Chapter5 The Disposition of the Ladies Mi’kmaw Women and the Removal of Kun’tewiktuk / King’s Road Reserve, Sydney, Nova Scotia

Martha Walls

In 1926, following a decades-long process, a small Mi’kmaw reserve on King’s Road in Sydney, Nova Scotia—a place Mi’kmaq knew as Kun’tewiktuk—was relocated outside of city limits. Removal of this community was precipitated at the start of the twentieth century by petitions from prominent Sydney residents who were supported by the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA), the federal agency responsible for Indigenous peoples and their territories. The plan to relocate Kun’tewiktuk was initially frustrated by the Indian Act, federal legislation first passed in 1876 that created a web of laws around Indigenous peoples and their lands and that included the stipulation that any surrender of reserve land had to first be approved by a majority of men aged twenty-one or older in an “Indian band.” Not only did adult Mi’kmaw men at Kun’tewiktuk oppose surrender, but because all Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia were regarded under law as belonging to a single “band,” any surrender at King’s Road would have required consent of all adult male Mi’kmaq, approval that was not sought by the DIA.1 The federal government’s solution to Mi’kmaq unwillingness to surrender their land at Kun’tewiktuk (and also a response to a similar intransigence of residents of urban reserves elsewhere in Canada) was the 1911 addition of Section 49A to the Indian Act. Section 49A, which allowed the federal Exchequer Court to ascertain if relocation of an urban reserve was ostensibly in the “best interests” of both its Indigenous inhabitants of an urban reserve and the wider (non-Indigenous) population of a city, was an important turning point in the case of King’s Road. The amendment offered a way around Indian Act rules on surrender and made possible the relocation of urban reserves even if the majority of male band members refused surrender. King’s Road would be the first reserve in Canada to be subjected to Section 49A; the inaugural Exchequer Court hearing under its auspices was held in Sydney in September 1915 and concluded with a ruling that mandated the relocation of the Mi’kmaq at Kun’tewiktuk.

The 375-page transcript of the Exchequer Court proceedings offers insight into the decision to relocate the King’s Road community. In addition to confirming a national twentieth-century discourse that highlighted the alleged incompatibility of Indigenous peoples with modern urban spaces, the hearings reveal how central were unflattering characterizations of Indigenous women to the court’s decision to force the removal of Mi’kmaq from Kun’tewiktuk. It reveals that an influential settler population in Sydney, Nova Scotia, no less than those in other North American jurisdictions, perceived Indigenous peoples, and especially Indigenous women, as a particular impediment to urban “progress” and industrial development.

Testimony from the King’s Road Exchequer Court hearing offers an opportunity to explore wider colonial processes that accompanied the removals of urban Indigenous peoples. Cities around the world as particular sites of colonialism have recently become objects of enquiry2 with an underlying recognition being that settler towns and cities, built as they were on occupied Indigenous lands and along Indigenous waterways, were “not so much settled as ‘resettled.’”3 While research surrounding urban colonialism in North America has focused on Western cities, notably Vancouver and Victoria, in the nineteenth century,4 the King’s Road relocation reveals that the uprooting of urban Indigenous peoples was part of an enduring continental colonial project that stretched to the east coast and well into the twentieth century.

The King’s Road case is also important for its formative place in the creation of Section 49A of the Indian Act. The twentieth-century displacement of urban reserves, like older processes of colonization, was, as Louise Johnson makes clear, accomplished largely by bureaucratic means.5 The removal of the reserve at Kun’tewiktuk was realized by a legal and judicial mechanism in the form of the creation of Section 49A and the Exchequer Court hearings. Fuelled by prominent and powerful settler men in Sydney, this bureaucratic process was a watershed moment in Canadian Indigenous policy.

Finally, the transcript of the 1915 Exchequer Court proceedings in Sydney provides a powerful lens through which to view how settlers’ concepts of Indigenous femininity informed colonial processes in cities. While scholars such as Geoffrey York and William Wicken have explored the King’s Road removal, they do not consider how intrinsic gender was to the process.6 No Mi’kmaw women from King’s Road testified before the Exchequer Court. In a way that symbolizes the tendencies of colonial power to simultaneously ignore and co-opt Indigenous women, representations of King’s Road’s women made in their absence were central to court proceedings.7 Of the thirty-four witnesses called to testify, fifteen, or 44 percent, commented specifically on the women of King’s Road; additional testimony addressed gendered matters of community life associated with women, such as child rearing and upkeep of domestic spaces. In many ways, the King’s Road case confirms the observations of such scholars as Louise Johnson (1994), Jean Barman (2006), Joan Sangster (2005), Jarvis Brownlie (2005), and Penelope Edmonds (2010), who have emphasized that negative, racialized representations of Indigenous femininity shaped colonial processes.8 However, the King’s Road Reserve case adds a layer to this analysis, revealing that the colonial state’s adoption of negative, gendered ideas was deliberate. The Exchequer Court judge in Sydney heard starkly divergent characterizations of Mi’kmaw women. Advocates for relocation advanced well-worn racist and sexist tropes that emphasized the moral and physical depravity of Mi’kmaw women, while defenders of the King’s Road community championed women as respectable and hard-working. In his ruling, though, the central Canadian judge, who depended on local informants, blatantly ignored the latter and crafted a decision in support of relocation based on the negative characterizations of Mi’kmaw women. In this way, his ruling confirms Sarah Carter’s observation that stereotypes of Indigenous women were “deliberately propagated by officials of the state” and reveals the extraordinary power of racialized concepts of gender in the formation of twentieth-century policy related to Indigenous peoples in Canada.9

The King’s Road Reserve was situated on a main thoroughfare on the south side of Sydney. Kun’tewiktuk was part of the larger unceded Mi’kmaw territory of Mi’kma’ki, which enveloped the Maritime provinces and stretched into eastern Quebec and included Unama’ki, the Mi’kmaw name for Cape Breton Island.10 Located on Sydney Harbour, Kun’tewiktuk offered access to oceanic resources, which were mainstays of Unama’ki Mi’kmaq. Unama’ki’s five designated reserves of Potlotek (Chapel Island), Wagmatcook (Middle River), Malagawatch, Whycocomagh, and Eskasoni were all situated on the saltwater Bras d’Or Lake or other waterways. Until the second half of the nineteenth century, Kun’tewiktuk was not formally designated a reserve but was used in seasonal cycles.

