The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...

One Chain: The Road Allowance

Perhaps the experience is not so common now, but at least until the 2000s, it was not unusual to encounter apparently fossilized english phrases or references that were quite mysterious in meaning, yet didn't need defining somehow. A light-hearted example is the apparent first word in imperative phrases lke "Let's go!" It was years before I learned explicitly that the first "word" was in fact a contraction of two words, "let us," and that this was how english makes a second person imperative. Otherwise, it was just a part of a standard phrase I learned by rote as a child. A not quite so light-hearted example is the term "road allowance," not necessarily heard very often, but rather mysterious. On its face, there is nothing mysterious about it. Obviously it refers to land set aside for roads. Somehow they seemed a bit strange anyway, in part because my childhood house backed onto a utility corridor, and oddly enough to me, that corridor seemed to be the same width as the road in front of the house. But for the grass and the series of electricity pylons hooked together by powerlines, it seemed like it would be trivial to establish a lane in each direction and start driving. Obviously the utility corridor was not intended for use as a road, though now I understand it was and is nevertheless intended to allow easy access for construction and maintenance vehicles. But the question lingered about the width coincidence with the regular road. I would not learn about the salience of road allowances to Métis in particular until much later. Only then did I end up learning the specific width of a road allowance was one chain.

But this begs the question of what "one chain" even really means. Well, in a real sense, it means one part of the concentrated essence of imperialism. The grand obsession of nineteenth century imperialists was stealing other people's land, surveying it, and then speculating on its value for profit. The british approach to surveying fixated on an insistence on superimposing an idealized grid on the land, regardless of any and all obstacles. The central measuring instrument for this task was the Gunter's chain, invented in 1620 by the mathematician Edmund Gunter. Its dimensions had origins stretching back to the roman empire, a pole 16.5 feet long. Gunter defined 4 poles as the length of one chain, with the chain to be made up of 100 links. These in turn were divided into groups of ten marked by metal labels or tallies. The result was a device 66 feet or just over 20 metres long, which could be folded and carried easily by a surveying team. Furthermore, it was comparatively easy to repair or refurbish, and it is trivial to find instructions on how to make them at home. Such a prosaic thing, applied to a task by turns cruel and viciously absurd. The official guide for dominion land surveyors published in 1883 to support the next big encroachment on Indigenous lands in the northwest gave instructions on what to do when the demands of forcing a grid of squares onto recalcitrant topography threw up such challenges as what to do about lakes and muskeg. Then there were the challenges presented by people, especially squatters. At first glance, the directions for what to do about the claims of squatters seemed quite generous. Just accept their claims, no matter how many of them there are, declared the guide. Well, unless of course in the surveyor's view the squatter's declaration was "clearly untrue, or in opposition to the facts." This left the way clear for a surveyor to ignore any Indigenous person, First Nations or Métis, who pointed out the lands to which they had an ongoing relationship and any of what the surveyor understood to be "improvements" they had made. It didn't matter if they had houses, cleared fields, or any of the other things recognized as "improvements" when "settlers" made them.

Road allowances were narrow, and they didn't make much sense as support for travel when first laid out. There was already an extensive system of trails, including larger, older trails that became the basis of the majority of the federal and provincial highways so familiar today. This established system respected the shape and features of the land, including sections used primarily in certain seasons, and it was how people got around when travelling from place to place. The surreal dream of a grid of orthogonal roads didn't seem all that impressive. For good or ill, many Métis wound up getting to know these colonial road allowances very well. The army of land speculators and surveyors who followed in the wake of the creation of the province of manitoba at the behest of the Red River Métis and their allies were officially supposed to be helpful. However, the new canadian government was not terribly interested in ensuring the Métis received the land they had negotiated for. No, the canadian government of the time was far more interested in meeting the demands of ontario-based land speculators and non-Indigenous potential homesteaders. Rather than simply survey and set aside contiguous land for Red River Métis in the areas they already lived, and extending the same approach to Métis in communities in the greater northwest, the canadian government opted to establish a convoluted system of scrip distribution and location confirmation. The "scrip" was a fancy coupon with a value in dollars redeemable for land or cash. Whether they received land scrip or cash scrip, Métis had to travel to a land office to register their possession and confirm its location, which was somewhere at random in the northwest. It seems quite obvious that the random location requirement had everything to do with dispersing Métis as much as possible.

