2
Located at the juncture of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, Winnipeg was built and lives amid a rich Indigenous history of the Cree, Anishinaabe, and Metis nations. It is a critical juncture in what Warren Cariou and Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair explain as Manitowapow, the powerful and generative confluence of waters and earth.1 For at least 6,000 years, the fork of the two rivers was a trade site that linked peoples across North America. Archaeological evidence suggests a period of especially rapid growth between 1100 and 1400.2 In the early 1400s Anishinaabe people farmed the land around what is present-day Lockport, located at the northern edge of an Indigenous agricultural world.3
The occasional arrival of European men associated with the fur trade toward the end of the 1700s shifted this history, but did not begin or end it. From the latter part of the eighteenth century through much of the nineteenth, modern-day Winnipeg was Red River Settlement. This was a complicated political entity within the enormous and colonial space of Rupert’s Land, whose commercial control and titular colonial governance was handed over to the private interests of the Hudson’s Bay Company. In the early nineteenth century, Red River was an overwhelmingly Indigenous society. By 1869, over eighty per cent of Red River’s 12,000 residents were French or English speaking Metis.4 They maintained relationships with a small number of European settlers and Indigenous relations, including the 500 Anishinaabe people who had 230 acres under cultivation at St. Peters, located north along the Red River.5
In 1868, Britain literally sold Rupert’s Land to the new, ambitious settler nation of Canada, formed a year earlier. This was carried out as a real estate transaction and without any meaningful input from local people. This overwhelmingly Indigenous population strenuously and effectively objected to the announcement that Red River was to become part of Canada on the most radically unequal of terms. Throughout the winter of 1869-70 Red River society, under the leadership of 24-year-old Metis leader Louis Riel, organized, took up arms, and struck their own alternative government. As scholar Adam Gaudry explains, nineteenth-century Metis wrote at length about a Manitoba Treaty, an attempt to define the relationship between the Metis and the newcomers.6 One expression of this was the 1870 Manitoba Act, the legislative mechanism that made Manitoba part of Canada not as a colony, but as a small and square province that famously looked like a postage stamp. The Manitoba Act also defined the province in explicitly Metis terms by recognizing the French language, the Roman Catholic faith, and distinct Metis practices of land tenure.7
English Canadian nationalism depends on a number of circulating narratives that rub up against a more complicated past. One is that Canada’s western history was a peaceful one, unmarked by the violence and conflict that characterized western America. But Manitoba was born in a moment of sharp colonial violence and vigorous, multilayered Indigenous resistance. The Manitoba Act was a hard-won gesture to the possibility that the Metis would maintain their rights and social centrality within a nation that defined itself as settler space. In the decades that followed the Manitoba Act, many of its implicit and explicit promises were abrogated, as the 2013 Supreme Court case Manitoba Métis Federation vs. Canada found.8 As historian Jack Bumsted explains, Red River in 1870 was occupied space.9 The Metis lost much of their land, and what was officially incorporated as Winnipeg in 1873 became at best an uncomfortable and often dangerous place. About two-thirds of the approximately 10,000 Metis left Manitoba, many going west and north.10 Documents that incorporated the city of Winnipeg left room for a number of kinds of exceptional land holding, including land “held in trustee of any tribe or body of Indians,” but urban reserves would not be created for a very long time.11
Like other western Canadian cities, late nineteenth and twentieth-century Winnipeg associated its modernity with the apparent absence of Indigenous people, especially those registered by law or custom as Indians. Examining Vancouver, historian Jordan Stanger-Ross describes a process of “municipal colonialism” that worked to regulate, remove, and diminish Indigenous communities from that city.12 Unlike Vancouver, Winnipeg had no reserve lands within its city limits. The apparent absence of Indigenous peoples became a source of civic pride. In 1874, a newspaper proudly declared that “the largest Indian encampment in the city just now are the cells of the provincial jail.”13
This jocular and ominous commentary reflects wider patterns. In early twentieth-century Canada, Indigenous space was increasingly defined as the ever-diminishing and disempowered reserves. Cities were emphatically defined as non-Indigenous space. Geographer Evelyn Peters explains that Canada had what amounted to a “largely segregated pattern of settlement” from 1900 to the late 1950s.14 The vast majority of Indigenous people, especially those defined as Status Indians under the terms of the Indian Act, lived on reserves located at a distance from cities. Cities employed a range of legal and extra-legal techniques to keep Indigenous people out and away. Indigenous peoples were kept out of cities and towns by the regulations of the Indian Act, passed in 1876 and made steadily more restrictive in the closing years of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. A federal system of residential schooling solidified in the 1880s, and the separation of Indigenous children from their families worked to both further undermine Indigenous kinship and locate Indigenous people outside of urban space.15
Population controls passed in the wake of the federal government’s sharp and violent crushing of the Northwest Resistance in 1885 were not lifted well into the middle years of the twentieth century. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Indigenous people were often required to apply for permission to leave their reserves to attend gatherings, work for wages, pick berries, or hunt in what was a variation on the “pass system” that is more generally associated with Apartheid-era South Africa.16 When Indigenous land holding thwarted plans for settler prosperity, law and state could be marshalled to further dispossess Indigenous people of their resources and land. This is what happened at the St. Peter’s Indian Reserve. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the prosperous Anishinaabe farming community north of Winnipeg was dispossessed of its land by a series of complicated shenanigans that would, a century later, be deemed an illegal surrender.17 Indigenous lands were also jeopardized by practices of water management. In what historian Shannon Stunden Bower calls the “wet prairie,” Indigenous lands were routinely flooded in the interests of making a wet landscape amenable to settler agriculture.18
