In 2014–2015 I was honored to serve as President of the Western History Association (WHA), my primary professional organization since 1986. That honor brought with it the opportunity to appoint the program committee, to help shape the 2015 annual conference program, and to offer a presidential address. The 2015 WHA conference marked a high point and culmination of my career as a historian of the North American Wests. The 2015–2016 academic year was my last year in the classroom. After a final research leave in 2016–2017, I retired from the University of Calgary.
For my presidential address, I chose to reflect on the scholarship in western women’s history that engaged me throughout my career. I had served on the Steering Committee for the 1983 Women’s West conference, the first conference devoted to western women’s history.1 One of the products of that conference was an organization, the Coalition for Western Women’s History, which still meets annually at the WHA conference and supports scholarship on women, gender, and sexuality in the North American Wests. I assessed the progress toward integrating women and gender into western history in my 2015 WHA presidential address, “Halfway Across that Line: Gender at the Threshold of History in the North American West.”2 In February, 2016, I presented it as my last Chair’s Lecture.
I returned to some themes of earlier lectures: borders and borderlands; differences of race, class, gender, and nation and how to bridge them; categories of inclusion and exclusion in the ways we imagine history and community; connections and disconnects between public and private acts in history and historical narratives. I brought new research to the themes and subjects of earlier lectures. Mahidiweash—Buffalo Bird Woman—appeared in my 2001 lecture. In the interim I had worked with the field notes of anthropologist Gilbert Wilson, who recorded her story, and was able to compare his records of what she said with the versions he published in Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden and Waheenee, the texts through which historians had learned her history.3 I returned to the international cast of border-crossing women homesteaders, the subjects of my 2011 lecture. By 2015 I had extended the study to cover all the women who succeeded in gaining title to their claims in the first two decades the Devils Lake Land Office operated. My case studies had swelled from 121 women who won their claims in the first decade, who I discussed in 2011, to 773 women who succeeded in the first two decades. With the help of historians Heather Devine and Michel Hogue I had located Métis women homesteaders more clearly in their historical contexts and communities.
Some of the people and scholars in earlier lectures appeared again because they had formatively influenced my work. May Wing, who I first interviewed in 1976, continued to inspire my efforts to write history as “ordinary people” experienced and made it. Carolyn Heilbrun’s Writing a Woman’s Life continued to influence my thinking about the importance of historical narratives.4 I began, as I had in 2003, with a key scene in John Sayles’ movie Lone Star, because it so vividly summarized the political and cultural processes of bridging borders. And, to be honest, because Lone Star remains my favorite movie, and so clearly challenges the boring and biased Texas history classes of my childhood.
Having had the opportunity to draw together so much of my scholarship in my presidential address, I chose a different way to close my teaching career as I prepared to retire from the University of Calgary in 2017. Instead of attempting a final Chair’s Lecture, I hosted a conference featuring some of the graduate students with whom I had worked at the University of New Mexico and the University of Calgary. The “Torches Passed and Present” conference highlighted their diverse work and career paths and allowed me to celebrate the graduate teaching that was one of the great pleasures of my professional life. Here, I present an essay that combines my introduction to the conference and my closing remarks.
Retirement, I have found, is not so much an event as a process. Part of that process is letting go and trusting others to carry on the work in their own ways. As my friends and family will attest, I have a few control issues, and I didn’t expect letting go to be easy. The “Torches Passed” conference became an opportunity to share professional space with former students who had become valued colleagues and who would continue their careers as I ended mine. It was a useful ritual along the path of retirement.
This book has been another useful part of that journey, a way to reflect on recurring themes in my work, and on my border-crossing journey. “Halfway Across That Line” comes from Chucho Montoya, the fictional character in Lone Star, who draws a line in the sand and issues the challenge for any border crosser: “Bird flying south—you think he sees that line? Rattlesnake, javelina—whatever you got—halfway across that line they don’t start thinking different. So why should a man?”5 Or a woman.
Chucho Montoya was right. Crossing the 49th Parallel did not immediately change how I thought. But over time the change did jar my thinking and expanded the perspectives from which I viewed my work and my world.
My border crossing adventure was far easier than most. I was not a refugee from famine, war, poverty, pogrom, or other violence. I arrived with a job; I spoke the language. The experience was, nonetheless, profound. I was over fifty when I arrived in Canada. I was formed in the United States and had chosen professional and personal paths that responded directly to American history and U.S. social concerns. I remain in fundamental ways American, even as I have developed Canadian roots and loyalties, and as my identity has subtly included Canada as well.
