Part I
When Worlds Collide
Starting off on the wrong foot. Early contact between Europeans and Canada’s Native groups didn’t always go smoothly . . .
By Adrian Raeside. Used by permission of Koko Press Inc.
In this part . . .
We look at Canada’s First Nations, from the Iroquois of the Eastern Woods to the buffalo hunters of the Plains, from the artists and noblemen of the Pacific Coast to the Inuit of the Far North. Then we look at the first Europeans to arrive on our shores: the Vikings, the “Three Big C’s” (Cabot, Cartier, and Champlain), and the two G’s (Gilbert and Guy). We also look at the fate of some of the early Arctic explorers. Hint: It wasn’t pretty.
Chapter 1
First Nations
In This Chapter
The Iroquois Confederacy terrorizes its neighbours The Plains Indians create a Hollywood legend The Pacific Coast Nations try to figure out what to do with all their wealth The Inuit of the Far North adapt to a harsh environment Canada has fifty-five founding nations rather than just the two that have been officially recognized.
— historian Olive Dickason
The first Canadians — the very first — arrived in prehistoric times when low sea levels created a temporary land bridge (dubbed “Beringia”) between Asia and Alaska. Early hunters, following the woolly mammoth, migrated overland into North America. When exactly this happened, no one is quite sure. Estimates range wildly from 100,000 to 10,000 years ago, depending on which expert you consult. The most commonly accepted view is that the first humans arrived roughly 15,000 years ago, with the oldest confirmed cultural site in the Americas being 13,350 years old (though sites in Alaska and Yukon suggest human occupation as long as 20,000 to 25,000 years ago). Either way, it was a long, long, long time ago: long before the birth of Christ, long before the pyramids were built, long before Moses led his people out of Egypt and into the Promised Land.
So, to say, as some do, that “we are all immigrants to Canada, even the Indians” is a gross distortion to say the least. Surely, any group whose roots in Canada go back to before the days of the pharaohs has a legitimate claim at being considered our “original” inhabitants and “first” nations. Indeed, when you hear commentators insisting that Native Canadians are “immigrants, same as everybody else,” I guarantee you they have a hidden agenda — usually one aimed at trying to undermine Native land claims and treaty rights. By the time the Europeans showed up, a wide variety of aboriginal societies had long since evolved and spread across every region of North and South America. The diversity was remarkable. In Canada alone, there were more than 50 separate Native languages, many of which were as different as Chinese and English. Today, only three of these — Cree, Ojibwa, and the Inuktitut language of the Arctic — are in a strong enough position to survive. Entire nations have vanished; entire cultures have been lost.
Slow Collision
Calling the European invasion of Canada “a collision” is a bit misleading. The process occurred as much by stealth as anything, and it took centuries to unfold, with European trade goods often preceding the arrival of the Europeans themselves by several generations.
Trade is good. It allows people to redistribute materials, generate wealth, and improve their quality of life. Complex and long-standing trade routes were already in place among the First Nations long before the Europeans arrived. It is a myth that the Natives, gullible and innocent of the ways of the outside world, traded away valuable furs for trinkets. Far from it. They were notoriously shrewd in their dealings with the Europeans. The metal goods the outsiders brought in — the iron, the weapons, the axes, and especially the cooking pans — revolutionized Native life. As the various Native societies jostled for position, ambushing, attacking, and attempting to outplay both their neighbours and the newcomers, a great social disruption occurred. This was inevitable: Cultures along trade routes are always transformed, and there is no doubt that European trade goods were both desirable and useful. And remember, the Europeans were also jostling for position. The French, Dutch, and English along the east coast battled it out for access to Native trade.
Not all imports were beneficial. Alcohol wreaked havoc among Native communities, and still does to this day. Native middlemen waged bloody wars of territorial control, and well-intentioned Christian missionaries caused terrible divisions within Native societies.
When the white man came, we had the land and they had the Bibles. Now they have the land and we have the Bibles.
— Chief Dan George
Even more deadly were the infectious diseases that the whites brought with them. The Europeans were crawling with germs, many of which were unknown in the New World. As a result, the First Nations had never developed a resistance to many of the illnesses the Europeans unwittingly introduced. Smallpox, measles, influenza, lung infections, and even the common cold all took a deadly toll on Native societies. Entire populations collapsed. It was a demographic catastrophe.
Here’s just one example: The Huron Confederacy in what is now northern Ontario had a population of 25,000 in the year 1600. But once Catholic missionaries and French traders made contact, a smallpox epidemic swept through the Huron community, killing thousands and leaving the population at scarcely 9,000 by 1640 — a shadow of its former greatness. Demoralized, with their population depleted and the missionaries sewing seeds of discord among them (the community was divided between those who had been converted and those who had not), the Huron could no longer maintain their once vast farmlands. Fields were abandoned. Villages sat empty. And the Huron, a once proud and powerful people, were overrun by their Iroquois enemies and destroyed. (See Chapter 3 for more on the Iroquois defeat of the Huron.)
Ethnohistorian Henry Dobyns estimates that the Native population of North America was more than 18 million prior to European contact — a number that fell a whopping 95 percent over the next 130 years. Ninety-five percent, mind you! That was far worse than the Black Death of the bubonic plague in Europe. (Other ethnohistorians support Dobyns’s conclusions, though they put the population at around 10 million prior to first contact.)
Not everyone agrees, however. More conservative historians, such as Alfred Kroeber, insist that the North American Native population was no more than one million prior to contact, and that any population decline was “moderate” and only partly due to disease. One thing is known from first-hand accounts and eyewitness reports: Disease did sweep through Native communities, did cripple their economies, did destroy their societies, and did leave haunting “ghost camps” in its wake. This awful human toll is not really reflected in any statistic. Today, there are approximately one million Canadians of aboriginal descent. The government distinguishes among three broad categories: Indian, Inuit, and Métis (mixed ancestry), of which some 655,000 are legally recognized, or status. The aboriginal population today has the highest birthrate of any group in Canada. Together, they represent more than 3 percent of the Canadian population — and rising. Theirs is a history interwoven with Canada’s, and it is a point worth remembering: This wasn’t an empty continent that the Europeans stumbled upon, and it wasn’t an empty land that they claimed as their own.
Figure 1-1 shows the distribution of Native Groups in Canada at the time of first contact.
People of the Longhouse
Let’s clear up one point of confusion right at the start: The term Iroquoian refers to the Native people who lived in the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes region. They shared a similar language and culture.
Figure 1-1: Native Groups in Canada.
Among them were the Huron in the Georgian Bay area, the Neutrals in the Niagara region, and the Erie, who lived on the south side of Lake — well, you can probably figure that part out yourself.
The Iroquoian people were the northernmost farmers in North America, living in heavily fortified log-palisade towns and tending large farmland fields. Their communities contained as many as 2,000 people, and they relied heavily on agriculture, especially maize, squash, and beans.
Their lifestyle centred around longhouse dwellings. These longhouses, some reaching almost 100 metres in length, contained the members of an entire extended family: as many as 50 people, living under one common roof. (How they did it, I’ll never know. There were seven of us when I was growing up, sharing one bathroom and three bedrooms, and that was tough enough.)
The term Iroquois, however, usually refers to one specific group of Iroquoian people, namely, the Five Nations who inhabited key lands south of Lake Ontario in what is now New ...
