays is instructive here: whereas Amigo’s Blue Guitar offers English translations of the Spanish lines, Fronteras Americanas / American Borders, with very few exceptions, leaves the Spanish lines of his text untranslated. Granted, there is the question of performance, for MacLeod’s play offers translation in its printed form as a script; however, Fronteras Americanas uses language more directly to challenge, expand, and recode Canadianness precisely through a lack of translation. At the same time, Verdecchia’s play, originally produced the year prior to nafta’s implementation, rethinks Canada and its borders in hemispheric terms, challenging Canadians’ complicity in  stereotyping Latin America and interrogating various forms of “Americanness,” both continental and US-centred. Contrasting the character of “Verdecchia,”37 the Argentinian-Canadian actor in search of home, with Wideload McKennah, a Chicano “inflated stereotype designed to deflate stereotypes,”38 this one-man play articulates Canadianness from different perspectives, seeking both to disorient and to reorient the Anglo-Canadian audience. The first disorientation and reorientation occurs at the beginning of the play, where, reflecting its first staging at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto, the character of “Verdecchia” interpolates the city within the continent. With slides echoing and re-presenting Canadian literary and cultural figures Northrop Frye and Leonard Cohen – “Here We Are” and “Let us compare geographies,” reworking Frye’s “Where is here?” and Cohen’s Let Us Compare Mythologies – “Verdecchia” announces that “here” signifies not just the Tarragon in Toronto but “America”: “And when I say am e ri ca I don’t mean the country, I mean the continent. Somos todos Americanos. We are all Americans.”39 Verdecchia subverts the conventional use of “American” in the United States and Canada through its Spanish counterpart, which “challeng[e]s the notion of America as an Anglophone culture.”40 Further, Rachel Adams argues that this

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declaration “echoes Latin American thinkers from Simon Bolivar [sic] to Jose [sic] Martí, who argued for the importance of regional solidarity under the banner of a collective American identity.”41 However, “Verdecchia’s” articulation of Americanness in Toronto not  only invokes this hemispheric inclusiveness but also challenges Canadians to think beyond their southern neighbour and its appropriation of the continent’s name. In a Canadian context, the Englishlanguage adjective will first signify, tacitly, as belonging to the United States. In this way, framed by the invocations of Frye and Cohen, Verdecchia’s introduction of Americanness is double-edged, and his introduction of the line in Spanish before it appears in English is particularly crucial as it reappropriates “America” through its Spanishlanguage meaning. Uttering “Americanos” before “Americans,” “Verdecchia” encourages and challenges a Canadian audience to consent to both interpolation within the Americas and interpellation as Americans in the continental sense. In its focus on borders, the play similarly yokes familiar Canadian concerns with other discourses in the hemisphere, demonstrating the points at which they overlap without reducing the significance of  site-specific borders. Again, the multiple invocations of fronteras / borders both allows and requires an audience to read multiple meanings simultaneously, as in the following example: The Border is a tricky place. Take the Latin-North American border. slide map of the Mexico-US border Where and what exactly is the border? Is it the line in the dirt, stretching for 3,000 kilometres? Is the border more accurately described as a zone which includes the towns of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez? Or is the border – is the border the whole country, the continent? Where does the US end and Canada begin? Does the US end at the 49th parallel or does the US only end at your living room when you switch on the cbc ? (20–1) It is not so much that Verdecchia “collapses the Canada-US and the Mexico-US boundaries into one North-South distinction named ‘the Latin North American border’”42 but, rather, that he gestures towards three borders simultaneously. “Verdecchia’s” first enunciation of “The Border” will signify immediately as the 49th parallel for a Canadian audience, which the play abruptly undercuts with the

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slide of the Mexico-US border and the reference to “the LatinNorth American border.” Although the term “Latin-North American border” as it is used to designate the Mexico-US border appears to sever North America’s southernmost country from the continental designation, its deployment here strategically invites the Canadian audience to identify as North Americans – that is, alongside the United States – in contrast to the first association with “the Border,” which emphasizes the division between Canada and its neighbour. The reference to the border’s length, three thousand kilometres, clearly refers to the Mexico-US and not the Canada-US border, but  Verdecchia brings the border discussion directly back to the Canada-US border by musing about whether national cultural institutions such as the c b c are enough to “defend” Canadianness across the “longest undefended border in the world.” In its transitions from nations to continents and back again, this scene locates anxieties about the Canada-US border within a larger hemispheric context, invoking the contrast between the militarization of the Mexico-US border without explicitly referring to it, and reminding Canadians that, for others in North America, “The Border” does not readily signify the 49th parallel but, rather, la frontera. In these early moments of the play, “Verdecchia” nudges the Canadian audience to reconsider its position along hemispheric lines as well as national ones, deftly repositioning the framework through which it is encouraged to identify. Following the arrival of Wideload, however, these more gentle suggestions become far more explicit, uncomfortable challenges to an Anglo audience, and “Verdecchia’s” more theoretical musings become reinforced through Wideload’s pointed, and targeted, commentary. Wideload’s more aggressive character in comparison to “Verdecchia” is immediately clear, and humorously exaggerated, through the gunshots that accompany his entrance onstage in a bandito costume. That the ArgentinianCanadian “Verdecchia’s” alter-ego should be a Chicano perhaps acknowledges that Anglo-Canadians’ associations with Latinos are likely to be filtered through US-based stereotypes of Chicanos, as emphasized by the bandito costume Wideload sports in the audience’s first encounter with him. Where “Verdecchia” has introduced some Spanish to the audience, offering English versions of the Spanish lines, Wideload challenges and disorients the Anglo audience by speaking entirely in Spanish when he first appears, with no accompanying translation. Although he offers his services as a guide

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to the audience, he only does so in Spanish. Thus, despite Pablo Ramírez’s claim that Wideload “is the perfect translator between Latina / os and Anglos,”43 in a very important and literal sense, he refuses to translate. Wideload divides the audience into “los latinos” and the rest by asking “los latinoamericanos” to identify themselves by raising their hands in the air (22). The latter term, “latinoamericanos,” appears in quotation marks within the text, suggesting that Wideload’s usage of the term “Latin Americans,” as he attempts to hail those members of the audience, is a self-conscious replication of how they might be described from an Anglo-North American perspective. But if Wideload acknowledges that “latinoamericano” may be a somewhat suspect label for an incredibly diverse range of identities, his conclusion, after the head count, that “el resto son… gringos” (22) carries enormous implications for an Anglo-Canadian audience, potentially even more so than does “Verdecchia’s” interpellation of them as Americans. Unlike Due South’s “The Edge” episode, Fronteras Americanas does not exempt Canadians from the category of “gringo.” Wideload’s attempt to interpellate the Anglo-Canadian audience as “gringos” mounts an even more difficult challenge to Anglo-Canadians than does the hemispheric identity suggested by “Verdecchia.” Whereas “Verdecchia” has raised the spectre of conflating Canadians with US  Americans, only to reassure the Canadian audience that his “Americans” denotes the Americas as a whole, Wideload returns the audience to the initial anxiety about being mistaken for US Americans and reinforces it. While “Verdecchia’s” Americanness offers the possibility of solidarity between Canadians and Latin Americans (as well as US Americans), Wideload’s “gringo” patently does not: it divides Canadians from Latin Americans and invokes Canadian privilege from a critical perspective. Certainly, Anzaldúa’s narration of the Mexico-US borderlands’ history after 1848, in which “the Gringo, locked into the fiction of white superiority, seized complete political power, stripping Indians and Mexicans of their land while their feet were still rooted in it,”44 yokes “gringo” to US power in ways that a Canadian audience would take for granted. Further, given that Wideload’s character primarily concerns himself with disabusing the Canadian audience of the US American stereotypes of Latin Americans that they have uncritically consumed and adopted, it is likely that the further association of “gringo” with “ignoramus” is also implicitly at work here.45

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If Wideload has begun his address to the audience by presenting himself, in Spanish, as a guide, he continues, in English, as a kind of border guard: “Eh, jou en Méjico now. Jou hab crossed de border. Why? What you lookin’ for?” (22). Although the members of the audience have already crossed the border, as they are “en Méjico now,” Wideload asks them uncomfortable questions about why they have come, implicitly demanding of his guests that they consider their cultural tourism in relation to Latin America. Wideload positions not only the audience but also Canadians more generally as tourists, even north of the 49th parallel, with his idea for a “third world theme park” to be built on “a big chunk of toxic wasteland up on de Trans-Canada highway”: You know, you drive up to like big barbed wire gates with guards carrying sub-machine-guns and you park your car and den a broken-down Mercedes Benz bus comes along and takes you in under guard, of course. And you can buy an International Monetary Fund Credit Card for fifty bucks and it gets you on all de rides. And as soon as you’re inside somebody steals your purse and a policeman shows up but he’s totally incompetent and you have to bribe him in order to get any action. Den you walk through a slum on the edge of a swamp wif poor people selling tortillas. (24–5) Wideload’s imagined theme park exploits stereotypes of violence, lawlessness, and poverty associated with Latin America. As Nothof notes, the theme park echoes Sander’s expectations of El Salvador in Amigo’s Blue Guitar,46 and, certainly, Wideload’s image of “poor people selling tortillas” intersects with the simplistic exoticism of both Sander and Borderline’s Gus. Thus, as guide and border guard, Wideload tours the audience around the cultural stereotypes they have been comfortable perpetuating while also interrogating both the stereotypes themselves and the Canadian audience’s complicity in their circulation. Although the Chicano Wideload positions himself as a guest in Canada, particularly in relation to the “ethnic family” (34) the Smiths, representatives of the “Saxonical” (24) culture that Wideload finds “a bit exotic” (34), it is the gringo AngloCanadian audience members who occupy the position of guests in the space of the theatre as they follow Wideload’s guided tour.

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Hospitality is particularly complicated in this play for “Verdecchia,” especially given his search for a home, for, as he says, “All sides of the border have claimed and rejected me” (51). His recounting of childhood experiences in Kitchener, Ontario, demonstrates both failed hospitality and outright hostility on the part of the Canadian cultural host, from his schoolteacher’s inability to pronounce his name – “‘Gwillyou – ree – moo … Verdeek – cheea?’ I put my hand up. I am a minuscule boy with ungovernable black hair, antennae and gills where everyone else has a mouth” (33) – to the person who responds to his letter protesting the banning of books in schools with the “suggest[ion] that I go back to my own country” (28). Yet Argentina also presents a tenuous home, due to the time that has elapsed since “Verdecchia’s” childhood departure, the threat of military service if he returns, and the fact that, not dissimilar to AngloCanadians in relation to Latin America, he is a tourist in relation to his nation of origin, which is posited as his legitimate “home.” Prior to his visit to Argentina, “Verdecchia” discloses: I have spent the last fifteen years preparing for this. I bought records and studied the liner notes. I bought mate and dulce de leche. I talked to my friends, questioned my parents and practised my Spanish with strangers … I’ve spent the last fifteen years reading newspapers, novels, and every Amnesty International report on South America. I tracked down a Salvador Allende poster, found postcards of Che and Pablo Neruda. I drank Malbec wines and black market Pisco with a Chilena macro-economist whose cheques always bounced … I saw Missing three times. (37) Although his family connections to Argentina and his practising Spanish clearly demonstrate stronger connections to Latin America than the average Anglo-Canadian audience member is likely to have, the fact that “Verdecchia” attempts to forge an affiliation with his “home” country through consumption as well as a more generalized Latin American culture undercuts his claim to Argentina as home. If he has been treated as a misunderstood and unwelcome guest as a child in Ontario, his life in Canada has also rendered him a guest in Latin America, as demonstrated by both his response to a shooting in Santiago where “no a mb ul a nc e e ve r co m e s” (39) and his

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illness in Argentina, prompting him to think, “I just want to go home – but I’m already there – aren’t I?” (50). For all his multiple border crossings, “Verdecchia” articulates the difficulty of many of these journeys, even across a border as seemingly undefended as the 49th parallel. Presenting his side of an exchange with a customs agent on a trip to Los Angeles (a city whose name he has to anglicize – “Lows Anjelees” [56] – in order to be considered to have pronounced “correctly”), “Verdecchia” suggests his identity is racialized and policed at the border, as indicated by the lines he has to repeat in order to respond to the (likely repetitive) questioning: I told you: pleasure. Come on what is this? I’m a Canadian citizen – we’re supposed to be friends. You know, Free Trade, the longest undefended border in the world… all that? [to audience] I had less trouble getting into Argentina. (57) “Verdecchia” mentions not once, but twice, that he is a Canadian citizen, suggesting either that the customs agent does not believe him or that he privileges the first half of “Verdecchia’s” hyphenate identity and insists on reading “Verdecchia” as an unwanted guest in the United States. “Verdecchia” finds the border very much defended in the difficulty he experiences in trying to cross it and that the rhetoric of friendship and neighbourliness does not correspond to actual hospitality at the border. “Verdecchia” explicitly refers to his hyphenated identity when he declares, at the end of the play, “I am a hyphenated person but I am not falling apart, I am putting together” (78), part of the play’s implicit and explicit engagement with the official Canadian discourses of multiculturalism and bilingualism. Returning to Canada after his trip “home” to Argentina, his arrival appears to be tinged both with disappointment and an inevitability: The airport is clean clean clean. And big big big. The car that takes me back into the city is big and clean. We drive through big clean empty land under a big, fairly clean sky. I’m back in Canada. It’s nice. I’m back in Canada … oh well … Why did I come back here? This is where I work I tell myself, this is where I make the most sense, in this Noah’s ark of a nation. (74)

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The size and cleanliness of Canada give an impression of blandness that contrasts sharply with his characterization of Latin America prior to his trip to Argentina: “oh well” hardly suggests an enthusiastic homecoming in its anti-climax. Yet multicultural Canada’s “Noah’s ark of a nation” appears to accommodate “Verdecchia’s” hyphens, both national and linguistic. That “Verdecchia’s” linguistic hyphens should yoke together not just English and Spanish but also French is crucial to reading the play’s representation of Canada: “Mais zooot alors, je comprends maintenant, mais oui, merde! Je suis Argentin-Canadien! I am a post-Porteño neo-Latino Canadian! I am  the Pan-American highway!” (75). In his self-designation as “Argentin-Canadien,” “Verdecchia” engages not only with a Spanishlanguage continental identity of americano but also with a Frenchlanguage sense of américanité that need not replicate “USians’ versions of America.”47 Further, “Verdecchia’s” articulation of his hyphenated identity in French also seems to endorse Pierre Trudeau’s vision for Canada as multicultural within a bilingual framework. It  would seem, as “Verdecchia” comprend maintenant, that the Canadian state has had the answers he has sought all along. But the hyperbolic and stereotypical use of French here (“zooot alors”) also undermines the official rhetoric. Although Verdecchia, the author, playfully multiplies the hyphenate possibilities in the lines quoted above, the excess of this litany appears to ironize those possibilities. They seem easy, obvious answers, but “Verdecchia’s” experiences of inhospitality in Canada suggest that the nation has more work to do before it can live up to these state-sponsored “solutions.”“Verdecchia” has felt “almost at home” in France, “où mes étudiants me disaient que je parlais le français comme une vache Catalan[,] … où j’étais étranger, un anglais, un Argentin-Canadien, un faux touriste” (28). In this sense, it is not necessarily Canada itself that functions as a home but the French language, as well as the fact that “Verdecchia” finds, increasingly throughout the play, a sense of home in dislocation. Ultimately, “Verdecchia” declares that he is “building a house on the border” (78), complicating hospitality by declaring a host status at the threshold itself. Building a house on the border constitutes Verdecchia’s solution to his “very bad border wound,” as diagnosed by El Brujo, who, despite his Toronto location at Bloor and Madison, claims they are in Mexico (71). Here, Verdecchia invokes GómezPeña’s work, in particular Border Brujo, in which the eponymous character insists to the audience, “this continent is your home.”48

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Verdecchia’s El Brujo’s palimpsest of Mexican and Canadian locations echoes Gómez-Peña’s and the Border Arts Workshop’s sense of the border “as a phenomenological category, … something that people carried within themselves, in addition to being an external factor structuring their perceptions.”49 Fronteras Americanas thereby invokes Mexico-US border studies discourse as a way to chart “Verdecchia’s” path to establishing a sense of home; however, significantly, “Verdecchia” needs both the border discourse and a hemispheric sense of Canada’s location as well as Canada’s own frameworks of identity – multiculturalism, bilingualism – in order to “put together.” Through Verdecchia’s “negotiation of emphasis among borders,” the text “both reproduce[s] and subvert[s] the ­ideology of Multiculturalism.”50 Reading Canada hemispherically, forcing the audience to engage with Spanish as well as French, expands Canada’s linguistic borders and the parameters of the nation’s multiculturalism, proliferating the possibilities of the host position. Although Wideload is presented as the more aggressive of the two characters in Fronteras Americanas, it is “Verdecchia’s” “Call to Arms” that informs the audience that “this play is not a plea for tolerance … This is a citation, a manifesto. This is a summons to begin negotiations, to claim your place on the continent” (54). If “the subject of tolerance is tolerated only so long as it does not make a political claim, that is, so long as it lives and practices its ‘difference’ in a depoliticized or private fashion,”51 both “Verdecchia” and Verdecchia ultimately undermine the value of tolerance in favour of a far more active conception of multiculturalism that redraws continental relations. Considering the timing of the play’s production at “the dawning of the age of na f ta,”52 the invocation of “negotiations” is particularly significant, though the demands of the play are quite different from those of the continental trade agreement. Again, the play’s interpellation of the Anglo-Canadian audience within a  continental framework underscores the paradigm shift that Verdecchia proposes, through both the character who bears his surname and Wideload, whose own interpellations of that same audience – “Yes, I am calling you you – I am generalizing, I am reducing you all to de lowest common denominator, I am painting you all with the same brush. Is it starting to bug you yet?” (76) – may be less comforting than “Verdecchia’s” but present a necessary counterpoint, demanding that Anglo-Canada enter the continental

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framework having owned up to its privilege and the ignorance it can no longer afford. When Wideload asks the audience to “please throw out the metaphor of Latin America as North America’s ‘backyard’ because your backyard is now a border and the metaphor is now made flesh. Mira, I am in your backyard. I live next door, I live upstairs, I live across de street. It’s me, your neighbour, your dance partner” (77), he intervenes in the Anglo-Canadian audience’s more likely association of national neighbours with the United States, insisting upon a hemispheric renegotiation of engagement between nations. c o n t i n e n ta l e n d o g a m y : ja n e u r q u h a r t ’ s s a n c t u a r y l i n e

