Patty and Reggie Girl pioneered the Friday "My Town" Photo Shoot Out asking us to post photos of our local community every Friday. From a handful of participants it has grown into a world wide phenomenon with over 77 contributors and is now in the capable hands of Gordon, ChefE, Jen and GingerV.
This week's theme, chosen by Cindy, is MY FAVORITE PLACE TO__________________.
For a comprehensive list and how to join instructions, just click on the camera at bottom of my side panel.
Next weeks theme, suggested by The Blogger Team is The Photo Study Of A Building.
I live in Toronto, in the Scarborough area of Toronto, in the West Hill area of Scarborough. So West Hill will be the focus of my photos.
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I'm cheating a bit. The Museum of Civilization is in Ottawa not Toronto, and certainly not in West Hill.
However, long before the English and French settled here, West Hill was home to several Iroquois villages.
Here Canada's First Nations peoples lived their lives for generations. They were the Iroquois to their enemies, known to themselves as the Haudenosaunee or the "People of the Longhouse"
Looking nothing like the Hollywood stereotype of "Indians", they lived in wooden villages behind pallisaded walls.
Across the country the way of life and style of clothing varied from tribe to tribe, but they all dressed warmly against the bitter snows of winter.
Of course their villages are gone now, from here. Only careful archeological work has turned up traces of their villages along the banks of Highland Creek and under the carefully manicured lawns of the private Scarborough Golf Club.
So to get some sense of what life was like 200 or a 1000 years ago in my own backyard, I need to travel to Ottawa.
The Museum of Civilization has the largest collection of First Nations artifacts in the country.
Here, if we can just take the time to contemplate, to open our eyes to a different world, to a different life, we might just get the vaguest sense of another time and another place and another way of life.
A way of life that once existed in my own backyard and along the pathways where I take Lindsay for her daily runs. Pathways originally trodden by very different feet.
Take the time now to loose yourself in these images. Spend a little time with them and let their magic work on you. Click on any of them to enlarge them. 
There was once a different world, with different values, different habits, different beliefs, right here, in this place.
Can you feel it?
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