Ottawa History Hub

The Recollects were the first Franciscan missionaries in New France, ministering to the French and Indigenous residents of the trading posts and going out amongst the various Anishinaabe, Algonquin, Innu, Wendat, and Odawa peoples to proselytise. They were forcefully removed from Quebec during the first English occupation in the 1630s, returned, and then died out after the 1759 occupation.

Samuel de Champlain was the famed military man, explorer extraordinaire, founder of Quebec City, and governor of New France in all but official title. He navigated the Ottawa River, and was the first European to chronicle the experience, naming the Rideau River, Chaudière Falls, and putting the site on paper for the first time.

Etienne Brule was the first coureur de bois, an independent fur trader operating in the Saint Laurence Basin. He travelled up the Ottawa River in 1610, learnt to speak several Indigenous languages to communicate with Algonquin, Huron-Wendat, and Odawa. He lived most of his life in the Great Lakes region, working as a fur trader, diplomat, adventurer, explorer and mercenary.

This episode introduces the Algonquin, an Anishinaabe people who've inhabited the Ottawa area for more than two thousand years. It includes elements of their language (Anishinaabemowin), religion (Midewiwin), and relationships with other Anishinaabe people (Ojibwe,Montagnais-Innu, and Odawa), as well as allied or rival Iroquoian peoples (Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat).

Before Ottawa was Ottawa, it was a forest, and before it was a forest, it was under 80m of water as an extension of the Atlantic Ocean. Whales, seals, walrus and other marine animals called it home. This is what Ottawa was like 115,000 years ago. The Champlain Sea stretched across the Saint Laurence and Ottawa River Valleys, before the glaciers melted and the seabed rose to the surface.