Original Storytelling

A surprising number of people ask Madeleine Duncan if she lives in a wigwam. The eighteen-year-old member of Curve Lake First Nation in Ontario’s Kawartha Lakes region is happy to explain how saplings are bent and covered in bark to create the adaptable Anishinaabe dwelling. But no, she often has to tell both adults and children visiting Lang Pioneer Village, she is an engineering student who lives in a comfortable modern home.

Duncan demonstrates traditional beadwork and explains how she braids cedar to make cordage. She also tells visitors about the Williams Treaties — agreements signed in 1923 that transferred twenty thousand square kilometres of land in south central Ontario to the Crown in exchange for cash payments to seven Indigenous communities. The area’s original Indigenous inhabitants are Michi Saagiig — also known as Mississauga, who are part of the Anishinaabe peoples of the Great Lakes region. In 2018, the federal government apologized to the Michi Saagiig signatories for the injustices they suffered — inadequate compensation, insufficient reserve lands, and the inability to hunt, fish, and harvest manoomin (wild rice).

 The story is brand new to most visitors. “I guess it wasn’t told to them the same way that it was told to me,” Duncan, the descendant of a signatory, said. “I’m glad that I can be here and share that. I think it’s unfortunate that Indigenous people have to bear the weight of teaching other people about what has happened, but the most accurate way is to hear it from us personally.” 

Lang Pioneer Village is a rarity among Ontario’s living history museums in that it has forged relationships with local Indigenous communities and provided space for them to tell their own stories, even when that means upending the whole concept of the pioneer. The Indigenous camp at Lang, called Aabnaabin, is both a triumph and a cautionary tale for new villages looking for a quick way to Indigenize their sites. Quick is definitely not how this works. 

In 2008, Joe Corrigan was the manager at Lang, located in the village of Keene, southeast of Peterborough, Ontario. He and Laurie Siblock, his eventual successor, were planning their annual fur trade re-enactment when they realized that, without participation from local Michi Saagiig communities, they weren’t telling the whole story. The museum managers called on Anne Taylor and Tracey Taylor from Curve Lake Cultural Centre to fill in the gaps. Collaboration on fur trade re-enactments led to War of 1812 bicentennial events in which people from the communities of Curve Lake and Hiawatha First Nation set up a traditional encampment and took part in a full-on, guns-blazing battle recreation. However, Tracey Taylor said, “as a cultural centre, we figured it shouldn’t just be special occasions that First Nations stuff was talked about, celebrated, shared. So we started the discussions with Joe and Laurie about a permanent camp.” 

It wasn’t a new idea. When Kim Muskratt of Hiawatha First Nation visited Lang Pioneer Village as a girl, she kept hearing that the site portrayed the first people to come to the area. Why, she asked her father, weren’t their forebears depicted? “Good question,” he replied. She kept asking. “As the years went by, I would put it in the suggestion box — a little suggestion asking, where are we in this?” 

When Lang staff asked Muskratt if she was interested in helping to create a permanent Michi Saagiig presence there, “I said, ‘Ha! Somebody’s been reading my suggestions! After all these years!’” Her next words were, “I think it’s a great idea. If you’re going to tell a story, tell it truthfully. If you’re going to represent this area, then represent it truthfully.” 

Staff from Lang soon realized that, if the collaboration was going to work, they’d have to set aside calendars and expectations. “I think what really impacted me was how different we are to their way of thinking, and to their spirituality, their connection with nature. Things we take for granted in terms of scheduling and things like that are completely different from their lifestyle,” Corrigan said. 

Slowly, surely, respectfully, the plans took shape. “It was a trust that was built over the years, and now we trust each other completely,” Muskratt said. The group settled on the name Aabnaabin for the Indigenous camp within the pioneer village. The word means “looking back to where we come from.” And in the summer of 2015, beside the Fife family’s log cabin and across from the print shop, visitors saw a representation of the history that the site had been missing: a recreation of an Indigenous hunting or wild-rice-harvesting camp from the 1820s, just at the time when an influx of Irish settlers was beginning to radically alter life in the area. 

The camp includes a wigwam constructed from bent tree poles and cedar bark, lashed and bound together with wood fibres. Over the years that camp has also included a sweatlodge frame for healing and purification and a kitchen-like structure for cooking around a fire. A traditional corn pounder, drying racks, and furs are also on display. Visitors learn about how wild rice was harvested, dried, and placed in a bootaagan — a pit for “dancing” the rice to remove the hulls. Aabnaabin has two gardens — a medicinal garden and a “three sisters” garden borrowed from Haudenosaunee culture, where beans, corn, and squash are grown.

“We’re oral people, but we’ve never been able to tell our story before. To see that come alive down in Lang, it’s surreal, it’s heartwarming,’” Muskratt said. Like Duncan, she has had to explain that in her ordinary life she doesn’t live as though it’s 1820 — she is a former nurse who owns her own business and a modern house. 

Muskratt, her husband Tom Cowie, and her nephew Caleb Musgrave, along with Anne Taylor, Tracey Taylor, and others from their two communities, all volunteer at the site. The pioneer village also hires interpreters like Duncan for the summer. “I feel privileged to be able to do it,” Duncan said. “I’ve never been so immersed in my culture. I don’t have my phone out here. I don’t have any plastic out here. Every little detail, we try and keep it as realistic as possible.” 

The camp quickly became one of the village’s most popular features. “We get phone calls all the time, just to find out if there’s someone at Aabnaabin that day. It’s a big part of what people are wanting to learn right now,” said Lang Pioneer Village manager Elizabeth King.

