Assiniboine
The Assiniboine or Assiniboin people known as the Hohe and known by the endonym Nakota, are a First Nations/Native American people from the Northern Great Plains of North America. Today, they are centered in present-day Saskatchewan, they have populated parts of Alberta and southwestern Manitoba in Canada, northern Montana and western North Dakota in the United States. They were well known throughout much of the late 18th and early 19th century, were members of the Iron Confederacy with the Cree. Images of Assiniboine people were painted by such 19th-century artists as Karl Bodmer and George Catlin; the Europeans and Americans adopted names. In Siouan, they traditionally called themselves the Hohe Nakota. With the widespread adoption of English, many now use the name that became common in English; the English adopted Assiniboine, used by the Canadian French colonists. It was a transliteration into French phonetics of what they heard the Ojibwe use as a term for these western people; the Ojibwe name was asinii-bwaan.
The Cree called them asinîpwâta. In the same way, Assnipwan comes from the word asinîpwâta in the western Cree dialects, from asiniy ᐊᓯᓂᐩ NA – "rock, stone" – and pwâta ᐹᐧᑕ NA – "enemy, Sioux". Early French traders in the west were familiar with Algonquian languages, they transliterated many Cree or Ojibwe exonyms for other western Canadian indigenous peoples during the early colonial era. The English referred to the Assiniboine by adopting terms from the French spelled using English phonetics. Other tribes associated "stone" with the Assiniboine because they cooked with heated stones, they dropped hot stones into water to heat it to boiling for cooking meat. Some writers believed that the name was derived from the Ojibway term Assin and the French bouillir, to boil, but such an etymology is unlikely. Assiniboine is a Mississippi Valley Siouan language, in the Western Siouan language family. In the early 21st century, about 150 people speak most are more than 40 years old; the majority of the Assiniboine today speak only American English.
The 2000 census showed 3,946 tribal members. Assiniboine are linked by language to the Stoney First Nations people of Alberta; the latter two tribes speak varieties of Nakota, a distant, but not mutually intelligible, variant of the Sioux language. The Assiniboine, along with the Stoney of Alberta, share a common ancestry with the Sioux nation. While it was believed that the Assiniboine originated among the Yanktonai division of the Dakota Sioux, linguistic analysis indicates that the Assiniboine and Stoney together form a group coordinate with that of the Santee and Yankon-Yanktonai, that they are no more related to one of these subdivisions than another; the separation of the Assiniboine from the Sioux must have occurred at some time prior to 1640, as Paul Le Jeune names them along with the "Naduessi" in his Jesuit Relations of that year. The Assiniboine and Sioux were both pushed westward onto the plains from the woodlands of Minnesota by the Ojibwe, who had acquired firearms from their French allies.
The Assiniboine acquired horses via raiding and trading with neighboring tribes of Plains Indians such as the Crow and the Sioux on their south. The Assiniboine developed into a large and powerful people with a horse and warrior culture. At the height of their power, the Assiniboine dominated territory ranging from the North Saskatchewan River in the north to the Missouri River in the south, including portions of modern-day Saskatchewan and Manitoba, Canada; the first person of European descent to describe the Assiniboine was an employee of the Hudson's Bay Company named Henry Kelsey in the 1690s. Explorers and traders Jean Baptiste de La Vérendrye and his sons, Anthony Henday, Alexander Henry the younger confirmed that the Assiniboine held a vast territory across the northern plains, including into the United States The Assiniboine became reliable and important trading partners and middlemen for fur traders and other Indians the British Hudson's Bay Company and North West Company, operating in western Canada in a vast area known as Rupert's Land.
