Half the Earth
During the 1400’s, advances in the navigational technology used by sea-faring royal merchant and colonial army ships helped to enable cross-Atlantic voyages into previously uncharted seas. The suddenly round world became rapidly more accessible by sea. Certainly, Vikings had crossed the Atlantic earlier (and they had left.) Also, since some long ago, pre-glacial time, many thousands of people ranged across North, Central and South America.

From the 15th to the 19th centuries, European kings and traders looked for a western route to Asian goods to replace the arduous, dangerous, east-west land routes and shipping corridors along Africa’s east coast and across central Asia seas. They sent their ships west, across the Atlantic Ocean, trying to get around, or across, the Americas.

This push to the west turned up an entirely forgotten continent, half of the world, full of cultures that in pre-glacial times presumably originated in the far-east. Or, perhaps the Asian population descended from a reverse migration. However the many cultures of the world developed as and where they did, the Americas were a surprising fact.

A Very Old World: The Americas were inhabited by Mayan, Inca, Aztec, Toltec and others in the south. In the north, many nations and tribes were active travellers, traders and warriors, including the Southwest, Northwest, Plains and Woodlands Nations. The Ojibway, Sioux and Cree tribes lived in the Lake of the Woods area, descended from the earlier Late Western Shield and Late Plains cultures. The ‘new world’ actually was an extremely old world.

While continuing to search for the western route to Asia from the 1500’s to the 1800’s, Europeans explored North, Central and South America. They exploited resources, created settlements, pioneered industrialization, dictated culture and appropriated land. The half of the world that had been entirely unknown was, in the 1400’s, poised to be absolutely colonized.
Hundreds of years later, Canadians have yet to fully resolve the many consequences of colonization. Legal proceedings between First Nations and the various levels of Canadian government continue. In the Lake of the Woods region, those proceedings concern Treaty #3, originally signed in 1873.