The Disposition of the Ladies: Mi’kmaw Women and the Removal of the King’s Road Reserve, Sydney, Nova Scotia

• Published in: Journal of Canadian Studies
• Main Author: Walls, Martha
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) 2017
• Subjects: First Nations; Mi’kmaw
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/jcs.50.3.538; https://utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/jcs.50.3.538

In the late nineteenth century, politically powerful residents of Sydney, Nova Scotia, launched a campaign to remove from King’s Road a small Mi’kmaw community that refused to surrender its urban tract and move outside of the city. An Indian Act amendment of 1911 made possible a federal Exchequer Court hearing, which, after gathering testimony from witnesses in support of and opposed to relocation, was empowered to decide the fate of the King’s Road Reserve. This paper highlights the court’s transcript to explore twentieth-century colonialism as it unfolded in an urban setting. It considers how formative negative stereotypes of First Nations femininity were in the shaping of a colonial policy that assumed that Indians—particularly women—were a detriment to urban progress.