We pack a lot into the pages of every issue of Kayak, but there’s always more great stuff we just can’t fit in. So join Teeka and Beau, our otter mascots, to find out more about the theme of each issue, or just pick up some random bits of Canadian history.

First Nations Take a Stand

Pontiac’s War

In the 1760s, the British started to take over land around the Great Lakes that had been held by the French. Commanders gave First Nations land to settlers and brutally beat down anyone who objected.

One chief, Obwandiyag (the English called him Pontiac), gathered other First Nations to oppose the British. They fought for two years, capturing British forts and killing 400 soldiers and capturing or killing more than 2,000 settlers in what is now southwestern Ontario, New York, Ohio and Michigan.

British general Jeffrey Amherst was so desperate he wondered whether they could find a way to infect the First Nations warriors with the dreaded disease smallpox.

By July 1766, Pontiac’s alliance had split up, but the British had proclaimed rules that still affect First Nations treaty claims in Canada. Pontiac was killed by a member of an enemy nation in 1769.