Victoria Freeman's ​Where Histories Meet: Indigenous and Settler Encounters in the Toronto Area

Reviewed by Maria Meindl

(University of Calgary Press, 2025)

One early-spring morning about sixty years ago, my classmates and I piled on a bus to travel to the recently opened “Pioneer Village,” about an hour’s drive from our downtown Toronto school. I don’t remember much of the visit, except for a walk along a street that looked like it had come straight out of the Little House on the Prairie books. Eager to escape the chill, we crowded into the kitchen of one building, where a lady in an apron, long dress and bonnet showed us a tool that allowed her to peel dozens of apples in minutes by turning a crank. There was a delicious smell in the room, from baking apple crisp, and we each got a bowl-full before getting on the bus again. I wanted more.

The “living history” museum then known as Pioneer Village was built around the farm of a settler family, the Stongs, who lived there in the 1820s. It was never actually a village. The buildings had been transported from other parts of the region. There was a mill, a blacksmith’s shop, a church, a general store, a school, and so on. Hoards of school children and tourists got the feeling of stepping back in time by visiting Pioneer Village and sites like it, planting the seeds of dearly-held settler narratives that have been hard to root out. Thinking back to that idyllic school trip, I’m not surprised. For a little white girl in 1960s Toronto, terra nullius tasted sweet.
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The aptly named Where Histories Meet by Victoria Freeman intervenes in those narratives. It’s the outcome of a project which started at what is now called The Village at Black Creek, repopulating the history of the site with long-overlooked/suppressed Indigenous “content, context and perspective.” The project was led by Jennifer Bonnell and Alan Corbiere of the York University History Department, in collaboration with five First Nations in the surrounding area: the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Mississaugas of Scugog Island, the Chippewas of Rama, the Chippewas of Georgina Island, and the Six Nations of the Grand River, along with local conservation authorities and the University of Toronto’s map department. As Chief Kelly laRocca, Mississaugas of Scugog Island, remarks in the book’s introduction:

​I think they need to know the truth that Black Creek Pioneer Village was manufactured. That it was a manufactured landscape. That’s important. And then, I guess, on the flip side of that coin, they need to know that our people were here, even though we don’t have necessarily stories of my great-great-grandfather going there and harvesting wood, or something. It doesn’t mean that our people weren’t here. It wasn’t terra nullius. It wasn’t empty. 

The Village became what Freeman calls an “anchor” for a profound exploration of Indigenous-settler relations in an area which follows rivers, trails, portage and trade routes west to the Grand River and north to Orillia, including the north shore of Lake Ontario and the city of Toronto proper.

To create this indispensable book, the team wove together a range of sources: official documents, genealogy, letters and diaries, as well as interviews with Knowledge Keepers and Elders suggested by the five participating First Nations. Colonization has done violence to Indigenous histories. Elder Carry Sault of the Mississaugas of the Credit notes: “There wasn’t much anybody knew about who we were and what we were. It’s like we faded away from history.” The attempt at erasure attacked the social or shared aspects of memory. Margaret Sault (Mississaugas of the Credit) remarks that gatherings such as Powwows were long forbidden. For all that is lost, a great deal is being revitalized. Freeman refers to the book as a “place” where sources meet. Beautifully produced, it is full of maps, genealogy charts, photographs and reproductions, all in colour.

The word that came to me again and again reading Where Histories Meet was “calm.” That is a strange thing to say. History by its nature doesn’t tend to be calm, and the book’s express purpose is to complicate a previously oversimplified narrative. But there is a feeling of calm when reading it. It is thorough and balanced, including many voices, and Freeman takes the time to clarify what it means to consult each source. Reading this book is like listening to a speaker who allows time for each word to sink in.

