On the 240th birthday of Guelph’s founder John Galt in 2019, Leanne Caron was in Scotland visiting Galt's grave at the Greenock cemetery.
Caron, a city councillor and member of the Guelph Heritage Society, was accompanied by an Indigenous student working with the Guelph Civic Museum.
“And we stood there at his grave and she smudged his grave,” said Caron, referring to the First Nation cleansing ceremony.
“The moment was not lost on me,” Caron said. “She was smudging the grave of her colonizer. And as we stood there and the power of that moment came over me I thought to myself Gil Stelter should be there.”
Caron has known Stelter, a retired University of Guelph history professor, since the 1990s and everything she knows about Galt, she learnt from Stelter.
He's considered one of the leading sources on Guelph's history.
The topic for the Guelph Historical Society lecture Tuesday night at the Guelph Civic Museum was John Galt, the local Indigenous and the founding of Guelph, as told by Stelter.
Guelph was founded on April 23, 1827 by Galt. He lived in Burlington to be closer to York, now Toronto, where John Brant, Mohawk, grand chief and Indian superintendent, was his neighbour.
The construction of some of the first buildings In Guelph were by First Nations workers after Brant struck a deal with Galt.
When Brant first met him, Galt agreed with him that the Six Nations, also know as the Haudenosaunee, were not subjects of Britain but allies to the British, said Stelter.
On their second meeting in 1825 in York, Brant asked Galt if he would be the official lobbyist at parliament for the Six Nations. He was busy with other affairs at the time, but agreed to write a letter which outlines the legal aspects of the Haldimand Tract to send to parliament. The tract had settlements along it and was close to Guelph.
Brant is the son of Joseph Brant, a Mohawk war chief and leader of the Six Nations.
“Galt with young Brant was very much like Joseph Brant had been with other British leaders before that. He got along really well with him and he believed in this business of alliances between Europeans and the Indigenous,” said Stelter.
The people in Upper Canada who were in charge looked into areas like Treaty 3, which had few people living there like the Mississaugas and Anishinaabe along the rivers.
“Galt believed, as did John Brant, that they couldn’t make a goal of a traditional Haudenosaunee economic system; this 12 mile tract (Haldimand Tract) is too narrow with settlement all around. Well you’re not going to have any wild animals in there to hunt because of that. So that’s why Joseph Brant was willing to sell some of this land because he didn’t think that they could protect themselves from squatters,” said Stelter.
There were many people coming into Upper Canada because it was great for farming, he said.
Guelph sits on Treaty 3 the Between the Lakes Treaty, the land was four million acres, with 400 people, about 18 chiefs and worth 1,180 British pounds, it was known as the Crown Reserve for the Six Nation Lands in 1821.
The Anishinaabe signed over the land in the treaty to the provincial authorities, said Stelter.
Brant and Galt had a similar demise. Brant was elected to the Upper Canadian Legislative Assembly in 1830, the following year he was removed from the legislature because his voters didn’t own land. He died at age 37 in 1832. Galt was fired in 1829 from the Canada Company. He died at age 59 in 1839.
The Canada Company wanted quick lands sales with no effort toward infrastructure spending from the company, said Stelter. There was a difference of opinion between Galt and the directors of the Canada Company, he said.
"I would say there is good documentary evidence that Galt was a different kind of colonizer and he never intended to be a colonizer," said Stelter. The kind of colonizer who had relationships with Indigenous people like Brant. He didn't want to exterminate Indigenous people like the founder of Ottawa, Philemon Wright did, said Stelter.