Aboriginal-European Contacts

A useful way of understanding the general impact of the European presence on aboriginal peoples in Canada is to focus upon the reasons that the two groups, native and newcomer, had for coming into contact and, in most cases, establishing a continuing relationship. It tended to be the case everywhere but Yukon that the principal factor that first brought the two together, trade, encouraged cooperation. Other motives behind native-newcomer contact were Christian evangelization and military alliance. Commercially motivated relations forced the European to seek at least a minimal level of acquiescence from the indigenous peoples, but interactions established for religious and strategic reasons tended to have negative consequences for natives. What should also be borne in mind is that contact – for whatever reason and in every region – inevitably introduced diseases to which aboriginal peoples had limited or no resistance, resulting in horrendous loss of life. Also highly destructive was the process of settlement and resource exploitation by Euro-Canadians that was well under way across the country by the nineteenth century. The onset of the settlement and mining frontiers everywhere led to the dispossession, economic marginalization, and attempted assimilation of aboriginal peoples at the hands of the Canadian state and Christian churches. In the long sweep of native-newcomer relations, this era – a harrowing epoch from which aboriginal people have been emerging over the past halfcentury – was the most destructive. That was when their numbers declined drastically, their community cohesion withered, and their sense of themselves as vibrant individuals and collectivities suffered the greatest damage.

It seems strange to reflect that such a concatenation of effects should have been set off by the prosaic codfish. The first European contact, by the Norse about the year 1000, was apparently motivated by a desire to colonize and establish permanent settlements, but hostility from the indigenous population on the northern peninsula of Newfoundland drove the Vikings out. Although trading Aboriginals: developments and climatic conditions deterred European settlement for close to five hundred years after the abortive Norse effort, knowledge of the northern sea routes to North America was not lost. The proteinrich fish stocks of the Grand Banks off Newfoundland remained an annual magnet to fleets from a variety of western European ports, as the fact that the Portuguese called Newfoundland the “land of the baccalos,” or codfish, clearly indicates. The fishery was soon supplemented by whaling, particularly in the Strait of Belle Isle and at the mouth of the Saguenay, where Basque whalers – with the benefit of harpooning techniques learned from the Labrador Inuit – established a dominant position.

From the Atlantic fishery, with its seasonal visits and occasional (though unrecorded) encounters between aboriginal coastal peoples and Europeans, emerged the second great commerce of Canadian history, the fur trade. Many fishing captains probably shared the experience that Jacques Cartier recorded in his 1534 narrative of coasting the Baie des Chaleurs, where he met some Algonquians, probably Mi’kmaq, who by holding furs up on sticks towards the sailors indicated that they wanted to engage in barter. The principal object of these and later aboriginal traders was the Europeans’ iron, which was a great improvement over the limited copper and the bone and wood from which they traditionally fashioned utensils and weapons. In the seventeenth century, the European market for furs, especially beaver pelts, expanded dramatically owing to the simultaneous development of fashionenhanced demand for broadbrimmed men’s hats made from compressed beaver fur and the near-exhaustion of European sources of supply such as the Baltic. Other furs were valuable, too, but beaver was the most important through the seventeenth century. Also in that century France in particular would be stimulated to maintain contacts with aboriginal people because of a desire to convert them to Christianity. This motive was not unique to the French; both non-Catholics in England and Catholics in Spain and Portugal similarly sent missionaries to the native peoples of North America from the seventeenth century onwards.

Whether drawn to the northeastern shores of North America by fish, furs, or faith, the Europeans found it necessary to establish harmonious relations with at least some of the aboriginal peoples with whom they came into contact. Even seasonal fishing visits would be dangerous in the lightly crewed, small craft should the Mi’kmaq, for example, try to repel the strangers. For those, like the English in particular, whose lack of salt forced them to land to dry their catch on shore, a hostile aboriginal populace was an even greater menace. For the fur merchants, aboriginal toleration of their presence and cooperation in their activities was vital. Not only did the Montagnais and Huron know how to locate and take pelts, but in some cases they also processed the pelt and in almost all instances they transported the furs to market, usually at Montreal from the mid-1600s onwards. In the case of beaver, natives turned the raw pelt into a highly desirable trade item by wearing the furs against their bodies as a cloak for a season. The combination of heat, abrasion, and body oils removed the coarse longer hairs, leaving the soft downy fur that hatters needed, and made the skin supple. Finally, if the Huron or Montagnais would not put up with the stranger in their midst, there would be no opportunity to spread the Christian message. In native society the exchange of personnel was a favourite way of facilitating trade and guaranteeing non-belligerence. The Huron accepted Jesuits at missions in Huronia because the priests’ presence eased the commercial relationship and guaranteed the strangers’ good treatment of Huron vendors who took their furs to market in the summer. Whether the missionaries realized it or not – and the sources suggest that usually they did not – they were hostages to the very trade that they often decried.

