Guest Review: Evelyn Peters, Matthew Stock, and Adrian Werner with Lawrie Barkwell, Rooster Town: The History of an Urban Métis Community, 1901 – 1961

Note from Andrea: Ok, blog post change of plans! But we are really excited to be able to bring you this special review of the new book, Rooster Town: The History of an Urban Métis Community, 1901-1961! Special thanks to Jo McCutcheon for her wonderful review, and to Ariel Gordon at the University of Manitoba Press for providing us with a review copy! You can purchase the book directly from the University of Manitoba Press here.

Evelyn Peters, Matthew Stock, and Adrian Werner with Lawrie Barkwell, Rooster Town: The History of an Urban Métis Community, 1901 – 1961 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2018, 237 pages).

Jo McCutcheon is the Executive Director of the Association of Canadian Archivists and teaches part-time at the University of Ottawa, focusing on digital history, material culture, children, youth and the residential school system and settler-colonialism in records created by the federal government. She has worked as a professional researcher on her own and with a diversity of research firms for more than twenty-years. She is an active member of the Canadian Historical Association (CHA), several CHA committees and on social media sites.  She also serves on several volunteer boards including Minwaashin Lodge in Ottawa. You can find her on Twitter at @jomac_613.

When I saw the message asking if there was an interest in undertaking a review of Rooster Town, I was quick to indicate my keen interest. I had heard about this urban Métis community, from David G. Burley’s work published in Urban History Review[1]and again was reminded a few years ago after having read an article from the Winnipeg Free Press.[2]

For those who are not familiar with Rooster town, this was one of the several names applied to a largely Métis urban community that existed just outside Winnipeg from 1901 to the late 1950s, not far from Fort Rouge, St. Vital and St. Norbert. At its peak in 1946, it was home to fifty households. However, beginning in 1951, the City of Winnipeg began targeting this area for suburban development and a new high school. Pressure from the city resulted in a steady population decline, data from 1951 and 1956 showing specifically that the number of families decreased to thirty-seven in total.[3]By 1961, only one family remained listed as community members.[4]

I grew up in Winnipeg and even though I often made the trek from Transcona to Charleswood each Sunday for family dinners, I never heard of Rooster Town. Indeed, when talking to family about this new book, I was met with comments and stories that felt like echoes from the sensational news stories from both the Winnipeg Free Pressand the Winnipeg Tribunethat were so harmful and humiliating to long-time Rooster Town residents, published during the 1950s in particular.[5]

The Book

Dr. Evelyn J. Peters, Canada Research Chair and urban social geographer, led this project and guided it to its completion. Dr. Peters worked with two research associates and co-authors, Matthew Stockand Adrian Werner. Mr. Werner specializes in data visualization and created more than fifteen maps that detail change over time, showing where and when mostly Métis families lived in Rooster Town. Dr. Peters also worked with Lawrie Barkwell from the Manitoba Metis Federation and kept the MMF informed about the project. The book is organized chronologically, establishing the context of the community and providing illustrations of original Métis settlements along the Red and Assiniboine rivers.[6]Each chapter has maps that have been generated to depict the families of Rooster Town, listing family names and locations so that readers and following families throughout the period.

This work provides readers with a rich text that is nuanced in its analysis. For instance, readers can trace and track community changes from more than thirty-three tables created from exhaustive archival research – reconstructing families, kinship networks and Rooster Town community members from manuscript census records from 1901 to 1921[7], municipal and federal voting lists, military records from the First World War, Manitoba Vital statistics records, City of Winnipeg assessment and collectors’ rolls, building permits, Winnipeg fire insurance maps, Manitoba and Henderson’s Directories for the city of Winnipeg, newspaper sources (news stories, obituaries and community stories), as well as family and aerial photographs and oral history interviews. The book very much lives to up to its goal, to “…[countering] the silence around urban Métis histories and geographies, and [exposing] the role colonial institutions, attitudes, and practices played in shaping Métis inhabitants’ urban experiences.”[8]

Their work also provides a chronological consideration of the expansion and contraction of Rooster Town depicted using map data visualization of the community located on the University of Manitoba Rooster Townwebsite.[9]From the extensive and painstaking genealogical research undertaken by the authors, who also consulted Métis scrip records, we know that Rooster Town was the third largest Métis community in Manitoba and expanded and contracted from 1901 to 1961 when it was dispersed. Readers can dig more deeply into the families and their genealogy by studying the eleven tables that make up Annex B: Rooster Town Population Change Details which provide family names, maiden names, loss of population due to death or moving, identification of families without obvious kin links to Rooster Town, with kin links to Rooster Town and families through married widows or formed with previous families or descendants.  Family names have known years of birth and death.  These table are just one way the authors demonstrate their historical research rooted in time and place.

