The Pre-Contact Era

It is difficult to determine how many human beings lived in these various native communities before the Europeans came to the shores of North America. Part of the problem is the far-flung and diverse nature of the aboriginal populations involved. An additional factor is that, until recently, non-native scholars made a poor job of estimating what the figures might have been for aboriginal peoples before contact. Serious efforts at establishing these numbers were first made late in the nineteenth and early in the twentieth centuries, just as scholarly study of aboriginal peoples was beginning. However, this was also the era when the contemporary native population was at or approaching its nadir as a consequence of the drastic mortality rate that Alan McMillan cites in the case of the Wakashans. In all of Canada in the early decades of the twentieth century, government census figures for status Indians placed them at only slightly more than 100,000. To anthropologists and others trying to calculate pre-contact population, it seemed reasonable, knowing what they did about recent rates of population decline, to estimate that the numbers earlier had been two and one-half or three times what they were in their own day. Non-native scholars simply could not fathom that their presence in North America could have had any more deleterious effect than that.

In the latter decades of the twentieth century, scholarly estimates have mounted steadily, driven in particular by a growing realization that the number of deaths owing to European diseases, particularly in the southern hemisphere, was astronomical. Knowledge from French sources about the impact of disease on sedentary agriculturalists such as the Huron, of whom one-third to one-half died in the late 1630s and early 1640s, make it clear that similarly high figures for what is now Canada are also conceivable. Further evidence of initially high aboriginal populations has also come from the steady advance of archaeology, which indicates both that human habitation of northern North America occurred earlier than once thought and that pre-contact populations were higher than previously calculated. Scholars now assume with a fair amount of confidence that the mortality rate of aboriginal people between first contacts and the late twentieth century was as high as 90 or 95 percent. In other words, it is likely that the indigenous population of the western hemisphere when Europeans arrived was ten or twenty times what it is now. At the present time, estimates of total aboriginal population across Canada range up to one million, and there are even surmises that put the number at as much as two million. All such estimates must be used with caution, but what is clear is that there were large numbers of original occupants throughout the western hemisphere, including Canada. European and Euro-American concepts such as “the virgin land,” or terra nullius in the favoured Australian formulation, are unsound and archaic.

In the pre-contact era, aboriginal peoples were distributed unevenly across the Canadian landscape, population densities varying according to the ability of the lands to support human life. Across the northern regions, in Arctic areas stretching from Labrador to the Beaufort Sea, were a succession of Inuit peoples. These peoples were the most recent immigrants from Asia, scholars believe, entering North America from Siberia just over 5,000 years ago and gradually spreading across the continent from Greenland to Alaska and Siberia. Within Canada, the Labrador Inuit were found along the Labrador coast to Hudson Bay, with a few settlements on the southern part of Baffin Island. Later, some would Aboriginals: establish themselves in the most northerly portions of what is now Quebec. The other major groupings were the Central Inuit, including groups on Baffin Island and the western shores of Hudson Bay; the Banks Island Inuit on Banks, Victoria, and other large islands off the central Arctic coast; and the Inuvialuit, or Western Inuit, who were located along the Arctic shore of the western part of the modern-day Northwest Territories and the easternmost portion of modern-day Yukon.

South of the Labrador Inuit were a number of Algonquian groups who depended primarily on hunting, fishing, gathering, and trading. On the island of Newfoundland, the Beothuk became known as “red Indians” because of the practice of decorating their bodies with reddish ochre. The numerically largest of the eastern Algonquians were the Mi’kmaq, who, in terms of present-day geography, occupied most of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island and also stretched into northeastern portions of New Brunswick. Other Algonquian nations found in New Brunswick were the Maliseet, especially in the Saint John River valley, and the Abenaki to the south. To the northwest, in what is now Quebec, were many other hunter-gatherer groups. In the northeast, near and stretching into Labrador, were the Innu, whom the French termed Nascapi. To the west were the people the newcomers labelled Montagnais, and to the north a variety of Cree communities. The St Lawrence River, or the River of Canada as the indigenous people called it, was a main transportation route over which some interior Iroquoian groups travelled to the Maritime region, apparently to trade. French explorer Jacques Cartier encountered some of these farmer-merchants at present-day Gaspé in 1534.

The identity of the Iroquoians who used the St Lawrence River and inhabited large settlements at what are now Quebec City and Montreal is something of a mystery. Unravelling the identity of what anthropologists have come to term “the St Lawrence Iroquoians” is complicated by at least two factors. First, these people died out, moved out, or were driven out of the St Lawrence valley between the explorations of Cartier in the 1530s and the voyages of Samuel de Champlain in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Secondly, in the closing years of the twentieth century, both surviving Huron and Mohawk who are resident in Quebec contend that they are descendants of the St Lawrence Iroquoians, although Alexander von Gernet says in his contribution to this essay that such claims are contradicted by the linguistic evidence.

