Category Archives: History

Love of Country in Bulgaria, Canada, or the United States

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Abuse of Power, Bulgaria, Concentration Camps, Death of Truth, History, Social Justice, Truth Seeking

It was at the University of Toronto that Lilia Topouzova and her colleagues Julian Shehirian and Krasmira Butsova, recreated spaces from a Bulgarian home and turned them into an immersive audio installation where Concentration camp survivors’ voices and their silences could live on. Their installation is called The Neighbors. It was the official Bulgarian entry to the 2024 Venice Biennale. That showed that Bulgaria was now dealing with this issue, after decades of silence. We heard small snippets from the audio in the CBC Ideas radio show. In the autumn of 2023 it had its North American debut in a small room on the campus of the University of Toronto.

The room is based on 20 years of research that Topouzova and her eventual interviews with survivors. The original project was done in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Julian Chakurian, was a partner in the project. She is a historian in training doing a PhD in the history of science at Princeton university and also is a multimedia artist with an interest in archives and expositions of what she called “wayward histories.” Too many stories have been lost. Gone for good.

This is what she said about her recordings of the survivors:

 “Based on the oral histories that I recorded, there were three categories of Camp Survivor narratives. There were the narratives of the people who had always told their story. There were very few of them, but these are the kind of practiced narrators. That was one way of remembering the Gulag. The second way of remembering the Gulag were people who still had memories of their experiences, but they had never told them before. Some people had never shared their story, because usually nobody asked them, but they remembered everything, and they usually had chronicles of their experiences, little notes that they had taken down.    And the third category, and that is the most painful category, is of those who couldn’t speak. There was no language. There were no words.”

 

This was a very disturbing description of the survivors in this last category.  One can only imagine the suffering that spawned their condition. As a result, this is what the 3 researchers did:

 

“I knew they had been sent to camps. I could see many of them had their files, but they couldn’t express. Based on these three categories that emerged from the oral histories from the scholarly research, we decided to recreate three different rooms to illustrate the different ways of remembering trauma.”

 

Again, I want to bring this into the modern political arena even though that might be uncomfortable to some privileged Canadians or Americans or their offspring. Imposed silence is definitely not golden.  Nor should the survivors be maliciously misrepresented as people who are maligning their country, as Donald Trump and the Trumpsters are doing in American with their American descendants of enslaved people, and indigenous people. Or women who experienced sexual assaults or violence or systemic racism in that country. Or Canada. Or members of the LGBTQ community,  who have suffered systemic injustice and discrimination for decades. It is a horrible defamation of their suffering by  a privileged sector of their society who call them haters of their country. And again, we have similar men in our country as well. Men who want to hide the truth. We even have women who want to hide the truth.

 

Try to bring the truth out of darkness into light is not an act of hate against one’s country. Trying to get your country to recognize what happened there and admit that is an act of love. That is not hate. If you want to hide the truth of what happened in your country from its people, or others,  that is an act of hate. If you love your country you would never do that.

 

The Sounds of their Silent Memories: Lilia Topouzova

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Bulgaria, Concentration Camps, Death of Truth, History, Truth Seeking

During the Communist era in Bulgaria from 1946 to 1989 there was little room for political dissent. Protesters, anyone who opposed the government, could be arrested, sent to the Gulag, and silenced. Silence was often the point.  The powerful members of the Communist party brooked no public dissent in order to preserve their authority. They wanted silence. They demanded silence. And some of the victims, even after the regime was dismantled, had nothing left to offer other than silence. It was if they had lost the capacity to speak.

