The Ojibwa of Southern Ontario

Randall White, a political scientist, is also a Toronto-based economic
consultant and author of Voice of Region: On the Long Journey to Senate
Reform in Canada.

The first great event in the written history of Ontario is the saga of
the Huron Confederacy, in the first half of the seventeenth century. It
has been attracting students for a long time. Yet what happened in the
region north of the Great Lakes during the much longer subsequent
period, from the middle of the seventeenth century to the end of the
American War of Independence, has remained much more mysterious.

Percy Robinson’s Toronto During the French Regime, first published in
the 1930s, was a rare full-length treatment of the subject for many
years. Now the first half of Peter Schmalz’s book on the Ojibwa does
for the Indian side of old “French and Indian Ontario” what
Robinson’s book did for the French side. Like Robinson, Schmalz is a
high-school teacher with a sophisticated avocational interest in the
historian’s craft.

Schmalz’s text is distinguished by a bold argument. He claims that,
in the late seventeenth century, it was primarily the Ojibwa, not the
French, or even the French and their Algonkian allies, who reconquered
southern Ontario from the Iroquois (who had conquered the Huron
Confederacy, and its allies, in the middle of the seventeenth century).
He buttresses the claim with evidence from oral traditions that still
survive among the Ojibwa—the dominant aboriginal group in southern
Ontario today.

Various forms of debate on this point may ensue for quite a while.
Whatever their ultimate result, Schmalz, like Robinson before him, has
written an unusually interesting book. It will engage anyone seriously
concerned with the history of Canada’s most populous province or with
the wider aboriginal history of Canada. In the second half of his
narrative, Schmalz carries the often unsettling more recent story of the
southern Ontario Ojibwa down to the present. The book appropriately
concludes with a chapter entitled “Native Issues Will Come to the
Forefront in the 1990s.” Two sections of intriguing photographs and
other illustrations are bound into the volume.