Where Histories Meet: Indigenous and Settler Encounters in the Toronto Area

Where Histories Meet is a richly illustrated and accessible historical survey of relations between Indigenous peoples and settlers in the Toronto region from the time of the Toronto Purchase to the Indian Act.

Where Histories Meet traces the histories of the Toronto region’s Indigenous peoples and their relations with settlers, focusing on the period from the colonial treaties of the 1780s to the Indian Act of 1876. Created in consultation with five local First Nations, this groundbreaking study brings archival records, oral memory, and the voices of Indigenous Elders and knowledge keepers into respectful dialogue to understand the colonial dynamics that still structure Indigenous-Canadian relationships today.

Beginning with a deep history of Indigenous presence in the region, Victoria Freeman explores the significance of the Toronto Carrying Place portage route and how treaties and changes to the land through agriculture, logging, milling, and settlement impacted local Indigenous Nations. She reveals how the building of Yonge Street facilitated government and missionary attempts to transform Indigenous peoples into Christian farmers and how immigration and Indigenous dispossession were fundamentally linked.

Freeman highlights the creative ways that Indigenous communities sought to resist, subvert, or adapt to increasing government control, even as they were increasingly isolated on small reserves. She explores the differing interpretations among local First Nations regarding past conflicts and agreements that profoundly shape present-day struggles over land claims, consultation, and revenue-sharing.

Where Histories Meet tells the stories of individual people, their families, and their wider networks, revealing the interconnections between Indigenous peoples and settlers in the fur trade, warfare, treaty-making, missionization, and governance. Freeman presents the past in its full complexity, without homogenizing Indigenous or settler experiences or perspectives.

About the Author

Where Histories Meet was created in consultation with the Mississaugas of the Credit, Chippewas of Rama, Six Nations of the Grand River, Chippewas of Georgina Island, and Mississaugas of Scugog Island First Nations. Indigenous Elders and knowledge keepers contribute pithy, thoughtful, and sometimes humorous contemporary reflections.

Victoria Freeman is an independent scholar and public historian of Indigenous-settler relations in Canada. She has worked extensively on projects that record and share Indigenous histories and that foreground Indigenous perspectives. She is the author of Distant Relations: How My Ancestors Colonized North America and a co-author of A Treaty Guide for Torontonians.

Where Histories Meet is proudly published by Bighorn Books.

Introduction: Where Histories Meet

Part One: The Toronto Carrying Place
1. Toronto’s Indigenous Name
2. Deep Time in the Humber River Watershed
3. Trade and Colonial Rivalries

Part Two: Founding York
4. Early British Treaties
5. Turning Indigenous Territory into Private Property
6. Indigenous-Settler Encounters
7. Settlers on Indigenous Lands

Part Three: Changing Relationships
8. The War of 1812 and its Aftermath
9. The Postwar Fur Trade along Yonge Street
10. Deforestation, Farming, and Milling

Part Four: The Civilizational Agenda
11. Indigenous Christanity
12. Yonge Street Camp Meetings
13. The Credit Mission
14. The Coldwater and the Narrows Settlement
15. “Progress,” Setbacks, and Strategies for Self-Sufficiency

Part Five: Agency in Times of Struggle
16. The Quest for Secure Land Tenure
17. Defending the Crown
18. Surviving, Rebuilding, Adapting, Resisting
19. From Civilization to Assimilation
20. Black Wampum

Part Six: New Strategies for Dark Times
21. The Indian Act and the Great Council Fire
22. After 1876

Conclusion: Confronting History, (Re)making History