In This Issue:

Program News

• Happy Thanksgiving to Canadians near and far!
• Photos from our 5th annual Canadian Thanksgiving dinner
• Former Hildebrand Fellow Aaron Gregory appointed professor at Cal Poly Humboldt

Upcoming Events:

• Book talk: Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands, 1867–1945
• Graduate student discussion with Prof. Andrea Geiger

 Happy Thanksgiving to Canadians Near and Far! 

Dear friends,

On behalf of the Canadian Studies Program, it is my pleasure to wish you and your families a very happy Canadian Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is a day to spend with those closest to you, and to appreciate the people and things that matter. This fall, Canadian Studies is celebrating our 40th anniversary at Berkeley. At this landmark moment, we’re more grateful than ever for the support our friends have shown for us over the last four decades. Whether you’ve been with us since the very beginning or are just joining us, your friendship and engagement are critical to sustaining and growing the program. We enjoyed seeing so many of you at our Canadian Thanksgiving dinner this weekend (see photos below).

I would like to also recognize that today is Indigenous Peoples Day in California, which celebrates Native American people, their cultures, and their history. The holiday originated in Berkeley in 1992, and last year President Biden recognized it for the first time nationally. I encourage our American readers, as well as Canadians resident in the US, to take some time to learn about the tribes in your area and the contributions that Native Americans have made, and continue to make, to the United States.

In friendship,

PROGRAM NEWS

Canadian Studies celebrated Thanksgiving with our Bay Area friends on Saturday at our 5th annual community Thanksgiving dinner. Together with our partners at the Digital Moose Lounge, we served a fantastic turkey dinner to one hundred local Canadians and friends of Canada from across the area, including consul general Rana Sarkar. A special raffle sent guests home with prizes ranging from hand-knit Inuit toques to free airline tickets courtesy of Air Canada. But the heart of the event was being able to connect with fellow Canadians and meeting friends new and old. We can’t wait for next year!

Left: Professor Bloemraad with Rana Sarkar, Consul General of Canada in San Francisco; David Stewart, chair of the Canadian Studies Advisory Board; and Sarah Price, Prime Moose, Digital Moose Lounge. Right: Dinner at Clark Kerr Campus.

Former Hildebrand Fellow Aaron Gregory Appointed Professor at Cal Poly Humboldt

Canadian Studies is proud to announce Aaron Gregory, a former Hildebrand Fellowship recipient, has been appointed assistant professor of Native American studies at Cal Poly Humboldt (formerly Humboldt State University), in northern California

Dr. Gregory received his Ph.D. from Berkeley last year in community and regional planning. His research is situated at the intersection of science & technology studies (STS), critical infrastructure studies, and political ecology as they relate to Indigenous histories, communities and contexts.

Dr. Gregory’s primary research interest is in Indigenous-led renewable energy projects, and he received a Hildebrand Fellowship in 2021 for research into one such effort on Vancouver Island. His previous fieldwork examined the role of technology in Indigenous land restitution projects. We wish him the best in his new position!

UPCOMING EVENTS

Book Talk: Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands, 1867–1945

Wednesday, October 19 | 12:30 pm | 223 Moses | RSVP here

Andrea Geiger will discuss her new book, Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands, 1867–1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2022). Making a vital contribution to our understanding of North American borderlands history through its examination of the northernmost stretches of the U.S.-Canada border, the book highlights the role that the North Pacific borderlands played in the construction of race and citizenship on both sides of the international border from 1867, when the United States acquired Russia’s interests in Alaska, through the end of World War II. Imperial, national, provincial, territorial, reserve, and municipal borders worked together to create a dynamic legal landscape that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people negotiated in myriad ways as they traversed these borderlands. Adventurers, prospectors, laborers, and settlers from Europe, Canada, the United States, Latin America, and Asia made and remade themselves as they crossed from one jurisdiction to another.

Within this broader framework, Geiger pays particular attention to the ways in which Japanese migrants and the Indigenous people who had made this borderlands region their home for millennia negotiated the web of intersecting boundaries that emerged over time, charting the ways in which they infused these reconfigured national, provincial, and territorial spaces with new meanings. To see the North Pacific borderlands only as a remote outpost that marked the westernmost edges of the U.S. or British empire, is to miss not only the central place it occupied in the lives of the Indigenous peoples whose home it continues to be, but the extent to which it functioned, in the eyes of Japanese entrepreneurs, as an economic hinterland for an expanding Japanese empire, as well as the role it played in shaping wartime policy with regard to citizens and subjects of Japanese ancestry in both Canada and the United States.

Andrea Geiger is professor emerita of history at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests include transpacific and borderlands history, race, migration, and legal history. She received a J.D. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington, and is the author of the award-winning Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885–1928.

This event is co-sponsored by the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI), the Center for Race and Gender, and the Department of History.

UC Berkeley students with a research interest in Professor Geiger’s work are welcome to attend a small group discussion with the speaker following her public presentation. For more information, please email canada@berkeley.edu.