This Editor’s Note opens the present issue of RIAS through a meditation on the Canada-US border not simply as a line of division but as a dynamic cross-section—one that can reveal the entangled geographies, cultures, and histories of North America. Drawing insight from across the disciplines of geography, literature, history, and environmental studies, it proposes the east-west border as a methodological lens through which to apprehend regional continuities and local specificities alike. Exploring a number of examples, the essay considers the border as simultaneously separating and connecting the two countries, paying special attention to vernacular landscapes that defy simplistic geopolitical readings. The essay further considers the symbolic and contested role of the Haskell Free Library and Opera House in Vermont, recently politicized by US authorities, as a lived space of permeability and intercommunity resilience. Ultimately, the border emerges here as a site where the global and the local, the political and the personal, intersect— offering a uniquely instructive vantage point on the interdependent realities of modern North America.

This thematic issue of RIAS explores the evolving dynamics of US-Canada relations amidst the backdrop of Donald Trump’s second presidential term and Justin Trudeau’s resignation as Canadian Prime Minister. The issue gains heightened relevance due to Trump’s provocative rhetoric, including threats of economic tariffs, discussions of annexation, and broader expansionist ambitions. The US-Canada border has historically been viewed as stable compared to the US-Mexico border, yet this assumption is being challenged. 
The issue examines how the US imagines Canada, often overlooking its Indigenous and multicultural realities, and interrogates  historical and contemporary border tensions. Featuring interdisciplinary perspectives from scholars in Canada, the US, and beyond, the issue contextualizes current political shifts by addressing historical policies on immigration, Indigenous rights, and cultural representation. Through its engagement with global American studies, this issue underscores the necessity of examining US-Canada relations from multiple international perspectives.

In this thematic issue of RIAS, we address a number of issues about the border, drawing on perspectives from multiple disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, from anthropology to political science, economics, and literature, and including the works of scholars based in Canada, the US, and Germany. Their works engage issues of Indigeneity, Africandescendant populations, Franco-Canadians, Gender and Race, Colonialisms, and the more-than-human world. Topics include hunting, cross-border Indigenous relations, treaties, oil protests, immigration, domestic workers, historical memory, creative fiction, and the notions of borders as textures, zones, lines, connections, and cultural imaginaries. Our emphasis on combining social science and humanities approaches is essential to this work. Much previous work on the Canada-US border has tended to focus either on political/legal issues or on literary/media studies. Instead, we strive instead to bring multiple disciplinary perspectives into conversation and include artistic/visual
work. This volume thus contributes to a broader project than one that would center on nationalist interests—either the US or Canada’s—and rather brings to the study of bordering practices and border theory a continental approach, one that attends to the places and spaces that are and/or become the border.

This paper examines the complex interplay between Indigenous identity and settler-colonial borders through autoethnographic and storytelling approaches. As both an Indigenous person of the Menominee Nation of Wisconsin and an immigrant from the island of Bermuda, my experiences span both oceanic and continental borders between the United States, Canada, where I presently live and work, and the United Kingdom’s largest remaining overseas territory, providing a unique vantage point on the politics of Indigenous identity across these settler-imposed boundaries. Using these experiences as a starting point and inspired by the works of Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson and sociologist Avery Gordon, in this paper, I integrate personal narrative with critical analysis to examine the complex nature of an Indigenous life lived across the borders of settler colonialism. Further, I also examine the historical and contemporary ramifications of the Jay Treaty and, in doing so, highlight the asymmetrical recognition of Indigenous rights to mobility upon their traditional territories, territories that existed long before the arrival of settlers to North America, between the United States and Canada. This treaty, which ostensibly provides certain border-crossing rights to Indigenous peoples, is upheld by the United States but not Canada. Not only does this asymmetry underscore the persistent challenges faced by Indigenous communities in asserting their ancient pre-colonial mobility rights, but it also speaks significantly to the imbalance of power that exists between nominally sovereign Indigenous nations and the sovereignties of settler nation-states whose border controls Indigenous people are now subject. Through this narrative, the paper seeks to contribute to the broader discourse on Indigenous internationalism and the ethical responsibilities of Indigenous scholars. By centering stories and storytelling as both epistemological and methodological tools, the paper advocates for a decolonial approach honoring the interconnectedness of Indigenous experiences and the enduring ties between Indigenous nations across borders.

This article explores how contemporary Québécois and Francophone Canadian writers think about the return to a homeland linked to identity transformation, border crossing, and mobility. Drawing from the theories of the mobility turn and using Rosi Braidotti’s notion of “nomadism,” I show how this return (physical or imaginary) generates both conflict and resilience. My hypothesis is that analyzing a fictional text through the lens of mobility allows for new approaches to identity formation and contributes to renewing literary forms.

The construction of new oil pipelines and the expansion of existing ones have been met with sustained resistance across North America. Pipeline expansion has been justified for economic reasons, but has emerged as a “chokepoint” for the industry as popular resistance has sought to protect land and water resources. This resistance has both national and cross-border continental dimensions, depending on the specificities of the pipeline under analysis. The cross-border dimensions are particularly evident in the efforts to halt the expansion of Canada’s tar sands, the source of much of the increased oil production. Despite the continental scope of the oil industry, however, distinct national dimensions—“border effects”—and cross-border alliances remain.