 

This really proved the truth of what the  Czechoslovakian writer Milan Kundera once said:

 

 

The CBC radio show Ideas, described the work of Lilia Topouzova this way:

 

For 20 years, Lilia Topouzova has been collecting the stories of those who survived: some had many stories, some had little to say, some had nothing to say — or just no way of saying it. From these eloquent stories she has recreated a Bulgarian room from the Communist era, where her meetings and conversations with survivors can be heard, a space about the absence of memory and what that does to a people, a space to bear witness to those who were sent to the camps, but who were everyone’s friends, relatives and neighbours. The installation The Neighbours is the official Bulgarian entry to the 2024 Venice Biennale.|

Bulgaria has at long last come to own the history of Bulgaria. As a filmmaker, Lilia naturally employs sounds to tell her stories, but this was difficult because many of the survivors did not want to be heard or seen, and neither did the new regime in Bulgaria.  How then to tell their story respectfully?  That was the challenge of her and her team.  She concluded that “this story was fundamentally about sound, about whispers, about hesitation, and the sound of a room where someone simply cannot speak. “She has spent more than two decades studying the Bulgarian Gulag, excavating a history that has been deliberately silenced.”

 

Obviously, that was a very difficult task.  Bringing this story up to our times, it is a stark reminder, that when the forces of darkness try to muzzle the truth, or hide the truth, or even, destroy the truth, as many are doing around the world, even in the United States, much to our current surprise, we must all realize that if those dark forces are allowed to be successful any later job of restoration will be extremely difficult. Whether in Bulgaria, the United States or Canada, for that reason, we must be vigilant to resist those powers of darkness, even if it is challenging.

 

As the CBC Ideas host Nahlah Ayed said, “Lilia is fascinated by what lives inside silence.”  By that she meant inside both the silence of survivors and the authorities. The victims often came to visit Topouzova, but then did not speak. They kept silent, because it was uncomfortable for them to speak about the horrors they had experienced.  Sometimes they came to see her with their files but could not speak.

 

I was struck by the similarities to what survivors of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools said. They too were often reluctant to speak. Who can blame them? Dredging up painful incidents and practices is never easy. Sometimes silence seems like the only bearable response. We must respect those survivors who are brave enough and strong enough to speak, for only by hearing those words can the rest of us learn about what happened. And we need to learn what happened so that we never let it happen again. We must cherish those who are able to speak, for the benefits they bestow upon us.

 

Topouzova said,

 

“They didn’t want to talk to me about the camp. They wanted to talk to me about the weather, about Canada. I was also beginning to recognize that the camps are a kind of a present absence.”

 

It is hardly surprising, under such circumstances, how difficult it is to bring to the light such horrible events. The camps were truly chambers of horror. Consequently, Topouzova said this about the camps,

“Everybody knows they existed. Nobody wants to talk about them, at least directly. So, I’ve had conversations with people about ordinary things, like the weather and mosquitoes, for instance.”

 

In some cases it took years for victims to speak. That’s how horrible the experience was. We must be grateful to them for sharing.

 

Silence is not Golden

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Concentration Camps, Death of Truth, History, Modern History, Truth Seeking

 

 

This island in the Danube River was benign. Other islands were not that.

Right in the middle of the Danube River, on an idyllic island the main Bulgarian concentration camp was located. That island was called Belene  and it was the main forced labour camp of  a network of concentration camps in Bulgaria  that now is largely ignored by the current government, even though it is no longer a communist government. That struck me as odd. Why the silence?

 

No one mentioned it to me on our cruise either. No one mentioned it on any of our excursions. It was as if it never happened.

 

According to Lillia Topouzova, “Very clearly the [Bulgarian Interior ] minister said, Belene should vanish as a symbol of the repressive system.”

 

No one wanted to be reminded what happened there. Even the victims were not keen on bringing up painful memories. At least, at first. Topouzova on the other hand, was very interested in the silence of both oppressors and oppressed and everyone else in between. She respected the silence of the victims. And she was very patient. As she said,

 

“There was no language. There were no words. I knew they had been sent to camps. I could see many of them had their files, but they couldn’t express. And the silence of those who lived near the camps, but learned to never acknowledge their existence. They didn’t want to talk to me about the camp. They wanted to talk to me about the weather, about Canada. I was also beginning to recognize that the camps are a kind of a present absence. Everybody knows they existed. Nobody wants to talk about them, at least directly. So I’ve had conversations with people about ordinary things, like the weather and mosquitoes, for instance.”

