Against a grey sky with clouds that threatened to burst into rain and wind gusts that danced around the barren trees, the Dawson Trail commemorative project team unveiled an interpretive landmark on the western terminus of the trail at the Seine River Parkway.

The Provencher Boulevard placement was the final of 15 wayfinding markers to be positioned by the small group of community residents and volunteers throughout the path that highlight the traditional place names and heritage of the original Dawson Trail.

“This one is particularly meaningful and dear to us, as it marks the original western terminus of the trail and makes a clear statement as to the core values that have driven our project from the start, and reminds us of our interconnectedness,” Pierrette Sherwood, chairwoman of Dawson Trail Arts and Heritage Tour, said at the event last week.

The Dawson Trail is Canada’s first all-Canadian water- and land-based route, named after Simon J. Dawson, a surveyor on the expedition that led to the construction of a road that began at Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay), Ont., and ended at the Red River Settlement (now Winnipeg).

Construction of the road began in 1868, and took three years to complete. It runs upon First Nations trails thousands of years older, linked the Great Lakes and the eastern provinces to the Prairies. It was the first attempt to provide an all-Canadian highway over that span without having to detour through the United States.

In 1870, before it was completed, the Wolseley Expedition used the trail to reach the Red River Colony and quell the Red River Rebellion of 1870.

The interpretive marker, like the others along the trail, highlights the Indigenous, Métis and francophone traditional place name, latitude and longitude. It also offers a different perspective — reclaiming the narrative and exposing the truth about the project through the words of three Indigenous leaders: Chief Peguis, Louis Riel, and Chief Na-sa-kee-byness.

“The Canadian employees opening the road to Lake of the Woods showed… true spirit of hostility which they hold towards settlers of the Assiniboia. They tried to seize the best properties… they claimed to have bought from the (First Nations),” reads in part a letter Métis leader Riel wrote to lieutenant-governor Alexander Morris in January 1873.

“(They) never arranged with me for our lands. We never sold our land to the said company nor to the Earl of Selkirk,” reads an excerpt of a letter Chief Peguis wrote to the British parliament in February 1860.

“We started this project four years ago, Pierrette and I have been partners in this from the beginning,” said heritage adviser and expert consultant Mireille Lamontagne.

“We thought maybe we had taken it far enough on the decolonization of the story and then we met with the City of Winnipeg’s Welcoming Winnipeg committee, which is all Indigenous. They really helped guide us in the beginning and set us on a course where it was like, yeah, we aren’t going far enough.”

In the beginning, the group did months of research, drawing from thousands of sources, including a file of information — documents his ancestors collected during the construction of the Dawson Trail — provided by elder Carl Smith of Brokenhead.

“He came to me at one point with a file that had been buried in his basement for 40 years, and that file ended up being the foundation for like four of our markers. It contained information I couldn’t find in any archive,” Lamontange said, adding the entire experience has taught her not to tiptoe around sharing about the colonial nature of the past.

On its website, the group said the goal of the project is to “reach beyond colonial narratives on its role in linking together a new nation to bring you some lesser-known ‘nuggets’ about the coming of the road, and its impact, that foregrounds community knowledge, as well as Indigenous and women’s experiences. These more diverse perspectives highlight the need to bring this story into the era of national reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.”

The project had five phases — installing the trail markers being the final phase — and was initiated in 2019, to uncover and revive the rich history of the Dawson Trail in Manitoba. The group was led by a steering committee of local representatives and supported by local, provincial and federal government funding.

For more information about the project or to read a richer, more in depth history of the Dawson Trail, visit dawsontrailtreasures.ca.

shelley.cook@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @ShelleyACook