Jane Urquhart’s novel Sanctuary Line, published in 2010, is the only text under discussion in this chapter to have been produced after the implementation of nafta. While much of the novel takes place during a pre-nafta period, and the agreement itself is never mentioned, Urquhart’s representation of Canada in relation to Mexico invokes pre-nafta agreements between Canada and Mexico as well as invoking a post-nafta sense of the economic relations between the two countries. The novel teases out the power imbalances between North American nation-states while simultaneously underscoring a continental unity through the natural world. As Sadowski-Smith notes, nafta’s opening up of the borders between signatory countries was limited to “goods and investment capital” rather than to the movement of people: “nafta has thus been working to create a common North American territory where goods and services can move more freely but where borders continue to intrude on everyday lives of various groups of people.”53 Yet some border crossings have been legalized and encouraged where they benefit the nation-state. In  particular, Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (sawp), which it opened to Mexican labourers in 1974, establishes a limited framework for inter-continental migration. In Sanctuary Line, the narrator Liz’s recollections of Mexican workers in her uncle Stanley’s southern Ontario orchards during her childhood and adolescent summers highlight a failure to increase the cross-border mobility of Mexicans, in particular, in any empowering way. saw p demonstrates an affinity between Canadian and US attitudes towards Mexican labour, given that, in the US context,

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“Capitalists [have] welcomed Mexicans as temporary laborers, but not as residents.”54 As Adrian Smith argues, saw p puts Canada in the position of “a (legal-cultural) imperialist force in the Western Hemisphere,” as it “secures unfree labour by downloading onto sending states the costs of workforce training and social reproduction” while it simultaneously “endeavours to minimize its indebtedness to migrant farm workers for the duration of their employment in Canada” and denies them “the rights, privileges, and protections afforded to [Canadian] citizens and near-citizen workers.”55 Although sawp is not explicitly mentioned in Sanctuary Line, Liz gestures towards it in her detailing of her uncle’s practice of hiring Mexicans: he was “one of the first to employ foreign workers.”56 She also highlights the conflation of people with goods: not only does she acknowledge that “the Mexicans [were] flown to the cargo terminal at the Toronto airport” (20) but she also considers the implications of this arrangement, wondering what it would be like “to arrive and depart from there, being human and not, therefore, technically cargo; what it would be like to be picked up and delivered like office supplies, or mufflers for cars, or, … more accurately, farm equipment” (29). Liz stops short of making the connection between workers as cargo and the slave trade; and, of course, the Mexican labourers hired by her uncle are not slaves but seasonal workers who receive “low wages,” although her uncle “was kind without being patronizing to his employees. Or so we were told, perhaps by him” (20). Much of the novel presents Liz’s nostalgic reminiscences of her childhood summers with her uncle’s family, yet she frequently unsettles her memories in this fashion, undermining initial assertions with further reflection. In foregrounding Mexican seasonal labour, Urquhart, like Janette Turner Hospital, might appear to overlay the Canada-US border with the Mexico-US border – except that Hospital transposed the original news story of Salvadoran refugees to the northern border, while Canada’s sawp makes migrant labour from other parts of the hemisphere integral to the agricultural economy. Liz, however, pays far more attention to the Canada-US border than to other continental borders, despite her lengthy acquaintance with Mexican labourers. In Liz’s Irish-North American family narrative, and their oft-invoked family history, Canada and the US appear as siblings, precisely through the Butler family’s straddling the Canada-US border across Lake Erie. Liz recounts the diverging fates of the brothers

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Amos and Samuel Butler, the former determined, in 1786, to “remain loyal to the … British monarchy,” leading him to “assembl[e] his family of six and set out for the British colony of Upper Canada, only a two-day journey by horse and wagon and a short boat ride across Lake Erie,” while the latter “felt that he must be true to the New Republic of the United States of America” (63). The eighteenthcentury bifurcation of the family continues into the twentieth century, but the closeness of the border-straddling family is consistently highlighted, both in geographical and personal terms. The family’s Canadian location is characterized by its proximity to the US, in “the deep south of this northern province” (5). Not only are there stories of the early Canadian Butlers setting fire to trees, with the residents of “the then small settlement of Chicago across the lake, [seeing] the glow in the northern sky and [knowing] it was the burning of Essex County” (80–1), but Liz’s mother also recalls “seeing an orange stain in the night sky in the 1960s and being told that Detroit had been set on fire in the midst of civil unrest” (81). Although Stanley’s wife Sadie, a Butler cousin from “the more successful American branch of the family” (34), is described in terms that distinguish her from the Canadian Butlers as “very American,” bringing “ambition” and “taste” across the border when she marries Stanley (33), elsewhere cross-border distinctions collapse between the two halves of the family: Stanley considers “his American cousin” Tom to be “his mirror image, his doppelganger” (69), more like a twin than a cousin in their cross-border sameness. Canada and the US are therefore clearly aligned in the novel through the Butler legacy. If Canada has viewed its relationship to Latin America, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, as one of offering sanctuary and hospitality to refugees, many of whom were fleeing upheavals in their country in which the US was involved on some level, Liz both questions the official family version of her uncle’s beneficence to foreign workers and frequently admits to her own ignorance about the Mexicans who, like her, spent summers at her uncle’s orchard. She exposes the inhospitality with which she was complicit as a child and teenager, and the extent to which the Mexican workers were rendered Other by her family and other Canadians in the area: We would see the Mexicans on weekends in town. On Saturdays they posted letters and bought some personal items in the stores,

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and on Sundays they attended an early mass, performed in the basement of the Legion Hall, in Latin, the closest language to their own, by the local priest, in advance of what my mother called the real service at the town’s Catholic Church … We did not think about the possibility that the special mass meant they were not made to feel welcome to join the local congregation. (156–7) With the benefit of hindsight, Liz perceives the inhospitality of the seemingly hospitable gesture of granting the Mexicans a “special” (separate, Other) mass, acknowledging that hostipitality is all the Canadians have to offer. The fact that the mass is in Latin (“the closest language to their own”) underscores the limits of the Canadians’ hospitality, for “language is hospitality”;57 further, Liz acknowledges that no one ever “suggested that it would be a good thing if I learned Spanish” (128). Liz therefore both comments on the inhospitality of her environment and her older family members and admits her own participation in this inhospitality. In the description above, “the Mexicans” are undifferentiated from each other, seemingly lacking individual identities. Even as children, Liz and her cousins occupy a position of power and privilege in relation to the Mexicans, as they “watch the Mexicans work” (97), as though the Canadian children are overseers of foreign workers. The foreman, Dolores, and her son, Teo, with whom Liz plays as a child and later becomes romantically involved as a teenager, appear as the only real individuals with identifiable personalities. Otherwise, Liz describes “a few other Mexicans, whose names we never troubled to learn, their bodies as muscular and sturdy as alert engines, primed for labour and waiting to be put into gear” (123). Without the benefit of names, these Others lose not only their identities but also, seemingly, their humanity, the cargo terminal that furnishes their entry into Canada writing over their human characteristics and making them into the mechanized equipment to which Liz has compared them. Where Liz’s interaction with Teo – both as a friend and later as a potential lover – diverges from the bullying he receives from her male cousins who make fun of his name and abandon him during a game of hide and seek, she does candidly admit her ignorance about his life and culture. Although Derrida argues that not asking the stranger’s name is absolutely hospitable, for hospitality does not

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“consist in interrogating the new arrival,”58 the fact that Liz never “ask[ed] him to tell [her] the name of the town he came from” or “his last name” (157) rests on her complacency, her acceptance of her own ignorance, despite the fact that she has known Teo for many years. On several occasions, Liz attempts to imagine Teo’s home. Much like Carol Shields’s protagonist Larry in Larry’s Party (1997), who tries to imagine the Colombian labour that is required to produce the alstromeria he sells in his Winnipeg florist shop, Liz conjures images that both betray her ignorance and demonstrate an attempt to understand.59 Unlike Larry, however, Liz has immediate access to answers to the questions she raises for herself. She muses about Mexican schools, whether they take the shape of “large brick buildings, with two classrooms for each grade level,” whether Teo attends a local school or has to “take a yellow bus each day” to a rural school further away: “Maybe his school would be like the bunkhouses on the farm, roughly painted, with thin walls, rickety windows, and no playground” (45). Despite her interest in Teo’s circumstances, however, she does not ask Teo about them. Instead, Liz’s knowledge of Mexico has come from exoticist school textbooks glorifying the exploits of “heroic” European explorers, who “often met a sad end at the hands of ‘the natives,’ who were, it seemed, consistently ungrateful for the word of God and the European flags the explorers had taken great trouble to bring to their shores” (118). The social studies textbook inverts Kant’s critique of European imperial powers’ inhospitality, claiming that it is Indigenous peoples in the Americas who are guilty of hostility towards “good” European guests. Liz’s attempt to read Teo in relation to this Eurocentric history fails, although it is unclear to what extent she manages, as a child, to criticize the historiography with which she is presented, and to what extent Teo is simply exceptional. Describing a textbook map of Mexico, “twisting like a funnel cloud at the end of British North America,” Liz acknowledges, “I knew that this country was where Teo lived when it wasn’t summer, but I never once associated him with the ungrateful natives” (118). Although both Liz and Teo spend only their summers in southern Ontario, Liz is “still in what could be called [her] natural habitat,” whereas Teo “had landed in unfamiliar territory” (127). As a biologist, the adult Liz invoking a sense of “habitat” functions on multiple levels, and she notes “a particular kind of Mexican ‘ladybug,’ that, according to the experts, ‘doesn’t belong here and is upsetting what

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remains of the ecosystem.’ What does belong here? I wonder at such times. Do we?” (49). Liz clearly reads a xenophobia in these scientific statements that echo the discourse of anxiety around foreign workers, a discourse that has infiltrated her family’s sense of the Mexican workers as well. Liz recalls her uncle asking Dolores to join a dance, while Liz’s mother is “seemingly impassive, not looking at us or the Mexican woman entering our territory” (55), as though the nation-states to which the characters belong map out the social space between them. While Liz is a guest and Teo a guest-worker at the orchard, Liz has claim to the host position, being a family member with historical claim to the location, even if, as she acknowledges, her uncle’s “timehonoured empire” (6) was built on Indigenous territory, “the ancestral countryside of a more legitimate tribe, one that had been gone for a long time, leaving in its wake two words, Red Cloud: a name stolen and then anglicized by those who came later and pushed that tribe out” (49). Ultimately, however, Teo will be revealed to be both illegitimate and more legitimate a host than Liz, as Liz’s mother explains, many years after the discovery of Stanley’s affair with Dolores and Teo’s sudden death in a car accident the same night, that Teo was Stanley’s son. As much as Teo has been identified with Mexico, with even Stanley, his biological father, pointing to a page of an atlas in an old schoolhouse and asserting, “This is your country” (47), Liz’s mother’s revelation unsettles the assignation of host and guest positions that has persisted throughout the narrative. Teo, unbeknownst to almost everyone, including himself, has been both foreign and at home, and Liz’s sense of their similarity underpinning “unspoken, intermittent alliance” (127) turns out to have been a family likeness as well. In this manner, Urqhuart recalibrates continental relationships through personal relationships, emphasizing Mexico as part of the North American continent, despite its Othering not just by its immediate neighbour to the north but also by Canada. If Canada and the United States are rendered as close partners in the novel’s description of the Butler family’s cross-border bifurcation, consolidated in Stanley’s marriage to his cousin across Lake Erie, Stanley has also had a lengthy relationship (nearly two decades, at least) with the Mexican Dolores; the family continental ties would have potentially increased further had Teo lived to continue his relationship with Liz – his biological cousin. Thus, North America, via the novel’s

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characters, is linked not only through sibling and cousin relations but also through near-incestuous relationships, or endogamy, which embed the continental interconnectedness of the three countries. In terms of hospitality, this endogamy complicates claims to the host position, with individuals of different countries able to make several simultaneous claims to belonging on different sides of two North American borders. In addition to this continental endogamy, Urquhart reconceptualizes North America through the natural world, namely, the monarch butterflies that Liz studies as an adult. The monarch’s migration patterns encompass Canada, the US, and Mexico, making them a natural continental tie between the three countries. This connection was exploited during na f ta negotiations, for which the monarch was a “logo … invoked to ‘naturalize’ the idea of a continental trade bloc.”60 But Liz’s fascination with the monarch reclaims the butterfly for its place in the natural, rather than the economic, world even as it intersects with concerns about continental connectedness. She describes the monarch’s seasonal departure from southern Ontario: as a child, she imagines the monarchs “floating out over the great lake, heading for Ohio” (12). She explains the cycle of reproduction over three generations before the monarchs reappear in Ontario, for  “not a single monarch ever returns”; rather, “their great-­ grandchildren … make the return flight, the two previous generations having mated and died at six-week intervals in springtime Texas and Illinois. The third generation we welcome in June mates and dies six weeks later in our very own Ontario fields, engendering the hardy fourth Methuselah generation, which … lives an astonishing nine months in order to be able to make the long journey back” (12–13). Working as a biologist as an adult, Liz traces her fascination with the butterflies back to her childhood, when she “didn’t even know where they went or where they came from, depending on your point of view” (10). Liz’s own Ontarian sense that the monarchs originate from her location finds an inverse in Teo’s own claim, remembered years later by Liz’s mother, observing the butterflies: “From my country” (264). The butterflies’ lifecycle is not bound by nation-states but is hemispheric, and the fact that it is cyclical makes it impossible to designate a point of initiation or origin in any one country. Thus, the economic imbalance between Canada and Mexico is countered by the reciprocity of the natural world, which insists on connections within the landmass of North America.

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The focus on the butterflies’ reproduction echoes the narratives of the Butler family history as well as the relationships of endogamy throughout the novel, forging connections between the natural and human worlds. But if the butterflies might be said to be equally “Canadian” and “Mexican,” as in Teo’s laying claim to them and their belonging to his country, Liz’s perspective continues to assert her own position as fixed, the Mexican position as mobile, in her explicit comparisons between the monarchs and the Mexican labourers. She describes her childhood sense of the butterflies “as something summer always brought to us, like our own fruit, or like strawberries or corn at roadside markets, or, for that matter, like the Mexicans” (10); of Teo specifically, she says, “it was as if [he] was born anew each summer, like the blossoms, like the fruit, and … like the butterflies” (157). Whereas the Mexican workers have also appeared to be mechanized, with some descriptions of their bodies positing that their only purpose is labour, the tying of seasonal work to the monarchs’ lifecycle implies a naturalization of migrant labour, at least from Liz’s childhood and adolescent perspectives. If, as an adult, Liz works “to tag the butterflies in order to follow the course of their migration” (10), the tagging both posits an origin in southern Ontario and attempts to account for the hemispheric lifecycle as a whole. Urquhart’s novel highlights both continental economics through the narratives of Teo, his mother, and the other Mexican labourers and exposes the gaps in her Anglo-Canadian narrator’s understanding of the labourers’ context and experiences. Liz does not, in Elias’s words to Callie, learn Teo’s language in order to understand his story, as she wonders about his life but does not ask him himself. Liz acknowledges her complicity in inhospitality to the seasonal labourers, an inhospitality that is not confined to herself or her family but extends towards the greater community and, arguably, to Canada as a whole, the nation that prides itself on providing sanctuary. Liz’s family’s economic privilege has allowed it to mistake hosts for guests in the treatment of Teo and to ignore the implications of importing human beings as cargo for the benefit of the Canadian economy. As Mireille Rosello writes, “if a nation invites immigrants because they are valuable assets, because it needs them for an economic or demographic purpose, that country is not being hospitable”;61 in Stanley’s case, his seasonal hiring practices as facilitated by S AW P are not only a temporary arrangement, hardly a permanent welcome, but are also all the more inhospitable if we consider the ways in which

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he “accommodates” his own son in the workers’ bunkhouses. To return to Wideload’s address to the Tarragon Theatre’s Anglo audience, Sanctuary Line puts pressure on the “gringo” perspective even as it chides the Canadian narrator and her family for failing to acknowledge the continental ties between their home and the seasonal workers’, to conceive of home in a larger, hemispheric sense. Borderline, Amigo’s Blue Guitar, Fronteras Americanas, and Sanctuary Line demonstrate a variety of ways in which Canada cannot be divorced from the Americas in geographical, political, or economic terms. Although Canada has been preoccupied throughout its history with its relationship to the United States, its “non-involvement in continental affairs” is somewhat of a myth, as another Verdecchia text, The Noam Chomsky Lectures (1991), written with Daniel Brooks, clearly illustrates: the fact that “Canadian aid to Chile actually increased during Pinochet’s rule,” the Canadian government’s approval of the invasion of Panama, and the “Canadian loans and Canadian arms” behind political assassinations in Guatemala all explode Canada’s sense of itself as guarantor of political justice in the Western hemisphere.62 The Noam Chomsky Lectures is, among other things, a testament to Canada’s “quiet … acquiescence” to US militarism and intervention,63 in the Americas and elsewhere. Canada may not be as wealthy, as powerful, as visible or as noisy as the United States, but it has certainly been complicit, even if quietly so. Acknowledging that a strong force behind such complicity is Canada’s relationship to its major trading “partner,” the economics that both underpin and are sustained by this relationship, and imbalance of  political power does not absolve Canada of its ethical failures. If Canada signed the Safe Third Country Agreement in the wake of 9/11, limiting its ability to offer sanctuary to refugees, the agreement had been “in the works since the 1980s”: “Contrary to the perception of Canada as a generous and humanitarian state, Canada has consistently attempted to minimize its obligations to refugees.”64 Thus, that the injustices of which Canada is guilty of perpetrating in the Americas have occurred alongside its offer of sanctuary to refugees and Vietnam draft resisters echoes the ruptures in Canadian hospitality encountered by those crossing not only the 49th parallel but also other thresholds in the Americas on their way to the Canada-US border. Whereas the four texts discussed in this chapter clearly demonstrate Canada’s multiple relations to the Americas, they also urge Canadians – some implicitly, some explicitly – to look beyond the

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49th parallel and to own up to the privileges of the host position in the north of the Americas. J.C.M. Ogelsby’s reference to Canadians as “gringos from the far North” dates back to 1976,65 yet likely comes as a surprise to an Anglo-Canadian audience confronted by Wideload McKennah two decades later. The appellation of “gringo” serves as a reminder to Canadians that their sense of disempowerment only operates legitimately in relation to the United States and that ignorance about other countries in the hemisphere is hardly the exclusive purview of US Americans. These texts acknowledge the nuances of economic, political, and cultural power as they are manifested at the 49th parallel at the same time as negotiations of power at other border sites in the Americas are brought to bear on Canada’s relationship to the United States. Americanness, these texts suggest, comes in many forms that tend to be eclipsed in Anglo-Canada’s perception. But “Verdecchia’s” articulation of américanité as an ­ “Argentin-Canadien” and the doubled Americano / gringo interpellation of an Anglo-Canadian audience encourage us to both embrace and brace ourselves for the continental identities that intersect not only with our spatial location in the hemisphere but also with its attendant privileges. In recent decades, Canada has “revealed values … closer to those of other rich, English-speaking countries than to those of struggling Latin American nations,” particularly where the government’s “advocacy of a neoconservative economic agenda” is concerned.66 “Here We Are,” Fronteras Americanas tells us, at the border, on the continent, and claiming our place, these texts indicate, not only involves accepting the invitation into the continental identity of Americanos but also owning up to our gringo privilege, power, and ignorance.