The end result for Métis after the first Resistance movement of 1869 and the second of 1885, was not a general dispersal. Yes, many Red River Métis left manitoba after 1869 due to incessant settler violence, but an important number of those who left returned. Some managed to hold onto their land, many lost it or were unable to successfully navigate the scrip redemption system to acquire land in colonial terms anywhere else. Others resettled throughout the north saskatchewan river valley and suffered another cycle of dispossession via violence and the scrip system. But these were not "dispersals" in the sense of, Métis wound up in random places they had never been and had no connections to, even though that seemed to be the effective plan devised by federal officials. Far from it. People went to familiar wintering sites from taking part in bison hunting brigades and trade. They had family, friends, and business associates throughout the northwest. Unfortunately, the Métis were also dealing with conditions in which a combination of burgeoning racism, mass disruptions to their diversified economy, and land loss pushed many of the people into precarious economic conditions. The road allowances weren't roads yet, and the "settlers" were enjoined from building on them. Métis needed places to live, and those not too far from where they worked. To the extent possible, Métis families and communities sought to stick together. This made perfect sense, as they could coordinate to watch over children, gardens, and homes when necessary, and pool resources to cope with emergencies and arranging community events. On the less positive side, even when renting accommodation wasn't expensive, racism made it difficult to do so, or to find decent lodgings for a family. Therefore wily and determined Métis families took advantage of the road allowances.

Quote of a cleaned up, piled Gunter's chain from the university of melbourne's surveying and geomatic engineering collection website, accessed 9 july 2026.

Many of the best documented road allowance communities were in manitoba, and were most numerous across canada in the 1930s as the great depression pushed even more Métis into packing up and moving to find work. The names in manitoba include: thomas settlement, wooden tent (metikewap), pine bluff, moose lake, big eddy, young point, rall's island, umphreville, cold lake, and rooster town. While it was possible to build basic housing on road allowances, there were drawbacks. First, this was definitely basic housing, with little by way of insulation, and certainly no foundations. Second, Métis could be forced to move on, even if just further along the same road allowance, which demanded structures be movable or at least not too elaborate, so they could be abandoned without excessive loss. Not having an official fixed address or property, road allowance communities were not tax paying, and this provided ready excuses for municipalities to block Métis children from attending local schools. Of course such basic amenities as utilities or transit service were out of the question, so M&ecaute;tis homes typically continued to feature kerosene lamps and wood stoves. Nearby settler communities complained about the road allowance communities, even as they took advantage of the people living in them, many of whom formed part of a flexible labour force the settlers used to cover seasonal and other forms of episodic work. Once the pressure of local expansion shifted their gaze to land Métis occupied however, it didn't take long for settlers to develop schemes for removing them and making a point of burning their homes and all their goods at the first opportunity to make sure the Métis didn't come back.

As I read more of the articles about road allowance communities written by Lawrence J. Barkwell for the Virtual Museum of Métis History and Culture, this apparently simple story became more complicated. Many of the documented communities were not literally built on road allowances at all, but were "informal" settlements that grew up together with the rest of a developing, not yet incorporated town. When the settlers began taking steps to formalize the town, bringing in surveyors, the Métis tried again and again to have their neighbourhoods surveyed along with the rest of the settlement. This the newly minted municipal leaders refused to do, effectively denying them basic services. But this wasn't just about services. By the 1930s, there was no longer a homestead act in force, people couldn't take over land by setting up a home, clearing and planting fields and so on, then regularizing their occupation by registering and paying a fee. Now, if people wanted to have the sort of rights that would allow them to build a home and "make improvements" without risk of having it all bulldozed or burnt, they had to buy it. Land could not be purchased unless it had been surveyed. Being well aware of these factors, settlers found all sorts of reasons to delay or otherwise prevent survey of lands Méis lived on. The settlers knew they could take advantage of Métis poverty to outlast their ability to challenge settler policies, or settlers might take other steps to make it impossible to live there. Among the most infamous examples of the latter tactic feature in the shameful history of the expansion of the city of yellowknife. The settlers were of the view that "development" entailed removing the First Nations and Méis out of town, preferably out of sight and firmly away from sites they coveted for building higher end properties for investment and tourism. In the case of Métis who determined to stay put at their community of willow flats, the settlers literally moved the garbage dump next door, and proceeded to dump and incinerate trash there.