Changing circumstances for Mi’kmaq led to a year-round settlement at Kun’tewiktuk. Over the nineteenth century, lifeways in Unama’ki were transformed. As customary lands and resources and access to both were diminished by settler encroachment and colonial laws, Mi’kmaq found new ways to create a degree of economic stability; they acted as guides for sport hunters, sold handcrafts to local markets, and worked for wages.11 These adaptations prompted some Mi’kmaq to settle more permanently at Kun’tewiktuk, where proximity to Sydney allowed for sales of handcrafted items, particularly baskets, to households and businesses in the town. The site also provided access to wages as men from Kun’tewiktuk found employment with lumbering operations, on the railway, and in an expanding industrial sector and women worked in Sydney as domestic servants.12 Over time, Mi’kmaq increasingly lived year round at Kun’tewiktuk, and in 1882, its population was large enough that Ottawa designated 2.07 acres there as the King’s Road Reserve.13 It was geographically the smallest reserve in Unama’ki and the only one in an urban centre.14

Many Kun’tewiktuk Mi’kmaq hailed from Eskasoni, which was forty kilometres away and accessible by canoe and a small portage between East Bay and Sydney River. At 2,800 acres, Eskasoni was geographically the largest reserve in Nova Scotia and held special political and spiritual importance as the seat of the Mi’kmaq Sante Mawiomi, or the Grand Council, an institution, headed by a grand chief, that remained important to the twentieth-century Mi’kmaq.15 As King’s Road emerged as a reserve in its own right and as its population rivalled and even surpassed that of Eskasoni (in 1910, the DIA counted 117 Mi’kmaq at Eskasoni, compared to Sydney’s 127), strong ties continued to link the two reserves.16 Political connections were particularly important, so much so that when King’s Road elected its first Indian Act chief in 1902, the DIA was concerned that an elected chief operating so close to the orbit of the powerful grand chief would not be recognized by reserve residents. This concern was unfounded, as Mi’kmaq accepted the elected chief as a “headman” whose authority was secondary to that of the greatly esteemed grand chief.

Significantly, the urban location that endeared Kun’tewiktuk to the Mi’kmaq also led outsiders to covet reserve land. By the turn of the twentieth century, land at King’s Road was attracting attention for its potential use as a residential area in the rapidly expanding industrial city. Sydney had seen its population increase from approximately ten thousand in 1901 to nearly seventeen thousand by 1915, urban growth that challenged the city’s infrastructure and placed pressure on sewage systems, electrification, and water services as well as on residential areas.17 As Sydney residents sought new places to build homes, the picturesque harbourside King’s Road Reserve, touted by one witness to the Exchequer Court as the “playgrounds of the city,” came to be regarded as prime residential real estate.18 As non-Indigenous residents of Sydney eyed the King’s Road Reserve, they recognized it as a parcel of land that might readily, and with state backing, be claimed by them. In a scenario echoing Jean Barman’s description of non-Indigenous actors seeking reserve land in Vancouver, Sydney’s prominent politicians and businessmen—men whose interests rested in “profit . . . and the formation of urban space in their own image”—clamoured for the land on which the King’s Road Reserve stood.19 Their vision of King’s Road’s future did not include Mi’kmaq.

These business interests found support in DIA officials, who agreed that reserve land at King’s Road should be put to other purposes and the Mi’kmaq settled elsewhere. The DIA’s interest in both the profit obtainable by selling reserve land and its support for moving Mi’kmaq out of cities was made clear by DIA decisions with respect to Mi’kmaq land in the Sydney area and elsewhere. Just six years after King’s Road was established, the DIA sold 0.66 acres of the reserve to make way for railway tracks.20 The DIA was also reluctant to support new urban reserves in industrial Sydney, as evidenced by its refusal in the first decade of the twentieth century to grant an urban tract to a settlement of around fifty Mi’kmaq in nearby North Sydney. Characterized by the DIA as “an indolent lot,” the Mi’kmaq at North Sydney were considered illegal squatters on land owned by the Dominion Iron and Steel Company. Mi’kmaq in North Sydney, like the community at Kun’tewiktuk, chose that site so they could better access urban opportunities. The DIA, though, opposed the creation of a reserve at North Sydney. It not only refused to purchase reserve land there but also, in 1910, prohibited Mi’kmaq from North Sydney from moving to King’s Road.21 Instead, the DIA stated its preference for moving Mi’kmaq from both King’s Road and North Sydney to outside city limits.22 Legal technicalities led to a different trajectory for North Sydney. Although the North Sydney Mi’kmaq, like residents of King’s Road, “persist[ed] in their intention to remain where they are,”23 they had little legal footing given that they were perceived to have settled “illegally” on nonreserve land. Unlike residents at King’s Road who, for a time, had the backing of an Indian Act provision that demanded a land surrender before reserve land could be sold, the reserveless Mi’kmaq at North Sydney had little legal recourse when the DIA compelled them around 1910 to leave the site.24 As Sarah Brennan has argued, the 1910 dispersal of the North Sydney Mi’kmaq (who were sent to other Mi’kmaw communities) “set the tone for what was to come at King’s Road.”25

While the DIA refused to create an urban reserve near Sydney and proved willing to displace local Mi’kmaq, it was also committed in the early twentieth century to generating revenue by selling reserve land identified as “surplus” and “unused.” Duncan Campbell Scott, the deputy superintendent general of the DIA and “principal architect” of Canadian “Indian” policy from 1913 to 1932, was particularly committed to reducing the number of Nova Scotia reserves through sale and to relocating Mi’kmaq as sales occurred.26 In early 1918, Scott undertook a survey of Nova Scotia’s reserves, instructing Nova Scotia Indian superintendent A. J. Boyd to forward to the DIA “specific information . . . with a view of determining the salability of each particular reserve.”27 Later that year, Scott clarified that he would consider selling not only uninhabited reserves but also “reserves on which Indians reside, but of which they are not making sufficient use.”28 The definition of what constituted “sufficient use” rested with the DIA.

