Tired of taking the same old walks during the pandemic? Try taking a walk through Indigenous history

August 4, 2020 by Chris Sasaki - A&S News

In response to restrictions put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic, many people are re-discovering simple pleasures like baking, gardening and taking walks. And many are using various apps to turn their walks into guided cultural or historic tours.

The Driftscape app provides users with a map filled with a variety of content — from architecture to literature to LGBTQ2S+ history — which can be used to plan a themed walk.

It also includes Indigenous content, provided by First Story, an organization originally known as the Toronto Native Community History Project that is dedicated to researching and preserving the Indigenous history of Toronto and the surrounding region.

Jon Johnson, an assistant professor, teaching stream, at Woodsworth College, collects and shares Indigenous history and for years has been a part of First Story and the Toronto Native Community History Project. Mostly of French Canadian descent, Johnson has a small amount of Haudenosaunee and Kichisipirini ancestry as well. He shares this knowledge through First Story and through walking and bus tours.

“It’s very common for people to think there isn’t much Indigenous history in Toronto,” says Johnson. Quoting Indigenous activist and scholar, Rodney Bobiwash, he says his goal is to get people to see the Toronto landscape and Toronto’s history with a different set of eyes.

“If we can accomplish that,” says Johnson, “then we can come to some truly good purpose in history: to get people to acknowledge that Toronto is a territory of Indigenous presence and design going back thirteen thousand years.”

In the Driftscape app, select the “Indigenous” layer, then the “First Story” layer to see Indigenous content. Then, you’ll discover the location of the 10,000 year old footprints found during construction in 1908 but since covered in concrete and the waters of Toronto Harbour. You’ll read the story of George Armstrong, who was of Irish and Algonquin heritage, and who remains the longest serving captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs NHL hockey team. You’ll learn about efforts to restore Anishinaabemowin place names to the streets of Gichi Kiiwenging (Toronto) — and much more from thousands of years of Indigenous history.