I was editing an article the morning of September 11, 2001, when my telephone rang. Without preface, my American colleague Jewel Spangler asked, “Are you watching TV?”

“No, I’m editing this article,” I responded.

“You should turn it on,” she said.

“Which channel?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

I turned on the television to watch a plane slam into the second tower. Numbly watching the Twin Towers crumble, I shakily called my mother in Galveston. “We’re under attack,” she said. “It’s just like Pearl Harbor.” I called my cousin in New Jersey to see if her family was safe.

Then, knowing I was being irrational, I called my son’s school. “I know this makes no sense,” I said, “but I’m American, and I just need to know that my son is alright.” A kind woman’s voice responded, “I am Canadian, I have children and grandchildren, and all I want to do right now is hug them. So, if you need to see your son, come on to the school.”

As I drove through that bright, crisp September morning, I suddenly noticed an unusual number of airplanes heading to the Calgary airport. And for the first time, I began to glimpse how important the border could be. At that moment the 49^th Parallel simultaneously provided refuge for the diverted travelers in those planes and erected a wall that barred me from reaching my family.

Needing human contact that afternoon and still stunned from unrelenting news coverage, I drove to my office. My colleague Doug Francis saw me arrive and rushed to hug me. In the coming days, friends and strangers continued to shake my stereotypes of Canadian reserve with their kindness. The Calgary airport remained packed with planes hastily diverted north of the border, while the Calgary Drop-In Centre, erected to house homeless people, sheltered stranded passengers. Helplessly seeking something to do, I chipped in with two American colleagues to send a stack of pizzas to the Drop-In Centre.

The morning of September 10 I had begun a new semester and a new class that my colleague Sarah Carter and I were piloting, “Mild West/Wild West?: Comparative History of the Canadian and U.S. Wests.” (The question mark in the title is essential.) The first day of class was September 10, 2001; my first lecture was September 12.

I was supposed to lecture on ways that Americans and Canadians had imagined our borders and our respective Wests. I intended to contrast the place of the U.S. and Canadian Wests in some of the foundational national histories and compare how the Canada-U.S. border had functioned in Canadian and American imaginations.¹ I was going to discuss the work of George F. G. Stanley who drew a line at the border that separated U.S. savagery from Canadian civilization—that separated a mythic U.S. Wild West from a mythic Canadian Mild West.² I intended to talk about how Americans, unlike Stanley, thought that Canada was pretty much like the States, but had imagined a racialized southern boundary that separated White Americans from darker poorer Mexicans allegedly clamoring to sneak across the border. I was going to talk about how both these borders were human inventions, and about the part that historians had played in their creation.

The morning of September 12, I was reviewing my lecture notes while CNN droned in the background. Then two newscasters grabbed my attention as they speculated that the flights that leveled the Twin Towers had originated in Maine and Boston because dark people could sneak across the border from Canada. And everything I intended to say that morning shifted beneath my feet.

I somehow got through my lecture that morning. I ended with the CNN newscast and told the students that whatever I thought I knew about our borders was changing as I spoke, and that I hoped that our semester together would help us make sense of the altered realities we were about to confront.

Over two decades later, the events of September 11 still impact American culture and global politics. At the time, they dramatically underscored my nascent understanding of the Canada-U.S. border. I knew that the border, and the nations it separated, had always been historically constructed and contingent. I had not grasped that the ways the 49^th Parallel was policed, politicized, and imagined would continue to change after I crossed it. I knew that the border had always been selectively porous, allowing some people and groups to enter Canada while excluding others. I had not yet grasped that at times I would not be able to cross it, as happened immediately after 9/11, and at times during the COVID-19 pandemic. I knew that the border operated symbolically to bridge or to separate the ways Americans and Canadians imagined ourselves and our histories. I had not expected so personally to witness the process of reimagining its significance.

