Acknowledgement

“The GTHA sits on Indigenous lands of the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Wendat, the Métis, and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. The land we live and work on is occupied through an ongoing colonial encounter. It is our collective responsibility as settlers on or visitors to this land to recognize how colonial institutional systems of power have and continue to oppress Indigenous peoples.”

The Land Beneath Hamilton

The land beneath Hamilton has been home to human life for over 10,000 years (City of Hamilton, 2021). Long before the word “Hamilton” was spoken here, these territories were shaped by the Neutral Nation (Attawandaron), whose settlements extended across the Niagara Peninsula and who numbered approximately 40,000 people at the time of first European contact in the early 1600s (Redeemer University, 2023). Within a single generation, European-introduced disease reduced that population to roughly 12,000 by 1641, before the Haudenosaunee wars of the 1650s dispersed them entirely. After the dispersal of the Neutral Nation, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora) maintained stewardship of this land, followed by the Mississaugas, an Anishinaabe people who established themselves here through the early 18th century (City of Hamilton, 2021).

The Dish With One Spoon

The land is covered by the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, formalized between the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee at the Great Peace of Montréal in 1701 (Borrows, 1997). The Dish represents the shared land and the abundance it sustains. The single Spoon is a teaching: take only what you need, leave enough for others, and care for the dish so it is never empty (Great Lakes Commons, 2016). This is not a historical relic. It is a living covenant that binds all who live, work, and speculate on this land today (Borrows, 1997; Hill, 2017).

Treaty No. 3: Between the Lakes Purchase (1784, confirmed 1792)

The land is also covered by the Between the Lakes Purchase (Treaty No. 3, originally negotiated 1784, confirmed 1792), agreed between the Crown and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation over approximately 3 million acres across what is now southern Ontario. The Mississaugas of the Credit have articulated their own vision for this territory: a nation defined by strong, caring, and connected membership that “respects the earth’s gifts and protects the environment for future generations” (Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, 2023). These treaties are not completed transactions. They are living relationships with ongoing obligations (Hamilton Civic Museums, 2022). In March 2026, Canada and Ontario reached a $183.4 million settlement with the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation over the Rouge River Valley Tract Claim, acknowledging that the original land surrenders were improperly made and inadequately compensated (Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, 2026). As Chief Claire Sault has stated plainly: “Everybody benefited but us” (as cited in CBC News, 2025). The settlement is a step. It is not an ending.

Hamilton’s industrial rise made it Canada’s steel capital by the mid-20th century, producing 60% of the nation’s steel at its peak (Cruikshank & Blyth, 2020). That rise was built upon this land, once a living ecosystem sustaining Indigenous communities through fishing, ceremony, and relationship. Hamilton Harbour was identified as a Great Lakes Area of Concern in 1985, formalized in the 1987 Protocol to the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, due to contamination from over a century of heavy industry (ECCC, 2023). The Randle Reef remediation project, with Stage 2 completed in 2022 at a cost of $138.9 million, contained 60,000 cubic metres of contaminated sediment, a material archive of what extraction without reciprocity produces (ECCC, 2022).

Truth and Reconciliation

Across Canada, Truth and Reconciliation is not a past event. It is an ongoing obligation. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s (2015) 94 Calls to Action name what must change. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (2021), adopted into Canadian law, affirms the rights of Indigenous peoples to their lands, territories, resources, and the conservation of their environments (Government of Canada, 2021). The distance between these commitments and the lived reality of Indigenous communities remains a wound that Canadian society has not yet closed. Hamilton’s own Truth and Reconciliation commitments (Indigenous consultation protocols, land acknowledgements at civic events, cultural programming) are beginnings, not conclusions (City of Hamilton, 2021).

Indigenous Knowledge and Climate

Globally, Indigenous peoples represent approximately six percent of the world’s population, yet they steward the lands that hold eighty percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity (UNEP-WCMC, 2023). This is not coincidence. It is the consequence of millennia of knowledge, care, and right relationship with living systems: knowledge encoded in the Dish With One Spoon teaching, in the Haudenosaunee principle of thinking seven generations forward, and in land stewardship practices that kept ecosystems productive and resilient across continents (Hill, 2017; Indigenous Climate Hub, 2025). The United Nations Development Programme (2024) and the Convention on Biological Diversity now formally recognize Indigenous knowledge as integral to addressing climate change.

The futures imagined in this book exist within a living planet that is always evolving and under accelerating pressure. Stronger storms. Hotter summers. The Niagara Escarpment, which defines Hamilton’s landscape and shelters its remaining Carolinian forests, sits within a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve under ecological stress from a changing climate (Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, 2019). Great Lakes water levels are projected to shift measurably by the end of this century (Angel & Kunkel, 2010). Eighty-five percent of discarded textiles in Canada go to landfill (ECCC, 2021). The same industrial logic of extract, consume, and discard that contaminated Hamilton Harbour now manifests in fast fashion, overconsumption, and a cultural disconnection from the land that makes these patterns feel normal rather than catastrophic (ECCC, 2021; Fashion Sustainability Directory, 2025).

A Living Obligation

To acknowledge this land is not to perform a ritual. It is to accept an inheritance of harm and of responsibility, and to ask what changed behaviour looks like. What kind of relationship with this land do we want to pass forward? What does it mean to be a steward rather than an owner? It means listening to Indigenous knowledge keepers. It means supporting Indigenous-led conservation and co-governance. It means practising the discipline the Dish teaches: take only what is needed, keep the dish full, and remember that the spoon belongs to everyone.

Let us remember that we are all stewards of the land and of each other. Let us seek a more just future together.