Description
The Mississaugas are part of the Ojibwa Nation, and they established themselves on the north shore of Lake Ontario between 1700 and 1720. During the American Revolution, the British Crown began purchasing large tracts of land for the incoming Loyalists. The first land purchase involving the British Crown and the Mississauga Nation was in 1781. By 1800, all that remained of the Mississauga’s territory was the “Mississauga Tract” which covered the land, from Etobicoke Creek to Burlington Bay. In 1805, the British began negotiations for that last tract of Mississauga land. On August 2, 1805, the Mississauga and the British Crown signed Treaty 13-A, commonly referred to as the First Purchase.
Language
Algonquian language family.
Culture
Mississauga people secured all their needs from the environment hunting and fishing and harvesting plants for food and medicines. Wild rice, grows in shallow water and was gathered in late summer using birch bark canoes. Mississauga people lived traditionally in single-family dome shaped or conical birch bark wigwams.The word tipi, popularized in modern entertainment media, is actually the word for “house” from an unrelated First Nation language spoken out on the western prairies, and it has no application to Mississauga wigwams. By 1830, with strangers despoiling their hunting lands and with rising water from a new dam on the Scugog River at Lindsay flooding their rice beds, the Mississauga people moved away.