THUNDER BAY – A lesson in Northwestern Ontario’s treaty history adorns the walls of Thunder Bay Museum’s second-floor exhibit space.
Treaty #3: Manidoo Mazina’igan, a travelling exhibit from Kenora’s MUSE: Lake of the Woods Museum, will be at the Donald Street facility until the end of April and open to visitors Tuesday to Sunday, 1-5 p.m.
“The importance of the exhibit is that it helps us to understand where we are right now in terms of Canada’s relationship with Indigenous Peoples … by helping to understand where these treaties came from, the circumstances that brought them about, the different complexities in their signing, bringing attention to some of the ways in which treaty promises were not always kept,” Thunder Bay Museum curator Michael DeJong said Tuesday.
“And then it really just highlights how these treaties are living documents and still continue to be very relevant and important today.”
Representatives of Canada and Anishinaabe First Nations in the region signed Treaty 3 at Northwest Angle on Oct. 3, 1873, about two years after the signing of Treaty 1 and Treaty 2 to the west.
The MUSE honoured Treaty 3’s 150th anniversary in 2023 with an exhibit of the treaty, adhesion documents and colourful information panels developed by The MUSE’s Indigenous advisory committee.
Those information panels and reproductions of the treaty and adhesions form the exhibit Treaty #3: Manidoo Mazina’igan/The Sacred Document.
The exhibit was a collaboration between Grand Council Treaty #3, The MUSE: Lake of the Woods Museum, Library and Archives Canada, the Government of Canada and the Province of Ontario.
In addition to explaining how Treaty 3 came to be, the exhibit “tells the story of what’s happened since in a kind of a grand 150-year overview and also at the end looking to the future,” MUSE director Braden Murray said Tuesday in a phone interview from Kenora.
“What we found during the 2023 exhibit was a lot of people learning and saying, ‘you know, I’d heard a lot about Treaty 3, but I didn’t really know the whole story,’” Murray said.
“This is a great opportunity to get the story and to better understand our friends and neighbours in the Treaty 3 territory.”
Thunder Bay Museum staff, in consultation with the museum's Indigenous advisory group, created additional exhibit panels about other treaties pertaining to Northwestern Ontario.
“We’re very grateful to the Lake of the Woods Museum for making this available to us, and we’re really pleased to be able to put it on display,” said DeJong.
