The Treaties and Trails That Still Shape Toronto
Map by C.W. Jeffreys
The more I learn about the Treaties that have shaped the places I’ve called home, the more I’m struck by how these agreements jump out of history.
That is, these aren’t historical documents—they are living ones, with real relevance to our lives today.
For me, home has always been Toronto. It’s the place I grew up and the place I go back to. My landmarks there are modern ones: the distance to the subway, the direction of the highway, and the definition of all things by whether they are north, east or west of ‘The City.’
But in the world that existed some 200 years before the 401, the most important landmarks weren’t on land. Settlements we think of today as places on a highway were often originally places on a river. The city I know as the ‘Centre of the Universe’ was, back then, on the edge of what the average white person would call the known world.
Before the first Treaties touched the area, Toronto wasn’t necessarily a destination—it was the shortcut to the north and the west. It was an area defined by the three river systems we know today—the Don, the Rouge, and the Humber—the westernmost of which provided the best route between Lake Ontario and Lake Huron.
The placemaking of Toronto began not because of what the land offered, but for what the water did—namely, a route to somewhere else. The origins of the city’s name are said in fact to refer to the narrows at the north end of modern-day Lake Simcoe, derived from a Mohawk term “where there are trees standing in the water,” in reference to the traditional Indigenous fishing methods once used at the Mnjikaning Fish Weirs.
From there, Toronto (a.k.a. Taronto, Tarento, Tarontha, or Toronton) became the name of that lake, the ancient portage trail leading to it, and to the place at the mouth of the Humber River where the region’s great carrying route began. The French built Fort Toronto at the trailhead, and a trading post further north, near the bend in the river that was home to Teiaiagon, an important population centre that had been literally on the map since the early days of French exploration. Modern excavations in the area of Toronto’s Baby Point neighbourhood have found evidence of walled palisades, in the style of Haudenosaunee settlements (though the Huron-Wendat people are thought to have previously occupied the site), and visitors to Magwood Park today can still see burial mounds from these first inhabitants.
The historical records say, that, in 1788, the year after the Toronto Purchase, when the surveyor making his way west reached the banks of the Humber, that people from the Anishinaabe-speaking Mississaugas—members of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation with whom the Crown had made the Treaty—stopped him.
They said that those lands west of the Humber hadn’t been part of the deal.
It was one of several ‘misunderstandings’ to taint the Toronto Purchase, which the Mississaugas had struck with the English a year earlier at another portage route, meeting in between the seat of colonial power in Kingston and Indigenous territory to the west at Carrying Place. Carrying Place was a significant settlement in its day, placed on another ancient portage trail that connected the open waters of Lake Ontario with the shelter of the Bay of Quinte across the thin northern neck of modern-day Prince Edward County.
There, at the place the Haudenosaunee called Kente—one of seven significant known Iroquois settlements, along with Teiaiagon—the Mississaugas held a series of councils with Sir John Johnson, a Baronet and a Loyalist leader during the American War of Independence, who had been made ‘Superintendent of Indian Affairs.’ In the end, a deal was struck, in which the Crown’s representatives walked away believing they had purchased a block of land stretching from Ashbridge’s Bay to Etobicoke Creek.
(Interestingly, instead of following natural boundaries like the creek itself, as would have been the custom, the area was surveyed and mapped using a rigid, abstract grid. The western boundary was a straight line across the land, becoming a now mostly-disappeared road called Indian Line, which roughly follows modern-day Highway 427.)
The Mississaugas, by contrast, believed they had made a lease agreement, a deal to welcome newcomers in exchange for rent in perpetuity, not a sale extinguishing their right to use the lands to hunt, fish, or access the waterways. The British promised them gifts “as long as the sun shines, the waters flow, and grass grows,” starting with the money, gun flints, brass kettles, mirrors, laced hats, flannel, and rum they were given at Carrying Place in 1787.
From that point on, confusion reigned.