Metis people had a different stake and a different experience of legal and extra-legal regulation within prairie cities, including Winnipeg. Metis communities persisted within the city’s limits, although on diminished terms and in precarious circumstances. The community of Rooster Town, which moved around the city’s southern reaches in the last decades of the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth, is a case in point. Anchored in the overlapping histories of about a dozen Metis families, Rooster Town families lived on land they had no formal title to in homes they built themselves in part from scavenged materials. They supported themselves on wages earned by men who worked for the day for the railroad or local farms; and they drank the water that women and children carried from a common pipe. Historian David Burley has explained how in the late 1950s the people of Rooster Town were dispossessed of the little they had in the interests of building a new suburban housing development and the public and commercial buildings that went with it: the Grant Park Shopping Centre and Grant Park High School.19
In late nineteenth and twentieth-century Winnipeg, other Metis people would define themselves, through constant and watchful cultural labour, as white or the particular and pliant category of “French.” The English-speaking and Protestant Metis had different possibilities and limits. Take John Norquay, Premier of the new province of Manitoba from 1878 to 1887. Politically, Norquay was a conservative and an ally of famously anti-Indigenous Prime Minister John A. Macdonald. Norquay was also Indigenous. He spoke Cree, Salteaux, and Dakota and walked around Manitoba’s legislature in moccasins.20 By the middle of the twentieth century, it would be much less possible to be both Indigenous and elite. Like many descendants of the fur trade elite, Norquay’s family defined themselves as white and fought hard when that claim was threatened. When a plaque commemorating Norquay was erected in 1948, his descendants refused to accept its description of the premier as a “Halfbreed,” threatened legal action, commissioned a genealogy “proving” him to be of English and Welsh lineage, and provoked what historians Gerald Friesen and Jean Friesen politely describe as a “minor scene.”21
The remaking of Winnipeg as non-Indigenous space in the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century was accomplished through ideas as well as laws and policies. Historian Kurt Korneski explains how Winnipeg’s early twentieth-century cultural elite—both left and right wing—had very little to say about Indigenous people.22 When they did refer directly to Indigenous people, men like the radical cleric and politician J.S. Woodsworth expressed his discomfort with the racial hierarchies of prairies society, explaining that “One of the most pathetic sights is that of an Indian stepping off a sidewalk to let a white man pass.” Woodsworth went on to locate Indigenous people as somehow outside of time, “belated survivors of an earlier age, strangers in the land of their fathers.”23
The transformation of Red River into Winnipeg preceded the city’s enormous, much celebrated, and much discussed growth in the first years of the twentieth century. These were years of growth for Canada as a whole, and for what was now clearly western Canada and the city that served as its so-called gateway. Winnipeg became a poster child for capitalist ambition and colonial expansion, both predicated on a certain kind of population growth. There were modest population booms in the early 1870s and the early 1880s, but growth remained relatively slow in the three decades following Manitoba’s conflicted entry into confederation. This changed in the first years of the twentieth century, and between 1902 and 1905 the population more than doubled from an official count of 42,340 in 1901 to 90,153 in 1906.24 By 1915, the population was 212,889. Winnipeg’s growth outstripped Canada’s as a whole and that of other western Canadian cities.25
This growth reflected high rates of international migration. Between 1901 and 1911, more than half a million immigrants found their way to Winnipeg. Between 1881 and 1916, almost 80 per cent of the city’s population was born outside of the province of Manitoba. Winnipeg had become a city of newcomers. It remained an overwhelmingly white and European place. About half of foreign-born migrants were British, with Scandinavians and Icelanders, Germans, Austro-Hungarians, Russians, Poles, and Ukrainians also well represented.26 These patterns reflected the way that Canadian immigration policy and practice had expanded its definition of who might be an appropriate Canadian, but remained committed to a policy of whiteness. A head-tax was imposed on Chinese immigrants in 1885, and it was raised steadily until Chinese immigration was banned in 1923. In different ways, Black Americans, South Asians, and Japanese people all found themselves hyper-regulated, taxed, discouraged, and sometimes excluded altogether.27
Turn of the century Winnipeg was a place of both immigrant possibility and immigrant strife. For much of the left, the poverty and social dislocation of new migrants and their vulnerability to insufficient infrastructure came to stand as a powerful symbol of the inability of capitalism to meet basic human needs. At critical junctures this critique overlapped with and fed upon what historians have called social gospel, moral regulation, or moral reform discourse, which called upon Christianity and modernity to make genuine social change. Winnipeg took on a particular import to early twentieth-century reformers, for it came to be associated with hardship, vice, and social pathology. Almost exclusively, this was connected with recent European immigrants coded as “foreigners,” and their linguistic and to a lesser extent cultural differences registered as racial ones.
