Chapter 2 From the Beginning: Canadian Peoples Old and New PDF

chapter 2 From the Beginning: Canadian Peoples Old and New C. Roderick Wilson and Carl Urion Beginnings1 I f we were to peer through the mists of time to the Age of the Ancestors, the First Americans, what would we see? Probably we would see a small group of people, about 15 or 20. At times they might be joined by people from other bands, but usually that was about the right number of people to live together. Mostly they lived near the sea. They might follow streams to places where it was easy to spear salmon or go inland to hunt deer or bear, or to gather berries on hillsides, but they were seldom far from water. They had spears and baskets, warm clothing and sleeping robes, and, especially in the winter, shelter from the Subarctic storms. But they moved frequently and did not have much else by way of physical possessions. What they mostly had was not things, but knowledge, the knowledge to find what was needed, that which was provided. Anthropologists for the most part would say that they had environmental knowledge (what do the land and sea provide and how can they be used?) and social knowledge (how do members of the group relate to each other in order to get things done?). Anthropologists might also state that the Ancestors themselves (to judge from their descendants) would have given primacy not to environmental knowledge or to social know ledge but to religious knowledge as being more fundamental. In our view, however, the Ancestors (again inferring from their descendants’ views) would have put it still differently. They would not have thought of hunting or gathering or even of knowledge as things unto themselves. They would not have thought of hunting as a specialized skill to be learned so much as an expression of the hunter’s spirituality. In sum, we are suggesting that: (1) just as contemporary Native people are the biological descendants of the Ancestors, and hence we can infer that the Ancestors had straight black hair, skin that tanned easily, and so on, so can we look to the traditional ways of thinking of Native people across the New World to get some sense of what their world view was; (2) the Ancestors were real people in time and space about whom we will never know many things but about whom some matters of importance and interest may be said; and (3) Native peoples and anthropologists frequently see things differently and speak about things with different vocabularies, but dialogue on these matters is both possible and important. Native peoples have their own ways of speak ing of beginnings. Tsimshian groups, for instance, consider that they are descended from an ancestress who was carried away and married by one or another supernatural (for example, grizzly or killer whale) in the form of a man, but who eventually returned to her homeland with her children. Such stories, among other things, define the nature of reality and (spiritual) power, the basis for relationships within the group, and the nature of relationships with external groups. Just as we noted in the first chapter that one should not think of one academic discipline as right and the others wrong, so one should not think of one origin story as right and another wrong. For one thing, each story is told in its own vocabulary; the resulting conflicts in view are more apparent than real. For instance, Native Elders commonly assert that the First Nations have been here forever, since the creation of the world. This view is seen as conflicting with those of archaeologists, some of whom place the original peopling of the New World as recently as 12,000 years ago.2 How does one relate the archaeological discourse of hypothetical carbondated years to the discourse of Aboriginal origin myths? One approach is to ask what even 12,000 years means, not in the scientific language of radiometric dating (where it seems almost as yesterday), but in the language of culture. What does 12,000 years mean in terms of the history of Western culture, the cultural frame for most of us? Two meaningful comparisons, of the many possible, would be to point out that the JudeoChristianIslamic tradition is usually seen to begin with Abraham, only some 4,000 years ago, or to point out that the protoIndoEuropeans, the small horticultural group ancestral to speakers of modern languages ranging from Hindi and Russian in the east to Icelandic and Portuguese in western Europe, began their migrations, as best as we can now reconstruct, some 8,000 years ago. In other words, the most recent suggested date for the inhabiting of North America is far more distant than most ancestral events in Western culture for which there is any glimmering of cultural mem ory. Thus, the Native Elder and the archaeologist, in their different ways, seem to be saying much the same thing: 12,000 years ago is, in almost any sense, at the beginning of the world. Another way of dealing with this apparent contradiction is to note that both the Aboriginal and anthropological/Western narratives are origin myths, but are written in very different modes. Immigrants to the Americas in the last millennium all knew that they were going somewhere new. The Ancestors likely had no such sense. They were not going anywhere, at least in the sense of journeying, and their remembered narratives reflect that. A similar point is that Aboriginal narratives are not primarily about time and space, but about relationships. “The Creator gave us this land and that is why....” The Navajo provide an interesting case. Their oral literature has been extensively translated, so it is easily accessible. It is profoundly rooted in a particular landscape, the land given to the Navajo, between the four sacred peaks. But as archaeologists have shown, the Navajo arrived in their present home, moving south from Canada, not long before the Spanish arrived in the area. That is, their narrative is about the nature of their relationship to the Creator and his provisions, not about what year they arrived there. In the following sections we will discuss, with out making exclusive truthclaims, first, what various kinds of anthropologists have to say about the original settling of the continent and about how Native societies developed in the millennia prior to European discovery, and second, some general issues from the history of Native–EuroCanadian relationships that will help the reader form a context for the following chapters. The Settling of the Continent Viewpoints from Physical Anthropology All humans are related, forming one species. But some of us are more alike and some are less alike. It is from this perspective that we use the term “Amerindian.” It suggests that in general the Aboriginal inhabitants of North and South America are more like each other than they are like people deriving from elsewhere on the globe. This in turn implies that Amerindians have been here for a long time, long enough to become somewhat distinct from other peoples. The perspective of relatedness also suggests, however, that Amerindians are more like people from eastern Asia than anywhere else. This does not prove that the longdistant ancestors of Native peoples came here from Asia, but it does suggest it as the strongest possibility. Even to a casual observer, Amerindians and people from eastern Asia share features that link them together and separate them from the rest of the world. People from both areas tend to have straight black hair, a lack of malepattern baldness, and little facial or body hair; they have skin that tans easily, rarely have blue eyes, and may have epicanthic eye folds (“slanted” eyes). Less visible traits linking these peoples include the Inca bone (the occipital bone at the back of the skull is divided in two, the smaller, upper portion being referred to as the Inca bone, in commemoration of its first being noticed by archaeologists working in Peru) and the Mongolian spot, a purplish spot about the size of a dollar coin on the skin at the base of the spine. Such a list could be expanded at some length. It is not that everyone in these populations has all these characteristics, but these heritable traits are found more or less frequently among these people and are not found among other peoples. While the relative biological affinity of New World and east Asian peoples is visible to the layperson, we are not limited to the approach of simply listing points of physical connectedness. For instance, large numbers of heritable traits, including nonvisible characteristics such as blood proteins, can be treated mathematically to create an index of genetic similarity. While the specific numbers generated in such an approach depend on exactly which characteristics are included, such studies generally attempt to be broadly inclusive and typically conclude both that there are interesting variations within New World peoples and that they are linked more closely to eastern Asia than elsewhere. In fact, the people of the far northwestern part of North America are genetically closer to the people of Siberia than they are to the people of South America. Ultimately, the question of New World origins must be placed in the context of human evolution generally. The present evidence is that North and South America, like Oceania and Australia, have been inhabited only by fully modern human beings, Homo sapiens sapiens (Hss). That is, the early evolution of human beings took place primarily in Africa, secondarily in Asia and Europe, and not at all in the rest of the world. While this line of thought categorically concludes that the ancestors of Amerindians must have come here from somewhere, with respect to time it is vague. The most exciting recent research bearing on this issue is undoubtedly the study of human dna, with the promise of more detailed studies to come. Looking at the big picture, the most definitive line of research involves Y chromosomes (the study of male lines of descent). The startling conclusion is that all nonAfrican humans are descended from an individual who lived in East Africa about 60,000 years ago (although this view is opposed by the people who think Hss evolved in several Eastern Hemisphere locations). Globally, at the most basic level, it is accepted that there are three genetic groups: Africans, Eurasians (which includes natives of Europe and the Middle East, and southwest Asians east to presentday Pakistan), and east Asians, which includes natives of Asia, Japan, Southeast Asia, the Americas, and Oceania. Modern humans reached the Middle East by 100,000 years ago, southern Asia by 50,000, Australia by 40,000 The study of mitochondrial dna (mtdna, inherited through the female line) is revealing a picture that becomes both simpler and more complex as we proceed. The main hypotheses at this time seem to be that: (1) “the Ancestors” emerged from a singlesource ancestral population that probably developed in a period of 5,000 to 15,000 years of isolation in Beringia, during which time they became differentiated from their close kin in east Asia and Siberia; (2) this founding population had no more than four major haplotype mtdnas, which indicates that it was relatively small; (3) the founding haplotypes are uniformly distributed across the Americas, which indicates that the hemisphere was populated relatively quickly, soon reaching even the tip of South America; and (4) there has been some “back migration” of populations from North America to Siberia—that is, some Siberian populations derived from North American groups. In passing, let us note that this research quite explicitly contradicts a “late entry” of as little as 12,000 years ago. Teeth