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Conclusion

What if the Canada-US border didn’t exist? This scenario is envisioned in the graphic novel usna : The United States of North America (2012), written by David Longworth, Harry Kalensky, and Allan Stanleigh, and illustrated by Dave Casey, based on an original screenplay by Longworth and Stanleigh. usna is a dystopian, speculative fiction in which the Canada-US border has disappeared following the “amalgamation” of the former countries of Canada and the United States, a decision based on the desire for “open access to natural resources and the free flow of labor” for the purposes of competing in the international marketplace and “a shared defense that would be less costly and more efficient.”1 The dystopic elements of usna include “the adoption of the old United States social model,” the domination of the economy by the military and the creation of a police state, and the near-complete corporatizing of food production, which also encompasses a vast “prison farm network” (29, 19). Meanwhile, war rages in Central America, and young people are drafted from usna to fight. Despite the promises of prosperity used to entice Canadians to consent to amalgamation, this prosperity has not materialized. A rebel movement has developed to fight back against usna and reinstate exiled Canadian prime minister Samuel Stern, a former political science professor at McGill who had previously warned that amalgamation “would lead to a more militarized society, and … a more aggressive military stance on the world stage” (91). If, prior to amalgamation, “the border has, in some ways, protected [Stern] from some of [his] more vocal and passionate opponents from down south” (90), the dissolution of the 49th parallel has resulted in his exile from North America altogether.

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usna thus depicts the end result of Manifest Destiny from a Canadian perspective, where Canadians’ everyday lives have become unrecognizable and dissent of any kind is forbidden. Civilians greet each other as “neighbor” (30), echoing the relationship of the former constituent nation-states of what is now the United States of North America. However, “neighbourliness” has been recoded by the state. Sara Ahmed argues that neighbourhoods are conceived of as spaces “where a sense of community arises from the simple fact of shared residence,” yet they also “become imagined as organic and pure spaces through the social perception of the danger posed by outsiders to moral and social health or well-being”; thus, “it is symptomatic … of the very nature of neighbourhood that it enters public discourse as a site of crisis.”2 In usn a, the surveillance state operates through “Neighborhood Patrol” (30), and billboards entreat citizens to put each other under surveillance: one reads, “be a g ood n e i ghb o r : i nf or mat i o n yo u p rov[i d e ] m ake s you eligi b l e [ f or ] $1,000,00[0]” (3). In the dystopia of u s n a, being a good neighbour does not mean generosity to one’s neighbour but, rather, suspicion of one’s neighbour. If, in Ahmed’s analysis, neighbourhoods function to distinguish between neighbours and threats posed by strangers, in u s n a , all neighbours are threatening, and the notion of organic community never arises, a reflection, ­perhaps, of what is deemed an artificial amalgamated nation. “Neighbours” in usna only have relationships to the state, not to each other. If previous chapters of Discrepant Parallels seek to underscore the multiple ways in which the Canadian nationalist perspective on the Canada-US border is complicated and subverted by different experiences of and positions on the 49th parallel, no such complications are imagined in usna . The Canadian rebels include key ethnicminority characters whose identities are entirely subsumed within a Canadian nationalist cause. Jean-Claude Boisvert defuses any possible anxieties about Quebec nationalism with his explicit self-­ identification as “a nationalist” and “a freedom fighter for Canada. Some of us, more than a few, want it back” (41). Boisvert eulogizes a lost Canada that was “one of the last nations to know the meaning of democracy and social justice,” promising that “we will regain our values as a people” (41). Just as usna writes out any possibility of Québécois resistance to Canada, so, too, are Indigenous challenges to the Canadian nation-state missing from its narrative. Not only is

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it reported that the Haida and Inuit contribute to the rebel movement through “disruption and sabotage of the Alaskan and BC coastal shipping lanes” and a “blockade [of] the North-West passage near Baffin Island” (188), respectively, but the Native character of Iron Bear, referring to the rebel’s leader Emmett O’Brien, asserts, “It will be an honour for our people to ride along side [sic] such a feared warrior” (126). Although Iron Bear’s nation is never identified, his invocation of Wakan Tanka (128) suggests he is Sioux. Thus, his incorporation into the Canadian resistance is doubly significant, given the Sioux are a border-straddling nation, yet Iron Bear operates to restore the Canada-US border. usna therefore projects a victimized Canada that is united in its opposition to the United States, devoid of any internal challenges to the Canadian nation-state that was. With the longest undefended border in the world having disappeared, all groups within what was Canada seek its restoration, without any acknowledgment of power imbalances within the Canadian nation-state or of the historical injustices it perpetrated. Canada thereby becomes a purified space at the same time as it no longer exists. Although amalgamation suggests a combination of Canadian and US American elements, as indicated by the usna flag that bears both stars and a partial maple leaf, it is clear that the relationship of “neighbours” between these nationstates has given way to a remaking of the new country in the United States’ image, as the depiction of Toronto high school students pledging allegiance to the amalgamated flag indicates (17). There is no more hostipitality in Canada-US relations because the Canadian host can no longer be usurped, given the demolition of this position. In this police state of usna, the relationship between the spectral constituent nation-states can only be one of hostility. That usna should project a Canada overwhelmed by military presence and para-military activity sidesteps contemporary realities in which the Canadian military is involved, which are far from the sharp demarcation of Canadian and US American values suggested by the graphic novel. In the case of Canada’s role in Afghanistan, the Canada-US border has been displaced and tested at a considerable remove from the 49th parallel itself, as is explored in Jane Urquhart’s Sanctuary Line, a novel that not only positions Canada in relation to the hemisphere but also focuses on Afghanistan and Canada in a post-9/11 context. Mandy, the narrator’s younger cousin, appears only through Liz’s memories of their summers together and her

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recollections of visits and conversations following Mandy’s entering the military; she is dead by the time Liz’s narration begins, killed by an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan. On one level, Mandy, the product of an American mother and a Canadian father, consolidates the novel’s alignment of Canada and the United States as  she  participates in the countries’ shared military objectives in Afghanistan. On another level, the ways in which the novel traces Mandy’s engagement with the military both seek to distinguish the Canadianness of this engagement and perhaps prove insufficient to carving real differences between Canada and its southern neighbour, not just in relation to the hemisphere but also in relation to ­majority-world sites elsewhere. The novel emphasizes peacekeeping as central to Mandy’s military ambitions. As part of her preparation for Royal Military College, Mandy works with search and rescue efforts on the Great Lakes, an early sign of her associating the military with positive and productive contributions to society.3 Later, at the end of the novel, Liz discovers that a desire to participate in peacekeeping drew Mandy and her secret lover, Vahil, to each other (255, 256). Despite the cooperation of Canada and the US in Afghanistan, the novel’s focus on the peacekeeping ambitions of Mandy, the soldier we know best in the novel, appears to mark Canada-US difference as the novel includes in a list of examples of “how frail each life is” an instance of “an American bomb striking a Middle Eastern city” (242), foregrounding US military aggression in contrast to Canada’s peacekeeping efforts. However, the novel invokes the confusion of the Canadian public, particularly at the beginning of the Afghanistan mission, surrounding the nature of Canada’s participation in the US-led coalition’s efforts. As Karsten Jung writes, “despite an initial reluctance in the  public debate to acknowledge this fact, i saf [International Stabilization Assistance Force] is not peacekeeping in the traditional sense.”4 Indeed, in Canadian discourse surrounding the Afghanistan mission, the phrase “peacekeeping” became supplanted by “peacebuilding” and “peacemaking,” contributing to a “conflicted terminology” that “conflat[es] war and peace.”5 While peacekeeping, a  “primarily passive role,” “ensures the maintenance of ceasefires and peace agreements,” the “more pro-active” peacebuilding encompasses “post-conflict reconstruction of civil society and state institutions,” which might include “the disarmament of belligerents and

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support for rebuilding economic, social and political structures in a war-torn state”; peacemaking, however, “refers to a military action that is robust and intense. It generates conflict and combat until such time as there is a military resolution.”6 As George Melynk notes, peacemaking, not peacekeeping, “has been used as a descriptor of Canada’s role in Afghanistan.”7 Although Urquhart’s novel does not engage explicitly with the differences between peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and peacemaking, the shift from Mandy’s youthful desire to join the military in order to become a peacekeeper to her “journey into the chaos of a desert war so debatable in its intentions” (196) echoes the disorientation of the Canadian public in its understanding of Canada’s military purpose in Afghanistan, in particular, and the ethos of the Canadian military, in general. Indeed, as late as 2006, as Patricia Molloy points out, “some 70 percent of Canadians thought that the mission was a peacekeeping effort.”8 If we return to Kant’s insistence that guests must be treated hospitably “so long as [they] behav[e] in a peaceable manner in the place [they] happe[n] to be in,”9 it is clear that peacemaking is not peaceable in itself, and Canadian forces in Afghanistan cannot, according to Kant’s terms, expect hospitality. Mandy is a great lover of books, and, given Sanctuary Line’s publication in 2010, nearly a decade into Canada’s military presence in Afghanistan, we can appreciate that the teenaged Mandy’s reading of Conrad’s Lord Jim, “a book about the poison of ambition and invasion and colonization” (176), suggests a considerable disjunction between her expectation of the Canadian military’s purpose and the reality she will encounter in Afghanistan. In his discussion of the “erosion of Canadian independence and difference from the United States” after 9/11, Kent Roach includes Canada’s “commitment to international law and internal peacekeeping” as casualties of post9/11 relations between Canada and the US.10 As Sherene H. Razack’s study of Canadian peacekeeping indicates, however, despite the “everyday national mythologies about Canada as a kinder, gentler nation – mythologies enacted in peacekeeping,” in its structures and its common eruptions into racist violence, peacekeeping is not as far from the targets of Lord Jim’s critique (as Sanctuary Line presents it) as Canadians would like to believe, for even “modern peacekeeping is constructed as a colour line with civilized white nations standing on one side and uncivilized Third World nations standing on the other.”11 With particular reference to the Somalia Affair, Razack

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observes that “the pursuit of racial dominance … intimately structured the peacekeeping encounter,” with the “violence directed against bodies of colour becom[ing] normalized as a necessary part of the civilizing process.”12 Razack’s analysis of the racism inherent in the structure of peacekeeping unsettles those “everyday national mythologies” cherished by Canadians while also demonstrating those mythologies’ collusion with that systemic racism: “A Canadian today knows herself or himself as someone who comes from the nicest place on earth, as someone from a peacekeeping nation, and as a modest, self-deprecating individual who is able to gently teach Third World Others about civility.”13 In the context of the Canadian peacekeeper sent to other countries to provide assistance, the assumption that Canadians occupy the position of “gently teaching” majorityworld peoples about civility betrays an arrogance that undermines hospitable relations; but then, the extent to which the peacekeeper can be considered welcome by the country apparently waiting to be taught civility must also be questioned. Although Sanctuary Line does not probe the assumptions behind peacekeeping, in its construction of the Canadian military figure as hopeful peacekeeper whose desire to do good on the world stage is frustrated by the dubious justifications for the Afghanistan mission, the novel encapsulates the contradictions of attempts to value Canadianness for its privileging of justice, at home and elsewhere. Alongside Canadian confusion and ambivalence surrounding the Afghanistan mission and the purpose of the Canadian military, the novel also invokes the US-Canada violence that has unfolded in Afghanistan, for “poor Mandy … would never fully recover from the ‘friendly fire’ that had dropped from an American war plane on a platoon of recently arrived Canadian troops in Afghanistan, killing six of her colleagues” (81). The term “friendly fire” and the alternative “fratricide” for the accidental killing of Canadian soldiers by US forces each articulates a close relationship between the two countries and their military objectives and personnel,14 with “fratricide” both positing a closer relationship of family (much like the Butlers in Sanctuary Line), rather than friendship, and underscoring the extent of lethal violence in a way that “fire” does not. But “friendly fire” in particular indicates a violent Canada-US hostipitality, one “friend” killing the other, albeit accidentally. The fact of the United States’ greater military power highlights US dominance over Canada, despite the accidental nature of the killings, even far away from the

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49th parallel in a conflict in which, unlike the War of 1812, we are supposed to be on the same side. The Afghanistan mission demonstrates the slippages between the desire to distinguish Canadianness from Americanness, in this case through a sense of Canada’s peacekeeping tradition (which, as Razack notes, requires constant “reinstall[ation] of our innocence” when acts of Canadian peacekeeping violence are exposed);15 the erosion of Canada-US distinction detected by the Canadian public through the Canadian military’s engagement in peacemaking rather than peacekeeping; and the sense of our being on the same side as the United States while also struggling to maintain an idea of the Canadian military project as different from its American counterpart, as is attested to by the Canadian cultural investment in Canada’s not having joined the Iraq War (an investment that itself ignores the fact that “Canada was indirectly providing more support for the US in Iraq than most of the members of the ‘coalition of the willing’”).16 In the dominant Anglo-Canadian imaginary, the Afghanistan mission becomes a site of struggle, for the border between Canadianness and Americanness as legible identities infused with national values blurs, and the cultural currency of the 49th parallel as marker of distinction becomes tested in a distant geopolitical location. If usna ’s projection of Canadian resistance to amalgamation into the United States of North America obscures the actual role played in recent years by the Canadian military in Afghanistan, we might read the graphic novel’s speculative fiction as responding to contemporary trends in the Canadian political sphere. As Stephen Harper’s Conservative government continues to move Canadian politics further to the right, it is tempting to view this redefinition of Canadian values as attempting to erase meaningful distinctions between Canada and the United States, particularly with respect to enthralment to the free market, social conservatism, and the increasing belligerence of the military. Further, if James Laxer in 2003 identified concern for the environment as a key distinction between Canada and the United States,17 such examples as the prominence of the Alberta tar sands in the Canadian economy, the controversy over proposed pipelines to deliver oil to the United States and China, and (omnibus) Bill C-45’s weakening of environmental protection, which prompted the development of the Idle No More movement, further erode Canada’s reputation for being more environmentally conscious than the United States.

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But the Conservatives’ concerted attempt to remake Canadianness is perhaps most clearly encapsulated in the government’s rewriting of the guide entitled Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship to place more emphasis on Canada’s colonial ties to B ­ ritain and on Canada’s military history. This guide is intended to educate new Canadians, ostensibly hospitably welcomed across the border into the body politic (joining the “generations of newcomers” that Canada has “welcomed … to our shores”),18 about what it means to be Canadian. Discover Canada prompted the production of an alternative guide, People’s Citizenship Guide: A Response to Conservative Canada, which criticizes “the current government’s attempt to create a more militarized Canadian society, even as it embraces the economic and social agenda of the new right.”19 But even as Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan, and “the extent of government and media propaganda for the war[,] may have caused a fundamental shift in Canadian values,”20 many of the texts Discrepant Parallels studies demonstrates that those values that have been promoted by the dominant Anglo-Canadian national imaginary as constitutive of Canadianness have been undermined throughout Canada’s history. While Anglo-­nationalism, as portrayed in usna , might point to the border as guarantor of the nation’s justice and hospitality, protector of ­Canada’s inherent sense of equality and desire for social harmony, many border texts also identify the border as an imperial scar on the landscape of the continent, a site where the policing of racialized b ­ odies constitutes an ethical failure, making impossible the hospitable welcome within the nation, an alibi for the nation-state’s privilege and power in relation to the vast majority of countries in the Western hemisphere. Defending the border has long been considered symbolic in Canada, an attempt to safeguard not just Canadian sovereignty as it might be generally conceived but also such particular elements of Canadian society as the welfare state, universal health care, and government support for state broadcasting and the arts, all of which have suffered – and not just under Conservative governments – in recent decades. However, just as the border never guaranteed Canada’s functioning as a just society, so defending the border is not merely a symbolic act, and never has been, as the policing of those rendered Other at and through the nation’s threshold has attested throughout Canada’s history. In the twenty-first century, nation-state borders have weakened in  some respects and been reinforced in others. In the midst of

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nation-state concerns about security, what continues to cross nationstate borders with the greatest ease, of course, are information and capital. As David McFadden implies in his anecdote about the Hamilton McDonald’s addressing customers as Americans, and as Bryce Traister argues in the context of Canada-US border shopping, the consumer “is first and foremost construed as an ‘American’ subject, whether or not she’s wearing an American flag or a Canadian maple leaf on her new denim jacket. The ‘global citizen’ of a postnationalist imaginary similarly conjures a subject born of Americanstyle privilege.”21 If the border has simultaneously afforded Canadian citizens (when the Canadian dollar’s value is high) more purchasing power across the 49th parallel and figured as the politically symbolic safeguard of Canada’s public institutions, “These days, what ultimately matters to first-world consumers is retail, and … the desire for national affiliation and difference has come to be associated with the idea that trade protectionism of any sort, and the desire for national self-interest such measures have in the past tried to satisfy, have become an expense ‘the people’ can simply no longer afford. The discourse of national identity in Canada that organizes itself around a public welfare state thus emerges as the foe to be slain by the new universal consumer.”22 Even the flows of transnational capital, therefore, reinscribe Americanness as the default subject position, evacuating national difference. The national differences that have been considered constitutive of Canadianness by those who have valued those differences – namely, the welfare state and public institutions – are not essential national characteristics but state-funded programs that would not, and that will cease to, exist without that funding. The distinction between state and nation has been collapsed in popular nationalist discourse, as though Canadians simply, and naturally, care more for their fellow citizens, with universal health care offered as the evidence for national solidarity found lacking in the country to the south that privileges low taxation and individualism. As the Harper government seeks to lower taxes and gut public institutions, the struggle over what Canadianness means escalates, and it is not simply US power that is to blame but also those in power in Canada, and the voters who put them there. It is unclear how long Canada’s cherished mythologies about its equality, justice, and hospitality will persist, although it is clear that Harper’s government does not speak for all Canadians. But if those

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who dissent from Harper’s agenda wish to see a reinstatement of values that will make Canadianness meaningful and distinct, they must not simply seek a return to a pre-Harper Canada but must also own up to the injustices of the nation-state, at its threshold and within. In recognizing the Canada-US border as the primary site of Canada’s overlapping relationships to colonialism, postcolonialism, and neocolonialism, we must not only consider the border’s potential to “serve the useful purpose of containing the United States within the limits of its own boundaries and of forcing the expanding and increasingly corporate US imperialism to stand in the light of recognition” but also,23 as the Idle No More movement reminds us, hold Canada itself to account for its colonial history and failure to de-colonize, for its history of racism and the persistence of racism that the historical offers of sanctuary to some racialized subjects must not eclipse, and for its economic and political privilege relative to the vast majority of countries with which it co-exists in the Western hemisphere. Meaningful distinctions between Canada and the United States cannot come from a flattening of differences between communities north of the 49th parallel, as envisioned by usna , in which everyone’s interests are presumed to be aligned with and subsumed within those of the dominant culture. Canada must stand in the light of recognition in order to become meaningfully different – for citizens within its territory, for those who seek to reject or revise the status of citizen in this nation-state, for refugees or temporary labourers seeking passage across the nation-state’s threshold into the rights of citizenship, and for those citizens of other nations who may not welcome Canadian military presence within their borders – if the 49th parallel is truly to become the doorway to the just, hospitable space Canadian mythology declares it to be.

