Cities
Three places. Distinct histories. A continent of connections.
Begin with cities in Mexico, Canada and the United States. Each profile connects a present-day place with Indigenous communities, colonial change and the landscapes that made settlement possible.
A contemporary view of Mexico City’s historic center.
Mexico / Lake Texcoco basin
Mexico City
A colonial capital built over a Mexica metropolis.
The Mexica established Tenochtitlan on an island in Lake Texcoco in the fourteenth century; its founding is traditionally dated to 1325. Causeways, canals and intensive agriculture connected a powerful urban center to the surrounding basin.
In 1521, Spanish forces and Indigenous allies defeated Tenochtitlan after a siege. Spanish colonial authorities built Mexico City over much of the conquered city, reworking its sacred and civic spaces. Conquest brought devastating violence and disease, but did not erase Indigenous residents, knowledge or political action.
Source starting point: INAH’s Templo Mayor Museum and archaeological research on Tenochtitlan.
Old Montreal today; its stone streetscape reflects later layers of the city.
Canada / St. Lawrence River
Montreal
An island within long-standing Indigenous networks.
When Jacques Cartier visited the island in 1535, he described Hochelaga, a St. Lawrence Iroquoian village. Its precise location remains debated. The region also belongs within broader, continuing Indigenous histories, including those of the Kanien’kehá:ka, or Mohawk people.
French settlers established Ville-Marie in 1642. Missionary ambitions, river travel and the fur trade shaped the settlement, alongside alliances and conflicts involving distinct Indigenous nations. British conquest in 1760 changed colonial authority, not the island’s long-standing importance as a meeting place.
Source starting points: Pointe-à-Callière’s archaeology and history collections; The Canadian Encyclopedia entries on Hochelaga and Montreal.
Lower Manhattan’s present-day waterfront.
United States / Hudson River estuary
New York
Lenape homelands, a Dutch port and an English colony.
Manhattan is part of Lenape homelands. Long before European colonization, Lenape communities lived, fished, farmed and traded throughout the region’s waterways and coastal landscapes.
The Dutch established New Amsterdam at Manhattan’s southern tip in the 1620s. Commerce depended on Indigenous trade networks and also on enslaved African labor. Colonial expansion brought warfare and dispossession. England seized the settlement in 1664 and renamed it New York; Lenape communities endured displacement and continue today.
Source starting points: the National Museum of the American Indian’s Native New York exhibition; New Netherland Institute collections on Dutch colonial history.
Reading the past
A city holds more than one history.
Indigenous peoples are living communities, not a chapter that ended with European arrival. Their histories continue through language, governance, relationships to land and urban life.
Dates mark particular events, not clean breaks. Colonial rule began and changed at different times across North America, and its consequences remain part of the present.
Read written records alongside archaeology, oral histories and knowledge shared by the communities concerned. Ask who created a source, whose perspective it preserves and whose experience may be missing.
Keep exploring the evidence
Useful starting points include Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), Pointe-à-Callière in Montreal, the National Museum of the American Indian and the New Netherland Institute. Seek out Indigenous-led sources alongside museum and archival collections.
The photographs on this site show contemporary places. They are illustrations, not evidence of how those places looked in earlier centuries.