Good morning, this is Marcus Gee. I travelled to rural Alberta to learn what I could about a chapter of my family’s history. What emerged was a story of dispossession and exploitation, but also of resilience and survival. More on that below, plus a piano prodigy and an unlikely leader on climate. But first:
Today’s headlines
- Former FBI director James Comey is indicted by a grand jury on two charges
- Postal workers announce immediate strike after Ottawa directs Canada Post to end door-to-door delivery
- Interim parliamentary budget officer warns that Ottawa’s finances are unsustainable without change
- Canada and England will share women’s rugby’s biggest stage yet in the World Cup final clash
An interpretive path at the Frog Lake Historical site, on June 6, 2025.Amber Bracken/The Globe and Mail
History
What I learned about the legacy of Frog Lake
When I was growing up, we always had an old leather-bound book on our shelf. Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear was the story of how my grandfather’s aunt had been held captive by Cree warriors after an event called the Frog Lake Massacre.
Her birth name was Theresa Fulford. She grew up on a farm in the Ottawa Valley and married a man named John Delaney. He was a farm instructor at Frog Lake in Canada’s distant North-West, near the border of what are now Alberta and Saskatchewan.
His job was to teach the Cree how to farm like white settlers. The Cree, like the other peoples of the North-West, had been devastated by European diseases and exploited by American whisky traders. The buffalo, their main source of sustenance for centuries, were disappearing, gunned down by white hunters. The farm-instruction program was meant to prepare the Cree for life on the reserves that were being established to contain them.
Illustrations from the book Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear, co-authored by Theresa Delaney.
The program was a flop. The instructors were poorly trained and the Cree were not supplied with proper tools and seed. Frustrated and near starvation, a group of them rose up at Frog Lake, killing John Delaney and eight others.
Theresa saw her husband shot dead before her eyes. Published in 1885, Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear is her account of her time among the Cree warriors as they roamed the prairie with avenging Canadian troops on their tail.
The story has fascinated my family for generations. Lately, as Canada has grappled with the sins of colonialism, including the residential school system, we have begun looking more skeptically at Theresa’s account, which is shot through with paternalism and outright racism. We have read and reread her little book and studied the events, including the Riel Rebellion, that lead to Frog Lake.
But what we did not know for all those years was that there was a whole other side to the tale.
After I last wrote about Frog Lake in 2020, I got an e-mail from a woman who said she was a descendant of John Delaney. That was a surprise to me. He and Theresa had no children. We arranged to meet in Calgary, where she lives.
What she told me that day amazed me. We knew that John Delaney had a reputation for exploiting Indigenous women, taking advantage of his role in controlling food stocks in a time of malnutrition. But that he had a child was startling news to me and my family.
I set out to learn more about the unexpected after-story of the massacre, and I found that there was a whole other family with connections to John, Theresa and Frog Lake that we never knew. And they had their own stories to share, which put this chapter of history into a new light.
A mural titled Creature Medicine by Métis artist Sarah Houle-Lowry is seen in Calgary, May, 2025.Amir Salehi/The Globe and Mail
This year, with the help of my family and others with ties to the event, I was able to discover more details about this newly found part of our past. I pored over birth records, combed through biographies and newspaper clippings, read survivor accounts and visited the Frog Lake memorial in Alberta.
What emerged was a story of dispossession and exploitation, tenacity and survival, in the Canadian West. I hope you will read the full story and allow me to share with you the things I learned, and the people I met.
The Shot
‘You can’t teach that.’
Canadian pianist Ryan Wang has been playing the piano since he was four years old. Now 18, he will compete in the International Fryderyk Chopin Competition in Warsaw in October.Anna Liminowicz/The Globe and Mail
He’s already played for the King. Now, Canadian teenager Ryan Wang heads to Warsaw for his biggest competition yet. The famed International Fryderyk Chopin Competition starts on Oct. 2 in Warsaw, and it could put his career on a stratospheric level.
The Wrap
What else we’re following
At home: Ontario’s decision to kill speed cameras puts Premier Doug Ford at odds with some municipalities and police forces.
Abroad: China, the world’s worst polluter, is becoming an unlikely climate leader, writes Asia correspondent James Griffiths.
Meet: In a UN address on Thursday, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas vowed Hamas would have no role in governing postwar Gaza. Today, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks.
Bid: Hudson’s Bay will begin auctioning off hundreds of pieces of store memorabilia, art and other artifacts in November.
Talk: Four common misgivings about therapy, according to a therapist.
Cheer: Canada’s 2026 FIFA World Cup mascot is a moose named Maple.