Читать книгу Indigenous Toronto - Группа авторов - Страница 15

RON WILLIAMSON AND LOUIS LESAGE

Most of what has happened in Toronto occurred well before there was any kind of written history. There are almost two hundred places around the city where tangible fragments of Indigenous lives have survived for thousands of years.

The earliest of those traces dates to about 13,000 years ago, when people came to live along glacial shorelines like the Davenport Ridge. It had formed a thousand years earlier during the retreat of a continental glacier that had stretched across most of Canada and the northern United States. People used these ridges for their sightlines to track caribou, mastodon, mammoth, and other game in what was then an open spruce forest much like the environment found today in the subarctic region of Canada.

At this time, early Lake Ontario was about one hundred metres below its present level and had receded to a distance of several kilometres south of its present shoreline. The resulting expansion of the land provided a productive habitat for plants and animals, and this complex landscape now lies hidden at the bottom of Lake Ontario, along with, perhaps, evidence of the lives of these early peoples.

Figure 1: 13,000-year-old miniature projectile point.

There is not much to find at their camps since their populations were small and few of their belongings have survived the millennia. Sometimes the wear patterns and organic residues on their stone tools offer clues to how they were used. Traces of mastodon or mammoth blood were recently found along the edges of a stone tool discovered on a site of this period located in Hamilton. Evidence of dog blood was also found on tools from that site, including on an imitation projectile point the size of a thumbnail (Figure 1). The association of miniature points and butchered dog has been found previously in the Plains area of the U.S. on sites of this age, but this is one of the earliest signs of dog ceremony in the Great Lakes region.

Figure 2: Banded Slate Birdstone.

By nine thousand years ago, Southern Ontario had warmed, with the result that new species migrated and colonized the region. Humans had to adapt to changing environmental conditions by shifting their hunting strategies and developing new implements, like drives, traps, and nets. With time, populations increased, and people began to interact and exchange ideas and goods with others across vast distances. By four to five thousand years ago, populations in Ontario shared elaborate mortuary ceremonies with distant groups throughout northeastern North America. The group that constructed a cemetery on the west side of Grenadier Pond south of Bloor Street four thousand years ago, for example, identified with a larger Great Lakes–wide religious belief system that originated in the Mississippi Valley.

People at this time also created artifacts made of banded slate that were carved and ground to resemble animals. While these artifacts may have had day-to-day uses, such as weights for spear-throwing devices, they also had a sacred meaning, since they were included in burials. Regardless of the context in which they were used or found, they rival any of the art produced anywhere in the world at that time (Figure 2).

The introduction of corn to Indigenous populations in Southern Ontario about 1,600 years ago profoundly changed their lives. Producing food through agriculture meant abandoning the mobility that had characterized Indigenous life for millennia. Instead, people established base settlements and transformed their environments by clearing land around them for crops, while sending out hunting, fishing, and gathering parties to harvest other natural resources.

The first agriculturalists of southern Ontario were the ancestors of the Neutral, Huron-Wendat, and Tionontaté (Petun). The Haudenosaunee or League of the Iroquois to the south of Lake Ontario, in what is now central New York State, consisted of the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk nations, with the Tuscarora joining as the sixth nation in 1722.

Base settlements around which corn was initially grown are discovered and excavated regularly; one dating to around 1,300 years ago was found recently near the mouth of the Rouge River. In Toronto, these settlements can be attributed to the ancestors of the Huron-Wendat. Within a few centuries, these places evolved into villages, which were several hectares in size and surrounded by hundreds of hectares of cornfields. A village was only moved once its cornfields lost fertility and firewood in the vicinity became scarce.

Moving an ancestral Wendat village meant creating a new ossuary over which a Feast of the Dead was held. All those who had died during the fifteen to twenty years the village was occupied were taken out of their primary graves and brought to a large pit, where they were mixed together to create a new community of the dead. Toronto is home to a dozen known Wendat villages and four ossuaries that date from 700 and 450 years ago. There would have been far more villages and ossuaries, but land development in the twentieth century destroyed them. Anishinaabeg also held Feasts of the Dead in the seventeenth century, but only the Wendat created ossuaries filled with the commingled remains of ancestors.

The Moatfield village and its associated ossuary were found in 1997, during construction for upgrades to a community soccer field just south of the Leslie–Highway 401 interchange. Six Nations Council of Ohsweken, the closest Iroquoian-speaking First Nation, directed that the ossuary be moved since a lamppost had not only pierced actual ancestors’ remains, but the soul of the community of the dead. In their judgment, the souls could not rest in that location. The ossuary was completely excavated and the remains of eighty-seven ancestors were reinterred in another location nearby, never to be disturbed again.

Villages and ossuaries are found regularly throughout south-central Ontario, but any decisions regarding their investigation and protection are now governed by the Huron-Wendat Council at Wendake, Quebec.