Article by J. Patrick Boyer

Anniversaries are opportunities to look back and take stock. In 2017, when Ottawa staged “Canada 150” to celebrate a century and a-half of Confederation, many pointed out that six of today’s 10 provinces and all three northern territories only became part of the country after 1867, while Indigenous Peoples protested that a scant 150 years overlooked their longer history on this land. With Bracebridge contemplating 2025 as the 150-year mark since the settlement’s 1875 incorporation as a village, it may be salutary to open a longer lens onto continuous human life here that predates even Egypt’s pyramids.

 Before Euro-Canadian settlers, Ojibwe people dwelt in settlements with planted crops and fish weirs, travelling waterways north and south between Lake Couchiching, Lake of Bays and Lake Muskoka. In Muskoka’s north, the Menominee family by Lake Vernon had stone buildings on their farm and horses from the Prairies. Along Muskoka’s Georgian Bay coast, Beausoleil Island settlements entertained summertime Indigenous wayfarers from long distances while Potawatomi people from Michigan began a mainland community in the 1830s. However, this is still just recent history.

 For uncounted generations, Indigenous artifacts across Muskoka’s landscape waited like patient time-capsules to offer clues and open deeper understanding about humans living here for millenniums.

Indigenous oral tradition – the accounts elders pass on through generations – suggested Beausoleil Island might reward those seeking news about times past. In 1989 Parks Canada’s senior archaeologist, Brian Ross, brought a team of archaeology students to launch a “dig.” Two painstaking decades later, still digging, Ross described Beausoleil as “one of the most fascinating sites in Canada” because many different cultural groups are represented by the variety of unearthed artifacts. These historically significant treasures date from millenniums before Contact.

“We’re finding material representative of both northern Ontario and southern Ontario aboriginal groups, from as far away as north of Lake Superior to Hudson’s Bay, and south to Michigan and Ohio,” Ross explained. “People have been coming here for thousands of years to swap ideas, exchange goods, probably to forge treaties and alliances, make marriages. Definitely, Beausoleil Island has been a gathering place for these people for eons.”

 Beausoleil’s packed earth, yielding to years of careful excavation, released many stone arrowheads and spearheads (“points,” to archeo-logists), stone knives, scraping tools, engraving tools, drills, axes, and adzes.

“We’ve found pendants, a great amount of pottery, and native ceramics,” Ross itemized. “There are storage vessels, cooking vessels, and miniature vessels for small amounts of precious substances. We’ve found a few pipes.” The earliest implements are stone tools, one “an incredibly beautiful chipped-quartzite knife” dating from between 7,000 to 5,000 years ago.

 In addition to those sobering dates, pottery artifacts and ceramic vessels display distinctive decorative patterns that enable archaeologists to distinguish between cultural groups. Parks Canada’s close examination of attentively crafted works pin-pointed “people who came from a laurel tradition in northern Ontario, the Saugeen complex in southern Georgian Bay, the Point Peninsula Indigenous complex farther east and south in Ontario and New York State, and people from Michigan.” Evidently, the idea of summering in Muskoka did not begin with vacationers and cottagers arriving alongside 1860s homesteaders.

 These distinct First Nation groupings, widely separated geographically, had characteristic decorative styles displayed in the various pottery designs on objects unearthed all over Beausoleil. Parks Canada discerned that some displayed combined decorative techniques.

“People from one group were integrating with another group, exchanging ideas, and trying another’s pottery designs on their own,” interpreted Ross. “We see traits from one culture intermixed with another’s on the same vessel, so it’s definitely transitional. This exchange and interaction of ideas confirms there were distinctly different peoples gathering on Beausoleil Island.” Again, Muskoka as a crossroads of cultures for the last 150 years with hinterland values and urban expectations continuously mashing-up, is also nothing new.