I noticed those changes first at airport security and in my son’s heightened anxiety when I traveled to the States. After 9/11, I had to call him every time my plane landed safely. I learned to arrive even earlier to navigate security for crack-of-dawn flights from Calgary to the U.S., to jettison all liquids and take off my shoes to clear security. To my surprise, I often had to endure being singled out for enhanced screening in the United States, in groups that usually consisted of dark young men and me. I think I was there to dispel accusations of racial and gender profiling, as Americans selectively racialized the Canadian border in response to fears of terrorists. I experienced enhanced screening in Calgary as well, but with a difference. For the better part of a year the same Security Officer at the Calgary airport pulled me out of line for enhanced screening. I didn’t mind since it got me out of the long screening lines. Finally, I asked her, “How do you decide who to screen?” “Oh,” she said, “I just look for people who look nice, who won’t yell at me.” I didn’t know whether to be more flattered or terrified.

The three lectures in this section represent research and thoughts about borders, borderlands, comparative histories, and border crossings that began shortly before my move to Calgary and that responded to daily experience as well as to the dramatic events of 9/11. Collectively, they represent three historical approaches to national borders: comparative, borderlands, and cross-cultural histories.

In April 1999, just before my move to Calgary, Jeremy Mouat and I presented a joint paper at the Organization of American Historians meeting in Toronto, “Frontiers, Staples, and People: State and Society in Western Canada and the American West,” the beginning of a joint project comparing the historiographies of western Canada and the U.S. West. That first conference paper eventually mushroomed into a forty-seven-page journal article. During its long gestation we began calling it “The Beast.”³

Jeremy’s generous crash course on the Canadian West provided essential grounding, both personally and professionally. Our collaboration provided much of that first 2001 lecture to “Mild West/Wild West?” It later became the basis of a seminar I developed, “Frontiers, Borders, and Borderlands.” Acknowledging Dr. Mouat’s shared authorship, I used an early iteration of our work for my 2003 lecture, “Telling Differences: The 49^th Parallel, the West, and the Histories of Two Nations.”

Canadian colleagues Sarah Carter and Sheila McManus also generously collaborated on comparative projects. Sarah Carter and I developed our undergraduate course, “Mild West/Wild West?” The opportunity to co-teach with Dr. Carter and to learn from her lectures enriched my thinking about our comparative pasts, and I missed our conversations and collaboration when she left the University of Calgary in 2006 to accept the Henry Marshall Tory Chair at the University of Alberta. I continued to teach “Wild West/Mild West?” until I retired.

I developed new insights into the connected and separate histories of women in the U.S. and Canadian Wests at the Unsettled Pasts conference that Sarah and I collaborated to organize in 2002, and as Sheila McManus and I co-edited One Step over the Line: Toward a History of Women in the North American Wests from some of the conference papers.⁴ My work on comparative and borderlands histories owes a great deal to those early collaborations with generous colleagues.

During 2004–2005 I served as President of the Pacific Coast Branch-American Historical Association. My presidential address focused on national borders and borderlands. It examined, in part, the ways that the 9/11 attacks affected changing perceptions and policing of the U.S.-Canada border. It served as my 2006 lecture as well.

The gap between my 2003 and 2006 lectures was shorter than the dates might suggest and occurred due to a research leave and a brief medical leave. I gave my 2003 lecture in November 2003, during the 2003–2004 academic year and my 2006 lecture in February 2006, during the 2005–2006 academic year, so there was a gap of only one lecture, during the 2004–2005 academic year.

The final essay in this section began long before 9/11. In 1972, while I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan, I visited a friend serving in the Teacher Corps in Nulato, Alaska, an Athabascan village on the lower Yukon River. I spent that summer studying Alaska history and anthropology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. My short time in a Native village and a summer living in a log cabin without running water or indoor plumbing has helped me imagine the isolation and environmental challenges of western homesteaders. Although my trips to Alaska theoretically crossed two U.S.-Canada borders, I did not have to negotiate any international boundaries to fly there from Seattle. Staying in a former missionary’s poorly insulated frame house at 40 below (Fahrenheit) and being a White person in an Athabascan village provided instant immersion in the social and environmental boundaries of Native Alaska, a place within U.S. borders yet far removed from the “lower 48.” The “Outside” remained remote in pre-pipeline Alaska, even in Fairbanks, where news often arrived on film by plane from Seattle a day after it was broadcast in the lower 48.⁵ The pipeline itself was one more reminder of the ways that U.S. economic interests would impact Native people, who once again adapted to changes wrought from the Outside.