Where Histories Meet begins with an account of the region in “Deep Time,” including an underwater photograph of the five-thousand-year-old fish-weir, consisting of hundreds of stakes driven into the water, at what is currently referred to as Atherley Narrows between Lake Simcoe and Lake Couchiching. Toronto’s name is said to be derived from the Mohawk word, Tkaranto: “Where there are trees in the water.” Footnotes and remarks by Elders and Knowledge Keepers from various nations qualify this assertion, as they do almost every other statement in the book. History done right is by no means an exact science.
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According to Kory Snache, Chippewas of Rama: 

Anywhere you wanted to go in what’s now Ontario, you had to go through those lakes. You had to go through that slot at the Narrows. If you want to go east, west, south, whatever, you had to go through the Narrows. You had to go through Mnjikaning, where the barriers are, so it was a strategic choke point.” (Mnjikaning means “Fish Fence” in Anishinaabemowin).

Trade and travel routes underpin this foundational chapter, but they also support the structure of the whole book. Of this choice, Freeman writes: “we can better understand Indigenous history and the history of Indigenous-settler relations in the Toronto area through this larger regional lens rather than in the isolated silos of stand-alone accounts of individual First Nations, individual town histories, or the settler history of York or Toronto.”

From describing pre-contact Indigenous life in southern Ontario, Where Histories Meet works its way through the centuries, exploring the fur trade, the foundation of York and the War of 1812. It considers the effects of Christianization and patterns of European and American settlement, which resulted in deforestation, farming, milling, overhunting and overfishing, and removal of Indigenous nations from their lands. In 1876 came the genocidal Indian Act. Lethal diseases were imported, land stolen, and treaties broken at every turn. The book ends in the present, with Indigenous resilience shining out despite continued injustice.
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Where Histories Meet adds multiple dimensions to what might easily be taken at face value. The Dish with One Spoon Wampum, an oft-cited mouthful in many an earnest land acknowledgment, is seen differently by different participating nations. The Wampum commemorated an agreement between French and English, the Anishinaabek (including the Mississaugas) and the Haudenosaunee. For the Haudenosaunee, it is an agreement to share the resources on the North Shore of Lake Ontario:

​So, in the 1700s, the Great Peace at Montreal, where we all came together, forty Nations came together and put an end to the Indian Wars. It was called the Dish with One Spoon Treaty, where we all agreed to share these lands in a respectful manner for the environment, conservation. We all were to keep that dish clean and leave enough for our other brothers to share from. It was not an ownership issue to those lands, because title and ownership was foreign to us. (Phil Monture, Six Nations of the Grand River)

However, the Anishinaabek see things differently. They refer to a second Wampum, which showed that resource sharing was “intended to be conditional on intertribal diplomacy and permission.” Then again, it’s important to understand the meaning and significance of Wampum. Treaties among Indigenous peoples have, as Freeman puts it, been “activated and commemorated through Wampum … a living presence with the power to manifest stories.”
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Not just stories, but world-views encounter each other on these lands, and Where Histories Meet makes painfully obvious how colonizers took advantage of that fact. Under British rule, Indigenous law held no sway. Following the War of 1812, when the settlers flowed into then-Upper Canada in great numbers, 

​[N]ew settlers were not prepared or educated for an ongoing relationship with Indigenous peoples. Most had no understanding of treaty relations: they believed treaties were one-time land deals that had freed up Indigenous land without any ongoing obligation or relationship with Indigenous peoples required on their part. There was little concept of ensuring a mutually beneficial coexistence in the future. Indigenous peoples were expected to ‘die out’ or defined as a problem to be ignored, pushed to the margins, relocated elsewhere, or eliminated through cultural transformation. 

Colonization was horrendously disruptive, marked with double-dealing, broken promises, and violence, but this book shows how it was counterbalanced with (as one chapter is called) “Surviving, Rebuilding, Adapting, Resisting.” Persuasion and diplomacy were used with colonial powers, alliances created between Indigenous nations, but the tensions between people who believe they have to adapt to survive, and those who adopt an uncompromising position continue to this day.