have played a special role in the study of evolution (human and nonhuman alike) for two reasons. First, they tend, more often than other parts of animal anatomy, to be preserved. Second, they are evolutionarily conservative; that is, they tend to vary less within populations and to change more slowly over long periods of time than many other anatomical features. This becomes relevant for us in a comparative study of tooth morphology by Christy Turner. He studied the shape of fossil teeth in museum collections around the world and also contemporary teeth. He found a small number of major types, including what he called the sinodont pattern, encompassing the prehistoric and contemporary peoples of China, northeastern Asia generally, and the New World. Within the sinodont pattern, he distinguished a number of subtypes. New World peoples divide into three subtypes: the Eskimoan peoples, the Athapaskans and some other Northwest Coast groups, and all other Aboriginal New World peoples. Each of these subtypes in turn is most closely associ ated with fossil populations coming from distinct areas of northeastern Asia. The implication (not accepted by all) is that there were three separate migratory streams into the New World from that area, with the Eskimoans being the most recent, preceded by the Athapaskans, in turn preceded by the original stream. In summing up the evidence from the subdisci pline of physical anthropology that relates to the question of the settling of the New World, one can firmly state that the ancestral populations came here from eastern Asia in what seems to any living person a very long time ago but on an evolutionary scale in recent times. It can further be stated, although with less certainty, that they probably came over long periods of time in at least three separate streams of migration. Viewpoints from Linguistic Anthropology Language Classification Systems It has always been clear that some languages are closely related. A shared or similar vocabulary leads easily to the conclusion that there must be a shared past. Reversing this equation, the widespread existence of dialects suggests that contemporary languages might over time evolve into separate languages; the widespread existence of families of related languages suggests that processes of linguistic fission have been going on for a long time. As early as 1786 Sir William Jones, a British colonial official in India, reported structural similar ities between some European languages (by then common knowledge) and the Asian languages Sanskrit and Persian (at the time quite surprising). The idea that peoples who looked quite different and who had very different cultures might nevertheless share, at least in part, a common linguistic ancestry was electrifying. In North America the first comprehensive attempt at classifying Aboriginal languages was made in 1891 by John Wesley Powell of the Bureau of American Ethnology. He classified the Aboriginal languages of North America into 58 (later revised to 51) different stocks. We can now see that his classification was very much a product of the times: there was virtually no information on some of the languages; he assumed that all Amerindian languages represented a single stage of evolutionary development and therefore ignored grammar as a factor in determining relationships; and, because the primary purpose of making the classification was to provide a basis for the placement of tribes on specific reservations, there was no particular interest in the degree of relationship but only in the fact of a relationship. In spite of these rather severe defects it is still regarded as a foundational, if conservative, statement. In the context of this particular discussion, it is a minimalist statement about the past. In 1921 Edward Sapir constructed a classifi cation that dramatically reduced the number of stocks to six. Although much linguistic work had been done in the intervening 30 years, and Sapir himself had by then worked on 17 Native lan guages, the difference between the two classifications lies less in the quality of analysis than in the fact that Powell was a “splitter” while Sapir was a “lumper” who was willing to go beyond the hard evidence and who had an eye on the grand sweep of historical processes. For instance, he classified Beothuk, the extinct language of Newfoundland, as Algonquian, largely because its Indian neighbours are. It may well have been, but we will never know. He attempted to link the NaDene phylum to SinoTibetan. He even suggested that HokanSiouan was the basic North American Indian language and implied that an ancestral protolanguage might at some point be reconstructed. This is not to suggest that Sapir was indifferent to the question of to what extent the suggested connections between various languages had been demonstrated. The 1929 version of his classification contains two separate lists (see Table 2.1, compiled by Regna Darnell). The first is the radical 6unit classification; the second is a more conservative grouping into 23 units. The premise for the second list was that by this date linguistic analysis had proceeded to the point where even the most conservative would now accept some linking of units listed separately by Powell; 12 of the 23 represent this kind of wellsubstantiated linking. Until recently the lists of Sapir and Powell more or less defined the parameters of the classificatory discussion. In 1986, Darnell noted that unfortunately linguists usually chose one list or another, but that the field was now generally conservative in that there was growing insistence on thoroughly demonstrating relationships. Table 2.2 is a modified version of her chart showing established linguistic groupings for Canadian languages. This picture was challenged in 1987 with Joseph H. Greenberg’s radical proposal that there are three basic groupings in the New World: EskimoAleut stretching across the Arctic rim from eastern Siberia to Greenland; NaDene run ning from central Alaska to Hudson Bay with outliers as far south as Arizona; and Amerind covering all the rest of North and South America. The first two groupings are not new and are fairly conventional; the proposal of an Amerind macrophylum is startling (as is including EskimoAleut in another macrophylum, Eurasiatic, which also includes stocks as diverse as ChukchiKamchatkan, Altaic, Uralic, and IndoEuropean). Greenberg’s groups are startling for at least two reasons. One is that they link geographically distant peoples whose separation would have taken place well over 20,000 years ago. The other reason is methodological: instead of a painstaking pointbypoint analysis of the sound, word, and grammatical subsystems, comparing two languages at a time, repeating the process for possibly numerous dyads, and eventually reconstructing a hypothesized protolanguage, Greenberg looks at words only and does so for large numbers of languages at the same time. His work is controversial and points to a far horizon. While the overall picture may turn out to be generally valid, the work itself has serious flaws (some of it is simply sloppy), and the apparent congruence with Turner’s model of dental groups is seen by some as superficial. While some recent mitochondrial dna studies tend to disconfirm the threewave hypothesis, very recent work studying the entire genome is strongly supportive. Interestingly, this work also indicates that speakers of secondand thirdwave languages may derive the majority of their genes from firstwave sources. Implications of Typological and Distributional Data In considering the implications for us of the various classification systems and the distribution of language families across the New World map, let us start with some of the points on which linguists agree they spread from there into the Alaskan interior and thence eastward across northern Canada and that subsequently some groups moved southward, with some (ancestral to the Navajos and Apaches) reaching the American Southwest. The third family is EskimoAleut, represented in Canada by Inupik (Inuktitut). It is an extreme case, a single language continuum spread from northern Alaska across to eastern Greenland. Apart from any archaeological evidence, this is a strong indication of relatively recent occupation of the region. The British Columbia coast stands out as the one region of Canada characterized by linguistic diversity. On principle, then, one would expect that the BC and Alaskan coasts were inhabited earlier than the other parts of Canada. This is entirely likely if the continent generally was inhabited prior to the last ice age (the Pleistocene) when one considers that parts of the coast were virtually the only regions in the country to escape glaciation. At this point we have moved to the controversial. It should be noted that the controversy here is not really linguistic. It arises because what had been until recently the dominant archaeological model has the New World settled very quickly and very late (postPleistocene, about 12,000 years ago). Since for the most part linguists are more concerned with establishing relationships than with determining how old the relationships are, they do not often consider the issue of time. We have already noted that based on where the most linguistic diversity is to be found within their language family, the EskimoAleut generally are thought to have reached their present distribution from points of origin on the Alaska coast. This is both orthodox linguistics and consistent with the standard archaeological view; it should also be noted that both groups are thought to be relatively late arrivals on the continent and that the point of origin of both would have been on the Beringian side of the iceage glaciers. The point here is that the pattern of inferred historic dispersal presented by both the Eskimo Aleut and the Athapaskans is not exceptional but is very much the general pattern. In plotting the distribution of the likely centres of major Amerindian language families and language iso lates, Gruhn (1988) notes that 42 of 47 such centres are to be found in coastal regions, virtually all of them on the Pacific or Gulf of Mexico coasts. In other words, the distributional evidence is that the original settlement of the Americas was along the coastal areas, with interior areas being settled later. The linguistic evidence does not support the notion of people funnelling into an empty North American continent from a northern corridor between mountains of ice, but of people moving eastward from the Pacific and northward from the Caribbean. Gruhn also argues that the shallow time depth of the standard archaeological model is not sufficient to generate the linguistic diversification found within many language families. It should also be noted that if Greenberg’s picture is at all correct, the point is even more nearly valid. If 12,000 years is thought to be inadequate to generate the linguistic diversity found within the Hokan or Penutian groups, for instance, is it sufficient time for the entire Amerind macrophylum—all the diverse languages and language families south of the Athapaskans—to have developed? The most recent “big news” in Amerindian lin guistics is the discovery that the language of the Ket people living on the Yenisei River in central Siberia is related to the Athapaskan languages. The language is dying, with no living monolinguals, fewer than 200 fluent speakers, and none of them younger than 50. So the linguistic analysis indicating that Ket and the Athapaskan languages had a common ancestor is timely; in not many years the work would no longer be possible. In a sense, however, it