History
The area was inhabited for thousands of years by cultures of First Nations peoples. At the time of European contact, when Montreal was founded, the Mohawk Nation, an Iroquoian-speaking people based in upstate New York, used this territory as a hunting ground.
The Sulpician Order established a Roman Catholic mission and trading post at what became the adjacent Kanesatake. The Mohawk made this a new base and were granted a nine-mile square portion of land by the French king in 1716. The Sulpician Order was granted a narrow strip next to theirs. Unhappy with that, they arranged a change to the grant without informing the Mohawk.
A niobium mine (also known as columbium) was operated just off the Ste-Sophie road not far from the Trappist monastery.
Read more about this topic: Oka, Quebec
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The second day of July 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more”
—John Adams (1735–1826)