While I occasionally return to my hometown, Windsor, Ontario, to do reporting for other articles, few of them have been as directly linked to my childhood as the story of Canada’s next national urban park. It was a trip that filled in some blanks from my past.
As I wrote in an article, a bill that’s now in its final stages at the Senate with funding in the current federal budget means that a patchwork of lands surrounded by industry, highways, stores and houses will become a national urban park, probably within a year.
[Read: Amid Heavy Industry, Canada’s Newest (and Tiniest) National Park]
While the final boundaries of the park, as well as its name, have yet to be worked out, one bit of land that is likely to be included was once my childhood hangout. It sat several blocks from my family’s home in the neighborhood, which was developed between the 1950s and 1970s. Back then, everyone called the park Rankin Bush, presumably for the street that once marked its eastern boundary before developers came along.
It had a novel feature: ribbons of crumbling sidewalks and partly grown-over, unpaved roadways crisscrossing the forest. They were useful for cycling, bouncing balls and acting as a platform for experiments with homemade gunpowder that produced, at best, a fizzle and a disappointing puff of smoke. Legends about what older kids did at night in the bush were plentiful, but I can offer no confirmation.
I vaguely knew by the time I was in high school that the sidewalks and roadways were leftovers of a planned company town that was supposed to support a steel mill project before it collapsed during the Great Depression. Now, and then, a section of the unfinished mill sits near the Ojibway Nature Center, which will become the key component of the national park. But the collapse of the steel mill project had the unintended consequence of preserving swaths of tallgrass prairie and woodlands in an area that otherwise had long been consumed by industry and agriculture.
What I didn’t fully know until reporting the article was the ambition of the project. At one point, U. S. Steel had budgeted 75 million Canadian dollars for the mill and town, which is about $1 billion today, and it was intended to employ 16,000 people.
Nor was I aware of how troubled the project was from the beginning. The steel company incorporated the town of Ojibway in 1913 and bought 1,400 acres of land, but a year later, World War I shut the project down. While Canada’s economy was thriving by the end of the 1920s, a postwar recession in the first half of the decade meant a slow restart for the mill and its model town.
An article that appeared in The Border Cities Star, the predecessor of The Windsor Star, in 1920 used an extraordinary bit of hyperbole to claim that the stately pace of the construction was all part of a plan.
“It is a calm, deliberate and stupendous undertaking, as must have been the construction of the pyramids,” the article speculated.
Much less obvious during my childhood than that bit of industrial history was pretty much anything about the Indigenous people of the area, except that they fought for Britain in the War of 1812. The nearest Indigenous community was the Walpole Island First Nation. But they were over 120 kilometers by road from Windsor, and the topography of the Great Lakes meant that their connections to the world were east toward London and Toronto, not farther southwest.
The descendants of the Indigenous people who lived in Windsor and surrounding Essex County are the Caldwell First Nation, and they had no land base back then, making them effectively invisible. Even in a country rife with land injustices involving Indigenous people, a publication that was prepared for the federal government in 1988 lays out a particularly protracted quest for justice.
This spring, the community signed an agreement with Parks Canada that committed the government to work with the Caldwell members on the establishment and management of the new urban national park.
The ceremony was held at Point Pelee National Park, a sandy point that juts out into Lake Erie, southeast of Windsor. It became a park in 1918.
Until the middle of the 19th century, Point Pelee, along with Pelee Island farther out in the lake, had been the Caldwell First Nation’s home. The island was lost through a private treaty with a settler that was ultimately declared illegal. When the Caldwell members returned from a hunting and gathering trip around 1840, they found that the point had been taken over by farmers.
At one point, the government was sympathetic. After floating various schemes, it sent an official down to Point Pelee in 1895 to pose as a fruit farmer who was looking to buy 200 acres of land that it planned to turn over to the Caldwells. The deception was apparently an attempt to keep the land price down.
But that plan fell apart after the government decided it was too expensive. Even worse, the government then announced that the Caldwell First Nation’s claim to Point Pelee was not valid. A long process to reclaim the land began.
In June 1922, a small number of Caldwell members occupied a tiny portion of Point Pelee. Research by K. Jack Conley at Western University found that Duncan Campbell Scott, the poet and public servant who expanded and enforced the notorious residential school system, told the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to remove the group. But after growing onions and selling baskets to tourists, the group left on its own.
It took until 2011 for the government to finally settle the Caldwell First Nation’s land claim.
On Saturday, the community will acknowledge the end of its local near invisibility. After being without land for nearly two centuries, the Caldwell First Nation has a home on 198 acres of land that it purchased west of Point Pelee, near Leamington. The first of its members will officially move into the first 28 of a planned 150 townhouses, bringing back their land base.
Trans Canada
This section was compiled by Vjosa Isai, a reporter and researcher at The Times in Toronto.
A native of Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has reported about Canada for The New York Times for over two decades. Follow him on Bluesky at @ianausten.bsky.social.
How are we doing?
We’re eager to have your thoughts about this newsletter and events in Canada in general. Please send them to nytcanada@nytimes.com.
Like this email?
Forward it to your friends, and let them know they can sign up here.
Read More: A New National Park That Rests on Indigenous and Industrial History