Her counterparts at similar sites are paying attention. “We have really been museums of colonization, and we need to include the Indigenous story better,” said Rondalyn Brown, manager of Westfield Heritage Village in Hamilton. “We want to do the right thing, but it’s hard to know what that is sometimes. It’s not about us figuring out what we’re going to say about their story.” 

King said it’s important not to be paralyzed by fear of making a mistake. Lang’s Michi Saagiig partners “have always worked through things with us without being judgmental, and without being upset at us because we’ve done something wrong. Instead, they teach us what we’ve done and how it would be best to move forward. It’s been a lot of relationship building,” she said.

How did Lang succeed — albeit with bumps along the way — where so few other pioneer villages have even ventured? “One of the things we learned is not to push through — to respect First Nations perspectives. And by holding off for three or four years to make sure you got their input and their side of things, it was a better product in the end,” said Corrigan.

Aabnaabin would never have happened without money and support from band councils and from provincial and federal governments, along with the firm backing of the Peterborough County Council, Corrigan said. In a 2009 meeting, the council voted to include a permanent Indigenous presence at the site. In its 2018 master plan, the county reiterated its commitment to provide “a more equitable interpretation of the settlement and colonization of the region.” Or, as King put it: “Let’s tell what really happened, and let’s make it accessible to everyone.” 

Pioneer villages looking to emulate Lang shouldn’t expect local First Nations to place the same priority as the museums on checking off the “increase Indigenous participation” box. “We had to realize that they’re not at our beck and call,” Corrigan said, adding that Elders and knowledge keepers face overwhelming demand for their time and participation in community projects. 

Even without Indigenous participation, living-history sites can tell a more inclusive story. When he joined Lang in 2003, Corrigan said, “we were saying it all the time, that the people like [nineteenth-century British-Canadian author] Catherine Parr Traill and the original settlers owed their survival to the First Nations.” Earlier this year, Lang added a permanent indoor exhibition that looks at the intertwined stories of Irish settlers and the people upon whose homelands they settled. Non-Indigenous staff and volunteers can also point out that settlers weren’t all white farmers from the British Isles and France, said Thomas Peace. A history professor at Huron University College in London, Ontario, he also chairs the board at Fanshawe Pioneer Village. If, as he said, Lang is the model, then Fanshawe is at the stage of “tilling the field” — working with community members in hopes of including stories of Black, Oneida, and other settlers. In the meantime, “these museums have an important place in the civic infrastructure, and that is to tell Treaty history,” he said. 

Tracey Taylor said these changes will help visitors understand a critical reality — that First Peoples didn’t just disappear. “We’re still here. We’re still alive and living well, but the surrounding areas need to know our perspective and our oral histories.” 

Muskratt said that even though she and other Michi Saagiig have demanding lives and many commitments, they are eager to volunteer their time at Lang, “because it’s my people. My dad didn’t get to tell that story. My grandmother didn’t get to tell that story. I get to tell the stories they were afraid to tell. I think that’s why it means so much to me.” 

As much of an achievement as the Aabnaabin camp and exhibition are, the people who brought them into being have even bigger ideas for Lang. “I would love to see full-time Michi Saagiig staff working there, not just in the summer,” said Anne Taylor. Muskratt went further. “My dream is that every pioneer village, every settlers village across Canada and the United States, will eventually have one of these.” And if those facilities asked her what the first step is? “I’d say, go see Lang. They’ll tell you exactly where to start.”  

The Origins of Ontario's Pioneer Villages

All over Canada, there are living history sites focusing on settlers, the fur trade, military forts, and more. Pioneer villages — from the sprawling Upper Canada Village on the St. Lawrence River to the compact Kawartha Settler Village near Bobcaygeon — are especially plentiful in southern Ontario. Most came into being in the 1960s and 1970s as cities expanded and people started worrying about the fate of their communities’ early buildings. 

Many pioneer villages are on lands managed by conservation authorities. Because educational programming was already taking place there, they were seen as natural places to relocate buildings that were about to be lost to development. 

Pioneer villages have typically told “a story of progress that emphasized moving from pioneer self- sufficiency to the modern world, from simplicity to complexity,” said Alan Gordon, a professor in the University of Guelph History Department and the author of Time Travel: Tourism and the Rise of the Living History Museum in Mid-Twentieth-Century Canada. They often acknowledged the existence of Indigenous people, but only as belonging to the past. “The emphasis was on pioneering — the idea that people came to virgin lands, hewed out farms from the forests, and were self-sufficient. The process by which First Nations lost their lands was skipped over,” just as it was in schools, Gordon said. 

He added that, because pioneer villages are a collection of buildings such as the church, the hotel, the small cabin, and the fancy house, they already tell a particular story — one that, unlike a museum exhibition, can’t easily be changed. — Nancy Payne   

Through Indigenous Eyes

The jingle dancer changes everything. The 2017 short film kiskisiwin | remembering opens with peaceful scenes of barns, sheep, and neat frame houses at Black Creek Pioneer Village in North York, Ontario. Then an Indigenous woman starts dancing beside an old-time general store, jolting the viewer into realizing that such sites have long ignored stories like hers. Jesse Thistle, a Cree-Métis academic and the author of the award-winning memoir From the Ashes, remembered enjoying a school trip to Black Creek until another student told him, “This isn’t for your kind of people.” In the video’s narration, he describes re-turning as an adult university student, after reclaiming his Indigenous heritage. He said he realized, “that kid was right. The history presented here leaves my kind of people out. It paints this land as empty, wild, and untouched before settler arrival. Like Canada happened without us.” Public history, he went on to say, has to include Indigenous history. “We are the original peoples of this land, not the pioneers.” — Nancy Payne