During the 18th century and early 19th century, south of the border in what became Montana and the Dakota territories, the Assiniboine traded with the American Fur Company and the competing Rocky Mountain Fur Company. The Assiniboine obtained guns, metal tomahawks, metal pots, wool blankets, wool coats, wool leggings, glass beads, as well as other goods from the fur traders in exchange for furs. Beaver furs and bison hides were the most traded furs. Increased contact with Europeans resulted in Native Americans contracting Eurasian infectious diseases that were endemic among the Europeans, they suffered epidemics with high mortality, most notably smallpox among the Assiniboine. The Assiniboine population crashed from around 10,000 people in the late 18th century to around 2600 by 1890; the Lewis and Clark Expedition was mounted by the United States in 1804–1806 to explore the Louisiana Territory, newly acquired from France. The expedit
Canadian Northern Railway
The Canadian Northern Railway is a historic Canadian transcontinental railway. At its demise in 1923, when it was merged into the Canadian National Railway, the CNoR owned a main line between Quebec City and Vancouver via Ottawa and Edmonton. CNoR had its start in the independent branchlines that were being constructed in Manitoba in the 1880s and 1890s as a response to the monopoly exercised by Canadian Pacific Railway. Many of these branchlines were built with the sponsorship of the provincial government, which sought to subsidize local competition to the federally subsidized CPR. Two of these branchline contractors, Sir William Mackenzie and Sir Donald Mann, took control of the bankrupt Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company in January, 1896. Mackenzie and Mann expanded their enterprise, in 1897, by building further north into Manitoba's Interlake district as well as east and west of Winnipeg, they began building and buying lines south to connect the U. S. border at Pembina, North Dakota, east to Ontario.
The Canadian Northern Railway was established, in 1899, all railway companies owned by Mackenzie and Mann were consolidated into the new entity. CNoR's first step toward competing directly with CPR came at the start of the 20th century with the decision to build a line linking the Prairie Provinces with Lake Superior at the harbour in Port Arthur-Fort William which would permit the shipping of western grain to European markets as well as the transport of eastern Canadian goods to the West; this line incorporated an existing CNoR line to Lake of the Woods and two local Ontario railways, the Port Arthur and Western Railway and the Ontario and Rainy River Railway whose charters Mackenzie and Mann had acquired in 1897. To reach Port Arthur which became the lake terminus of the CNoR, the line extended south of Lake of the Woods into northern Minnesota before heading northeast through Rainy River District to the head of navigation on the Great Lakes; the Winnipeg-Port Arthur line was completed on December 30, 1901 with the last spike being driven just east of Atikokan station by Ontario's Commissioner of Crown Lands, Elihu Davis.
Throughout this time and Mann had been busy expanding their prairie branch line network to feed the connection to Port Arthur. This network expanded in subsequent years to cover most parts of the prairies. In 1903, the federal government and Grand Trunk Railway were seeking a 2nd transcontinental railway for Canada and approached Mackenzie and Mann to seek their co-operation; this effort was spurned and GTR and the federal government would go on to form a system composed of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway and the National Transcontinental Railway. Mackenzie and Mann began their first significant expansion outside of the prairies with the purchase of Great Lakes steamships, the fr:Quebec and Lake St-John Railway into northern Quebec's Saguenay region and the acquisition of branchlines in southwestern Nova Scotia and western Cape Breton Island. Other acquisitions were in southern Ontario and a connecting line was built from Toronto to Parry Sound. In 1905, CNoR reached Edmonton, which had just been named capital of the newly formed province of Alberta.
In Eastern Canada, in 1908, a line was built east from a connection at Capreol, Ontario, on the Toronto – Parry Sound line to Ottawa and on to Montreal. In 1910 a direct Toronto–Montreal line was built. In 1911, federal funding was made available for construction of the line Montreal – Ottawa – Capreol – Port Arthur. In 1912, with GTR and CPR holding the ideal southern routes around Mount Royal to downtown Montreal, CNoR started building a double-tracked mainline north by building the Mount Royal Tunnel under the mountain. In western Canada, in 1910 construction was started on the line west of Edmonton through Yellowhead Pass to Vancouver, thanks to subsidies provided by the government of British Columbia. In 1911, work was started on a new townsite named Port Mann on the Fraser River that would accommodate the new car shops and from where lines would extend to Vancouver and to the delta of the Fraser River CNoR's initial expansion in the 1890s and 1900s had been frugal by acquiring bankrupt companies or finishing failed construction projects.
By the 1910s, significant expenses were adding up from the construction north of Lake Superior and the Mount Royal Tunnel, but the largest costs were from building on "the wrong side" of the Thompson and Fraser rivers in the mountains of British Columbia. CPR had trackage on the desirable eastern side, leading to the port of Vancouver, forcing CNoR to blast tunnels and ledges out of these canyons; the most infamous construction folly on the CNoR in British Columbia happened in 1913, when blasting for a passage for the railway at Hells Gate triggered an enormous landslide which blocked the narrow swift-flowing Fraser River. The resulting damage to Pacific salmon runs took decades to reverse by the governmental construction of fishways. In addition to difficult construction between Jasper and Vancouver, CNoR started construction west of Edmonton in 1910 two years than GTPR, which had started construction east from Prince Rupert in the Skeena River, leading to Yellowhead Pass. In 1910 the company entered the trans-Atlantic liner business with the founding of the Canadian Northern Steamship Company.