is also no surprise, confirming what almost everyone thought to be the case (that as relatively recent arrivals from Siberia, Athapaskans likely had close relatives there). Viewpoints from Archaeological Anthropology Archaeologists all agree that people have lived in the Americas for at least 12,000 years. That general time frame was established in 1927 when a magnificently crafted stone spear point, to be named Folsom, was found still embedded within the ribs of an extinct form of bison, itself lying in a datable geological formation. That direct association of a human artifact with a datable object in an undisturbed context forever silenced the thendominant conservative view that people had been here for only some 3,000 years. When this chapter was first drafted in the mid 1980s, the clearly dominant view at that time was that people had been in the western hemisphere for about 12,000 years. We called this the conservative view or the “Clovisfirst view,” referring to the proposition that sites identified as belonging to the Clovis culture, widely scattered across North America, were the oldest sites on the continent. In opposition to this view was the “earlyentry view” proposed by radicals who suggested dates on the order of 25,000 years or even older. In recent years the earlyentry view has gained ground and has now become dominant. Let us now take a look at how we arrived at the new consensus. In the 1980s the lateentry view was that there was no shortage of sites for which claims could be made for earlier dates, but that a careful examination of these sites raised questions that had not been fully answered. Old Crow in the northern Yukon is an example. The most famous Old Crow artifact is a hide flesher made from a caribou leg bone. Originally dated at 27,000 Bp, improved technical knowledge has led to it being reassessed at only 1350 Bp. Numerous other bones from the area, many of extinct animals, showing unmistak able evidence of having been worked on or made into tools are dated from 45,000 to 25,000 Bp. The problem for some is that these artifacts have been washed out of their original context by the Old Crow River. Lastly, modified bones have been found in contexts reliably dated at 80,000 Bp and earlier, but there is no agreement that the cuts were made by humans. The view of those advocating an early entry to the Americas is that although some unsubstantiated claims for extreme antiquity were made in a few cases, and although some sites like Old Crow are less than perfect in some regards, there is an evergrowing list of sites in much of North and South America that have been reliably dated as being older than 12,000 Bp. Bluefish Cave, for instance, “next door” to Old Crow, has in situ mammoth bone cores and flakes dated to 24,000 Bp. Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania dates to at least 18,250 Bp and contains artifacts similar to those found in Siberia from the same time period. Another of these sites is Monte Verde, in southern Chile. The main site is exceptionally well preserved because of its waterlogged condition and includes a series of wooden hidecovered houses with numerous wooden artifacts, food remains in wooden mortars, and numerous vegetal food sources. Its dwellers were not a small band of mobile hunters. The site is dated to 14,800 Bp. Given its far southern location, not just in terms of distance but also in terms of a sequence of major environmental adjustments that people must have made as they made their way south, one can only speculate about what a reasonable starting time would have been. The excavation of the Buttermilk Creek Complex in central Texas, starting in 2006, has been influential. Dating some 2,500 years before Clovis, it reveals a tool kit characterized as highly portable, but involving stoneworking techniques out of which Clovis techniques could naturally have evolved. Significantly, given that a typical Clovis site consists of a handful of blades and other tools, already more than 15,000 Buttermilk artifacts have been catalogued (Waters et al. 2011). Paisley Caves in central Oregon has also received much attention in the last few years because of its 900 human coprolites dated to over 13,000 years ago. The value of the original find was questioned, since there were no associ ated tools. Tools have since been found, including points from the Western Stemmed Tradition, previously thought to be younger than Clovis. This finding documents two distinct cultural traditions coexisting at this early time. The situation with two opposing “camps” of archaeologists (with many, of course, not fully subscribing to either view), has existed for decades. In 1996, however, the situation became newly complicated and lively. The precipitating event was the discovery of a virtually complete human skeleton washing out of the bank of the Columbia River near Kennewick, Washington. Kennewick Man was a middleaged male about 174 centimetres tall who died about 9,300 Bp, and whose long, narrow face and brain case and projecting midfacial region appear to some archaeologists not to be “typically Amerindian.” Relatively little is still known about him, because until 2004 he was immobilized in a series of legal actions. His existence has nevertheless stirred considerable reexamination of the whole field (but not, as reported in the media, a revolution). It turns out that the handful of relatively complete New World skulls of roughly this age share the specific features mentioned but differ in other ways; more importantly, they differ substantially from living Amerindians as a group. The biological history of people in the New World thus seems more complex than previously thought. The most likely explanations involve recognizing that the peopling of America started early enough for genetic changes to take place in local populations. There is at this point no need to conclude that Kennewick Man and his contemporaries were not ancestral to living Amerindians even though they looked quite different. The controversy generated by the Kennewick discovery need not have led to questions about what route(s) were used in settling the Americas, but it did. As a consequence, the dominance of the conservative position involving a late and midcontinental entry quickly leading to Clovis culture has been substantially weakened and seems now to be the minority position. A glacierfree corridor east of the Rockies apparently did not exist prior to about 11,000 Bp, so that a Pacific coast entry, possibly but not necessarily involving boats, seems most likely. In the 1970s Knut Fladmark was the first to propose this idea in print, although as he notes himself, others had discussed the notion. An often unappreciated fact in favour of this route is that during ice age maxima ocean levels were some 120 metres lower than currently. This not only created a large land mass where the Bering Strait now is, so that people could walk to the Americas from Asia, but it meant that a coastal route south was probably feasible. Unfortunately, it also means that direct archaeological evidence supporting this idea is hard to come by, since it is now under water. There are also serious advocates of other pos sible routes for people entering the New World. One of the most speculative has the Solutrean culture (a bifacial technology very similar to Clovis) of about 20,000 Bp on the north coast of Spain leading to the Clovis culture of America, with Europeans skirting the icefields of the North Atlantic in boats and coming down the coast to what is now the southeastern United States, where the earliest Clovis points to date have been found. Another possible landing site is coastal Brazil, where burials have been discovered that start about 11,000 Bp and continue for 3,000 years, and that show what appear to be African morphological characteristics (Neves et al 1999). Still other possibilities can quickly be found the Internet by curious readers. One other factor in this controversy must be mentioned, even in such a brief summary. The lifestyle of the oldest “Early Americans” about which archaeologists generally agree, in western North America from about 11,500 to 7500 Bp, is often referred to as biggame hunting. The sites giving rise to this designation are characterized by the remains of large animals and the tools to kill and process them. These killing tools are fluted, lanceolate spear points, the earliest being termed Clovis (in use from 11,500 to 11,000 Bp). The earlyentry advocates think that the lateentry advocates simply project this lifestyle into the older past and assume that the very first Amerinds must also have been biggame hunters and must also have been using the same type of stone hunting tools. There are other forms of tools as well, including bone tools, firehardened wood tools, and other types of stone tools. In fact, in South America most of the early people contemporary with Clovis in North America were foragers, and not specialized hunters. The argument is that the “Clovisfirst” people are not finding preClovis sites in North America because they are not looking for the right kinds of things. It is entirely appropriate to end this discus sion of the settling of the New World on this note because we need to remind ourselves that the past is not there simply to be dug up; rather, anthropologists are actively reconstructing the past. The patterns upon which reconstructions are based are not only in the data but also in the minds of those doing the reconstruction. Since the radicals and conservatives have largely resolved their differences, perhaps we can start paying more attention to the mental patterns of those who originally provided the data. The General Archaeological Sequences The view taken here is that the first people came to this continent from what is now Siberia earlier than was formerly conventionally thought, via a land bridge (or its associated coastal waters) known as Beringia that existed intermittently from 70,000 to 12,000 Bp, and first spread down the Pacific coast and then into the continent’s interior. Most of what is now Canada either was abandoned when the glaciers came or was not settled at all until they had melted. At that point ancestors of the people now known as Ktunaxa and Salish could move into the BC Interior from the west coast, the Algonquians and then the Siouans and Iroquoians into central and eastern Canada from the south, and the Athapaskans into the interior northwest from the coast. Still later, the Eskimoans3 moved across the Arctic in a series of westtoeast migrations. The Paleo-Indian Stage (11,500–7500 BP) The PaleoIndians are the earliest people about whom there is relative agreement, both because there is more evidence and because they pro duced “diagnostic” forms of projectile points. We have already mentioned two of these, Folsom and Clovis. They are both bifacially flaked (worked on both sides), fluted projectile points, a style found widely across the continent. Fluted points have been dated in Canada from the Debert site in central Nova Scotia (10,600 Bp), Sibbald Creek near Calgary, Alberta (9570 Bp), and Charlie Lake Cave north of Fort St John, BC (10,500 Bp). The Debert site yielded 140 artifacts, including spear points, drills, knives, wedges, and scrapers, providing a fuller view of the range of activities and skills of these people than most sites. The distribution of fluted points is most extensive in the United States but extends to western Beringia. One can now state that the base for PaleoIndian cultures was already established in Siberia by 28,000 Bp. It also is significant that Beringia seems culturally complex, with