034 - Benjamin Hoy - A Line of Blood and Dirt

Writing Westward Podcast

A conversation with historian Benjamin Hoy about his book A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border across Indigenous Lands (Oxford University Press, 2021).

Benjamin Hoy is an Associate Professor of History and the director of the Historical GIS Lab at the University of Saskatchewan. He has published on a wide range of topic including Indigenous history, borderlands, game-based learning, Indigenous representations in board games, and extradition policy. Today we discuss his first book, A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border across Indigenous Lands (Oxford University Press, 2021). In it, Hoy examines the creation and enforcement of the Canadian-United States border between 1775 and 1939 and its impacts on the Indigenous residents whose land the border was created across. Rather than a dry administrative history of the border's creation, Hoy's text is driven by a focus on the lived experiences of the people at the border. The cast of characters is diverse and some of the stories are wild.

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Podcast Notes:

• Host and Producer Brenden W. Rensink is Associate Director of the Redd Center, an Associate Professor of History at BYU, General Editor of the Intermountain Histories project, and author of the 2018 book Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands. Links to other publications and projects here: https://linktr.ee/bwrensink
• Support provided by the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University.
  
• Podcast Music was written and recorded by local Provo composer by Micah Dahl Anderson.
• Episodes are recorded via Skype or in person and amateurishly engineered and produced by Professor Rensink.
• To submit a book to be considered for a podcast episode, email [email protected].