A deed did surface from the 1787 Treaty talks, witnessed by three chiefs of the Mississaugas, though Johnson denied having put anything on paper. The deed didn’t include details of the lands to be sold, and instead left blank spaces to supposedly be filled out later by surveyors.
Nearly 700 people are said to have attended the councils at Carrying Place, and though written records and oral memory don’t agree, there’s reason to believe those talks pertained to two land secessions—smaller blocks at Toronto and Matchedash Bay, on either end of the Carrying Route to Lake Simcoe, as well as a more widespread granting of rights on the north shore of Lake Ontario.
The question of what lands were affected was thus murky right from the get-go. The Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation also note on their website 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.
Of course, this added to the confusion, and to the doubts of the Treaty’s legitimacy in the first place. So did the question of whether the Indigenous leaders the Crown had compensated were able to grant them the land in the first place. When Alexander Aitkins, the surveyor that had been halted at the Humber, was allowed to continue mapping the Toronto Purchase lands at the western extremity, near Etobicoke Creek, he advanced less than three miles inland, heeding the warning from the Mississaugas that, should he go any further, he would meet other First Nations people who wouldn’t be so happy to see him.
Whether it was a failure in communication, a failure in record-keeping, a failure in trust, or all of the above, the confusion of the 1787 Toronto Purchase created enough anxiety for colonial authorities for them to seek out a new deal in 1805. According to the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, the British authorities themselves were worried this first deal was illegal, and that settlers therefore wouldn’t be able to secure legal title to the lands they were claiming.
A new deal was struck on August 1st, 1805, in which the Crown purchased more than 250,000 acres of land, covering much of modern-day Toronto, for 10 shillings, or about $31 today. This agreement, in conjunction with the 1787 deal, became officially known as Treaty 13.
Nearly 200 years later, in 1998, the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation took the Crown to court over it. The result came in 2010, when they settled with the federal government for $145 million.
At the time it was the biggest land claims settlement in history. In the end though, what it secured was $20,000 for each adult band member, with the rest put in a trust for future generations.
“You couldn’t buy my truck, not for $20,000,” band member Marvin LaForme told the Toronto Star at the time. “I’m concerned the people didn’t get enough money.”
Today, a decade later, one might be tempted to think that reconciliation is doing its job, perhaps slowly, and that these episodes of broken trust have been addressed, and can be left in the past.
The truth is, right now, our governments are negotiating new Treaty settlements, ones that affect not faraway places or ancient times, but the places you know, love, and maybe live in. Just the other week, on October 26th, 2020, public consultations opened in relation to a land claim made by the Algonquins of Ontario.
It’s the largest land claim being negotiated in Ontario and, if successful, it will be the province’s first modern-day constitutionally protected Treaty. It pertains to more than 36,000 square kilometres in eastern Ontario, and an area with more than 1.2 million inhabitants. What’s happening now is one of the remaining steps to finalize the new Treaty, following an Agreement-in-Principle made in 2016.
That agreement includes provisions ensuring that no new reserves will be created, no land will be expropriated from property owners, nor any carved out of Algonquin Provincial Park. What it does include is a framework for shared management of fisheries and resources, the return of historically and culturally significant sites, and the creation of new parks and protected lands.
To me, it’s a reminder that these Treaties never belong in the dustbin of history—even though it seems sometimes that’s where lost documents were found. Each one is made to endure—“as long as the sun shines, the waters flow, and grass grows”—because they aren’t about a one-off agreement or exchange. Each Treaty speaks to a relationship that, for those who remember, is just as real today as it was in the 1780s. Forgetting that may at times seem convenient, but whether nation-to-nation or person-to-person, when you give your word it follows you, even through centuries and generations.
Written by Next Gen Men Copywriter and Content Strategist Geoff Davies as part of Treaties Recognition Week, an annual event that offers an opportunity to learn more about our collective Treaty rights and obligations. We are all Treaty people.