{"id":46949,"date":"2016-05-12T01:00:09","date_gmt":"2016-05-12T01:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=46949"},"modified":"2016-05-12T01:00:09","modified_gmt":"2016-05-12T01:00:09","slug":"metis-and-the-medicine-line-creating-a-border-and-dividing-a-people-by-michel-hogue-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=46949","title":{"rendered":"Metis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People by Michel Hogue (review)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Metis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People by Michel Hogue (review)<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Labour \/ Le Travail<\/a>
\nIssue 77, Spring 2016<\/a>
\npages 297-299
\nDOI: 10.1353\/llt.2016.0039<\/p>\n

Sterling Evans<\/strong><\/a>, Louise Welsh Chair in Southern Plains and Borderlands History
\nUniversity of Oklahoma<\/em><\/p>\n

Michel Hogue, Metis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People<\/em><\/a> (Regina: University of Regina Press 2015)<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is not an exaggeration to assert that Michel Hogue\u2019s<\/a> Metis and the Medicine Line<\/em> is now one of the best studies written about the western Canadian \u2013 US borderlands. It is thoroughly researched from a variety of different archival sources from both sides of the 49th parallel<\/a>, it is very well organized and written, and will be a standard for North American borderlands history for many years to come. Likewise it is a fine addition to the already robust scholarship on Metis<\/a> history (and note, it was Hogue\u2019s choice to use the word \u201cMetis\u201d without an accent on the \u201ce\u201d). Thus, this combination of themes works to do exactly as the book\u2019s subtitle suggests, relating the history of how creating a border divided a people.<\/p>\n

To do so, Hogue argues that the goal of Metis and the Medicine Line<\/em> is to reveal \u201chow the process of nation-building and race-making were intertwined and how \u2026 the Metis shaped both.\u201d (8) \u201cThe experiences of these borderland Metis communities,\u201d he continues, \u201ctherefore offer a fresh perspective on the political, economic, and environmental transformations that re-worked the Northern Plains across the nineteenth century.\u201d (9) And finally, he states how the book \u201coffers a (partial) corrective to those who would focus solely on race by drawing attention to the historical circumstances that gave rise to the Metis emergence as an autonomous people \u2026 and to the resilience and persistence of such notions.\u201d (19) Those are noble objectives, but it is fair to assess how well they are achieved in this study. Along the way, Hogue gives special attention to how the Metis developed \u201cmobile communities\u201d (7) in the borderlands, how they negotiated \u201cracialized markers of belonging,\u201d and how they created a \u201chybrid borderland world\u201d (10) and \u201can interethnic landscape.\u201d (20) And more than theoretical labels here, these kinds of terms help to define Hogue\u2019s message of Metis resilience and agency and set up the book\u2019s themes well in the Introduction.<\/p>\n

At that point Metis and the Medicine Line<\/em> is divided into five chapters, all with cleverly developed action noun signposts as main title markers. The first chapter, \u201cEmergence: Creating a Metis Borderland\u201d discusses the importance of the Metis bison economy and trade and how the Metis used that for border marking. Chapter 2, \u201cExchange: Trade, Sovereignty, and the Forty-Ninth Parallel,\u201d explores the Metis role in the \u201cgrowing salience of the 49th parallel\u201d (55) and how they came to negotiate it for their benefit. Chapter 2, \u201cExchange: Trade, Sovereignty, and the 49th Parallel,\u201d explores the Metis role in the \u201cgrowing salience of the 49th parallel\u201d (55) and how they came to negotiate it for their benefit. Chapter 3, \u201cBelonging: Land, Treaties, and the Boundaries of Race,\u201d gets into the more difficult business of trying to explain the complexity of Metis racial identity (and especially with the concept of \u201cracial marking\u201d) and continues to address the bison economy (especially as that came to change with the different degrees of bison decline on opposite sides of the US-Canadian border. In what I consider to be one of the book\u2019s greatest strengths, Hogue provides excellent analyses of the Metis role in Plains geopolitics \u2013 not only in their dealings with the US and Canadian governments, but also with other Indigenous groups throughout the Northern Plains. The fourth chapter, \u201cResistance: Dismantling Plains Borderlands Settlements, 1879-1885,\u201d gets into some comparative discussion of US and Canadian policies on Native peoples, offers more on border diplomacy, and reiterates the role of Louis Riel<\/a> in all of this history. Likewise, for the Metis on the Canadian side of the line, it provides excellent analysis on \u201csymbols of economic re-orientation.\u201d (172) And finally, Chapter 5, \u201cExile: Scrip and Enrollment Commissions and the Shifting of Boundaries and Belongings,\u201d is a bit more complicated and perhaps unnecessarily too detailed (the only place in the book I thought so) on the history of the scrip use by Metis peoples in Canada. This chapter seems like more of a stand-alone…<\/p>\n

Read or purchase the review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Metis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People by Michel Hogue (review) Labour \/ Le Travail Issue 77, Spring 2016 pages 297-299 DOI: 10.1353\/llt.2016.0039 Sterling Evans, Louise Welsh Chair in Southern Plains and Borderlands History University of Oklahoma Michel Hogue, Metis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,19,459,8,3015],"tags":[23767,6305,23768],"class_list":["post-46949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-canada","category-history","category-media-archive","category-native-americans","tag-labour-le-travail","tag-michel-hogue","tag-sterling-evans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46949"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46949\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46950,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46949\/revisions\/46950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}