The subsidiary acquired two liners from the Egyptian Mail Steamship Company and operated them under its Royal Line brand. The pair of ships were renamed upon purchase—Cairo became Royal Edward and Heliopolis became Royal
Ethnic groups in Europe
The indigenous peoples of Europe are the focus of European ethnology, the field of anthropology related to the various indigenous groups that reside in the nations of Europe. According to German monograph Minderheitenrechte in Europa co-edited by Pan and Pfeil there are 87 distinct peoples of Europe, of which 33 form the majority population in at least one sovereign state, while the remaining 54 constitute ethnic minorities; the total number of national or linguistic minority populations in Europe is estimated at 105 million people, or 14% of 770 million Europeans. There are no universally accepted and precise definitions of the terms "ethnic group" and "nationality". In the context of European ethnography in particular, the terms ethnic group, people and ethno-linguistic group, are used as synonymous, although preference may vary in usage with respect to the situation specific to the individual countries of Europe. There are eight European ethno-linguistic groups with more than 30 million members residing in Europe.
These eight groups between themselves account for some 465 million or about 65% of European population: Russians, French, Italians, Spaniards, Poles. Smaller ethno-linguistic groups with more than 10 million people residing in Europe include: Romanians, Turks, Swedes, Czechs, Serbs. About 20–25 million residents are members of diasporas of non-European origin; the population of the European Union, with some five hundred million residents, accounts for two thirds of the European population. Both Spain and the United Kingdom are special cases, in that the designation of nationality and British, may controversially take ethnic aspects, subsuming various regional ethnic groups, see nationalisms and regionalisms of Spain and native populations of the United Kingdom. Switzerland is a similar case, but the linguistic subgroups of the Swiss are discussed in terms of both ethnicity and language affiliations. Of the total population of Europe of some 740 million, close to 90% fall within three large branches of Indo-European languages, these being.
Romance, including. Germanic, including. Afrikaans, a daughter language of Dutch, is spoken by some South African and Namibian migrant populations. Three stand-alone Indo-European languages do not fall within larger sub-groups and are not related to those larger language families. Besides the Indo-European languages, there are other language families on the European continent which are wholly unrelated to Indo-European: Uralic languages, including. Turkic languages, including. Semitic languages, including. Kartvelian languages, including Georgian, Zan and Laz. Northwest Caucasian languages. Northeast Caucasian languages. Language isolates. Mongolic languages exist in the form of Kalmyk spoken in the Caucasus region of Russia; the Basques have been found to descend from the population of the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age directly. The Indo-European groups of Europe are assumed to have developed in situ by admixture of Bronze Age, proto-Indo-European groups with earlier Mesolithic and Neolithic populations, after migrating to most of Europe from the Pontic steppe.
The Finnic peoples are assumed to be descended from Proto-Uralic populations further to the east, nearer to the Ural Mountains, that had migrated to their historical homelands in Europe by about 3,000 years ago. Reconstructed languages of Iron Age Europe include Proto-Celtic, Proto-Italic and Proto-Germanic, all of these Indo-European languages of the centum group, Proto-Slavic and Proto-Baltic, of the satem group. A group of Tyrrhenian languages appears to have included Etruscan, Rhaetian and Camunic. A pre-Roman stage of Proto-Basqu
Turlock, California
Turlock is a city in Stanislaus County, United States. Its estimated 2015 population of 72,292 made it the second-largest city in Stanislaus County after Modesto. Founded on December 22, 1871, by prominent grain farmer John William Mitchell, the town consisted of a post office, a depot, a grain warehouse and a few other buildings. Mitchell declined the honor of having the town named for himself; the name "Turlock" was chosen instead. The name is believed to originate from the Irish village “Turlough”. In October 1870, Harper's Weekly published an excerpt from English novelist James Payn's story Bred in the Bone, which includes the mention of a town named "Turlough". Local historians believe that this issue of Harper's Weekly was read by early resident H. W. Lander who suggested the alternate name. Mitchell and his brother were successful businessmen, buying land and developing large herds of cattle and sheep that were sold to gold miners and others as they arrived, they were leaders in wheat farming and cultivated tracts of land under the tenant system.