Attitudes of Sydney’s non-Indigenous residents who lobbied for Mi’kmaw relocation aligned with the DIA’s interest in both removing Indigenous peoples from cities and dispensing with reserve lands. Echoing arguments that would become familiar as Indigenous communities butted against expanding cities across Canada, settler residents of Sydney complained that the potential of the land on which the King’s Road Reserve stood would not be realized so long as it was occupied by a culturally moribund population that impeded modern “progress.” As numerous scholars have observed, Indigenous peoples and cities were at this time viewed as an “impossible contradiction”;29 they were “incongruous”30 and “mutually exclusive.”31

Leading the charge to remove Mi’kmaq from King’s Road was Sydney lawyer Joseph A. Gillies, an occasional member of Parliament for the Nova Scotia riding of Richmond.32 Gillies owned property adjacent to the King’s Road Reserve and, from the late 1880s, used his political leverage to seek the relocation of his Mi’kmaw neighbours, whom he regarded as a “great nuisance.”33 Gillies’s cause was amplified in the Sydney Daily Post, the local newspaper that he had purchased in 1901. Gillies, like relocation advocates in other Canadian cities, was clearly motivated by self-interest.34 His involvement with the King’s Road Reserve was initially piqued by concerns about the value of his own property that abutted the reserve. Gillies’s personal stake in relocation grew as Ottawa purchased from him another piece of land—a tract outside the city that, for a time, was to become home to the King’s Road Mi’kmaq.35 A prominent resident of Sydney with ties to the federal government, Gillies transformed his self-interest into a wider campaign for Mi’kmaw removal that found resonance with Sydney property owners, political allies, real estate agents, and the city’s mayor and council, which in early 1915 passed a resolution demanding that “the Government of Canada . . . immediately take necessary steps for the removal of the Indians from their present location upon the King’s Road.”36 From the outset, DIA officials supported Gillies’s crusade and worked to secure a land surrender from the Mi’kmaq. James Smart, the deputy minister of the Department of the Interior, which was the administrative home of the DIA in 1899, endorsed the King’s Road Reserve relocation and urged, “If anything can be done to relieve the situation I see no reason why it should not be done. I can well understand the annoyance caused by these Indians hanging around [Gillies’s] premises all the time.”37 A decided lack of local support for the small reserve,38 coupled with the DIA’s stark receptiveness to Gillies’s agitation, resulted in repeated DIA efforts to convince the King’s Road Mi’kmaq to relocate outside of the city. Despite this pressure, the Mi’kmaq, like Indigenous peoples in other cities, refused to leave.39 Mi’kmaw resistance was initially taken up by Grand Chief John Denny, from nearby Eskasoni, the seat of the Sante Mawiomi. In November 1899, after consulting with “my people,” Chief Denny advised Ottawa that the Mi’kmaq would concede to relocation only if the reserve was replaced by an urban tract “within one mile” of the existing one.40 When Ottawa refused this request, the grand chief retracted his conditional support for removal and returned to the DIA an unsigned land surrender.41

Mi’kmaq refusal to endorse surrender was a blow to relocation as the Indian Act made clear that any land surrender required the signed consent of a majority of a band’s male residents aged twenty-one or older.42 For its part, the King’s Road community seems to have regarded the matter as closed, for in 1910, it petitioned Ottawa for much-needed additional housing on the reserve.43 However, the relocation lobby continued, and Gillies urged Ottawa to amend the Indian Act “to enable the Department to . . . readily deal with a case of this kind.”44 Whether a response to this particular request or to similar demands emanating from other Canadian cities, in 1911 Ottawa added Section 49A to the Indian Act, allowing for the forced removal of urban reserves when a “band” refused to surrender. A move in keeping with Ottawa’s early twentieth-century commitment to strengthening its assimilative capacities in the face of mounting criticisms, Section 49A allowed that when cities of eight thousand or more residents petitioned for the removal of a reserve, said reserve could be forced to move if an Exchequer Court ruled that relocation was in the best interests of both reserve residents and the wider city.45

Following the Indian Act amendment, the DIA secretary advised the Mi’kmaq that he did “not consider it advisable to resort to this [Section 49A]” but that in the absence of their willingness to sign a surrender, the DIA would do just that.46 Much to Ottawa’s chagrin, the Mi’kmaq “refused absolutely to entertain any proposition looking to disturb them in their present situation within the city limits.”47 A series of Indian Act chiefs and councillors, the first of which had been elected at King’s Road in 1902, led Mi’kmaw opposition to relocation.48 In light of sustained resistance, the King’s Road Reserve earned the dubious distinction of being the first—but not the last—reserve in a Canadian city to be subject to Section 49 of the Indian Act and an Exchequer Court hearing that would determine its fate.

