‘Town below the town’: Series details Fort Erie’s Indigenous burial sites

A new three-part documentary series examines the 10,000 years of Indigenous history buried under Fort Erie, its producer says.

‘Echoes of the Ancestors: The History of Indigenous Burial Sites of Fort Erie’ premieres September 10 on Bell Fibe TV1 in three parts of about 15 to 20 minutes each.

Producer Mitch Baird told Fort Erie Radio how he and director-host Michael Summers, both Indigenous community members, started the project two years ago after construction crews found Indigenous artifacts near the Niagara River where a wastewater pumping station is currently being installed.

The two filmmakers then revisited the Peace Bridge excavation of the 1990s, where archaeologists recovered hundreds of thousands of objects from beneath a single truck yard.

“There’s a town below the town that’s existed for thousands of years,” Baird said.

Archaeologists consider 10 objects in a one-metre square to be a significant find, Baird said. But squares dug in Fort Erie have produced more than 5,000 artifacts, which Baird credits to a flint outcropping along the Niagara shoreline people have mined for millennia.

Some Peace Bridge artifacts date back roughly 9,000 years, according to Baird, who said crews there recovered flint arrowheads, the bones of hunted animals, shaped stones that weighed down fishing nets, pottery, pipes and knives.

Ron Williamson, the lead archaeologist on the Peace Bridge excavation, appears in the film. Baird said Williamson has stopped excavating new sites in Fort Erie because archaeologists already know millions of artifacts lie under the town and already know how people lived there.

The first episode explains why people settled on Fort Erie’s shore after the Ice Age, the second covers more recent finds and the Indigenous residents still living in the area, and the third asks how the town builds new housing, roads and sewers above thousands of years of graves and artifacts.

“How do you build a town on top of another town that’s almost 10,000 years old?” Baird said.

The pumping station dig has reached Stage 3 of Ontario’s archaeological assessment process, Baird said, and the volume of material has committed crews there to years of excavation at a single intersection.

A burial site investigation order has blocked a planned housing development at 237 and 253 Niagara Parkway since November 2024, after human remains were found in soil trucked onto the property. Owner Stuart Wright told Fort Erie Radio in January the investigation could cost him between $500,000 and $2 million.

Baird said the Fort Erie Native Friendship Centre and the town now agree that excavation happens only where a project cannot proceed without it, and that known burial and artifact sites stay undisturbed.

“Dig where we have to, for whatever reason, to make sure we do all the steps, but if we can avoid it, let’s avoid it,” he said.

The Public Bridge Authority has stopped digging foundations altogether, according to Baird, who said it maps the ossuaries and burial sites on its property and now builds above ground level.

The documentary also examines the Orchid ossuary, an Indigenous burial ground on the Niagara Parkway excavated in 1964, with remains more than 1,000 years old. Baird said Ontario now recognizes the land as a graveyard, though nothing on the lot identifies it as one.

Baird said Rick Hill, one of the people interviewed, contrasts how two sets of remains from the Snake Hill excavation site were handled: the American soldiers went home in flag-covered coffins, while the Indigenous remains were boxed up and no one knows where they ended up.

Mayor Wayne Redekop and Fort Erie chief administrative officer Chris McQueen also appear in the series, with McQueen setting out the archaeological steps a developer clears before work can start.

“We’re trying to bring awareness to how delicate and complicated these things are,” Baird said.

Baird is currently organizing a local screening for the documentary series with the town and the Friendship Centre.

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