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

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

Sheila McManus seeks to understand how the running of the 49th parallel,
which constitutes the boundary between two nations (Canada and the
United States) as well as a province and a state (Alberta and Montana),
played out, insofar as it was part of a policy designed to nationalize a
unified geographical region occupied by a common cultural group, the
Blackfoot Confederacy. As the subtitle indicates, McManus filters the
elements making up the stuff of the Alberta–Montana borderlands
through two historical membranes: race and gender.

The book isolates and examines several problems faced by the national
governments in their attempts to divide and nationalize a common
topographical, economic, social, and linguistic space. Boosters focused
on matters as diverse as the relative fertility of the soil or “the
racialized and gendered characteristics of aboriginals and
immigrants.” In the beginning and for many decades thereafter, as
McManus points out, the process of nationalization was slow, uneven, and
messy. Even when the population of Montana had expanded to 240,000 and
that of Alberta to 73,000 by the turn of the 20th century, the border
remained permeable. Mormons fleeing mainline American persecution
brought their irrigation technology to southwestern Alberta; railway
companies drove their north–south spurs across the border; national
governments established national parks that were very similar in design
and purpose. While the differences in American and Canadian Aboriginal
policies are well known, policy makers on each side shared important
analytical and regulatory frameworks as well as ideological premises.

These similarities, McManus contends, help to explain common Aboriginal
experiences of racism and poverty on both sides of the border. Likewise,
shared convictions about the role of white women in immigration and
colonization policies and campaigns explain to some extent the creation
of two very similar white settler communities in Montana and Alberta.

This is one of an increasing number of border studies that, by
employing the techniques of comparative history and knowledge of
gendered relationships, have illuminated the inner recesses of
Canadian–American relations, revealing subtleties and complexities
unknown to traditional students of the field.