That the French had to accommodate aboriginal practice by exchanging personnel was only one of several indicators that the trade in animal furs that developed, first in New France and later in the western interior and on the Pacific coast, was an exchange that compelled cooperation between newcomers and natives. Other signs were the necessity for early French traders to learn aboriginal languages, in particular Huron, in order to barter. In the western fur trade, especially after the English Hudson’s Bay Company began to travel inland in the late eighteenth century to compete with Montreal-based traders, similar evidence of cooperation and aboriginal influence is found both in the way in which native women were married to whites and in the manner in which consumer demands were heeded. For the many western traders, both French and English or Scottish, the wooing and wedding of an aboriginal partner had to be done according to the customs and requirements of her culture. (The fruit of these unions were the Metis, as Olive P. Dickason explains.) Would-be suppliers of western native traders also had to pay careful attention to the demanding standards concerning type, quality, and price that Dene and other traders had as to cloth, iron goods, and “luxury”’ items such as alcohol. In the Pacific fur trade that developed after initial Spanish contacts with the Nuu-chah-nulth in the 1770s, the Europeans had to fit their activities into the well-established trading patterns that pre-dated their arrival. Newcomers who tried to maximize their profit by circumventing middlemen such as Chief Muquinna of the Nuu-chah-nulth found themselves under attack by the aggrieved natives.

Though the fur trade encouraged cooperation, it also had unfortunate aspects. By far the worst was epidemic disease, which killed tens of thousands over the centuries. The first recorded sufferers were the Huron, who lost between one-third and one-half of their numbers to diseases and aggression by the Five Nations Iroquois in the late 1630s and 1640s. The western interior also saw major epidemics in the 1730s, 1780s, and 1830s. The 1730 and 1781–82 outbreaks exterminated the Michele band of Upper Ktunaxa and reduced the Chipewyan by one-half. The outbreak of an epidemic in the 1830s severely shrunk the numbers of the Assiniboine and Mandan, thereby restructuring alliances in the Canadian fur trade because the agricultural Mandan disappeared as trade partners for northern groups. Similar patterns of epidemic disease, which was invariably introduced at fur trade posts, were to be found in British Columbia, especially after the maritime phase gave way to the land-based trade early in the nineteenth century.

Second only to disease was the commercially inspired violence that the fur trade sometimes stimulated. The dispersal of the Huron by the Five Nations in the late 1640s was only the most recent instalment in the continuing story of Iroquois attacks on rival nations that had begun in the 1620s with the Mohican and would continue into the 1650s. A different type of fur-trade violence occurred in the western interior during the so-called competitive trade era, in which the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Montreal-based North-West Company employed sharp trading practices, extensive use of alcohol, and violence directed against both native males and their spouses to gain an advantage. Finally, the most enduring consequence of the fur trade was over-trapping of animals, an abuse of the ecosystem that had ended the commercial usefulness of an area such as Nova Scotia by the eighteenth century and made some native groups dependent on Euro-Americans.

Also harmful to the long-term interests of the aboriginal peoples was the century of diplomacy and warfare that dominated in the eastern half of the continent from the dawn of the eighteenth century until the aftermath of the War of 1812. Although Europeans and their colonial allies often talked of “using” native peoples in their warfare, the reality was that aboriginal groups from the Atlantic littoral to the Michigan-Wisconsin territory decided whether to fight and with whom to ally according to calculations of their own interests. So, for example, the Mi’kmaq and Maliseet, as Janet Chute underlines, fought with the French in the struggle for the continent that lasted until 1763, not because the French “used” them or even because most Mi’kmaq had converted to Catholicism, but rather because they opposed the English; the latter were oriented towards settlement and agriculture, the former were still primarily a commercial people who cooperated with native peoples. Similarly, the resistance to British rule in the interior after 1763 that American historians term “the conspiracy of Pontiac” was in fact an alliance of inland groups who, by joining forces against the Thirteen Colonies, sought to keep the expanding agrarian frontier penned east of the Appalachian mountain chain. The same forces were at work during the American Revolutionary War, when a majority of nations fought with the British against the American rebels, not so much for love of King George III as in an attempt to defend their lands from expansive American agriculture. Finally, the Shawnee leaders Tecumseh and his brother the Prophet fashioned an alliance that fought with the British and British North Americans in the War of 1812 in an effort to regain control over interior lands and deter the further encroachment by frontiersmen of the young republic.

The motivation on both sides during the century of diplomacy and alliance was quite simple. European powers such as Britain and France sought native allies because the peoples of the eastern woodlands were exceptionally able warriors in battle and powerful deterrents before a clash. George Washington and a party of Virginia militiamen learned first-hand of native military prowess when they were thumped and sent packing out of the Ohio valley in 1755. A countryman of Washington, Brigadier-General William Hull, demonstrated in 1812 how effective the threat of aboriginal attack could be. Hull surrendered Detroit to British forces without firing a shot, so fearful was he of the large native companies that were rumoured to accompany his British attacker. The native groups that fought – and it is important to realize that not all nations were drawn into the European and colonial military tangles – did so primarily in defence of their lands. In the long struggle for the eastern half of North America, aboriginal peoples tended to favour the more northerly, less agricultural European group over the more southerly, more agrarian-oriented people. Tragically, in every case from the struggle for the Nova Scotia peninsula in the 1750s to the bloody confrontation in the Ohio country in the 1760s to efforts in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, the more northerly power failed to win a lasting victory. The final result of the century of diplomacy, alliance, and warfare was the dispossession and marginalization of the aboriginal peoples in the face of the expanding agricultural frontier of the Europeans and their colonial offshoots.