 

It was hardly surprising that I had never heard of the Bulgarian Gulag. It was no accident. It was deliberately kept a secret supposedly to protect the Bulgarian society’s reputation, but really to protect the reputations of the powerful. Now I really want to see them. I knew we would sail very close to the island where one of the main camps was located.

 

But Lilia Topouzova, and her two fellow researchers, were determined to ferret out the truth and bring what really happened into the light of day, but only if that met with the approval of the victims she interviewed. She worked very hard to respect their wishes.

 

It took her 20 years to amass the story. That was the sound of silence. And it was not golden, but it was fruitful.

 

History is like an Almost Empty School

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, History, Truth and Beauty

 

 

This photograph was taken near a university in Bucharest, Romania

 

The Romanian communist party, like most communist parties around the world, and like the Republican party in the United States, want to control the narrative. That means they want to control history. Which means that they want to control the truth, or at least perceptions of the truth. In the Unites States for example, the Republicans want to erase or minimize history that shows the country was not always at its best. For example, they want to minimize stories about slavery or the assault on the native peoples of North America. Canada did this too when they refused to release information about the mistreatment of indigenous people at residential schools. For example, even though I went to university for 7 years I never once heard about residential schools while I attended university.

 

In Romania, when the communists came to power soon after the completion of World War II, the communists started to erase the royal family from the historical record. Within about 3 years it was if there never had been a royal family.

After the communists lost power in Romania 1989, the truth started coming out. It was then learned that 17,000 teenagers had contracted Aids. No information had been released about this by the communists. The communists wanted people to believe that under communism things were perfect and their leaders were perfect. That is what the communist leader of Romania wanted. I think that is what Donald Trump wants too.

This is unfortunate, because unless a country acknowledges its history—its truth—it can never move beyond that. It is chained to an unacknowledged past. It is like an almost empty school.

The Expulsion of the Acadians

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, History

 

No one likes to be expelled. It is an insult. You feel unwanted. Undocumented people in the US don’t like it. The Mennonites who left Russia for Germany during the Second World War did not like it. No one likes it. It is a profound insult, even when disguised as a voluntary withdrawal.

 

The Acadians had settled the area in and around Annapolis Royal since the founding of Annapolis Royal in  the early 1600s. They were among the earliest Europeans to move to Canada. The Acadians had lived in the region of Atlantic Canada, particularly Nova Scotia, and were mainly French Catholics who maintained a neutral stance between the French and the British during their interminable wars of aggression by both sides. Particularly the British looked down upon them with suspicion.

 

Many Acadians were descended from about 50 French families that settled in the Annapolis Royal. Not all were French and they considered themselves an independent people by the time they were expelled.

 

In 1713 in the Treaty of Utrecht the French signed over to Britain the land the occupied by Acadians, without of course, consulting them or the Mi’kmaq,  whose traditional territory it was. Their views did not count.  This was typical of imperial powers. The English were worried about security and signed peace and friendship treaties with the Mi’kmaq toward that end from 1725 to 1726 and again in 1752.

 

The Acadians had established a vibrant community around the Bay of Fundy where they built dykes to tame the extremely high tides and lived in peace with their allies the Mi’kmaq.

 

Between 1755, just before the beginning of the Seven Years War between France and Britain, and 1764 after the British took over in Canada from the French, they quickly saw to it that the Acadians were expelled from Canada. 10,000 of these people were expelled in the next 10years. The expulsion of the Acadians is also referred to as the “Grand Dérangement.” And like so many expulsions it truly was deranged. This one was the forced removal of Acadians (French settlers in Nova Scotia) from their homes and land by the British authorities between 1755 and 1764 mainly as a result of their refusal to swear an oath of allegiance to the British Crown.  They really had done nothing to warrant such treatment, just like the Japanese in Canada during the Second World War had done nothing to warrant their expulsion to concentration camps in Canada.

In 1755 the British authorities led by Governor Charles Lawrence demanded, as tyrants demand clear demonstration of loyalty, as we are seeing again in the 21st century in a nominally democratic country like the United States.

