Archaeological discovery validates ancestral activity across Thunder Bay area

By Rick Garrick

FORT WILLIAM FIRST NATION — Fort William First Nation’s Faith Johnstone was excited about discovering a fully intact arrowhead on July 8 during an archaeological dig with Woodland Heritage Northwest at the Baseball Central ball diamonds in Thunder Bay.

“We uncovered a fully intact arrowhead,” says Johnstone, lead monitor and field technician with the resource management response unit at Fort William. “It’s so exciting, this is the first complete arrowhead our team has found in four to five years of doing this work. It’s super significant not just for the team, but our whole community — finding a complete artifact like this in the middle of the city speaks to how much of our heritage is still here right underneath our feet. It shows that our ancestors were here living and thriving and connected with this land in ways that are still being rediscovered.”

Johnstone says the work they are doing is more than just about archaeology.

“It’s about reclaiming our identity and exercising our inherent treaty rights to protect what’s ours,” Johnstone says.

Johnstone says their team was digging test pits within five-metre intervals when the arrowhead was discovered at the ball diamonds.

“It was approximately 12 inches underground, and our onsite archaeologist, Dave Norris, said it looked to be around 3,000 to 4,000 years old,” Johnstone says. “We will not know until it’s fully analyzed, but I trust his judgment.”

Dave Norris, senior archaeologist at Woodland Heritage Northwest, says the City of Thunder Bay had contacted them to do a study at the ball diamonds.

“We did sort of a mapping exercise where we took lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) data of that area and noted what we feel is a relic shoreline,” Norris says. “When we went to investigate, we dug shovel tests in that area, and we were lucky enough to find that artifact. It’s made of local stone called taconite and fashioned into a projectile point-like shape, so quite interesting and a pretty significant find for sure. The edges have been retouched to make a point and we don’t know if it was necessarily an arrowhead per se, but it certainly looks like it was meant to be one.”

Norris says they figure that the people occupying the ball diamonds area were there about 4,000 years ago.

“We haven’t been able to date it, but given the geology of the area, that’s what we assume at this point,” Norris says. “A lot of times, we use elevation of the landscape to determine sort of how old sites are.”

Norris says they have only done a preliminary study of the ball diamonds area.

“We have to move forward with a more extensive investigation, which might yield more artifacts, so we’re pretty excited about it,” Norris says.

Fort William Chief Michele Solomon says Fort William was invited to participate in the archaeological dig at the ball diamonds.

“There’s really been a collaboration between Fort William First Nation and the City of Thunder Bay,” Chief Solomon says. “So when they were going to be having some work done over near the ball fields, Fort William First Nation was invited to participate in the dig. From what I understand, Thunder Bay is one of two communities that are working on a municipal archaeological plan, so we’re grateful that they’re working on this archaeological plan and that they’ve invited us to participate, and if it wasn’t for that, I don’t know how this would have rolled out for us.”

Chief Solomon says the discovery of artifacts validates the activities of the ancestors across the territory and land.

“It’s important that our people are part of doing archaeological digs and making sure that when there’s findings of artifacts like this that we’re informed and that something is done about it immediately because when you think about what happened in Red Rock [Indian Band] and the challenges that happened there with the finding of artifacts, it wasn’t well respected,” Chief Solomon says.

The remains of First Nations ancestors were uncovered in May 2024 during excavation at the site of Parks Canada’s $37 million Administration and Visitor Centre for the Lake Superior National Marine Conservation Area in Nipigon.