The Medicine Line: Native Nations and the U.S.-Canada Border

No Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe or Wabanaki delegate sat at the table in Paris on September 3, 1783, when American and British diplomats ended a war by drawing a boundary through the middle of their world. It ran through the Great Lakes to the Lake of the Woods and then due west toward a Mississippi that did not lie where the negotiators' map put it. Later treaties carried it west along the forty-ninth parallel, to the Rockies in 1818 and the Pacific in 1846, through fur-trade country the gold rushes would soon overrun, and across the hunting grounds of the Blackfoot, Cree, Nakoda and Métis, who went on crossing it as they always had.

In 1877 Sitting Bull and several thousand Lakota crossed it too, fleeing the army that had hunted them since the Little Bighorn, and made camp at Wood Mountain under the eyes of the North-West Mounted Police. The soldiers behind them stopped at a line they could not see. Plains peoples had a name for a boundary like that. They called it the Medicine Line.

By then the line had begun to harden. Wolf hunters had massacred Nakoda families in the Cypress Hills in 1873, bringing the Mounted Police west. As the buffalo failed, the border became a ration line; eight Cree and Nakoda men were hanged at Battleford in 1885, after the North-West Resistance; and in 1924 the United States created the Border Patrol. What does a people do when two foreign governments run their frontier straight through its homeland?