 First Nation artifacts revealing Muskoka’s human heritage extend inland from Georgian Bay Township. Eileen Gowan in Lake Muskoka had First Nation artifacts embedded along the island’s shoreline, including a tobacco pipe and various stone points. Jennifer Sumner, teaching the community development program at OISE/University of Toronto, photographed findings near her cabin and sent them to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto to arrange an appointment with Dr. Mima Kapches, senior curator of Ontario Archaeology.  A Muskoka cottager herself, Dr. Kapches became so intrigued she drove over from Bala in her own boat to investigate the exact location of Sumner’s Eileen Gowan finds. She identified the pipe as an Iroquoian ring bowl pipe, circa 1,500 AD, believing it either a gift or traded item. A large spearhead was a Lamoka-type point dating from 2,000 to 1,800 BC; the sharply edged blade a stone tool for precise cutting of animal hides. When Sumner showed Kapches a 2½ inch arrowhead, she confirmed it far older than the other items, dating from around 3,000 BC.

“This can mean people have been summering on this island for over 5,000 years,” Sumner said in humble awe. “We are just part of a long line of humans who have chosen to live on this island during summer months.”

On Lake Muskoka’s Gairney Island, Toronto lawyer Donald Wright was puzzled by a smooth stone a couple feet wide resembling a board embedded in the shoreline embankment like a step. His wife Mary, also intrigued, took it to the Royal Ontario Museum’s “bring it in and we’ll take a look” identification service for peoples’ archaeological discoveries. The Gairney Island stone, not of local material, likely originated in Michigan, with staff hypothesizing it had been traded or gifted.

In 2014, Huntsville teacher Shelley Yearley began researching her 2019 history of the family’s generations-old Springfield Farm at Fairy Lake, consulting specialists Bill Allen and Dick Day about Aboriginal stone-cutting tools, pounding tools, arrowheads, and spearheads retrieved over decades past. Allen photographed and measured each while Day addressed their provenance. None came from decades of extensive clearing and ploughing fields but were unearthed near the farm beach. Research on watery areas indicated a likely presence of eels in the creek draining the property that drew food-seeking Indigenous People.

 Fascinating evidence of First Nation presence in south Muskoka is a Sparrow Lake petroglyph. To the north in today’s Parry Sound District, similar images on sheer rock faces at lake edges provide tantalizing Indigenous records. Southeast from Sparrow Lake, Peterborough Petroglyphs display several hundred images on the white marble face of an outcrop. Parks Canada erected a plaque celebrating “one of the largest known concentrations of prehistoric rock carvings in Canada.” They range from realistic animal and human forms to abstract and symbolic representations which, notes Parks Canada, reflect “the spiritual and intellectual life of the Algonkian Indians who carved them between AD 900 and 1400.” To settler society, these petroglyphs are a fascinating heritage site; to Indigenous peoples, a sacred place.

Radiocarbon dating developed after the Second World War enables scientists to identify eras of Indigenous habitation by identifying when and in what regions specific, yet diverse cultural remnants originated, science-based detective work establishing both era and origin of Muskoka artifacts.

 Muskoka’s Master Plan for Archaeological Resources, a thorough and comprehensive record prepared in 1994, identifies markers of significant First Nation presence over past centuries by specifically listing cultural artifacts, areas of cleared land, cemeteries, and extensive points collection locations.

 To learn more from such heritage markers, it helps to examine “Greater Muskoka” – the contiguous Canadian Shield landscape known to First Nations before Ontario’s government drew arbitrary mid-1800s boundaries between Muskoka, Parry Sound, Haliburton, Simcoe, and Georgian Bay’s coast. This larger territorial unity’s range of spearheads, stone pipes, rockface designs, and sculpted landforms enables correlating artifacts and better establishing patterns of human habitations and activities through time.

 For example, Indigenous artifacts come to hand through accidental discovery by children digging, farmers plowing fields, contractors excavating construction sites, tips from oral history, and organized archeological digs. Down Lake Huron’s shore from Georgian Bay Township at Wiiwkwedong (Kettle Point First Nation), Ontario’s first Indigenous archaeologist, Brandy George, was guided to her work by growing up walking behind her grandfather Mishoomis when he plowed a field following a rainfall knowing she would find freshly unearthed arrowheads in the furrows.

