Remember who was here first

To know the past is to understand the present and build a better future.

With this in mind, it’s heartening to witness the growing public commitment to preserve and promote the history of Waterloo Region.

The regional government has high hopes for expanding the grounds of Schneider Haus — which at the age of 201 is Kitchener’s oldest residence.

Last week Kitchener’s planning department approved spending $450,000 to save and move a 156-year-old stone farmhouse in the city’s southwest corner.

Meanwhile, the six-year-old Waterloo Region Museum is the biggest, and likely the best, community museum in Ontario.

And across the region, old industrial buildings are being spared from the wrecker’s ball and reclaimed for people to live or work in.

This represents incredible progress from the bad old days when we ignored, tore down or paved over our heritage.

Learning and seeing our history tells us who we are and encourages a shared sense of community.

But as we celebrate this past with new vigour, we should do a better job remembering that the human history of this area began long before the first Mennonite settlers arrived in the early 1800s. We need to remember Indigenous people were here first. To be fair, a greater effort is being made today than even a decade ago to tell the community about this important part of its history.

The Waterloo Region Museum deserves applause for showcasing in its main gallery First Nations artifacts and tracing a history of local Indigenous communities that go back 12,000 years. There is such a rich and ancient story to be told here. It’s not all happy nor will everyone agree on all of it. But it needs to be heard. While this area was long the territory of the Mississauga, in the late 18th century it became part of the Grand River Valley tract granted by the British to the Six Nations.

Later, Six Nations leader Joseph Brant sold sections of this tract to nonindigenous settlers.

From time to time, physical evidence of Indigenous people, quite literally, comes to light. A substantial, centuries-old longhouse was excavated many years ago in Wilmot Township.

What is now Kitchener’s Victoria Park was once a Mississauga winter campground, a fact highlighted in a public walk earlier this year.

While the growing awareness of this part of our past is welcome, there’s more for the community to do.

There is an urgent need for people in Waterloo Region to learn more about First Nations history in this part of Ontario.

Perhaps the regional government, working with the two local universities, could create resources to do this.

More tangible signs that reflect the historic Indigenous presence in the region would be appropriate, too.

As a starting point, why not erect more historical plaques or a statue?

Getting this history project underway soon would be especially worthwhile in this, Canada’s 150th birthday year.

This is a time to forge stronger bonds between the Indigenous and nonindigenous inhabitants of this land.

A new telling of what is so old should be part of this process.