Book Review: A Line of Blood and Dirt - Creating the Canada-United States Border Across Indigenous Lands

The Colonial powers of Britain, Russia and the United States, committed to four Treaties in establishing boundaries in North America. They are: the Treaty of Paris 1783, the Treaty of 1818, Anglo-Russian Treaty 1825, and the Oregon Treaty of 1846, roughing out what is the border today. Indigenous Nations who lived along this continuous border from the East Coast to the West Coast were ignored in the establishment of this boundary. During this time, hundreds of Indigenous people were hired and used as guides, and laborers. They were also used for their knowledge by the survey teams not realizing the impact it would have on them in the future.

I am constantly reading daily news, history, reference, and books sent to me. I became curious about this 1798 law, the Alien Act, that I heard and read about recently on how and why it was established. Then I remembered this particular book A LINE of BLOOD and DIRT that was published in the early part of 2021. Even though I try to read everything for the store it takes a while to get to them as with this book.

The Alien Act of 1798 came about after the Revolutionary War because Britain was pressuring United States citizens into the British Navy where they were capturing and stealing the men for their ships where this continued basically up to the 1812 War.  During the Dakota War and the Civil War in the 1860’s, Britain had less of a military presence so the British tried staying neutral. However, the broader area was a hot bed for defectors, draft dodgers, and smuggling being the biggest problem.  Men could just walk back and forth and US citizens could get way from war.  Meanwhile, the British deserted for better pay by the North and the South. The border was not really committed until about 1868. Through these years the people of Canada feared the United States would try to annex Canada, to take over the country. In fact, Canada never wanted to be part of the United States. These disputes did not consider in any way the Native Indigenous peoples living along this boarder line, the Native population had been traveling freely for hundreds of years.                                                                                                                                                                            

The countries involved with the placement of Northern Boarder were Britain, Canada, and the United States which built their border over already existing ones. For the Cree, Lakota, Blackfoot, and the Me’tis, the borders were established for land structure and resources pertaining to everyday life. For all that power Canda and the US employed, they still could not erase the Indigenous boundaries, that happened only after starvation and disease. That’s when everything went wrong leading to the devastation of the Buffalo and rampant Small Pox.

A LINE of BLOOD and DIRT gives a good overview of the establishment of the Northen border which is the longest continuous border in the world at 5,525 miles or 8,893 kilometers. That’s many Indigenous homelands devastated by decisions not of their own making. A LINE of BLOOD and DIRT has an excellent bibliography with notes on each chapter. Even after 250 years border control along with immigration is still a hot issue for both countries!