Adoption and intermarriage were practiced during the time of the fur trade as a way of sealing bonds between peoples. To some extent, they were also strategies. In 1771, Nanebeaujou, one of the Head Chiefs of Southern Georgian Bay, adopted English fur trader Ferral Wade as his son. Fur traders often married Indigenous women in the mid-1800s. Sometimes they were temporary “country marriages,” though some were longer-lasting. One paragraph had me rubbing my eyes and thinking I must not be understanding correctly: “At one point, before 1800, six of eighteen of the highest-ranking officials [in the Indian Department] were married to Indigenous women, and another five were of partial Indigenous descent.” The prominent Jones family, including the influential Methodist minister Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby/Desagondensta) (1802-1856) included several intermarriages.

We meet a troupe of fascinating characters in this book. On the theme of intermarriage: Nahnebahwequay (Upright or Standing Woman) was a Mississauga woman of the Eagle Dodem, who married William Sutton, an Englishman. She was outspoken about the injustices against her people to start with, but during their marriage it came into law that women who married settlers lost their rights and entitlements. This served the goal of having Indigenous women adhere to colonial gender roles. Nahnebahwequay wrote in 1861: “Although I have been married 21 years, it was not until the last four years that the department has made this excuse for robbing me and my children of our birthright, which I inherited from my forefathers before the white man ever set his foot on our shores.” She was later chosen by the Anishinaabek General Council to travel to England to get support for their cause during a time of removals and dispossession. She addressed Queen Victoria, The Aborigines Protection Society and other dignitaries. Pregnant at the time of her departure, she gave birth to her 6th child there (again, a section I read over a number of times not quite believing my eyes). She noted in one speech that the Indigenous man “is only clearing the land for white men and making it valuable for the Indian department … And they know that the work they put into their land, that their children won’t get the benefit of it … We should do to others as we would others to do to us.”

And there are some bad actors in this history. Among the worst was Samuel Peters Jarvis, Chief Superintendent of the Indian Department from 1837 to 1845. After a career of defrauding funds from his Indigenous constituents, he was called to task by his own government. He was dismissed and ordered to return 4,000 pounds. After reading about him in the book, I looked through a number of websites that either overlook or whitewash his behaviour. There is still a street named after him in Toronto.

Where Histories Meet does not just fill the significant gaps with stories from the Indigenous nations on these lands, it shows the relationships between the colonizers and colonized over a period of four centuries. On one level, it reads like a slow and cruel train wreck, yet we also see profound connections, courageous allyship, and many junctures where things might have gone differently. Freeman begins the book with an anecdote recounted by Elizabeth Posthuma Simcoe. At a 1793 naming ceremony for what would later become the City of Toronto, one of the Anishinaabek from the area of what is now Lake Simcoe took the child of John Graves Simcoe in his arms, an indication that “the histories and cultures of Indigenous and settler peoples were already in dialogue.” Even Samuel Peters Jarvis had, as a child, been given the name of “Nehkik” Otter by the Mississaugas.

This history of deep connection makes the betrayals of the colonizers and settlers seem all the more egregious and heartbreaking. It’s not that they just blundered in, not knowing what they were doing; there were opportunities aplenty, fuelled by the enormous generosity of the colonized nations, to see a different perspective and act accordingly. However, the long timeline is also hopeful. The Indian Act arrives relatively late in this story. For me, anyway, seeing the full sweep of that history brings a renewed motivation to double down and keep trying.
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Finally, as Kory Snache remarks, if agreements were honoured, good relations could be re-established:

​I think the biggest thing is letting them know that there was a positive coexistence based on mutual agreement and understanding. And honouring those agreements. That’s the biggest thing. Saying that there was a positive relationship. It wasn’t all negative. And letting them know that out of a lot of both people’s control, mainly government policy, it became sour. And that there is an opportunity to regain those ties again, to rebuild something great. I think those are the biggest things. There’s an opportunity there for a renewed nation-to-nation relationship.

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Maria Meindl is the author of a memoir, Outside the Box, a novel, The Work, and many short fiction and non-fiction pieces, including in The Temz Review. In 2005, she founded the Draft Reading Series, which is still going strong after 20 years. She teaches Feldenkrais movement classes, and runs a webinar series called The Work, Straight Talk on Craft and Method, about the history of wellness, fitness and performer-training methods.