In Ottawa last month, the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) unveiled a new map for the future—the Indigenous Reconciliation Action Plan (IRAP). Shaped through a year of listening and dialogue, it is at once a framework and a promise: that municipalities, long seen as outposts of settler governance, can begin to walk differently on this land.
On Manitoulin Island, such a plan cannot be read as a sterile document. It collides with memory and unsettled history. The Island itself was once promised under the Bond Head Treaty of 1836 to be a permanent refuge for the Anishinaabek, a place where they could live free from the encroachment of settlers. But that promise was undone within a generation.
The 1862 Treaty, pushed through under duress, opened the Island to settlement. Anishinaabe families were displaced, villages emptied and newcomers arrived to stake claims on the land.
Out of that wave of settlement grew a peculiar identity: the “Haweaters,” descendants of those who arrived after 1862, who proudly styled themselves as the true islanders, holders of local lore and status. Their chosen name came from the hawberries that dot the Island’s autumn hedgerows, but behind the romantic branding lay a quieter truth: that their standing was built upon a dispossession. The First Nations people forcibly relocated to Manitoulin when colonial farming experiments faltered were never invited into the Haweater mythology.
Instead, assimilation policies sought to contain and diminish them, while settler society crowned itself with a folkloric identity that excluded the very first peoples of the land.
Such legacies still haunt the present. In Billings Township, a rumour circulates—quietly, persistently—that the cemetery in Kagawong sits atop an older First Nations burial ground. Archival records lend the rumour weight: early land deeds referenced the need to “reserve” both an Indigenous burial site and a river trail before transferring property to municipal hands.
Over time, the traces were obscured, the village of Gageigawan erased from the landscape, until only memory and brittle documents remained. Today, the Township has attempted gestures of recognition through initiatives like the “Billings Connections Trail,” which names Kagawong Cedars Cemetery as a site of layered significance. But the whisper of that rumour is itself a form of testimony—an insistence that history lies just below the sod, waiting to be acknowledged.
The IRAP, then, lands on Manitoulin not as a distant policy but as a challenge: can the Island’s municipalities face the shadows in their own backyards? Can councils in Billings, Central Manitoulin, Gore Bay, and beyond embrace the hard work of Reconciliation not as symbolism, but as daily practice?
The plan, crafted by Indigenous-owned Tawi:ne Consulting with guidance from AMO’s Indigenous Advisory Council, makes clear that municipalities cannot shrug off responsibility. Development without consultation, chronic underfunding of Indigenous services, and a lack of cultural awareness remain systemic problems. The plan urges municipalities to listen, to learn and to act.
For Manitoulin, this is not optional. The Island is layered with broken promises—the Bond Head Treaty’s betrayal, the erasures that gave rise to the Haweater myth, the burial ground in Kagawong rumoured to have been turned into settler cemetery. If reconciliation is to mean anything here, it must mean municipalities moving beyond gestures and embracing the uncomfortable truth that their very existence is built upon treaties and displacements that remain unresolved.
On Manitoulin, history does not sit neatly in archives. It lives in oral tradition, in the quiet insistence of stories passed from generation to generation. Some Odawa people recall that the ground in Kagawong where the settlers’ cemetery now stands was once a burial place for their ancestors. That belief surfaced briefly in the digital sphere too—through a Facebook post that can still be glimpsed in search results but appears to have since vanished, leaving only its ghostly trace. Whether in oral memory or fleeting online fragments, the story refuses to disappear.
And this is the challenge the AMO’s Indigenous Reconciliation Action Plan lays bare: reconciliation is not abstract, not rhetorical, not something to be deferred. It requires municipalities—including those here on Manitoulin—to wrestle with the contested ground they stand on.
It means acknowledging that the Haweater identity, however cherished, was built in a hierarchy that pushed aside the very first peoples of the Island. It means taking seriously the rumours, the archives, the oral traditions, and the unresolved treaties, and understanding them not as inconvenient shadows, but as essential truths demanding attention.
The IRAP offers a roadmap, but maps are only as useful as the will to follow them. For Manitoulin’s municipalities, the question is simple and urgent: will they use this guide to confront the Island’s unfinished history, or will they leave the compass on the shelf, content to walk in circles while the ground beneath them continues to speak?
EDITOR’s NOTE: Jacqueline St. Pierre is The Expositor’s Local Journalism Initiative reporter. This article is not part of the LJI process.
Occasionally, Expositor scribes may pen an Op-ed article and this article is published in that spirit.
