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Complex Numbers #1071970 added June 1, 2024 at 9:13am
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Border Dispute
Wars have been fought over less than this.
Article is from Atlas Obscura and 2019, but the Wikipedia article  suggests that the issue hasn't been resolved over the last five years.
After probably a few hours at sea, they reached the island’s rocky shore, and managed to land among the island’s main residents: puffins, razorbills, murres, and Arctic terns.
If I were that guy, I'd have pointed at one of the latter birds and proclaimed: "It's my tern now!"
Depending on whom you ask, Machias Seal Island is either off the coast of Maine or of Grand Manan. It’s also either American or Canadian. It is the only place with this particular unsettled identity that you can actually stand on top of. Although the ownership of some stretches of water is still contested, this island—and neighboring North Rock, which is even smaller and barer—are the last crumbs of their land the two countries don’t agree on.
Just wait a few years, and climate change will settle the debate for us.
I feel obliged to point out that while I've never been to this island, it sits within easy distance of the easternmost point of the continental US: Quoddy Head Lighthouse. I visited that spit of land when I decided to travel from it to the westernmost point, in the state of Washington. Quoddy Head was the easier of the two to reach, requiring significantly less hiking and way fewer bears.
The article delves into the source of the land dispute, then:
If the world were more just, this would all be moot: The people of the Passamaquoddy Nation likely used the island long before anyone else even knew it existed. (“Machias,” also the name of precipitous local river, is a Passamaquoddy word that means “bad little falls.”) Instead, even as their identifications and affiliations have shifted, the neighbors have kept squabbling over it, like a pair of growing siblings in a shared bedroom.
Look, let's hope it stays on the "siblings" level of quarrel. We don't want to go to war with Canada. We have a history of losing said wars.
The rest of the (rather long) article delves into the American side of things, focusing, as the headline implies (look at that, a headline matching up with the text), on one person's, or more properly one family's, quest to keep the US claim to the island.
I won't quote further, but it's a way more interesting read than the Wiki page. |
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