In 1763 the French ceded control of Canada to the English in the Treaty of Paris that ended the Seven Years’ War. As a result, Quebec became a British colony, and the Acadians in the Maritimes became British subjects, whether they liked it or not. But starting in 1755 the British rounded up the Acadians in those territories they already controlled, confiscated their property, and deported them to various British colonies around the world where the British felt they would not pose a threat. Some were also deported to France. This is all very reminiscent of what Americans are currently doing to their undocumented people in what their current leader has bragged is the greatest deportation in American history to the cheers of his loyal Trumpsters. The desire to expel the other is a common unattractive goal.

Here is how the Canadian Encyclopedia described it:

 

“Soldiers rounding up terrified civilians, expelling them from their land, burning their homes and crops ‒ it sounds like a 20th century nightmare in one of the world’s trouble spots, but it describes a scene from Canada’s early history, the Deportation of the Acadians”.

 

This church was built in Grand Pre in 1922 to commemorate the expulsion of Acadians. We must remember even the bad parts of our history.  It is now a UNESCO world heritage site.

Just like modern deportations, the expulsion of Acadians was harsh with many of them perishing on their forced journeys as a result of disease and terrible conditions. They were allowed to take with them only what they could carry in a suitcase. In an act of savage vandalism, their properties were burnt to discourage them from returning.

Governor Lawrence ordered his soldiers not to pay the least attention “to any remonstrance or Memorial from any of the inhabitants.” When one of his Colonels, John Winslow, read the deportation order, he admitted that although it was his duty, it was “very disagreeable to my nature, make and temper.” He was like so many before and after him in claiming he was only following orders. As he said, “it is not my business to animadvert, but to obey such orders as I receive.”

Some Acadians resisted expulsion and some even launched retaliatory raids against the British troops.

Many of those deported never made it to their places of deportation on account of horrendous conditions on the ships or modes of transportation. Like the legendary Evangeline of Longfellow’s poem, many of the Acadians were forced to wander interminably looking for loved ones.

After the Seven Years War ended in 1763 some of them returned to their homelands but often found their land had been given away to others. This too is another unfortunate common occurrence among the supporters of deportations. Often authorities hand out the property of the deportees to those favored by the current regime. This was incisively shown in the film that last year was nominated for best Picture at the Academy Awards, namely “Zone of Interest.”  Among other things it depicted the eagerness of Germans to steal property from Jews sent to death camps. It showed women callously describing how they might take property such as fur coats that had belonged to Jews in their neighbourhood of the camp at Auschwitz. Humans have a nasty inclination to abandon friends when minor economic gains can be achieved.

 

The expulsion of Acadians represents a dark chapter of forced displacement and cultural loss by Canadian ancestors. I know many Conservatives, particularly in the USA, who don’t like to be reminded of such sad chapters in the history of their nation. But the stories of the resilience of the Acadians and the astonishing preservation of their culture amid the hardships are testaments to their enduring spirit. Christiane and I had benefited greatly from that culture in our attendance at a local bar in Digby a couple of days before we drove to Grand Pre.

Many of the Acadians were attracted to Louisiana by familiarity of the language and remained to there and developed the culture now known as “Cajun.”  As a result, they developed one of my favorite forms of music; Cajun or Zydeco music. Is any music better? If you want to hear some great music watch the film The Big Easy starring Dennis Quaid, John Goodman, and Ellen Barkin. The sound track to the film is stellar and gives a great taste of this music which I first heard about at a Winnipeg Folk Festival.

In 2003, Queen Elizabeth II on behalf of the British crown apologized and acknowledged the wrongs committed during the Acadian deportation. Sometimes apologies are necessary.