“It was exhilarating to witness the first flash of sunlight announce the emergence of an ancient arrowhead hidden underground for more than 10,000 years.” Mishoomis had repeatedly told her, “Our people had been here since time immemorial.” It was something her scientific study of ancient arrowheads now confirmed. Peter Storck, an archaeologist and senior curator at the Royal Ontario Museum, shows that the flint trade extensively influenced social interaction between early peoples. The types of imported flint, or chert, in a given area “reveal information about how Indigenous groups travelled and traded,” explains Storck, “and the kinds of social relationships they had with other groups.”

Counterpoint to the Beausoleil Island dig in Muskoka’s southwest is the 1979-80 Greaves Site excavation in the district’s northeast, near Dorset, just over the Haliburton line in Livingston Township. Carmen Greaves, a summer cottager at Kawagama Lake began digging for an addition. For years locals were finding fragments of ceramic bowls and stone points, keeping or discarding them as they fancied. Greaves discovered cached remnants right beside her cottage. Attending the 1979 Sportsmen’s Show in Toronto, she studied Ontario Ministry of Culture displays and realized she potentially had a significant First Nation site on her northern property and contacted the ministry’s Roberta M. O’Brien who promptly directed site testing in June of an archeological site threatened by cottage extension. Greaves and neighbour Bill Tyes, owner of adjoining property, agreed to large-scale testing to determine the extent and nature of Indigenous occupation.

Two students on O’Brien’s archeological team, surveying north of Kawagama, located seven more sites at lakes Crown, Wolf, Livingston, and Fletcher. Greaves own site bore results of flooding after 1867 when dams raised water levels and disturbed shoreline profiles, impacts of logging white pine, bush-farmer cattle foraging, access road construction, erection of cottages and outbuildings, and footpaths to the shore.

Yet these sites yielded ceramics establishing visits during the Late Woodland times, and also earlier in the Middle Woodland era (between 700 BC to 1,000 AD.) Artifacts recovered include pottery vessels with charred food remains indicating use in cooking, a vasiform (hollow tube) pipe bowl made between 1350 and 1575 AD, and a decorated trumpet pipe bowl fashioned sometime during the 14th to 17th centuries. Stone tool manufacturing was indicated by chipped remnants scattered on the ground.

The pottery was crafted in the fashion of Point Peninsula people, who J.V. Wright explains in Ontario Prehistory: An 11,000-year Archeological Outline, “continued to maintain the seasonal migratory lifestyle of their earlier Laurentian People ancestors, returning to small campsites [like the Greaves Site] from year to year.” Algonkians traded with visiting parties of Iroquoian-speaking people bringing corn and fish nets to exchange for furs and meat.

Dorset Heritage Museum holdings include artifacts, photographs, Ministry reports on the Greaves and Kawagama digs, and specimens in display cases. Muskoka Lakes Museum in Port Carling, former site of the Ojibwe settlement Obajewanung, has the largest holdings of points in the district and information panels accompanying many other artefacts. A 7,000-year-old lanceolate (a narrow, jagged-edged point tapering like the head of a lance) used by Indigenous people of north Muskoka to hunt large animals is the oldest and much-prized artifact in the Indigenous collection of Huntsville’s superbly curated Muskoka Heritage Place.

 In 1967 when 100 years of Confederation were celebrated, a 30-metre-high teepee at Expo ’67 in Montreal refreshingly showcased First Nation culture with Indigenous Peoples of Canada presenting their own story. Today Gravenhurst’s Muskoka Discovery Centre features its new Misko-Aki exhibit Confluence of Cultures that carries forward the Expo inspiration, portraying artifact meanings in the fulsome richness of Indigenous history, as told by First Nation communities of Greater Muskoka themselves.

 In today’s Muskoka, that unique story increasingly enters mainstream society, helped by artifacts from soil beneath our feet opening the past, revealing confluence of cultures, bringing a richer story, and bequeathing deeper respect.