For those who claim to be experts on Canada please do read the history around the voyages of Jacques Cartier. When he arrived at what is now Montreal he asked the local peoples what the name of this country was and they replied Canada - at least that was what he heard and the name has been given to this enormous land mass ever since. It is the name given to Canada by the First Nations ancestors to the explorers who had come to see this continent. That makes it very legitimate! They are the original peoples in this land and like my grandfather who said that his family had always lived around Andover, Hampshire, England the First Peoples of Canada also say that their people have always lived in this country. When you are going back thousands of years that is how you would see it I am sure. There are a lot of countries where the people who live there do have such long ancestral lines going back. There are also settlers (like my very small Canadian line- my mother, her father and his mother all the rest are English and the ancestors of my mother, her father and his mother are also English) but they are also welcomed but they should not assume that they have any more rights than anyone else to a place especially those with a long history and I mean thousands of years not a century give or take a couple of years here and there. Certainly in our elementary and high schools the early history of Canada was taught very well when I was a child. We knew that the First Peoples were first and that Jacques Cartier thought that the name of this country was Canada but apparently the First Peoples who told him that name actually were referring to the word they used for a village. But the name has stuck and anyone saying "so-called" Canada is not respecting our known history and, for sure, it would be polite and correct if that comment "so called" ceased to be used. I do know that Turtle Island was the name (translated) used for all of Canada by the First Peoples (we also learned that in school) but Canada does have a good "sound" to it and it was from the Huron-Iroquois language I think although not spelled quite the same it was kanata (in English, I do not know the spelling in the First Nations Language). .
I attended Tecumseh Avenue Public School in London, Ontario named for Tecumseh (Shawnee Chief). Tecumseh along with 2000 of his warriors supported Major-General Sir Isaac Brock in the capture of Detroit. Unfortunately Tecumseh was killed at Moraviantown during the Battle of the Thames in 1813 but remembered forever at my elementary school in London, Ontario. But not a very popular person in the United States as he was preventing the westward expansion of settlers there.
Our First Peoples are taking their place as leaders in our country as they should - our Governor General Her Excellency Mary Simon is Inuit and the Premier of Manitoba The Honourable Wab Kinew has his ancestral line in the Onigaming First Nation.
Countries benefit greatly from settlers; they bring in fresh genetic variety into an area which is important for the survival of peoples. They can also help countries with their labour shortages and a good example is Israel employing Palestinians and the wages they earned were much greater than anything they could make in Gaza. But one is left to ponder how Hamas had such accurate maps of people's houses. The Russian-Israeli hostage just released commented that he had escaped at one point but was turned over to Hamas once again by local inhabitants (surely they could have helped him to escape). The French Resistance saved many British airmen during the Second World War by hiding them and getting French fishermen to take them back to England and they risked their lives doing that and some did perish.
Back to work, But I will be careful in the future when I am donating money if the article is correct about some of these groups who are using the weird terminology "so-called." I must stop reading these articles they distract me from my work on the Siderfin book - an ancient English family but likely they did not arrive in England before 1200 and were possibly a Jewish family from Italy who came at that time. By 1500 they were Church of England and lived in Somerset, England. I say possibly because I did find the Siderfin surname in a list of Jewish names at one of the many OGS conferences that my husband managed to get me to attend including the ones where I spoke which is amazing in itself although I am a good public speaker but do not choose to do that particularly. I prefer the sidelines and preferably seeing things on computer or television and simply staying home. The Jewish thought is because one of my brothers and I show 2% Jewish ethnicity but the other three do not. However, I am the poorest match to the Siderfin out of the five so I may be mistaken at that thought. It also could be the ancestry of our mitochondrial haplogroup which wintered only at Ukraina as far as present research shows and a number of descendants groups of H11 are Jewish so perhaps that is the reason. My likely mitochondrial ancestor possibly arrived in the Ayrshire/Argyllshire area of Scotland 8,000 to 12,000 years ago having made the enormous trek from Ukraina perhaps through the Scandinavian Peninsula and across to Scotland perhaps by way of Doggerland. But I find it quite fascinating that both our yDNA and our MtDNA lead us back to ancient peoples of the British Isles.
Back to work, I must get this book done just in case there is a spot for me to get my 15 min cataract surgery before Christmas.
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