implicit to the idea of borderlands and frontiers is the
Last updated: 3/1/2024
implicit to the idea of borderlands and frontiers is the assumption that Euro Americans simply have not yet moved in or taken over but in evitably they will It is all part of a process the first stage if you will of inexorable conquest Borderlands are therefore spaces created by Europeans and Euro Americans as they seek explore or expand into lands without borders Borderlands appear where independent explorers frontiersmen and coureurs de bois launch themselves into the woods in the process forging new paths for others surveyors settlers and armies to follow eventu ally Or they develop where missionaries licensed traders and presidial soldiers move as representatives of church state or mercantile institutions at the forefront of official colonial projects As Jeremy Adelman and Steve Aron outline borderlands exist prior to European or Euro American ability to claim draw and defend real imperial or national borders The meeting of peoples creates frontiers and the meeting of empires creates borderlands in their model Most important the only empires are European and borders come into being only with European and Euro American sovereignty The problem here is that such an equation not only denies the existence of Indian borders but also credits the boundaries claimed by European empires and the United States with undue clarity Meanwhile whether intentionally or not the maps in our textbooks contribute to an image of the Americas as a big blank with no political divisions until Europeans and rival imperial colonizers arrive and begin to draw lines divvying up the continent When textbooks start with the obligatory section on pre Columbian America they feature maps that detail geographical divisions Eastern Woodlands Northwest Coast Great Plains Great Basin Southwest Subarctic Arctic or subsistence zones agriculture hunting hunting gathering and fishing Or the maps detail the zones of different language families Iroquoian Muskogean Siouan Uto Aztecan Athabaskan Salishan Eskimo Aleut Algic If and when the names of Indian peoples never nations appear in textbook maps they float free of borders hovering above the landscape with no defined boundaries to recognize the divisions of their territories Thus textbooks implicitly and explicitly tell our students that Indians had cul tural economic and language zones of variation but they had no named settlements or towns no charted roads or highways no territorial markers