The Memory of Water: Indigenous History at Niagara Falls

What follows is drawn from published scholarship and documented records, not oral history. It cannot by any means replace the knowledge held by the communities whose ancestors shaped this land long before it was bordered or claimed.

Roughly 10,000–12,000 years ago, after glacial ice carved out the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence basin, humans occupied the river corridor now known as the Niagara River. This narrow channel binding Lake Erie to Lake Ontario functioned as a geographic and cultural artery. This made the Falls not just a scenic backdrop, but a community centre. One that harmoniously organized movement and meaning through relationships that mutually benefited not just the people, but the land itself.

The Attawandaron and Regional Life

By at least the first millennium CE, the people most directly connected to what is now called Niagara Falls were the Attawandaron; an Iroquoian-speaking nation later labeled the Neutral Nation by French colonizers. The label merely reflected their refusal to be drawn into external wars, it was not an absence of political power. Their neutrality was a deliberate diplomatic strategy.

The Attawandaron were agriculturalists and traders, cultivating what is known as the three sisters (corn, beans, and squash). They understood the river not as a boundary, but as a connective system linking lake to lake and interior to coast.

By the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the Attawandaron maintained permanent, fortified villages across the territory between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. Some settlements housed more than a thousand people. Their location gave them considerable influence over trade networks stretching from the Atlantic coast into the western interior. They hunted deer in the hardwood forests of the escarpment, harvested fish from the river system, and cultivated tobacco that circulated as a valuable trade good. Relations with neighbouring nations were governed primarily through negotiation and alliance rather than military dominance.

This political balance held its existence alongside growing regional conflict. When the wars between the Huron-Wendat confederacy and the Haudenosaunee intensified, the Attawandaron initially navigated conflict without destruction; maintaining their neutrality amid the rising instability.

Naming, Language, and Erasure

By the early seventeenth century, the name Niagara was already in use.

Derived from an Attawandaron Iroquoian root and recorded by French observers in forms such as Onguiaahra, the word likely referred to the narrow strait or neck where waters converge rather than the waterfall itself. The name reflects an understanding of land as relationship and movement rather than fixed possession.

As French explorers encountered the region, the word gradually devolved into Niagara. What later appeared as “mispronunciation” functioned as a colonial mechanism: unfamiliar names were altered and normalized until they displaced their original forms. Through this linguistic shift, authority over the land’s meaning quietly changed hands. Naming became a means of erasure.

Disease, Economy, and Collapse

By the 1630s, European contact had begun to transform the region in material ways. Epidemic diseases introduced through trade and indirect contact devastated the Neutral Nation, dramatically reducing Attawandaron populations before sustained European settlement occurred. At the same time, European demand for fur accelerated extraction and competition within existing trade systems.

Between roughly 1640 and 1653, these pressures—combined with the introduction of firearms—escalated inter-Indigenous conflict in what became known as the Beaver Wars.

These were not simply Indigenous wars. They were the result of colonial destabilization: European empires injected an extractive, profit-driven economic system into Indigenous networks previously governed by protocols of reciprocity and sustainability.

When the Huron-Wendat confederacy collapsed under Haudenosaunee military pressure in 1648–49, the Attawandaron lost their buffer. By 1653, their villages in the Niagara and western Lake Ontario region had been destroyed or abandoned. The Attawandaron then ceased to exist as a distinct political entity. Survivors were killed, displaced, or adopted into other Iroquoian nations.

The land did not empty, it just shifted hands.

Aftermath and Continued Indigenous Presence

Following this collapse, Haudenosaunee nations (particularly the Seneca) maintained influence over the Niagara corridor. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Anishinaabe peoples, including the Mississaugas, became stewards of the western riverbank through warfare and diplomacy. The Falls remained contested, which is just another way of saying they remained central.

European Accounts and Colonial Fortification

European knowledge of Niagara Falls developed entirely within this Indigenous-controlled landscape.

The first documented European eyewitness account was recorded in 1669–1670 by René de Bréhant de Galinée during an expedition reliant on Indigenous guidance. Later accounts, including those published by Louis Hennepin in the 1680s and republished in subsequent editions, were produced within Seneca territory and dependent upon Indigenous hosts who regulated access to the Falls; shaping how they were represented to European audiences.

