ABSTRACT
Empire, indigenous cultures, and the black Atlantic The presence of a clearly articulated North American knowledge framework that could situate and relativize nation-based narratives would appear less astonishing than the current isolation and division of labor pertaining to Canadian and United States studies. The beginnings of both Canada and the United States emerge from European imperial expansion. Many differences notwithstanding, both nations originate in white settler cultures that entertain conflicted relationships with indigenous populations while grappling with their own insecurities of cultural indigeneity and emergence against European cultures. New France and British North America, and then the United States and Canada, gained and expanded their land base by expropriating indigenous populations and accumulated other wealth as part of hemispheric and transatlantic networks that also engaged in slavery and the slave trade.
