From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Aboriginals: Introduction/J.r. Miller
Prior to contact, aboriginal mobility must be understood in two senses: seasonal and long term. Virtually all aboriginal communities moved, in whole or partially, at various seasons of the year in search of economic opportunities and social interactions. This was most obviously true in the case of hunter-gatherer-fishers; for example, some eastern Algonquians, after hunting in small, family-based parties in northern Quebec during the winter, would migrate to fishing locations at particular points on rivers in the spring and then to summer locations for trade and socialization. However, seasonal movement was also the case for minority portions of sedentary peoples such as the Iroquoians or many of the coastal peoples on the Pacific. From their villages, parties would set out to trade or to war with other groups. Usually these expeditions were composed of males, but on the Pacific it was by no means unusual for women to be part, and in some cases leaders, of trading expeditions. Many of the sections that follow provide examples of the seasonal rounds pursued by a variety of aboriginal peoples.
The other form of mobility was not seasonal, and it resulted in long-term if not permanent relocations. This movement was the shift, usually over many years, of a group from one region to another, most likely in search of economic opportunities but sometimes also as a consequence of military setbacks. Thus, while it is not clear precisely why the St Lawrence Iroquoians moved out of the river valley in the latter part of the sixteenth century, their doing so would not have been a rarity. In the west, as Patrick Moore notes, the presence of the Sarcee in the shadows of the Rockies was merely one instance of an Athapaskan people migrating far to the south in search of game and trade. Their movement paled beside that of another northern Athapaskan group, the Apache, who ended up in the American southwest. Mary Marino’s section on the Siouans provides several examples of migrations into Canada well into the historic period, and Janet Chute explains the Ojibwa’s westward movement and adaptation to Plains ways. Another variation on the migration theme emerged in northwestern Ontario, Joan A. Lovisek observes, where the mingling of Cree and Ojibwa over many decades led in the twentieth century to the emergence of the ethnic subgroup and language dialect now known as Oji-Cree. It is hardly surprising that human populations that reached their pre-contact locations in North America by vast migrations over thousands of years continued to move and adapt to new terrain once they were rooted in North America. As one eminent scholar, Bruce Trigger, has put it, Europeans did not introduce change to the aboriginal peoples of what is now Canada. They were merely the latest form of change for them.