local variations of regional patterns being expressed. Prehistory, illustrator Dave Laverie, 1984:5) Microblades, very small, unifacial, parallelsided flakes that presumably were often inset into bone or wood tools, are found in Alaska and the Yukon before 11,000 Bp. Part of their interest is that they appear in Siberia about 25,000 Bp, and hence they quite directly link peoples on the two continents. They are also of interest because their use persists so long, on the BC coast and Interior until after 4000 Bp and in the Arctic (where they are associated with people called PaleoEskimos, or the Arctic Small Tool Tradition) until about 2800 Bp. About 10,000 Bp, fluted points were replaced on the Plains by stemmed points that are quite thick in crosssection. Collectively called Plano points, they were developed in the US Great Basin around 12,000 Bp. They were then used on the Plains, on the northern barren grounds by 8000 Bp, and as far east as the Gaspé Peninsula. While they generally seem not to have been used after about 7500 Bp, their use persisted in northern Ontario until as recently as 5000 Bp. One needs to be cautious in assuming that their persistence in the Subarctic has to do with cultural isolation; Plano style points at Acasta Lake in the Keewatin District dated at 6900 Bp have side notches, presumably showing an awareness of a new hafting style developed on the Plains. Canadian PaleoIndians east of the Rockies concentrated on hunting big game. In the far West a more diversified economy developed, although from quite early times salmon constituted the primary resource. The productivity of specific locations has led to spectacular archaeological sequences. The Milliken site near Hell’s Gate, the narrowest part of the Fraser River and a natural location for fishing, provides an almost continuous record of occupation dating from 9000 Bp. Farther north, the Namu site provides the longest essentially continuous record of occupation, dating from 9700 Bp. The deepest level provides the earliest microblades on the coast. Recent work at On Your Knees Cave on Alaska’s Prince of Wales Island has revealed human remains and artifacts dating to 10,000 Bp made from material that could only have been transported by boat, as well as other tools (not microblades) dating to 10,300 Bp. dna analysis indicates a relationship to about 1 per cent of living Amerindians, but this 1 per cent is restricted to points scattered along the Pacific coast all the way to the tip of South America. (More such work suggesting specific migration routes is much anticipated!) Sites on Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands off the northern British Columbia coast) go back to 10,000 Bp and also indicate a strongly developed maritime culture. There are also tantalizing finds of artifacts from underwater beaches that may be even older. After the Paleo-Indians: Western Canada Not only are the sequences on the west coast very old, they link at early stages to the area’s contemporary residents. That the Haida are a linguistic isolate living on partially unglaciated islands and that sites such as Skoglund’s Landing show a growing cultural complexity without significant intrusions suggest that the Haida have occupied the islands for at least the last 10,000 years. The sequence in Prince Rupert harbour begins about 5000 Bp and leads directly to the Tsimshian. Because the site was waterlogged, there is remarkable preservation of perishables after 2000 Bp, including whole houses and canoes (the large rectangular planked houses typical of the historic period appear on the coast at about this time). Farther south on the coast, Wakashan history can be inferred to extend to at least 4500 Bp and Salish to 3500 Bp. That is not to say, of course, that these people did not exist earlier as distinct groups. The history of the Interior Plateau of BC is less well known, partly because people tended to live in the same places as earlier people did, and making a new semisubterranean pit house often meant digging up an old one. In any case, small villages appear by about 6000 Bp, located near good fishing sites (and as salmon reestablished themselves on these streams in the postglacial environment). Houses of much the same style were still used in the nineteenth century. The Plains appear to have been relatively depopulated from about 7500 to 5000 Bp, possibly due to the effects of the hypothesized hot ter and drier period known as the Altithermal. If so, this was merely an extreme example of the standard Plains adaptational pattern: both the buffalo and those who lived off them moved from the Plains to the adjacent mountains and parkland during times of stress, including the average winter. HeadSmashedIn, a buffalo jump in southern Alberta, was in use from at least 5700 Bp. Such sites, where massive quantities of meat were processed repeatedly, leave an interesting chronology, but of only one aspect of life. Pottery appeared on the Canadian Plains somewhat before arrowheads. It is found as far northwest as central Alberta and, like burial mounds (found as far northwest as southeastern Saskatchewan) and farming (as far northwest as North Dakota), was derived from the Woodland culture of southern Ontario and the Mississippi Valley and ultimately from the cultures of Mexico or even Colombia. Eastern Canada: Archaic Period (9500–3000 BP) “Archaic” is an unfortunate term, but it is thoro ughly embedded in the literature. It generally refers to people who have a broadly based foraging lifestyle of hunting, fishing, and gathering. L’Anse Amour is the earliest known burial mound in North America (7500 Bp). Located in southern Labrador, it is associated with the Maritime Archaic culture. It contains the body of a young teenager and numerous grave goods, including points, knives, needles, a flute, and a toggle carved from an antler. Key interpretations are that the grave goods indicate not only a belief system including an afterlife, but: (1) a productive maritime hunting economy (a toggle harpoon head pivots inside the hide of a speared animal after the attached line is pulled, allowing the offshore hunting of sea mammals), and (2) the subsequent development of some degree of social differentiation. By 5000 Bp Maritime Archaic people had expanded to Newfoundland, indicating they had seaworthy craft. The Laurentian Archaic developed in south ern Ontario and Quebec, later expanding to New Brunswick and Maine. Few campsites have been found (they moved a lot), but about 6000 Bp they started placing grave goods in burial sites. These goods indicate an extensive trade network, including conch shells from the Gulf of Mexico, copper work from west of Lake Superior, and ground slate points from Maritime Archaic people. Eastern Canada: Woodland Period (3300 BP–Historic Era) Woodland culture is primarily a culture of the eastern United States, extending into the southern part of eastern Canada. It is a northern extension of a settled, agricultural way of life largely originating in Mexico (although local plants were domesticated before more southerly cultigens were adopted) but achieving a regional cultural focus in the central Mississippi Valley. The archaeological convention (arising out of the incorrect assumption that only agriculturalists made pottery) is to refer to people as Woodland if they made pottery even if they were not actually agriculturalists. About 3300 Bp Laurentian Archaic people started making ceramic beakers with pointed bottoms and cordmarked walls. This marks the begin ning of Woodland culture in Canada, although the people continued to be nomadic hunters. The Point Peninsula phase began about 2750 Bp. The pottery marking this phase clearly was strongly influenced by the Adena culture of the Ohio Valley; it also demonstrates local affinities (like cord marking) and influences from northern Ontario (“toothed” markings). As time goes on, the extensive trade in regionally identifiable goods indicates complex and continuing connections spanning half the continent. Canadian Woodland culture clearly developed in part out of local antecedents generally thought to be associated with the Algonquian language family. Just as clearly, southern Ontario had also been inhabited for some time by Iroquoian speakers. Although there are reasons to think that Iroquoians may have reached the area as early as 3500 Bp, only by 1100 Bp are there palisaded villages with corn fields and large ossuaries clearly identifiable as Iroquoian. About 700 years ago these people experienced a significant geographic expansion from a southern Ontario base leading to their historically known territories. From earliest times this has been a region of hunters living in small bands that moved frequently. It is also a region of acidic soils that quickly destroy most of the things that humans leave behind. It is not surprising, then, that we know relatively little about the area. Boreal Forest and Subarctic Tundra As noted earlier, PaleoIndians moved into the Subarctic tundra and boreal forest as the glaciers melted. The lanceolate points characteristic of the PaleoIndians continued to characterize this region after the sidenotched points that archaeologists use to define the Shield Archaic (6000 Bp to historic times) were introduced. About 2200 Bp Shield Archaic people living in eastern Manitoba and the adjacent Rainy River region of northern Ontario started making pottery associated with the Laurel culture. The Rainy River region is also known for burial mounds with especially rich grave goods. This is most unusual for boreal forest hunters, but perhaps the point is more that the area is relatively close both to the Great Lakes and to the Plains and, therefore, to people living different lifestyles. Around 700 ce other types of pottery originating in southern Ontario came into use. The Arctic The Arctic is the most recently inhabited part of Canada. Only 4,000 years ago did people spread eastward from what is now Alaska, moving quite rapidly across the High Arctic islands to northern Greenland. These first inhabitants of Canada’s Arctic are known as Independence I people, from the Greenlandic fjord where they were first identified. They were part of a cultural tradition known both as PaleoEskimo and as the Arctic Small Tool Tradition, from their use of microblades as tool components. The use of microblades and a complex of other features link the PaleoEskimo both to earlier Alaskan cultures and ultimately to the Diuktai culture of northeastern Siberia. Diuktai, formerly dated to 35,000 Bp, is now understood to be only 25,000 years old, making it marginally less interesting but still ancestral to these people. The rapid movement of the first PaleoEskimos across previously uninhabited areas seems to require some explanation. One possible factor may be that, although people had been living in the North for some time, their annual cycle had them moving seasonally back and forth between forest and shore; only now had they learned to live throughout the year near the Arctic shoreline. Another factor may be that the shore region was now habitable for the first time since the glacial age due to a stabilized sea level and increasing (although still low) stocks of maritime resources. This may be reflected in the apparently greater reliance of the Independence I people on land resources like caribou and muskox than on seals and walrus. Since few land animals live on islands and since these land animals reproduce slowly, an explanation explanation for why the people kept moving from island to island and why they disappeared shortly after reaching the eastern end of the High Arctic island chain may be that they simply ran out of food and in the end literally had nowhere to go. Only 300 years after the Independence I people, however, a second wave of PaleoEskimos, known as PreDorset people, moved eastward out of Alaska. Perhaps because they had a more balanced reliance on land and sea resources, their colonization of the Arctic was successful. In any case, for about 1,000 years small, mobile groups of these people occupied the Far North. This is not to say they occupied all the territory all the time. Richer areas seem to have been used continuously; other areas were occupied or abandoned as local conditions warranted. The cultural variability one would expect under these conditions did in fact arise. In general, we can say that these people lived in skin tents for much of the year. They also used snow houses (they may have invented them) and heated them with oil lamps. They may have used skin covered boats. They had dogs, but not dog sleds. They used sinew backed bows much like more modern ones. Life in the Arctic is never easy, but life for the PreDorset became harder as the decades went by because their entry into the Arctic coincided with a longterm cooling trend. With game becoming scarcer, even good hunters may go hungry. By 3000 Bp the PreDorset range seems to have become restricted to Foxe Basin and Hudson Strait Given these circumstances we are not surprised to find that people turned increasingly to hunting sea mammals, particularly those, such as seals and walrus, that are “iceloving” and hence fairly accessible. With this orientation there is a concomitant decline in the number of dogs, bows and arrows are abandoned, the snow knife is invented, oil lamps are used more, stone cooking pots are used, ice creepers (to strap on the feet while walking on ice) are found, and the kayak is definitely used. By 2500 Bp the cumulative effect of these changes had become transformative; the new society is referred to as Dorset. Dorset culture flourished and recolonized the sea margins of the North from Labrador to Greenland and westward toward Alaska. While our narrative is focused on the Canadian Arctic, we must now turn to Alaska. The archaeology of Alaska is complex, in part because it was a meeting ground between North Pacific and Arctic peoples. A critical event was the adaptation in the archaeology of Alaska is complex, in part because it was a meeting ground between North Pacific and Arctic peoples. A critical event was the adaptation in the ninth century by northwestern Alaskan peoples of a Japanese innovation—making large floats out of animal skins. By acting as a drag and a marker, the device greatly improved the efficiency of wal rus and whale hunting. After this the population expanded greatly and society became more complex. The resultant cultural tradition is referred to by archaeologists as Thule culture. For a variety of reasons, but certainly in part because it was effective both economically and socially, Thule culture spread into southwestern Alaska, into the interior of Alaska, and eastward across Canada to Greenland. The bearers of Thule culture into Canada were Inupik speakers, ancestral to the modern Inuit. While it is clear that their sweep across the Arctic was rapid, we know very little about the nature of their relationship with the Dorset populations already there. It is easy to envision hostile encounters between bands of armed hunters, but there is no direct evidence of such conflict. Perhaps the Dorset simply retreated. Or, as Hickey (1986) thinks more likely, the Thule incorporated at least some Dorset people (although recent dna studies suggest little genetic connection between Dorset and Inuit, with the notable exception of the Sadlermiut, who lived on several islands in northern Hudson Bay). In Hickey’s scenario, it would be advantageous to the immigrant Thule to take advantage of the detailed local environmental knowledge of Dorset men. Dorset women would be valued as domestic and procreative assets, but more importantly as a medium for social alliances. Such a process would leave little archaeological evidence. An intriguing line of evidence in favour of Dorset people being incorporated into Thule society is the continued tradition of women in the eastern Arctic making special “dressup” clothing that is much more complex in construction than are utilitarian garments. This seems more consistent with the ornate Dorset artistic aesthetic than with the generally austere Thule taste. In this view, Dorset women in Thule households would generally have raised their children as Thule, but might well also have passed on special skills and aesthetic judgments that they valued highly. In any case, Thule people prospered and over roughly 1,000 years evolved into the several historic Inuit societies. As a radical footnote to this discussion, we note that Robert McGhee has proposed that the Inuit traverse to the eastern Arctic was far quicker than previously thought. He suggests that Inuit in Alaska, who were already using and trading iron, heard from Dorset people both about a lode of meteoric iron far to the east and about the Norse, who had new things to trade. In possibly two years they could have travelled the 4,000 kilometres to Ruin Island, between Ellesmere and Greenland, and about 1360 ce established the first Inuit settlement east of Alaska. In sum, North and South America were inhabited an unimaginably long time ago by people who migrated over the land mass that now constitutes Asia and the Americas. They, of course, did not think of their experiences in those terms, for their frames of reference were different. Nevertheless, they created a series of diverse and successful adaptations to the entire range of environments to be found. And here, in turn, they were “found” by another kind of migrant A Millennium of European Immigration European immigration began with at least one aborted attempt at settlement by the Norse about 1,000 years ago. There is scant but tantalizing evidence for contact between Europeans and Indigenous Americans over the next 500 years. European and African immigration to the territory that is now Canada began building in the sixteenth century, accelerated dramatically in the seventeenth century, increased even more dramatically in the eighteenth century, and became overwhelming in the nineteenth century. The human migration from Europe between the early 1600s and 1930 was probably the largest ever, and it changed the face of the Americas. The history of the First Nations of Canada in the face of that massive immigration of Europeans is one of survival. It is first of all a history of physical survival, given the effects that European diseases had on Indigenous populations. An aspect of history that resonates with our own era has to do with another kind of survival: the history of the relations between Indigenous Canadians and the Europeans, Africans, and Asians who migrated here after 1600 is one of the struggle for survival of sovereignty within a European Christian conception of land rights. The paradox was that during the first century of sustained contact, it was obvious that Europeans stayed on at the sufferance of their hosts and trading partners. While explorers could claim a territory for a European crown, in practice control over the territory was not always coincident with the claim. Recognition of the reality of Amerindian control made it necessary to purchase land from Indians or for Europeans to ally themselves with Indians for trade and warfare. Europeans professed dual postures to their Indian allies, trading with them, even adopting Indigenous forms of negotia tion and trade protocols, but claiming European sovereignty in law. Thus, more than 150 years after the beginning of sustained contact, the French could claim to the English that the French presence in Acadia was by right of Indian invitation, yet in negotiating the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 they completely ignored consideration of Mi’kmaq or Maliseet interest or opinion in the French relinquishment of Acadia to the English. In the European conception of things, America was a wilderness and Natives were part of that wilderness. That idea could be maintained despite all the evidence: the obvious concentration of Indigenous populations, the obvious control and management of unfenced pasture areas in which many Native people harvested mammals for food, the practice of agriculture, the military power and skills of Indigenous groups, and the extensive trade networks. The country was no wilderness, and given the evidence it is a wonder that Europeans could see it as one. It was a European legal and moral convention to assume that land that had not been extensively used and modified by “civilized” peoples was in fact empty, and so could be claimed by Christian, civilized Europeans. That idea may have been a powerful constraint on European understanding of how American Indigenous groups occupied and used land, although willful blindness seems to many more likely. The period of sustained contact began in Canada in Newfoundland and the Maritimes, and shortly thereafter in the Gaspé and the immediate St Lawrence watershed. During the sixteenth century, European settlement in North America was focused on the subtropical regions, but Europeans had become familiar with the North Atlantic coast through the activity of the Atlantic fishery. Portuguese, Basque, and English exploitation of the Newfoundland fishery accelerated during the 1500s, until every summer saw around 17,000 European males along the northeast coast. Though occasionally some crew members wintered over, there was no really permanent settlement. Trade in furs, at first an adjunct to exploration, began in earnest during this time, with French and English voyages of trade and exploration along the coast and up the St Lawrence River. The first and lasting effect of sustained contact was disease. No one knows the extent of the first great smallpox epidemic in 1520–4. It began in the West Indies and Mexico and spread northward to affect most of North America. It was followed by a devastating epidemic of measles just seven years later. An epidemic caused by an unknown pathogen affected people of the St Lawrence Valley in 1535, and smallpox struck again in the eastern Great Lakes region in the early 1590s. European diseases took a crushing toll: smallpox, for example, seemed to hit every other generation, as each generation that had gained some immunity was replaced by a new, susceptible one. The number of people who died or who were permanently disabled by disease is a matter of speculation. Estimates of the population of North America north of the cities of Mexico in the early sixteenth century vary from 4.5 million to as high as 18 million, and one of the difficulties in making the estimate is the incalculably devastating effect of the early epidemics. The cost in human life has been very great: suscept ibility to European disease was a major factor in the decline of the Indigenous population until the 1920s, to the extent that by the last part of the nineteenth century the Indigenous population of the United States and Canada dropped to around 300,000. Epidemics of smallpox, measles, influenza, and bubonic plague were the greatest killers, and diphtheria, cholera, typhus, scarlet fever, and typhoid also caused high mortality. The early epidemics preceded initial European settlement in the Northeast, so when that settlement began in earnest in the early 1600s it was among an Indigenous population already seriously affected by European diseases. Alliances in Trade and Warfare