The Mitchells owned most of the area, over 100,000 acres, from Keyes to Atwater. In the early 20th century, 20-acre lots from the Mitchell estate were sold for $20 an acre. While it grew to be a prosperous and busy hub of activity throughout the end of the 19th century, it was not incorporated as a city until February 15, 1908. By that time intensive agricultural development surrounded most of the city. Many of the initial migrants to the region were Swedish; as an early San Francisco Chronicle article stated of the region and this community's lacteal productivity, "you have to hand it to the Scandinavians for knowing how to run a dairy farm." Turlock went on to become known as the "Heart of the Valley" because of its agricultural production. With the boom came racial and labor strife. In July 1921, a mob of 150 white men evicted 60 Japanese cantaloupe pickers from rooming houses and ranches near Turlock, taking them and their belongings on trucks out of town; the white men claimed the Japanese were undercutting white workers by taking lower wages per crate of fruit picked.
In protest, fruit growers threatened not to hire the white workers behind the eviction, preferring to let melons rot on vines than hire such characters. As a result of this stance, the eviction had the opposite effect of. By August, Japanese workers had returned, moreover, they were nearly the only people employed to pick melons; the affair gained national attention, California's Governor William Stephens vowed that justice would be served. Six men were arrested, though they were untroubled by the charges, stating that leaders of Turlock's American Legion and Chamber of Commerce had told them no trouble would come of their actions. Although a former Turlock night watchman testified that one of the accused had disclosed a plan "to clean up Turlock of the Japs," all those arrested were acquitted of charges; the San Francisco Chronicle's editorial line was opposition to both the evictions and Japanese labor, with one column stating "we in California are determined that Oriental workers shall be kept out of the state.
But that does not mean that the decent citizens of California will tolerate for one moment such proceedings as the attack of a mob on the Japanese cantaloupe workers in the Turlock district."In 1930, Turlock's population was 20% Assyrian. They were such a significant part of the population that the southern part of town became referred to as Little Urmia, referring to the region of northwestern Iran from which they came. In the 1930s Turlock was cited by Ripley's Believe It or Not as having the most churches per capita in the U. S.. Various religious centers reflecting a diverse population, such as Sikh Gurdwaras, various Assyrian Christian churches, many mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic churches have been built. During World War II, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U. S. government placed Japanese Americans into concentration camps all over the country. The Stanislaus County Fairgrounds was the site of one of fifteen temporary "assembly centers" and held 3,669 Japanese Americans, a majority of them U.
S. citizens. In 1960, California State University, opened to students, helping to spur growth in the city as the university expanded in its early years. In the 1970s, State Route 99 was completed through the area bypassing the then-incorporated areas of Turlock in a route to the west of the city through undeveloped land. Since that time, the city has grown westward to meet the freeway's north–south path, although urban development west of the freeway has only begun to take hold. In an attempt to allow for orderly growth of the city, comprehensive growth master plans have established urban growth boundaries since the 1960s. Turlock experienced extensive growth of both residential and commercial areas in the 1980s, following a statewide boom in housing demand and construction; the housing boom of the 1980s diminished in the early 1990s but increased again in the second half of the decade as a result of San Francisco Bay Area growth, which placed a higher demand for more affordable housing in outlying areas.
Following the dot-com bust, housing demand intensified, producing higher house prices in an area known for affordable housing. A recent boom in the retail sector has produced considerable growth along the Highway 99 corridor; the city reached its northern urban growth boundary, Taylor Road
Urmia
Urmia is the largest city in West Azerbaijan Province of Iran and the capital of Urmia County. It is situated at an altitude of 1,330 metres above sea level, is located along the Shahar Chay river on the Urmia Plain. Lake Urmia, one of the world's largest salt lakes, lies to the east of the city, the mountainous Turkish border area lies to the west. Urmia is the 10th most populated city in Iran. At the 2012 census, its population was 667,499, with 197,749 households; the city's inhabitants are predominantly Azerbaijanis. There are minorities of Kurds and Armenians; the city is the trading center for a fertile agricultural region. The Christian history of Urmia is well preserved, is evident in the city's many churches and cathedrals. An important town by the 9th century, the city has had a diverse population which has at times included Muslims, Jews, Bahá'ís and Sufis. Around 1900, Christians made up more than 40% of the city's population. Richard Nelson Frye suggested Urartian origin for the name while T.