The Exchequer Court hearing, held in Sydney from 20 to 24 September 1915, was presided over by Judge Louis Arthur Audette, a federal judge from Quebec whose career spanned 1912 to 193149 and who, on several occasions, was called upon to adjudicate federal cases involving Mi’kmaq.50 Appointed by Audette to represent the Mi’kmaq and to present the case for preserving the King’s Road Reserve was George A. Rowlings, a prominent Conservative lawyer and two-time federal candidate from Guysborough County, Nova Scotia.51 To make the case for relocation, Audette appointed none other than Joseph A. Gillies, the man who had waged a decades-long campaign to remove Mi’kmaq from King’s Road. Before and throughout the five-day proceedings, Gillies’s Sydney Daily Post publicly built his case for relocation. Leading up to the hearing, Gillies ran an editorial arguing for the necessity of “cleaning up” an unnamed city neighbourhood that was rife with “unsanitary conditions and open immorality”52—a scenario that laid the groundwork for a prorelocation perspective. The Sydney Daily Post reported court testimony in an overtly partisan way. For instance, on 20 September, the first day of the hearing, Gillies’s paper outlined what would become his paternalistic position in court: that “the removal of the reservation to a more suitable locality had become imperative not so much from the point of view of the section of the city concerned as an act of justice to the Micmac residents themselves.”53

As per the new Section 49A of the Indian Act, the court’s mandated task to consider equally the interests of both the “public” (meaning non-Mi’kmaw residents of Sydney) and the “Indians of the band” (the Mi’kmaq of Kun’tewiktuk) gave to its proceedings a veneer of impartiality.54 The thinness of this veneer, though, is revealed by the court’s lengthy transcript. While the trial was intended to represent the interests of both sides in the case, it was heavily stacked against the Mi’kmaq. The hearings also illuminated how negative conceptions of Indigenous femininity shaped the ultimate decision of the federal court and the fate of Kun’tewiktuk.

The roster of called witnesses revealed stark bias against the Mi’kmaq (see table 5.1). Of the total thirty-four witnesses who appeared before Judge Audette, twenty-six (76.5 percent) were called in support of relocation; of them, most were in fact holders of land near or adjacent to the reserve or real estate agents who were interested in land sales. Rowlings identified the self-interest of Gillies’s witness roster and complained that it “consists wholly of land dealers and speculators . . . and people living in the vicinity of the Reserve, who naturally have their views in regard to their personal dealings in the matter.”55 These witnesses also tended to be strangers to the community, many admitting under oath that they had little familiarity with the Mi’kmaq. For example, when asked, “Have you ever been on the reserve?” witness John Midgley, who owned property near the reserve, testified, “No, I have not, just passing by.”56 Another witness, Supreme Court Judge Walter Crowe, commented, “I have not been on the Reservation since over fifteen years ago, probably.”57 Such revelations prompted Judge Audette to critique witnesses’ obvious self-interest and lack of expertise and to remind Gillies that it was his responsibility to “defend the public’s interest and not his own,” something one is “very likely to lose sight of, when [one has oneself] as a client.”58

In contrast to the large number of witnesses called to support the cause of relocation, only eight witnesses (23.5 percent) endorsed the maintenance of the King’s Road Reserve. Just three of these witnesses (8.8 percent)—elected chief Joe Christmas, his son Ben (who would be elected chief in 1919), and former chief Joe Julien—lived in the community. The remaining five witnesses were interested parties who, through their jobs as service providers, their work for the DIA, or their affiliations with the Roman Catholic Church, had considerable familiarity with the King’s Road community. This imbalance ensured that Mi’kmaw voices were underrepresented and that testimony endorsing the sale and relocation of the King’s Road Reserve monopolized the court’s proceedings.

Analyses of the identities of the witnesses who appeared before the court reveal another serious imbalance: not a single Mi’kmaw woman was called to testify before the court (see table 5.2).

Despite the fact that women composed an important constituency in the community, roughly half of the King’s Road population, their absence from the witness stand should come as no surprise.59 Although Mi’kmaw women, like Indigenous women across the country, were not silent on political matters, often taking pen to paper to write of their concerns to state officials or engaging in political “acts of refutation,” which included the refusal to vacate land, they were, in 1915, both on and off reserve, excluded from the male-dominated world of formal politics.60 In rules laid out by the Indian Act, women could not participate in land surrenders, a process involving men of age twenty-one or older. Moreover, like non-Indigenous women, Mi’kmaw women could not vote or hold office provincially or federally. Women were additionally barred from voting in band elections and from serving as chiefs or councillors, an exclusion that held until 1951.61 Although the King’s Road debate coincided with a first-wave feminist movement that called for greater political equality for women, the exclusion of Indigenous women from the campaigns waged by Euro-Canadian feminists ensured that the political marginalization of Indigenous women remained largely unchecked in this era.62

Despite their immediate exclusion from the Exchequer Court proceedings, women of the King’s Road Reserve—or rather, nameless representations of them—were central to the arguments made by both sides. Such a focus emerged from Gillies’s questioning, which from the outset invoked images of Mi’kmaw women. Emphasis on the women of King’s Road might also have been expected given the central place that Indigenous women had long held in federal Indigenous policy and in the public’s interest in those policies. Ottawa had always viewed Indigenous women as requiring particular reformation.63 Of special concern was the perceived sexual autonomy of Indigenous women, which was blamed for subverting the modesty and subordination that marked middle-class ideals about women’s sexuality. Indigenous women were, even more than other marginalized and stigmatized groups of women, essentialized as being promiscuous. Their alleged immorality was regarded not just as a personal moral failing but as a threat to the stability of a patriarchal Euro-Canadian society.64 Consequently, Canadian Indigenous policy of the late nineteenth century, an era in which the ideology of separate spheres idealized women as chaste wives and mothers, was fixated on erasing Indigenous women’s autonomy and subordinating their sexuality as well as their economic, social, and political roles to men. This policy was also to work on another level; once assimilated, it was anticipated that Indigenous women would further the assimilative agenda of the state by encouraging their spouses and children to do the same. Enduring concerns about Indigenous women, combined with widespread critiques of an assimilative federal policy perceived as failing, sharpened Canadians’ worries about Indigenous women.

