This winter/spring, I was part of a reading group that went through Arthur Manuel's most-excellent
Unsettling Canada. It was a real eye-opener, and has caused me to rethink many things about this country's history and how it functions. In particular, how the first nations of this country have been systemically disenfranchised and impoverished in the most ridiculous and egregious ways, and how the struggle for justice and recognition among them continues to this day.
As part of this group we alternated writing and sharing land acknowledgements. I was lucky enough to have the privilege of coming up with the last one for our group, which gave me a chance to do something which was long overdue -- unraveling some of the last several hundred years of Toronto, particularly some of the details around how it was claimed and defined as being crown territory (inspired somewhat by Decolonizing Canada's example).
I don't consider the end result a shining example of writing or research and am a bit embarassed to share it, but I think the message and contents are too important to keep to myself. My hope is that other residents of the Toronto area will find it help in understanding themselves, and maybe rethinking some of their own concepts about land ownership and title in this city, as well as their obligations to at least partly address some of the wrongs that have been committed.. If you find this text useful, please feel free to share it with family and friends-- but please also understand that it's only a starting point for me, as it should be for you. Many details about the history of this territory are still unclear and unexplained to me.
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For my land acknowledgement, I would like to focus in on a particular group and issue: the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and the so-called Toronto purchase. I moved back to Toronto about five years ago after spending some time in other colonized parts of Canada. One of the things I’ve been focusing on since then has been reconnecting with Toronto in its natural state -- its parks, its ravines, its islands. Although there is very little that is completely untouched, you can still see a beauty which transcends anything man-made if you go to the right places. And that inevitably goes to the question, which I have posed many a time while in somewhere particularly wonderful or miraculous (for example, a sunset over Ashbridge’s bay) -- was there someone else here, hundreds of years ago, appreciating something similar to what I am currently appreciating?
Most acknowledgements taking place in Toronto mention the Missisaugas as the most recent indigenous group to claim treaty rights to this land, but who were they? If you’re in this room, you probably know that Toronto is no longer disputed territory -- but what’s the story here, and how it did it come to be so?
I feel ashamed to admit that, although I was dimly aware of most of the facts here, I had to look up almost all of this on Wikipedia to get specifics. But you have to start somewhere, and better not to remain ignorant. Later,
Sam Burton pointed out to me that the Missisaugas of the Credit First Nation have their own website, which I have drawn on for supplementary material.
First, about the Mississauga. I will just quote from Wikipedia:
“The Mississauga are a subtribe of the Anishinaabe-speaking First Nations people located in southern Ontario, Canada. They are closely related to the Ojibwe. The name "Mississauga" comes from the Anishinaabe word Misi-zaagiing, meaning "[Those at the] Great River-mouth." It is closely related to the Ojibwe word Misswezahging, which means ‘a river with many outlets.’”Incidentally, Anishinaabe is an autonym -- that is to say, this is a name that was placed upon a group of people, not one they chose for themselves.
In any case, within this sub-tribe, there were various groups of the Mississauga at the time of the American revolution, laying claim to various parts of this region: Manitoulin island, the Kawartha lakes region (just north of Oshawa), and then a last group who claimed an area around Credit river, just west of what we’d now call Toronto.
