Rooster Town

The History of an Urban Métis Community, 1901–1961

Evelyn Peters, Matthew Stock, Adrian Werner

• Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780887558252
• eBook ISBN: 9780887555664
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Geography
• Index: History

Melonville. Smokey Hollow. Bannock Town. Fort Tuyau. Little Chicago. Mud Flats. Pumpville. Tintown. La Coule. These were some of the names given to Métis communities at the edges of urban areas in Manitoba. Rooster Town, which was on the outskirts of southwest Winnipeg endured from 1901 to 1961.

Those years in Winnipeg were characterized by the twin pressures of depression, and inflation, chronic housing shortages, and a spotty social support network. At the city's edge, Rooster Town grew without city services as rural Métis arrived to participate in the urban economy and build their own houses while keeping Métis culture and community as a central part of their lives.

In other growing settler cities, the Indigenous experience was largely characterized by removal and confinement. But the continuing presence of Métis living and working in the city, and the establishment of Rooster Town itself, made the Winnipeg experience unique. Rooster Town documents the story of a community rooted in kinship, culture, and historical circumstance, whose residents existed unofficially in the cracks of municipal bureaucracy, while navigating the legacy of settler colonialism and the demands of modernity and urbanization.

CHAPTER ONE

Settler Colonialism and the Dispossession of the Manitoba Métis

THE STORY OF ROOSTER TOWN CONTRIBUTES to and broadens our understanding of settler cities and Indigenous people, especially in the Canadian context. Since 2004, when geographer Nicholas Blomley1 noted the lack of scholarship on the city as a postcolonial space, a number of studies have begun to explore how settler cities have defined perceptions of Indigenous2 peoples’ places and identities in relation to urban areas. The existing work, while claiming to explore settler colonialism and Indigenous people, really focuses on First Nations people and primarily on those who were registered under the Indian Act.3 Métis people were defined differently in legislation and administrative practices and, while some of their experiences were similar to those of First Nations people, some were radically different. Research on specific Métis experiences of urbanization helps to complicate the theoretical frameworks of settler colonialism. In addition, current criticism’s emphasis on settler colonial attitudes, mechanisms, and processes hides the way Indigenous people in Canadian cities have challenged dominant practices—sometimes through explicit resistance, and sometimes simply by attempting to make better futures for themselves, their families, and their communities. Although there were and continue to be power differentials between Indigenous people and the dominant society, our work illustrates that past social and spatial patterns were also co-constructed, and Indigenous people and communities were able to assert some agency over their lives in relation to the city.

Studies on settler colonialism and urban Indigenous peoples point out that the contrast between civilization and savagery are central to colonial definitions of Indigenous identities in Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand.4 A substantial amount of research on white settler attitudes has documented their views of Indigenous peoples as primitive, backward, and often savage.5 For settlers, authentic Indigenous cultures were associated with the past, or with places distant from the metropolitan centres of society. Literary critic Anne McClintock adds that Indigenous cultures are seen as existing in “anachronistic space—prehistoric, atavistic and irrational, inherently out of place in the historical time of modernity.”6

Cities have been key in translating these stereotypes into spatial arrangements, which, in turn, have cemented ideas about the incompatibility of Indigenous people and urban space.7 In the process of transforming Indigenous lands into private property and replacing Indigenous residents with settlers, municipal, provincial, and federal governments made self-invested decisions about where Indigenous people belonged in relation to the developing city. As historian Penelope Edmonds noted, the “tension between ideas about savagery and civilization played itself out spatially in the townscape.”8 Because colonial landscapes varied between different urban settings, the focus here will be on Canadian urban areas. The existing literature suggests that, as Canadian cities grew, they employed three main strategies to address the issue of Indigenous people in cities: containment, expulsion, and erasure. These strategies primarily focused on First Nations people.

