Note from GeNA: This article was written by Glenelm resident Mary Jane Logan McCallum, and it originally appeared on shekonneechie.ca. Mary Jane is a member of the Munsee Delaware Nation and a professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous People, History and Archives in the department of history at the University of Winnipeg. We thank her for graciously allowing us to republish her work here.
For many, Indigenous history seems to unfold somewhere else, somewhere other than where one lives now. This separation from Indigenous histories is made worse when public histories are based in inadequate, false, and misleading narratives. This reality is even more challenging when these accounts – accounts that perpetuate racist assumptions about Indigenous absence and peaceful colonization – are about your own neighbourhood. Untangling from this, while learning a new, complicated and unfamiliar history, comes with the territory of being an Indigenous historian.
I live in Glenelm, a neighbourhood that is part of the residential area of Elmwood in Winnipeg. It is bordered by the Red River, Henderson Highway, the Elmwood Cemetery, and Roxy Park. Historians of the area tend to start the historical clock at Confederation and presume no prior history to that. For example, Jim Pask writes in the 1980s that, prior to 1905, “Elmwood had been virtually unpopulated.” More recently, Jim Smith echoes this narrative, arguing that Glenelm was a low-lying and uninhabited swamp, naming the Selkirk Settlers the first population of the area until the wetlands were drained in the twentieth century.[1]
Given that the period after white settlement in Canada accounts for only a fraction of the length of time Indigenous people have lived here, it’s remarkable that this narrative hasn’t yet been challenged and replaced with a more realistic understanding of the history of our neighbourhood. Thanks to research by Dr. Anne Lindsay, I’ve learned that the local history of the area is anything but a transition from terra nullius to subdivision. Below, I condense Lindsay’s already condensed history into four parts.
North American History to Scale Graph by Adele Perry, Facebook, 2014.[2]
Part One: A Long Timeline
From time before memory, in what we know as the City of Winnipeg today, the land along the rivers provided a rich home to many Indigenous people. My neighbourhood offered not just land along the Red River, but a confluence as well. The Seine River Channel used to flow through Glenelm and into the Red River near where Elmwood Cemetery lies today. Convergences like this were rich gathering places and the confluence at Glenelm was, Lindsay argues, almost certainly a place where people “could gather to meet and exchange not only trade goods, but intellectual and cultural ideas … from all over North America.”[3]
Summer View in the environs of the Company Fort Douglas on the Red River. Drawn from nature in July, 1822/ Scène estivale aux environs du fort Douglas de la Compagnie, sur la rivière Rouge. Dessiné d’après nature en juillet 1822. Peter Rindisbacher. Library and Archives Canada, C-001938 / Peter Rindisbacher. Bibliothèque et Archives Canada, C-001938.
Part Two: Fur Trade, Selkirk Treaty
By the late 1700s, fur traders were drawn to what we know as Winnipeg by the long-standing Indigenous trade networks that converged here. Soon, non-Indigenous competition for access to the area led to the “fur trade wars.” When Lord Selkirk established a colony Red River beginning in 1811, tensions and violence rose even more, eventually leading Selkirk to seek out an agreement with local Indigenous leaders to share the land along the rivers with the newly arrived colonists. This agreement (often called the “Selkirk Treaty,” the “Peguis Treaty,” or the “Peguis-Selkirk Treaty”) permitted the settlers to establish themselves in what would become Winnipeg. At first, many settled on the west side of the Red River. On the east side of the river, where my neighbourhood sits, Lindsay argues that Indigenous people continued to “take advantage of [the area’s] many resources” including access to water and wood, fish and shellfish, and a variety of wildlife.[4]
The Selkirk Treaty outlined conditions of 5 First Nations leaders for use of land extending in two-mile tracts along both sides of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers. Glenelm falls within the Treaty. Hudson’s Bay company Archives E.9/1 fo.11
Part Three: Anglican Mission
The 1820s brought many changes. The Anglican Church Missionary Society established a mission where the present-day St. John’s Cathedral and St. John’s Park now sit, while, as the fur trade wars were ending, many workers were laid off. Fur prices declined, and in some areas, fur bearer populations were in crisis. Adjusting to these changes, an increasing number of Indigenous families relocated to Red River. By the late 1820s, a number of these families had begun to establish an Indigenous community across the river from the Red River Mission at present-day Glenelm – an area that gave them, Lindsay explains, “access to the [mission] school,” where they could send “their children as day scholars, while adults attended Sunday School, intent on learning to read and write. Some of the adults also worked at the mission.”[5]
Although the confluence of the Seine and Red rivers had already changed by this time, the river bottom that snaked across Glenelm was still a rich wetland, as a description of the area in the 1840s makes clear. Remembering his boyhood at the Red River Academy across the river, Métis Reverend Benjamin McKenzie recalled that,
On the opposite side of the river were to be seen some … magnificent big elm trees, …some unpretentious little log dwellings, occupied by Indian converts – swampy Crees – some of whom were regularly employed around the Mission.… Behind these dwellings, there was a large swamp with tall reeds and this, in winter, we used as a skating rink. This swamp was fringed with growths of tall poplar, oak, ash and elm, with their usual complement of nut willows, high-bush cranberries, pin-cherries, choke cherries, raspberries and wild plums. On these we duly made raids at the right season, crossing over in a long and steady dugout of about 18 feet, and returning laden with spoils from the forest.[6]
By McKenzie’s time, Glenelm was the site of a thriving Indigenous community. The mission offered education and employment opportunities, while the land and wetlands offered everything from construction and manufacturing materials to food and recreation. Far from terra nullius, my neighbourhood was a place where Indigenous people gathered, a place where Indigenous community grew and thrived, and an area that offered its members access to the resources they needed, and to the employment and skills that they sought as they successfully negotiated a changing social, cultural, and economic landscape.
