Borderland Identities in Niagara: Craig Davidson’s Cataract City (2013)

This present article explores how border identities are narrated in Craig Davidson’s Cataract City (2013), a Canadian novel about friendship between two young men, set in Niagara Falls, Ontario and their involvement with a smuggler on the Tuscarora Reservation near Niagara Falls, New York. Drawing on research on the complex and contradictory nature of border identities in Canada and elsewhere, it examines how the novel’s Niagara protagonists negotiate identity and relationships in the region. My reading shows how the text’s protagonists engage in cross-border activities without forming ties on the other side of the border. The Native characters demonstrate a different rapport with the 49th parallel, positioning themselves outside of both the American and Canadian nation-state yet without forming pan-tribal alliances. In the end, Davidson’s fictional representation of the Canada–U.S. border region in Cataract City confirms and complements border studies research that finds increasing obstacles to cross-border cooperation and an absence of shared identity constructs along the Canada–U.S. border.