A new way to explore the distant past: archaeologist N. Ont wants indigenous communities to play a bigger role

The call came on a Sunday. A couple digging up a stump not far from New Liskeard found what they thought was an arrowhead.

Archaeologist Ryan Primrose packed up and headed over, thinking it might be an “unusual rock.”

And it was very unusual. A foot long piece of quartz, carved into a point.

“It immediately became clear that this was a very rare site,” says Primrose.

Buried in the ground, he found dozens of other ancient stone tools packed with red ocher – a dye used to paint icons – and a small piece of charcoal that is 3,100 years old.

That is before the Roman Empire and even before the city of Rome was founded.

One of the most important parts of unearthing that find, known as the McLean Cache, was an appeal to Timiskaming First Nation’s Wayne McKenzie, who was holding a celebration and ceremony at the very spot where his ancestors once walked.

He says he still gets a kick out of holding that 3,000-year-old piece of quartz.

“It was pretty cool to watch. It really filled my heart to see it,” says McKenzie.

“I’m a traditional man. So I sing a lot of old traditional songs passed down thousands of years, but to get a taste of it. It’s home.”

Primrose says many of the tools were never used and that the people who buried them probably never intended to retrieve them, but left them behind as a kind of sacrifice.

He says there are also tools very similar to those found in Michigan and Illinois, suggesting a trade network connection between the Great Lakes and the Temiskaming District much earlier than originally thought.

McKenzie says this part of his people’s history is not well understood, including in their own communities, and hopes more will be revealed in the coming years.

“There’s kind of a messy history part there. There’s also a beautiful part of what was here and how we lived,” he said.

For years, Primrose has hired indigenous people to work on its archaeological digs to “provide both education and employment and most importantly, to expose them to their own history”.

But now he wants to take that further and develop a new process where First Nations people collaborate with archaeologists, then return their findings to elders to be interpreted and decide how to proceed with the excavation.

“So that one isn’t considered superior to the other, but both are seen as ways of understanding the past,” says Primrose, who worked on Mayan sites in Central America early in his career.

“I think it behooves us as archaeologists to involve those First Nations people in understanding that history, which has not yet been written, so that they themselves can be authors of the past.”

He wants to test that new process at a place known as Mill Creek, which flows from Lake Temiskaming on land owned by the City of Temiskaming Shores.

Tina Nichol grew up splashing in the creek and playing on trails she didn’t know were probably walked by her ancestors centuries ago.

When her grandfather, who used to take her to Mill Creek, died when she was 16, they found his birth certificate in a shoe box proving he was native.

“You felt that even as a child playing down there. You knew how special and sacred that place was,” Nichol said.

“It makes you feel good knowing you walked in their footsteps.”

Nichol now works for the Keepers of the Circle, a women’s center in the Temiskaming area, and helps organize an annual pow wow in Mill Creek for National Indigenous Peoples Day.

And she is excited to be involved in future archaeological excavations at the site and find out if ceremonies were also held there in the past.

“We’re all new to this. This is a new kind of relationship that we have with scientists. So I think we need to take our time and do it culturally appropriate and learn from the past,” Nichol said.

“It’s a deep love and very humbling to be there and witness both the findings and grow up there and watch it unfold. You couldn’t ask for a better truth and atonement at the same time.”