Sanctuary: Native Border Crossings and the North American West.

The Sioux, Sitting Bull, and the Border

The forty-ninth parallel boundary between western Canada and the United States appears like a quiet and unexplained guest in North American history, with its seemingly arbitrary straight line, slightly mysterious origin, and hazy significance, and to none more so than North America's Native peoples, whose territories it divided. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s the "medicine line," as many Native groups came to call the boundary, became, however briefly, their friend. [1] As they were pushed and pulled across it, groups on both sides ...

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