Thread by @TODreamsProject

1. Today we celebrate Toronto’s 185th birthday. Which is pretty weird. Because Toronto isn’t 185 years old. And it wasn’t founded in March. Thus begins my yearly rant…

2. It was in July 1793 the first British soldiers sailed into Toronto harbour & began chopping down trees to make way for the town that would become a city of millions. Fort York began to rise on the waterfront. The town's first 10 blocks were soon laid out — Front up to Queen.

3. Sooo if Toronto was founded 226 years ago this July, why are we celebrating its 185th birthday today? Well, for the answer you have to look to a bunch of Victorian guys who decided to whitewash our city’s history in 1884.

4. By then, Toronto was a booming metropolis of about a hundred thousand people. Railroads! Big department stores! Confederation! A big bastion of Britishness! Local businessmen & leaders wanted to celebrate this modern metropolis, so they seized upon an idea: a birthday party.

5. That year, they threw a huge, week-long bash in celebration of Toronto’s “birthday.” There were fireworks. Parades. Speeches.

6. Victoria Freeman writes about the birthday party in detail in this utterly fantastic article, “Toronto Has No History!”, based on her dissertation [PDF]: ow.ly/ZbKpi It’s thanks to her work that I learned a whooole lot of this stuff.

7. There were historical floats included in the parades that week. But Toronto's first birthday party wasn’t really about honouring Toronto’s history at all.

(pics of the parade via the City of Toronto Archives)

8. In fact, it was much more concerned with twisting & diminishing Toronto’s history, stereotyping local First Nations, practically erasing the Mississaugas entirely, and glorifying colonialism to fit a narrative of Toronto as an entirely virtuous and very British city.

9. They even got this guy, Sir Daniel Wilson, the first history prof at U of T, the guy who first used the term “prehistory” in English, to give a big speech about the history of Toronto… and he declared that Toronto *had* no real history.

10. Nearly 100 yrs after the city was founded & 1000s of yrs after the first people set foot on this land, Wilson claimed Toronto had “scarcely a past…no record [to] look back upon…nothing practically to repent of.” The city's story so far was nothing but “great white sheets.”

11. But maybe weirdest of all: the date being celebrated wasn’t the day the city was founded. Instead, they decided that Toronto’s “birthday” was the day it was incorporated as a city — when 10,000 settlers were already living here.

12. And *that’s* the date we’re still celebrating all these years later. Toronto’s “birthday” happened when the city was already 40 years old.

13. But when you shift Toronto’s “birth” from 1793 to 1834, of course, you’ve just exiled 40 years of the city’s history. That time includes war, riots, duels, plagues and countless other events during that formative period — stuff that’s still influencing our city to this day.

14. And as Freeman points out, that shift is especially worrying when it comes to what it means for the way Toronto has remembered its relationship with Indigenous nations — particularly the Mississaugas.

15. If we talk about Toronto’s founding in 1793, we talk about a new settlement — one built on land where the First Nations had been living for millennia and where Mississaugas were still living when those first British soldiers showed up.

16. But if we talk about 1834 as the birth of Toronto, then who was here before the city? 10,000 settlers. You’re not engaging with the moment our city was *actually* founded — and the events that led up to it.

17. The story of the settlers arriving and seizing Indigenous territory for themselves is much easier to ignore in favour of a story about a town of settlers who’d been living in this place for generations now taking a step into modernity as an incorporated city.

18. It means, for instance, that you’re probably not talking about the Toronto Carrying-Place: the First Nations trade route that first brought Europeans here. Or the villages that were here long before Toronto: places like Ganatsekwyagon and Teiaiagon.

19. You’re not talking about the Toronto Purchase: the treaty the British used to take this land from the Mississaugas — invalid even by the super-sketchy standards of colonialism. And how a settler murdered Chief Wabakinine after he signed it.

20. It means you’re not talking about the people who were enslaved by settlers like Peter Russell and William Jarvis — people brought to our city against their will, and forced to help build it.

21. It means you’re not talking about the French, the ruined fort they left behind to be found by the British when they arrived, or their centuries of trade and war with the First Nations who lived on the shores of Lake Ontario.

22. It means you’re not talking about the fact that Toronto was founded as a haven for refugees from the American Revolution. How terrified of democracy many of our city’s founders were as a result. Or their nightmare coming true when the US invaded Toronto during the War of 1812

23. You’re not talking about the governor who founded the city, John Graves Simcoe, and his wife Elizabeth. And how their vision for our city is still influencing us to this day.

24. And it becomes easier to claim Indigenous history as an entirely separate “prehistory”, to avoid talking about the ways Indigenous nations contributed to & influenced our city’s founding years—and have since—even giving their lives to defend the town from those U.S. invaders.

25. Plus countless other fascinating founding stories. The Simcoes' badass cat and their adventurous dog. The duel that killed the Attorney-General. How the town's first hanging went terribly wrong. And on and on...

26. This year, thankfully, there does seem to have been a shift in the way some are talking about this date — recognizing it as “the anniversary of incorporation” rather than a “birthday” and acknowledging the thousands of years of Indigenous history that came before the city.

27. But it does still seem to me that it makes much less sense to commemorate Toronto’s 185th birthday in March, than to mark the 226th anniversary of our founding at the end of July. (A date that would sink up closely with Simcoe Day, as it happens.)

28. And most importantly: to use that day to talk about what happened at the fascinating moment when our city was *actually* founded. The good *and* the bad.