An almost neurotic interest in Indigenous women’s sexuality led to heightened surveillance and reform initiatives. Among these was the vigorous implementation of a nationwide field matron program (including at Kun’tewiktuk), which saw “respectable white women” dispatched by the DIA to serve as watchdogs and to support assimilation by “encourag[ing] the Indian women and girls to make their homes more like those of white people.”65 This same era featured a national social reform movement aimed at remedying a perceived crisis in families that was blamed largely upon the alleged deterioration of sexual morality among urban women and girls.66 Indigenous women occupied a disproportionate level of concern67 and evoked particular anxieties in nervous colonial cities where real and imagined sexual relationships between Indigenous women and non-Indigenous men raised concerns about moral propriety, venereal disease, urban health, and cross-racial miscegenation.68 Thus feared, urban Indigenous women were particularly susceptible to surveillance and control by police who interpreted city laws and statutes.69 Such anxieties clearly informed Sydney residents who took the Exchequer Court stand in support of the King’s Road Reserve relocation.

Mi’kmaw women emerged in Judge Audette’s court in various and conflicting ways, evoked very differently by the two sides in the case. Collectively, witnesses called by Gillies who supported the sale and relocation of the reserve endorsed stereotypes that underscored the rationale of gendered Canadian Indigenous policy of the early twentieth century—that is, that Mi’kmaw women were morally depraved and, having failed to be transformed by earlier assimilative policies, remained devoid of the vestiges of respectable middle-class femininity. Gillies and his prorelocation witnesses drew on these unflattering stereotypes, and their testimonies fixated on Mi’kmaw women’s sexuality: women of King’s Road were depicted as intemperate, immoral, and lascivious. This characterization overtly served Gillies’s aims, for it not only portrayed Mi’kmaw women as being endangered by their proximity to Sydney and rescuable by their removal from it but also cast them as figures whose immorality threatened surrounding neighbourhoods. By emphasizing that relocation would benefit both residents of King’s Road, especially women, and protect the wider city of Sydney, this characterization fulfilled the Exchequer Court’s mandate.

Sydney was a multinational place where aspirations to “whiteness” were undercut by the presence of not only Indigenous people but also non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants, many of whom had settled in Whitney Pier, a working-class neighbourhood near the city’s steel plant and coke ovens. The presence of undesirable others and fears about cross-racial miscegenation sharpened criticisms of Mi’kmaw women. One of the sustained lines of argument made by Gillies’s witnesses was that the urban location of the reserve exposed morally susceptible Mi’kmaw women to the corrupting influences of foreigners—most particularly, “the negroes” who worked in nearby coke ovens.70 Gillies’s witnesses advanced that this foreign element posed two interrelated threats: First, allegedly, the foreigners had a tendency to illegally ply Mi’kmaw women with alcohol and, in the process, break both the city ban on the sale of alcohol and the Indian Act regulations that criminalized the sale of alcohol to Indigenous people. Second, Gillies’s witnesses proposed that once tempted by drink, Mi’kmaw women were inclined to engage in illicit sexual behaviour.

In his opening salvo before the court, Gillies seized on this dual danger facing Mi’kmaw women who lived on King’s Road near Sydney’s “undesirable . . . foreign element.”71 Gillies testified that the women of King’s Road were in a “very debauched” condition. Not only did they frequently secure alcohol and become “staggering drunk,” but, he alleged, in this state, they would “on many occasions” go with “negroes and disreputable characters . . . into the woods.”72 Gillies’s meaning was (quite deliberately) only very thinly veiled—he was clearly suggesting that these were illicit sexual liaisons between Mi’kmaw women and unscrupulous foreign men. Witness Robert McLean, a real estate agent who had gained his expertise in the reserve via a single visit made ten years earlier, presented a similarly sensational scenario. When asked by Gillies to describe the women’s “character when they are drunk and under the influence,” McLean claimed that “the bad ones are bad immorally. . . . I mean they will go with anybody, sleep with them, and have sexual intercourse.”73 The conclusion to be drawn from these sordid allegations—allegations that were admittedly not based on first-hand knowledge—was that the proximity of the reserve to the city of Sydney exposed morally susceptible Mi’kmaw women to vice and morally susceptible men to Mi’kmaw women. Only the removal of the community to a remote location would alleviate this two-pronged danger.

Gillies’s witnesses exploited the caricature of the drunken squaw—a term used with abandon on the witness stand. As Adele Perry has argued, the use of the derisive term squaw excluded Indigenous women from the realm of respectable womanhood and, in so doing, justified their exclusion from Euro-Canadian cities that valued the uplifting presence of Anglo-Saxon women.74 While a “squaw” was at once a person to be pitied, witnesses also made clear that inebriated Mi’kmaw women posed a threat to surrounding neighbourhoods. Witness John Parker, for example, testified that his family had been occasionally “molested at night” by drunken Mi’kmaw women.75 Under cross-examination by Rowlings, Parker admitted that by the term molested, he actually meant “disturbed.”76 Parker’s intent was obvious; his use of the word molested evoked the dangerous sexuality of Mi’kmaw women and clearly presented them as a threat to Sydney.

While Rowlings criticized Parker’s testimony as misleading, other witnesses reinforced the theme that the women of the King’s Road Reserve posed a threat to the city of Sydney. For example, real estate agent Henry Frowde alleged that residents of Sydney felt imperilled by the “disposition of the ladies” there, that they were in “dread of being in the vicinity of the Indians.”77 Demonstrating the depth of the townspeople’s alleged fear, Frowde proposed, “If I say to a little girl ‘I will send for the Indians,’ she will run.”78 In this manner, the reserve, and its women in particular, were depicted as a menace to the city. As the discourse surrounding the drunken squaw suggests, there was a fine line between Mi’kmaw women being the victims of urban vice and danger and their being the cause of it.