Quote of a diagram of the tags used to mark groups of ten links on the Gunter's chain, via the uk european and metal detecting forum, accessed 9 july 2026.

Wonderful as road allowance and other "informal" communities can be, they can also be difficult and dangerous. Maria Campbell's powerful and groundbreaking memoir Halfbreed documented both the highs and lows she observed in her own community. Even as life on the road allowance helped the people maintain access to wage labour, space for gardens, and access to important plants and animals settlers considered wild, the systematically enforced poverty also wore people down. Until 1951, Indigenous ceremonies were outlawed across canada, forcing Métis to suspend their own participation in them or find ways to do so in secret. Acquiring any sort of formal education was no easy feat, with few people completing elementary grades beyond the sixth, and many scholarship opportunities favoured men, especially men inclined to enter the catholic priesthood. This is not to deny Métis women could seek to join the grey nuns, or that they tended to complete more years of schooling by going to attend convent schools. To take the veil though meant stepping away from direct participation in the day to day life of their families, quite apart from the obvious implications for marriage and childbearing. It regularly fell to Més women to provide the fallback support when men had to work away for extended periods, or slipped into the clutches of alcohol abuse. Quite apart from all these issues, Métis communities had to cope with race-based violence from both opportunistic civilian settlers and the police, especially the nortwest canadian mounted police, later renamed the royal canadian mounted police.

For Métis who had moved into what became the provinces of alberta and saskatchewan, the great depression pushed the dire conditions faced by them and First Nations people stripped of "status" under the colonial indian act into the public eye. Part of the reason for this was that a significant number of settlers who had lost their jobs and homes decided to leave for "the bush," taking up trapping, hunting, and fishing licenses. Still other settlers tried their chances at prospecting and surveying for merchantable timber. Suddenly there were far more people putting pressure on the resources forming the basis of Indigenous subsistence economies, and the settlers were often of the view they were entitled to them over any Indigenous person. Just as is happening today, growing "informal communities" raised a moral panic about potential lawlessness, unsanitary conditions, and as always, unsightliness. In alberta specifically, the provincial government became especially interested in removing Métis living in the southern regions to firmly north of edmonton. In this they were enacting a parallel policy to that pursued under revisions to the indian act allowing reserves to be expropriated and First Nations residents forced to move away if the reserve turned out to be close to a growing city. In the "move Métis north" case, the settler idea was that the more urbanized south could not support a land-baed subsistence economy while the north still could.

The story of the unique in canada alberta Métis settlements starts at least fifteen years before the great depression, when the Big Five founded l'Association des Métis d'Alberta et des Territoires du Nord-Ouest to work towards the goal of establishing a permanent landbase in the province. The Big Five were Malcolm Norris, Felice Callihoo, Joseph Dion, James P. Brady, and Peter Tompkins. They led a determined campaign, supported by many other members of l'Association that finally pushed the province to appoint a commission led by Judge Albert Freeman Ewing to "examine and report on Metis health, education, homelessness, and land issues," and resulting in a recommendation that "Alberta Metis should have land reservations for farming colonies (Settlements), homes, and schools." It was a triumph of political organizing, leading to the initial establishment of twelve settlements, originally referred to as colonies: buffalo lake, cold lake, east prairie, elizabeth, fishing lake, gift lake, kikino, marlboro, paddle prairie, peavine, touchwood, and wolf lake. Of these, four were unilaterally withdrawn by the province, cold lake, marlboro, touchwood, and wolf lake. There were pre-existing Métis communities at the originally set out locations of marlboro and wolf lake, so the decision to refuse to keep them within the settlements seems strange. In the case of cold lake, it appears the province attempted to pressure the established Métis community to abandon their established homes closer to the First Nations reserve for unbroken bush. Once again, the province would not agree to make or keep an established Métis community into a settlement.

Agricultural colonies won some serious interest from the saskatchewan provincial government, and combined with Métis lobbying and interest, began its "green lake experiment." This involved the the already over hundred-year old Métis community developed on the athabasca river system between two important fur trade portage sites. Knowing all too well the fur trade coud no longer support them, the Métis were interested in training and help to increase the accessibility of their community to wheeled vehicles. the provincial authorities and green lake Métis seemed to have enough overlap to make the experiment a success. Barkwell notes the province's primary interest was reducing social assistance costs, and to that end in 1940 it set up "Central Farm," described by Barkwell as:

...a program of 99-year leases on 40-acre (160,000 m2) plots. In addition, a new road [was] built to Meadow Lake and Île à la Crosse. Thus, in 1940 the provincial government set aside Townships 57 to 62 in Ranges 12 and 13 West of the third Meridian as an agricultural project for the Metis.... Unfortunately, these forty-two acre parcels were too small to sustain commercial farming.

The size of the farming parcels is not so surprising from a present-day perspective, especially for anyone who has read Sarah Carter's book Lost Harvests. What provincial officials wanted was Métis subsistence farmers who would therefore not require social assistance or compete or seem to compete in any way with their settler counterparts. This might even have worked out to some degree, except that rather than allow the green lake Métis to get on with things, the province began shipping destitute Métis from central saskatchewan to the farm for agricultural training. As Barkwell drily notes,

In effect though, this government colony at Green Lake was used to train semi-skilled labour [for] the lumber and fishing industries that were growing in size in northern Saskatchewan.

Considering this effect, and the ultimate collapse of the "green lake experiment" combined with the conspicuous dropping of any plans to emulate the alberta Métis agricultural colony example, the question remains open as to whether provincial officials weren't more interested in shipping a cheap workforce to where lumber and fishing companies wanted it. They were certainly determined the Méis they sent north would not return to their homes outside lestock in the road allowance community known as little chicago or chicago line. After the people were gone, the province burnt down all the houses.

Graced with one of the most colonial of names out of all the western provinces, british columbia maintained a stubborn anti-Méis community position. By now the pattern was firmly established. Métis and "non-status indians" travelled to a burgeoning town or city to work in service jobs and so-called "semi-skilled labour" in construction, land clearing, fishing, and so on. They built up an unincorporated community outside the formal town, such as island cache near prince george. In island cache's case, it withstood major social and economic change until 1972, when severe flooding gave the town the pretext it wanted to bulldoze it and redefine the area as an industrial zone. Later the province would literally delete island cache from the map. Still, the most famous Métis community in british columbia today may well be that of kelly lake, which is suth of dawson creek and among the oldest in the province. Kelly lake is within the southern tail of the region included within Treaty 8, founded by Kahnawake and red river Métis who moved to the region during the fur trade and intermarried with the Cree bands who had lived there from time immemorial. The provincial government would very much like to deny the Métis traditional homeland includes any part of british columbia, but kelly lake is well documented in written records by both government officials and settlers who came to the area later. Today the kelly lake Métis continues to cope with ongoing lack of basic services, even when nearby industrial installations have been hooked up to such key amenities as water, sewerage, and electricity. Forty to fifty years ago, kelly lake would likely be referred to colloquially as a road allowance community, although it is technically an unincorporated hamlet in settler terms.

What then were road allowance communities? They were Métis founded and build groups of homes and even small businesses, self-governing in nature, typically denied any path to formalized status as part of a larger settler community or as an independent hamlet or town. Most settler accounts of road allowance communities emphasize poverty and dysfunction, entraining them into their preferred themes of Indigenous failure and inevitable vanishing, whether it be by assimilation or literal death. Perversely, to this day settlers seem determined to refuse to accept that these communities were the product of Métis making pragmatic decisions. Historically Métis were, like other Indigenous peoples in what is currently called canada, economically self-supporting and organized into close-knit communities with social and economic ties all over their traditional lands. Since they already had proven self-government and economic capacity, setting up "informal" communities on literal road allowances helped Métis families deal with imposed economic change and blatant refusal to accept they has as much ability and right to pursue other options than menial labour and assimilation as any other Indigenous people in canada. It remains a baffling matter of record that for all the pious declarations on the part of federal, provincial, and municipal officials of their determination to get Métis off social assistance and into stable work in healthy communities, until very recently their experimental policies seemed effectively geared to produce the precise opposite.