As historian Mariana Valverde explains, languages of reform in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Canada were profoundly racialized: they were rooted in ideas of racial difference and hierarchy and, more particularly, of the superiority of British English-Canadian people and the threats that migrants and Indigenous people posed to them and the society they were building in the Canadian west.28 These languages of social critique and reform were also steeply gendered. As a movement, moral regulation was tied closely to first wave feminism and its chosen issues of the day: temperance and women’s suffrage. Moral regulation was highly attenuated to issues of the body and reproduction, and invested women with special powers in relation to both. As Winnipeg grew, it became seen as a special site not only of racialized poverty, but of gendered vice. In 1910, Reverend J.G. Shearer, the General Secretary of Canada’s Moral and Social Reform Council, told the national press that “They have the rottenest condition of things in Winnipeg in connection with the question of Social vice to be found in any City in Canada.”29
In these discussions, gender, race—coded mainly as foreignness—and class coalesced into a somewhat amorphous, ominous, and prescient threat. One Protestant minister told another central Canadian audience in 1909 that
In Winnipeg from one-quarter to one-third of the total population were now composed of foreigners, and housed principally in the north end of the city, and for the most part, under appalling conditions of overcrowding and of diseases and vice bred by unsanitary surroundings.
For Reverend James Allan, this was a special danger in light of the work of colonization that western Canada had before it. “In a country where almost half a continent of fertile land lay undeveloped, there was being reproduced all the misery and poverty of the crowded centers of Europe.”30
The heated and hyperbolic discussions of foreigners and vice in the early twentieth century anticipate and prefigure early twenty-first century mainstream reporting of Winnipeg as Canada’s “most racist city.”31 Then, as now, there were pressing social and material circumstances somewhere amid the moral panic. Mass, transoceanic migration reconfigured support networks, and conditions of arrival did little to foster the transfer of Indigenous knowledge to migrant people. Aggressive capitalism created and often impoverished a working class. Staggering population growth from the earliest days of the twentieth century to the onset of the First World War seriously outstripped Winnipeg’s modest and patchy urban infrastructure. This included its capacity to provide drinking water to its residents.
1 Warren Cariou and Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair, “Introduction,“ Manitowapow: Aboriginal Writings from the Land of Water (Winnipeg: Portage and Main Press, 2011), 4-5.
2 Much of this research is summarized in the extensive bibliography here: www.theforks.com/about/history/heritage-research/bibliography, accessed 7 August 2015.
3 See Catherine Flynn and E. Leigh Syms, “Manitoba’s First Farmers,” Manitoba History, 31 (Spring 1996): 4-11.
4 See Norma Hall, “An Overwhelmingly Metis Settlement,” found on her remarkable blog, www.hallnjean2.wordpress.com/the-red-river-resistence/overwhelmingly-metis, accessed 7 August 2015.
5 Norma Hall, “St. Peter’s Parish/’The Indian Settlement’/Peguis’ Settlement,” www.hallnjean2.wordpress.com/resources/definition-provisional-government/the-people-electorate/st-peters-parish/, accessed 8 August 2015.
6 Adam Gaudry, “Kaa-tipeyimishokaahk—We are those who own ourselves: A Political History of Metis Self-Determination in the North-West, 1830-1870” (Doctoral Dissertation, University of Victoria, 2014).
7 See, on this, D.N. Sprague, Canada and the Metis: 1869-1885 (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 1988); Gerald Friesen, The Canadian Prairies: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), Chapters 6, 8, and 9.
8 See www.mmf.mb.ca/wcm-docs/docs/metis-scoc-judgment-march-8-2013.pdf, accessed 8 August 2015.
9 J.M. Bumsted, “Reporting the Resistance of 1869-1870,” in Thomas Scott’s Body: And Other Essays on Early Manitoba History (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2000), 95.