In other ways, Gillies’s witnesses presented the reserve as a threat to the city of Sydney, and they linked this threat back to the character of Mi’kmaw women and their many shortcomings, notably as homemakers. Gillies’s witnesses emphasized that they believed that the small reserve, home to 123 people in 1915, was too congested, particularly given the absence of water and sewerage services. The population density of the reserve and its access to services were, in and of themselves, not the problem—after all, other Sydney neighbourhoods, such as Whitney Pier, were even more densely populated and also underserved by city water and sewerage. At issue was the way that people lived: the homes were said to be ramshackle and basic protocols of hygiene overlooked. These conditions made the reserve not only an eyesore but also, more sinisterly, a public health menace. Such concerns clearly borrowed from—and fuelled—nationwide anxieties about public health and moral hygiene that existed from the 1880s through to the end of World War I.79 Nationally, many marginalized people living in impoverished conditions bore the brunt of such concerns, but at King’s Road, blame for this state of affairs was placed firmly on the shoulders of women who, as disorderly “squaws,” had by nature no regard for tidiness or sanitation. Historian Kristin Burnett makes clear the link between concerns over reserve hygiene and Indigenous women, noting that a federal public health program founded on Canadian reserves in 1915 featured nurses whose main tasks were to tie “household management and childcare practices to ill health and high infant mortality rates.”80

The appearances of women at King’s Road were offered as proof of their alleged failure to create a clean and hygienic community and were something upon which several of Gillies’s witnesses commented. Real estate agent Henry Frowde, recounting one of his rare visits to the reserve, testified that while there, he “found the women sitting around the doorsteps with their hair hanging down their backs and dressed more or less disheveled.”81 Such alleged inattention to personal grooming was linked to a more sinister carelessness: Mi’kmaw women were said to have rejected even the most rudimentary practices of hygiene. Witnesses contended that women of the reserve routinely threw their “slop pails” of “household waste . . . out of their backdoor which is at somebody else’s front door.”82 The consequence of such “carelessness,” it was alleged, was the creation on the reserve of a noxious sludge in which “children wallowed,” a critique that marked the women’s maternal capabilities for criticism.83 Worse still was the accusation that Mi’kmaw women compounded this mess by responding “to the cause of nature” anywhere they pleased.84 Said one witness, “At their doors . . . the women in particular . . . go outside . . . and squat down [to urinate].”85 Other witnesses likewise contended that “squaws and younger children” relieved themselves along the railway track that ran near the reserve.86 These allegations about the toileting practices of women not only denigrated their respectable femininity in a dramatic way but also threw their very humanity into question. In addition, these tales offered further evidence of the health risk posed by a “filthy” community.87 Virtually every one of Gillies’s witnesses, including the many who acknowledged they had never set foot on the reserve, described in vivid detail the alleged stench of the King’s Road community. Not only was this odour said to devalue properties near the reserve, but it also led to assertions that the reserve was a dangerous breeding ground for contagious diseases.88

Mi’kmaw women’s supposed shortcomings as housekeepers, combined with their reputedly unhygienic and disorderly natures, created in the testimony an image of the King’s Road Reserve as a public health menace. Gillies’s questioning—which picked up threads of stories published in his newspaper—guided testimony in this direction, as he was committed to demonstrating the veracity of his own opinion that the reserve was “certainly very dangerous to the public health.”89 The portrayal of the King’s Road Reserve as a filthy breeding ground for deadly disease perfectly served the prorelocation argument, for it made clear that relocation would, by freeing Sydney of a public health menace, be in the city’s best interest—a burden of proof demanded of the Exchequer Court proceedings. The collective depiction of Mi’kmaw women offered by Gillies’s prorelocation witnesses, then, drew on long-standing stereotypes of Indigenous women as sexually immoral and as poor homemakers to present this segment of the community as threats to themselves and to the wider city. The sole solution to this two-part problem, Gillies’s witnesses contended, was the sale of the reserve and the relocation of its residents.

This portrayal did not go uncontested, however. Rowlings’s witnesses who opposed relocation questioned the very premise that Mi’kmaw women were inherently immoral and unkempt and instead championed the female residents of King’s Road as industrious workers who, in their well-maintained homes and through their paid employment, offered important support to their families. These witnesses confirm Penelope Edmond’s observation that urban colonial spaces were “mixed, uneasy, and transformative” places where derision and fear of Indigenous peoples existed alongside both dissenting perspectives and an at times grudging recognition of the need for their labour.90 Presenting Mi’kmaw women in this alternative way, Rowlings suggested that the Mi’kmaq were good neighbours whose continued presence in the city would benefit the people of Sydney as well as the reserve residents whose own economic well-being depended on the maintenance of their King’s Road location.

Witnesses subpoenaed by George Rowlings in support of the community offered very different accounts of the women living at Kun’tewiktuk. As individuals with close ties to the reserve and its residents, these witnesses offered a far less salacious—and doubtless a far more realistic—portrayal of Mi’kmaw women. Rowlings’s witnesses rejected the notion that Mi’kmaw women were morally bereft, intemperate, and in need of intervention. Instead, their testimony emphasized that female residents were law-abiding, diligent workers who made valuable economic contributions to their community. Their key argument against the sale and relocation of the reserve was that removal from the city bounds would undermine the city-based occupations that supported men and women in the community.