The above are bare historical facts and might seem rather abstract. It is important to note that the Mississauga of First Credit are a living, breathing society who live quite close to us (near Brantford, Ontario). The band has an enrolled population of 2,330 people, 850 of whom lived on the New Credit Reserve. Here are the words they use to describe themselves on their own web site:
“The Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation is a thriving and vibrant community, bursting with people reaching for their roots as well as the future as they prepare to teach the next 7 generations it’s history and culture. This community has survived many hundred years of change; we fought through near extinction, battled in many wars, suffered a complete loss of culture, undertook a new way of life, faced the trials and tribulations that have come with facing our Canadian government and those now occupying our traditional territory, however despite every inch of transformation the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation have endured, they continued to adapt and grow into the resilient First Nation community that stands today.”What is now called Toronto purchase occurred after the American revolutionary war, when the British crown wanted to reserve land for the loyalists:
“The 1787 purchase, according to British records, was conducted on September 23, 1787, at the "Carrying-Place" of Bay of Quinte. The British crown and the Mississaugas of New Credit met to arrange for the surrender of lands along Lake Ontario. In the case of the Toronto area, the Mississaugas of New Credit exchanged 250,808 acres (101,498 ha) of land in what became York County (most of current Toronto and the Regional Municipality of York bounded by Lake Ontario to the south, approximately Etobicoke Creek/Highway 27 to the west, approximately Ashbridge's Bay/Woodbine Avenue-Highway 404 to the east and approximately south of Sideroad 15-Bloomington Road to the north) for some money, 2,000 gun flints, 24 brass kettles, 120 mirrors, 24 laced hats, a bale of flowered flannel, and 96 gallons of rum.
At the time, the Mississaugas believed that the agreement was not a purchase extinguishing their rights to the land, but a rental of the lands for British use in exchange for gifts and presents in perpetuity.”It is worth acknowledging, at this point, the Missaugas’ perspective on this purchase:
“The Crown, in the 1780s, recognized the need to secure communication and supply lines to their western outposts and to unite the settlements along Lake Ontario from Kingston to Niagara. In order to meet Crown objectives, Sir John Johnston, Superintendent General of the Indian Department, met in 1787 with a number of Mississaugas at the Bay of Quinte where the Mississaugas of the Credit purportedly sold the lands of the Toronto Purchase Treaty. A supposed deed documenting the sale of the lands was found years later and raised serious questions about the legitimacy of the deal between the Crown and the Mississaugas. Problematically, the deed was found blank and had no description of the land “purchased” by the Crown. Also of concern was that the marks of the chiefs who had agreed to the sale were written on separate pieces of paper and then affixed to the blank deed. An attempt to survey the Toronto Purchase Treaty lands in 1788 met Mississauga opposition indicating that there had been no clear delineation of land boundaries agreed upon by the Crown and the First Nation.”Returning to Wikipedia:
“An Indenture (a revision) of the deal was made on August 1, 1805. Both the 1787 Purchase and its 1805 Indenture were registered as Crown Treaty No. 13. For this revision, the Mississaugas were given the amount of ten shillings equivalent to about $27 in 2010 dollars.
...
Starting in 1986, the [descendants of the] Mississaugas opened a land claims settlement process with the Government of Canada to rectify its grievance over the Toronto Purchase and a smaller plot of land near Burlington Bay.[6] In 2010, Canada agreed to pay $145 million for the lands, based on the ancient value of the land, extrapolated to current dollars. The money was distributed to the band government, with each of the 1,700 present day Mississaugas receiving $20,000, with the rest placed in trust for future generations.”I wish to acknowledge two things:
- That the British (and subsequent Canadian) claim to the land we call Toronto is based on fraud, that is to say, a misrepresentation of what was being exchanged.
- Given the sum of economic activity and land value in Toronto, 145 million is a pathetically small number. And even on its own terms, it was only designed to compensate for the supposed value of the land at the time, not the cost to the Mississaugas of this injustice.
It is hard to see, from my privileged vantage point, as a beneficiary of this injustice, what would be appropriate compensation. All I can say is… more? And that it is not just for us to decide what that compensation should be -- this should be decided in conjunction with the aggrieved party. Moreover, part of any proper settlement would be a determination to conduct business differently in the future. That is to say, agreements between peoples should be based on mutual understanding and respect, not on taking advantage of ambiguous language to gain a self-interested result - a practice that continues to this day, as we have learned.
What is my responsibility as a settler, knowing what I know now about the history of Toronto? To know that my own knowledge of this region’s history is quite limited and rooted in invalid assumptions, but to continue to work on rectifying my own ignorance. To share with others what I manage to learn. And to try to see similar injustices happening in the present, and speaking out about them.
Further references:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anishinaabehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississaugashttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Purchasehttp://mncfn.ca/about-mncfn/http://mncfn.ca/torontopurchase/![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