The people who lived in my neighbourhood before the 1870s – which is a subject I continue to learn about – were diverse. If you visited my neighbourhood in the 1860s, you would have met Indigenous people who would later apply for and get Métis Scrip, Indigenous people who would take Treaty but would later be persuaded – and in some cases mislead – to leave Treaty and take Scrip, people who would take and remain in Treaty, as well as a small handful of non-Indigenous people.
Botanist David Douglass stopped in Red River in the 1820s and took species of several grasses and cereal crops like this species of wheat, Triticum canadense. Triticum canadense. D. Douglas. s.n. Red River, 1827. Natural History Museum BM 000086219.
Part Four – Immigration and the new nation of Canada
Beginning in the late 1860s important changes rolled though what would become Glenelm. The arrival of white settler immigrants – many of them from eastern Canada – increased racialized tensions during the 1870s and 80s. What historians have come to know as “The Reign of Terror” of the early 1870s drove many Indigenous people away from the area.
A long period of “forgetting” and indifference about Indigenous history ensued, as Canadians intrenched their institutions and presence while their governments used law, policy, and custom to keep them “safe” and separate from Indigenous people. In 2008, after decades of Indigenous efforts finally broke through Canadian apathy and ignorance, the government delivered a formal apology for the harms of residential schools. Since then in Canada, and elsewhere around the world, there have been a range of efforts to address erroneous or partial histories that unproblematically honour white settlement and erase Indigenous history.
Today
Here in Winnipeg, the City initiated an Indigenous Relations Division which later established the Welcoming Winnipeg Initiative to consider applications from the public to alter historical markers and place names and make recommendations to City Council. Since 2019, 20 such changes have been made with seven others under review. Perhaps the most well-known change under this initiative is the formal renaming of streets associated with Roman Catholic priest and bishop and key architect of the Indian residential school system Bishop Grandin, especially the large north-south thoroughfare now called Abinoji Mikinah.
While the work of Welcoming Winnipeg and the Indigenous history of my neighbourhood highlight the richness and the importance of these histories and the opportunities Winnipeggers have to discover and honour them, it also exposes the importance of solid historical thinking. Generations have grown up with a persistent colonial narrative that has kept them from learning about the Indigenous history of my neighbourhood and neighbourhoods like it because they had been taught not to see these histories. They have been taught that no such histories could exist. June is Indigenous History month in Canada. What better time to begin finding out about the Indigenous histories of our own neighbourhoods.
Mary Jane Logan McCallum
Winnipeg, June 2024
With thanks to Dr. Anne Lindsay, Kathryn Boschman and Jill McConkey
[1] Pask, Jim et al, On the East of the River: A History of the East Kildonan Transcona Community (Winnipeg, Manitoba: City of Winnipeg, n.d. Ca. 1980s.), See also: “Where a City Began: A Brief history of North East Winnipeg,” 14 July, 2022, HeritageWinnipeg.com, https://heritagewinnipeg.com/blogs/where-a-city-began-a-brief-history-of-north-east-winnipeg/; “The early settlement of Elmwood,” 8 March, 2021 Winnipeg Free Press, https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/our-communities/correspondents/2021/03/08/the-early-settlement-of-elmwood;and “Early Elmwood history part 2,” 27 March 2021, Winnipeg Free Press, https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/our-communities/correspondents/2021/03/27/early-elmwood-history-part-2.
[2] https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10152746589144772&set=a.10150096694309772
[3] “Glenelm,” Unpublished presentation by Anne Lindsay presented 30 January 2023.
[4] “Glenelm,” Unpublished presentation by Anne Lindsay presented 30 January 2023.
[5] “Glenelm,” Unpublished presentation by Anne Lindsay presented 30 January 2023.
[6] “Reminiscences of Reverend Benjamin McKenzie,” Archives of Manitoba Ecclesiastical Diocese of Rupert’s Land Fonds, PRL-84-59 7953. With thanks to Erin Millions for this reference.