The city of Saint John was not meant to be shared. Are we sharing now?

A few weeks ago, I spoke with Julia Wright on CBC’s Information Morning about how the city of Saint John was not meant to be shared. I explained that the 1785 city charter was designed, at least in part, to cut Wabanaki people off from the harbour (in violation of Treaty) and to restrict all the “liberties and privileges of freemen” to “the American and European white inhabitants” of the city.¹

On Twitter, my friend Daniel Samson, an historian at Brock, shared this 1797 map of the area that very clearly highlights authorized Black settlement spaces well outside of the city limits. Daniel discusses these exclusions as part of a much larger heritage of systemic racism in the Maritime Provinces, powerfully concluding that “our communities are material legacies of 18th-century strategies of inclusion, denial, and removal.”

You can listen to my discussion with Julia, which engages some of my current research about Saint John, here on the CBC website. In addition to the city charter, I spoke about the Bentley Street portage route and the former Wolastoqey village that is now a fenced-off part of the city Port and a footing for the Harbour Bridge. Before the bridge was constructed in 1968, a ferry bearing the name of the Wolastoqey village — Ouangondy — connected west Saint John with the city’s uptown.

One thing that I didn’t have time to talk about in the radio piece was Fort Frederick. Near the Wolastoqey village site, in front of what is now the Carleton Community Centre, there is a marker for Fort Frederick, a site with its own fraught and complex colonial history. But something that is forgotten in the current commemoration material around that site is that there was a truck house at this location prior to the arrival of the Loyalists.

I like to remember the truck house because it helps me reflect on those agreements that my ancestors made to live in this territory alongside their Wabanaki partners in Treaty. In the Peace and Friendship Treaties, the British promised to establish truck houses in and amongst their settlements where Wabanaki people could freely and easily sell and trade their goods. Continuously facilitating Wabanaki access and economic participation in this way was just one specific condition that the British agreed to – in exchange for the amazing right to live here in this beautiful place at all.

And so a truck house master named John Green was stationed at Fort Frederick to ensure this access and to tend to this one aspect of the Treaty relationship. Tending to this relationship is something that my ancestors decided we didn’t have to do anymore once the Loyalists arrived and gave us a majority status in the region. When I remember that there was a truck house in this location, it helps me assess whether we are, as a city, continuing to operate in violation of those historic agreements — continuing to consolidate ourselves against a space that we are still not willing to share.

Yesterday, the Green Paper on Local Governance Reform was released by the Province of New Brunswick to great interest and fanfare. The document contains one instance of the word “Indigenous” (in a demographics chart) and one instance of the word “treaty” (in a reference to western Canada). And so are we acting as partners or as rulers? Are we ensuring Wabanaki access or economic activity and participation in a manner that is consistent with agreements that were made on our behalf many years before spaces like Saint John were chartered — or are we continuing to ignore our responsibilities under Treaty and to represent the structures of our cities and municipalities, the “material legacies of 18th-century strategies of inclusion, denial, and removal,” as the primary conditions of belonging and participation in this territory?

1. The argument that the city charter cut off Wolastoqiyik access to the harbour salmon fishery comes to me, as noted in the radio interview, from Jason Hall, ethnohistorian for the Wolastoqey Nation of New Brunswick.

Rachel Bryant is a settler writer, researcher, and educator. She lives with her family in Menahkwesk/Saint John, which is part of Wolastokuk in the unceded land of the Wabanaki Confederacy. She writes about Menahkwesk/Saint John history on her blog where this piece was first published.