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Notes

introduction

  1 The description of the Canada-US border as the longest undefended border in the world has become commonplace, but, as Marian Botsford Fraser notes, the border’s reputation as an “undefended border” stems from the terms of the Rush-Bagot Agreement (1817), although rather than “completely disarm[ing] the border[,] it actually guaranteed only the balance of naval power” on the Great Lakes (Walking the Line [Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1989], 80).  2 Highway 61, directed by Bruce McDonald (Toronto: Video Services Corp., 2005 [1991]), DVD.   3 Douglas Ivison, “‘I Too Am a Canadian’: John Richardson’s The Canadian Brothers as Postcolonial Narrative,” in Is Canada Postcolonial? Unsettling Canadian Literature, ed. Laura Moss (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2003), 169.   4 John Richardson, The Canadian Brothers: or The Prophecy Fulfilled (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1992 [1840]), 47.   5 Ibid., 49, 49–50, 190.   6 Ibid., 170.   7 Daniel Coleman, White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 63.   8 Jody Berland, “Writing the Border,” in Canadian Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. Sourayan Mookerjea, Imre Szeman, and Gail Faurschou (Durham, N C: Duke University Press, 2009), 473.   9 As Ian Angus notes, “The coalition against the fta (at least in English Canada) pulled together in opposition the forces of left-nationalism and many other social groups, such as feminism (nac), unions, cultural workers,

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and so forth” (A Border Within: National Identity, Cultural Identity, and Wilderness [Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997], 224). Frank Davey, however, points out that there was no consensus among cultural workers regarding the impact the fta would have on Canadian ­culture, with anti- and pro-fta statements by groups of writers and artists published in the Globe and Mail “on the eve of the 1988 federal election” (Post-National Arguments: The Politics of the Anglophone-Canadian Novel since 1967 [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993], 10). 10 Angus, A Border Within, 127. 11 Ibid. 12 Claudia Sadowski-Smith, “Introduction: Border Studies, Diaspora, and Theories of Globalization,” in Globalization on the Line: Culture, Capital, and Citizenship at US Borders, ed. Claudia Sadowski-Smith (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 8. 13 Lorraine Code, “How to Think Globally: Stretching the Limits of Imagination,” Hypatia 13, 2 (1998): 82. Thoughout volume, unless otherwise stated, emphases appear in the original. 14 Ibid. 15 David Staines, “Introduction: Canada Observed,” in The Canadian Imagination: Dimensions of a Literary Culture, ed. David Staines (Cambridge, M A: Harvard University Press, 1977), 2. 16 Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 105. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 106. 19 Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 25. 20 Ibid., 53–5. 21 Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality,” Angelaki 5, 3 (2000): 4. 22 Berland, “Writing the Border,” 476. 23 George Grant, Technology and Empire (Concord, ON: Anansi, 1969), 73. 24 Derrida, “Hostipitality,” 3. 25 Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000), 21. 26 Ibid., 101. 27 Eli Mandel, “The Border League: American ‘West’ and Canadian ‘Region,”’ in Crossing Frontiers, ed. Dick Harrison (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1979), 105.

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28 Angus, Border Within, 47. 29 Robert Schwartzwald, “an / other Canada. another Canada? other Canadas,” Massachusetts Review 31, 1–2 (1990): 18. 30 Georges Erasmus and Joe Sanders, “Canadian History: An Aboriginal Perspective,” in Nation to Nation: Aboriginal Sovereignty and the Future of Canada, ed. John Bird, Lorraine Land, and Murray MacAdam, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Irwin, 2002), 3. 31 Quoted in Michael Murphy, “Civilization, Self-Determination, and Reconciliation,” in First Nations, First Thoughts, ed. Annis May Timpson (­Vancouver: ubc Press, 2009), 256; David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 28. 32 Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” 106. 33 Judith Still, Enlightenment Hospitality: Cannibals, Harems and Adoption (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2011), 43. 34 Rauna Kuokkanen, Reshaping the University: Responsibility, Indigenous Epistemes, and the Logic of the Gift (Vancouver: ub c Press, 2007), 129. As David Murray notes of the uneven transactions between European ­colonizers and Indigenous peoples, “Jacques Cartier’s first encounter,” for instance, “involves exchanges that strip the Indians of everything. ‘They gave us whatsoever they had, not keeping any thing, that they were constrained to go back againe naked’” (Indian Giving: Economies of Power in Indian-White Exchanges [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000], 24). 35 Donald J. Grinde Jr, “Iroquois Border Crossings: Place, Politics, and the Jay Treaty,” in Sadowski-Smith, Globalization on the Line, 169. 36 Mireille Rosello, Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 6. 37 Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 95. 38 Canada, Canadian Multiculturalism Act, R.S.C., 1985, c. 24 (4th Supp.), 3. Online at http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/PDF/C-18.7.pdf (viewed 12 August 2013). 39 Rosello, Postcolonial Hospitality, 11. 40 Patricia Molloy, Canada / US and Other Unfriendly Relations: Before and After 9/11 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 2. 41 Rosello, Postcolonial Hospitality, 17. 42 Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 100; Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 86. 43 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987), 3.

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44 As Victor Konrad and Heather N. Nicol note, however: “On the ground a new ‘secure border’ has replaced the benign, ambiguous, mythical, yet comforting ‘longest undefended border in the world.’ Added to the now familiar security features of high technology surveillance and processing, more border guards, and bigger and more complex crossing apparatus, are arming the border. While US border staff carry arms routinely, Canadian border officials have not, until now” (Beyond Walls: Re-Inventing the Canada-United States Borderlands [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008], 161). 45 W.H. New, Borderlands: How We Talk about Canada (Vancouver: ub c Press, 1998), 35. 46 Kent Roach, September 11: Consequences for Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 166. 47 Ibid., 143. 48 Davey, Post-National Arguments, 259. 49 Angus, Border Within, 42. 50 Davey, Post-National Arguments, 265. 51 Jennifer Andrews and Priscilla L. Walton, “Rethinking Canadian and American Nationality: Indigeneity and the 49th Parallel in Thomas King,” American Literary History 18, 3 (2006): 601. 52 See, for instance, Gregory S. Jay, “The End of ‘American’ Literature: Toward a Multicultural Practice,” College English 53 (1991): 264–81; John Carlos Rowe, ed., Post-Nationalist American Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman, eds., The Futures of American Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); John Carlos Rowe, ed., The New American Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine, eds., Hemispheric American Studies (New Brunswick, N J: Rutgers University Press, 2008); Winfried Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe, eds., Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies (Hanover, N H: Dartmouth College Press, 2011). 53 John Carlos Rowe, “Post-Nationalism, Globalism, and the New American Studies,” in Rowe, Post-Nationalist American Studies, 25. 54 Ibid. 55 Bryce Traister, “Border Shopping: American Studies and the Anti-Nation,” in Sadowski-Smith, Globalization on the Line, 46. 56 Winfried Siemerling and Sarah Phillips Casteel, “Introduction: Canada and Its Americas,” in Canada and Its Americas: Transnational Navigations, ed. Winfried Siemerling and Sarah Phillips Casteel (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 9. 57 Ibid.

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58 Traister, “Border Shopping,” 47. 59 Herb Wyile, “Hemispheric Studies or Scholarly na fta? The Case for Canadian Literary Studies,” in Siemerling and Casteel, Canada and Its Americas, 59. 60 Siemerling and Casteel, “Introduction,” 8. 61 Claudia Sadowski-Smith and Claire F. Fox, “Theorizing the Hemisphere: Inter-Americas Work at the Intersection of American, Canadian, and Latin American Studies,” Comparative American Studies 2, 1 (2004): 7. 62 A similar concern about the expanded American Studies project has emerged from a Latin American Studies perspective. As Robert McKee Irwin argues: “Mexican and Spanish-language scholarship is routinely rendered invisible by American studies scholarship, even that which exhibits the best intentions of inclusiveness. Postnationalist American studies may indeed promote the US-Mexico borderlands as a major center of intellectual inquiry, but it is a center skewed ever northward that still firmly maintains an apparently impenetrable intellectual wall at its Mexican edge” (Bandits, Captives, Heroines, and Saints: Cultural Icons of Mexico’s Northwest Borderlands [Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2007], 9). 63 Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Border Fictions: Globalization, Empire, and Writing at the Boundaries of the United States (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 119. 64 Rachel Adams, “The Northern Borderlands and Latino Canadian Diaspora,” in Levander and Levine, Hemispheric American Studies, 315, 325. 65 Rachel Adams and Sarah Phillips Casteel, “Introduction: Canada and the Americas,” Comparative American Studies 3, 1 (2005): 8. 66 Bryce Traister, “Border Shopping,” 34. 67 Gérard Bouchard and Yvan Lamonde, “Introduction,” in Québécois et Américains: La culture québécoise aux XIXe et XXe siècles, ed. Gérard Bouchard and Yvan Lamonde (Montréal: Fides, 1995), 8; Yvan Lamonde, “L’ambivalence historique du Québec a l’égard de sa continentalité: Circonstances, raisons et signification,” in Bouchard and Lamonde, Québécois et Américains, 81; Bouchard and Lamonde, “Introduction,” 11. 68 Coleman, White Civility. 69 Rinaldo Walcott, Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2003), 33. 70 Siemerling and Casteel, “Introduction,” 8. 71 Quoted in Luiza Ch. Savage, “Updated: Obama Proposes Travel Fee for Canada,” Maclean’s 16 February 2011, available at http://www2. macleans.ca/2011/02/16/obama-proposes-travel-fee-for-canada/.

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chapter one

  1 Anna Jameson, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (London: Saunders and Otley, 1838), 3:173.   2 Ibid., 20.  3 Jameson, Winter Studies, 2:80.   4 Marian Botsford Fraser, Walking the Line: Travels along the American / Canadian Border (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1989), 7.   5 Ibid., 205.   6 James Laxer, The Border: Canada, the US and Dispatches from the 49th Parallel (Toronto: Doubleday, 2003), 274.   7 Ibid., 86, 42.   8 Daniel Coleman, White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006).   9 Ibid., 11. 10 See Eva Mackey, The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada (London: Routledge, 1999), 13. 11 Wayne Grady, The Great Lakes: The Natural History of a Changing Region (Vancouver: Greystone, 2007), 33. 12 David R. Smith, “Structuring the Permeable Border: Channeling and Regulating Cross-Border Traffic in Labor, Capital, and Goods,” in Permeable Border: The Great Lakes Basin as Transnational Region, 1650– 1990, ed. John J. Bukowczyk, Nora Faires, David R. Smith, and Randy William Widdis (Pittsburgh / Calgary: University of Pittsburgh Press / University of Calgary Press, 2005), 149. 13 Laxer, Border, 7. 14 Fraser, Walking the Line, 69. Further, as Phil Bellfy points out, paying particular attention to the example of islands in the St Mary’s River, “lines drawn upon the water can never be firmly established, as water erodes some shores, wind and sand build up others, and rising and falling water levels can dramatically change where the middle of the channel falls” (“The Anishnaabeg of Bawating: Indigenous People Look at the Canada-US Border,” in Beyond the Border: Tensions across the FortyNinth Parallel in the Great Plains and Prairies, ed. Kyle Conway and Timothy Pasch [Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013], 206). 15 Laurie Ricou, The Arbutus / Madrone Files: Reading the Pacific Northwest (Edmonton: NeWest, 2002), 23. 16 David W. McFadden, Great Lakes Suite (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1997), 192, 17, 32. All further references to this text appear in parentheses.

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17 The separation of author, character, and voice in this text is a slippery one, as Brian Fawcett identifies in his reference to the experiences of “McFadden – or McFadden’s protagonist” (“McFadden’s Dilemma,” Books in Canada [March 1987], 3). The fact that the narrator / protagonist is a persona of the author in a fictionalized text of the author’s experience complicates the matter. I have tried to clarify to whom I am referring by using “McFadden” with respect to his authorial role of writing and of selection, and “the narrator” with respect to experiences and opinions as they are represented within the text. 18 Steve Clark, “Introduction,” in Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit, ed. Steve Clark (London: Zed, 1999), 1. 19 Kristi Siegel, “Introduction: Travel Writing and Travel Theory,” in Issues in Travel Writing: Empire, Spectacle, and Displacement, ed. Kristi Siegel (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 4; David McFarlane, Review of A Trip around Lake Erie and A Trip around Lake Huron, Books in Canada (August–September 1981), 29. 20 Alison Russell, Crossing Boundaries: Postmodern Travel Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 5. 21 Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), viii. 22 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 4. 23 Ibid. 24 Coleman, White Civility, 210, 25; Laura Moss, “Is Canada Postcolonial? Introducing the Question,” in Is Canada Postcolonial? Unsettling Canadian Literature, ed. Laura Moss (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2003), 2. 25 Ian Angus, A Border Within: National Identity, Cultural Plurality, and Wilderness (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 113. 26 Coleman, White Civility, 171. 27 Ricou, Arbutus / Madrone Files, 206. 28 Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001), 14. 29 Roger Célestin, From Cannibals to Radicals: Figures and Limits of Exoticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 17. 30 Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism and Exoticism in French Thought, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 265.

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31 Huggan, Postcolonial Exotic, 13. 32 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in PostColonial Studies (London: Routledge, 1998), 94. 33 Michael Kowalewski, “Introduction: The Modern Literature of Travel,” in Temperamental Journeys: Essays on the Modern Literature of Travel, ed. Michael Kowalewski (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 9–10. 34 Ibid., 10. 35 For recent statistics regarding obesity in Canada and the United States, see Margot Shields, Margaret D. Carroll, and Cynthia L. Ogden, “Adult Obesity Prevalence in Canada and the United States,” nhc s Data Brief 56 (March 2011). Available at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db56. pdf. Although the prevalence of adult obesity is lower in Canada than in the United States, obesity rates have been increasing in both countries since the 1980s. 36 Claudia Sadowski-Smith, “Introduction: Border Studies, Diaspora, and Theories of Globalization,” in Globalization on the Line: Culture, Capital, and Citizenship at US Borders, ed. Claudia Sadowski-Smith (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 8. 37 David McFadden, A Trip around Lake Erie (Toronto: Coach House, 1980), 113. 38 Angus, Border Within, 113. 39 Mackey, House of Difference, 32. 40 Holland and Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters, 16. 41 Bryce Traister examines the similar, more recent example of “‘Wal-Mart Canada,’ which has festooned its stores with maple leaves in order to fool Canadians into believing that the stores’ corporate interests coincide with its customer’s [sic] presumed national identifications” (“Risking Nationalism: n afta and the Limits of the New American Studies,” Canadian Review of American Studies 27, 1 [1997]: 203). 42 David Staines, “Introduction: Canada Observed,” in The Canadian Imagination: Dimensions of a Literary Culture, ed. David Staines (Cambridge, M A: Harvard University Press, 1977), 2. 43 Holland and Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters, 7. 44 Dennis Lee, “Cadence, Country, Silence: Writing in Colonial Space,” in Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism, ed. Cynthia Sugars (Peterborough, ON: Broadview 2004), 45. 45 Ibid., 46, 54. 46 Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (London: Virago, 1979 [1972]), 66.

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47 Kit Dobson, Transnational Canadas: Anglo-Canadian Literature and Globalization (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009), 30. 48 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987), 3. 49 John J. Bukowczyk, “The Production of History, the Becoming of Place,” in Bukowczyk, et al., Permeable Border, 3. 50 Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality,” Angelaki 5, 3 (2000): 4, 6. 51 Ibid., 6. 52 Traister, “Risking Nationalism,” 201. 53 Derrida, “Hostipitality,” 14. 54 Karl S. Hele, “The Anishinabeg and Métis in the Sault Ste Marie Borderlands: Confronting a Line Drawn upon the Water,” in Lines Drawn upon the Water: The First Nations Experience in the Great Lakes’ Borderlands, ed. Karl S. Hele (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008), 67. 55 Donald A. Grinde Jr, “Iroquois Border Crossings: Place, Politics, and the Jay Treaty,” in Sadowski-Smith, Globalization on the Line, 178. 56 Dennis Lee, “Civil Elegies,” in Civil Elegies and Other Poems (Toronto: Anansi, 1994), 27. 57 McFadden, Trip around Lake Erie, 52. 58 Karl S. Kele, “Introduction,” in Hele, Lines Drawn, xiii–xiv. 59 Derrida, “Hostipitality,” 14. 60 Ibid. 61 Nick Mount, When Canadian Literature Moved to New York (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 150. 62 However, the radical decline in Detroit’s fortunes in recent years might temper its status as a symbol of US power over Canada, despite the city’s proximity to Windsor and the fact that “our two cultures eyeball one another across the Detroit River as we do nowhere else along the border” (Fraser, Walking the Line, 97). 63 Marshall McLuhan, “Canada: The Borderline Case,” in Staines, Canadian Imagination, 247. 64 Ibid., 246, 247. 65 Stephen Clarkson, Uncle Sam and Us: Globalization, Neoconservatism, and the Canadian State (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 366. 66 Charles Acland, “Popular Film in Canada: Revisiting the Absent Audience,” in A Passion for Identity: An Introduction to Canadian Studies, ed. David Taras and Beverly Rasporich, 3rd ed. (Toronto: Nelson, 1997), 276; Clarkson, Uncle Sam, 362.

