Settler colonialism at Portage and Main, past and present

This dissertation examines the Portage and Main (P&M) intersection and the metropolitan business district of Winnipeg. It looks at how that location has become a reified expression of the North-western plains’ colonial and settler colonial ideology. Between 1862 and 1913, P&M would grow to become the largest settled financial engine driving Canada’s economic expansionism across the North-western plains. It drove the settler commercial economy’s growth when it was first developing on the plains and continues to enable commercial expansionism today. Winnipeg’s P&M Central Economic District remains one of the most important places representing westward and northward commercial expansionism and the processes by which non-Protestants were dispossessed of land. By the 1880s, P&M had become a physical embodiment of the financial banking and exchange processes associated with Britain’s Protestant Reformation Tradition and the Banking Reform laws of the Second Great Reformation movement. Meanwhile, its commercial processes would dispossess the established Roman Catholic and tribal First Nations Indigenous peoples who have lived in the conjoined Great Forks region for millennia of their land and territory. In this dissertation, I argue that Protestant businessmen had built P&M as a physical reflection of the economic, social, and cultural architecture of the Second Great Reform and Banking Reform movements of Britain. In my first two chapters, I show that this Protestant Reformation movement's Victorian, Edwardian, and high modernist ideology cannot be divorced from the processes that have built Winnipeg's contemporary business district meanwhile dispossessing both the French Catholic and non-Protestant Indigenous people’s communities downtown. Throughout this dissertation, I examine the physical, ideological, and religious ideas which have reified settler commercial ideology into P&M’s infrastructure and architecture. I do this by looking at the development of the British Commonwealth in Manitoba and at P&M, and; at how Protestant businessmen and their free market ideology got built as a reflection of the financial, social, architectural, infrastructural, and legal frameworks of the Reformation movement of Winnipeg. Close examination of the British Reform movement in Winnipeg shows that the exchange's money-system, which was first established in the North-west at this metropolitan centre, expressed an abstract and anti-immanent financial and ideological framework that has been dispossessing, segregating, and impoverishing the French Catholic community as well as Indigenous peoples who have lived and traded in the downtown region for millennia. Making this argument, I show in particular that the long-standing anti-Catholic sentiments of the Reform Tradition remain key to comprehension of the high modernist and contemporary city planning infrastructure and architecture associated with Urban Renewal and the Unicity.

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