The evolution of the Canada–US borderland in the Pacific Northwest included the wholesale transformation of social organization and individual identities together with the redefinition and application of public power. Before and After the State examines the impact of those changes across a region that already harboured a vibrant, highly complex mélange of societies with dynamic local, regional, and global trade and kin networks. Allan McDougall, Lisa Philips, and Daniel Boxberger explore fundamental questions of state formation, social transformation, and the (re)construction of identity to expose the narratives and other devices of nation building, their impact on generations caught in the transition, and the reverberations of those national myths that continue to the present.
Table of Contents:
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
10 Written out of the Script: Three Generations of McKays / Lisa Philips
11 Later Revisions: (Re)constructing the Cast of US and Canadian Pioneers / Lisa Philips
Conclusion: Epic Scripts / Lisa Philips and Allan K. McDougall
Notes; Index
About the Author :
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.
Review :
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)
