You can take a stroll through Ottawa’s history on these special tours

Indigenous Walking Tours explore monuments, art, architecture and more through an Indigenous perspective. Jaime Morse explains how it works.

Several walking tours are taking place this summer, offering a glimpse into Ottawa’s storied history.

“Unearthing Our Roots on Ottawa Routes” is a series of tours that celebrate Ottawa’s diversity and heritage, the City of Ottawa says.

“As part of the Ottawa Stops Hate Together campaign, these tours are designed to connect communities with each other—and with Ottawa’s complex and often untold history.”

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Tours take place during the week and on weekends throughout the summer and into the fall. They include the Black history in Ottawa streets bus tour, the queer history walking tour, Don Kwan’s Chinatown walking tour, the Indigenous walking tour, and the National Holocaust Monument walking tour.

Details about how to take part in the tours can be found at the City of Ottawa’s website.

Organizers of two of the tours sat down with CTV Morning Live to talk about them.

Indigenous Walking Tour – Alternating Saturdays

“Led by Jaime Morse, this powerful walking tour shares the rich Indigenous history woven into downtown Ottawa,” the City of Ottawa says.

Morse says she was inspired to start offering these tours because of her kids.

“I’m from out west, so when I came to Ottawa, I really wanted them to be able to see themselves in the space around them. I realized quickly that there’s some monuments, some architecture, and some artwork around the city that I could really tell the story of who they are and how our people came to be here,” she said.

The tour highlights stops such as a land marker downtown that acknowledges Ottawa’s presence on unceded, unsurrendered Algonquin territory, and a totem pole in Confederation Park.

“What’s that doing in Ontario, when they’re really from the west coast of Canada? So, I can talk about how it got there, a little bit about the structure itself and the artist. People are passing by these structures all the time not knowing what they are,” she said.

Morse says her goal is to teach others about the Indigenous people who live and have lived in Ottawa.

“The full takeaway of being a part of the tours is really just to learn new information about First Nations, Métis and Inuit on unceded Algonquin territory and really that we exist in this space,” she said. “There’s different ways and perspectives of looking at monuments. So, even if a monument might have some information there, we have to think about who wrote that information, when it was written, and for what purpose, which may not always be in line with an Indigenous perspective.”

Queer History of Ottawa Walking Tour – Sundays

“Step into Ottawa’s vibrant queer history with drag king Morgan Mercury. This engaging tour begins in Centretown at Dundonald Park and dives into the stories of the 2SLGBTQ+ community—from the public service purge between the 1950s and 1990s to the trailblazers who shaped queer life in the capital, including Charlotte Whitton, Elaina Martin, and Rupert Raj,” the City of Ottawa says.

This tour delves into the history of Ottawa’s gay village and why Capital Pride is celebrated in August, and not in June like other places.

Mercury told CTV Morning Live the “We Demand” rally is an important part of the city’s history.

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“It happened August 28, 1971, on Parliament Hill. It was 100 protesters coming from Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa, to give 10 demands to the Canadian government related to gay rights,” Mercury said. “At the time, this was two years after the official decriminalization of homosexuality in Canada and there was a policy in place—the LGBT Purge it’s now known as—which was during the Cold War, there was a lot of worries about spies and people who had ‘moral defects’ and the government had a policy to figure out who were homosexuals to get them out of the public service and the military.”

Mercury says there is a lot of hidden history about queer folks in Ottawa that people might not know about.

“If you were living as queer person here in Ottawa in the 1950s to the 1990s, you were kind of living a double life in many ways,” Mercury said. “I thought that that information is really important to talk about. It’s not even that long ago. Survivors of the purge are still alive and living in the city today.”

One story Mercury says people might now know is the history of Charlotte Whitton, the first woman to become mayor of Ottawa in 1951.

“Before she was mayor, she lived in Ottawa for over 20 years with her female roommate Margaret Rose Grier. They lived in what was known then as a ‘Bostonian marriage’—this was like career women, spinsters, feminists—and they lived together in Ottawa from 1922 until Margaret passed away in 1947,” Mercury said. “We found out in 1999 a bunch of letters had been written between them, and they had written a bunch of poetry to each other as well. Nothing is confirmed about the nature of their relationship, but I take that story as like what would it have been like for me and my partner and our cat to live together in Ottawa if we were here in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.”