10 See Jennifer S.H. Brown, “Métis,” The Canadian Encyclopaedia, www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=A1ARTA0005259, accessed 5 December 2015.
11 “An Act to Incorporate the City of Winnipeg,” in Alan F.J. Artibise, ed., Gateway City: Documents on the City of Winnipeg, 1873-1919 (Winnipeg: Manitoba Records Society, 1979), 42.
12 Jordan Stanger-Ross, “Municipal Colonialism in Vancouver: City Planning and the Conflict over Indian Reserves, 1928–1950s,” The Canadian Historical Review, 89:4 (December 2008): 541-580. See also David Vogt and David Gamble, “‘You Don’t Suppose the Dominion Government Wants to Cheat the Indians?’: The Grand Trunk Railway and the Fort George Reserve, 1908-12,” BC Studies, 166 (Summer 2010): 55-72.
13 Manitoba Free Press, 24 October 1874. Thanks to Gustavo F. Velasco, whose “Land, Class Formation, and State Capitalism in Winnipeg” (Master’s Thesis, University of Manitoba, 2011), brought my attention to this quote.
14 E.J. Peters, “‘Our City Indians’: Negotiating the Meaning of First Nations Urbanization in Canada, 1945-1975,” Historical Geography, 30 (2002): 75.
15 See Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015, at www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/File/2015/Findings/Exec_Summary_2015_05_31_web_o.pdf, 41-182.
16 Sarah Carter, Capturing Women: The Manipulation of Cultural Imagery in Canada’s Prairie West (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 1997), 187-88.
17 See Sarah Carter, “They Would Not Give Up One Inch of It: The Rise and Demise of St. Peter’s Reserve, Manitoba,” in Alan Lester and Zoe Laidlaw, eds., Indigenous Communities and Settler Dispossession (London: Palgrave, 2015), 173-93.
18 Shannon Stunden Bower, Wet Prairie: People, Land and Water in Agricultural Manitoba (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), Chapter 1.
19 See David Burley, “Rooster Town: Winnipeg’s Lost Metis Suburb, 1900-1960,” Urban History Review, 17:1 (Fall 2013): 3-25. Evelyn Peters and Laurie Barkwell’s ongoing research on Rooster Town is described in www.uwinnipeg.ca/index/uw-news-action/story.896/title.-remembering-rooster-town-public-help-wanted, accessed 13 November 2015.
20 Grant MacEwan, “Honourable John,” Manitoba Pageant, 5:3 (April 1960), found at www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/pageant/05/honourablejohn.shtml, accessed 14 August 2015; Sarah Carter, Aboriginal People and their Colonizers in Western Canada to 1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 131; Gerald Friesen, “John Norquay,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Volume XI, 1881-1890, www.biographi.ca/en/bio/norquay_john_11E.html, accessed 8 September 2011.
21 Robert Coutts, The Road to the Rapid: Nineteenth-Century Church and Society at St. Andrew’s Parish, Red River (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2000), 111; Jean Friesen and Gerald Friesen, “River Road,” in River Road: Essays on Manitoba and Prairie History (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1996), 11.
22 See Kurt Korneski, “Reform and Empire: The Case of Winnipeg, Manitoba, 1870s-1910s,” Urban History Review, 37:1 (2008): 48-62; Kurt Korneski, “Britishness, Canadianness, Class, and Race: Winnipeg and the British World, 1880s-1910s,” Journal of Canadian Studies, 41:2 (Spring 2007): 161-84.
23 J.S. Woodsworth, Strangers within Our Gates: or, coming Canadians (Toronto: F.C. Stephenson, 1909), 192.
24 R.M. Simpson and A.J. Douglas, “Typhoid Fever in the Province of Manitoba with special Regard to the City of Winnipeg,” American Journal of Public Hygiene, 19:2 (May 1909): 233.
25 See Alan Artibise, Winnipeg: A Social History of Urban Growth, 1874-1914 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s, 1975): table 6, 130-31.
26 Artibise, Winnipeg, 137 and chart 12, 142.
27 See, on these years, Donald Avery, Reluctant Host: Canada’s Response to Immigrant Workers (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995).
28 Mariana Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885-1925 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991).
29 “Report of Royal Commission on Charges Re Vice and Of Graft Against the Police,” 1911, reprinted in Artibise, ed., Gateway City, 208.
30 “Winnipeg’s Dark Side: Shocking Picture Painted by Rev. James Allan,” The Globe (Toronto), 12 October 1909.
31 See Nancy Macdonald, “Welcome to Winnipeg: Where Canada’s racism problem is at its worst,” Maclean’s, 22 January 2015.