Canada Before the Contact Period

Canadas location in the northern reaches of the continent meant that it would be a paradoxical place. Its climate and geological landforms suggested that it would present great challenges to the people who tried to inhabit it and wrest a living from its lands and waters. On the other hand, its seemingly boundless terrain of waterways, lowlands, forests, plains, and mountains harbored a vast treasure trove of resources. For the relatively modest numbers of people, considering the larger populations of Europe, Asia, and the southern part of the America continents, the nation that we now call Canada would display essential tensions: between bounty and austerity, struggle and peace, and freedom and restraint. It is in understanding its contradictory nature that one finds the essence of Canadian history. The contradictions lie in the initial years of fitful meetings between the peoples of two worlds: the original inhabitants of North America and Europeans. This protracted era, called the contact period, suggests themes in Canadian history that have weathered the test of time. Northern North America, rather than being a vacuum for energetic Europeans to explore and settle, was a vast landscape inhabited by a flourishing mixture of Native peoples who had fashioned a way of life over the centuries that was in tune with the environment and, as far as we can determine, was part of a complicated system of relationships between neighboring and often competing tribal groups. From a European perspective, Canada was alternately viewed

as an obstacle or an objective. The obstacle idea was rooted in the energetic exploratory activity that led Europeans to find a short western ocean route to the riches of Asia. Antithetically, the objective ideal emerged in large measure as a secondary plan, at least for the place we now call Canada. If not easily and readily traversed, then perhaps the waters, soils, and rocks of northern North America would yield other substancesperhaps even richesthat would make European settlement a worthwhile endeavor. Thus for Native peoples, Canada had been an austere yet often bounteous home for countless generations. For the vanguard of European explorers and settlers, the image of Canada fluctuated between being a barrier or a magnet. Indisputably, the vast continent became the arena for a clash of peoples and cultures that would account for much of Canadas early colonial history. In order to come to grips with precontact North America, historians must be particularly creative in seeking a variety of sources. In order to understand Native peoples before and during the early contact years, we cannot rely exclusively on the most common historical source: written documents. Instead we should make imaginative use of archaeological material, as well as the contributions of anthropologists and ethnographers. Moreover, as the written record of the contact period unfolded, it was almost exclusively the product of European males, who inevitably defined and remembered events that fit their principles and ideals. We are left with the documents, maps, and visual portraits of what they saw and how they reacted to life in the New World. Therefore, the task of determining what the lives of Native peoples were like before and during contact is a particularly

challenging one. And while some conclusions about Amerindians will probably remain forever ill defined and debatable, a combination of oral testimony, Native traditions, and carefully interpreted records of European-based peoples gives us a clearer insight to life in Canada hundreds of years ago. Until recently, Canadas Amerindians tended to be portrayed as a backdrop for the substance of Canadian history, a group to be considered during the fur trade era of the early colonial period and in the context of several nineteenth-century conflicts, or as an interesting sidebar to flesh out the complexity of the Canadian past. Thanks to a wealth of scholarly and popular literature on Native peoples in the past generation, we now know that their impact on Canadian history was and continues to be far greater than previously acknowledged. Neither background to the European invasion nor anecdotal supplement, the countrys Native peoples are an essential part of the historical admixture for a rounded understanding of the Canadian past.