Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 1997
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 2, Spring 1997, pp. 119-30.
Abstract
This paper examines the connections among political protest movements in twentieth century western Canada and the United States. Protest movements are social movements and related organizations, including political protest parties, with the objective of deliberately changing government programs and policies. Those changes may also entail altering the composition of the government or even its form. Social movements involve collective efforts to bring about change in ways that avoid or reject established belief systems or organizations. They begin with assessments of what is wrong and propose a blueprint for action to achieve new goals by drawing on committed supporters willing to take risks. Thus I hypothesize that protest movements, free from constraints of institutionalization, can readily cross national boundaries.
Contacts between protest movements in Canada and the United States also stem from similarities between the two countries. Shared geography, a British heritage, democratic practices, and a multi-ethnic population often give rise to similar problems.1 Similarities in the northern tier of the United States to the adjoining sections of Canada's western provinces are especially prominent. People in this area have all been relatively dependent on resources, either for extraction or initial processing.2 Consequently, they have strong ties to a world economy and strong reactions to the same kinds of economic problems. They also share an immigrant heritage that ties them to countries beyond the British Isles. With the closing of the US frontier, population movement into Canada, and later, back into the United States, enhanced what Marcus Hansen has called "the mingling of the Canadian and American peoples."3 All these factors contribute to what some political scientists and geographers believe to be a "borderland"-a geographic area straddling two political jurisdictions that displays unique or blended characteristics.4 Blended or not, there is still evidence that these are areas with distinct regional cultures.5 One can then expect that common problems will lead to common solutions, regardless of political boundaries.
I concentrate here on the states of North Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin and the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. The time frame is virtually all of the twentieth century. Contacts are divided into three substantive areas. The first deals with agriculture and the concerns of farmers. The second focuses on industry and the concerns of workers. The third raises issues of identity relating to race, ethnicity, gender, or more general lifestyle concerns. Although not an exhaustive inventory, it highlights prominent events and contacts. Accounts of contact emphasize chronology and the direction they travel. Because I expect that cross-border contacts among protest movements will be associated with times of shared problems, I do not anticipate that they are any more likely to originate in one country than in the other.
Comments
Copyright 1997 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln