CANADA - LAND AND FIRST PEOPLES

Montagnais family, early 1600s, as represented by Samuel de Champlain, 1612.

NATIVE LAND

Canada, it’s been said, has been the victim of too much geography. The second largest country on earth, it stretches from the rainforest of Vancouver Island to the pebbled desert of the Arctic, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the latitude of northern California (though barely) to the Arctic Ocean. Canada’s extent, from sea (east) to sea (west) to sea (north), is a rhetorician’s dream and an administrator’s nightmare. Its prosperity, compared with most of the rest of the world, has saved many a politician the trouble of saying something original on occasions of public ceremony. Yet that prosperity, like the population, is unevenly distributed and heavily concentrated in certain favoured pockets. Fortunately, there aren’t too many people and there’s enough prosperity to go around. Perhaps only its sparse population has saved Canada from becoming a political impossibility.

Geography has certainly helped limit Canada’s population, but accidents of geology also played a part. The continents of North and South America took their current form millions of years ago, separated from Eurasia and Africa by thousands of kilometres of ocean except for a tiny stretch of shallow water, the Bering Strait, between Alaska and Siberia. Crucially, the Strait wouldn’t always be covered in water, for as the climate cooled the northernmost regions of Eurasia and North America became forbiddingly cold. During the Pleistocene ice age most of the northern part of North America was covered in successive glaciations, further isolating the remaining habitable areas of the continent—south of what is now the latitude of Washington, D.C.—from the rest of the world. As water was absorbed into the huge glaciers, the sea level fell and the Bering land bridge grew very large.

The Americas in pre-glacial times boasted an impressive array of fauna, similar to those found in Eurasia and including horses, mastodons, and tigers. Many of these survived the ice age, the more so because no predators existed with the capacity to drive them to extinction. Yet there were differences from Eurasia too, in plant phyla and in the range of animals inhabiting the continent. One such difference was the absence of human ancestors.

The oldest traces of human ancestors have been found in Africa, dating back to long before the Pleistocene era. The first variety of modern humans, Homo sapiens, seems to have evolved around 150,000 years ago, also in Africa. Superseding other human varieties, Homo sapiens spread from Africa into Eurasia, reaching the northeastern corner of that vast land mass, eastern Siberia, about twenty thousand years ago. The climate was cold and the terrain icy, covered with an immense glacier just over three kilometres thick and spreading down from the North Pole. The seacoast was, however, considerably farther out than at present.

Not everything was covered with ice. In particular, the area between Siberia and Alaska (which scholars have dubbed “Beringia”) was dry, though cold and unpleasant. And even after crossing Beringia, early humans didn’t find ice everywhere. Between fifteen thousand and thirteen thousand years ago the ice cap began to retract, opening an ice-free north–south corridor along what is roughly the line of the Rocky Mountains. Scholars dispute how soon and how much this corridor opened, but certainly by about eleven thousand years ago it was possible to move from Alaska through the interior of northwestern North America, down to the grasslands of the Great Plains and beyond to the temperate climate of northern Mexico.1

People did move, but their movements (which may have included movement by sea as well as land) have been difficult to trace and even more difficult for archaeologists to agree upon. Using the most cautious and conservative interpretation, humans reached Alaska around twelve thousand years ago and the southwestern United States eleven thousand years ago. At that time an ice sheet still covered most of modern Canada, east and west, though it was beginning to melt along its southern edges. As the ice retreated, the land exposed became first tundra, then spruce scrub, and finally woodland. Animals followed the advancing forest, and humans followed the animals.

The earliest humans to inhabit North America lived by hunting and fishing. They appear to have hunted some of North America’s animals to extinction: mammoths, camels, mastodons, giant sloths, and horses, for example, disappeared. The two-metre giant beaver also passed out of existence. There was plenty of other game, deer, moose, bear, and beaver, enough to support a limited population.

The North American peoples of eleven thousand years ago, like other human groupings on other continents, used implements of stone and wood. But unlike the peoples of Asia and Europe they continued to do so right up to the era of “discovery,” or contact with European explorers, in the fifteenth century. And that wasn’t the only feature of human existence in the Americas that deviated from experience overseas.

In southwest Asia, in Mesopotamia, local societies domesticated both plants and animals. Practising agriculture, they were able to break away from hunting and gathering as the basis for existence. Agriculture required organization, but it would also support larger numbers of people. Villages arose, and then towns and then cities, and finally organized states, which appeared around 3700 BCE in Mesopotamia and slightly later in Egypt. Metal tools also appeared, first copper and bronze, and then, around 1000 BCE, iron. The invention of the wheel facilitated transport—transport based on the mastery of the horse. All these aspects of culture spread, making possible larger and larger states, culminating in the empires of Alexander the Great and then Rome, both of which were about five thousand kilometres wide at their greatest extent.2 At the other end of Eurasia, China produced a state structure by 2000 BCE and emerged as a unified empire around 200 BCE. (Unlike the realms of Alexander and Rome, the Chinese Empire lasted into the twentieth century.)

Why did the Americas not follow the same path? They had, to begin with, an unfavourable geography, divided by mountains and deserts, making communication difficult. Another part of the answer lies in the available plants and animals. Far fewer plants were suitable for cultivation, and diffusion of agriculture was slow. Without the horse and the wheel, and without boats above a certain size, large-scale movements, whether of people or of goods, were seriously inhibited. Domestic animals consisted of the dog and the llama, and the llama was confined to the peoples of the South American cordillera. True, there were canoes, either dugouts or wood frame, but they couldn’t compare to the larger ships of Eurasia.

Settlement of what is now Canada proceeded slowly, paced by the gradual disappearance of the ice sheet. Even as late as nine thousand years ago most of eastern Canada was covered by an ice cap centred in Ungava; it would take another thousand years to melt completely. Around the fringes of the ice cap were ice-fed lakes like Agassiz, in (or rather on) Manitoba, and Iroquois, more or less where the Great Lakes now sit. Fringing the ice cap was the advancing boreal forest, consisting of pine to the south, spruce to the west, and birch to the northwest and east. Behind the forest was the prairie, contracting in the west and shifting gradually to the east and north. Behind, or in, the forest were the people and the animals they hunted.

The geography changed. The melting of the ice cap raised the levels of the oceans. Beringia, the land bridge to Siberia, disappeared. The islands on the east coast — Newfoundland and the islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence — took on their present-day dimensions. With the weight of the ice cap removed, the land rose. Finally, with the melting ice cap finished as a source of water, the great lakes in the interior of North America — Great Slave, Great Bear, Athabasca, Manitoba, and Winnipeg as well as the five “Great” lakes of eastern Canada — also assumed their present limits.


FIRST PEOPLES


Archaeologists have labelled the first inhabitants of North America the Paleo-Indians. The Paleo-Indians were simultaneously moving north and south, eventually to reach Tierra del Fuego in South America and the tree-line along the edge of the tundra to the north. These people hunted in bands of fifteen to fifty, equipped with spears tipped with a flaked stone point—called Clovis points after their point of discovery, near Clovis, New Mexico.

As the climate improved, the Clovis culture evolved into a more elaborate and more densely populated form, called Archaic by archaeologists. This time is regarded as a period of adaptation during which the peoples of North America became differentiated by locale and in which many languages and local cultures appeared. Populations now numbered in the hundreds, supported by a more sustained and more predictable hunt for food. Though diet remained basically meat or fish, in the eastern woodlands native plants like the Canada onion were eaten and apparently cultivated and sunflowers were exploited for their seeds and oil. Farther west, on the Great Plains, the climate fluctuated between extreme dryness and rainfall close to what now prevails; this had its effect on the big game (such as bison) and thus the food supply. Consequently, the population of the plains also rose and fell considerably. There appear to have been population migrations during this period, linking the Dene of northwest Canada to the Navajos and Apaches of the American southwest—all belong to the Athapascan language group. The Dene themselves may well have arrived later in North America than other language groups.

Finally, there was the northwest coast—the coast stretching from northern California up through the Alaska panhandle. Heavily forested, with a mild climate, abundant rainfall, and a never-ending supply of fish, the region has been called a “paradise for hunter-gatherers.”3 A reliable food supply and freedom from the climatic extremes of most of the rest of North America allowed the development of a rich and socially complex culture in coastal British Columbia. The key was salmon, abounding salmon. Access to salmon and control over the best fishing grounds became the basis of wealth. One archaeologist characterizes the northwest coast culture as comprising “social stratification with hereditary slavery,” while another points to “hereditary social inequality” and “semi-sedentary settlement with permanent winter villages.”4 These characteristics were in place by roughly two thousand years ago.

There remained the High Arctic, the frigid semi-desert found north of the treeline on the North American mainland and in the Arctic archipelago. In this region there was never any question of agriculture: food had to be hunted on the ice floes or in the barren lands. The Paleo-Eskimos spread from Alaska to Greenland and down the coast of Labrador as far as Newfoundland. (Use of the term Eskimo differs by location and date. In Canada and Greenland since about 1970 Inuit has superseded the older term Eskimo. In Alaska, however, Eskimo is still used.) The Dorset culture, which predominated from about two thousand to one thousand years ago, had most of the characteristics of the later Inuit; it was probably the Dorset people who made the first contact with Europeans along the Atlantic coast.

The Native peoples of the Americas had moved across the continent, north to south, south to north, west to east, mostly on foot to begin with, although small watercraft, canoes and kayaks, had come into existence by at least two thousand years ago. In Eurasia, however, larger ships were developed to sail the coastal waters of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, and intrepid mariners sometimes ventured into the unknown.

There seemed to be no point and certainly no profit in travelling far from the sight of land, especially into the cold Atlantic Ocean, and the chaos and impoverishment of European society after about CE 500 made adventuring west more a matter of chance than deliberate design. Nevertheless, there was a way to cross the Atlantic without getting too far from land: by hopping from Scandinavia via various groups of small islands to the larger islands of Iceland and Greenland. And in the ninth and tenth centuries small bands of Norse seafarers did just that, landing in Iceland in 874 and in Greenland a century later, in 986. (The Norse are better known under the name Vikings.) Having established permanent settlements on both islands, around 1000 the Norse ventured farther, to “Vinland” on the coast of northeastern North America, under the leadership of the first historically named individual in Canadian history, Leif Ericsson. In 1960 the probable site of the settlement was uncovered on the north coast of Newfoundland, at L’Anse-aux-Meadows. It was certainly a Norse site; whether it was also Vinland is still disputed by some.

The Norse discovered that Vinland, or the land about it, was not uninhabited. They had several fierce encounters with Natives, whom they called Skraelings, and when the Norse sailed away the Skraelings held the field.

The Skraelings are generally assumed to have been Dorset Eskimos, who lived by hunting whales, seals, and other marine mammals along the coast of Labrador and Newfoundland. (The Dorset were the only Eskimo people to live south of the treeline, as their sites in Newfoundland attest.) The Dorset people gave way to the more technologically advanced Thule culture, with better weapons and better boats. It was the Inuit of the Thule culture who would occupy all the coastal Arctic into historic times.

To the south, the character of the woodland societies of the eastern seaboard and the Great Lakes regions had also been changing. Farther south, in Mexico, agriculture developed to the point that city states became possible, creating large urban centres of wealth and power. This wealth and power derived from corn, or maize, domesticated and cultivated in Mexico, from which it spread very gradually northward to the southern United States by about CE 200. It continued to move northward, encouraged by the favourable climate of the period—the Medieval Maximum, as it’s known, that also drew the Norse across the Atlantic. Corn became a major crop in what is now southern Canada only hundreds of years later, around CE 900, and even then it was much smaller and presumably less easy to cultivate than corn of the present day. It could only be grown at all because of the development of a variety that took less time to plant and harvest in the shorter growing seasons.

