Before 1793
Toronto's Indigenous History
Toronto's own history — and even its name — starts long before York was founded in 1793. The land has been home to Indigenous peoples for over 10,000 years, and "Toronto" itself comes from a Mohawk word for a place well north of the modern city.
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Our history of Toronto page, like most accounts, starts the clock at the 1793 founding of York. That's the origin of the current city government — it is not the origin of the place. People have lived on this land for more than 10,000 years, and the name "Toronto" itself predates any European settlement by centuries.
Where the name actually comes from
"Toronto" is widely traced to tkaronto, a Mohawk word meaning roughly "where there are trees standing in the water" — originally describing a narrows between Lake Simcoe and Lake Couchiching, well north of the modern city, where the Wendat and later Haudenosaunee drove stakes into the water to build fish weirs. The name migrated south over generations of maps and trade routes until it settled on the site of the current city, long before Simcoe founded York in 1793 and even survived his attempt to rename the place. This is also, distantly, the same root behind local slang like T Dot and the Dot — abbreviations of a name that was already secondhand when the British arrived.
The peoples who were here
Before sustained European contact, the region was home to the Wendat (Huron), followed by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and by the 17th–18th centuries the Mississaugas of the Credit, an Anishinaabe people who remain the most direct historical stewards of the land the city now sits on. Archaeological sites around present-day Toronto — including village sites near the Humber River, a historic carrying-place trail connecting Lake Ontario to Lake Simcoe — show continuous Indigenous settlement stretching back well over 10,000 years.
The Dish With One Spoon
Long before any treaty involving the British Crown, the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples of the region were themselves party to the Dish With One Spoon covenant — an agreement to share the territory and its resources peacefully, take only what is needed, and keep the "dish" (the land) clean for those who'd use it after. It's still invoked today, including by the City of Toronto itself, as the founding relationship underlying the land the city occupies.
The Toronto Purchase (1787, and its 200-year aftermath)
In 1787, the British Crown negotiated a land agreement with the Mississaugas of the Credit for territory including what is now downtown Toronto — the Toronto Purchase. The original document was later found to be invalid (it left the actual boundaries and price blank), and the Mississaugas of the Credit spent roughly two centuries pursuing a formal claim over the shortfall. In 2010, the federal government settled the claim for $145 million, one of the largest specific land-claim settlements in Canadian history at the time — a rare case where a founding-era land deal was actually revisited and compensated in the modern era rather than simply left as historical footnote.
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Sources
- City of Toronto — Indigenous History of Toronto
- Wikipedia — Toronto Purchase
- Wikipedia — Etymology of Toronto
- Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation — Our History