Our Homes on Indigenous Lands

In 1890, Harry and Mary Ann Foote arrived on unceded Coast Salish territory and purchased Jedidiah, a private island. Starting with the simple question "where am I from?", this narrative traces one family across Canada and through hundreds of years to share a personal lens on the lived experience of settler colonization. Drawing on original letters, transcripts, and oral histories, the book weaves connections between the stories of specific ancestors and their connection to land, treaties, and Indigenous peoples at the time. Accounts include colourful stories of homesteading on Jedediah Island in British Columbia, construction of PEI's parliament building in the 1800s, life during the so-called "Indian Wars" of the 1700s, and homesteading on the shores of Ouentironk (Lake Simcoe) in Ontario. The earliest stories go back to the 1600s, when a settler with the unlikely name of Peter Rambo was one of the earliest founders of a New Swedish settlement in what we now call Pennsylvania. In the context of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this book tells evocative stories of place, possession and people from the 1600s to the 1930s.