Acceleration of the trade in furs coincided with the first sustained European settlement in the early seventeenth century in the areas that now form Canada and the United States. European immigration began building in the 1630s, with French, English, Dutch, and Swedish establishment of furtrading posts and with experiments in agricultural settlement by the French and English. Trade relationships begun during the sixteenth century formed the basis for the initial pattern of European settlement, with the various European nations establishing colonies in territory controlled by the Indigenous nations with which each European nation had regularly allied itself in trade. We tend to look at those alliances nowadays in terms of their lasting significance rather than what motivated them at the time. Perhaps we lend too much relevance to those alliances that seem to have endured and to have changed history because of the eventual balance of power between European nations. The seventeenth century was a time of huge increase in trade between Europeans and Amerindians as well as of European encroachment on Indian land. Our discussions cloud a very complex period of competition among the European groups themselves for control of land for expansion and of competition among Indigenous nations, both in economic terms and for favourable terms of survival given the European onslaught. The alliances built on, exploited, and irrevocably disrupted ancient trade patterns between Indigenous nations. Indigenous trade patterns had been predominantly north and south, but the French inroad had been east to west, from Acadia to Gaspé, the St Lawrence Valley, and then the Great Lakes and south through the Ohio and Mississippi River systems. The French were allied initially in the Maritimes with the Mi’kmaq and Maliseet, then with factions of those groups’ occasional enemies, the Eastern Abenaki. Their allies north of the St Lawrence were the Montagnais and, in the interior, the Algonquians and a major group of Huron nations. The Dutch were initially allied with the Algonquian groups around the Hudson River, but sought alliance with the group that became known as the Five Nations Iroquois. England’s beachhead was first in New England and then in its settlements south of Chesapeake Bay. The Iroquois of the Five Nations gained tremendous political power by challenging the French and their allies to control trade on the St Lawrence and then by allying themselves with the British. As the English took over Indian land in New England and along the Hudson River, groups displaced by British encroachment moved westward, and some former enemies of the Five Nations put themselves under the protection of their erstwhile foes. Five Nations ascendancy was clearly realized when they destroyed the strongest interior trading partners to the north, the Huron allies of the French, during the mid1600s. Disease was a continuing major factor in the European expansion of the seventeenth century, with epidemics of bubonic plague in New England in 1612–19, measles in 1633–4 throughout the whole Northeast and again in 1658–9, scarlet fever in 1637 among the Hurons, diphtheria in 1659 in New England and eastern Canada, and smallpox, which racked the entire Northeast at least once during each decade from the 1630s to the 1690s. Military action against Indians was usually along lines consistent with the pattern of European alliance, but in New England there was military action against Indians for control of land. The military action, from the European colonizers’ standpoint, was probably not as effective as disease. The effects of disease on Native populations were so obvious that English colonists could interpret the devastation brought by epidemics as divine sanction for European possession and repopulation of the land. Control over territory and trade was clearly the cause of war. France and England were at war during much of the seventeenth century. The Five Nations Iroquois fought the French for nearly the entire century, the Abenaki fought the English for control of northern New England, and New England Algonquians went to war to attempt to remove the English from their territory. European Expansion into the Interior during the Eighteenth Century The eighteenth century was a time of continued conflict between European powers and conflict between England and her American colonies. A significant part of that conflict was played out in America. The Five Nations Iroquois established peace with French colonists in 1701, but their allies the Fox, in the area that is now Wisconsin, continued hostile action against the French and their Dakota allies. The French sought to maintain a continental sphere of influence through the Great Lakes to the Mississippi, and fought with the English over control of trade in Hudson Bay. During the early part of the eighteenthcentury French interests were well served by Mi’kmaq military conflict with the English in the Maritimes. If the focus is on European conflict, the his tory of relationships between European colonists and the different Indian nations during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is one of shifting alliances and unclear national boundaries: for example, during the last era of formal conflict between the French and the Five Nations Iroquois, many Christianized Iroquois settled in villages near Montreal. That illustrates two aspects of Amerindian–European relationship: (1) missionization had become important as a policy of control and pacification; and (2) Amerindian political organization was markedly different from that of Europeans. Indian military strategy, patterns of alliance, social movement, and migration are more clearly explicable if the focus is not on European spheres of influence and power balances but on Amerindian groups’ own attempts to control trade and land on their own terms, to adapt to the presence of Europeans, and above all to retain a land base for themselves that they might control. In other words, Indian political alliance was not a matter of less powerful nations aligning with more powerful European partners, but was instead a series of strategic partnerships, negotiations, diplomatic ventures, and armed hostility, all oriented toward maximizing each Amerindian group’s interests. Relationships among Indian nations were oriented to the same end—maximizing the specific national interest of the individual nation. The nations of New England and the American Atlantic seaboard, displaced and decimated by European disease and finding refuge with other groups, were among the first to couch the struggles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in terms of a conflict of a duality, Indians against Europeans. Groups such as the Delaware, formed as a collectivity from Algonquian survivors of groups north of Chesapeake Bay, first moved west to put themselves under the protection of their former antagonists, the Five Nations Iroquois, and then further west to the continental interior and to Upper Canada. Some of their leaders were influential in attempts to bring Indian nations together to fight in common cause against European colonists. The English Royal Proclamation of 1763, requir ing that any alienation of Indian land be negotiated and that the Crown be the sole European agency in negotiation, was a central component of an imperial strategy to ally Indian nations with Britain. When English domination was established in Quebec and the Maritimes during the last half of the eighteenth century, the possibility for Indian nations to play off one power against the other was removed, but during the war between England and the 13 American colonies, Indian nations were fighting on both sides, and they continued to face other Indian nations in battle in alliances with Europeans until the cessation of hostilities between Canada and the United States in 1814. Patterns of European migration changed as well. Until the establishment of the United States, around twothirds of the immigrants other than slaves had been indentured labourers. After the American Revolution, European immigration to North America was predominantly by free persons, and there was a large onetime immigration of British Loyalists from the United States to Canada. The last part of the eighteenth century saw increased direct trade between Europeans and Indians in the interior, building on primarily east–west trade routes that had been established in the fur trade among Indian groups. That trade was extended through the watersheds that led to Hudson Bay. Trade with the Pacific Northwest began dur ing the last part of the eighteenth century. It was joined by the Russians, who established permanent trading and missionary ventures with their claim to Alaska. English and American trading in the Northwest was initially by ship, and the commodities bought from Indians were primarily maritime products, such as sea otter pelts. By 1821, when the Montrealbased North West Company and the Londonbased Hudson’s Bay Company amalgamated, the fur trade relied primarily on land mammals and was conducted in trading posts, and the hBc had extended its domain to the coast with the amalgamation. The decade of the 1830s saw the beginning of European settlement in the area that is now British Columbia. Though conflict between west coast Indians and individual traders could be bloody, the pattern of alliances and warfare of the east coast was not repeated in the West, except for the battles fought between Tlingits and Russians. Before any appreciable contact, around 1770, the first of the great smallpox epidemics hit the Northwest Coast. It may have reduced the total population by 30 per cent. Before the introduction of European disease, the area had been the most highly populated of any nonagricultural area in the world, with as many as 180,000 inhabitants. Losses from a single epidemic would claim as much as twothirds of the population of a single community, and as each succeeding epidemic claimed lives the Native population was reduced to just over 30,000 by the late 1800s. The eighteenth century was also a time of displacement and migration. In the West, some nations whose way of life and habitation had been primarily in woodlands and parklands saw some of their people move onto the Plains. In the south, adoption of the horse as a central part of the culture facilitated that movement. Some groups whose livelihood had been in agriculture and the harvest of land mammals abandoned agriculture to hunt with horses and to trade for agricultural products and European goods with Indigenous agriculturalists in the river valleys. In the northern Plains, the move was facilitated by a growing market to provision the fur trade with food and other supplies. A Tide of Immigration and the Beginning of the Reserve Era The nineteenth century, by contrast to the preceding 200 years, was a period of relative peace between European powers and a period of wholesale change in the Americas. The United States and Canada had used Aboriginal groups as buffers along their common border. When the possibility of war between the two countries diminished after the signing of a formal treaty in 1817, the importance of Indians as military allies decreased and a period of oppressive attempts to control them began. The United States began relocating Indians westward, including groups who had lived near the eastern international border with Canada, and by the 1820s the strategic importance of Indian nations in that area, as military allies of Canada, was diminished. The intensification of industrialization in Europe displaced many of its own people and created a worldwide