Read Online Colin Woodard by American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America - Free Book Online

Englanders might cooperate closely with one another, much as the Scandinavian countries do within Europe. Texans might finally utilize their constitutional right (under the terms of their annexation to the United States) to split into as many as five individual states. Illinoisans might agree to divide downstate from Chicagoland. Southern, northern, and interior California might each become a separate state. The external borders of this retooled United States might remain in place, or perhaps some Canadian or Mexican provinces might apply for membership in this looser, more decentralized federation. Throughout history far stranger things than this have happened.
    But one thing is certain: if Americans seriously want the United States to continue to exist in something like its current form, they had best respect the fundamental tenets of our unlikely union. It cannot survive if we end the separation of church and state or institute the Baptist equivalent of Sharia law. We won’t hold together if presidents appoint political ideologues to the Justice Department or the Supreme Court of the United States, or if party loyalists try to win elections by trying to stop people from voting rather than winning them over with their ideas. The union can’t function if national coalitions continue to use House and Senate rules to prevent important issues from being debated in the open because members know their positions wouldn’t withstand public scrutiny. Other sovereign democratic states have central governments more corrupted than our own, but most can fall back on unifying elements we lack: common ethnicity, a shared religion, or near-universal consensus on many fundamental political issues. The United States needs its central government to function cleanly, openly, and efficiently because it’s one of the few things binding us together.

    What might North America have been like if none of the ten Euro-Atlantic nations had ever been established? If the original Indian nations—the First Nations in Canadian parlance—had avoided the devastating epidemics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and continued to develop on their own terms, what might they have been like today?
    Actually, it seems we’re about to find out.
    In the far north a very old nation is reemerging after centuries in the cold. Across the northern third of the continent, aboriginal people have been reclaiming sovereignty over traditional territories from northern Alaska to Greenland and nearly everywhere in between. In this sprawling region of dense boreal forests, Arctic tundra, and treeless, glaciated islands, many native peoples never signed away the rights to their land, which they still occupy and, to a surprising degree, continue to live off using the techniques of their forefathers. They’ve won key legal decisions in Canada and Greenland that give them considerable leverage over what happens in their territories, forcing energy, mining, and timber companies to come to them, hat in hand, for permission to move forward on resource extraction projects. In 1999 Canada’s Inuit—they don’t want to be called “Eskimos”—won their own Canadian territory, Nunavut, which is larger than Alaska. The Inuit of Greenland control their own affairs as an autonomous, self-governing unit of the Kingdom of Denmark and are moving aggressively toward full independence.
    Together with the Innu, Kaska, Dene, Cree, and dozens of other tribes, the northern aboriginal people have cultural dominance over much of Alaska, the Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Labrador, all of Nunavut and Greenland, northwestern interior British Columbia, and the northern swaths of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and Québec. This eleventh nation—First Nation—is far and away the largest of all by geography (much bigger than the continental United States), but the smallest by population (less than 300,000, all told).
    First