A return to native roots

It has taken them 148 years to return home.

But Monday morning - just as dawn breaks over a field near the rocks overlooking Fairy Lake - they were to gather in a special ceremony to honour their ancestors and welcome the world to Muskoka.

The Wasauksing First Nation from Parry Island are coming, as are the Chippewa from Rama First Nation near Orillia, gathering in a unity powwow that they hope may bring some attention, perhaps even international attention from this week's G8 summit, to their remarkable and largely forgotten story.

Wasauksing Chief Shane Tabobondung wonders what world leaders such as U.S. President Barack Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy would think if they knew that the magnificent lakes and forests of this tourist playground were once the traditional grounds of one of the tribes that got shunted off to Parry Island in the years before Confederation.

It was 1850. The famous explorer, David Thompson, half-blind and impoverished, had a generation earlier taken on the final assignment of his life - another story little told - in which he paddled through this rugged countryside and reported back that it would make fine farming country once the pines were felled. The governments of the day, still reeling from rebellion, needed good land to offer settlers, and so sent William Robinson off to negotiate with the natives who had lived here long before the Europeans arrived.

Robinson struck a deal for roughly 30,000 square miles, for $8,000 and an annual payment of $240 - roughly the nightly cost of the cheapest room available at the Deerhurst Resort where the world leaders will meet.

Twelve years after they signed this treaty they could not read, the "Muskoka" natives who had been sent to a reserve on Parry Island travelled back to Obajewanung - now Port Carling - and asked surveyor John Stoughton Dennis if he would draft a petition for them that would go to Lord Monk.

They called the then governor-general "Father." They called themselves "your Red Children" and they begged for the right to return to where they had been happiest.

"We are in trouble," they had Dennis write for them. They said their "feelings have changed" about the move to this faraway island with other tribes they did not know. "This place," they said of their Muskoka, "is beautiful in our eyes, and we found we could not leave it."

They never got an answer back.

Last fall, Huntsville Mayor Claude Doughty got in touch with the two nearest first nation communities and asked if they would like to do something as part of the town's G8 celebrations.

It could easily have been taken as an insult. The summit itself did not ask. The Parry Island natives - impoverished, with high rates of unemployment, welfare and even suicide (Chief Tabobondung's brother among them) - had received none of the "legacy" money that had been spread so widely about the region.

(They do, however, have a $17-million waterworks program under way for the 19,000-acre island, a clean-water system they have needed for more than a decade, and Tabobondung is careful to point out that local MP and Industry Minister Tony Clement was helpful in acquiring the funding.)

They thought about the invitation for some time, and then agreed to come - 148 years after that 1862 letter was sent but never answered.

"I knew that we wouldn't be involved with the G8," Tabobondung said in an interview this week at the band office on Parry Island, across a single-lane bridge from Parry Sound.

"But I thought, 'This is part of our traditional country. Our ancestors are still there - we should celebrate that.'"

The 39-year-old chief says guidance came from his grandmother, Chief Flora Tabobondung, who passed away four years ago at the age of 86. Flora was a legendary figure in Canadian first nations, one of the chiefs chosen to go to England in 1982 when the Constitution was being repatriated, one who fought for aboriginal presence at the constitutional table and who subsequently was named to the Order of Canada for her work.

The current chief was largely raised by his grandmother, who secretly introduced him to sweat lodges and other ceremonies that the powerful churches of the Island frowned upon. Deeply spiritual, he believes his grandmother spoke to him during a tobacco ceremony and said he should do it and do it without anger, without accusation, without dwelling on the past.

"She was a very forgiving woman," he said.

The dawn powwow is being billed as "A celebration of native culture," but Tabobondung also sees it as a reaching out.

"We're hoping for a little attention," he said. "We have an aboriginal perspective that is based on an environmental economy rather than a monetary economy. We think it is a perspective that can have value for the world.

"It's time to move on from an economy that is centred on profit to one that is centred on the health of the world.

"We want to look upon this return as a positive, not a negative.

"The important thing is to be heard."