demand for agricultural land and agricultural products. Between 1814 and World War I around 50 million people migrated from Europe to the “new Europes” of the Americas and Australasia. Twothirds of them came to the United States and 4 million to Canada, where the largest tide of immigration was to the West after the 1890s. The policies of both the United States and Canada were westward expansion and the alienation of ever more Indian land to provide a place for Europeans to farm. Populations of Amerindians continued to decline in the face of repeated epidemics, but the birth rate of new immigrants was one of the highest ever recorded, especially among Caucasians. The AfricanAmerican population increased as well, through natural increase and the importation of slaves, so that their population in North America rose from 1 million in 1800 to around 12 million by 1930. Policies that became preeminent in the early 1800s seem to have driven Canadian government interaction with Indigenous nations for the next two centuries. It appeared to most nonNative observers that Indigenous groups were dying out. The continuing dramatic toll of disease in Native populations appeared to make their eventual demise inevitable. Social philosophy as it developed during the nineteenth century saw all human groups as developing through inevitably sequenced stages, and Native cultures were thought to be in a stage of “savagery.” From that perspective, EuroCanadian culture was an aspect of western Europe’s preeminent development to “civilization.” During the last half of the nineteenth century the concept of social Darwinism expanded on the assumption that Indian cultures represented less progress and less cultural development than European cultures, and it was assumed that “civilized” cultures were “fittest” to survive in any context of cultural conflict over resources. Peace between the United States and British North America after 1817 brought an end to the long period of military and political alliance among First Nations and European, colonial, and American governments. No longer needed as political allies, Native people became objects of altruism: European social philosophers saw them as being in need of “advancement” to participate in “civilization.” Churches and missionary societies defined Natives as needy in economic, social, moral, and spiritual terms. Indians in areas where Europeans wanted land needed to be protected and, eventually, assimilated. Churches and philanthropic organizations, primarily in Britain but also in the United States, focused on Canadian Indigenous nations as subjects of concerted missionary activity. From the 1820s until midcentury, British missionary organizations were a powerful lobby in the British Parliament for reorienting colonial policy toward the philanthropic end of Christianizing and civilizing Indians and Eskimos. Since the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the man agement of the relationship between Indians and the government had been the responsibility of the British government rather than any colonial government. An imperial policy of “civilization” of Indians as communities began in 1830. It marked the beginning of the reserve period in Canada. Indians were to congregate on land reserved for them, apart from the rest of Canadian society, and, as communities, to adapt to Canada’s changing social order by learning to farm. The government encouraged missionary activity, and the nineteenthcentury debate over which came first, civilization or Christianization, seems to have had its popular origins in this period. The policy had its greatest impact east of Lake Superior. Rupert’s Land was still the domain of the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Indigenous nations there were autonomous and relatively selfsufficient through participation in the fur trade and through traditional harvest of food and other resources. They effectively controlled the Plains, the western and northern woodlands and parklands, and the Arctic. European settlement began to increase in BC in the 1840s, and the first reserves in that colony were established during this early period of increased government control of Indians. In the last few years of 1870s the policy changed from one of assimilation by community to one of outright assimilation as individuals: the policy of establishing isolated reserves changed, and it was thought that reserves should be close enough to nonNative communities for individuals to have an incentive to become “enfranchised,” that is, to have the same legal status (and way of life) as individuals as nonNative Canadians. Though provision was made for individual enfranchisement, the number of people who opted for it was minuscule. When Canada took over control of Indian affairs at the time of Confederation, Indigenous nations became internal colonies. Until then, Indian groups had maintained control over their land, financial arrangements, membership, busi ness dealings with outsiders, and internal governance. The first legislation about Indians in postConfederation Canada, the Indian Act of 1876, effectively removed their control in all those areas and imposed systems of band governance that allowed the federal government exclusive control over Indian national leadership, land, membership, and money. Another challenge to internal band authority and First Nations’ community integrity was the policy’s manifest orientation toward individual enfranchisement. Canada had no effective control over those matters in the North and West, so at first the policies applied only to those bands east of the Lakehead (the northwestern corner of Lake Superior). The priority for all Indigenous nations in Canada where they were in contact with Europeans became maintaining the integrity of their individual communities. During the last few years of the 1860s, Native community integrity was at the heart of the conflict surrounding the admission of Manitoba as a province, and it was most surely the issue in the 1885 Rebellion. In the case of Manitoba, an attempt was made to resolve it by negotiating terms for the admission of the province that appeared favourable to retaining Metis community structures. The almost immediate failure of those provisions was one of the origins of the tension that resulted in the 1885 uprising. During the 1870s pressure to alienate Indian lands in western Ontario and in Manitoba motivated the federal government to enter into formal treaties, as had been done earlier in Ontario with the Robinson Huron and Robinson Superior treaties of 1850. An added federal government impetus as the treaty process moved west was to attempt to extinguish Metis claims. The selfsufficiency of the nations of the prairies and western parklands was threatened during the decade after Confederation because of the dramatic decrease, then absence, of the great buffalo herds upon which they depended. During the 1870s the Plains nations joined treaty negotiations as an alternative to starvation, though some groups of Cree, Assiniboine, and Saulteaux attempted to maintain autonomy through coalition by congregating in the Cypress Hills in Assiniboia, near the intersection of the present boundaries of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Montana. In 1871 British Columbia entered Confederation with the federal government assuming responsibility for the administration of Indian affairs, but with a proviso for provincial involvement in any Indian land settlements. (Except for a few early treaties on Vancouver Island and the extension of Treaty No. 8 into the northeastern part of the province, the alienation of Indian land in BC has not involved treaties.) Thus the establishment of reserves and the policy of wardship of Indians during an anticipated period of assimilation were cornerstones of the policies governing Indigenous nations within Confederation. The policies that characterize the reserve period were begun in the 1830s, were modified in the 1850s and again in the late 1860s, and then were implemented as each area of the country was alienated from effective Native control. A most interesting aspect of the policies was the uniformity with which they were applied. The policies directed governmental relations with groups such as the Mi’kmaq and Iroquois, who had been trading with and fighting alongside Europeans for almost 300 years; with groups such as the Cree and Blackfoot, who had had completely different trading relationships with Europeans; and with groups in the Mackenzie watershed and northern BC, some of whom were entering their first sustained relationships with Europeans. If we focus on the government’s rationale for the institution of such policies, it is possible to accept Tobias’s (1991) interpretation that the policies were directed by a concern for the “protection, civilization, and assimilation” of Indigenous people. If, instead, we look at the legislation itself, the way policies were carried out, and the effect of the policies “on the ground,” the idea of protection is not an acceptable interpretation. The reserve era was one of control and containment of Indians, primarily under authority provided by the Indian Act. Characteristics of the era are: Duplicity in the alienation of even more land, including land previously reserved for Indians; Heavyhandedness and arbitrary judgment in the definition of who was an Indian, both through the Indian Act itself and most particularly in the way recognition as being Indian was effected in individual cases; Control over internal governance of bands, the election and recognition of leadership, and the definition of band responsibilities; Corruption in the provision of goods and services to bands; Legal sanctions against the practice of Indigenous religion and spirituality; The establishment of industrial schools, then residential schools operated by churches, in which Indian custom was denigrated and in which an attempt was made to wipe out the use of Indigenous languages; The institutionalization and structuring of schooling, generally, that made academic success and achievement extremely difficult; Control over persons and individual move ment and mobility, with the institution of “passes” for leaving reserves; Control over the finances of individuals and bands; The institution of policies that made early Indian successes at farming impossible to maintain; and Legal sanctions against meeting and organizing. Though the reserve era is characterized by the Indian Act, federal administration of reserves, and oppressive policies, it is in fact simply a name that characterizes oppression over a period of time, whether or not the people affected were resident on reserves. Reserves were not established in the North for either Inuit or northern Dene, and some bands whose treaties provide for reserves have still to see them established, but the Indian Act has applied to all people recognized as Indian under the Act. The constraint and regulation of the reserve era have been as oppressive to offreserve Indians as to those who live on reserves. Exclusion from identification as Indian under the Act had the effect of socially defining a significant number of “nonstatus Indians” as “Metis.” During the early part of the twentieth century, Inuit were specifically excluded from definition as Indian but nonetheless had their affairs administered by the same department as Indians. The Metis, the large community of mixedancestry people who had begun forming Indigenous communities west of the Great Lakes as early as the late 1600s, did not have reserves, as their rights to land were supposed to have been recognized by the