“My Home Is on Both Sides”: Indigenous Communities and the US-Canadian Border on the Columbia Plateau, 1880s–1910s

Abstract

For indigenous groups inhabiting the interior Pacific Northwest’s Columbia Plateau, issues of native group identity took on a transnational dimension with the imposition of the US-Canadian border in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article examines how the Okanagan, Sinixt, and Ktunaxa peoples, whose homelands and communities were bifurcated by the forty-ninth parallel, negotiated and complicated Canada’s and the United States’ enforcement of the international boundary. These partitioned indigenous communities endeavored to maintain cultural connections to each other across the line while also engaging their recognized political status within the bounds of either nation-state. Focusing on the activities of Native Plateau peoples in the borderlands reestablishes the persistence of indigenous articulations of territory and nationhood that transcended the US-Canadian border.