The book begins with a consideration of settler colonialism and the dispossession of the Manitoba Métis.  What is striking about this chapter and conclusions of the study as a whole is that it challenges previous research that concluded many Métis made what was considered to be a substantial profit by selling their script in the 1880s in particular. See Annex A in particular for an outline of their research that challenges dominant view on this issue. The authors remind us that the current literature and the strategies used in Canadian cities to address Indigenous people –containment, expulsion, and erasure focused on First Nations– and that their work provides much needed insight into Métis specifically .[10] This work will also provide important examples for future lectures and classes demonstrating the ways in which Métis challenged colonial processes.

Subsequent chapters outline key connections Rooster Town had to the larger urban community, Fort Rouge and provides readers with a framework to consider this community from the turn of the 20^thcentury to the 1960s. The authors have mined public databases and records that provide insight into houses and land and the various municipal activities required to live in Rooster Town that provides evidence to refute the often racist and humiliating newspaper depictions of Rooster Town.  This book provides readers more than the institutional records and it is one of the key elements I loved about this book.  Reading photographs, newspapers and listening to families provides important insight and snap shots into the daily lives and strategies of families struggling to make ends meet and struggling to keep a roof over their heads while still paying taxes, and improving their homes.  The authors also demonstrate the ways that Rooster Town community members celebrated weddings, their generations of Métis community members, ways they routinely came together to play music and speak their language.

What I Learned

There are so many elements of this new, collaborative, interdisciplinary, and impressive archival work to share and explore. Rooster Town is important because it fills a significant research gap in our understanding of Métis experiences in urban centres. In particular, this work provides insight into one of many Métis communities that formed on the “fringe” or at the edge of a growing urban community. This work reminds academics about past studies that identified Métis communities that formed close to urban settlements on the prairies and British Columbia, studies that date back to 1959. Jean H. Lagassé’s pioneered work on Métis communities in the 1950s and is an important part of departure for this work, reminding us about the ways in which non-Indigenous communities labelled these settlements, “each White community has labelled its fringe settlement with a colorful appellation.  Melonville, Rooster Town, Smokey Hollow, Bannock Town, Fort Tuyau (French for Pipe), Fort Rouge, Little Chicago, Mud Flats, Shaughenessy Heights, Pumpville, Tintown, and La Coulee are some of the terms used in referring to Métis fringe settlements.”[11]

Reading this book made me think about the challenges faced by Rooster Town community members during the First World War and provides excellent examples for future classes.  For example, from this work, I learned that, 90 percent of Servicemen from Rooster Town volunteered.[12]The outline of the chapters made me think about new perspectives on what was happening as cities grew throughout 1920s, as families across the land faced hardship, unemployment and sought relief during the Depression of the 1930s; how families were once again forced to adapt when many men left to join the war effort during the Second World War; and then how Rooster Town was portrayed in major newspapers during the 1950s when the focus on growing cities resumed following the war – a time when the baby boom required more high schools and Grant Park High School was envisioned.

Something that I found to be particularly striking was the extent to which this book challenges the view that Rooster Town was a community dependent on social services. Instead, it shows a community that emphasized work and support networks. This book introduced me to the community members who worked for years in Rooster Town, as labourers, farmers, washer women, and teamsters. Community members often intermarried, and developed family strategies to live together and to stay in the community when heads of households were away, sick or had died.

Using municipal records outlined above as well as amazing research on aerial photography, this research team also challenges the dominant view that all community members were squatters.  The status of land and home ownership were complicated over time, but it is clear that the city collected taxes, charged for building permits, assessed the value of homes and buildings. Rooster Town also provided community members with opportunities to  ‘self-build’ their homes or even move buildings from rural communities in an effort to keep their housing costs low and living in Rooster Town on the edge of Winnipeg provided them with a way to mitigate poverty faced living in rural areas that could no longer manage the larger scale farmer needed to be successful.[13]When you also add a careful analysis of assessment and collector’s rolls, along with building permits, readers can see the diversity of “housing strategies Rooster Town residents employed to try to cobble together some comfort and security by squatting, renting, paying taxes on lots they occupied, and purchasing land.”[14]