Burrow connected the origin of the name Urmia to Indo-Iranian urmi- "wave" and urmya- "undulating, wavy", which comes from the local Assyrian folk etymology for the name which related mia to a Syriac word meaning "water". Hence Urmia means "Watertown" – a name befitting a city situated by a lake and surrounded by rivers, a kind of "cradle of water"; as of 1921, Urmia was called and Urmi. During the Pahlavi Dynasty, the city was called Rezaiyeh after Rezā Shāh, the dynasty's founder, whose name derives from the Islamic concept of rida via the Eighth Imam in Twelver Shia Islam, Ali al-Ridha. According to Vladimir Minorsky, there were villages in the Urmia Plain as early as 2000 BC, with their civilization under the influence of the Kingdom of Van. Excavations of the ancient ruins near Urmia led to the discovery of utensils that date to the 20th century BC. In ancient times, the west bank of Urmia Lake was called Gilzan, in the 9th century BC an independent government ruled there, which joined the Urartu or Mana empire.
Nestorians who did survive the invasion of Baghdad by Timur fled through northern Iraq up into the Hakkari Mountains to the west of Lake Urmiya and the area remained as their homeland untill 19th century. During the Safavid era, the neighboring Ottoman Turks, who were the archrivals of the Safavids, made several incursions into the city and captured it on more than one occasion, but the Safavids regained control over the area; when in 1622, during the reign of Safavid king Abbas I Qasem Sultan Afshar was appointed governor of Mosul, he was forced to leave his office shortly afterwards due to the outbreak of a plague. He moved to the western part of Azerbaijan, became the founder of the Afshar community of Urmia; the city was the capital of the Urmia Khanate from 1747–1865. The first monarch of Iran's Qajar dynasty, Agha Muhammad Khan, was crowned in Urmia in 1795. Due to the presence of a substantial Christian minority at the end of the 19th century, Urmia was chosen as the site of the first American Christian mission in Iran in 1835.
Another mission was soon underway in nearby Tabriz as well. During World War I the population was estimated by Dr. Caujole to be 30,000, a quarter of which were Assyrians and 1,000 Jews. During the 19th century, the region became the center of a short-lived Assyrian renaissance with many books and newspapers being published in Syriac. Urmia was the seat of a Chaldean diocese. At the beginning of the First World War tens of thousands of Assyrians and Armenians from the Ottoman Empire found refuge in Urmia. During the war, the city changed hands several times between the Russians and the Ottoman troops and their Kurdish allies in the following two years; the influx of Christian refugees and their alliance with the Russians angered the Muslims who attacked the Christian quarter in February 1918. The better armed Assyrians managed to capture the whole city following a brief battle; the region descended into chaos again after the assassination of the Assyrian patriarch Shimun XIX Benyamin at the hands of Simko Shikak one month later.
Turkish troops and Simko managed to take and plunder the city in June/July 1918. Thousands of Assyrians were massacred as part of the Assyrian Genocide. According to the 2016 census, population of Urmia city is 736,224, with an annual growth rate of 2.0% and an average of 3.27 people per household. The city has been home to various ethnic groups during its history; the population of Urmia in the early Islamic period was Christian. At the beginning of the 20th century, the city had a significant Christian minority with the Christian population of the town consisting of 40–50 % of the total population. According to Macuch, Ishaya, the city was the spiritual capital of the Assyrians, who were influenced by four Christian missions, established in the city in the period from 1830 to the end of World War I. A large number of the Assyrians and Armenians were killed in 1914 during the Armenian and Assyrian genocides, which resulted in a change in the city's demographics. During the era of Reza
North Saskatchewan River
The North Saskatchewan River is a glacier-fed river that flows from the Canadian Rockies continental divide east to central Saskatchewan, where it joins with another major river to make up the Saskatchewan River. Its water flows into the Hudson Bay; the Saskatchewan River system is the largest shared between the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Its watershed includes most of Saskatchewan; the North Saskatchewan River has a length of 1,287 kilometres, a drainage area of 122,800 square kilometres. At its end point at Saskatchewan River Forks it has a mean discharge of 245 cubic metres per second; the yearly discharge at the Alberta–Saskatchewan border is more than 7 cubic kilometres. The river begins above 1,800 metres at the toe of the Saskatchewan Glacier in the Columbia Icefield, flows southeast through Banff National Park alongside the Icefields Parkway. At the junction of the David Thompson Highway, it turns northeast for 10 kilometres before switching to a more direct eastern flow for about 30 kilometres.