But there are differences, rooted in part in childhood and in my formative school years. I spoke English when I got here and have learned to be deliberate about how I spell it for different contexts and audiences. I usually remember when to use labour, neighbour, favour, flavour, and colour, but they still look odd to me. I carefully used Canadian spellings in my book manuscript, only to be overruled by my editor, so all those carefully inserted “u’s” came back out. I can recite the American presidents in order, but not the British monarchs. In a habit probably rooted as much in generation as culture, I still think in miles and Fahrenheit, but I now automatically translate from kilometers and Centigrade. Years of traveling back and forth from Canada to the United States and navigating changing exchange rates have taught me that money is an abstraction. Having spent considerable time mentally converting Canadian dollars into U.S. dollars and back again or trying to translate kilometers per liter into miles per gallon, I finally realized that it doesn’t matter how much a quart or liter of milk costs on either side of the border if I have enough money to pay for it.
I have often been surprised with realizations of my growing bi-national identification. One of the earliest occurred during the women’s hockey championship game at the 2002 Winter Olympics. In retrospect, the fact that I was engrossed with women’s hockey at all was one sign that I’d been in Canada for more than one winter. In the final game between the Canadian and U.S. women’s hockey teams I found myself reflexively cheering for Canada and crying tears of joy when the Canadian women triumphed. I am no longer surprised by such moments, though they still pop up occasionally at odd times.
Acculturation has been a two-way process. As I became more at home in Canada, I developed a new capacity to view the United States with curiosity from the outside. I can be surprised that American drivers don’t stop for me as I wait on a curb. In Calgary, traffic would grind to a halt if I put so much as a toenail into the street. I cringe now when I hear an American tourist exclaim, “Canadians are just like us,” and assume it’s a compliment. I remain distressed by all the social ills that led me to study American social movements and provided the subjects of some of my lectures. And I have become rooted enough in Canada to feel comfortable being similarly distressed by Canadian quirks and social ills. It’s part of feeling at home and being committed to home. Some people have summer cottages. I have two countries.
Part of belonging to two countries is remaining engaged with events in both. It has often been frustrating to witness events in the United States from the Canadian side of the border, to not fully share celebratory moments or to helplessly witness distressing ones. I’ve witnessed both U.S. tragedy and triumph in the quarter century since I left, from 9/11 through Barack Obama’s election as president to the COVID-19 pandemic and the political polarization of the 2020s. The country I left in 1999 is not the country to which I return in 2025.
Neither is Canada, of course. Some of the changes in both countries have been connected: I’ve taught Canadian students just returned from military tours in Afghanistan and known colleagues who lost children there. Some are purely Canadian. I’ve become more accustomed to a political landscape with more than two major parties; I’ve seen the Progressive Conservatives merge with the Canadian Alliance and become the Conservative Party. I’ve seen the New Democratic Party win control of the Alberta government in 2015 and lose it again four years later. I’ve heard the wrenching testimony to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and engaged in debates about how to reckon with the long-dead leaders’ complicity in residential schools. But most changes, lived daily, have been less stark, and more immediate.
Unsettling as the process of culturally transplanting myself has been at times, I have come to regard being unsettled as a gift. My greatest growth has never happened when I was most comfortable; often it has come when I was most distressed. The move to Canada challenged my American-centric perspective and my personal comfort zones. I’ve learned to let friendships unfold at their own pace, without immediately sharing all my personal history. I’ve been pushed to view history differently, to question older “self evident truths,” including the assumption that all history is national history. It’s been well worth the journey.
The most difficult times have occurred when I was viewing painful U.S. events from the Canadian side of the border, especially the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the more recent political events surrounding the Trump presidency and re-election. I have been selfishly very grateful that I retired in 2017 and avoided daily questions about American politics. History has been for me, among much else, a form of engagement with the present, and in that sense an act of faith. The essays in this final section represent both professional culminations and the thresholds to all that comes next.
Notes
1 The conference, held in Sun Valley, Idaho, was sponsored by the Institute of the American West. Other members of the Steering Committee were Susan Armitage and Melissa Hield. Patricia Albers and Paula Petrik chaired the Program Committee.
2 A longer version of my address was published as Elizabeth Jameson, “Halfway Across That Line: Gender at the Threshold of History in the North American West,” Western History Quarterly 47:1 (Spring 2016): 1–26, and appears here with the permission of Oxford University Press, which grants ownership of articles to their authors.
3 Gilbert L. Wilson, Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden (1917; repr., St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1987) and Waheenee: An Indian Girl’s Story (1921; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981).
4 Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988).
5 Lone Star, written and directed by John Sayles (Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers, 1996).