Celebrating Indigenous History Month: Asking the right questions

CONNOR LUCZKA Local Journalism Initiative Reporter crluczka@midwesternnewspapers.com

TREATY 45 ½ – June is National Indigenous History Month, a time of reflection and learning, but the local history concerning Indigenous People surrounding Listowel is not well documented or well known.

The reason for that gap is complicated and multi-faceted, but it can be found and understood.

Before the arrival of Europeans, the Saugeen Ojibway Nation (SON) occupied two million acres from what is now the town of Arthur to Lake Huron and north to Georgian Bay. The land spread across the region and surrounded the Maitland River and what would become the town of Listowel. In 1836, The Saugeen Treaty no. 45 ½ opened 1.5 million acres (everything below the peninsula from Southampton to Owen Sound) “in exchange for economic assistance and protection from settler encroachment ‘…upon which proper houses shall be built for you, and proper assistance given to enable you to become civilized and to cultivate land, which you Great Father engages for ever to protect for you from the encroachments of the whites,’” according to the Saugeen Ojibway Nation Environment Office. Listowel would later incorporate 39 years later in 1875.

The history of the region is complex and starts not here in Treaty 45 ½ but in Niagara, according to Randall Kahgee. Kahgee is a lawyer at Olthuis Kleer Townshend LLP. He is also a former chief of Saugeen First Nation.

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