Borders

Thomas King was born in Roseville, California, in 1943. His mother was Greek, and his father was Cherokee. King’s father left his family when he was a young boy, so King has limited memories of him. King attended primary and high school in Roseville and went on to Sacramento State University. After failing his freshman year there, he worked a series of odd jobs. Eventually, he received a bachelor’s degree from Chico State University, and in 1986, he earned a PhD from the University of Utah. Beginning to take an interest in Native storytelling, King wrote his dissertation about oral literary traditions. In the 1980s, King emigrated from the United States to Canada and found employment as a professor of Native Studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta. In Alberta, King began to write in earnest, and he published his first novel, Medicine River, in 1990. In 1993, he published One Good Story, That One: Stories, the short story collection in which “Borders” first appeared. In the 2000s, King published several detective novels under the pseudonym Hartley GoodWeather. Later in his career, King became increasingly politically involved, writing nonfiction books about Indigenous history in Canada and even running for Parliament in 2007. For his contributions to literature, King was named a Member of the Order of Canada in 2004 and promoted to Companion of the Order of Canada in 2020. He currently lives in Guelph, Ontario with his wife and their three children. Natasha Donovan, who illustrated and adapted the text of King’s short story into the graphic novel, is from Vancouver, Canada. Her mother is Métis, originating from Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan. Her father is English and Irish. Donovan holds a BA in Anthropology from the University of British Columbia. Throughout the 2010s and 2020s, Donovan has illustrated graphic novels such as Surviving the City and picture books such as Classified. For the former, she won an Indigenous Voices Award in 2019. Donovan currently lives in Bellingham, Washington with her partner.

Recent archaeological evidence suggests that the Blackfoot people were present in the region by the early 16th century. Some historical scholars believe that the Blackfoot people migrated from the Great Lakes region to the Plains region in the early 17th century. At any rate, the existence of the Blackfoot and other Indigenous groups on the North American continent is longstanding, predating the first rough formation of the U.S.-Canada border by the Treaty of Paris in 1783. This treaty ended the Revolutionary War and drew lines between the newly formed United States of America and British North America, which would become known as the Province of Canada in 1840, and as “Canada” only in 1867. Thus, when the border guards in King’s story insist that the narrator’s mother needs to declare herself either “American” or “Canadian” and refuse to accept her answer of “Blackfoot,” they deny a claim to the land that far predates that of either country.

King’s novel examines the story of a young boy  as he struggles with the political and personal significance of his identity as an Indigenous person living in Canada. Other books for kids and teens about growing up or feeling “stuck” or lost between identities include Pedro Martín’s Mexikid: A Graphic Memoir (2023) and Shifa Saltagi Safadi’s Kareem Between (2024). Mexikid, like Borders, is a graphic novel about a family road trip across an international border to reunite with a faraway family member. Kareem Between, as the title suggests, is a verse novel that follows a young protagonist as they are trapped and separated from family by state power. Both novels are intended for a middle-grade audience. Readers seeking a novel by another prominent Native author might turn to Sherman Alexie’s well-known The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007). Like Laetitia in Borders, the main character in this book ventures from the reservation he calls home to establish himself in a majority-white community. Fans of Natasha Donovan’s illustration work in Borders can find her again in This Place: 150 Years Retold (2019), a graphic novel anthology by Indigenous artists. Those looking for more of Thomas King’s short stories might start with the collection in which Borders first appears, One Good Story, That One: Stories (1993). From that collection, “A Coyote Columbus Story” often appears in anthologies. For a deeper dive into the experience of Indigenous communities on the North American continent, readers may also pick up King’s The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America (2012) or Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (2014).