in 1670, london was a large city. it had palaces and houses and shops and carriages and factories and everything. london was founded in 43. that's 2000 years ago.
a hundred or so years after the birth of the hudson's bay company, edmonton was a trading post where the blackfoot and cree would bring their furs for trade.
london was still bustling, full of people and horses and new kings and old and new buildings and old new factories.
i imagine edmonton as a ramshackle assortment of tents, teepees, wooden cabins and buffalo skins. coyote and hare, weasels and ravens.
megpye tells me while we are driving downtown the other day that the epcor (hydro - water and power) plant is built on a sacred site, a burial ground and that there is a vigil every summer for three days. the fires burn, the drummers drum and the dancers beat out the rhythm with their feet nonstop.
i wonder if that memory remained alive in the minds of the cree or blackfoot whose land it was. it was only 150 - 200 years ago. or was it lost, then relearned, resurrected. i wonder if anyone will have a link to the past that contained not a power plant and transformer station, but a graveyard. will there be some elder who recalls a grandparent saying there was a special burial place just over there -on the north river bank of the saskatchewan.
i wonder when the plant was built, probably in the last hundred years. was anyone there to remember that there was a burial there? or was the knowledge lost to the local cree and blackfoot, then rediscovered, exhumed by some historian or anthropologist.
when i was in europe this time last year, i marvelled at the houses in the streets of amsterdam. they often had the year they were built in the keystones above the doorways. this custom i recognized from special historical houses in ontario, some of which i remembered had stones reading in the early 1800s. how completely amazing and strange it was seeing dates in the 1400s not on special historical houses, but ordinary houses that people lived in.
before europe knew of north america, people were living ordinary lives there, just like the current tenants.
the locals could speak of those times, vividly if vaguely. the times of the dyke builders, the times of the pumping of water by windmill and gaining ground, creating the netherlands.
the old church in delft has been sinking back into the earth, it's been standing there since 1250, i am amazed that such a thing can exist in such clear living memory. they even say "has started to sink in over the years" casually as if it has been happening in the last 10 years and not over the last 300.
here 200 years is a vast distance in time, practically unknowable. more familiar seems the ancient geological stretches of time that saw the great beds of oil and coal and dinosaur bones laid down in the earth. this is the oil city. not the trading post city. where are the trails that the traders walked? can anyone point to the route that anthony henday walked in on? or do we only know the history of the new expressway named in his honour. what happened here before the oil boom? before the settlers? before the trading post? no one seems to know. even wiki has only one vague sentence of edmonton's history before 1795. it speaks in a geological time frame, of ancient ice fields retreating. what was here on the riverbank in 1795? a village? a settlement? hunting grounds? a portage? nothing?
the burial grounds? maybe that's the one. or are they the graves of the merchants and traders who were gathered here because of the hudson's bay people?
it is strange to think that this place is only 200 years old.
megpye promised me we'd go to the vigil this summer and add our feet to the dance. i'll ask them
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