Celebrate Aboriginal Culture

Experience Ontario Aboriginal Tourism Destinations. Ontario offers dozens of tourism destinations for families to immerse themselves in Aboriginal culture, customs and traditions.

There are locations in every corner of the province for families to visit on a day trip or vacation road trip. For example, you can:

• Taste traditional foods such as bannock, corn soup or blueberry tea in Ottawa.
• Experience Manitoulin Island’s majestic scenery on horseback while an Anishnaabe guide shares the legends of the land.
• Go for a hike and wonder at the mysteries of ancient petroglyphs carved into marble rock face hundreds of years ago just northeast of Peterborough.
• In downtown Toronto, view beautiful pieces of Inuit art in a setting that evokes the Arctic landscape.
• Canoe Temagami’s ancestral waterways and take photographs of loons, beavers and moose.
• In Midland, time travel to a reconstructed Iroquoian longhouse and learn about Ontario’s earliest European settlers and the Huron Wendat People.
• Watch a moving spectacle of drums and swirling colours at summertime powwow celebrations across the province.

Supporting local tourism is part of the Ontario government’s efforts to build a strong economy and vibrant communities.

• “Ontario” stems from a Huron word “Onatari:io,” meaning beautiful lake.
• The top five Aboriginal languages spoken in Ontario are Ojibway, Oji-Cree, Cree, Inuktitut and Mohawk.
• Tourism is an important part of Ontario’s economy. In 2011, Ontario tourism brought in over $23 billion and supported more than 300,000 direct and indirect jobs.

Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs, June 3, 2013

Source: http://news.ontario.ca/maa/en/2013/06/celebrate-aboriginal-culture-this-summer.html