The antirelocation witnesses resoundingly challenged the stereotypical depictions of women proffered by those called to the stand by Gillies. Those who supported the maintenance of the reserve discredited the drunken squawcaricature offered by Gillies’s witnesses. When Sydney’s stipendiary magistrate Daniel Cameron, a man who since 1905 had heard many cases involving public intoxication, appeared before the court, Gillies attempted to draw from him testimony that confirmed the propensity of Mi’kmaw women to drink. Cameron, however, rebuffed this questioning, asserting that when it came to alcohol-related infractions, “the record of the Indians is a good one.”91 Furthermore, Cameron undermined Gillies’s drunken squaw character by emphasizing that only one Mi’kmaw woman had come before him for drunkenness in his seven years as a stipendiary magistrate. Far from being morally depraved, Cameron described this woman as a law-abiding, dedicated employee who, on occasion only, suffered a “weakness for taking drinks.”92 Other witnesses affirmed Cameron’s testimony, including the only two women to appear on the stand. These women, both non-Mi’kmaq former day school teachers on the reserve, emphasized the peaceful tenor of reserve life and denied ever having witnessed any public drunkenness.93

Rowlings’s witnesses also challenged the assertion that the women of King’s Road were inept in their domestic responsibilities. Former Indian agent and physician to King’s Road Dr. Duncan McIntyre insisted that the women of the reserve were “clean in their habits and paid . . . attention to cleaning their houses and that kind of thing.”94 Although McIntyre patronizingly attributed this attentive cleanliness to DIA guidance and the work of the reserve’s federal day school teachers, who successfully “[taught] them how to keep their houses neat and clean,” he nevertheless denied that Mi’kmaw women were slovenly and unhygienic.95

Rowlings’s witnesses denied that the reserve was mired in filth. Although they acknowledged that its sewage service was not up to the most modern standards due to the DIA having begun but never completed the installation of a sewage system there, Sydney health officer John Knox McLeod was quick to point out that in this condition, the reserve was no different than other underserviced areas of the city.96 Blame for the lack of sewerage services was not placed on the Mi’kmaq but rested with the failure of the DIA to fulfill its responsibilities to the community. Parish priest Donald McAdam, for one, was clear that any issues with sanitation on the reserve would be easily rectified “with a little more generosity and care on the part of the Department [of Indian Affairs].”97

Rowlings’s witnesses undermined Gillies’s fearmongering about the reserve being a hotbed of dangerous contagions. McLeod testified that apart from a single case of typhoid, there had been “no cases reported” of any disease on the reserve.98 Former Indian agent Duncan McIntyre and his successor, Cecil Sparrow, physicians both, confirmed this claim. McIntyre insisted that Mi’kmaq were no more prone to contagious diseases such as tuberculosis than any other “class of people.”99 Both agent-doctors agreed that “there has not been any sickness to speak of, no epidemics of any kind, no infectious disease of any kind such as Scarlet Fever and the usual infectious diseases as Measles, children’s diseases of any kind to speak of.”100 Such statements were confirmed by the parish priest, Donald McAdam, who noted that in the fifteen years in which he had served the community, he had seen no epidemics among them. Collectively, Rowlings’s witnesses emphasized that Mi’kmaw women were temperate, law-abiding residents of a clean and disease-free community. According to this testimony, the city of Sydney was in no way imperilled by the presence of women on the King’s Road Reserve or, indeed, by the reserve itself.

Finally, Rowlings’s witnesses revealed the centrality of women to the reserve’s financial circumstances by emphasizing the important economic roles the women of King’s Road played and linking their abilities to fulfill those roles to their community’s urban location. Much like Mi’kmaw women of earlier decades identified by Andrew Parnaby, women at King’s Road manufactured baskets and other items for sale in Sydney.101 In addition, by the turn of the century, many women at King’s Road had, like their male counterparts, entered the world of the waged economy made possible by their proximity to the city.102 According to the testimony of Chief Joseph Christmas, “pretty near all” of the women from King’s Road worked for wages in Sydney.103 Somewhat ironically, in light of their alleged slovenliness, the many Mi’kmaw women who worked for wages did so as domestics hired to clean homes and businesses in Sydney. A line of employment shared with immigrant and other marginalized women, such work was also one type for which Mi’kmaw women, like other Indigenous women in Canada, were specifically groomed by federal policy and programs such as the field matron program and residential schools.104

The wages earned by women at King’s Road were important to their families. While domestics’ wages were low, so were the earnings of labouring Mi’kmaw men. As a result, households at King’s Road, like working-class households elsewhere, probably depended on two (or more) incomes to make ends meet. It is also likely that by the turn of the twentieth century, the waged work of women at King’s Road had grown relatively more important to families’ survival as men’s wage-earning prospects diminished.105 In his testimony before the court, Chief Joseph Christmas explained how his own once lucrative business manufacturing pick handles for use in Cape Breton coal mines and oars for boats had, in recent years, been undermined by the factory production of these two commodities.106 As male lines of work such as this were undercut, it seems likely that women’s paid labour became relatively more important to households at King’s Road. If this is the case, it may be that gender divisions of labour at King’s Road stood in contrast to a wider Unama’ki trend identified by Andrew Parnaby whereby Mi’kmaw men of the late nineteenth century earned “the lion’s share of family income.”107 Regardless, it is clear that female labour formed an important part of the domestic economy at King’s Road, something that was stressed by Rowlings’s witnesses, who were adamant that women’s access to work in Sydney in and of itself justified the maintenance of the King’s Road Reserve. Without fail, Rowlings’s witnesses stressed that the removal of the Mi’kmaq from King’s Road to a site farther from the city would severely imperil women’s (and men’s) abilities to earn incomes. As the Indian agent emphasized on the witness stand, for Mi’kmaw wage workers, the location of the King’s Road Reserve “could not be improved upon.”108

The descriptions of women that emerge from the two sides of the King’s Road case are very different. Joseph Gillies’s prorelocation faction—men with plenty of interest in reserve land but little connection to, or respect for, the community—drew on age-old stereotypes that unflatteringly cast Mi’kmaw women as morally susceptible and dangerous. In contrast, Rowlings’s witnesses—individuals who had knowledge of and sometimes close ties to the King’s Road community—revealed that Mi’kmaw women, far from being conduits of urban vices, were law-abiding, diligent workers who brought stability to their community by carving out important—if modest—employment niches in the expanding industrial city of Sydney. There is no doubt that Rowlings’s case against the King’s Road Reserve relocation offered a vision of Mi’kmaw women that was truer to the reality of women’s daily life on King’s Road in the opening decades of the twentieth century. Despite the convincing argument that relocation of the community would bring tremendous hardship to families who depended on its proximity to urban-based employment, however, Justice Audette ruled that “having regard to the interest of the public and the Indians located on the small Sydney Reserve . . . the said Indians shall be removed from such Reserve.”109