At this point, it turns north where it arrives at Abraham Lake. Bighorn Dam constricts the north end of Abraham Lake, where the North Saskatchewan emerges to track eastward to Rocky Mountain House. At Rocky Mountain House, the river abruptly turns north again for 100 kilometres where it switches east towards Edmonton, Alberta. In Edmonton, the river passes through the centre of the city in a northeasterly direction and out towards Smoky Lake at which point it changes to the southeast and more to the east as it makes its way to the Alberta–Saskatchewan boundary. From the border, the river flows southeast between North Battleford and Battleford and on in the direction of Saskatoon. About 40 kilometres northwest of Saskatoon, near Langham, the river veers to the northeast where it passes through the City of Prince Albert. About 30 kilometres downstream of Prince Albert, the North Saskatchewan River joins the South Saskatchewan River at Saskatchewan River Forks to become the Saskatchewan River. From there, the river flows east to Tobin Lake and into Manitoba emptying into Lake Winnipeg.
The river course can be divided into five distinct sections. The first, the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, is the smallest area geographically, although the largest in terms of run-off and contributed water flow; the glaciers and perpetual snows of the mountain peaks feed the river year-round. Mountains, with little vegetation, experience fast-melting snow cover; the second section of the river comprises the foothills region. The terrain is rough, with a deeper and more defined valley; this area is well covered with forest and muskeg, run-off into the river is much more constant and stable than in the mountains. From Edmonton to the mouth of the Vermilion River, the North Saskatchewan flows through the plains-parkland divide, with occasional stretches of prairie; the North Saskatchewan River valley parks system. Cutting across Edmonton and the Capital Region; the river runs in a well-defined valley with deep cuts in the landscape. The fourth section, from the Vermilion River to Prince Albert is principally prairie with a few small stretches of timber and secondary forest cover.
The valley of the river is much wider, the river itself spreads out across shallow water and flows over many shifting sand bars. Low-lying, flat areas, border the river for much of this section; the final section of the river, from Prince Albert to the Saskatchewan River Forks, has many rapids. The valley is more shallow than the previous sections of the river, the channel is much better defined. There is little prairie and much tree cover in this section; the Bridge River Ash is in the vicinity of the North Saskatchewan River, which erupted from the Mount Meager massif in southwestern British Columbia about 2350 years ago. The river is shown on a Hudson's Bay Company map from 1760, labeled as the Beaver River, its Cree name is kisiskâciwanisîpiy. From this name is derived the name Saskatchewan, used as well for the South Saskatchewan River and the Saskatchewan River, the province of that name, its Blackfoot name is omaka-ty. The section of the North Saskatchewan river that falls within the Banff National Park boundaries has been designated a Canadian Heritage River in 1989, for its importance in the development of western Canada.
The river demarcates the prairie–parkland divide for much of its course and acted as a natural boundary between plains Blackfoot and woodland Cree First Nations people for thousands of years. With the westward expansion of the fur trade spearheaded by the North West Company and followed by the Hudson's Bay Company, the river became an important transportation route for fur trade brigades' York boats, to which it was well suited as it follows an eastern trend toward Hudsons Bay, the entry point for the HBC into Canada. Many fur trade posts were constructed on the river, including Fort Edmonton and Rocky Mountain House, the uppermost post reached by canoe navigation; the river's importance continued after the amalgamation of the Hudson's Bay Company and the North West Company. The river was plied by a number of steamboats right up to WWI, although for everyday freight the growing web of railway lines in the western prairies replaced them; the river was used commercially for many years - to carry flatboats of settlers goods and construction materials downstream from Edmonton, to float thousands of logs in the annual log drive downstream to Edmonton prior to WWI, as a source of ice blocks for
Assyrian people
Assyrian people, or Syriacs, are an ethnic group indigenous to Western Asia. Some of them self-identify as Chaldeans. Speakers of modern Aramaic and as well as the primary languages in their countries of residence, modern Assyrians are Syriac Christians who claim descent from Assyria, one of the oldest civilizations in the world, dating back to 2500 BC in ancient Mesopotamia; the tribal areas that form the Assyrian homeland are parts of present-day northern Iraq, southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran and, more northeastern Syria. The majority have migrated to other regions of the world, including North America, the Levant, Europe and the Caucasus during the past century. Emigration was triggered by events such as the Massacres of Diyarbakır, the Assyrian Genocide during World War I by the Ottoman Empire and allied Kurdish tribes, the Simele Massacre in Iraq in 1933, the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Arab Nationalist Ba'athist policies in Iraq and Syria, the rise of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and its takeover of most of the Nineveh plains.
