Gatineau shoreline tells Canada's story and should be a National Historic Site
Randy Boswell, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: December 18, 2015 | Last Updated: December 18, 2015 11:16 AM EST
In terms of world history, we typically think of Canada’s capital as a young city in a relatively new country, a nation poised to celebrate just its 150th birthday in 2017. Compared to Quebec City, say, which marked its 400th anniversary in 2008, or 2,000-year-old London, England, Ottawa-Gatineau has seemed like a babe in the woods, a pioneer lumber village founded barely 200 years ago in the midst of the Ottawa Valley’s white pine forest.
But a new, old story about the history of the place has recently come into focus, and it speaks to the great antiquity and significance of the prehistoric human presence around the confluence of the Ottawa, Gatineau and Rideau rivers. Perhaps, if the tendency towards forgetting Canada’s aboriginal past had not been such a prominent feature of national storytelling in our history, this story would have become well known much sooner.
The story also shines a spotlight on a prominent piece of land in the capital that should be designated a National Historic Site — not only because new research proves it was profoundly important in the aboriginal history of the Ottawa Valley, but also because its uses and transformation over the centuries, including the 21st, tell the story of Canada like few other places in the country.
The place in question, situated on the Gatineau shore directly across the Ottawa River from Parliament Hill, became known in the 19th century as “Hull Landing.” Today, it encompasses the site of the Canadian Museum of History and adjacent riverside properties owned by the National Capital Commission.
We now know, after more than a century of uncertainty, that there was once a large, complex and ancient indigenous burial ground there, at the very centre of what became Canada’s capital city.
We also know that this sacred site — so close to the thundering waterfall that punctuated the landscape for millennia before lumber mills and hydro dams obscured its magnificence — began receiving the remains of the dead some 5,000 years ago. That’s several lifetimes before the oldest and most renowned of the Great Pyramids of Egypt entombed the Pharaoh Khufu, circa 2,560 BC.
This site is only now understood to have been used by countless generations of First Peoples over thousands of years. It held evidence of at least three distinct burial practices (communal, cremation and individual, including a purported “chief of gigantic stature”), attesting to its continued and evolving use over a great span of time.
The newly confirmed location of this cemetery, a natural canoe landing that marked one end of a well-worn portage route around Chaudière Falls, only deepens the symbolic significance of that great cataract, an enduringly important spiritual site for First Nations and a natural wonder seen as second only to Niagara Falls by early European explorers.
The full story of this ancient burying ground has only emerged with the recent discovery of a few long-overlooked 19th-century newspaper articles, including ones published in the Ottawa Citizen and Toronto’s Globe in July 1860.
But the place where the burial ground existed for millennia has a rich history quite apart from that ancient use. Just as this shoreline locale had served for so long as a key carrying place for aboriginal travellers, it provided contact-era explorers — almost certainly including Samuel de Champlain in 1613, on his way to and from meeting the great Algonquin chief Tessouat farther up the Valley — a stopping point to rest, camp and portage around the turbulent Chaudière.
During the early 1800s, when fledgling Bytown (future Ottawa) and older Wrightstown (future Hull, later Gatineau) were growing up around the headlocks of the Rideau Canal, the old portage site on the opposite shore — then owned by the region’s original settler, Philemon Wright — became the north-side terminus of a ferry connecting the two communities, as well as Upper and Lower Canada.
It was home, as well, to precursors of today’s thriving Ottawa-Gatineau tourism industry, boasting an inn (Bédard’s Hotel) and public house (King’s Tavern) in the mid-1800s. Then came a steamship dock, where passengers from Montreal and around the world disembarked when visiting the country’s new capital.
During the era when the Ottawa antiquarian Dr. Edward Van Cortlandt twice investigated the burial ground (in 1843 and 1860), the place he knew as Hull Landing was being exploited as a supply of sand for major public works projects.
While workers were excavating sand there in 1843 to build the nearby Union Suspension Bridge — the first permanent link between English and French Canada, a span of which still exists today — Van Cortlandt was alerted to a common grave containing about 20 sets of ancient human remains.
And it was in the summer of 1860 — when Hull Landing sand was being used for mortar to bind the stone blocks of the new Parliament Buildings — that Van Cortland was again called upon to collect prehistoric human bones being churned up by a work crew. This fact is the basis of a chilling possibility: that fragments of the skeletal remains encountered by those workers remain encased in some of the outer walls of East Block and West Block.