French attempts to establish a permanent presence followed. Fort Conti (1679) and Fort Denonville (1687) were short-lived. Fort Niagara, constructed in 1726, marked sustained colonial militarization—not because the land was empty, but because it was strategically vital. Control of the river depended entirely on Indigenous alliances. Though the fort changed hands repeatedly (French, British, American, British again). Indigenous people continued to live in the region and use the portage.

Treaty, War, and Betrayal

In 1764, thousands of Indigenous leaders from across the Great Lakes gathered at Niagara with British Crown representatives following Pontiac’s War; a pan-Indigenous resistance movement that nearly expelled the British from the region. Wampum belts were exchanged and promises were spoken—this was not a land sale, but a relationship agreement.

The Crown pledged that settlement would not proceed without consent and that sovereignty would be respected. Indigenous leaders agreed to peace, not surrender.

This gathering became known as the Treaty of Niagara. Many Haudenosaunee and allied nations still consider it binding. The wampum belts exchanged remain constitutional records of an agreement never nullified. Canada’s tendency to treat treaties as closed documents contrasts sharply with Indigenous understandings of treaties as living relationships, a difference that shaped what followed.

War, Borders, and Resistance

During the American Revolution and the War of 1812, Niagara again became a battlefield. Indigenous warriors fought not out of loyalty to the empire, but out of fear of erasure through American expansion. The wars fractured Haudenosaunee nations and displaced entire communities. Indigenous military support at battles such as Queenston Heights played a decisive role in preserving Upper Canada.

In 1813, Tecumseh, the Shawnee leader who built a confederacy to resist U.S. expansion, was killed at the Battle of the Thames. His death weakened the confederacy’s military resistance, though Indigenous legal and diplomatic resistance continued.

After the wars, Indigenous contributions were repaid with dispossession. Borders were imposed without consent. The Niagara River became an international boundary dividing nations older than either state. Though the Jay Treaty of 1794 affirmed Indigenous border-crossing rights in U.S. law, Canada has never formally recognized the rights. In 1926, Tuscarora Chief Clinton Rickard founded the Indian Defense League, organizing annual border crossings to assert those rights.

Tourism and the Manufacture of Absence

By the nineteenth century, Niagara Falls had become a major tourist destination. Railroads, hotels, and commercial attractions transformed the landscape. Indigenous people were incorporated into this economy, but primarily as performers and vendors. All while their political and territorial claims were undermined through land seizures, residential schools, mobility restrictions, and park boundaries that excluded them from their own traditional sites (obliterating their land, homes, and families).

Tourism framed Niagara as pristine wilderness “discovered” by Europeans, erasing Indigenous stewardship.

This erasure was not incidental; it was necessary to justify development.

Continuity, Not Disappearance

Today, there is no reserve at Niagara Falls itself, but Indigenous presence has not vanished. People live here, work here, return for ceremony and teaching. Languages are being reclaimed. Six Nations of the Grand River and the Mississaugas of the Credit remain central political communities whose lands were systematically reduced despite treaty promises.

The Falls have witnessed all of this—stewardship and extraction, memory and erasure. Once known, this history renders the landscape no longer neutral. It becomes testimony.

The Attawandaron no longer exist as a distinct nation, but their language survives in the name Niagara. That persistence is not symbolic; it is a form of survival that outlasts conquest and erasure, still embedded in the land itself for those willing to read it.

Well, doesn’t all of this just mean Indigenous peoples weren’t as “advanced” as Europeans?

That answer depends entirely on whether "advancement" is defined by how fast land can be consumed, or how long life can be sustained.

What happened in Niagara was the result of forced structure and imposed systems, not evolutionary failure.

Indigenous societies in the Niagara region were advanced in ways that did not resemble European priorities. They had permanent agriculture, complex diplomacy, long-distance trade networks, legal protocols, ecological knowledge refined over thousands of years, and systems of governance capable of maintaining peace between powerful neighbours. 

The Attawandaron’s neutrality alone required political sophistication, not simplicity. Their society did not collapse because it lacked capacity; it was overrun by pressures it did not create and could not opt out of.

European colonialism did not arrive as a neutral competitor. It arrived as a totalizing system.