issuance to individuals of “scrip,” which was to be exchanged for land. Resistance The record of First Nations resistance to the measures of the reserve era is a long and detailed one. From the very beginning of the reserve era, individual leaders approached the government with complaints, protests, and constructive suggestions. The kind of control exerted by government agencies over the lives of Indians and whatever Inuit were in the orbit of govern ment influence militated against either economic development or individual achievement. The era between the two world wars was one of particular economic hardship for many Canadians, and particularly so for the many First Nations people whose traditional subsistence base of agriculture and resource harvest had been destroyed. PanCanadian organization of Indians began in 1919 with the efforts of F.O. Loft, a Mohawk army officer who was an organizer of the League of Indians of Canada (Cuthand 1991). Regional coalitions of First Nations groups began organizing in the 1920s and 1930s; one of these in Alberta was responsible for eventual government establishment of Metis settlements in the only province to set such land aside. After World War II it became increasingly clear to government that the inequities perpetuated in the name of wardship had to change, but change was slow and often apparently in the wrong direction. As after World War I, returning Indian veterans were in the vanguard of organization and protest. For the first time since sustained contact, the rate of increase in the Indigenous population was accelerating, but postwar economic development largely excluded Indians, so the economic distinctions between EuroCanadians and Indians became more marked. The middle part of the century brought the last relatively isolated groups of Indigenous people into sustained contact with government agencies, and yet another revision of the Indian Act in 1951 reinformed policies of control. The concept of wardship was still firmly entrenched in its provisions. A major change came in 1960 when registered and treaty Indians—quite abruptly and with negligible consultation—were recognized as citizens of Canada. The federal government took over administration of Indian and territorial schools from the missionary groups who had operated them since at least the 1850s, and many of the residential schools were phased out. The courts took on more importance as contentious issues were increasingly being settled there. In 1969 a major change in governance was proposed in a government White Paper: the Indian Act and reserves were to be phased out and provinces would take over administration of Indian affairs. Echoing the policy changes of the 1850s, Indigenous people were to be dealt with individ ually by government, not as groups. The government professed the changes to be a movement toward equality and justice. A very strong Indigenous protest, particularly from the National Indian Brotherhood (later to become the Assembly of First Nations), came in response: the message was that injustice had indeed been perpetuated but that government had not got the main point about the nature of the injustice. Rather than an equality in law as assimilated individuals, Indigenous people—as groups and not as individuals—had rights that derived from their status as Indigenous people. There were rights to land that had never been ceded, rights that derived from treaties, rights that inhered in the nature of Indigenous peoples’ relationship with land, and rights to govern themselves. Those rights had not been granted by the government and could not be removed by government: treaty rights had been negotiated and could not be unilaterally changed; other rights were inherent in Aboriginal status in Canada. In the 1970s, two important court decisions in Canada about land, one brought by the Nisga’a in BC and the other by Cree and Inuit in northern Quebec, made First Nations’ claims about land and rights credible to the federal government. For the first time since Confederation there was a government willingness to discuss a remedy for the negative consequences of the policies of the reserve era. The federal government instituted processes whereby claims for compensation and land could be heard, and those claims were to be distinguished as either comprehensive or specific. Comprehensive claims were primarily those where rights to EuroCanadian use of land had not been negotiated, and specific claims were for cases in which specific obligations had not been met by the government. The claims process continues, but the system set up to deal with claims has been overwhelmed by the several hundred claims brought to it, and should it continue to work at its present pace, claims will not be resolved for centuries. The policy foundation for a return to First Nations selfgovernment was established in the 1970s, though it was laid piecemeal. The substantive foundation was the persistent will of First Nations leaders and Aboriginal people generally to demonstrate that the right to and responsibility for selfgovernance had never been relinquished. One of the first government policy objectives was to mandate control of First Nations schools by First Nations peoples. A corollary was the provision of funding for legal treaty research in connection with claims processes, as well as the federal provision of funding for national and regional First Nations organizations to represent Indigenous interests to government. As a result of those measures, the nature of schooling has changed dramatically since the 1960s. Most schools on reserves, for example, are now run under the authority of band councils; access to postsecondary schooling, while still a problem, has improved dramatically; and there has been a movement to make curricula consistent with First Nations interests and cultures. At this point, however, it must be noted that the actual results of these changes are mixed. Another result of those measures is that Aboriginal organizations have become key players in constitutional issues. First Nations issues were front and centre in negotiations to patriate the Canadian Constitution in the early 1980s, not because of a priority placed on those issues by government but because of strong and effective First Nations representation to the Canadian public and to the Parliament of the United Kingdom, which was required to pass the measure as a last vestigial act of Canadian colonialism. The constitutional conferences of the mid1980s between federal, provincial, and territorial governments and First Nations leadership came to no formal definition of the “existing rights” of Indigenous people—rights that had been codified in the new Constitution—but media attention to those conferences brought the concept of First Nations selfgovernment to public awareness. One of the lasting consequences of those debates is that Aboriginal selfgovernment is now a putative objective of the Department of Indian Affairs. It is a rocky road. A good example of the complexities of establishing First Nations selfgovernment within Canadian Confederation is the debate over reinstatement of Indians who had been forced to enfranchise at marriage. Bill C31 was passed in 1985 as a measure that recognized gender equality: Indian women who had married nonIndians had been forced to enfranchise, while Indian men who married nonIndians brought legal recognition as Indian to the spouse. The complex question was whether or not the principle of gender equality was paramount over the principle that First Nations, as all nations, have the right to determine membership and affiliation. Parliament imposed a resolution by passing legislation reinstating large groups of people as Indian and requiring bands to establish clear membership criteria. When the Meech Lake Accord of 1987 sought to bring Quebec to agreement on constitutional issues, it was couched in terms of recognition of Canada’s having been created by “two founding nations,” British and French. The response of the Assembly of First Nations and of other Aboriginal groups was to recall a long history of alliance, trade, negotiation, and participation in the establishment of the current Canadian polity. It was more than symbolic that a treaty Indian member of the Manitoba legislature, Elijah Harper, was able in 1990 to delay—and thus obviate—passage of the Accord and its acceptance by the rest of Canada. The subsequent attempt through the Charlottetown Accord of 1992 to reconcile differences between Quebec and the rest of Canada, an effort that included a national referendum, saw First Nations people vote with the majority for rejection, even though national First Nations leadership had been instrumental in fashioning the Accord, and even though it included measures that were supposed to lead to self government. The federal government professes a commit meant to First Nations self government but there is no clear agreement among the various levels of government and Canadian First Nations about how to accomplish it. During the first few years of the twenty first century the federal government attempted to specify legislation that would define the terms of self government, but all but a few First Nations leaders voiced strong objection to what they said was an inappropriate and unilateral imposition of terms. The discussion is much more complex now than it was 20 years ago. In the first place, Indigenous peoples all over the world are working in concert to effect both international political change and social changes that reflect Indigenous values. The United Nations has played an important role in an international and intergovernmental discourse about Indigenous peoples’ right to self government and self determination. Postsecondary specialization in Native studies has been possible in Canada since the 1970s: now there is an academic and legal specialization focus ing specifically on Indigenous governance. Courts are currently playing a large part in redefining the relationship between Canadian Indigenous peoples and others. It is almost impossible to pre dict how that relationship will evolve, but one generalization that can be made is that the field is very complex. Self Government within the territory of Nunavut, for example, will be realized differently than in urban communities or on reserves. Self Government is not a right that can be granted by any other government. Thus it is not something for which any formula or policy can apply across the board. It is instead a principle. The long history of First Nations on this part of the continent and the important place that self directed First Nations have had in the creation of Canada are evidence of the principle that the rights and responsibilities of self government are inherent and have never been compromised. Except for the most oppressive period of the reserve era, between the 1870s and 1970s, First Nations have in fact been self governing. In the twenty first century, individual First Nations will reaffirm self government in a modern Canadian social context. In the past 100 years the effects of Europe’s diseases have diminished. Physical survival is no longer in question. Survival in terms of community integrity is a continuing struggle, even in the face of federal government commitment to a move to First Nations self government. Survival as nations honors the Ancestors who established those nations thousands of years ago, as well as those who have struggled to maintain the integrity and autonomy of First Nations communities.

Chapter 2 From the Beginning: Canadian Peoples Old and New PDF

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