Star Trek, the Frontier, and the Borg

“We are the Borg,” the faceless cube intones in the movie First Contact. “Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.” These words have struck such fear into a generation of science fiction fans that the final sentence has escaped the genre pen and become a larger cultural touchstone. Simply say the words “Resistance is futile,” and most people, sci-fi fans or not, will immediately understand exactly what you mean, and fear appropriately.

Throughout genre history, American science fiction has frequently had a frontier element. Whether it’s Han Solo promising to move quantities of goods to market without revenuer interference (“selling whiskey to Indians”), Commander Adama plotting a course beyond the Red Line (“light out for the territories”), or Malcolm Reynolds’ all-around cowboy ethic, science fiction has pilfered generously from America’s frontier mythology. That goes double for Star Trek, which Gene Roddenberry pitched explicitly as a “space western.”

Captain Kirk announced the original Star Trek by describing himself traversing the “final frontier.”  He made it his goal to encounter undiscovered peoples, several of which, in the original series, are depicted as having Native American qualities. (These qualities are broad stereotypes, and often played by White actors in heavy makeup, though that’s too many themes too address here.) Though the Prime Directive stops Kirk becoming an out-and-out conqueror, he’s nevertheless frequently a White Savior.

Perhaps that’s what made Picard’s contact with the Borg so terrifying: colonists and empires don’t like having their own actions thrown back at them. In the original series, Kirk and the Federation dealt intermittently with the Klingon threat, a metaphor for America’s interactions with the Soviet “menace,” but never investigated that in detail, perhaps because, in light of the ongoing conflict between two global superpowers, creators couldn’t face the implications. America was an empire, too.

As the Cold War wound down, though, such investigation became available to Picard. The Next Generation included more scrutiny of the Federation and its operant principles, which were primarily White, male, and expansionist. The series still held itself back in service to the tastes of its time, and Roddenberry’s humanist philosophy, but we began seeing rot and disorder among the Federation hierarchy. White humanity’s innate goodness wasn’t something the Federation could take for granted anymore.

A Borg drone (Hugh) from the episode "I, Borg"

White America’s history with indigenous peoples will never escape the taint of racism. Forced removals and the Trail of Tears; state-sponsored missionary activity designed, in no uncertain terms, to abolish native culture; the Carlisle Indian School. And that’s just our interactions with Native Americans. The phrase “Your culture will adapt to service us” accurately describes the philosophy underlying how White people viewed Native American culture until very recently—and, in too many quarters, still does.

Funny enough, while America saw itself as a bastion of rugged individualism, it painted the “Evil Empire” as a faceless collective bent on assimilating citizens’ identities into a top-down social stratum. It’s almost like, viewing from within, we saw ourselves as individuals with goals and personalities, while viewing our “opponents” from without, we considered their people the sum total of their government’s belligerent rhetoric. One wonders how Native Americans saw the Cavalry crossing the frontier.

American frontier myth, to work, always requires viewing from the White side. Whether it’s children playing Cowboys and Indians, or NASA pledging to establish colonies on the Moon and Mars, somehow the White settlers always win. But science fiction, which regularly abandons moorings in the putatively “real” world, has liberty to speculate on big themes which we’re often denied in reality, including the possibility that, someday, somebody new may cross another frontier and find us.

That’s what happens with the Borg. After decades of Roddenberry’s mythology assuming humans, mostly White males, would win the colonial enterprise, the Borg upend this assumption. They enter our space. They want to conquer us, and make us part of their, ahem, enterprise, rather than us inviting strangers into our Federation. And though, pursuant to the needs of episodic television, the humans always successfully resist the alien invaders, they nevertheless remind us, victory isn’t certain.

Our frontier myth has frequently tainted America’s interaction with the wider world, as historians like Greg Grandin have noted. The myth has faltered significantly in the 21st Century, but still basically drives our foreign policy. That’s why we need something like the Borg, to remind us that, viewed from outside, we probably don’t look like the Federation. We probably look like an anonymous mass of technological monstrosities, bent on yoking other peoples to our vision.