Thread by @TODreamsProject

1. Today we celebrate Toronto’s 186th birthday. Which is quite strange. Because Toronto isn’t 186 years old. And it wasn’t founded in March.

Here goes my annual rant…

2. It was July 1793 when the first British soldiers sailed into our harbour & began chopping down trees, making way for a town which has since 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. Elizabeth Simcoe, the wife of the governor who founded Toronto, painted what she saw that week: the masts of the British ships, the tiny white tents of the soldiers building Fort York at the mouth of Garrison Creek, the towering green forests and the pale blue harbour...

4. Sooo if Toronto was founded 227 years ago this July, why are we celebrating its 186th birthday today?

Well, for the answer you have to look to a bunch of Victorians who decided to whitewash our city’s history in 1884.

(pic: Wikimedia)

5. By then, Toronto was a booming city of about 100,000 people. Railroads! Department stores! Confederation! A bastion of Britishness!

Local businessmen & leaders wanted to celebrate this modern metropolis, so they seized upon an idea: a birthday party.

(pic: @TorontoArchives)

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

7. 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.

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

(pics of the parade: @TorontoArchives)

9. No, it was much more concerned with twisting & diminishing the city’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.

10. They even got this angry-looking fellow — Sir Daniel Wilson, the first ever history professor at the University of Toronto — to give a big speech about the history of Toronto.

He declared that Toronto *had* no real history.

(pic: Wikimedia)

11. Nearly a hundred years after the city was founded — and thousands after the first people set foot on this land — Wilson claimed it had “scarcely a past … no record [to] look back upon." The city's story so far was nothing but “great white sheets.”

(pic: @torontolibrary)

12. 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 officially incorporated as a city: March 6, 1834.

When 10,000 people were already living here.

13. 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.

(pic: City of Toronto, by John Howard)

14. Of course, by shifting Toronto’s “birth” from 1793 to 1834 we’ve just symbolically exiled 40 years of the city’s history. A period that includes war, riots, duels, plagues and countless other formative events — stuff that’s still influencing our city to this day.

15. 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.

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

(pic via the ROM)

17. 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.

(pic: City of Toronto, by John Howard)

18. So the story of settlers arriving & seizing Indigenous territory for themselves is easier to ignore — in favour of a story of a town filled with people who’d been living here for generations, taking a step into modernity as an incorporated city.

(Simcoe 1790s / Howard 1830s)

19. 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.

20. 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.

Or how a settler murdered Chief Wabakinine after he signed it.

(pic: @TorontoArchives)

21. And you're not talking about other important foundational stories either.

You’re not talking about the people like the Pompadours who were enslaved by settlers like Peter Russell — brought to our city against their will, and forced to help build it.

22. It means you’re not talking about the French, the forts they built near the mouth of the Humber, or their centuries of trade & war with the First Nations who lived on the shores of Lake Ontario.

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

24. We’re not talking about the governor who founded the city, John Graves Simcoe, or his wife Elizabeth Posthuma Gwillim. His letters & poems. Her diaries & paintings.

Or how their vision for our city is still influencing us to this day.

25. And it becomes easier to claim Indigenous history as an entirely separate “prehistory” — a term our angry old friend Professor Wilson coined — to avoid talking about the ways Indigenous people contributed to & influenced our city’s founding years... And all the years since.

26. Thankfully, there seems to have been some shift in the way *some* people talk about this date — recognizing it as “the anniversary of incorporation” rather than a “birthday”. Others even acknowledge the thousands of years of Indigenous history that came before the city.

27. Others, not so much.

28. So, for me, it stills seem to make much less sense to celebrate Toronto’s birthday in March than to mark the anniversary of our founding at the end of July.

A date that would sink up nicely with Simcoe Day, as it happens.

29. ...and join other Canadian cites — like Quebec City and Montreal — in counting from the date they were founded. Heck, Halifax & Dartmouth even call the civic holiday "Natal Day" as a way of recognizing the founding of their cities.

30. But most important of all: to use that day to talk about what happened at the fascinating moment when Toronto was founded.

The good *and* the bad.