Essay by Liam Riordan
Riordan is American historian specializing in the Revolutionary era (ca. 1760-1830), UMaine faculty member since 1997. Non-traditional, and especially non-textual, sources are important to my research and teaching, which draws on interdisciplinary cultural studies and social history methods
Today’s boundaries of the state of Maine are easy to picture in the far northeastern corner of the United States, but that seemingly enduring border was a matter of enormous uncertainty, conflict, and negotiation among Wabanaki, French, Acadian, British, and US individuals and groups over several centuries. Just as the large manuscript collections of the Kennebec and Pejepscot Proprietors reveal dramatic conflict over land claims in the mid-coast region of Maine that have been expertly assessed for the Colonial and Revolutionary eras by historians Ian Saxine, Lisa Brooks, and Alan Taylor, so too, the international border of the United States and Canada was created by human actions over a long period of time and was not formed by a natural or organic process.
Treaty of Washington boundary map, 1842
Maine Historical Society
Many overlapping authorities had strong claims in this borderland, starting, of course, with Wabanaki Nations, especially the Passamaquoddy (Peskotomuhkati) Maliseet (Wolastoqey), and Micmac (Mi’kmaq), whose Homelands were cleaved in two by the lasting demarcation of the international border by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty (officially, the Washington Treaty) of August 9, 1842. A printed map from the treaty year gives some sense of the sharp differences of opinion about where the border should run as it shows proposed borders by the British, US, and a neutral arbiter in 1831 as well as the final line of 1842
The sundering of Indigenous Homelands, which are not depicted on the map, remains potent and poses ongoing challenges for these First Nations, as signified by their distinct preferred names today (as noted with the Indigenous preferred version in parentheses above). In addition, fixing the border involved not just a clash between national and imperial authorities, but also sharp differences among settlers and leaders in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia as well as those in the new sovereign polities of New Brunswick, Upper and Lower Canada, which were fused as the Province of Canada in 1841 (previously Quebec), and Maine that all came into being during the critical border formation period after 1783.