More about Borders

The line that divides North America into two countries is an artificial one. You can tell this by its straightness. Squiggly lines follow natural formations—rivers and mountain ranges. Straight ones are manmade, which is what most of the Canada-US border is.

Yet it’s not a meaningless line. The countries and cultures that grew up along it are not only parallel but often divergent. Originally they diverged over whether to break with the past in a radical experiment or whether to continue to evolve within the British Empire.

Secondary choices followed from that first one. How were the two societies to be organized and what was to be the status of the inhabitants? Were they all to be equal citizens of the new society, responsible for asserting their own interests?

Or were they to continue to be subjects of a parental, hopefully benevolent, power looking out for them? What about the land they lived on? This was important to relations between new settlers and first peoples, many of whom had no sense of private ownership.

The vast majority of North American borders are artificial, following manmade survey lines. Mountains, other watersheds and big rivers have lives of their own. The Mississippi and Missouri, St. Lawrence and Ottawa are political boundaries as well as physical ones.

Even when forms like these determine a border of a state or province, its other borders are usually manmade, except when it is along a coast. So the North American map is more like a jigsaw puzzle than the tapestry of countries that makes up Europe and Asia.

A striking example of this is Four Corners where the states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah intersect. This artificial boundary approximates the dividing line between the Navaho First Nation and the Ute one (for which the state of Utah is named).

Canada acquired its own Four Corners—not called that—with creation of Nunavut out of the North West Territories in 1999. The meeting of the 60th parallel and 102nd meridian brings together the two territories and the provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan

Nunavut was set up to give the Inuit people greater say in running their own affairs, They make up 80% of the population of the new Territory while they were a minority in the NWT.

Midway between straight and squiggly line boundaries is the system of river lots of New France that spread to parts of Western Canada. The first white settlers in Quebec surveyed long strips of land back from the river frontage which was their highway.

Later settlement brought straight-line township surveys. English speaking refugees from the American Revolution established Québec’s Eastern Townships in their new homeland.

In Western Canada the Red River Uprising broke out in 1870 when English speaking surveyors from the East started drawing lines across river lots of French speaking Métis.

For many First Nations, private ownership was not a liberating but a limiting concept. Land over which they had moved back and forth freely was now subdivided by lines marking state, civic and personal boundaries. The water they drank, game they pursued and vegetation they harvested freely now became subject to someone else’s control.

It was to cushion aboriginal societies that the British government closed off the “Indian Lands” that American settlers saw as a resource to be developed rather than a preserve. The 1774 Quebec Act that kept those lands under Québec jurisdiction was a prime cause of the 1776 Revolution.

And that Revolution led to the artificial line that divides North America in two countries.