Agriculture altered the culture of the peoples of the Great Lakes and Atlantic regions, creating, in parallel to British Columbia, the basis for a larger population, a more permanent settlement, and a more hierarchical society. It drew in the ancestors of the Iroquois, who moved north up the Susquehanna, driving out the ancestors of the Algonquins, who moved farther east and north to the Atlantic coast, Ungava, and the Canadian Shield, and who remained predominantly hunter-gatherers. These were the societies that the Europeans found, and described, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. South of the Great Lakes, though extending at a few points into modern Ontario, were the Mound Builders, whose largest centre, at Cahokia in Indiana, probably housed a population as large as many contemporary European cities. Cahokia also demonstrated the limitations of North American horticulture, for the crops its inhabitants cultivated depleted the soil. As food dwindled, so did the town. Cahokia was abandoned before 1500, and by 1600 the Mound Builders and their towns weren’t much more than a memory.

The absence of any large towns or cities in northern and central North America didn’t mean that the population of the continent was insignificant, merely that it was widely dispersed. It was subject, too, to disease and to the misfortunes of war. Though North Americans of the fifteenth century lived free of the scourges of Eurasian diseases, such as smallpox, their lives lasted no longer than those of contemporary Europeans. (The existence of some diseases such as malaria or syphilis in pre-contact America is also the subject of dispute among scholars.) The average life expectancy for men in North America has been estimated at twenty-five to thirty years—roughly what it had been in Europe. As to the total population, as a recent survey put it, “controversies abound.” At the low end, the population of North America above the Rio Grande has been placed at 900,000, and at the high end, at 200,000,000. Both figures seem unlikely, and scholarly speculation has tended to cluster around figures ranging from two million to seven million.5

What these large figures meant in detail may be seen from the example of the Iroquois. The Iroquoian language group is divided into two— southern (Cherokee) and northern (Iroquois, Huron, Petun, Neutral, Susquehannock, and Wenro). The northern Iroquois lived north and south of the lower Great Lakes; another group of Iroquois, who lived in the St. Lawrence Valley, disappeared at some point in the sixteenth century. According to the archaeologist Dean Snow, the northern Iroquois collectively numbered ninety-five thousand at the beginning of the seventeenth century, before the Europeans made any substantial impact on them. The figure was a historic high. The omens of catastrophe were all around the Iroquois, but no one could read them.6

NOTES

1. For some time a site at Old Crow in Yukon Territory was regarded as harbouring proof of a very early arrival (twenty-seven thousand years ago) of human immigration to North America, but re-dating according to more advanced scientific methods has reduced that date to a mere thirteen hundred years ago: Alan D. McMillan, Native Peoples and Cultures of Canada: An Anthropological Overview, 2nd ed. (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1995), 28.

2. See on these points Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1999), 362–63.

3. Dean R. Snow, “The First Americans and the Differentiation of Hunter-Gatherer Cultures,” in Bruce Trigger and Wilcomb E. Washburn, eds., The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 1, part 1, North America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 182.

4. Quoted in James V. Wright, A History of the Native People of Canada, vol. II, 1000 BC–AD 500 (Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1999), 896.

5. Bruce Trigger and William R. Swagerty, “Entertaining Strangers: North America in the Sixteenth Century,” in Trigger and Washburn, Cambridge History of the Native Peoples, 362–63. See also Olive Dickason, Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times, 2nd ed. (Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 1997), 8–9, which discusses the issue of population figures and links it to the decimation of North America’s population following the arrival of the Europeans.

6. Dean Snow, The Iroquois (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 88–89.

By Robert Bothwell in "The Penguin History of Canada", Penguin Group, Canada, 2007, excerpts pp.12-19. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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