From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Aboriginals: Introduction/J.r. Miller
Origins
The origins of these many human communities are the subject of a bewildering number of explanations on the part of natives themselves. Perhaps the most straightforward is that of the Metis, whose genesis as a distinct people is the product, as Olive P. Dickason shows, of the interaction in recent centuries between natives and non-natives in the western fur trade. More complicated are the origins of the First Nations. While each of these peoples has its own creation story, many of the explanatory legends overlap and possess similarities. Strikingly different, however, are the creation stories of the Haida on the Queen Charlotte Islands (or Haida Gwaii, as they call their lands) in the Pacific and of the Onondaga, one of the six nations of the Iroquois League or Confederacy, located south of Lake Ontario when the Europeans came to North America.
According to the Haida version, in the time of Raven a god by the name of Quautz encountered a crying woman who lived entirely alone and was miserable. When the woman saw Quautz, she was so startled that she sneezed. In the stuff she spewed out, Quautz noted, Aboriginals: was a tiny man, perfectly formed. Quautz instructed the woman to house the little one in clam shells until he was grown.
The Iroquois, on the other hand, believe that humans came to earth after the pregnant wife of a chief fell from Skyland through the hole created by the uprooting of a Great Tree. When the creatures below saw her fall, they decided to try to rescue her. Swans caught the woman and began to lower her slowly towards the water, and the others decided to dive below the surface to bring up some earth they had heard existed there. Several failed in the attempt, but, finally, a little muskrat dove into the water and brought some mud up in its tiny paw. When the animals cast about for a place to put the mud, the Great Turtle volunteered to have it on his back. Once placed on Turtle, the earth expanded rapidly until it became the world. The swans brought the woman down to earth, which the Iroquois nations to this day call Turtle Island.
The obvious contrasts between the Haida and Iroquois accounts should not obscure certain underlying similarities in aboriginal peoples’ understanding of their origins, as Eldon Yellowhorn remarks of creation stories among the Plains Algonquians. The Cree of northwestern Ontario, for example, have a creation story involving a flood, a muskrat who dove into the waters in search of clay and retrieved earth that expanded to be the entire world, and a human figure – in this case baked out of clay by the trickster figure Wee-sa-kay-jac. The latter had to try three times before he got the clay figure just right. The first attempt was black, and Wee-sa-kay-jac flung it across the waters to an unknown land; the second, which was an unhealthily pale figure, he also tossed across the flood; the third was an olive-brown being, and Wee-sa-kay-jac decided that this version, obviously an Indian, was perfect. In the Blackfoot account, the being corresponding to Wee-sa-kay-jac was Napi, or Old Man, who created the world and its animals and humans. However, on his first attempt he made a slip, producing buffalo who could kill people with their long horns and eat them. The results of a second effort were more to Napi’s liking: this time the people had bows and arrows, knew how to make buffalo jumps, and were able to live off the buffalo in their land.
What all these aboriginal accounts share is an explanation of their origins that places them at creation in the lands they occupy. In that regard, as Joan A. Lovisek points out in relation to the Innu and Western Woodland Cree, most aboriginal accounts differ dramatically from the version favoured by western science. (Among the Tsimshians, in contrast, Margaret Seguin Anderson, Susan Marsden, and Deanna Nyce indicate that the Nisga’a have both a creation story about their in situ genesis and accounts that refer to migration from elsewhere.) According to the scientific story of creation, which is based primarily on archaeological and linguistic evidence, the ancestors of the aboriginal peoples of Canada came to North America from Asia, across what is now known as the Bering Strait. Sometime between 30,000 and 50,000 years ago, a prolonged ice age lowered the oceans by locking up vast quantities of water in frozen form. Migratory hunter-gatherers from Siberia began venturing eastward on what was a vast grassy plain, its width perhaps 1000 or even 2000 kilometres in places. Over many thousands of years these peoples made their way southward, most likely down a plateau between the ranges of mountains of the west or in the lee of the Rocky Mountain range as we know it today. Some of these peoples made their way far to the south, to central and even South America. Others, it is held, proceeded as far south as the modern-day southern plains states of the United States and then branched eastward in the direction of what are now the southern states of the eastern United States.
A variation on the theory of immigration from Asia emphasizes maritime approaches rather than a land bridge across what is now the Bering Strait. According to this alternative theory, Asian peoples travelled to North America on rafts, and some of them made their way southward along the narrow coastal area or again by boat. Of these, some would eventually make their way eastward. While this theory has a certain plausibility, material realities have limited its acceptance by social scientists. Since maritime travellers leave little physical evidence of their presence, archaeology has been unable to confirm the hypothesis. The same holds true of possible southward passages, either by immigrants across the Bering land bridge or by raft-borne arrivals, along a coastal area. The later rising of ocean levels would have erased the artifacts that could verify the presence of these travellers.
