Purpose. This article investigated the potential of a custom-built board game as a means to teach historical empathy, improve class participation, and to improve student understanding of the limitations of archival collections. Method. Participant behavior as well as verbal and written feedback were collected during a pilot study of POLICING THE SOUND. A total of 88 undergraduate and graduate participants from History and Indigenous Studies took part during the pilot study. Results. Student participation and understanding of historical context improved during the game. While graduate and undergraduate students showed similarity in their enjoyment of the game and their belief that it made historical arguments, the curricular differences in graduate and undergraduate programs influenced how each group approached the game. Conclusion. Participant feedback, facilitator observation, and external observation indicate that groups of players can resolve confusion more efficiently than individual players can, time constrained decision-making may help maintain student engagement, an inability to win does not necessarily cause disengagement in short educational games, and that a structured debrief is important in achieving educational goals even in custom-built games.

Throughout the nineteenth century, Canada and the United States struggled to gain accurate demographic data on the First Nations and Métis communities they claimed to oversee. Enumerators grappled with linguistic and cultural differences, distrust, the ambiguity of racial categories, and the geographic mobility and isolation of many Native American communities. Understanding how, where, and why national census takers and Indian agents failed to overcome these challenges sheds light on the locality of federal power and the pathways through which Native Americans maintained their autonomy.

In 1899, Levi Edwin Dudley, the American consul at Vancouver, complained about the ways that Canadian and American police officers enacted justice along their shared border. During one of Dudley's investigations into alleged abuses, he spoke with a Canadian officer about the ways that local agents on both sides of the border approached their jobs. The officer, speaking under conditions of anonymity, noted that “on the border here we must do things in an irregular way in order to preserve the peace.” The ability of criminals to move back and forth across the line forced American and Canadian officers to “‘stand in’ with each other, [or] we should have the country filled with desperadoes.” American officers transferred criminals over to Canadian agents without proper clearance and Canadian officers later returned the favor. This system of irregular justice utilized informal prisoner exchanges built on local understandings, professional courtesy, and mutual concern to circumvent the slow, uncertain, and expensive extradition process. For Dudley, this kind of behavior threatened the liberty of citizens in both countries. For the officers tasked with policing a region of bisecting jurisdictions, it was a necessary evil.

No abstract

During the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the American Civil War, Canadian Confederation, transnational violence, and rising concerns over undesirable immigration increased anxieties in Canada and the United States over the permeability of their shared border. Both countries turned to a combination of direct and indirect control to assert their authority and police movement across the line. Direct control utilized military units, police officers, customs officials, and border guards to restrict movement by stopping individuals at the border itself. This approach had minimal success in limiting the movement of groups such as the Coast Salish, Lakota, Dakota, and Cree. In response, both countries employed indirect border-control strategies that attacked the motivations for crossing the border instead of its physical manifestation. They used rations, annuities, extra-legal evictions, and reserve land to impose national boundaries onto First Nations communities in the prairies and on the West Coast. The application of this indirect approach differed by region, by tribe, and by community leading to a ragged set of borderland policies that remained in flux throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.À la fin du XIXe siècle, la guerre de Sécession, la confédération canadienne, la violence transnationale et les préoccupations grandissantes entourant l’immigration indésirable ont exacerbé les craintes au Canada et aux États-Unis à l’égard de la perméabilité de leur frontière commune. Les deux pays ont mis en place une série de contrôles directs et indirects pour marquer leur autorité et pour surveiller les mouvements transfrontaliers. Le contrôle direct a misé sur des unités militaires, des agents de police, des douaniers et des gardes-frontières pour restreindre les déplacements en stoppant les personnes à la frontière. Cette méthode a connu un succès mitigé pour limiter la circulation de groupes tels les Salishs du littoral, les Lakotas, les Dakotas et les Cris. En réaction, les deux pays ont usé de stratégies indirectes de contrôle qui se sont attaquées aux motifs de traverser la frontière plutôt qu’aux passages proprement dits. Ils ont eu recours à des rations, à des rentes, à des expulsions extrajudiciaires et aux terres de réserve pour imposer une frontière nationale aux communautés des Premières Nations des Prairies et de la côte Ouest. L’application de ces stratégies a varié selon la région, la tribu et la communauté, ce qui a mené à une courtepointe de politiques frontalières qui ont continué à évoluer pour le reste du XIXe siècle et le début du XXe siècle