As historian Adam Hough said in the documentary Colonization Road, “consciously or unconsciously these settlers were the vanguard. Their names are on our streets. We revere and honour these people for their hardships.” At the same time we ignore the indigenous people who were originally the inhabitants of the land.

Kenora was located at an important intersection.  There was an important road that ran through it and of course, in time, the Canadian railway and the Trans-Canada highway.  Many residential schools were located in this area. The newcomers, guided by a white elite down east, wanted to exploit the timber and mineral resources nearby. As Cuyler Cotton, historian and policy analyst said, “Within a 5-mile corridor from the north end of Lake of the Woods, you find the entire infrastructure that ties this country together.”  Today within that narrow belt are the infrastructure, roads, railways, gas lines, Trans-Canada highway, electric power lines, and fibre optic cables. It is an interesting intersection, and as Cotton said, “So much can happen at an intersection, collision is what happened here in Kenora.”

I spent most of my first day on this inferior jaunt driving through that corridor.

According to Cotton,

“the greatest number of residential schools are found within this area. In the region there were policies of cultural genocide that were going on. All of this happened here in force. And very, very quickly.”

Teika Newton, a researcher said,

“There was a colonial agenda that was behind all of that industrial activity, and there still was a power elite that existed in the eastern parts of the country, and they saw the west as their resource bank. Colonization road is a really powerful and it’s a really powerful physical force that was very, very deliberate and very, very strategic. They wanted the land. We were on the land, and so dispossession and then erasure became the primary way over and over again, through policy, through informal relationship, through violence every mechanism possible, really”

This was the Canadian system of dominance and extraction that now goes by the name of settler colonialism.

Do deny that it existed as Stephen Harper and Brian Pallister did, is just plain wrong.