As residents of Upstate New York we are marked by the fraught specters of the border and enemy within. Trump’s antagonistic struggle with neighboring Canada, 170 miles north, summons the complexity of the disturbing phantoms haunting the land on which we live. From New York to Canada, the fraught apparitions of the rent promises of history arise at every crossing.
Historic road signs about one mile from our home, mark our rural town’s prideful acknowledgement of its Haudenosaunee heritage. We think back to the open Indigenous Territories when the waters and lands on either side of the St. Lawrence River served as shared grounds for the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy. Vibrant cherry orchards and four sister’s gardens provided plentiful provisions along with the fruits of territorial hunting and fishing.
These are now distant memories rendered unstable by disturbance of the utopic visions of the past. Today, one of the sacred burial grounds of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy remains unceremoniously covered by the original nineteenth-century buildings of Cornell University. Other signposts across our Finger Lakes Region mark the prior savagery of the 1779 Sullivan Campaign that aimed for the “total destruction and devastation” of Haudenosaunee settlements. Following the destruction of their vibrant villages and peoples, the remaining Haudenosaunee were then restricted to six miles on each side of the St Lawrence River by the Halimand Treaty of 1784, which now constitutes the border of Canada and the US.
The specters within do not wane. Right down the road from our house are New York historic signs marking the slave graveyard in our community’s backyard. In contrast, across the county are the more heroic markers in front of nineteenth-century homes. Everyday citizens, from Hanniah Wilcox and Nancy Ann Price in Freeville to Harriet Tubman in Auburn, bravely harbored those fleeing the traumas of the enslaved.
What is now Trump’s contested border of trade and profit has served both as the remaining territory of the Haudenosaunee as well as the aspirational goal of the prior routes of the Underground Railroad and the subsequent resistance to the Vietnam draft. Just as our homestead marks the violent legacy of its history, Canada served then, as it does now, as the contrasting beacon of hope from the enemy within.