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67 Clarkson, Uncle Sam, 366–7. 68 Ibid., 367. See Clarkson, Uncle Sam, 367–77 for case studies of cultural free trade battles between Canada and the United States, specifically related to television and magazine publication. 69 Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (London: Routledge, 1994), 25. 70 Ibid. 71 Holland and Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters, 46. 72 Linda Hutcheon, As Canadian As … Possible … Under the Circumstances! (Toronto: York University and ECW , 1990), 25. 73 Victor Turner, Blazing the Trail: Way Marks in the Exploration of Symbols (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992), 49. 74 Jennifer Andrews, “Humouring the Border at the End of the Millennium: Constructing an English Canadian Humour Tradition for the Twentieth Century and Beyond,” Essays on Canadian Writing 71 (2000): 141. 75 Linda Hutcheon, “Introduction,” in Double-Talking: Essays on Verbal and Visual Ironies in Contemporary Canadian Art and Literature, ed. Linda Hutcheon (Toronto: ECW, 1992), 25. 76 Ibid. 77 D.C. Muecke, The Compass of Irony (London: Methuen, 1969), 61. 78 Ibid., 99–100; D.C. Muecke, Irony and the Ironic. 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1982), 37. 79 Coleman, White Civility, 7. 80 Mackey, House of Difference, 70. 81 The gift shop’s name, The Call of the Wild, adds an additional element of cross-border irony, of course, given it is the title of the American author Jack London’s 1903 novel set in the Yukon. 82 Hutcheon, As Canadian As, 20. 83 Robert Kroetsch, The Lovely Treachery of Words (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989), 55. 84 Ibid. 85 Atwood, Surfacing, 128. 86 Susan Purdie, Comedy: The Mastery of Discourse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 5. 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid., 129, 59. 89 Muecke, Compass of Irony, 20. 90 Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 28. 91 Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, 18.

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 92 Ibid.   93 Ibid., 89.   94 Vander Zalm was the Social Credit premier of British Columbia from 1986 to 1991 who resigned from his position due to an investment-related scandal involving the Fantasy Gardens theme park in Richmond, B C.   95 Jennifer Andrews, In the Belly of a Laughing God: Humour and Irony in Native Women’s Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 18.  96 Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, 5.   97 Richard Cavell, “Introduction: The Cultural Production of Canada’s Cold War,” in Love, Hate, and Fear in Canada’s Cold War, ed. Richard Cavell (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 17.   98 Reg Whitaker, “‘We Know They’re There’: Canada and Its Others,” in Cavell, Love, Hate, and Fear, 39. As Whitaker and Gary Marcuse note of Canada’s National Film Board, “Under the rhetoric of anti-Communism and absurd charges of ‘espionage,’ ‘sabotage,’ and ‘subversion,’ a purge was carried out” (Cold War Canada: The Making of a National Insecurity State, 1945–1957 [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994], 229).   99 Melissa S. Williams, “Toleration, Canadian-Style: Reflections of a YankeeCanadian,” in Canadian Political Philosophy: Contemporary Reflections, ed. Ronald Beiner and Wayne Norman (Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2001), 216. 100 George Bowering, At War with the US (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1974), 1. 101 Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1948), 78. 102 Clarkson, Uncle Sam, 381. 103 Ibid. 104 Michael Tucker, Canadian Foreign Policy: Contemporary Issues and Themes (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1980), 80. 105 William M. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977–1992 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), xi. 106 McFadden does not mention the small number of Canadians who volunteered to fight with the Americans in Vietnam. 107 Patricia Molloy, Canada / US and Other Unfriendly Relations: Before and After 9/11 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 109. 108 LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard, 6. 109 Lynette Hunter, Outsider Notes: Feminist Approaches to Nation State Ideology, Writers / Readers and Publishers (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1996), 113. 110 James Doyle, North of America: Images of Canada in the Literature of the United States, 1775–1900 (Toronto: ecw, 1983), 149.

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111 Mackey, House of Difference, 24. 112 Coleman, White Civility, 8. 113 Ibid., 212. 114 Ibid., 239. 115 Mackey, House of Difference, 12. 116 Coleman, White Civility, 221. 117 Angus, Border Within, 20. 118 Ibid., 127. 119 Bowering, At War, 18. c h a p t e r t wo

   1 Robert Storey, “Can the RCM P Really Licence Its Image to Disney?,” Globe and Mail, 6 July 1995. Canadian Periodicals Index Quarterly.    2 “So Long, Dudley,” Globe and Mail, 30 June 1995. Canadian Periodicals Index Quarterly.   3 Keith Walden, Visions of Order (Toronto: Butterworths, 1982), 3.    4 As Michael Dawson notes, “Since the inception of the North-West Mounted Police in 1873, the image of the Force has been used by Canadians and non-Canadians alike. Mountie novels, especially prominent from the 1880s until the 1920s, were written by American, British, and Canadian authors. Hollywood dominated the Mountie movie industry form the 1930s to the 1950s. Throughout the twentieth century US as well as Canadian companies enlisted the Mountie image for commercial purposes” (The Mountie from Dime Novel to Disney [Toronto: Between the Lines, 1998], 3).    5 “So Long, Dudley.”   6 Ibid.    7 “Disney Wins Right to Market Mounties: Force Trying to Make Money, Control Spread of Red-Tunic Schlock,” Globe and Mail, 28 June 1995. Canadian Periodicals Index Quarterly.   8 Ibid.   9 Walden, Visions of Order, 1.   10 Ibid., 2.   11 Sarah A. Matheson, “Television, Nation and National Security: The c b c’s The Border,” in Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada-US Border, ed. Gillian Roberts and David Stirrup (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013), 61–2.   12 George Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1970), 70.

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13 Michael Dorland and Maurice Charland, Law, Rhetoric, and Irony in the Formation of Canadian Civil Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 32. 14 Jennifer Welsh, At Home in the World: Canada’s Global Vision for the 21st Century (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2004), 24. 15 Jason Ackleson, “From ‘Thin’ to ‘Thick’ (and Back Again?): The Politics and Policies of the Contemporary US-Canada Border,” American Review of Canadian Studies 39, 4 (2009): 340; Welsh, At Home in the World, 74. 16 Bordertown, “In Cold Blood,” episode 12, season 3 (La Crosse, WI: Platinum Disc, 2004), dvd. 17 Bordertown, “Medicine Woman,” episode 3, season 1 (La Crosse, WI: Platinum Disc, 2004), dvd. 18 Bordertown, “Sweet Revenge,” episode 8, season 3 (La Crosse, WI: Platinum Disc, 2004), dvd. 19 Bordertown, “In Cold Blood.” 20 Bordertown, “Field of Honour,” episode 16, season 3 (La Crosse, WI: Platinum Disc, 2004), dvd. 21 Bordertown, “Under Western Skies,” episode 26, season 3 (La Crosse, WI: Platinum Disc, 2004), dvd. 22 Bordertown, “Nebraska Lightning, episode 3, season 3 (La Crosse, WI: Platinum Disc, 2004), dvd. 23 Bordertown, “Marshal Law,” episode 18, season 3 (La Crosse, WI: Platinum Disc, 2004), dvd. 24 Eva Mackey, The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada (London: Routledge, 1999), 38–9. 25 Bordertown, “Medicine Woman.” 26 Daniel Coleman, White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 8. 27 Bordertown, “The Runners,” episode 2, season 1 (La Crosse, WI: Platinum Disc, 2004), dvd. 28 Bordertown, “Honour Thy Father,” episode 11, season 3 (La Crosse, WI: Platinum Disc, 2004), dvd. 29 Walden, Visions of Order, 118. 30 Roger L. Nichols, “The Canada-US Border and Indigenous Peoples in the Nineteenth Century,” American Review of Canadian Studies 30, 4 (2010): 417, 416. 31 Bordertown, “Conduct Becoming,” episode 14, season 3 (La Crosse, WI: Platinum Disc, 2004), dvd. 32 Kyle Conway and Timothy Pasch, “Introduction: Paradoxes of the Border,” in Beyond the Border: Tensions across the Forty-Ninth Parallel in

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the Great Plains and Prairies, ed. Kyle Conway and Timothy Pasch (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), 20. 33 Joshua D. Miner, “Navigating the ‘Erotic Conversion’: Transgression and Sovereignty in Native Literatures of the Northern Plains,” in Conway and Pasch, Beyond the Border, 174. 34 Mackey, House of Difference, 34. 35 Ibid., 67. 36 Walden, Visions of Order, 128. 37 Bordertown, “Wild Horses,” episode 6, season 3 (La Crosse, WI: Platinum Disc, 2004), dvd. 38 Bordertown, “Hired Hand,” episode 21, season 3 (La Crosse, WI: Platinum Disc, 2004), dvd. 39 Aniko Bodroghkozy, “As Canadian as Possible …: Anglo-Canadian Popular Culture and the American Other,” in Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, ed. Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc (Durham, N C: Duke University Press 2002), 580. The b b c provided investment support in the third and fourth seasons of the program. 40 Ibid. 41 Bodroghkozy notes that, in the 1994–95 season, Due South was the only Canadian production that ranked in the top ten most-watched programs in Canada, “with an average Canadian audience of 1,750,000” (“As Canadian as Possible,” 567). Further, Dawson observes that Due South, “during its first season on cbs, … ranked in the top third of TV programming,” while by the summer of 1995 the program was airing “in fortyseven different countries. In some places, such as England, it was drawing 30 or 40 per cent of the TV audience” (Dime Novel to Disney, 168). 42 Dawson, Dime Novel to Disney, 169, 33. 43 Due South, “Pilot” (Enfield: Network, 2006), dv d. 44 Statistics Canada, “Census Agglomeration of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan,” Focus on Geography Series, 2011 Census (Ottawa, 2012). Available at https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/as-sa/fogs-spg/ Facts-cma-eng.cfm?LANG=Eng&GK=CMA&GC=715 45 Due South, “Pilot.” 46 Dawson, Dime Novel to Disney, 169. 47 Due South, “Mountie on the Bounty, Part 2,” episode 53, season 3 (Montreal: Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm, 2003), dv d. 48 Due South, “Pilot.” 49 Ibid.

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50 Due South, “Some Like It Red,” episode 34, season 2 (Montreal: Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm, 2003), dvd. 51 Due South, “Flashback,” episode 40, season 2, (Montreal: Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm, 2003), dvd. 52 Dawson, The Mountie from Dime Novel to Disney, 53. 53 Ibid., 169. 54 Christopher Gittings, “Imaging Canada: The Singing Mountie and Other Commodifications of Nation,” Canadian Journal of Communication 23, 4 (1998). Available at http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/ viewArticle/1062/968. 55 Terry Goldie, Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), 13. 56 Due South, “Dead Men Don’t Throw Rice,” episode 62, season 4, (Montreal: Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm, 2005), dv d; Due South, “One Good Man” (aka “Thank You Kindly, Mr. Capra”), episode 30, season 2 (Montreal: Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm, 2003), dv d. 57 Gittings, “Imaging Canada.” 58 Due South, “Pilot.” 59 Coleman, White Civility, 196. 60 In contrast, in the episode “Chinatown,” Fraser explains to Vecchio that he learned both Cantonese and Mandarin from his grandparents, who “helped set up an English language library in China before the revolution” (episode 6, season 1 [Enfield: Network, 2006], dv d). Whereas Fraser’s knowledge of these Chinese languages warrants explanation, the provenance of his knowledge of Tsimshian goes unaddressed and is therefore reified. 61 Due South, “The Mask,” episode 28, season 2 (Montreal: Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm, 2003), dvd . 62 Rhiannon Bury, Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 186; Gittings, “Imaging Canada.” 63 Due South, “Easy Money,” episode 55, season 4 (Montreal: Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm, 2005), dvd. 64 Due South, “Pilot.” 65 Due South, “The Man Who Knew Too Little,” episode 14, season 1 (Enfield: Network, 2006), dvd . 66 Julia V. Emberley, Defamiliarizing the Aboriginal: Cultural Practices and Decolonization in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 81.

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67 Rachel Adams, Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 16. 68 Due South, “The Edge,” episode 31, season 2 (Montreal: Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm, 2003), dvd . 69 Rafaela G. Castro, Chicano Folklore: A Guide to the Folktales, Traditions, Rituals, and Religious Practices of Mexican-Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 117–18. 70 Following David Marciano’s exit from the program, Due South introduced a storyline in which Vecchio was forced to go deep undercover, with another detective taking on his identity. Although Stanley Raymond Kowalski is the real name of Rennie’s character, he is also most commonly referred to as “Ray” or “Vecchio” by other characters. 71 Due South, “Asylum,” episode 51, season 3 (Montreal: Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm, 2003), dvd . 72 Dawson, Dime Novel to Disney, 168. 73 Due South, “Pilot.” 74 Crash Test Dummies, “Superman’s Song,” written by Brad Roberts, The Ghosts That Haunt Me (Arista; Universal Music Publishing, 1991). 75 Dawson, Dime Novel to Disney, 169. 76 Due South, “Free Willie,” episode 1, season 1 (Enfield: Network, 2006), dv d . 77 Due South, “Hawk and a Handsaw,” episode 12, season 1 (Enfield: Network, 2006), dvd . 78 Due South, “Vault,” episode 24, season 2 (Montreal: Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm, 2003), dvd . 79 Due South, “Odds,” episode 57, season 4 (Montreal: Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm, 2005), dvd . 80 Phil Bellfy, “The Anishnaabeg of Bawating: Indigenous People Look at the Canada-US Border,” in Conway and Pasch, Beyond the Border, 206. 81 Royal Canadian Mounted Police, “Frequently Asked Questions: ib et.” Available at http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/ibet-eipf/faq-eng.htm. Accessed 25 July 2013; Ackleson, “From ‘Thin’ to ‘Thick,’” 340. 82 Ibid. 83 Joanne C. Elvy and Luis René Fernández Tabío, “‘Normalizing Relations’: The Canada / Cuban Imaginary on the Fringe of Border Discourse,” in Roberts and Stirrup, Parallel Encounters, 85. 84 Yasmin Jiwani, “Soft Power: Policing the Border through Canadian TV Crime Drama,” in Political Economy of Media and Power, ed. Jeffery Klaehn (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 275.

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  85 Following the death of Layla at the end of season 2, another ethnic-­ minority female character, Khalida Massi (Athena Karkanis), was introduced to the i cs team in season 3.  86 The Border, “Gray Zone,” episode 2, season 1 (Toronto: Video Service Corp., 2008), dvd.   87 Royal Canadian Mounted Police, “Integrated Border Enforcement Teams (i b e ts).” Available at http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/ibet-eipf/index-eng.htm (viewed 25 July 2013).   88 Jiwani, “Soft Power,” 274.  89 Ibid.   90 Quoted in Matheson, “Television,” 71.   91 Serra Tinic, “The Borders of Cultural Difference: Canadian Television and Cultural Identity,” in Conway and Pasch, Beyond the Border, 36.   92 Patricia Molloy, Canada / US and Other Unfriendly Relations: Before and After 9/11 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 136.  93 The Border, “Bodies on the Ground,” episode 3, season 1 (Toronto: Video Service Corp., 2008), dvd .   94 Matheson, “Television,” 88. As Patricia Molloy points out, however, in real circumstances, the values of the Canadian government where capital punishment is concerned can be rather murky, as attested to by cases where the government has not demanded a guarantee that extradited Canadians will be exempt from the death penalty elsewhere (see Canada / US, 22).  95 The Border, “Family Affairs,” episode 7, season 1 (Toronto: Video Service Corp., 2008), dvd.  96 The Border, “Enemy Contact,” episode 8, season 1 (Toronto: Video Service Corp., 2008), dvd .  97 The Border, “The Sweep,” episode 8, season 2 (Toronto: Video Service Corp., 2009), dvd.  98 The Border, “Spoils of War,” episode 10, season 3 (Toronto: Video Service Corp., 2010), dvd; The Border, “No Refuge,” episode 12, season 3 (Toronto: Video Service Corp., 2010), dv d.  99 The Border, “Pockets of Vulnerability,” episode 1, season 1 (Toronto: Video Service Corp., 2008), dvd . 100 Jiwani, “Soft Power,” 275. 101 The Border, “Bodies on the Ground.” 102 The Border, “Gross Deceptions,” episode 4, season 1 (Toronto: Video Service Corp., 2008), dvd. 103 The Border, “Nothing to Declare,” episode 4, season 2 (Toronto: Video Service Corp., 2009), dvd.

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104 Ibid. 105 The Border, “Gray Zone.” 106 rc mp, “Integrated Border Enforcement Teams.” 107 The Border, “Shifting Waters,” episode 12, season 2 (Toronto: Video Service Corp., 2009), dvd . 108 Liz Carver, LaGarda’s successor, is Asian-American, continuing the program’s characterization of representative Americanness as ethnic-minority and female (not to mention eroticized and exoticized). 109 The Border, “Stop Loss,” episode 1, season 2 (Toronto: Video Service Corp., 2009), dvd. See Molloy, Canada / US, chapter 6, for a discussion of US soldiers who attempted to claim asylum in Canada during the Iraq War. 110 The Border, “Enemy Contact.” 111 Jiwani, “Soft Power,” 285. 112 According to Jiwani, The Border’s website (which is no longer available) described Williams’s character as the descendant of Black Loyalists (“Soft Power,” 278); this information was never disclosed within the program itself. 113 The Border, “Enemy Contact.” 114 Kent Roach, September 11: Consequences for Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 150. 115 The Border, “Bodies on the Ground.” 116 Government of Canada, “Regional Diplomacy,” 18 July 2012. Available at http://www.afghanistan.gc.ca/canada-afghanistan/approach-approche/ diplo.aspx?lang=eng. 117 The Border, “Missing in the Action,” episode 5, season 3 (Toronto: Video Service Corp., 2010), dvd . 118 Molloy, Canada / US, 133. 119 The Border, “Pockets of Vulnerability.” 120 The Border, “Enemy Contact.” 121 Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 189. 122 Ian Angus, A Border Within: National Identity, Cultural Plurality, and Wilderness (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 130. 123 Ackleson, “From ‘Thin’ to ‘Thick,’” 337. 124 Jiwani, “Soft Power,” 275. 125 Jim Bronskill, “Canada-US Border: American Police Want Legal Exemptions, rcm p Says,” Huffington Post, 30 July 2013. Available at http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/07/30/border-security-us-police-legalexemptions_n_3678240.html.

