A house built in the 1950s after Métis residents were forced out of the area and the homes they built were demolished
A house built in the 1950s after Métis residents were forced out of the area and the homes they built were demolished
Let’s start with a very quick history lesson, just off the top of my white settler head: people have lived on Turtle Island for thousands of years. It’s been called North America by colonizers for hundreds of years. A significant chunk of that has been called (by colonizers) Canada to justify white settlers imposing themselves, displacing Indigenous peoples, and usurping resources.
However, some of those settlers took an integrated approach, particularly in what was called “Rupert’s Land” by colonizers at the time, but is now blanketly labeled “Western Canada”. White—largely French, but some Scottish and Irish as well—settlers wanted to set up trading posts in this land, and to do so they made deals with First Nations in the area to form economic marriages (mostly white men and Indigenous women) and establish autonomous communities. These communities called themselves Métis. Many of the communities were established in the Red River valley in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, so they called themselves Red River Métis.
Canada wanted to start expanding its provinces into “Rupert’s Land” so they attempted to do so, and were met with Métis resistance. Fighting happened, negotiations were negotiated, and ultimately a deal was reached to create Manitoba. Despite being founders and having created many of the settlements and infrastructure that made rapid development for the benefit of all of Canada possible, Métis people were greatly discriminated against, both at home and from the federal government based in Ottawa. They have been referred to in legislation as “half breeds” and left out of treaty negotiations. There has been no shame in taking their land and resources with unfair, if any, compensation. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, their communities saw economic downturns that gave many of them little choice but to go into the colonist-declared provincial capital of Winnipeg. With little support and lots of discrimination, these families had to create their own community in an underdeveloped part of the city. This community was called Rooster Town.
Rooster Town was located south of the Assiniboine River and west of the Red River, past the point where settler communities had so far built homes. These areas are now mostly called Cresentwood and River Heights. Families had to build their own houses, which were not serviced by the city for plumbing and other infrastructure, despite having to pay property tax. Their homes were small for the often large families they had, in part because of discrimination from the financial sector. They were targeted by the police and stereotyped as drunk and disorderly. As interest in developing the areas for settler families grew, they were often forcibly displaced, having to either rebuild in another part of Rooster Town or find housing elsewhere, often in overcrowded tenement housing in impoverished parts of the city where it was more acceptable for people like them to live.
After World War II, this development expanded rapidly to house largely whtie families who were part of the baby boom. Streets were paved in a grid, and homes popped up as quickly as possible for these families to move into—a mix of bungalos and two-storey homes with 3-4 bedrooms and basements, with front lawns to be manicured and backyards for kids to play in, with back lanes and two-car garages for the ideal nuclear family, with schools and parks nearby.
That was mostly in the 1950s and 60s, when a central vision of creating an “isn’t capitalism beautiful” façade across Canada and the US was a Cold War strategy for a picture perfect West. Throughout this time there was a media campaign with major newspapers of the time, like the Winnipeg Tribune and the still-around Winnipeg Free Press, portraying the residents of Rooster Town as unclean, lower class, lower intelligence, with too many children in poor shape, and not able to take care of themselves or develop this area to its potential, to garner up support from settler residents to evict and develop over where these families lived. The final elements of this vision were a shopping mall and a high school—the very ones I have written about—which were planned to go in the very spot where the last of the Rooster Town families was holding out. After much effort, the family was evicted, and their home was paved over for white capitalist dreams.
As mentioned in the above-linked essay, I went to that high school and worked in that mall throughout university. I lived in these neighbourhoods for the first 23 years of my life.
And I didn’t learn about Rooster Town until I was nearly 30.
I learned about it first in passing from a mutual follower on Twitter (RIP, problematic bird friend) who had Métis ancestry that lived in Rooster Town, but they had little knowledge of it. They were white passing and not taught much about the Métis side and had to do some digging and exploring of family history—a common experience for many Métis people living in settler establishments like Winnipeg. This mufo linked to a blog about Rooster Town, which sent me down a rabbit hole and made me angry. Why was I just learning about this now?
The Indigenous history taught to me in school was scant. I learned the bare bones basics about Métis leader Louis Riel in grade six when we had a unit based around Manitoba’s 125th anniversary as a province. I learned about French Canadian explorer La Verendrye who made the first European contact with some of the First Nations in this part of the country at the time. In university, going to the more progressive institution in the city, I learned a bit more about the Red River Resistance leading up to a negotiated founding of Manitoba. I learned a bit more about Upper Fort Garry, down the street from where I lived in my mid-20s, when there was a campaign to turn the space from a gas station into a park that recognized the historical significance.
But it took longer, and through a passing mention, for me to learn about Rooster Town—history overlapping the timeline of my parents, history that took place on land I physically stood on for decades, with notable moments being foundational to the establishment of my school and work. This is utterly outrageous.
I do not know what the history curriculum is for kids in school now. A lot of progress has been made on better awareness of Indigenous history and admitting more of the oppression of colonialism on the land we live on today. I don’t know what would be taught at all schools in the province, or city, or school division, but I sure as hell hope that my schools, of all ages, acknowledge Rooster Town. I hope a lesson is taught to the high school students sitting in desks in a space where a Métis family’s home used to be that this was all part of systemic oppression, and that it intentionally devalued the lives of Indigenous people to justify the comfort of the settler class. It’s a fact that will rile up anger in justice-minded people, as many teenagers are. But I hope, for the sake of the youths and overall relations and reconciliation with the Red River Métis nation, that they don’t end up mad at how long this fact was hidden from them.