The expulsion was later proved to have been completely unnecessary on military grounds and was justifiably judged as unjust and inhumane like so many other expulsions around the world. Governor Lawrence’s lack of imagination played as big a part as did the greed, confusion, misunderstanding, and fear of the people and their populist leaders. Yet the Acadians established a society in the region that could never be squelched in a laudable demonstration of resilience in the face of pitiful and abject cruelty. Unfortunately, those lessons have not been well learned by people who continue to use such tactics against those they manage to relegate to the category of “the other.” Once again, we learn that history is important so that hopefully, once in awhile at least, we can avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. Our neighbours to the south are managing to avoid learning such lessons by forcing history to be re-written or ignored.  Of course, we in Canada, have often done this  as well. History is important

From Ancient Indigenous People to Resistance Against American Intrusions

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, History, Indigenous People After Contact

 

 

Brockville is a city in Eastern Ontario in the Thousand Islands Region, one of the most beautiful places in Canada. We did not venture into that area this area, as we decided, unusually for us, to explore the city rather than the surrounding countryside. We had visited the Thousand Island region in the past and loved it, but today it was time to explore the city.

Brockville was previously inhabited by the St. Lawrence Iroquoians and later the Oswegatchie people. The St. Lawrence Iroquoians established a cluster of palisaded agricultural villages in the vicinity of what became Brockville from about 1450 until the 1500s. They were farmers! Before that the Point Peninsula People, as they are now called, inhabited the upper St. Lawrence River from at the least the Late Middle Woodland Period.

 

In the archaeological cultures of North, the Woodland period spanned a period from about 1000 CE until European contact in the 16th century. The phrase “Woodland Period” is a term used to describe prehistoric sites falling between the Archaic hunter-gatherers to the Mississippian cultures.  The Eastern Woodlands cultural region covers what is now Eastern Canada south of the Subarctic region, the Eastern United State, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. It was a period of constant development in stone and bone tools, leather crafts, and textile manufacturing. The people also cultivated the soil and constructed shelters. Many Woodland peoples used spear and atlatls until the end of the period when they were replaced by bows and arrows. The southern Woodland peoples also used blowguns.  I was not aware of any of most of that before this trip.

Increasingly the people used horticulture and developed what has been called the Eastern Agricultural Complex that consisted mainly of seed plants and gourd cultivation. They also became less mobile over time and in some places constructed and occupied villages and even cities. The period from 1000-1400CE was a period of what has been called “intensive agriculture,” which was likely continued until about 500 years ago. The people also made use of pottery that arisen earlier during the Archaic period in some places. The forms of pottery were widely diversified.

During the period of 1000-200 BCE the Early Woodland period, included times when people engaged in extensive mound-building, regionally distinctive burial complexes, and traded exotic goods across a vast part of North America that involved substantial interactions with other Indigenous peoples of North America. During that time, many people relied on both wild and domesticated plant foods and mobile subsistence strategies to take advantage of seasonally available resource such as fish, shellfish, nuts, and wild plants with which the people were intimately experienced.  Pottery then was widespread across North America.

By 1751, the Oswegatchie people had occupied much of the north shore of the St. Lawrence in the region we travelled. They withdrew from the North Shore of the St. Lawrence after negotiating with the British in 1784

Later it was settled by United Empire Loyalists and the city of Brockville became named by one of Britain’s most famous Generals, Sir Isaac Brock. English settlers first arrived in 1784 when thousands of refugees arrived from the American colonies after the American Revolutionary War. They were often referred to as United Empire Loyalists because they continued their allegiance to King George III.  They struggled with the American colonies in the years 1776 to 1783 and these skirmishes seriously divided the loyalties among people in some of the American colonies such as New York and Vermont.

 

The British capitulated to the Americans in 1782 and when the six-year war, which ended with the Americans who remained loyal to the British crown being treated harshly by the Americans who saw them as traitors. Many of them lost their properties in America.

Many Loyalists chose to flee north to the British colony of Quebec and Great Britain opened up the western regions of Canada at the time called Upper Canada and later Ontario. In fact, the British crown purchased land from the First Nations so they could allocate land to the loyalists in compensation for their losses and then helped them to establish settlements.

The first settlement by loyalists in the area arrived in 1785 and the first settler was William Buell Sr. Christiane and I walked on a street named after him in Brockville.  Later in the evening we dined at Buell Street Bistro. Buell was an ensign who left the King’s Rangers in the state of New York. Locals called the first settlement Buell’s Bay in his honour. Later, in 1810, the name was changed to Elizabethtown and then even later, Brockville.

