It is well-known that many Indigenous people did not move away from their traditional territories after the settlers took over their lands. Instead many built cabins on road allowances and riverbanks and carried on their traditions on the land. Jesse Thistle’s memoir From The Ashes (Simon & Schuster, 2019) speaks about the Metis road allowance settlements in Manitoba and Saskatchewan which also suffered from violent expulsions during the Depression in the 1930s.
In Eastern Ontario, violent expulsions also took place. One of these expulsions took place in Franktown in 1910. The record of this event is preserved only because in 1992 Alec Bell stopped at the Carleton Place & Beckwith Museum to talk with the curator about what had taken place. He said that it never sat well with him that when he was a boy, he participated in forcing people out of their homes. He said that the Indigenous people who had owned 1 large house and 5 smaller houses were forcibly removed from their homes, ushered up the road and onto the train and sent away. They were not yet on the train when they looked back to see that their houses and all their possessions were on fire.
Reva Dolgoy, the curator of the Carleton Place & Beckwith Museum contacted the Museum of Civilization in Gatineau and with Jean-Luc Pilon (the on-site archaeologist) visited Alec Bell’s farm and indeed found evidence of the house foundations on a narrow bedrock ledge surrounded by wetlands at the back of the farm.
The Expulsions at Ardoch & Burnstown
ARDOCH: In an article written by Jeff Green (Frontenac News, July 7, 2021), it was mentioned that Harold Perry, the renowned Indigenous elder and defender of wild rice at Ardoch recalled as a boy “houses in the small community where he was raised had been burned in a racially motivated attack.”
BURNSTOWN: In the book The Ancestors Are Arranging Things by Noreen Kurich (Borealis Press, 2017), Noreen describes two years of violent assaults and destruction at Springtown (which is located between Burnstown and Calabogie. Her writing is based upon reports in the Renfrew Mercury, the local paper at the time.
- In the summer of 1873 lumbermen beat up Mary Jane Ferguson and her husband and she died, having been beaten to death. Their house was ransacked. No conviction resulted.
- Later that summer lumbermen from the same timber drive targeted the drinking establishment of Maggie Constant, the daughter of Chief Kigonz Constant and Anastasia Takaminotinokwe Constant. They demolished the furniture and tore the roof off the building; leaving her and her mother and father homeless.
- Maggie rebuilt her saloon and one evening in late May of 1874, two lumbermen dropped into Maggie’s for a drink. One of the men, Jenkins became very drunk and Maggie cut him off. Other reports indicate that the dispute began when Maggie refused to allow him to sleep with her young daughter. Jenkins dragged Maggie out by the hair, threw her down and kicked and abused her. The other raftsman, McLellan, came to Maggie’s aid and when Jenkins attacked him, McLellan dodged and the blow struck her mother who died from the injury. Jenkins was convicted and served 5 years for manslaughter.