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126 Quoted in ibid. 127 Walden, Visions of Order, 136. chapter three

  1 The Border, “Gray Zone,” episode 2, season 1 (Toronto: Video Service Corp., 2008), dvd.   2 Peter Kulchyski, Like the Sound of a Drum: Aboriginal Cultural Politics in Denendeh and Nunavut (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2005), 17.    3 Jennifer Andrews and Priscilla L. Walton, “Rethinking Canadian and American Nationality: Indigeneity and the 49th Parallel in Thomas King,” American Literary History 18, 3 (2006): 600.   4 Ibid., 601.   5 Rauna Kuokkanen, Reshaping the University: Responsibility, Indigenous Epistemes, and the Logic of the Gift (Vancouver: ub c Press, 2007), 130.   6 Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2011), 34, 36.    7 Ibid., 38; Elizabeth A. Povinelli, “Citizens of the Earth,” in Varieties of Sovereignty and Citizenship, ed. Sigal R. Ben-Porath and Rogers M. Smith (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 220.    8 Audra Simpson, “Subjects of Sovereignty: Indigeneity, the Revenue Rule, and Juridics of Failed Consent,” Law and Contemporary Problems 71 (2008): 194.    9 Julia Emberley, “Epistemic Encounters: Indigenous Cosmopolitan Hospitality, Marxist Anthropology, Deconstruction, and Doris Pilkington’s Rabbit-Proof Fence,” English Studies in Canada 34, 4 (2008): 160.   10 Georges Erasmus and Joe Sanders, “Canadian History: An Aboriginal Perspective,” in Nation to Nation: Aboriginal Sovereignty and the Future of Canada, ed. John Bird, Lorraine Land, and Murray Macadam (Toronto: Irwin, 2002), 3.   11 Audra Simpson, “Under the Sign of Sovereignty: Certainty, Ambivalence, and Law in Native North America and Indigenous Australia,” Wicazo Sa Review 25, 2 (2010): 117.   12 Phil Bellfy, “The Anishnaabeg of Bawating: Indigenous People Look at the Canada-US Border,” in Beyond the Border: Tensions across the FortyNinth Parallel in the Great Plains and Prairies, ed. Kyle Conway and Timothy Pasch (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), 199; Audra Simpson, “Paths Toward a Mohawk Nation:

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Narratives of Citizenship and Nationhood in Kahnawake,” in Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, ed. Duncan Ivision, Paul Patton, and Will Sanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 126; Jace Weaver, That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), xiv (Weaver acknowledges that “Amer-European” is John Joseph Mathews’s term [xiii]); Joe Sheridan and Roronhiakewen “He Clears the Sky” Dan Longboat, “The Haudenosaunee Imagination and the Ecology of the Sacred,” Space and Culture 9, 4 (2006): 370, 377. 13 Audra Simpson, “Settlement’s Secret,” Cultural Anthropology 26, 2 (2011): 209. 14 Russ Castronovo, “Compromised Narratives along the Border: The Mason-Dixon Line, Resistance, and Hegemony,” in Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics, ed. Scott Michaelsen and David E. Johnson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 196. 15 Frank Davey, Post-National Arguments: The Politics of the AnglophoneCanadian Novel since 1967 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 63. 16 Jeannette C. Armstrong, Slash (Penticton: Theytus, 1985), 18, 22, 33. All further references for this text appear in parentheses. 17 In historical terms, ai m was indeed “modeled on the Black Panthers” (Weaver, That the People Might Live, 122). In its comparison and contrast between Indigenous activism and the Black Power movement, Slash echoes Harold Cardinal’s claim that, “for many, the [National Indian Brotherhood] represents the final attempt by Indians to try to solve their problems within the context of the political system of our country. If it fails, and particularly if it is destroyed by the federal government, then the future holds very little hope for the Indian unless he attempts to solve his problems by taking the dangerous and explosive path travelled by the black militants of the United States” (The Unjust Society [Edmonton: M.G. Hurtig, 1969], 107). 18 Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries (London: Fourth Estate, 1993) 93. 19 Davey, Post-National Arguments, 61. 20 Judith Still, Derrida and Hospitality: Theory and Practice (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 14. 21 Kit Dobson, Transnational Canadas: Anglo-Canadian Literature and Globalization (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009), 128. 22 Dale Turner, This Is Not a Peace Pipe: Towards a Critical Indigenous Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 81.

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23 Stuart Christie, Plural Sovereignties and Contemporary Indigenous Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 100–1, 101. 24 Kevin Bruyneel, The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of US-Indigenous Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xvii. 25 Donald A. Grinde Jr, “Iroquois Border Crossings: Place, Politics, and the Jay Treaty,” in Globalization on the Line: Culture, Capital, and Citizenship at US Borders, ed. Claudia Sadowski-Smith (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 168–9. 26 Davey, Post-National Arguments, 62. 27 John Borrows, Recovering Canada: The Resurgence of Indigenous Law (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 108. 28 Daniel Heath Justice, “Rhetorics of Recognition,” Kenyon Review 32, 1 (2010): 246. 29 Dobson, Transnational Canadas, 128. 30 Clare Bradford, “Postcolonial Bildungsroman: Indigenous Subjects and Identity-Formation,” Foreign Literature Studies (Waiguo wenxue yanjiu) 29, 6 (2007): 17. 31 Patrick Macklem, Indigenous Difference and the Constitution of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 12. 32 Turner, Not a Peace Pipe, 3. 33 Borrows, Recovering Canada, 57. 34 Turner, Not a Peace Pipe, 3. 35 Kiera L. Ladner, “Take 35: Reconciling Constitutional Orders,” in First Nations, First Thoughts, ed. Annis May Timpson (Vancouver: ub c Press, 2009), 282–3. 36 Ibid., 286. As scholars have noted, however, Supreme Court justices have articulated a variety of positions on Indigenous rights. For instance, in the case of R. v. Van der Peet, Chief Justice Antonio Lamer holds the view that “Aboriginal rights protect only those customs that have continuity with practices existing before the arrival of Europeans. Aboriginal rights do not sustain central and significant Aboriginal practices that developed solely as a result of their contact with European cultures” (Borrows, Recovering Canada, 60). Justice Beverly McLachlin, however, diverges from this perspective: “Aboriginal rights find their source not in a magic moment of European contact, but in the traditional laws and customs of the Aboriginal people in question … One finds no mention in the text of s. 35(1) or in the jurisprudence of the moment of European contact as the definitive all-or-nothing time for establishing an Aboriginal right” (quoted in Borrows, Recovering Canada, 74).

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37 Quoted in Ladner, “Take 35,” 290. 38 Darlene Johnston, “First Nations and Canadian Citizenship,” in Belonging: The Meaning and Future of Canadian Citizenship, ed. William Kaplan (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 349. 39 David Chariandy and Sophie McCall, “Introduction: Citizenship and Cultural Belonging,” West Coast Line 59 (2008): 5. 40 Quoted in Johnston, “First Nations and Canadian Citizenship,” 354. 41 Ibid. 42 Marie Battiste and Helen Semaganis, “First Thoughts on First Nations Citizenship: Issues in Education,” in Citizenship in Transformation in Canada, ed. Yvonne Hébert (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 104. 43 Johnston, “First Nations and Canadian Citizenship,” 363. 44 Battiste and Semaganis, “First Thoughts,” 93. 45 Turner, Not a Peace Pipe, 16. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 31. 48 Borrows, Recovering Canada, 208. 49 Sam McKegney, “Tenuous Tolerance: The Politics of Inconvenience from Kanehsatake to Caledonia,” West Coast Line 59 (2008): 63. 50 Chariandy and McCall, “Introduction,” 7. 51 Grinde Jr, “Iroquois Border Crossings,” 167. 52 Jeannette Armstrong, “What I Intended was Connect to… and That’s What Happened,” interview by Janice Williamson, in Sounding Differences: Conversations with Seventeen Canadian Women Writers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 18. 53 Thomas King, interview by Hartmut Lutz, in Contemporary Challenges: Conversations with Canadian Native Authors (Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1991), 107. 54 Christie, Plural Sovereignties, 178. 55 Katja Sarkowsky, “Maps, Borders, and Cultural Citizenship: Cartographic Negotiations in Thomas King’s Work,” in Thomas King: Works and Impact, ed. Eva Gruber (London: Camden House, 2012), 218. 56 Thomas King, “Borders,” in One Good Story, That One (Toronto: HarperPerennial, 1993), 137. All further references for this text appear in parentheses. 57 Andrews and Walton, “Rethinking,” 609. 58 See Bellfy, “Anishnaabeg of Bawating,” 219, for a discussion of how the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (2009) similarly attempted to

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impose nation-state citizenship requirements on Indigenous people at the border and the Anishnaabeg Joint Commission’s response. 59 Arnold E. Davidson, Priscilla L. Walton, and Jennifer Andrews, Border Crossings: Thomas King’s Comic Inversions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 124. 60 Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 46. 61 Daniel Heath Justice, “Rhetorics of Recognition,” 239. 62 Ibid., 250. 63 Glen S. Coulthard, “Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the ‘Politics of Recognition’ in Canada,” Contemporary Political Theory 6, 4 (2007): 442. 64 Thomas King, Truth and Bright Water (Toronto: HarperFlamingo, 1999), 1. All further references for this text appear in parentheses. 65 Davidson et al., Border Crossings, 142; Robin Ridington and Jill Ridington, When You Sing It Now, Just Like New: First Nations Poetics, Voices, and Representations (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 290. 66 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987), 3. 67 Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Border Fictions: Globalization, Empire, and Writing at the Boundaries of the United States (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 91. 68 Andrews and Walton, “Rethinking,” 601. 69 Thomas King, Green Grass, Running Water (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1993), 59. All further references for this text appear in parentheses. 70 Margery Fee and Jane Flick, “Coyote Pedagogy: Knowing Where the Borders Are in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water,” Canadian Literature 161–2 (1999): 132. 71 Ibid. 72 Davidson et al., Border Crossings, 72. 73 Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America (Toronto: Doubleday, 2012), 81. 74 Davidson et al., Border Crossings, 165. 75 Sarkowsky, “Maps,” 216. 76 Davidson et al., Border Crossings, 166. 77 Drew Hayden Taylor, In a World Created by a Drunken God (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2006), 39. All further references for this text appear in parentheses.

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78 Quoted in Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1996 [1972]), 16. 79 Jason’s mother does not appear in the play, and we do not hear her own story of her relationship with Harry and Jason’s father. However, the predatory connotations attached to their encounter through the dialogue appears to bear out the fact “that men and women have historically had (and … continue to have) very different experiences of hospitality both as hosts (more often hostesses) and as guests” (Still, Derrida and Hospitality, 22). We get no sense, for instance, of Jason’s mother occupying a powerful host position in relation to Jason’s father, a visitor from the US. 80 Lorraine Code, “How to Think Globally: Stretching the Limits of Imagination,” Hypatia 13, 2 (1998): 82. 81 Michael D. McNally, Honoring Elders: Aging, Authority, and Ojibwe Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 137. 82 Drew Hayden Taylor, Furious Observations of a Blue-Eyed Ojibway: Funny, You Don’t Look Like One Two Three (Penticton: Theytus, 2002), 19. 83 Drew Hayden Taylor, Funny, You Don’t Look Like One: Observations from a Blue-Eyed Ojibway (Penticton: Theytus, 1998), 43. 84 Audra Simpson, “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship,” Junctures 9 (2007): 69. 85 Davidson, Walton, and Andrews, Border Crossings, 73. 86 Quoted in Cardinal, Unjust Society, 28; Sophie McCall, First Person Plural: Aboriginal Storytelling and the Ethics of Collaborative Authorship (Vancouver: u bc Press, 2011), 33. 87 Frank Cassidy and Robert L. Bish, Indian Government: Its Meaning in Practice (Lantzville, BC  / Halifax, N S: Oolichan / Institute for Research on Public Policy, 1989), 56. 88 Alan C. Cairns, Citizens Plus: Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian State (Vancouver: u bc Press, 2000), 7. 89 Ibid., 12. 90 Ibid., 85. 91 Turner, Not a Peace Pipe, 42. 92 Ibid., 39. 93 Cairns, Citizens Plus, 144. 94 Kulchyski, Sound of a Drum, 250; Wayne Warry, Ending Denial: Understanding Aboriginal Issues (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2007), 57. 95 Simpson, “Subjects of Sovereignty,” 213. 96 Cairns, Citizens Plus, 87. 97 Warry, Ending Denial, 46.

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  98 Johnston, “First Nations and Canadian Citizenship,” 394.   99 Taiaiake Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto, 2nd ed. (Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2009), 11; Gerald R. [Taiaiake] Alfred, Heeding the Voices of Our Ancestors: Kahnawake Mohawk Politics and the Rise of Native Nationalism (Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 1995), 104. 100 Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness, 137–8, 19. 101 Turner, Not a Peace Pipe, 42. 102 Borrows, Recovering Canada, 34. 103 Ibid., 144. 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid., 138, 146. 106 Weaver, That the People Might Live, 37. 107 Thomas King, “Introduction,” in All My Relations: an Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Native Fiction, ed. Thomas King (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990), xiii–xiv. 108 Betty Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing: the Worldview of the Siksikaitsitapi (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2004), 21. 109 Sheridan and Longboat, “Haudenosaunee Imagination,” 376. 110 Stephanie Irlbacher-Fox, “#Idle No More: Settler Responsibility for Relationship,” 25 June 2013. Available at http://www.idlenomore.ca/­ idlenomore_settler_responsibility_for_relationship; Pam Palmater, “Why Idle No More Matters to Us All,” Now 32, 19 (10–17 January 2013). Available at http://www.nowtoronto.com/news/story.cfm?content=190705. 111 Taylor, Furious Observations, 31. 112 Thomas King, “Introduction,” in The Native in Literature, ed. Thomas King, Cheryl Calver, and Helen Hoy (Toronto: ec w, 1987), 10. 113 Thomas King, Interview with Lutz, 107. 114 Stuart Christie, “Thomas King Meets Indigenous Convergent Media,” in Gruber, Thomas King, 68. 115 Andrews and Walton, “Rethinking,” 606. 116 King, “Introduction,” in King et al., Native in Literature, 10; Christie, Plural Sovereignties, 178. 117 Cairns, Citizens Plus, 109. chapter four

  1 Afua Cooper, The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal (Toronto: HarperPerennial, 2006), 7.

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  2 Ibid., 68.   3 Ibid., 86.   4 Rinaldo Walcott, “By Way of a Brief Introduction Insubordination: A Demand for a Different Canada,” in Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism, ed. Rinaldo Walcott (Toronto: Insomniac, 2000), 7.   5 Katherine McKittrick, “‘Freedom Is a Secret: The Future Usability of the Underground,” in Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, ed. Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2007), 98.   6 Rinaldo Walcott, Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Insomniac, 2003), 20.  7 Ibid.   8 Lawrence Hill, Any Known Blood (Toronto: HarperPerennial, 1997), 46. All further references for this text appear in parentheses.   9 Lawrence Hill, Some Great Thing (Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1992) 230, 231. All further references for this text appear in parentheses. 10 Lawrence Hill, Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2001), 176. 11 Maureen Moynagh, “Eyeing the North Star? Figuring Canada in Postslavery Fiction and Drama,” in Canada and Its Americas: Transnational Navigations, ed. Winfried Siemerling and Sarah Phillips Casteel (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 141. 12 See Walcott, Black Like Who?, 90; Leslie Sanders, “Impossible to Occupy: André Alexis’s Childhood,” in Walcott, Rude, 173; Daniel Coleman, White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 9. 13 Walcott, Black Like Who?, 22. 14 Lawrence Hill, The Book of Negroes (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2007), 286. All further references for this text appear in parentheses. 15 Jennifer Harris, “Ain’t No Border Wide Enough: Writing Black Canada in Lawrence Hill’s Any Known Blood,” Journal of American Culture 27, 4 (2004): 368. 16 Ibid., 369. 17 Lawrence Hill, interview by Jessie Sagawa, “Projecting History Honestly: An Interview with Lawrence Hill,” Studies in Canadian Literature 33, 1 (2008): 316. 18 Walcott, Black Like Who?, 68; Harris, “Ain’t No Border Wide Enough,” 369, 372; Winfried Siemerling, “May I See Some Identification?: Race, Borders, and Identities in Any Known Blood,” in Siemerling and Casteel, Canada and Its Americas, 157; Stephanie Yorke, “The Slave Narrative

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Tradition in Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes,” Studies in Canadian Literature 35, 2 (2010): 129–44; Rachel Adams, Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 81, 87. 19 Lawrence Hill, “Freedom Bound,” The Beaver, February–March 2007, 17. 20 Abigail Ward, “Postcolonial Interventions into the Archive of Slavery: Transforming Documents into Monuments in Beryl Gilroy’s Stedman and Joanna,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 45, 2 (2010): 246. 21 Yorke, “Slave Narrative Tradition,” 143. 22 Lawrence Hill, The Book of Negroes: Illustrated Edition (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2009). 23 Clement Virgo, “Where We Need ‘The Book of Negroes’: A New Guide Uses Lawrence Hill’s Bestseller to Bring Black History Alive in Canadian Classrooms,” Maclean’s 7 March 2011, 77. See the “Black History in Canada Education Guide” at http://blackhistorycanada.ca/education/ LearningTools.pdf (viewed 8 February 2012). 24 Siemerling, “Some Identification,” 164. 25 Christine Duff, “Where Literature Fills the Gaps: The Book of Negroes as a Canadian Work of Rememory,” Studies in Canadian Literature 36, 2 (2011): 251. 26 Djanet Sears, Harlem Duet (Winnipeg: Scirocco Drama, 1997), 45, 26. All further references for this text appear in parentheses. 27 Ric Knowles, “Othello in Three Times,” in Shakespeare in Canada: A World Elsewhere, ed. Diana Brydon and Irena R. Makaryk (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 382. 28 Jacqueline Petropoulos, “‘The Ground on Which I Stand’: Rewriting History, African Canadian Style,” in Signatures of the Past: Cultural Memory in Contemporary Anglophone North American Drama, ed. Marc Maufort and Caroline De Wagter (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2008), 80; George Elliott Clarke, Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 193. 29 Ibid., 40. 30 Ibid., 28. 31 Walcott, Black Like Who, 103, 32. 32 Leslie Sanders, “Othello Reconstructed: Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet,” in Testifyin’: Contemporary African Canadian Drama, ed. Djanet Sears (Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2000), 559. 33 Margaret Jane Kidnie, “‘There’s Magic in the Web of It’: Seeing beyond Tragedy in Harlem Duet,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 36, 2 (2001): 38.

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34 Ibid., 40–1. 35 Peter Dickinson, “Duets, Duologues, and Black Diasporic Theatre: Djanet Sears, William Shakespeare, and Others,” Modern Drama 45, 2 (2002): 194. 36 Clarke, Odysseys Home, 28. 37 Audiences at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre, where Harlem Duet premiered in 1997, might similarly be aware of this convention, given the Tarragon’s positioning as “a literary theatre” (Ric Knowles, Reading the Material Theatre [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 135). 38 Quoted in Walcott, Black Like Who, 11. 39 Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 99. 40 Walcott, Black Like Who, 156. 41 Djanet Sears, The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God (Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2003), 45. All further references for this text appear in parentheses. 42 Walcott, Black Like Who, 44. 43 Caroline De Wagter, “Land and Cultural Memory: Djanet Sears’s The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God,” in Theatres in the Round: Multi-Ethnic, Indigenous, and Intertextual Dialogues in Drama, ed. Dorothy Figueira and Marc Maufort (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2011), 59. 44 Walcott, “Brief Introduction,” 7. 45 Petropoulos, “Ground on Which I Stand,” 77. 46 Walcott, Black Like Who, 20. 47 Sharon Morgan Beckford, “‘A Geography of the Mind’: Black Canadian Women Writers as Cartographers of the Canadian Geographic Imagination,” Journal of Black Studies 38, 3 (2008): 473. 48 Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, “Place and Displacement in Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet and The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God,” in Place of History: Migration and Identity in Black Women’s Literature, ed. Elizabeth Brown-Guillory (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), 166. 49 Djanet Sears, “Interview with Djanet Sears: A Black Girl in Search of God,” interview by Robin Breon, Aisle Say, http://www.aislesay.com/ONTSEARS.html (viewed 28 July 2011); Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (London: Routledge, 1994), 184. 50 Ibid., 175. 51 de Wagter, “Land and Cultural Memory,” 59.

