Peopling

Canadians are an amalgam of peoples, the product of migrations from different places at different times to different destinations. The initial peopling of most of Canada probably occurred during and shortly after the retreat of the Laurentian and Cordilleran ice sheets some 12,000 to 9,000 years ago. Thereafter regional cultures diversified slowly, for the most part in situ, over thousands of years. This relative demographic and cultural stability was interrupted, after 1500 C.E., by the arrival of newcomers and their diseases. Aboriginal populations plummeted, and different peoples, mostly of European background, occupied patches of land along the northern continental margin of agriculture. Until the end of the nineteenth century most of them were attracted by the prospect of farmland, first in the east and then, in stages controlled by developments in transportation, westward across a continent. After about 1850, as patches of agricultural land filled, many young people left for the United States, a much larger migration than that in the other direction. In the twentieth century both immigrants and the surplus rural young tended to move to the principal cities. Overall, then, there have been innumerable migrations to, within, and out of Canada; its peopling is a vast matrix of individual movements which intersect in myriad ways and on which this entry – this very encyclopedia – imposes a deceptive order.