Assyrians are predominantly Christian adhering to the East and West Syrian liturgical rites of Christianity. The churches that constitute the East Syrian rite include the Assyrian Church of the East, Ancient Church of the East, Chaldean Catholic Church, whereas the churches of the West Syrian rite are the Syriac Orthodox Church and Syriac Catholic Church. Both rites use Classical Syriac as their liturgical language. Most the post-2003 Iraq War and the Syrian Civil War, which began in 2011, have displaced much of the remaining Assyrian community from their homeland as a result of ethnic and religious persecution at the hands of Islamic extremists. Of the one million or more Iraqis reported by the United Nations to have fled Iraq since the occupation, nearly 40% were Assyrians though Assyrians accounted for only around 3% of the pre-war Iraqi demography. According to a 2013 report by a Chaldean Syriac Assyrian Popular Council official, it is estimated that only 300,000 Assyrians remain in Iraq.
Because of the emergence of ISIL and the taking over of much of the Assyrian homeland by the terror group, another major wave of Assyrian displacement has taken place. ISIL was driven out from the Assyrian villages in the Khabour River Valley and the areas surrounding the city of Al-Hasakah in Syria by 2015, from the Nineveh plains in Iraq by 2017. Since the expulsion of ISIL, the Nineveh plains have been divided into Iraqi and Kurdish-controlled zones, with Assyrian militias on both sides. In northern Syria, Assyrian groups have been taking part both politically and militarily in the Kurdish-dominated but multiethnic Syrian Democratic Forces and Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. Assyria is the homeland of the Assyrian people. In prehistoric times, the region, to become known as Assyria was home to Neanderthals such as the remains of those which have been found at the Shanidar Cave; the earliest Neolithic sites in Assyria belonged to the Jarmo culture c. 7100 BC and Tell Hassuna, the centre of the Hassuna culture, c. 6000 BC.
The history of Assyria begins with the formation of the city of Assur as early as the 25th century BC. The Assyrian king list records kings dating from the 25th century BC onwards, the earliest being Tudiya, a contemporary of Ibrium of Ebla. However, many of these early kings would have been local rulers, from the late 24th century BC to the early 22nd century BC, they were subjects of the Akkadian Empire. During the early Bronze Age period, Sargon of Akkad united all the native Semitic-speaking peoples and the Sumerians of Mesopotamia under the Akkadian Empire; the cities of Assur and Nineveh, the oldest and largest city of the ancient Assyrian empire, together with a number of other towns and cities, existed as early as the 25th century BC, although they appear to have been Sumerian-ruled administrative centres at this time, rather than independent states. The Sumerians were absorbed into the Akkadian population. In the traditions of the Assyrian Church of the East, they are descended from Abraham's grandson, progenitor of the ancient Assyrians.
However, there is no historical basis for the biblical assertion whatsoever. Ashur-uballit I overthrew the Mitanni c. 1365 BC, the Assyrians benefited from this development by taking control of the eastern portion of Mitanni territory, also annexing Hittite, Babylonian and Hurrian territories. The Assyrian people, after the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 609 BC were under the control of the Neo-Babylonian and the Persian Empire, which consumed the entire Neo-Babylonian or "Chaldean" Empire in 539 BC. Assyrians became front line soldiers for the Persian Empire under Xerxes I, playing a major role in the Battle of Marathon under Darius I in 490 BC. Herodotus, whose Histories are the main source of information about that battle, makes no mention of Assyrians in connection with it. Despite the influx of foreign elements, the presence of Assyrians is confirmed by the worship of the god Ashur; the Greeks and Romans had a rather low-level of integration with the local population in Mesopotamia, which allowed their cultures to survive.
The kingdoms of Osrhoene, Adiabene and Assur, which were under Parthian overlordship, had an Assyrian identity. Emerging in Sumer c. 3500 BC, cuneiform writing began a
North Battleford
Subdivisions of Saskatchewan
