Humber River

While it is seen within colonial settler’s society as a mute source of wealth and production to be claimed and ravaged, land within native epistemologies is seen as “mnemonic, it has its own set of memories” (Wheeler quoted by Byrd, 118). This understanding of the land imbues geography with meaning, turning physical space into a way of representing relationships, not only between individuals and the land, but also between the individuals occupying space and those individuals to come before them. It is easy to imagine how this concept is problematic for the colonial project, particularly how this would interrupt the indigenizing process of colonization described by Morgensen (144), and reveal the colonizers’ right to land and rule as carefully and purposefully constructed. The historic value of sites such as the Humber River hold the power to trigger these sacred memories and to bring into light not only the injustice of colonial practices but of the erred logics and processes which enabled and continue to enable this injustice.

Records of the Humber River’s long history of inhabitance date back as far as 10,000 B.C. The convenience of the waterway inland as well as the abundance of game and salmon made this location desirable (CHRS). Several native nations traversed this area including the Neutral, Seneca, Cayuga, Mohawk and Wendat. Later, in 18th century the Mississauga nation took control of the region. Along the Humber’s bank runs the Toronto Carrying-Place Trail, also known as the Humber Portage, which was well travelled in the Woodland period of inhabitance, but which also became crucial to the trade, exploration and missionary work in the region (CHRS). French explorer Etienne Brule was the first European to explore the region surrounding the river in 1615 (Levinson) and until approximately 1793, the French occupied the region, developing relationships with the Natives who lived there. A small French Fort Rouille was the first constructed on the river. As early as the 1660s, the Seneca villages of Teiaiagon and Ganetsakwyagon along the Humber were recorded as trading with French settlers (Freeman, 46), and missionaries including Jean de Brebeuf are known to have occupied this region. It is particularly relevant to the history of European settlement of Toronto as it is along the Humber that the first permanent European settlements were established by the British under control of Simcoe in 1793. It is Simcoe who gave the river the name “Humber” which it still carries today instead of its Mississauga name, “Cobechenonk” which means “leave the canoes and go back” (German).

In far more recent history, the urbanization of the land surrounding the Humber has caused great ecological devastation surrounding the river. Though the environmental degradation of such a significant part of history is a tragedy in and of itself, the effects of this degradation came to the public consciousness in the wake of Hurricane which touched down in October of 1954. Following the loss of homes and lives in this storm, the Toronto Regional Conservation Authority was formed which worked to prevent further development (Levinson). It was not until 1999 that the river was named a heritage river, and even this title did not provide it with any additional protection once the Navigable Waters Protection Act imposed in 1882 was amended to the Navigation Protection Act in 2012, which restricts the number of rivers and waterways which require federal approval for development, endangering the waterways (Levinson).

In this brief history of European settlement of the Humber River one can find evidence of colonial logic and processes that work to naturalize the settlers’ presence on land that is not their own. The renaming practice and the presence of missionaries underlie the settler colonial structure in a way that not only subjects the land to the “thingification” of colonization (Smith, 12) but which can also be read on the people who inhabited the land and their bodies. In the choice to rename the river Humber River there is an interesting politic of language that emerges, one that demonstrates Andrea Smith’s claim that native bodies and “by extension, that Native lands are inherently violable” (12). This is not merely a matter of changing the name on a map but of imposing on to this land, through allusion to the Humber estuary in England, the language, history and sovereignty of Britain. On to this “terra nullius” that has been occupied for thousands of years without being owned (Freeman, 51) they have imported a very European presence and culture. This land is less of a distinct, untamed place but rather a continuation of the glorious monarchy already established in Britain. Not only is this a means of silencing the land and its history so that the settler can better assert indigeneity, but it reveals the ownership of land as predicated on the ‘appropriate; use of the land, as the Native nations were not seen as its “owners” because their relationship with the land was not one inextricably linked with accumulation of wealth, power and capital. In this renaming, European principles are established and held up as “civilization” in this foreign land and the subsequent use, abuse and settlement of that land is simply understood as the “consummation” (Wolfe, 393) of that land’s ‘discovery’.

This perceived dominance of the land does not end with the land, however. As mentioned before, space is a crucial to the understanding of relationships. The gendered relationship which the settlers shared with the Humber River and the land surrounding it, one that asserts the masculinity and competence of the White settler while simultaneously proving the feminine passiveness and malleability of the new fertile land to be conquered, is one that is reflected in the settler’s understanding of the land’s native inhabitants. This similar relationship can be found in the naming of what is now known as the Mississauga nation, as Margaret Sault, a director of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation states that the very name Mississauga is a colonial word, “Ojibway, Chippewa – it’s what the Dutch, the British or the French called us. We’re Anishnabe”(German). In this case, the settlers not only used language to make assertions of dominance over the land, but using the same logic asserted dominance over the Anishinaabek people, so much so that the nation assumed the name of ‘Mississauga’ for themselves. The same expectation of malleability of the land is seen here in its inhabitants. Further, the renaming of the river to Humber illustrates the expected submissiveness of the people as it actively ignores the sovereign nations which lived on and cultivated that environment. In this there is the inherent assumption that the native sovereignties were not of the same calibre and power as that of Britain and that their long history and deep connection with the land was not to be compared with British rule, and thus were easily delegitimized as governing bodies.

