Immigrant and Indigene

• Main Author: Geiger, Andrea
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: University of North Carolina Press 2022
• Subjects: Canada; Metlakatla; Pacific; Yukon; Alaska
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469641140.003.0003

Chapter 2 considers ways in which both Indigenous people and Japanese migrants responded to the shifting legal, cultural and legal landscape that followed the formal incorporation of the north Pacific borderlands by Canada and the United States. At times, members of both groups engaged in complex acts of repositioning that took into account ways in which race-based legal restrictions in Canada and the US structured constraint or opportunity within their own borders. Examples include the Tsimishian who relocated to from Metlakatla, B.C. to New Metlakatla, Alaska in response to the B.C. government’s refusal to recognize Aboriginal title in B.C., only to be caught in the gap between ‘immigrant’ and ‘indigene’ in the United States. Also a telling example is that of Jujiro Wada, a Japanese immigrant with ties to both Alaska and the Yukon, who was forced to redefine himself on each side of the US-Canada border given the differing sets of racial barriers Japanese immigrants confronted in each. While Japanese immigrants shared certain attitudes with their Euro-American and -Canadian neighbors, viewing the land as empty and open to settlement, their encounters with Indigenous people were also shaped by perceptions of indigeneity rooted in Japanese history and culture.