'When Maps Fail'

When Maps Fail: Straight Line Metaphors and the Borders and Regions of the Canadian American Plains -- by Peter S. Morris

I found this paper on the web by chance, during a random search. I feel like I've stumbled on a goldmine; it addresses many of the main issues I'm interested in for my "Canadia" project. I recommend reading the whole thing -- it's not too long, and for an academic paper, remarkably un-stuffy and well-written.

But ... just in case you're in a hurry, I'll talk about a few highlights.

One could talk at length about the significance of the international border to this agricultural trade dispute of a few years ago. . . . But the only point I wish to make at the moment is this: quite simply, the Canadian-American border matters. It has not been an invisible line—an irrelevant piece of geographic trivia in North American history. No less so than the U.S.-Mexico boundary, we must conceive of the 49th-parallel border as a significant and ever-evolving component of historical-geographic change in the North American West (my emphasis).

Morris goes on to discuss how little scholarship has focused on the 49th parallel as a boundary and a borderlands area -- a place where there are conflicting views about who is the "Other"; where neighbours on either side of an international border line may have more in common than those who are citizens of the same nation, but live on opposite sides of a continent. Within both counties, there are those whose lives and values reflect a difference in culture much greater than the difference between the cultures on either side of the border line. Farmers in the Midwest and the Canadian prairies are bound to have more in common than those same farmers will have in common with people growing up in urban New Orleans or native people living in Iqaluit.

The question here is, where does one culture end and another begin? Is it ever that cut-and-dried? Can you differentiate between people who have more in common terms of economies, trade, and way of life than those who share currency, a flag, and nationalistic values, but perhaps little else?

Morris rightfully mentions how little scholarship there is on Canada-U.S. relations and our "shared borderland". Canadian and American scholarship, as he says, is mostly divided along nationalistic lines:

That this would be true for scholars from south of the border should be no surprise. It is virtually a national pastime in the United States to ignore our northern neighbors—Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood once referred to the border as a “one-way mirror.”

As much as I enjoy the validation Morris gives to the non-visibility of Canada in the Unites States, it's important to understand Morris's next point, which is the astute observation that, while Americans and American scholarship have predictably often ignored Canada and how Canadian borderlands history relates to it's own, Canadian scholarship has also tended to have a nationalistic focus: Canadians also "limit their studies to the people, places, and events on just one side of the border." He also offers a good reason for this, with which I agree:

Canadians, like most peoples, have sought a distinctive national identity in the histories they have written, and perhaps the strongest and most enduring bond linking the various Canadas together—West to East, French-speaking to English-speaking—has been a common desire to not be “American.”

Morris does well by paraphrasing former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's famous quip (also, coincidentally, quoted at the bottom of this blog) that being next-door neighbour to the United States is like sleeping with an elephant: the enormous bunkmate is impossible to ignore -- and every insignificant twitch and grunt that the elephant makes is felt in Canada tenfold. Therefore, it is by necessity, and because of the U.S.'s overbearing presence, that Canada has always focused on creating a strong nationalistic vision that is separate and different from the history of America, rather than being a part of it. (As for why the U.S. has made a national past time of ignoring Canada ... well, no excuse is given.)