What is indisputable is that to the northwest and southwest of the confluence of the Ottawa and St Lawrence rivers were other major groupings of Iroquoians. To the southeast of Georgian Bay, accessible by a lengthy canoe route up the Ottawa, across Lake Nipissing and the French River, and down Georgian Bay, was the Huron or Wendat Confederacy. This large population of agriculturalists was divided into four nations, the Bear, Rock, Cord, and Deer; they were notable for their sedentary agriculture and their matrilineal and matrilocal practices. Like all Iroquoians, and unlike Algonquians, the Huron traced their individual identity through their mothers’ lineage, and a newly married couple took residence in the longhouse of the bride’s family. The Huron were also famous as traders, their ability to harvest a surplus of corn and their strategic location providing the opportunity to trade with the hunter-gatherers to the north and other farmers south of them.

The more southerly Iroquoians, some of whom were located in what is now the United States, were principally three. The Neutral, as their name suggests, were a group located between two larger forces of Iroquoians who found it sensible to try to maintain peaceful relations with both. The Petun, or Tobacco, nation were long considered to have been the principal providers of tobacco, an extremely important role given the prominence of tobacco in aboriginal spiritual practices, but Alexander von Gernet maintains that they did not specialize in this essential crop. The use of and trade in tobacco were extremely widespread. Southeast of the Neutral and Petun, in fact south of Lake Ontario and stretching eastward towards the Hudson River, was the League of the Five Nations, or the Iroquois Confederacy. This federation, which appears to have begun forming only a century or so prior to the coming of the Europeans, was fashioned for both military and commercial reasons. It brought together in a political association Iroquoian nations known (from west to east) as Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk. (Later, in the second decade of the eighteenth century, the league would be expanded to six with the addition of the Tuscarora, who had moved northward to escape military pressures.) Iroquoians were sedentary and lived in large bark-covered dwellings known as longhouses; the Five Nations were particularly known as the Hodenosaunee, or People of the Longhouse.

Sedentary habits and longhouses were not typical, however, of First Nations in those parts of Canada between southern Ontario and the Pacific coast. These peoples were Algonquians, Siouans, or Athapaskans, the last of whom are dealt with in this entry in the section on the Na-Dene. All these groups were hunter-gatherers who followed a seasonal round of migration in pursuit of foodstuffs, raw materials to manufacture objects of various kinds, and opportunities to trade and participate in communal social and spiritual activities. In present-day northern Ontario and northeastern Manitoba were the Ojibwa, or Anishinabe as they called themselves, and Cree. Prior to European penetration of the continent, a number of Siouan peoples such as the Assiniboine in the southeast of what is now the prairies were found to the west of the Ojibwa and Cree, as well as Na-Dene groups in the woodlands to the north. In the most westerly region of the western interior was another confederacy, the Blackfoot, which illustrated how mobile and heterogeneous aboriginal populations could be. The Blackfoot Confederacy consisted of the Stoney, a Siouan group; the Sarcee, originally an Athapaskan or Na-Dene group that had migrated from the far north; and three Algonquian nations known as the Kainai (Blood), Siksika (Blackfoot proper), and Tsuu Tsina (Piegan). The Blackfoot in southwestern Alberta were only the northern portion of a larger Blackfoot community that stretched down into Montana in the United States.

What is now the province of British Columbia had the greatest ethnic complexity and heaviest population density. In the interior alone there was a bewildering variety of hunter-gatherers, stretching from the Ktunaxa in the southeast to the Carrier in the central Interior. In the northern interior were found other hunter-gatherers of the Na-Dene linguistic family such as the Chilcotin and Tutchone. However, the greatest complexity of all was found along the Pacific coast and on offshore islands. Some of these coastal peoples are classified as Na-Dene, as in the instances of the Haida and the Tlingit of the northern coast. Two prominent trading peoples, the Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka) and the Kwagiulth, belonged to the Wakashan linguistic family, while the Salish grouping embraced a number of nations such as the Coast Salish and Bella Coola to the north. Around 1800 the Salishan included twenty-three interlinked languages. The Tsimshian similarly included Gitksan, Nisga’a, and Tsimshian, with each of them in turn comprising a number of smaller units. All in all, British Columbia before contact was as it is now: the region of the country with the greatest diversity and linguistic complexity among its aboriginal population.

The other northerly linguistic grouping is classified by scholars as Na-Dene. Besides the groups that were found in what is now British Columbia, this family encompassed nations that are often referred to as Athapaskans or Dene. They included, among many others, Slavey (North and South), Gwich’in (Loucheux), Tagish, and Chipewyan in the subarctic region. Living as they did in a harsh land, these communities tended to be relatively small and highly dependent on the vagaries of the lands and waters for survival. Those who dwelt and foraged in the most northerly fringe of the subarctic also had to worry about rivalry and war with the Inuit. Athapaskans and Inuit were inveterate enemies, both struggling for survival in a challenging and sometimes inhospitable landscape.