Containment was probably the most widely used mechanism to keep people of First Nations away from urban spaces. In Canada, parcels of land known as reserves were set aside for their communities through legislation and administration. With respect to British Columbia, historical geographer Cole Harris wrote that “the allocation of reserves . . . defined two primal spaces, one for Native people and the other for virtually everyone else” based on a “racialized juxtaposition of civilization and savagery.”9 Reserves were purposefully located away from urban areas, in part, to give First Nations people access to hunting and gathering and to reduce subsistence costs to the Department of Indian Affairs. In some areas, however, reserves were located within urban boundaries, or cities grew to surround them. Attitudes toward these reserves reinforced ideas about Indigeneity and urban space. For instance, land use on reserves was seen as unproductive and wasteful.10 Historian Jordan Stanger-Ross summarizes attitudes toward reserves in Vancouver in the 1930s as follows: “Aboriginal people failed to possess property in a fashion that settlers were bound to respect.”11 Beyond the idea of wastefulness, reserves were also viewed as a threat to urban development. The view of the city as a living organism emerged in city planning theory in the 1920s; because municipal officials could not control the reserves’ use or appearance, these areas were presumed to pose a danger to the other healthy parts of the city.12 Reserves were seen as places of disease, bedlam, and disorder.13 As a result, reserve lands were surrendered, reserves were moved, and reserve boundaries were redrafted to shift them away from the borders of planned or expanding towns.14 In 1911, claiming to be acting in Indigenous peoples’ interests, the Government of Canada passed legislation to move reserves when growing towns came close because “such a situation, apart altogether from its accompanying irritation, is fraught with great danger to the Indians.”15

As reserves were segregated from developing townscapes, First Nations people were increasingly expelled through a variety of strategies. Edmonds notes that “the settler-colonial order, which made them landless, also constructed Indigenous people as inconvenient, anomalous, and vagrant.”16 Her examination of Indigenous people in the settler city of Victoria documented some of the strategies through which they were expelled from town sites. These included their forceful removal by the police, receiving municipal orders to leave at night or obtain a pass from their employers if they were needed, and eviction through nuisance and sanitation laws.17 Indigenous scholar Jaimy Miller documented the illegal surrender of the Pappaschase reserve in downtown Edmonton in 1881—through the dispersal of the band to other reserves and Métis settlements—to make way for settlers.18 Historian Coll Thrush found that as Seattle developed between 1880 and 1920, nearby Indian settlements were gradually removed and resettled.19 On the Canadian prairies, Indian Affairs officials at various levels enforced a pass system introduced after 1885, which required First Nations individuals to obtain permission from the Indian agent before they could leave their reserves. The purpose of this system was, in part, to keep First Nations people away from emerging prairie towns.20

According to Blomley, the erasure of Indigenous people in urban spaces happened in two ways.21 First was the ideological removal of Indigenous people from cities so that they were viewed as being out of place there—this was achieved by colonial narratives of empty lands, expectations that Indigenous people would die out, and when they did not, assumptions about their inevitable assimilation. Conceptual removal also occurred through settlers’ urban histories that do not acknowledge prior Indigenous occupation.22 The second element of erasure involved the material or physical removal of Indigenous people and the emplacement of a settler society.

However, the existing research on Canadian settler colonialism and Indigenous urbanity has focused almost entirely on First Nations people. And while there is a significant body of work that has explored the emergence of the Métis as a “new peoples” on the Canadian Prairies,23 there is virtually no research that, like our Rooster Town study, explores the links between the establishment of cities and Métis spaces and identities.24

Colonial legislation and administrative practices affected differently the experiences of First Nations and Métis people in relation to the city. First, the Métis were not acknowledged to have collective Indigenous rights to land like First Nations, whose rights were dealt with through treaties. Instead, Métis land rights were (supposedly) extinguished on an individual basis through a variety of mechanisms depending on time and place. Second, in connection with the non-recognition of Métis Indigenous rights to land, no reserves were established for Métis people. Historian Renisa Mawani has shown that in British Columbia the right of Métis people to live with their relatives on reserves was questioned.25 Reserves, with their unique administration by band councils and the fe...

Table of contents

• LIST OF TABLES
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER ONE
• CHAPTER TWO
• CHAPTER THREE
• CHAPTER FOUR
• CHAPTER FIVE
• CONCLUSION
• APPENDIX A
• APPENDIX B
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX