“More a Matter for Medical Men”: The King’s Road Reserve Relocation and Public Health in Early 20th-Century Sydney, Nova Scotia

Abstract

Abstract.The forced removal and relocation of the King’s Road Reserve in Sydney, Nova Scotia, between 1915 and 1926 is a key example of how settlers used public health discourses to dispossess Indigenous lands in Canada. At the turn of the twentieth century, non-Indigenous Sydney residents lobbied the government to remove the Mi’kmaw reserve, which was located in an expanding downtown core. They justified this removal by arguing that Mi’kmaq were public health threats to themselves and their white neighbours. Ottawa responded to this case, and other cases across Canada, by implementing section 49A of the Indian Act in 1911. This amendment allowed settlers to request an Exchequer Court trial to rule on urban reserve relocations if land surrenders could not be obtained. The King’s Road Reserve relocation has yet to be examined with a medical lens. Doing so illuminates the centrality of medical expert testimony during this particular episode of twentieth-century colonialism.