This article considers a specific, highly complex, and contentious case study, the uniquely Canadian phenomenon of the sale of hunting rights by First Nations Canadians to non-Indigenous, non-Canadian trophy hunters who want to hunt polar bears in Canada. These hunters, largely of European ancestry, come mainly from the United States and, more recently, from Western Europe as well. Ultimately, this analysis demonstrates both the necessity and the utility of anchoring transnational analyses in a more-than-human world because access to and protection of living non-human beings plays a crucial role in defining nations and communities. The essay addresses questions such as “What can we understand about the role of the Canadian state, the national government, the US-Canadian border, the philosophical constitution of a more-than-human world in both Indigenous and European-derived epistemologies, and the politics of Indigeneity in the international marketplace, through this one case study focused on human-animal relations?”

This article is the result of a collaboration between Philip Awashish, Eeyou leader, and anthropologist Jasmin Habib. It provides an account of the process by which the people of Eeyou Istchee, also known as the James Bay Cree, sought and, in the end, succeeded in obtaining an amendment to the Convention for the Protection of Migratory Birds in the United States and Canada (1916). The James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement signed in 1975 expressly permitted the goose hunt at all seasons and therefore conflicted with the 1916 Convention and the Act and regulations that enforced it. A protocol drawn up by Canadian and American negotiators in 1979, allowing exceptions to the closed season for Indigenous populations, was rebuffed by conservationists. However, the 1982 Canadian Constitution Act affirmed the primacy of treaty obligations of the Governments of Canada and Quebec and Indigenous peoples, and the courts ruled that it, therefore, permitted the harvesting of migratory birds. Eeyou’s attitudes respecting the economic and spiritual importance of the hunt are explored in the article. The article describes how this conflict of law was successfully resolved with a new protocol in 1995.

This article focuses on “Whoop-Up Country” in the Canadian/American West, analyzing a series of multi-layered cartographic texts through the lens of bordertextures. While the meaning of the Whoop-Up Trail may have faded into obscurity, the hidden histories, geographies, and knowledges of this border zone have survived and continue to resurface in the cultural imaginary. Zooming in on texts by Paul F. Sharp, Wallace Stegner, and Thomas King, the analysis carves out the multi-dimensional (hi)stories of the Canada-US border that account for the complexity of North American borderlands.

This paper challenges the myth of Canada as the “Promised Land” for displaced peoples, such as enslaved African Americans who sought refuge via the Underground Railroad. “Drawing on archival and secondary sources, the paper examines the measures taken by Immigration Canada to exclude Caribbean people, arguing that these policies are inextricably connected to the question of who is considered worthy of belonging to and contributing to the nation-building project. While some recognize that Chinese and Sikh immigrant men furnished the physical labor necessary for nation-building by constructing railways and working in the lumber industry, the bodies and the work performed are gendered. This paper seeks to expand the repertoire of actors and the parameters of what counts as nation-building activities by including Caribbean domestic workers. Specifically, the paper examines how these working-class women both inadvertently and directly contributed to Canada’s nation-building in two ways: 1) by assuming reproductive tasks on behalf of middle-class white women and their families and 2) through their activism against deportation.

This Afterword underscores the collective interdisciplinarity of Canada-US Border Studies as evidenced in the preceding essays, particularly as they decidedly transcend the borders of individual disciplines. In the process, the essay maps out how the empirical and theoretical richness of such collective interdisciplinarity in the study of the US-Canada border effectively captures and documents the social heterogeneity characterizing the cultural, economic, political, environmental, and historical borderlands found at the transnational crossroads of the US-Canada and Canada-US international boundaries. The theoretical and empirical analysis of this productive interdisciplinarity in the field of border studies more broadly is presented from the theoretical perspective of border theory as it emerged via the US-Mexico border and through a brief photo essay of the Freedom Convoy of 2022.

As the author of this review argues, Hospitable Linguistics represents a radical epistemological and methodological reimagining of language research, foregrounding relational, affective, and decolonial approaches in place of traditional structuralist and extractivist paradigms. The volume reconceptualizes language not as a system to be decoded but as a site of encounter, care, and epistemic risk. Central to its ethos is the notion of “hospitability,” which the editors reframe beyond the Derridean paradox into a lived ethics of recognition, vulnerability, and co-presence—especially in contexts marked by colonial violence and epistemic erasure. Through contributions ranging from Indigenous language revitalization and Afro-Caribbean verbal gesture to sonic border-crossings, knitting as a form of storytelling, and refusal as a mode of speech, the collection expands the field’s boundaries both conceptually and methodologically. The volume prioritizes co-authorship, embodied listening, and non-verbal semiotics as acts of linguistic sovereignty, challenging institutional norms and calling for reparative and relational modes of scholarship. Eschewing synthesis in favor of polyphonic resonance, the book enacts the very hospitality it theorizes. As such, it is not merely a compendium of alternative methods but a manifesto for transforming the ethical foundations of linguistics. This analysis evaluates the volume’s structure, key innovations, and intellectual stakes, proposing that Hospitable Linguistics is indispensable for scholars committed to decolonial, plural, and justice-oriented research in language and culture.