Around the same time, additional traces of aboriginal activity — pottery shards, arrow heads, tools — were being unearthed at Hull Landing.
As the industrial era took hold in the burgeoning capital, the landing was taken over by a major sawmill operation and then a sprawling pulp-mill complex — the famous E.B. Eddy paper plant — that symbolized the strength of Ottawa-Hull’s economy but also the degradation of its once-pristine environment.
After more than a century as a hub of industry, this riverside property was purchased by the federal government in 1972. It was then cleared of its unsightly pulp-and-paper trappings, save a single “digester” tower that stands today as a relic of Ottawa-Gatineau’s industrial heritage.
That tower now looms over the latest occupant of the old burial ground and boat landing: astoundingly, given the storied past of this patch of earth, the Canadian Museum of History.
It’s a coincidence almost too bizarre to believe, but Canada’s No. 1 cultural tourist attraction — a showcase of aboriginal heritage and a nationally important centre for archaeological scholarship, including a major research collection of human remains — is now located on the same stretch of Ottawa River shoreline where ancient aboriginals buried their dead 3,000 years before the birth of Christ.
In May 1983, after this parcel of land had been named the site of Canada’s new history museum, then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau (wearing a buckskin jacket and eagle feather to honour the fur-trade voyageurs) paddled from the foot of Parliament Hill to old Hull Landing to launch archaeological work.
No one knew, at that time, that experts were digging into the site of a 5,000-year-old indigenous burial ground. The archaeologists found only the stone remnants of a 19th-century lumber mill and other traces of life from that relatively recent time.
Something else the museum builders didn’t know: the bones and other objects Van Cortlandt had dug up at Hull Landing would go on to play cameo roles in Ottawa’s quest to become Canada’s capital, in the very origins of Canada’s first public museums, and in the earliest inklings of unease about disturbing aboriginal burial grounds — a 19th-century disquietude that foreshadowed today’s repatriation movement.
Today, the land encompassing this rediscovered burial place — a tiny portion of the region’s vast, unceded Algonquin territory — is controlled by the national institution most concerned with showcasing our collective past and the federal agency responsible for preserving and promoting the cultural heritage of Ottawa-Gatineau.
It’s hard to imagine a more advantageous scenario for the proper commemoration of an ancient archaeological site, one older than the Great Pyramid of Giza, in the heart of Canada’s capital.
A National Historic Site? At the very least.
But perhaps it warrants even more attention as part of the ambitious riverfront redevelopment now unfolding in the capital’s urban core. Nearby, Windmill Development’s real estate megaproject around the Chaudière Falls — named Zibi, the Algonquin word for river — promises to honour the region’s First Peoples, past and present. It has also deeply divided Ottawa-area aboriginal groups, some of which favour the creation of a sprawling indigenous spiritual, cultural and political complex encompassing Victoria Island, the Chaudière Falls and adjacent isles.
Meanwhile, the NCC continues its efforts to “animate” the capital’s shoreline lands, including LeBreton Flats and parts of old Hull Landing. And the Canadian Museum of History, its ongoing $25-million rebranding and reconstruction hailed as the country’s flagship project for the upcoming 150th birthday bash, is poised to unveil its reimagined Canadian History Hall in 2017.
Could these projects not somehow embrace the story of the lost-and-found burial site and the ancient culture that once thrived between the Falls and the Gatineau River delta?
As it happens, an industrial property immediately west of the museum — a portion of which was likely part of the ancient burial ground — is now also owned by the NCC. It’s due to be reclaimed as a national ceremonial space when the lease of the present occupant — the Kruger paper company — expires in 2028.
Perhaps at that location, which also offers a commanding view of Canada’s national legislature across the river, there is room for a more expansive commemoration of the country’s ancient indigenous heritage, or for other projects celebrating this century’s cultural and political renaissance of Aboriginal Canada — right where the very earliest inhabitants of the future capital, in their own Valley of the Kings, left an indelible mark on the land.
Randy Boswell is a professor of journalism at Carleton University. Boswell and Jean-Luc Pilon, an archaeologist at the Canadian Museum of History and adjunct professor at Carleton, have published two co-authored studies about the ancient aboriginal burial ground in the latest issue of the Canadian Journal of Archaeology.
http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news...y-and-should-be-a-national-historic-site
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