For Indigenous Heritage Month, the Wilmot-Tavistock Gazette interviewed our Managing Partner Rob MacDonald on local Indigenous history that deserves to be more widely known by the public. About 600 years ago, Wilmot was home to a Neutral Iroquoian village which included the largest longhouse that has been excavated in Ontario- at over 120 metres long!
In the early 1980s Rob led a public archaeology team that excavated the village, and also ran archaeology programs for school groups to visit the site. Shockingly, today there is very little commemoration and local memory of this Indigenous village, or in fact the many other villages that once dotted the region!
We applaud the Wilmot-Tavistock Gazette for highlighting this issue and calling for more public knowledge of the rich Indigenous heritage in Waterloo region.
You can read the full article here: https://asiheritage.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Digging-Deep-To-Unearth-Wilmots-Forgotten-Indigenous-History.pdf