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52 David Sealy, “‘Canadianizing’ Blackness: Resisting the Political,” in Walcott, Rude, 99. 53 Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 27. 54 George Elliott Clarke, Whylah Falls, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Polestar, 2000), xxvii. 55 Quoted in Clarke, Odysseys Home, 29. 56 Brown-Guillory, “Place and Displacement,” 167. 57 Wayde Compton, After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing, and Region (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2010), 14. 58 Wayde Compton, 49th Parallel Psalm (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 1999), 166. All further references for this text appear in parentheses. 59 Wayde Compton, “Introduction,” in Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature, ed. Wayde Compton (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2001), 17. 60 Walcott, Black Like Who, 20. 61 Wayde Compton, “The Epic Moment: An Interview with Wayde Compton,” interview by Myler Wilkinson and David Stouck, West Coast Line 38, 36, no. 2, (2002): 133. 62 Compton, “Introduction,” 18. 63 Ibid., 22. 64 Priscilla Stewart, “A Voice from the Oppressed to the Friends of Humanity,” in Compton, Bluesprint, 49. Both Compton and Stewart echo the anti-slavery discourse of eighteenth-century English poet William Cowper, particularly the following lines of Book II of The Task: “Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs / Receive our air, that moment they are free, / They touch our country and their shackles fall” (in John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, eds., The Poems of William Cowper, Volume II: 1782–1785 [Oxford: Clarendon, 1995], 140, ll. 40–3). 65 Peter James Hudson, “‘The Lost Tribe of a Lost Tribe’: Black British Columbia and the Poetics of Space,” in McKittrick and Woods, Black Geographies, 157. 66 Compton, “Epic Moment,” 137. 67 Wayde Compton, Performance Bond (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2004), 15–16. All further references for this text appear in parentheses. 68 Compton, After Canaan, 185. 69 Ibid. 70 Hogan’s Alley Memorial Project, http://hogansalleyproject.blogspot.com/ (viewed 15 April 2011).

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 71 Compton, After Canaan, 83–4.   72 Ibid., 84.   73 Esmeralda M.A. Thornhill, “So Seldom for Us, So Often against Us: Blacks and Law in Canada,” Journal of Black Studies 38, 3 (2008): 322.  74 Compton, After Canaan, 101–2.   75 Compton, “Introduction,” 19.  76 Compton, After Canaan, 101.   77 Ibid., 109.  78 Ibid.   79 Ibid., 110.   80 Hudson, “Lost Tribe,” 147.   81 Ibid., 112.  82 Compton, After Canaan, 113.   83 Winfried Siemerling, “Transcultural Improvisation, Transnational Time, and Diasporic Chance in Wayde Compton’s Textual Performance,” West Coast Line 63, 43, no. 3 (2010): 36.  84 Compton, After Canaan, 113.  85 Ibid.   86 Ibid., 116.   87 Ibid., 108.  88 Ibid.   89 Wayde Compton, “Black History in Vancouver Recognized at Last: The Hogan’s Alley Memorial Project.” Rabble.ca, 25 February 2013. Available at http://rabble.ca/news/2013/02/ black-history-vancouver-recognized-last-hogans-alley-memorial-project.  90 Compton, After Canaan, 108.  91 Ibid.   92 Compton, “Black History in Vancouver.”   93 Quoted in Compton, After Canaan, 118.  94 Ibid.   95 Ibid., 114.  96 Ibid.   97 Jennifer J. Nelson, Razing Africville: A Geography of Racism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 7.   98 Ibid., 3; McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 96.  99 Compton, After Canaan, 117. 100 Compton, “Epic Moment,” 141. 101 Djanet Sears, Afrika Solo (Toronto: Sister Vision Press, 1991). 102 Brown-Guillory, “Place and Displacement,” 160. 103 Clarke, Odysseys Home, 39.

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104 Siemerling, “Transcultural Improvisation,” 37. 105 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 103. 106 Walcott, Black Like Who, 20. 107 Harvey Amani Whitfield, Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North America, 1815–1860 (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2006), 6. 108 Judith Still, Derrida and Hospitality: Theory and Practice (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 188. chapter five

   1 Scott Michaelsen and David E. Johnson, “Introduction,” in Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics, ed. Scott Michaelsen and David E. Johnson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 1.    2 Gloria Anzaldúa describes the Mexico-US border as “una herida abierta” (Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza [San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987], 3).    3 Bryce Traister, “Border Shopping: American Studies and the Anti-Nation,” in Globalization on the Line: Culture, Capital, and Citizenship at US Borders, ed. Claudia Sadowski-Smith (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 34.   4 Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 3; Claire F. Fox, The Fence and the River: Culture and Politics at the US-Mexico Border (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1999), 119.    5 Ibid., 12; Peter Andreas, “A Tale of Two Borders: The US-Canada and the US-Mexico Lines after 9-11,” in The Rebordering of North America: Integration and Exclusion in a New Security Context, ed. Peter Andreas and Thomas J. Biersteker (New York: Routledge, 2003), 9.   6 Claire Lindsay, Contemporary Travel Writing of Latin America (New York: Routledge, 2010), 102; Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (London: Routledge, 1989), 216; Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 79.    7 Michaelsen and Johnson, “Introduction,” 3.    8 José David Saldívar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 13–14.    9 However, Gómez-Peña denounced border art in 1991 (see Fox, Fence and the River, 123).  10 Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 3; Michaelsen and Johnson, “Introduction,” 3.  11 Fox, Fence and the River, 46.

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12 Hastings Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson, Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 39. 13 Pablo Vila, “Conclusion: The Limits of American Border Theory,” in Ethnography at the Border, ed. Pablo Vila (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 322. 14 Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Ernestine Avila, “‘I’m Here, But I’m There’: The Meanings of Latina Transnational Motherhood,” Gender and Society 11, 5 (1997): 568. 15 Fox, Fence and the River, 119. Indeed, in a 2000 interview, Anzaldúa celebrates the portability, as it were, of her conception of the borderlands, noting that “it’s being taken up by a lot of different people who are in different disciplines, who are in different countries” and suggesting a universal applicability of her thinking, given Borderlands / La Frontera’s engagement with “the overlapping border spaces [that are] a reality in these times” (“Coming into Play: An Interview with Gloria Anzaldúa,” interview by Ann E. Reuman, melus 25, 2 [2000]: 5, 15). 16 Donnan and Wilson, Borders, 40. 17 Michelle Habell-Pallán, Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popular Culture (New York: n yu Press, 2005), 207. 18 Russ Castronovo, “Compromised Narratives along the Border: The Mason-Dixon Line, Resistance, and Hegemony,” in Michaelsen and Johnson, Border Theory, 203. 19 Albert Braz, “North of America: Racial Hybridity and Canada’s (Non) Place in Inter-American Discourse.” Comparative American Studies 3, 1 (2005): 86. 20 Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Border Fictions: Globalization, Empire, and Writing at the Boundaries of the United States (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 125. 21 Janette Turner Hospital, Borderline (London: Virago, 1990), 68. All further references for this text appear in parentheses. 22 Indeed, the fact that Hospital based her novel on a real-life incident in which dead Salvadoran refugees were discovered in a meat truck in New Mexico (Janette Turner Hospital, “Letter to a New York Editor,” Meanjin 47, 3 [1988], 560–1) demonstrates a clear palimpsest of Mexico-US and Canada-US border narratives. 23 Hospital recalls news programs about refugees featuring “titbits about … the underground railway from the Rio Grande to the Canadian border” (“Letter,” 561). 24 Sadowski-Smith, Border Fictions, 128. 25 Ibid., 130. 26 Ibid.

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27 Hospital’s use of “Spanish” rather than “Latino” or even the now outdated “Hispanic” here is inaccurate, of course, although it is possible that this inappropriate terminology is the responsibility of Jean-Marc, who must imagine Felicity’s experiences, and a reflection of the colloquial tendency in Canada, based on Quebec / Anglo-Canada tensions, to deploy language as a metonym to refer to personal or collective identity. However, as Sadowski-Smith observes, Borderline suffers somewhat from “an insufficient knowledge of events in El Salvador, misspellings of geographical place names in Latin America, and a superficial understanding of differences among right- and left-wing positions in El Salvador’s civil war” (Border Fictions, 130). 28 María del Pilar Blanco, Ghost-Watching American Modernity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 180. 29 Hospital, “Letter,” 561. 30 Anne F. Nothof, “The Construction and Deconstruction of Border Zones in Fronteras Americanas by Guillermo Verdecchia and Amigo’s Blue Guitar by Joan MacLeod,” Theatre Research in Canada 20, 1 (1999): 13. 31 Joan MacLeod, Amigo’s Blue Guitar (Winnipeg: Blizzard, 1990), 25. All further references for this text appear in parentheses. 32 Nothof, “Construction and Deconstruction,” 11. 33 Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 77. 34 Nothof, “Construction and Deconstruction,” 10. 35 Fox, Fence and the River, 50–1. 36 Hugh Hazelton, Latinocanadá (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 22. 37 I use “Verdecchia” to denote the character rather than the author. The author’s surname appears without quotation marks. 38 Urjo Kareda, “Foreword,” Fronteras Americanas / American Borders, by Guillermo Verdecchia (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1997), 10. 39 Northrop Frye, “From ‘Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada,’” in Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism, ed. Cynthia Sugars (Peterborough: Broadview, 2004), 12; Leonard Cohen, Let Us Compare Mythologies (Toronto: Contact, 1956); Guillermo Verdecchia, Fronteras Americanas, 21, 20. All further references for Verdecchia’s text appear in parentheses. 40 Mayte Gómez, “Healing the Border Wound: Fronteras Americanas and the Future of Canadian Multiculturalism,” Theatre Research in Canada 16, 1–2 (1995): 35.

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41 Adams, “Northern Borderlands and Latino Canadian Diaspora,” in Hemispheric American Studies, ed. Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine (New Brunswick, n j: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 321. 42 Sadowski-Smith, Border Fictions, 124. 43 Pablo Ramírez, “Collective Memory and the Borderlands in Guillermo Verdecchia’s Fronteras Americanas,” in Latin American Identities after 1980, ed. Gordana Yovanovich and Amy Huras (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010), 279. 44 Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 7. 45 Quoted in Rafaela G. Castro, Chicano Folklore: A Guide to the Folktales, Traditions, Rituals, and Religious Practices of Mexican-Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 118. 46 Nothof, “Construction and Deconstruction,” 11. 47 David Leahy, “Counter-Worlding A / américanité,” in Canada and Its Americas, ed. Winfried Siemerling and Sarah Phillips Casteel (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 67–8. 48 Guillermo Gómez-Peña, “Border Brujo,” in Being América: Essays on Art, Literature, and Identity from Latin America, ed. Rachel Weiss (Fredonia, NY: White Pine, 1991), 196. 49 Fox, Fence and the River, 122. 50 Gómez, “Healing the Border Wound,” 31. 51 Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 46. 52 Ramírez, “Collective Memory,” 274. 53 Claudia Sadowski-Smith, “Introduction: Border Studies, Diaspora, and Theories of Globalization,” in Sadowski-Smith, Globalization on the Line, 1. 54 Acuña, Occupied America, 128. Although Mexicans have travelled to the US for many kinds of work since the nineteenth century, the seasonal agricultural labour agreement known as the bracero program operated only between 1942 and 1965 in an attempt to redress a postwar “dearth of a native labour force” in the United States; “an estimated 4.5 million Mexicans” participated in the program (Lindsay, Contemporary Travel Writing, 99). 55 Adrian Smith, “Legal Creolization, ‘Permanent Exceptionalism,’ and Caribbean Sojourners’ Truths,” in Yovanovich and Huras, 132, 125, 126. 56 Jane Urquhart, Sanctuary Line (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2010), 19. All further references for this text appear in parentheses. 57 Derrida, Of Hospitality, 135. 58 Ibid., 27.

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59 Carol Shields, Larry’s Party (New York: Viking, 1997), 76. 60 Fox, Fence and the River, 10. 61 Mireille Rosello, Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 12. 62 Daniel Brooks and Guillermo Verdecchia, The Noam Chomsky Lectures (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1998) 41, 56, 88. 63 Ibid., 15. 64 Patricia Molloy, Canada / US and Other Unfriendly Relations: Before and After 9/11 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 114. 65 J.C.M. Ogelsby, Gringos from the Far North: Essays in the History of Canadian-Latin American Relations, 1866–1968 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1976). 66 Stephen Clarkson, Uncle Sam and Us: Globalization, Neoconservatism, and the Canadian State (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 400. conclusion

  1 David Longworth, Harry Kalensky, Allan Stanleigh, and Dave Casey, usna The United States of North America (Vancouver: usna Publications 2012), 18. All further references for this text appear in parentheses. Interestingly, journalist Diane Francis’s case for the union of Canada and the US, published one year after usna , precisely echoes those given in the graphic novel: “The merged nations would control more oil, water, arable land and resources than any other and would enjoy the protection of America’s military” (Merger of the Century: Why Canada and America Should Become One Country [Toronto: HarperCollins, 2013], 12).   2 Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000), 25, 26.   3 Jane Urquhart, Sanctuary Line (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2010), 25. All further references for this text appear in parentheses.   4 Karsten Jung, Of Peace and Power: Promoting Canadian Interests through Peacekeeping (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2009), 89.   5 George Melnyk, “Canada and Afghanistan: Peacemaking as Counterinsurgency Warfare – A Conflict in Terms” (2010) 5, available at http://www. ucalgary.ca/peacestudies/files/peacestudies/Canada%20and%20 ­Afghanistan%20JULY%202010%20CPS%20Version.pdf   6 Ibid., 9.  7 Ibid.   8 Patricia Molloy, Canada / US and Other Unfriendly Relations: Before and After 9/11 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 110.

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  9 Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 106. 10 Kent Roach, September 11: Consequences for Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 6, 166. 11 Sherene H. Razack, Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping, and the New Imperialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 13, 10. 12 Ibid., 11, 8. 13 Ibid., 9. 14 Robert Everett, “Parliament and Politics,” in Canadian Annual Review of Politics and Public Affairs 2002, ed. David Mutimer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 30. 15 Razack, Dark Threats, 11. 16 Jennifer Welsh, At Home in the World: Canada’s Global Vision for the 21st Century (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2004), 18–19. 17 James Laxer, The Border: Canada, the US and Dispatches from the 49th Parallel (Toronto: Doubleday, 2003), 42. 18 Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship (2012). Available at http://www.cic.gc.ca/ english/pdf/pub/discover.pdf. 19 Esyllt Jones and Adele Perry, People’s Citizenship Guide: A Response to Conservative Canada (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2011), 7. The publisher’s website states that royalties will be donated to the Canadian Council for Refugees, indicating a different conception of the nation’s hospitality from that espoused by the government’s new citizenship guide (see http://­ arbeiterring.com/books/detail/a-peoples-citizenship-guide/). 20 Melnyk, “Canada and Afghanistan,” 4. 21 Bryce Traister, “Border Shopping: American Studies and the Anti-Nation,” in Globalization on the Line: Culture, Capital, and Citizenship at US Borders, ed. Claudia Sadowski-Smith (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 40. 22 Ibid., 41. 23 Ibid., 33.

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Index

9/11, 16, 22, 109, 226, 230; and the Canada-US border, 4, 26, 93–4, 108; and Canada-US relations, 8, 16, 19, 21, 65, 112, 232 activism: African-Canadian, 167, 170–2, 187; Chicano/a, 193; Indigenous, 103, 115–19, 121– 2, 126, 131–2, 258n17; labour, 153. See also American Indian Movement; Black Power; Idle No More; National Indian Brotherhood Adams, Rachel, 18, 209 Afghanistan, 104–8, 230–5 African Americans, 22, 36, 55, 76–9, 103–5, 116–17, 149, 151– 2, 158, 160–5, 167–8, 172, 174– 5, 181, 184, 188–9; relationship to African-Canadian culture, 19, 164, 188–9 African Canadians, 19–20, 22, 55–6, 76, 104–5, 149–90; and diaspora, 188–9 Ahmed, Sara, 12, 14, 229 Alfred, Taiaiake (Gerald), 145 American Civil War, 77, 150

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American Indian Movement (a im), 115–16, 131–2, 258n17 American studies, 17–19, 23, 194– 5, 243n62 Andrews, Jennifer, 16, 53, 128, 132, 134, 141, 148 Angus, Ian, 8–9, 11–12, 16, 30, 33, 239n9 Anishinaabe. See Ojibway Anzaldúa, Gloria, 15, 39, 130, 192–3, 212, 269n2, 270n15 Argentina, 209, 211, 214–6, 227 Armstrong, Jeannette, 22, 112, 115–27, 131, 137, 142, 145, 147–8, 258n17 assimilation, 105, 116, 122–3, 132, 143–4, 146 Atwood, Margaret, 38, 42, 50 Bellfy, Phil, 244n15, 260n58 Berland, Jody, 8 Blackfoot, 71–2, 83, 112, 127–31, 134, 141–2 Black Loyalists, 150, 157–8, 165 Black Power, 117, 258n17 Booth, Wayne C., 52 The Border, 21, 65–7, 93–111, 113

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border studies, 17, 191, 195. See also Mexico-US border studies Bordertown, 21, 65–81, 83, 89, 91–5, 100–1, 103–5, 107, 109 Borrows, John, 123, 145–7 Bowering, George, 55, 63 Braz, Albert, 194, 204 Britain, 7, 36, 41, 48, 74, 82, 113, 125, 144, 157–60, 165, 175, 177–8, 220, 235, 250n4; and Canadianness, 30, 71; and empire, 26, 81–2, 149, 175, 178 Brown, John, 154, 157 Brown, Wendy, 108, 128, 172 Bureau of Indian Affairs (bi a), 118–19 Cairns, Alan C., 143–5, 148 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (cbc), 21, 26, 64–5, 93, 210–11 The Canadian Brothers, 6–7, 9 Canadian Constitution, 20, 22, 37; and Indigenous peoples, 111– 13, 115, 122–4, 126, 143, 145 Canadian Security Intelligence Service (c s i s), 94, 99–100 Canadian studies, 18–19 Canadian Television Network (c t v ), 21, 65, 67, 79 Carman, Bliss, 43–5, 49–50 Casteel, Sarah Phillips, 17, 23 Central America, 27, 59, 62, 193– 4, 199, 204, 208, 228. See also El Salvador; Guatemala; Nicaragua; Panama Charlottetown Agreement, 20, 22, 112, 123 Cherokee, 127, 133

