Rooster Town: The History of an Urban Métis Community, 1901–1961 by Evelyn Peters, Matthew Stock, Adrian Werner (review)

Given the steady growth of scholarly interest in Métis history over the past four decades, it is surprising that urban Métis communities have all but eluded sustained investigation. For the most part, scholarship on Indigenous experiences of cities has focused on First Nations people registered under the Indian Act and on the colonial mechanisms that contained, expelled, and erased them from urban spaces. Rooster Town expands and complicates this scholarship by training a critical lens on one of the many Métis communities that emerged on the edges of settler cities on the prairies and in British Columbia in the first half of the twentieth century. Its eponymous community developed on the southwest fringe of Winnipeg from around 1900 until its dissolution by the municipal government in the 1950s and early 1960s. According to authors Evelyn Peters, Matthew Stock, and Adrian Werner, Rooster Town was an innovative Métis response to settler colonialism and dispossession: flouting settler stereotypes about the inability or unwillingness of Indigenous people to adapt to urban life, Métis households moved to the community from rural parishes in order to access the urban labour market and gain economic and housing security. In examining the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of these households, Peters, Stock, and Werner make an important and overdue contribution to Métis historiography and, more broadly, to Canadian urban historiography and geography.

The book is structured chronologically in five chapters, each of which is complemented by maps, tables, family trees, and (in the final three chapters) building plans and photographs. Chapter 1 sets out the social and economic context in which Rooster Town came into being. It surveys the processes through which the Métis were dispossessed of lands reserved for them under the 1870 Manitoba Act and through which Métis farming, fishing, and small business-owning families were supplanted by large, well-financed operations in the 1870s and 1880s. Chapter 2 examines the formation of Rooster Town from 1901 to 1911, when many Métis households left the poverty of rural parishes to find wage work in Winnipeg. These households coordinated their movement and resettlement through kinship and social connections: the majority (81.3%) of Rooster Town’s founding families hailed from St. Norbert parish, and subsequent arrivals tended to come and settle in family units. Clustering outside the serviced area of the city, though for the most part squatting on city-owned land, these families established a place of cultural safety and mutual support. Chapter 3 highlights the variety of housing and tenure strategies employed by Rooster Town families between 1916 and 1926. These included squatting, self-building, renting, and purchasing land (a risky investment when low incomes and unstable employment could spell foreclosure on unpaid taxes). Chapter 4 details the persistence of these strategies during and beyond the Depression years when Rooster Town experienced rapid population growth (mainly through internal increase) and new households were formed. The final chapter examines the decade between 1951 and 1961 when Winnipeg newspapers and city authorities set their crosshairs on Rooster Town, deploying racist tropes to frame the community as a den of squalor and disorder and ultimately rationalizing its destruction and dispersal.

Undergirding this narrative is an impressive, if somewhat partial, selection and analysis of primary source material. Peters, Stock, and Werner make brilliant use of civil administrative records—including manuscript censuses, voter lists, assessment rolls, and building permits—to delineate patterns of movement, employment, housing, and land tenure among Rooster Town households. The authors are less successful, however, in obtaining and analyzing data on connections between these households, particularly extended kin connections. This problem arises from a restrictive, genealogically based understanding of kinship—an understanding that has lately been challenged and revised by Métis scholars Brenda Macdougall, Chris Andersen, and Adam Gaudry. The authors might have better elucidated networks of...