[PHOTO] "But they weren't doing much, so we killed them all ... ?"
This May 2013 photo was taken as I was walking with my father down the former course of Garrison Creek, along Bathurst Street near Fort York. On the side of a stairway leading from the street towards the fort, builders had erected a wall with a potted history of the Toronto area, the only entry relating to native peoples being a notation that First Nations settled the area circa 9000 BC. Below that entry, someone had scrawled some graffiti: "But they weren't doing much, so we killed them all ... ?"
First Nations erasure is a major problem in Canadian history. In this particular case, the graffiti artist missed a singular point about Toronto's pre-European history, that there were no mass killings of indingenous peoples by Europeans, that the main mass killings were conducted by other indigenous peoples. The mid-17th century Beaver Wars fought for control of the North American fur trade ended up seeing the dispersion of the native groups indigenous to south-central Ontario, notably the Huron. C.M.W. Marcel's 2006 Counterweights essay goes into interesting detail about the ephemeral Iroquois colonization of the northern shores of Lake Ontario. This settlement included two villages in modern Toronto's boundaries, Teiaiagon on the eastern shore of the Humber River in west-end Toronto and Ganatsekwyagon in east-end Toronto on the Rouge River. That first village later hosted the Mississaugas, an Algonquian-speaking Ojibwa group that has since been displaced from the area. (Wayne Roberts' 2013 NOW Toronto essay is recommended.)
History is interesting.