Archives of Manitoba unveils historical maps at open house

We’ve got the oldest map in our collection, which is from 1709. We’ve got other maps that show sort of the growing knowledge that the Hudsons Bay Company was looking for in terms of mapping western North America and the North so that they could advance their business. Really. Wow. So what kind of things could people learn by looking at those maps from the 1700s? Yeah, I mean, those maps really started with a lot of empty spaces and then filled up over time. And part of the way the Hudson’s Bay Company was able to do that was to work with Indigenous people to rely on Indigenous knowledge. Of course, the traders came in, they didn’t know anything, right? So they needed to talk to the people and work with the people who knew these places. And so we do have some maps that show the Indigenous way of mapping and the Indigenous knowledge that was used by people who are surveying the land and documenting that in order to send it to London to have maps made, and some of those maps here as well. I think it’s amazing. I think it’s a well kept secret. People should come here and learn some, learn some things. Pretty cool. The different types of maps and how people like interpreted everything and how different it is from now. How is the indigenous way of mapping different than the way they were doing it in England? Yeah, I mean it’s it’s more of an oral tradition and really about landmarks about how do you get from here to there. And so, you know, there were some certainly misunderstandings of that knowledge and so some errors on maps where they didn’t understand that way of knowing, but it was certainly there. And those who listened and documented it really learned about the landscape around them. I knew it was here. I’d never really came in before. It’s something I’d be interested in now. I know that it’s here and I could come use the resources that are here if I need to. So this map is the oldest one that we’re showing today. This was in 17 O 9 and it’s a Hudson’s Bay Company map. The map itself is on vellum, which is animal skin and that’s why it’s in this plexiglass case, to keep it, to keep its environment a bit more stable so that we can bring it out for an event like this. So what you’ll know here is this is the Hudson’s Bay and this is really as much as they knew at that time. They weren’t trading past the Bay, so they knew the places along the coast. That’s what they had mapped. But this map is really quite interesting. This red line on the map shows that the English are not to go to the one side and the French are not to go to the other. So it denotes that border between the two, and it was used in the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 to denote those lands. It was used again in a in the 1920s to settle the border between Labrador and Quebec. So even at that time it was used as legal evidence. It is interesting, but I see that there’s like a lot more older people than the younger people. And I think that, like, grandparents should take their grandkids here and learn about maps because this is something that we don’t do anymore. It’s all on Google.