Audette’s assertion that “the Reserve retards . . . the development of that part of the city” closely adhered to a wider sentiment asserting that Indigenous people were anathema to urban progress.110 In making this case, though, he drew heavily on the exchanges about Mi’kmaw women that had figured so prominently in the hearings. Audette specifically noted the importance of moving the Mi’kmaq “to another place outside the limits of the city of Sydney,” where they would be “away from the liquor shops and the undesirable foreigners settled at the Coke Ovens”—the foreigners with whom Mi’kmaw women were accused of having sexual relations.111 He also emphasized that relocation was warranted because “the Indians have not been always considerate and mindful of their neighbours in respect of cleanliness”—a remark that clearly reflected commentary about Mi’kmaw women’s substandard cleanliness and that ignored refutation of these claims by Rowlings’s witnesses.112 Audette’s ruling entirely disregarded the importance of being close to Sydney for work purposes. His final judgment that “what the Indian may lose from the convenience of close neighborhood to his place of labour . . . will be offset by the advantage of a large plot of territory” dismissed the testimony that identified Mi’kmaw women’s domestic work as being important to residents of the community.113 Ironically, the waged labour and white work that the DIA promoted in the early twentieth century as a solution to the poverty of Indigenous people and an antidote to their Indian characters were entirely disregarded by the Exchequer Court.

The proceedings of Audette’s court were in no way impartial. The hearings, like the Indian Act amendment that allowed for them, were intended not to objectively explore the relocation issue but, rather, to create a legal mechanism to overcome the Mi’kmaq’s refusal to surrender their Sydney reserve. Ian Bushnell, in his study of Canada’s federal court, reveals that Audette stood accused of “moulding law to agree with his conception of justice.” In the King’s Road case, his conception of justice clearly favoured non-Mi’kmaw residents of Sydney and was one in which “racism dominated.”114 In weighing the evidence, Audette chose to accept Gillies’s rationale to make Gillies’s private interests seem public. Audette gave no weight to testimony that disputed Gillies’s racist, sexist, and colonialist logic. In making a decision about what was in the public interest, Audette was overwhelmingly influenced by the negative stereotypes of Indigenous femininity that were proffered in his court. Despite pointed and convincing refutations of these stereotypes by witnesses who best knew the reserve and its residents, the Exchequer Court perpetuated these characterizations and used them to present the King’s Road Reserve as a moral and physical threat to public health, citizen morality, and urban progress in Sydney.

Judge Audette’s ruling—that relocation was in the best interests of the Mi’kmaq and of other Sydney residents—erased the Mi’kmaq’s legal foothold to resistance at Kun’tewiktuk. The Mi’kmaq, however, held on to their urban settlement for more than a decade. Preoccupation with World War I probably slowed relocation initially,115 but so did wrangling over relocation sites and Mi’kmaw refusal to accept relocation on Ottawa’s terms. Following the Exchequer Court hearing, the Mi’kmaq petitioned for and against various locales being considered for a postrelocation reserve,116 a level of engagement that frustrated the DIA and prompted one official to lament that “the Indians . . . are still as unreasonable as they have always been in the past, in this connection.”117 Even when, in 1921, their fate seemed sealed as Ottawa bought a piece of land slated to be home to the removed Mi’kmaq—a tract owned by Gillies118—the purchase of which the Mi’kmaq vehemently opposed, relocation did not proceed. William Wicken links uncertainty surrounding the 1921 federal election to a slowdown in the relocation process,119 but surely the Mi’kmaq’s opposition to the purchased site also discouraged action. Elected chief and councillors did not mince words, declaring that after “inspecting this land from one end to the other,” the community would refuse to move there except by force.120 It was only in 1924 that Mi’kmaw opposition to relocation unravelled. This circumstance, though, was no capitulation; it was, instead, a response to deteriorating conditions at King’s Road that were caused by a DIA-enacted building moratorium at the site and resultant overcrowding. In light of these difficulties, Chief Christmas petitioned for removal.121 A new site, one endorsed by Superintendent Boyd for being “far enough from the city but not too far,” was chosen.122 Chief Christmas and the Mi’kmaq, desperate for more land and better DIA support, grudgingly agreed to move there. By late summer of 1925, the construction of homes was underway, and by June of 1926, the relocation of the King’s Road Mi’kmaq to the site that would become known as Membertou was completed.

The relocation of the King’s Road Reserve was the outcome of a long-running process made possible by the 1911 amendment of the Indian Act, which empowered a federal Exchequer Court to decide the fate of urban reserves in Canada. The archival record, premised largely on exchanges between male DIA officials and Mi’kmaw men who headed the elected council at the King’s Road Reserve, is devoid of the perspectives on relocation of the women who lived there. Still, Mi’kmaw women ultimately mattered very much to the relocation process. Central to the testimony presented to the Exchequer Court were the witnesses’ varied characterizations of Mi’kmaw women. Those who supported the relocation of the reserve portrayed women as immoral and intemperate and as moral and physical threats to both their community and the wider Sydney environs. In contrast, witnesses who believed that the reserve should be maintained depicted the same women as lawful, sober, and hard-working assets to their community and to the city of Sydney. Judge Audette’s ruling reveals an overwhelming acceptance of the negative characterizations of Mi’kmaw women, and this perspective buttressed his ruling, which called for the removal of the King’s Road Reserve. The King’s Road Exchequer Court hearing, a milestone in Canadian Indigenous policy, starkly reveals the pervasive and insidious way in which racialized concepts of Indigenous femininity shaped Indigenous policy in Canada well into the twentieth century.