Carrie Dawson

An Indian without a Country

“‘[A]s soon as you leave I’ll be phoning the media to tell them that two white guys are trying to kick an Indian out of Canada’.” This, says Charlie Smoke, is the threat that he leveled at two Canadian Immigration agents who came to his work place in June 2001 and asked him to provide documentation proving that he has the right to work in Canada. Smoke, who considers himself “pre-Canadian,” did not produce that documentation, and so –some time later—the Canadian government tried to have him deported to the US, but he had no papers demonstrating his American citizenship, so the Americans didn’t want him either. Seven years earlier, Thomas King published “Borders,” a remarkably prescient short story about a Blackfoot family from Alberta who are detained at the American border because the woman driving the car refuses to identify as either Canadian or American, choosing instead to identify as Blackfoot. So, they camp in the parking lot and her son entertains television reporters who ask him how it feels to be “an Indian without a country.” Drawing on King’s “Borders” and Smoke’s real-life experience, this paper considers the value of what has been called diasporic or flexible citizenship for “pre-Canadian” Aboriginal people today. In 1994, 7 years before the Canadian media held Charlie Smoke’s citizenship claims up for national scrutiny, Thomas King published “Borders,” a short story about a Blackfoot family from Alberta who are detained at the American border because the woman driving the car refuses to identify as either Canadian or American, choosing instead to identify as Blackfoot. So, they camp out in the parking lot behind the duty-free store and her son entertains television reporters who ask him how it feels to be “an Indian without a country.” King’s prescience is remarkable, but his story resonates for many other reasons. As King invites us to laugh at the desperately earnest border guard who makes a show of cultural sensitivity but maintains that “you have to be American or Canadian,” he challenges us to understand our own countries as “borderline case(s),” defined by their interfaces rather than their essences. Secondly, by affirming the mother’s stalwart refusal of an identificatory rubric that assumes cultural homogeneity and obviates the long transnational history of a people whose communal identities predate North American forms of citizenship by centuries, King speaks to an idea of diasporic citizenship that is not conferred or confirmed by borders and birth certificates. Drawing both on King’s “Borders” and Charlie Smoke’s real-life experience at the Canadian/US border, this paper considers the value of what has been called diasporic or flexible citizenship for “pre-Canadian” Aboriginal people today.