Our City Indians: Negotiating the Meaning of First Nations Urbanization in Canada, 1945-1975

Abstract

Contemporary cultural criticism has celebrated the potential of the idea of the “traveling native” for disrupting cultural assumptions about the modern “nation.” The focus has been on movements across contemporary national borders and boundaries—fundamentally, on transnationalism. However, nations also make sense of themselves through internal spatial and social divisions. Challenging these divisions also disrupts definitions of “nation.” The urbanization of First Nations people in Canada provides a telling illustration of this point. First Nations people were systematically dispossessed of their lands, which were “emptied” for colonial resettlement. Colonial constructions of the Canadian “nation” involved the creation of narrowly circumscribed native territories or reserves, separate from metropolitan centers. Arguably, reserves were viewed as temporary enclaves, places where First Nations people would either be civilized through agriculture, Christianity, or education to take their place in emerging Canadian society, or where First Nations people could live in peace while their “races” died out. The invention of reserves as temporary and “primitive” spaces of First Nations culture and history, secured a “place” for First Nations people in the spatial order of the Canadian nation. By the early decades of the 1900s, almost all First Nations people were settled on reserves, and almost all reserves were located at a distance from urban centers. Through a variety of mechanisms, many of which remain to be fully documented, these largely segregated patterns of settlement persisted unaltered into the 1950s (Table 1). Increasing population pressure and a chronic lack of economic possibilities on the small and often resource-poor reserves resulted in a gradually rising number of First Nations people migrating from reserves to cities after mid-century. Despite their initially very small numbers, non-aboriginal people perceived First Nations peoples’ presence in urban centers as extremely problematic. The conference referred to in the title of this paper, one of a number of events during this period involving a variety of non-