Disease was not an accidental side effect; it was an unavoidable consequence of contact that disproportionately devastated Indigenous populations before meaningful resistance was even possible. Firearms and metal tools were introduced unevenly through the fur trade, deliberately destabilizing existing balances of power. Indigenous nations were forced into a market economy driven by European demand, not Indigenous need. Participation was not optional.

What is often framed as “competition” was not competition between equals. It was coercion masquerading as market logic. 

European powers imposed a worldview in which land was property, speed equaled progress, accumulation equaled success, and survival depended on domination. Indigenous systems—based on reciprocity and regeneration—were not inefficient; they were incompatible with extraction at scale. 

That incompatibility was resolved not through debate, but rather through entities like war and enclosure.

The idea that Indigenous peoples were “less advanced” only makes sense if advancement is defined narrowly as the ability to: exploit land faster, concentrate wealth, and sustain violence at industrial scale. 

By that definition, European empires were advanced. By every other measure—longevity, sustainability, social cohesion—Indigenous societies were demonstrably successful. They endured for millennia.

The settler state then required only a few centuries to institutionalize inequality.

So no, this was not a failure to adapt. It was a forced transition under threat, justified after the fact, by narratives of “inevitability” and survival-of-the-fittest thinking. Those narratives did important work: they turned dispossession into progress and violence into destiny.

What happened in Niagara was not the natural outcome of history.

It was the outcome of choices, made repeatedly, by colonial powers that benefited from calling those choices “inevitable.”

So, what do we do with this knowledge?

Knowing this history is not a demand for guilt, nor a call to turn away from the present you live in. It is more like being asked to see where you are standing. The point is not to carry personal blame for centuries past, but to notice that the ground beneath us was shaped by decisions we inherited rather than chose.

Letting this knowledge in just means allowing places like Niagara to become more than scenery, without needing them to become sites of shame. It asks that we listen more carefully to whose stories are still carried, to see more clearly what ways of relating to land might still matter in a time when so much feels so uncertain.

Indigenous approaches to regeneration and responsibility are not lessons trapped in the past; they are living responses to questions we are still asking (and direly need answers to).

The future does not arrive fully formed, but rather is made slowly, by what we are willing to notice, and what we choose not to forget.

Where this account does not reach

I acknowledge this account stops short of the deeper reckoning that is the history of the residential school system, not because that violence was absent from Niagara’s history, but because it deserves care beyond summary. Care that I myself fear I simply cannot articulate with the understanding it needs. As a result, I will more probably be linking literature from voices who can properly convey the true weight of that history.

I will only note that our region is not separate from that history. It is entangled with it through displacement and loss; through absolute terror. Children from surrounding Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe communities were taken to institutions such as the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, where utter violence and deliberate cultural destruction were routine. Lives completely destroyed.

To fully trace that legacy would require a different kind of attention—one that centres survivor testimony and intergenerational trauma rather than chronology alone. For now, this piece remains focused on the economic and territorial transformations that reshaped Niagara, acknowledging that beneath them lies a heavier history that cannot be responsibly condensed. One that must be approached on its own terms.

Selected Sources

• Borrows, John. Indigenous Constitutionalism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010.

• Borrows, John. “Wampum at Niagara: The Royal Proclamation, Canadian Legal History, and Self-Government.” In Aboriginal and Treaty Rights in Canada, edited by Michael Asch, 155–172. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997.

• Benn, Carl. The Iroquois in the War of 1812. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.

• Galinée, René de Bréhant de. Journal of a Voyage to Lake Erie, 1669–1670.

• Hennepin, Louis. A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America. London, 1698.

• Hill, Rick. “The Two Row Wampum and the Covenant Chain.” Treaty of Niagara 1764 Conference Proceedings. St. Catharines: Brock University, 2014.

• Johnson, Harold R. Peace and Good Order: The Case for Indigenous Justice in Canada. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2019.

• Noble, William C. “The Neutral Indians.” In Essays in Northeastern Anthropology, 45–70. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1978.

• Rickard, Clinton. We Have the Right to Exist. Tuscarora Nation, 1976.

• Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

• Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2011.

• Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples. Border Crossing Issues and the Jay Treaty. Ottawa: Senate of Canada, 2016.

• Tidridge, Nathan. The Queen at the Council Fire: The Treaty of Niagara, Reconciliation, and the Dangers of Amnesia. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2015.

• Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation (Jay Treaty). 1794.