Before and After the State

Politics, Poetics, and People(s) in the Pacific Northwest

By Allan K. McDougall, Lisa Philips, and Daniel L. Boxberger

UBC Press

The creation of the Canada–US border in the Pacific Northwest is often presented as a tale of two nations and two ideologies, but beyond the macro-political dynamics is the experience of individuals.

Before and After the State takes a multidisciplinary approach to examining the imposition of a border across a region that already held a vibrant, highly complex society and dynamic trading networks. It details the evolution of local, trading, and immigrant populations as they moved into the Pacific Northwest and imposed control over public power. Allan McDougall, Lisa Philips, and Daniel Boxberger use case studies to document the malleable character of identity – the discrepancy between individual lives and externally imposed assessments of those lives – and review the strength of national narratives north and south of the border.

The authors explore fundamental questions of state formation, social transformation, and the (re)construction of identity to expose the devices and myths of nation building. In revealing the mechanics of this transformation, they demonstrate how the creation of nation states and borders affected the people who lived in the region before and through the transition – with repercussions that still reverberate.

This book will find an audience among scholars of Pacific Northwest and BC studies, Indigenous studies, anthropology, history, and borderland studies. It will also be of interest to political scientists and legal scholars of borderland issues.

RELATED TOPICS: Anthropology, BC Studies, History, Indigenous Studies, Regional Studies

The authors show that histories on both sides of the border have downplayed pioneering before large-scale western migration. David R. Conn, Western Mariner

After reading this book one may never look at the Pacific Northwest in quite the same way. Tracie Lea-Scott, Heriot-Watt University, Dubai, British Journal of Canadian Studies

This exciting new work has much to offer on alternative understandings of Indigenous sovereignty in the trans-border Pacific Northwest. It will be an important study for scholars, students, and the general public interested in the region’s many aspects of society, culture, and history and how we should understand them better. Sterling Evans, editor of The Borderlands of the American and Canadian Wests: Essays on Regional History of the Forty-ninth Parallel

Allan K. McDougall is a professor emeritus in the Department of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario. He is the author of Policing: The Evolution of a Mandate and John P. Robarts: His Life and Government, winner of a CHOICE book award. Lisa Philips is a professor emerita in anthropology at the University of Alberta. She is the author of Making Their Own: Severn Ojibwe Communicative Practices, numerous periodical articles and book chapters, and coeditor of Theorizing the Americanist Tradition. Daniel L. Boxberger is a professor of anthropology at Western Washington University. He is the author of To Fish in Common: The Ethnohistory of Lummi Indian Salmon Fishing and Native North Americans: An Ethnohistorical Approach, as well as many periodical articles and book chapters.

Introduction: Hegemonic Transformation and the Imposition of the State in the Pacific Northwest / Lisa Philips and Allan K. McDougall

Part 1: Superimposing a Statist Structure: Setting the Stage

1 Setting the Political Stage in the Pacific Northwest / Allan K. McDougall

2 Identities on the Fringe / Daniel L. Boxberger

3 Eastern Games, Western Lives, 1793–1846 / Allan K. McDougall

4 Superimposing the Statist System / Allan K. McDougall

5 On a Mission: Translocality and Hegemonic Transformation in Nineteenth-Century Oregon / Allan K. McDougall

6 The Impact of Hegemonic Change on Blended Communities / Daniel L. Boxberger

Part 2: Hegemonic Transformation: Roles, Players, and Improvisations

7 Creating a Script: Hegemonic Transformation, Identity, and Translocality / Allan K. McDougall

8 Defining Roles and Constructing the Cast / Lisa Philips

9 Early Improvisations: Ranald MacDonald / Lisa Philips