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rfmcdonaldThe latest Historicist posting at Torontoist, "Unearthing the Alexandra Site's Pre-Contact Past", examines at length the First Nations presence in Toronto history, through a mid-14th century Huron-Wendat village.
Statistics Canada recorded more than seventeen thousand people of First Nations background in 2006, but most of these people come from points elsewhere in Ontario and Canada as a result of the annihilation of the Wendat-Huron in the mid-17th century and subsequent diaspora. There's still a significant amount of continuity beween aboriginal and modern Toronto--as Plummer points out, Yonge Street was originally a pre-contact trail.
Alexandra Site village, as was common, was located on a small ridge overlooking a waterway—the now-diverted Highland Creek—that provided transportation and fishing and was surrounded by cultivated fields. Unlike some other villages, there were no palisades, suggesting that it probably wasn't threatened with extensive conflict. The various Iroquoian and other Aboriginal communities demonstrated a high level of interaction and appear to have shared ideas and similar cultural practices.
Beginning in the Early and Middle Woodland periods (1,000 B.C. to A.D. 600), the Huron-Wendat's advantageous geographic position allowed them to become increasingly involved in extensive trading from the Great Lakes to Hudson Bay, the Saguenay, and beyond. At the Alexandra Site, beads made of sea shells from the eastern seaboard illustrate just how far the Huron-Wendat trading network stretched. Much later, in the early 1600s, these established trade networks incorporated white newcomers, and the Huron-Wendat became indispensable middlemen in the French fur trade.
Statistics Canada recorded more than seventeen thousand people of First Nations background in 2006, but most of these people come from points elsewhere in Ontario and Canada as a result of the annihilation of the Wendat-Huron in the mid-17th century and subsequent diaspora. There's still a significant amount of continuity beween aboriginal and modern Toronto--as Plummer points out, Yonge Street was originally a pre-contact trail.
