GSWS Reads: Benjamin Hoy

A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border across Indigenous Lands examines the creation and enforcement of Canada United States border from 1775 until 1939. Built with Indigenous labour and on top of Indigenous land, the border was born in conflict. Federal administrators used deprivation, starvation, and coercion to displace Indigenous communities and undermine their conceptions of territory and sovereignty. European, African American, Chinese, Cree, Assiniboine, Dakota, Lakota, Nimiipuu, Coast Salish, Ojibwe, and Haudenosaunee communities faced a diversity of border closure experiences and timelines. Unevenness and variation served as hallmarks of the border as federal officials in each country committed to a kind of border power that was diffuse and far reaching. Utilizing Historical GIS, this book showcases how regional conflicts, political reorganization, and social upheaval created the Canada-US border and remade the communities who lived in its shadows.  

Speaker: Benjamin Hoy is an Associate Professor of History and the director of the Historical GIS Lab at the University of Saskatchewan. He has published on a wide range of topic including Indigenous history, borderlands, game-based learning, Indigenous representations in board games, and extradition policy. His first book, A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border across Indigenous Lands, examines the creation and enforcement of the Canadian-United States border between 1775 and 1939 and its impacts on the Indigenous residents whose land the border was created across.  

Moderator: Holly M. Karibo is the 2020/2021 Farley Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at SFU. She is also an assistant professor of History at Oklahoma State University.

In partnership with SFU History