Introduction to the Wicked Problem

The countries of Canada and The United States of America are split by a theoretical political boundary which is reified by institutional structures which attempt to control cross-border movement and dictate and enforce the terms of occupation allowed within a given country’s borders.

The 1794 Jay Treaty – an agreement between the U.S. and Britain which arose in begrudging attempt to placate the latter following America’s independence – bore nested within a provision allowing for the free movement of North American Natives across the international borders separating the U.S. and Canada (U.S. Mission to Canada, n.d.; “John Jay’s Treaty,” n.d.).

This right to free movement was eventually granted to individual bearers of Indian Status, which is assigned under Canada’s Indian Act – a condition unlikely to be met by most U.S.-born Natives (“Border Crossing,” 2003; U.S. Mission to Canada, n.d.; “Background on Indian”, 2018).

So, while rights to cross-border travel for holders of Indian Status have been codified into U.S. legislation, Canada has refrained from any reciprocal legislative validation of cross-border rights for American Natives, partly on the basis that The Jay Treaty was effectively overturned by the Britain-U.S. War of 1812 (Francis, 2024).

The “wicked problem” here concerns the issue of how exactly to facilitate the reciprocal adoption of Native rights under the Jay Treaty within Canada. Such an adoption would entail the granting of Native populations within the United States the right to freely live, work and travel within Canada.

The Jay Treaty, in a sense, stands ‘grandfathered’ in to U.S. legislation, resulting in the incorporation of cross-border Native rights as a routine, familiar process to which the American public have become acclimated – to the extent they are aware of it (“Border Crossing,” 2003, U.S. Mission to Canada, n.d.). On the other hand, because the Jay Treaty has never been validated by Canada, to enact its reciprocal adoption in the present would presumably entail its reception as a novel prospect, subject to the evaluations and fears of both Native and non-Native Canadians.

To aid in exploring the complexity of this problem, I created a map which attempts to locate and characterize the actors and institutions involved in a spatial formation of rough geographic correspondence, with a variety of colour-coded connections formed to characterize the nature of the processes involved.

The Jay Treaty map, broken down by category of connection

While the full view of the systems map with all elements and connections included can grant the mapped system an illusion of relative comprehensiveness, breaking the map down by category of connection can better indicate the spatial trends and missing points of particular themed groupings of actors and processes.

Ancestral Influence

A single yellow connection indicates an ancestral influence, such as that of Britain on North America. This was a partial attempt to integrate a wide-range temporal scale within the mapped system. The colonial dynamics of Britain’s control over portions of North America sets the stage here for the figuring of power differentials within the system’s dynamics:

Power Differentials

Here we focus on red connections, which indicate identified power differentials between actors.  I would note that many of these identified power differentials – such as those identified between Native Canadians and non-Native Canadians, and Native Americans and non-Native Americans, would tend to also correlate with, or speak to, some sort of impact gap. I would consider the relationships of power indicated here to flow under the energy of reverberating but fluid dynamics, which are clasped and corralled by the structural rigidity of routine bureaucratic processes:

Bureaucratic Processes

Orange connections indicate what are essentially routine bureaucratic processes undertaken in navigation of the Jay Treaty, the general character of which is one of compliance to the terms of the respective governmental powers of Canada and the U.S.  The routine processes described here give way to more novel, paradigm-shifting levers of change, which act to address impact gaps:

Scholastic

Geography and Environmental Studies course components are placed off to the side, as if on the sidelines, ungoverned by the quasi-geographic logic of the map’s remainder.  They wear a regal, scholastic purple and are symbolized with what Kumu defines as a pill-shape, for different reasons than why I chose to use the shape for Native bands; just the simple implication that educational institutions provide “pills” to swallow.  Connections are also purple, with their attendant captions placed in purple italics to distinguish them from the other connections and connection-captions.  Here, the elements I specifically connected to course content are highlighted, but remaining elements also appear in faded form, to express that course learnings also inform my understanding of the mapped system’s whole, albeit possibly in a less direct manner.

Conclusions in light of the preceding

This website presentation allowed for interactive engagement with the Jay Treaty systems map, with separate “views” intending to indicate distinct patterns of category-specific processes and impact gaps within the system, in addition to amplifying the presence of missing points unacknowledged by my own map-making process. Further, the incorporation of semi-geographic correspondence in the placement of elements within the map allows an impression of how spatial patterns of influence, process, and actor agency differ between different categories of connection. Potentially, this multiple-view geographic approach further refines the potential for systems maps to aid in the collation and analysis of issues, and the delineation of their particular parameters and bounds.

Past levers of change have enacted meaningful adjustments to processes of cross-border movement and occupation for U.S.-born Natives within Canada, but the vast discrepancy in access to Jay Treaty rights between Canadian and American Natives necessarily creates a situation in which the onus for substantial change largely falls upon the more contextually privileged party – here, Canadian Natives, who stand in a position of relative advantage relative to American Natives in this regard while simultaneously occupying a marginalized position – generally possessing little power or influence – within Canada. Subsequently, it appears that the success of future levers of change would stand conditioned not only upon the altruistic enthusiasm of Native Canadians in advocating for the rights of Natives south of the border, but on eventual shifts in legislature to be put into force by Canada’s largely non-Native hegemonic powers, with attendant problems of attaining social license among the greater Canadian public.