The name Conestogo (or “Conestoga”) of our village in southwestern Ontario derives from a location in Lancaster County Pennsylvania located in the southeastern part of that state. This name was transplanted from Pennsylvania to the Waterloo region of Ontario because many of the original settlers of the Waterloo area came from Lancaster Country. Conestoga in
If you’ve followed the career of comedian Steve Martin you’ll remember some of those early stints where he would fire off a mean riff on his banjo. Well SM has been touring his banjo talents over the summer. The gig mentioned below (in Montreal) is long over, but he recently appeared on the CBC Radio
I am currently doing some research into the history of the Grand River land grants made to the Six Nations after the U.S. Revolutionary War. The village of Conestogo sits on these lands – not to mention many of the cities and towns up and down the Grand River Valley: Kitchener, Cambridge, Brantford, Elora, Fergus,
In this interview author Charles C. Mann discusses some of the “myths” about North American pre-history that he exposes in his recent book, 1491: New Revelations of the Native Americans Before Columbus. Disclose.tv – 1491: Interview w/ Charles C. Mann Video Some of the more important assumptions challenged by the “revelations” in the book are
The “Iron Bridge” is a single lane bridge spanning the Conestogo River about a half kilometer up stream from where the Conestogo meets the Grand River. I’m sure there is a history of this bridge somewhere, but I wasn’t able to find it. The Township of Woolwich has been pretty non-committal about keeping it in
One of the most celebrated encounters in the late 1800s between the U.S. Cavalry and a band of Indians was also the last. So typical of the “Indian Wars” of the late 1800s, this one was between the army of the U.S. authorities charged with managing the settlement of the west, and a band of
One of the enduring myths about life in the Americas before it was “discovered” by Europeans is that the entire “new world” was sparsely populated by nomadic tribes of simple-minded hunters and gatherers. This myth holds that these people had no permanent attachment to any specific piece of land, they did not live in permanent
My primary objective in the first few posts in this series is to explore how Canadian natives changed from being autonomous self-governing people to becoming subjects of the British crown? This change in status is extremely important. By the time of Confederation (1867) natives – at least in Eastern Canada – were no longer free
As I suggested in a previous post, the Indian Residential School issue in Canada is a fairly good focus for a discussion of what went wrong with the dominant white culture’s relationsihp with Canadian natives. While the Residential School issue really belongs to the previous two or three generations of Canadians, the problems that school
In this series of posts I consider some of the historical, political, anthropological and philosophical background to Canadian “native” issues. Along the way I touch on some interesting things I have recently (and not so recently) discovered about the native Indian presence in Canada. (Note: I use the term “native” to cover those people normally