This book also demonstrates the complex relationships between city officials, community members and readers of the two main newspapers.  As the authors note, Métis ownership generated property taxes but did not have immediate expenses as there were no amenities in Rooster Town – there were no roads, no sewer lines and there was no electricity.  While community members relied on outdoor privies, the community did not have the sanitation issues faced in the North End as there was not the same issue of crowding and sanitation. For most of the time, there was not a lot of public interest in Rooster Town within the general public. The life and experience of the Métis were not part of a public discourse even though there were concerns about First Nations on reserves. Housing was a challenge throughout Winnipeg, with extreme housing shortages reported. These challenges across the city meant that the city was in no position in the 1940s in particular to move Rooster Town residents as there was no houses or plans to address the acute housing shortage.[15]

Beyond the Book

There is so much in this book that I learned and that I will use to inform future lectures and assignments. For now, a website has been created using key sources including photographs, family trees, building permits and plans, maps, and census records. Particularly impressive is the inclusion of a discussion of methodological considerations for using the census records and the ability to download excel sheets with the transcribed census data from the 1881 census to the 1921 census. The website also has a ‘Donate’ tab inviting people to consider adding photographs and documents to the Rooster Town collection.  It is really exciting to see what some of the data that was collected for this work is available at no cost to researchers and the general public.

Front page of the Rooster Town companion website.

Overall, this is a wonderful book that demonstrates how urban Métis experiences of settler colonialism were different from other Indigenous peoples and, “that the establishment of Rooster Town destabilizes colonial narratives that depict Indigenous cultures as out of place in modern urban society.”[16]From this site and the book, there are several opportunities to explore the primary sources and develop assignments that will demonstrate the silences created by official documents and the long-lasting stereotypes and racist views that newspaper articles can have.  While I truly enjoyed reading this work, my favourite section was in “Chapter 5:  Stereotyping, Dissolution and Dispersal: Rooster Town 1951 -1961.”  In particular, the authors analysis that resulted in their section – “Alternative Perspectives of Rooster Town”.  For me, this section really demonstrated the ways that you need to read, take step back and use the sources available to challenge the stereotypes and selected photographs published in sensational exposés and ‘news’ stories. I am looking forward to digging into the data sets and sources created from this research and this book is on my Christmas list to give family in Winnipeg.

Thanks again to Jo McCutcheon for her review and Ariel Gordon at the University of Manitoba Press for providing us with a review copy! I know that I am definitely looking forward to reading this book! We hope you enjoyed this week’s blog post. If you did, please consider sharing it on the social media platform of your choice. And don’t forget to check back on Sunday for a brand new Canadian History Roundup. See you then!

Notes:

[1]David G. Burley, “Rooster Town: Winnipeg’s Lost Métis Suburb, 1900-1960” Urban History Review / Revue d’historie urbaine, vol. 42, n^o 1, 2013, p. 3-25, http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1022056ar, DOI: 10.7202/1022056ar

[2]Randy Turner, “The Outsiders: The story of Rooster Town: a Métis shantytown on the city’s fringe that struggled as the city prospered.” Winnipeg Free Press, posted January 29, 2016 and last updated January 31, 2016.

[3]Peters, et al., 146.

[4]Peters, et al., 153.  The Sais family sued the city for market value of their purchased land.

[5]The first time the name Rooster Town appeared in the newspaper was in a 1909 article in the then Manitoba Free Press, Evelyn Peters, Matthew Stock, and Adrian Werner with Lawrie Barkwell, Rooster Town: The History of an Urban Métis Community, 1901 – 1961(Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2018) 42.

[6]See Figure 1.1 Red River Settlement Parishes, Manitoba 1870.

[7]Authors note that they did not have census data for 1931 to 1946, leaving the team with less data to help with their reconstruction of Rooster Town families. Peters et al., xviii.

[8]Peters, et al., xi.

[9]http://roostertown.lib.umanitoba.ca/?page_id=370

[10]Peters et al., 2.

[11]Peters et al, page xiii quoting Lagasse’s study, A Study of the Population of Indian Ancestry Living in Manitoba(Winnipeg, MB: Manitoba. Department of Agriculture and Immigration. Social and Economic Research Office, 1959). As the authors note, only one other Métis community, similar to Rooster Town has been documented by Mike Evans and Lisa Krebs, Island Cache at the edge of Prince George, BC.

[12]Peters et al., 60. This chapter provides us with several important examples of Rooster Town soldiers and their contributions to the First World War.

[13]Peters et al., 49.

[14]Peters et al., page 84.

[15]Peters et al., 91.

[16]Peters et al., xviii.

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