I believe most Canadians know little about the founding of Canada beyond the two superstars in Canadian history: the Mohawk leader Joseph Brant, whose real name was Thayendanegea, and the British General Isaac Brock.
What is Canada?
- Canada is hockey.
- Canada is baseball.
- Canada is basketball.
- Canada is sport fishing along rivers or on one of the thousand of lakes.
- Canada is the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic Oceans.
- Canada is the great open plains of the West and big sky country.
- Canada is the majestic peaks, glaciers, mountain streams and thick forests of the Rockies.
- Canada is long backroads heading off into the horizon past farms, villages, forests, and lakes. Canada is a beaver dam, a moose wandering amongst trees in the boreal forest, or a muskellunge (Musky) landed in a rowboat on a Muskoka Lake.
OK, so now that we have flipped through the pictures on the wall calendar, Canada is much more than this.
The complete story
Whatever you might imagine about Canada, no one image can capture this vast and diverse nation. Its vast landscapes, its peoples from all over the world, its multitude of languages and the proud heritage of its Indigenous peoples all form part of the fabric of this country.
But Canada has its dark past as well.
Recent discoveries of mass graves from the Indian Residential Schools era has shown that the Federal Government and mainstream Churches were complicit is the abuse of Indigenous children. These kids were were ripped from their families to be “Christianized” by the schools and made into “good Canadians.”
These atrocities cannot be ignored when writing the story of Canada. As we will discover, the roots of these problems existed from the first encounters of the St. Lawrence Iroquois by Jacques Cartier and the first encounters of the Inuit by Martin Frobisher.
That being said, Canada did not become what it is by chance. It did so over hundreds or even thousands of years (in the case of its First Nations peoples) of seemingly small decisions that built upon each other as the years progressed.
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