Book a must-read for those living on any borderland

Reviewed by Karl Hele

Three Fires Unity is an excellent example of how Anishinaabeg tradition, history, and culture can be tied together with the European written record by an Indigenous scholar to create a book that places the Anishinaabeg at the centre.  Working with the idea that Lake Huron represented a borderland throughout the French, British, and American-Canadian periods, Dr. Bellfy deftly shows how the presence of these colonial-imperial states affected and were affected by the Anishinaabeg.  Simply, we were not passive in the face of the claims by the Europeans to our lands and waters.

The most interesting section of the book is contained within the fourth and fifth chapters. Here Bellfy discusses the impact of the division of the Anishinaabeg homeland between two colonial states – the United States and British-Canada. Detailed within these chapters are our attempts to implement the full understanding of the Jay Treaty as well as continued cross-border movements of people despite state efforts to control or stop it. For Garden River First Nation, Bellfy discusses the fact that Sugar Island in the St. Mary’s River remains untreatied land. The United States claims that the island rests within its borders, based on an agreement with England concerning the international border. Garden River First Nation members regularly resorted to the island throughout their history (and many continue to do so) which creates a potential claim by a ‘Canadian band’ to ‘US’ territory. The unsurrendered, untreatied, unceded nature of Sugar Island is an important feature of the nature of the borderlands where the Anishinaabeg and Settlers are unable to completely exert control, thereby forcing the redefinition of border and rights from the 1600s to the present day.

Bellfy’s book is a must-read for all Anishinaabeg and Settlers living in the Lake Huron region, or any borderland for that matter.  Overall the history Bellfy reveals serves as a corrective to standard Settler narratives from Canada and the U.S.

By Phil Bellfy, Three Fires Unity: The Anishinaabeg of the Lake Huron Borderlands (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011).