During my summer at the University of Alaska, I researched the contacts between newcomers and Indigenous people after European settlers arrived throughout the Americas. For my 2007 Chair’s lecture, I returned to that research, which focused on the efforts of missionaries and the U.S. government to “civilize” Alaska Natives by turning hunters into reindeer herders. I explored the diverse ways that Alaska Natives added reindeer to their means of subsistence while adapting with greater complexity to the White newcomers’ “civilizing” agendas. My brief sojourn in Alaska and my research into the reindeer project first focused my scholarship on the “cross-cultural contacts” between colonizers and Indigenous people that so centrally shaped the North American Wests I have studied and inhabited. I learned more about the histories of those contacts and their effects on Native Americans as an Anglo newcomer to New Mexico. I taught Latinx and Native American students at the University of New Mexico, where the legacies of Spanish conquest compounded the legacies of U.S. Indian policy.

The legacies of settler colonialism and its devastating impacts on the First Nations were readily apparent in Calgary. The United States had tried to move American Indians far away from Whites and from urban areas to large, mostly remote, reservations in the American West. Albuquerque had been an exception, located near ten of the nineteen New Mexico pueblos.⁶ Canada, in contrast, had established numerous smaller First Nations reserves, many of them around urban centers. In Calgary, the nearby reserves of the Siksika, Kainai, Piikani, Tsuut’ina, Chiniki, Bearspaw, and Goodstoney First Nations became a constant reminder of the enduring legacies of European settlement.

I returned to my Alaska research seeking a way to link my work with the history of settler colonialism in prairie Canada. I was reminded, in the process, how much my brief time in Alaska and my research there had influenced how I later approached cultural and social boundaries, the racialized power relations of settler colonialism, the myriad adaptations with which Indigenous people met their radically altered circumstances, and the inescapable connection of that history with my claims to homes in the North American Wests.

Notes

1. 1 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” first presented at the American Historical Association meeting in Chicago, July 12, 1893, coinciding with the World’s Columbian Exhibition of 1893, originally printed in Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1893 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1894); Harold Adams Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1930), best known through the revised 1956 and 1999 editions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), the latter with an introduction by Arthur Ray; Walter Sage, “Some Aspects of the Frontier in Canadian History, in Canadian Historical Association Annual Report (Ottawa: Department of Public Archives, 1928).

2. 2 George F. G. Stanley, “Western Canada and the Frontier Thesis,” in Canadian Historical Association Annual Report, 1940.

3. 3 Elizabeth Jameson and Jeremy Mouat, “Telling Differences: The Forty-Ninth Parallel and Historiographies of the West and Nation,” Pacific Historical Review 75:2 (May 2006): 183–230.

4. 4 Elizabeth Jameson and Sheila McManus, eds., One Step Over the Line: Toward a History of Women in the North American Wests (Athabasca, AB: Athabasca University Press and Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2005).

5. 5 In 1972, Alaskans debated the economic and environmental impacts of the proposed North Slope oil pipeline and prepared to implement the Alaska Native Land Claims Settlement Act of 1971 (ANCSA). ANCSA finally resolved the provision of the First Organic Act of 1884, which had guaranteed Alaska Natives’ possession of their land, by creating twelve regional profit-making Alaska Native corporations and over 200 villages, groups, and urban corporations to receive what would end up being around 45.5 million acres of land and about $1 billion. A 13^th regional corporation headquartered in Seattle was later established for Alaska Natives who lived outside of Alaska; they participated in the cash settlement but did not receive land.

6. 6 Sandia and Isleta Pueblos are closest to Albuquerque; Santo Domingo, San Felipe, and Cochiti Pueblos are between Albuquerque and Santa Fe; and Santa Ana, Jemez, Zia, Laguna, and Acoma Pueblos are all less than 60 miles from the city.