Rooster Town: The History of an Urban Metis Community, 1901-1961

Melonville. Smokey Hollow. Bannock Town. Fort Tuyau. Little Chicago. Mud Flats. Pumpville. Tintown. La Couleeese were some of the names given to Metis communities at the edges of urban areas in Manitoba. Rooster Town, which was on the outskirts of southwest Winnipeg endured from 1901 to 1961. Those years in Winnipeg were characterized by the twin pressures of depression anation, chronic housing shortages, and a spotty social support network. At the city’s edge, Rooster Town grew without city services as rural Metis arrived to participate in the urban economy and build their own houses while keeping Metis culture and community as a central part of their lives.

In other growing settler cities, the Indigenous experience was largely characterized by removal and confinement. But the continuing presence of Metis living and working in the city, and the establishment of Rooster Town itself, made the Winnipeg experience unique. Rooster Town documents the story of a community rooted in kinship, culture, and historical circumstance, whose residents existed unoally in the cracks of municipal bureaucracy, while navigating the legacy of settler colonialism and the demands of modernity and urbanization.