 

General Isaac Brock was a celebrated as a hero in the area and even a saviour by some in view of his success in repelling Americans and securing their surrender of Fort Detroit during the War of 1812. He was fatally wounded while leading troops up the heights near Queenston.

Brockville became the first incorporated self-governing town on January 28, 1832, two years before the town of Toronto.

A patent medicine industry developed there around 1854 and features such illustrious products as Dr Morse’s Indian Root Pills, Dr. McKenzie’s Worm Tablets, and later Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People. Those must be good.

Brockville along with many other towns in Canada West [now Ontario]  were targets of the threatened Fenian invasion after the American Civil War ended in 1865. In June 1866, the unruly Irish-American Brotherhood of Fenians invaded Canada! The raids were launched across the Niagara River from Vermont into Canada East (now Quebec).

Those unsuccessful raids were a significant catalyst to the confederation of Canada as the people of what became Canada saw their neighbours to the south as lawless ruffians who must be resisted.  Not that differently than today in other words. A year later, in 1867 the new Canadian Prime Minister John A. MacDonald called upon volunteer militia in every town to organize to protect the country from these American rabble rousers. That led to the organization of the Brockville Infantry Company and the Brockville Rifle Company (now called The Brockville Rifles).

Now in 2025 the American president is trying to lure, or perhaps bully, Canada into becoming the 51st state and make what he calls one big beautiful country.

Who ever said Canadian history is boring? Probably many, but not me.

 

Pluralism around the Sault

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, Colonialism, History, Indigenous People After Contact, Moral Humility, Pluralism

 

 

The Clergue blockhouse at Sault Ste. Marie

 

The Clergue blockhouse was right beside the Ermatinger house and was part of the original North West Company post at Sault Ste. Marie. Both of which were right beside our hotel.  Of course, I don’t think too many elites stayed in this block house. That was for the lessers.

This area of North America where Lake Huron and Lake Superior meet, including Sault Ste. Marie, Ignace Michigan, the Mackinac Straits, and St Joseph’s Island, were vitally important in the fur trade. There were many varied First Nations, and the French and English, and later the Americans and Canadians. Barbara Huck called it “The Crossroads of Humanity.” Often they fought each other; at other times they lived together peacefully. As Huck explained,

“For a half-century. Michilmackinac [a little south of Sault Ste, Marie] flourished. Living at a crossroads of humanity, the people of the straits were at home with diversity, unfazed by racial, linguistic, or religious  differences. A multilingual, multiracial community evolved as French traders married local Odawa and Ojibwe women. Prefacing the Metis community that would grow up around the forks of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers in Manitoba a century later, their mixed blood children soon became the dominant population of the straits.”

In Manitoba as well the Métis people became dominant, for a while.  When Manitoba became a province of Canada in 1870, 80% of the people were Métis. A lot of Manitobans have forgotten this. Some of the Indigenous people had left and the hordes of European immigrants, including Mennonites were not yet there.

It was also interesting what happened after America declared its independence from England. As Huck said,

“In 1775 the New England colonies rebelled, and the British turned to their new-found native allies.  Weighing the situation, the Odawa, Ojibwe, Winnebago, Sauk, Fox, Menominee, and Sioux decided that as rigid and obtuse as the British might be, they were not as bent on clearing and settling the land as the American rebels were.”

 

Where many nations live together, they have to make serious efforts to recognize each other and not assume, that all wisdom resides in their own community. They did learn that in the area around Sault Ste. Marie. Sadly, such lessons are sometimes hard to learn and too often not passed on to the next generation. I am a great believer in pluralism. It breeds humility, something always in short supply. Live and let live. We can all learn from each other. None of us have a monopoly on the truth. Pluralism is not always easy, but it sure beats warfare.

As Sally Gibson wrote in a chapter of Huck’s book,

“Sault Ste. Marie has long been a stopping place for travellers. Once a seamless zone of trade, the area is now separated by the Canadian-American border and twin cities name Sault Ste. Marie on either side of the St. Mary’s River Rapids. The rapids drop almost seven metres over less than three kilometres, draining Lake Superior. Travellers today can enjoy the natural beauty of the area and find remnants of the fur trade that stimulated early European settlement.”

