Tuesday, May 05, 2015

Ottawa - And the War of 1812


And so we bid good-bye to Ottawa (and Canada) from this trip via pictures.
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Above and below are the outside of Parliament.  I realized I didn't show the outside of this very cool building.

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Below is a picture of the statue commemorating the war of 1812.  Now when Americans think of the War of 1812, we remember the English burning down the White House, and the Star Spangled Banner song and that we finally taught the British to leave us alone.
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It says 1812-1815 to remind them that we did attack them once.
On the other hand, the Canadians remembered that we (America) actually started that war trying to take territory from Canada.  They were able to repel us.  They also told some story about the reasons that the British burned down the White House is because Americans torched Toronto, but that was new to me.
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The two pictures below are taken from Deco reliefs on a government building (the moose) and the Bank of Montreal (the First Nations people). 
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Speaking of the First Nations, the Canadians have had a very different history with them than the United States.  During the revolution, the British, the loyalists to the British and the Indians were allied against the colonies that became America.  In fact, in their telling, one of the big issues the First People had with Colonies was that we refused to honor the treaties that the British made to give the First People their lands.  After the revolution (again - according to the Canadian War Museum), many US loyalists moved to western Canada (now Ontario) and then took Indian land - despite treaties.
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Finally, here are a couple of cool statues.  Ottawa was awash in statues.  But I liked these.  Queen Elizabeth, young and on a horse, you usually don't see that.  And the statue to the animals that worked in World War One - in this case a red cross dog.  Apparently in the mud and trenches, they could get to places cars, horses and people could not get to.