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Chicano/as, 192–3, 209, 211, 213; Chicano studies, 17. See also Anzaldúa Christie, Stuart, 120, 148 citizenship, 3–5, 22, 38, 40, 44–5, 52, 79, 89, 109–10, 113–5, 120, 124, 126–8, 131–2, 143–7, 157– 8, 174, 177–80, 184, 187, 191, 196–7, 215, 219, 229, 235–7; and Indigenous peoples, 83, 111–12, 114–5, 120, 123–8, 131–2, 142–8, 261n58 civility, 7, 47–8, 51, 61–2, 96, 104, 107; and Canadianness, 28, 37, 58, 62–3, 66, 68–9, 72, 80, 86, 92, 95, 100, 107–9, 132, 156, 233. See also whiteness Clarke, George Elliott, 163–5, 173, 189 Clarkson, Stephen, 45, 248n68 class, 7, 9, 34 Code, Lorraine, 8–9 Cohen, Leonard, 209–10 Cold War, 53–4, 58, 60, 152 Coleman, Daniel, 21, 28, 30, 48, 61–2, 72 colonialism, 13, 19, 22–3, 29–30, 41–2, 65, 74–5, 84, 103–4, 110, 112–5, 118–9, 124–7, 132, 136, 138–9, 141–2, 144, 232, 235, 237, 241n34 Columbia Broadcasting System (c b s), 79, 252n41 Communism, 53–4, 58–9, 152–3, 249n98 Compton, Wayde, 22, 149–51, 174–90, 267n64; 49th Parallel Psalm, 174–83, 189; After Canaan, 183, 185–7; Bluesprint,

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183; Performance Bond, 181–3, 185, 189 Confederation, 26, 33, 51, 66, 69 contact zone, 23, 30, 131, 192, 194 cosmopolitanism, 9, 13, 195–7, 202 Crane, Hart, 44, 49 Cree, 72–5 Davey, Frank, 16, 118, 121, 240n9 Davidson, Arnold E., 128, 132, 134, 141 Dawson, Michael, 79, 81, 92, 250n4, 252n41 decolonization, 71, 125–7, 144–5, 147, 237 Department of Indian Affairs (d i a), 118–19 Derrida, Jacques, 10–11, 39, 206, 221 Dickinson, Peter, 165–6 Disney Corporation, 64–5 Dobson, Kit, 119–20 Douglas, James, 174, 178–9, 187–8 Due South, 21, 65–6, 79–95, 100– 1, 103, 107–9, 212, 252n39, 252n41, 253n60, 254n70 El Salvador, 195–6, 199, 201–6, 208, 213, 219, 270n22, 271n27 ethics, 12, 14–15, 97, 102, 188, 195–6, 206, 226, 235 ethnicity, 12, 14, 32, 103, 108–9, 128, 130, 194, 200, 213, 229, 255n85, 256n108 Eurocentrism, 139, 144, 222 exoticism, 31, 34, 95, 203, 205, 207–8, 213, 222, 256n108

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27 7

Fox, Claire F., 192–4 Fraser, Marian Botsford, 26, 239n1 Free Trade Agreement (fta ), 8, 19, 21, 23, 25–8, 36, 45–6, 62, 65, 81, 109, 112, 215, 239– 40n9, 248n68 Frye, Northrop, 209–10 gender, 5–6, 51, 81, 85, 95–6, 107–8, 132–3, 136, 256n108, 262n79 genocide, 61, 72, 113, 139 Gittings, Christopher C., 82, 84 globalization, 16–17, 193 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 192, 216–17, 269n9 Grant, George, 11, 66 Great Lakes, 21, 25–9, 34, 36–7, 41–2, 51, 55, 57, 80, 152, 154, 219–20, 223–4, 231, 239n1; and Indigenous peoples, 42 Grinde, Donald, Jr, 13, 41, 126 Guatemala, 204–5, 226 Hamilton, 40, 236 Harris, Jennifer, 159 Hawthorn Report, 143–4 health care, 27, 59, 62, 140, 214, 235 Highway 61, 5–10 Hill, Lawrence, 22, 150–62, 172, 174, 187–8, 190; Any Known Blood, 151–2, 154–62, 172, 188; The Book of Negroes, 152, 158–9, 161–2, 187–8; Some Great Thing, 152–4, 159–60, 188 Hogan’s Alley, 183–8 Holland, Patrick, 29, 34, 46

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homosocial, 67–9 Hospital, Janette Turner, 22–3, 194–205, 209, 213, 219, 226, 270n22, 270n23, 271n27 hospitality, 6–7, 9–15, 20, 22, 39–40, 50, 55, 61, 68, 86–7, 89–90, 97–8, 100, 105, 135–6, 141, 145, 149–51, 155–6, 159, 194, 196, 200–1, 203–4, 206, 214, 216, 221, 226, 232–3, 235– 6; and black North Americans, 77, 149–52, 155–56, 158, 161– 2, 165, 168, 172, 174–5, 181, 190; Canada as sanctuary, 14–16, 19, 22–3, 89–90, 98, 103–5, 121, 149–50, 152, 158, 163–5, 167–8, 177, 194, 196–7, 200–2, 208, 220, 225–6, 237; Canada-US, 5–7, 9, 21, 23, 26, 30, 37–8, 40, 43–5, 65–6, 73, 109, 113, 115, 138, 215; domestic, 35, 43, 137, 140, 154, 157, 194, 203, 206; and ethics, 14–15, 206; and guest, 4, 6, 9–11, 13–16, 21, 23, 27, 29, 39, 41, 43, 48, 60, 67, 79–81, 90, 93, 95, 97–8, 101, 106, 113, 115, 119, 128, 131, 133, 135– 6,  139, 141–2, 150–1, 153–4, 157, 168, 190, 196–7, 203, 206, 213–15, 222–3, 225, 232, 262n79; and home, 4–6, 10–11, 14, 35, 38–43, 53, 80, 93, 110, 137, 150, 155, 157–9, 162, 169, 173, 176, 184, 187–8, 190, 204, 206, 209, 214–17, 223, 226; and host, 5–6, 9–15, 19–23, 26–7, 37–41, 43–4, 52–3, 65, 67–70, 73, 79, 81, 85–7, 89, 91, 93, 96–7, 101–2, 109, 113–5, 119,

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126, 128, 136–8, 142, 147, 149– 50, 152–4, 157, 163, 167–8, 172–3, 184, 187, 190, 195–6, 205, 214, 216–17, 223–5, 227, 230, 262n79; and Indigenous peoples, 13, 41, 101, 113–15, 119, 126, 128, 132, 135–6, 138, 147; and parasite, 131, 135; and refugees, 200, 205–6, 208, 220, 226, 274n19 hostility, 9–11, 37, 39, 57, 130, 141, 150, 163, 174, 187, 206, 214, 222; and Canada-US relations, 5, 7, 27, 40, 43, 45, 70, 73, 101, 141, 230 “hostipitality”, 11, 39, 67, 141, 221; and Canada-US relations, 11, 69–70, 80, 101–2, 138, 140– 1, 197–8, 230, 233 Huggan, Graham, 29, 31, 34, 46 humour, 21, 27–9, 46, 49–55, 57, 58–9, 85, 96, 134, 154, 197, 211 Hutcheon, Linda, 46–7, 49, 52–3, 169 Idle No More, 146, 234, 237 immigration, 8, 26, 93, 99, 114, 139, 149, 167, 174–5, 177–8, 181, 194, 200, 225 imperialism, 13, 29, 31, 219, 222, 235; British, 81–2, 149, 175, 178; US, 17, 103, 132, 142, 237 indigeneity, 41–3, 81–5, 103, 133 indigenization, 79, 82, 84, 93 Indigenous peoples, 12–16, 19–20, 22, 29–30, 41–3, 61, 70–6, 81–5, 93, 101–5, 109, 111–48, 222–3, 229–30, 241n34; and land claims, 16, 73–4; and community, 146; and Indian

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status, 125, 131, 144. See also Blackfoot; Cherokee; Cree; Inuit; Métis; Mohawk; Ojibway; Okanagan; Tsimshian inhospitality, 87, 89–90, 201, 206– 7, 216, 220–2, 225; and black North Americans, 22, 104, 158, 161, 174; and Indigenous peoples, 13, 73, 119–20, 136–7, 141. See also hostility Integrated Border Enforcement Teams (i bets), 93–4, 102 Inuit, 82–3, 85, 103, 197, 230 irony, 21, 27, 32, 46–9, 52–3, 55, 57, 59–63, 85, 117, 138, 169– 70, 216, 248n81 Islam, 104, 107–8, 185 Jameson, Anna Brownell, 25–7, 57 Jay Treaty, 14, 74, 121, 127 Jiwani, Yasmin, 94, 99, 104, 108, 256n112 Justice, Daniel Heath, 123, 128 Kant, Immanuel, 9–10, 13, 222, 232 Kidnie, Margaret Jane, 165 King, Thomas, 22, 112, 127–35, 147–8; “Borders,” 127–9; Green Grass, Running Water, 127, 131–5, 139–42, 145, 148; Truth and Bright Water, 127, 129–31 Kroetsch, Robert, 49–50 Ku Klux Klan (kkk), 155–6, 160 Kulchyski, Peter, 112, 144 labour, 55, 153, 194–5, 218–19, 221–2, 225, 237, 272n54 Lampan, Archibald, 49

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language, 12, 17, 39, 108, 200, 221, 243n62, 253n60, 271n27; French, 20, 33, 130, 153–4, 198–200, 216–17, 227; Indigenous languages, 82–3, 116, 136, 139, 223; Spanish, 86–9, 201–5, 208–17, 221, 225, 227 Latin America, 15–16, 19–23, 44, 59, 88, 194–6, 201–4, 207–10, 212–14, 216, 218, 220, 227, 243n62, 271n27. See also Argentina; Central America; El Salvador; Guatemala; Mexico; Nicaragua; Panama; South America Latinos, 209, 211–12, 216, 271n27 Laxer, James, 26–7, 234 Lee, Dennis, 38, 41 liminality, 46–7, 179, 193 Loyalists, 14, 56, 66, 155. See also Black Loyalists McCrae, John, 43–45, 49 MacDonald, John A., 170–1 McFadden, David W., 21, 27–63, 85, 138, 160, 236, 245n17, 249n106 MacLeod, Joan, 22–3, 194, 202–9, 213, 225–6 McLuhan, Marshall, 45 Manifest Destiny, 11, 59–60, 140, 229 Meech Lake Accord, 20, 22, 112, 143 Métis, 72–3, 77, 182 Mexico, 23, 25, 44, 67–8, 85–9, 192–3, 195, 199, 204, 208, 212, 223–4, 243n62, 272n54; and

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Canada, 99, 195, 204, 216–25. See also Mexico-US border Mexico-US border, 15, 19, 39, 130, 191–3, 195, 199, 202–3, 210–12, 219, 224, 243n62, 269n2, 270n22; Mexico-US border studies, 17, 23, 191–4, 217 Mohawk, 100–2, 111–12, 143, 145 Molloy, Patricia, 232, 255n94, 256n109 Moynagh, Maureen, 155–6 multiculturalism, 14, 28, 37, 48–9, 56, 75, 92, 95, 108, 128–9, 149, 184, 215–17; Canadian Multiculturalism Act, 14, 20, 37, 49, 55, 75, 92 Nanook of the North, 84–5 National Indian Brotherhood, 116–17, 258n17 nationalism: Canadian, 8, 11–12, 19–23, 28, 38, 61–2, 64, 67, 72, 102, 114, 127, 150–1, 155, 164, 175, 177, 181, 183, 190–1, 195, 198–9, 202, 208, 229, 235–6; left-nationalism, 8, 62, 239n9; Québécois nationalism, 199, 229; US, 193 natural resources, 14, 73, 148, 228, 273n1 neighbour, 12, 18, 31, 218, 223, 229–30; and Canada-US relations, 5, 11–12, 23, 26, 30, 45–6, 57, 69, 72, 76, 93, 95, 110, 140–1, 150, 183, 191, 198, 210–11, 215, 218, 231 neocolonialism, 19, 30, 38, 42, 103, 113, 115, 138, 237

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Nicaragua, 59–60 North American Free Trade Agreement (na fta ), 8, 13, 17, 19, 21, 23, 25, 28, 36, 45–6, 65, 81, 85–6, 89, 109, 195, 209, 217–18, 224, 248n68 North-West Mounted Police, 66–7, 69–70, 76, 78, 80, 109, 128, 250n4 Nothof, Anne E., 204, 207, 213 Ojibway, 112, 135–6, 138, 261n58 Oka Crisis, 20, 22, 101, 112, 143 Okanagan, 112, 115–16, 121–2, 124, 126–7 Other, 29–31, 85, 155–6, 220–1, 223, 233, 235 Panama, 90, 226 peacekeeping, 231–4 postcolonialism, 15, 19, 30–1, 199, 237 Povinelli, Elizabeth A., 113 Pratt, Mary Louise, 30 Purdie, Susan, 50–1 Quebec, 12–13, 20, 33, 35, 72, 96, 100, 195–6, 198–200, 202, 229, 271n27 race, 15, 33, 36–7, 48, 70, 76–9, 100, 103–5, 135–6, 141, 150, 152–3, 156, 178, 182–3, 235, 237; and Canada, 55–6, 78, 84, 108, 153–4, 162, 166–7, 170, 172, 174, 180, 186–7, 189; and the United States, 55, 76, 165. See also whiteness racism, 13, 15, 30, 73–5, 78–9, 82, 98, 103, 150, 232–3; in Canada,

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index

15, 19, 55, 65, 71, 84, 104, 107, 142, 149–52, 154–6, 158, 163, 167–9, 171–3, 176, 180–1, 201, 232–3, 237; in the United States, 36–7, 47–8, 55, 120, 142, 151– 2, 156, 171–3, 176, 212. See also xenophobia Razack, Sherene H., 232–4 refugees, 14–16, 61, 97–9, 103, 114, 149–50, 158, 194–6, 198– 203, 205–8, 219, 226, 237, 270n23, 274n19 repressive state apparatus, 22, 65, 70, 83, 110, 120–1, 142, 182 Roach, Kent, 16, 232 Rosello, Mireille, 14–15, 225 Rowe, John Carlos, 17 Royal Canadian Mounted Police (rc mp ), 59, 64–6, 79–84, 89, 91–4, 102, 109 Royal Ontario Museum (ro m ), 169–70 Sadowski-Smith, Claudia, 18, 32, 195, 200, 218, 271n27 Safe Third Country Agreement, 16, 226 Schwartzwald, Robert, 12–13 Sears, Djanet, 22, 150–1, 162–74, 187–90; Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God, 162, 167–74, 188–9; Afrika Solo, 188; Harlem Duet, 162–8, 173, 187–8, 266n37 Seasonal Agricultural Workers Programme (saw p ), 195, 218– 19, 225 security 21, 66–7, 85, 97, 99–100, 103, 106, 108, 236, 242n44. See also Canadian Security

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Intelligence Service (c sis); US Homeland Security sexuality, 5–6, 81, 95, 132, 197. See also homosocial Shakespeare, William, 162–3, 166, 188 Shields, Carol, 117, 222 Siemerling, Winfried, 17, 23 slavery, 30, 36, 149, 159, 161, 175, 178, 219, 267n64; Canadian, 15, 56, 77, 104, 149–50, 157–9, 162, 169, 178; US, 14, 22, 36, 56, 76–7, 103, 149–50, 155, 158–60, 162–3, 165, 168, 175, 177, 190, 200 smuggling, 5, 93, 95, 101 South America, 194, 207–8, 214. See also Argentina sovereignty, 14, 107, 113, 133; of Canada, 5, 8–9, 11, 13, 16, 21, 25–7, 43, 65, 67, 70, 73, 91, 96–7, 100–3, 108–9, 115, 122, 124, 126, 133, 144, 148, 150, 191, 235; of host, 10, 70; of Indigenous peoples, 13, 73, 101–3, 109, 111–12, 114, 119– 20, 124–6, 133, 147–8; of Quebec, 12–13, 20, 33 stereotypes, 140, 203, 216; of blackness, 36, 169–70; of Canada, 22, 27, 59, 65–7, 79, 84, 86, 100, 134; of Chicanos, 209, 211; of Latin America, 209, 212–13; of the United States, 22, 79, 84, 134, 140–1 Stewart, Priscilla, 175, 267n64 “Superman’s Song,” 91–2 Supreme Court of Canada, 123–4, 259n36, surveillance, 21, 153, 229, 242n44

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index

Taylor, Drew Hayden, 22, 112–13, 115, 135–42, 145, 147–8 television, 20–2, 32, 42, 45, 64–111, 248n68. See also The Border; Bordertown; Due South terrorism, 98, 104, 106 tolerance, 37, 61, 71, 95, 128–9, 172–3, 217 tourism, 23, 41, 60, 64, 134–5, 142, 172, 213–14, 216 Traister, Bryce, 17, 19, 191, 236, 246n41 transnationalism, 16–17, 20, 155– 6, 164, 181, 193, 236 travel writing, 21, 25–32, 34, 36, 46, 60–1 treaties, 14, 101, 113, 122–4, 143, 147. See also Jay Treaty Trudeau, Pierre Elliott, 59, 125, 143, 216 Tsimshian, 83–4, 253n60 Turner, Dale, 119, 123, 125, 145 Turner, Victor, 46 Underground Railroad, 14–15, 19, 22, 149–50, 152, 154–5, 157–8, 160–1, 163, 165, 190, 200–1 Urquhart, Jane, 22–3, 194, 218– 26, 230–3 US Customs, 3–4, 40–1, 59, 94, 215

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US Homeland Security, 93–4, 102– 3, 106, 111 u s n a : The United States of North America, 228–30, 234–5, 237, 273n1 Verdecchia, Guillermo, 23, 194; Fronteras Americanas/American Borders, 194, 208–18, 226–7; The Noam Chomsky Lectures, 226 Vietnam War, 27, 57–9, 62, 208, 249n106; draft resisters, 14, 203, 226 Walcott, Rinaldo, 151, 159, 163–4, 166–8 Walton, Priscilla L., 16, 128, 132, 134, 141, 148 War of 1812, 6–7, 9, 25–6, 150, 160, 167–8, 171, 234 Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, 4, 260n58 Whitaker, Reg, 54, 249n98 whiteness, 4, 48, 79, 132, 136, 174, 212; and Canadianness, 14–15, 55, 81–2, 92–3, 95, 138, 150, 153, 160, 164, 166–8, 172, 204; and civility, 21, 28, 30, 58, 66, 72, 92, 107–8, 232 White Paper, 125–6, 132, 143–5 xenophobia, 106, 201, 223

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