 

Of course, once European countries arrived on the scene it did not take them long to make claims on the land. That’s what Europeans (later Canadians or Americans) do.  As Gibson said,

“The territory around Sault Ste, Marie was claimed for France by Sieur de Saint Lusson in an elaborate ceremony…recognizing the importance of the location, New France granted a seigneury on the St. Mary’s River to Chevalier de Repentigny in 1751.”

 

Of course, Gibson did not say by whose authority France did that because none of the people from Europe had any authority to make such grants. Americans always claimed land by conquest, but the locals in Canada had never been conquered. And the locals had never ceded the land. So there really was no basis for the grants. France could have used some humility.

Chevalier de Repentigny farmed the property and fortified it but he left within 5 years as soon as the 7 Years War broke out between France and England. After the French fell in that war, the English took over, but they really had no authority either. Of course, that did not stop the English from granting exclusive rights to the land in 1765 to an English trader Alexander Henry. He was given authority to the Lake Superior area. What did mean? I would say, as a recovering lawyer, that such a grant would be void for uncertainty. What area was covered by the grant, if the grant was otherwise valid?

I have always wondered what would be the legal effect of the United States placing a flag on the moon?  Would that give the Americans ownership of the entire moon?  Half the moon?  The light side of the moon? A square mile? An acre?  Or no part? How can you make such a decision? When you get right down to it claims of “ownership” are usually dubious at their root. Once more that should generate some humility.

Take another example. Indigenous people roamed the North American continent for thousands of years. Many of them were nomadic. Others were more sedentary farmers. What part did each First Nation own? How can you tell? By what right?

Really all claims of ownership are dubious?  Whether you are talking about the jungles of the Amazon or the plains of North America or the city of Steinbach?  All of them are fundamentally dubious!

I taught real estate law at the University of Manitoba Law School for about 10 years and nothing I learnt or taught there gave me any more certainty.

Life of the Elite During Fur Trade

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, History, Indigenous People After Contact

 

 

Ermatinger House, Sault Ste, Marie, Ontario

Without realizing it, when I last read Barbara Huck’s book, Exploring the Fur Trade Routes of North America, she was writing about Sault Ste. Marie! In fact, about places right next to our hotel. Was this coincidence or miracle? And our hotel was minutes away from what she talked about in the book.

Within a couple of blocks of our hotel in Sault Ste. Marie we visited some of the places referred to in the book by Barbara Huck that I was reading that very morning. Huck even had photos in her book of the same buildings I photographed like the one above. There were some weird coincidences on the trip and this was clearly one of them.

First, the stone house of independent fur trader Charles Ermatinger was built on the shore of the St. Marys River, is obviously not an ordinary house. As Sally Gibson wrote in Barbara Huck’s book on the Canadian fur trade, the house was ‘constructed in a classic Georgian style, with ground sloping to the water, it was an imposing sight for early 19th century travellers on the waterway.”I  accept that. I certainly was impressed. Thousands of visitors go to see the house each year. It has been completely restored and refurnished.  She wrote that the house is underpinned in the basement, which I did not see from outside, by cedar logs at least 38 centimetres in diameter and “has stone walls almost a metre thick.” It was built to last through dangerous times.

This house was part of the North West Company post at Sault Ste. Marie. The Ermatinger family lived there until 1828 when they moved back to Montreal. But Ermatinger was an independent fur trader after he left the company in 1808. No doubt he and his family, consisting of a wife and 13 children, enjoyed life there.  His wife was Mananowe (Charlotte) and was the daughter of a prominent Ojibwe policy maker by the name of Katawabeda. The occupants were the elites of 2 of the founding nations of this country; Indigenous and French. That too was impressive.

As Gibson explained, “In this gracious environment, the Ermatinger family offered hospitality to both area residents and weary travellers.” Apparently, invitations to the annual caribou dinner at the house were keenly sought by locals. I know I would love to have attended one of those. It was established as a National Historic site in the 1960s.