The presence of missionaries in this region is also significant in identifying the colonial process as the desire to bring Christianity to this new land was not only a means of civilizing people but a means of control and of Western dominance. The monotheistic religion which demands adherence to formal laws of a strict, all knowing and all powerful god was the perfect institution through which to naturalize the hierarchy and obedience expected of the European monarch and, by extension, the settler society. This is comparable and perhaps complementary to the process describe by Andrea Smith in writing, “to colonize a people whose society was not hierarchical, colonizers must first naturalize hierarchy through instituting patriarchy” (23). Further, the institution of Christianity in the traditionally polytheistic land is evidence of settler colonization’s performance of “the West’s potential universality” described by Morgensen (13). Just as heteropatriarchy was indigenized to “prove their own premise that the totality of human life can conform to [it]” (13), the acceptance of Christianity, a religion so radically different to the natives of that land, would lend legitimacy not only the settler colonial project of “civilization” but to the “land’s capacity to represent [the colonizers] and their way of life”(Morgensen, 13).

Discussion surrounding the relationship between land and colonialism is the ideal context within which to discuss the Humber River. The terrible flooding and tragedy that Hurricane Hazel caused can be understood as a direct result of the area’s colonial settlers need to consume. The development which encroached on floodplains and watersheds of the Humber is just one example of environmental degradation for the sake of “progress” and economic gain. This is similar to the account of Yanomami offers of Enlightenment in Discovering White People, “[white people] said we are the only people to be so ingenious, only we know how to produce machines and merchandise...and they never stopped to ask: “If we destroy the earth, will we be able to create another one?” (quoted by Stam and Shohat, 11). This inverts the idea of settler ingenuity and enterprise, and hints at the limitation of the earth and, consequently, to the settler’s practice of constant production and consumption, especially when compared to the sustainable, respectful relationship to the land that the native people shared for thousands of years. Perhaps the less obvious critique of this environmental destruction is the manner in which opposing attempts to protect the land is framed as “patrimony” (Morgensen, 14) and as a tool of indigenization by which “qualities of indigeneity are absorbed to represent the settler nation”(14). The very word “patrimony” evokes the masculine, patriarchal structures that settler nations introduced to instill their own sense of order, and furthers the notion that the settler has inherited the land, that it is their birth right. Protection of the land is not here framed within a relationship with the land but within the notion of possession and indigenized settler heritage, suggesting a natural link between the settler and the land where none exists.

As a resident of Woodbridge, an employee of Etobicoke and a student of Toronto, the history and geography of this land alter the manner in which I imagine almost every trip and every destination of my day to day life. Taking into consideration post colonialism’s demand that “settler, native, and arrivant each acknowledge their own position within empire and then reconceptualize space and history to make visible what imperialism has sought to obscure” (Byrd, xxx, ), I am forced to acknowledge that I am differently situated to the land than I had imagined. Not only am I personally unsettled by this new situation as an arrivant, it also allows me to imagine spatially my relationship with both native and settler cultures. This calls to mind the way in which I am complicit in settler colonialism by living, working and profiting from settled land and the way I am inherently implicated in the dispossession of native lands. The route I travel to work (in order to get to my destination, ironically named Castle Honda), is no longer silent, but the sign I pass simply stating “Humber River” puts myself and the present in conversation with the native and colonial histories in which these lands played such a huge role. Finally, the consideration of Hurricane Hazel not only draws my attention to the ways in which my habits of consumption affect the health of the land and its people, but complicates the ways that I consider the “natural heritage” of Canada and how one can respectfully and responsibly approach the issue of environmental degradation as an arrivant to this country. Ultimately, these histories have succeeded in haunting my day to day disrupting, as Amber Dean describes, my notions of the past and present and forcing me to consider “the past’s claims on the present [and the] past’s ongoing presence in the present state” (Deam, 115)

Works Cited

Stam, R. & Shohat, E. “The Atlantic Enlightenment.” Race in Translation: Culture Wars Around the Postcolonial Atlantic (2012): 1-25, 301-304. Print.

Byrd, J. “Preface” and “Introduction: Indigenous Critical Theory and the Diminishing Returns of Civilization.” The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (2011): xi-xxxix, 235-239. Print.

Wolfe, P. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8(4), (2006): 387-409. Print.

Byrd, J. “Been to the Nation, Lord, But I Couldn’t Stay There. Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (2011): 117-146. Print.

Smith, A. “Sexual Violence as a Tool of Genocide.” Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide in Canada (2005): 7-33, 193-199.

Morgensen, S. “Theorising Gender, Sexuality and Settler Colonialism: An Introduction.” Settler Colonial Studies, 2.2 (2012): 2-22. Print

Dean, A. “Space, Temporality, History: Encouraging Hauntings in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside” The West and Beyond: New Perspectives on an Imagined Region. (2010): 113-132. Print.

German, M. “Whose land? The displacement of the Mississauga has left Toronto with Major Cultural Deficit.” Wayne Roberts, 2 Oct, 2013. Web. 4 Nov 2013.

Levinson, R. “Toronto’s Humber River: A Canadian Heritage River Worth Protecting.” The Star, 12 Aug 2013. Web. 2 Nov 2013.

“Humber River.” The Canadian Heritage Rivers System, 2011. Web. 2 Nov 2013.

Freeman, Victoria Jane. “Toronto Has No History! Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism and Historical Memory in Canada's Large

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