Phoebe’s sad struggle from Six Nations to Hamilton’s North End to a pauper’s grave

Wicken certainly had no idea about the tragic life his ancestor lived as she moved from Six Nations of the Grand River to Hamilton’s North End, finally ending up in an unmarked pauper’s grave at Woodland Cemetery after her death in 1940 at 71.

As a university student, Wicken developed a passion for Indigenous history, particularly about the “process by which Indigenous people became assimilated into white working-class society in the 20th century.”

But he never saw the issue in terms of his own family. Wicken doesn’t identify as being Indigenous. “I am not Indigenous but have an Indigenous heritage,” he says.

He became a history professor at York University — where, at 68, he continues to work while living in Toronto — and spent a lot of time studying the history of Mi’kmaw communities of Nova Scotia. He frequently serves as an expert witness in court cases involving Indigenous communities and the federal government.

Then one day about 10 years ago, he was going through some Six Nations census material and other records and stumbled on a trove of information about his grandfather Clinton Claus and great-grandmother Phoebe. He decided it was time to research the First Nations history of his maternal forebears. And he spent several years working at it.

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• Dec 31, 1969
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• Dec 31, 1969
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On Wednesday, his great grandmother Phoebe Johnson (Claus) will become one of 9,000 entries into the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, when his 2,500-word article about her is published online. The DCB is a research and publishing project of the University of Toronto and the Université Laval that presents a wide range of biographies of famous as well as everyday Canadians whose stories give insight into an issue of some kind. Go to: http://www.biographi.ca/.

The biography is being unveiled in time for National Day for Truth and Reconciliation on Sept. 30.

Wicken is also working on a two-volume history of Six Nations from the perspective of his own family.

The story of Phoebe Johnson is interesting because it puts a face on the struggle First Nations people faced through the early decades of the 20th century when they moved from reserves to cities in search of work.

Those struggles were especially difficult for Indigenous women, says Wicken.

“Like most working-class women of her time, Phoebe Johnson did not have an easy life,” Wickens wrote. “What singled her out was her Indigenous identity.”

“She was unmistakably considered ‘Indian’ by society and a legal framework that made her life harder than it might have been. She experienced loss and dislocation, and she had few opportunities or social connections to improve her condition.

“The early deaths of her parents, an unwanted pregnancy, marriage to a man 36 years her senior, and his untimely death all rendered her early years difficult. Yet the resilient Phoebe survived.”

Phoebe was born on the Six Nations of the Grand River as a member of the Tuscarora Indigenous nation in 1869. Her parents were farmers who grew corn and potatoes as well as wheat. They had one dairy cow and six pigs.

Sometime in the 1870s, both parents died, and the Six Nations council appointed a guardian. Phoebe was placed in the Mohawk Institute Residential School in Brantford, a place where many former students say they suffered physical, emotional and sexual abuse. But Phoebe’s experience is unknown.

After graduating, she worked as a domestic servant either in Hamilton or in Buffalo, N.Y. By 1890, she returned to the reserve and became pregnant with Clinton, Wicken’s grandfather.

She married a widower named John Vanevery who was 57 while she was only 21. “Such disparity in age between spouses was not unusual; widowers often wed younger women,” Wicken wrote.

In 1892, Phoebe had another child, Harvey, and the following year Vanevery died. That set off a legal fight over inheritance between her and his children from a previous marriage.

Phoebe struggled financially and in 1896 she took her two sons to the Niagara County Poor House in Lockport, east of Lewiston. From there the children were moved to an orphanage, where they lived for four years. In 1900, Phoebe married Isaac Powless Claus and reunited with her two children.

Between 1899 and 1905, the couple had three children. “Just how they were able to support their growing family is unknown,” wrote Wicken.

In 1916, Clinton enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, and was sent overseas the following year. He sent part of his pay back to his mother while he was overseas. “When Clinton returned to Canada in May 1919, Phoebe and her family were living in the working-class north end of Hamilton.”

But more notable than the move to Hamilton was the decision to enfranchise, to relinquish their Indian status in exchange for Canadian citizenship and monetary compensation. Her family received $865 from the Six Nations’ trust fund.

Wicken says the reason for the decision was clearly because “her family was poor. Phoebe likely believed there was more opportunity in Hamilton than on the reserve.”

Wicken says there were at least 219 Indigenous people in Hamilton at the time, with most coming from Six Nations Reserve.

But Hamilton did not go well for them. “Isaac worked as a labourer … but made little money, and he and Phoebe moved from one boarding house to another in Hamilton’s north end for the rest of their lives. At some point, she became blind.”

And, he says, the family’s Indigenous past “had been kept hidden, a common decision in early 20th-century Hamilton.”

But, interestingly in Phoebe’s death notice in The Spectator, the First Nations heritage was given prominence: It said: “Ill for a long period of time, Mrs. Phoebe Claus, of the Tuscarora tribe, Six Nations Indians, died this morning at her home, 105 Victoria Avenue North.”

Wicken says, “it was the hope of escaping poverty and building a better future for her children that led to Phoebe’s decision to enfranchise and move her family to Hamilton’s north end … She and her descendants were separated from their heritage, as were many Six Nations families who chose similar paths in the expectation that their situations would improve.”

But, he notes, the options for Indigenous people in Canada during the early 20th century “were never good ones.”

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