Canada-History.txt

A Brief HISTORY
I s it history or blarney to suggest that St. Brendan, a sixth-century monk from Galway, was the first European to reach Canada? The good people of Newfoundland, where he is said to have landed, like to think he was. After all, on his return he told of being attacked by insects as big as chickens. “Of course,” say the Newfies, “they must have been our giant mosquitoes!”
A more serious claim is made for the Vikings, who seem to have sailed to the coast from Greenland around the year 1000. That is the carbon dating of tools and utensils, the vestiges of houses and workshops, and even an iron foundry dug up at L’Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland.
This takes some of the wind out of the sails of John Cabot, the Venetian navigator who claimed Canada’s eastern seaboard for England’s Henry VII in 1497. Locals fight over whether it was Nova Scotia or Newfoundland he actually discovered. Cabot himself mistook it for the northeast coast of Asia. In fact, Breton, Basque, and Portuguese fishermen had been here long before him but kept to themselves the secret of the coastal waters’ teeming cod fisheries. Initially, the English were attracted to Canada only by the fish, preferring to concentrate their colonizing activities farther down the American coast.
The French came looking for gold and diamonds, spices, and a passage to Asia. In 1535 Jacques Cartier ventured up the St. Lawrence as far as Hochelaga Village, dominated by a hill he named Mont Réal (Mount Royal). Cartier was not exactly showered with honors when he returned with eleven barrels of worthless yellow iron pyrites and glittering quartz. For the next 70 years, Canada was all but ignored until the French turned to the more lucrative new fur trade.
The strange European comings and goings were observed by native peoples whose ancestors had preceded these “discoverers” by at least 12,000, some of them 55,000, years. Waves of Siberian hunters had crossed a land bridge over the Bering Strait in pursuit of mammoth and bison. They spread through Alaska, south along the Pacific coast to the region of British Columbia, and later east across the Yukon and Northwest Territories.
New France
With no written culture to document it, the pre-European history of the Inuit and other early peoples is a vague archaeological patchwork of bones, stones, and artifacts. Their brief encounters with Atlantic fishermen left little impact, but the advent of French and later British colonizers brought, in exchange for their beaver pelts, copper kettles and guns, blankets and brandy, Christianity, measles, and smallpox.
After winters on the Bay of Fundy had proved too harsh, Samuel de Champlain and his first batch of French settlers left Nova Scotia and moved over to the St. Lawrence River in 1608. Within ten years, both tenant farmers (habitants) and fur traders (coureurs de bois, literally wood-runners) were colonizing Québec — New France — at the point where the river narrows.
To guarantee each habitant equal access to the waterfront, the farmland was divided into long narrow strips reaching down to the riverbanks. Local conditions were exploited with traditional French ingenuity. Manure, for instance, was shipped downriver by heaping it on ice floes during the spring thaw. Tough coureurs de bois sought furs from the Huron in Ontario and Algonquin in Québec, quickly learning language and customs and even marrying into the tribes.
Meanwhile, the huge untapped fur resources of northern Québec and Ontario attracted the renewed attention of the British. In 1610, navigator Henry Hudson thought he had located the fabled Northwest Passage for his London backers when, rounding the northern tip of Québec and heading south, he hoped, to China, he found himself locked in a vast bay on which he left his life and name. Over 50 years later, the bay was explored by two enterprising Frenchmen, Pierre Esprit Radisson and Médard Chouart des Groseilliers (known to Anglo-Canadian schoolchildren as “Radishes and Gooseberries”). Exasperated by the cost of the haul to Québec and by the heavy taxes imposed on fur pelts, they sought a new outlet for the fur trade. Fearing a commercial threat to the St. Lawrence River, the governor in Québec opposed their survey of the region.
This decision proved to be the beginning of the end for New France, for Radisson and Groseilliers promptly sold their idea to British merchants, who in 1670 founded the Hudson’s Bay Company. Charles II granted this tentacular private joint-stock company control of all territories draining into Hudson Bay; they were named Rupert’s Land after the king’s cousin, who was also titular head of the company. Its initials H.B.C. came to mean “Here before Christ.” It was here to stay.
The first British fur traders were much less adventurous than the French, waiting for the Indians to bring their pelts to the trading post rather than seeking them out in the forest. The coureurs de bois were more adapted to the wilderness and understood the Indians better. From them they learned to make swift, light birchbark canoes, snowshoes, and pemmican — a ghastly but nourishing mixture of buffalo fat with bits of dried meat and berries. The French also offered higher-quality goods. The H.B.C. was a penny-pincher, and Indians soon spotted — and spat out — its raw London gin tinctured with iodine to imitate French brandy.
But Britain backed this vested interest with tough diplomacy and a powerful navy, while Louis XIV was too wrapped up in his European power plays to pay much attention to French Canada. Although the British made no military conquests here during the War of Spanish Succession (1700–1713), their negotiators forced the French in the ensuing Treaty of Utrecht to give up all of Acadia (Nova Scotia) except Cape Breton. There, the French fortress of Louisbourg, which defended the sea approaches to Québec, was seized by the British in 1744. It was returned four years later in diplomatic negotiations, only to fall once and for all in 1758 in an assault mounted from the new British naval base of Halifax. In the final struggle for Québec, the courageous French military commander, Marquis de Montcalm, led outnumbered troops to a victory at Ticonderoga. But, poorly coordinated with local Canadian militia, they lost the city of Québec in 1759 to Britain’s General James Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham. Both Montcalm and Wolfe were killed in the battle.
The French army burned its flags and sailed home, followed by most of the merchants and colonial leaders, leaving the habitants to fend for themselves. After 150 years of courageous struggle against the harsh Canadian wilderness, New France was abandoned, the old country displaying a cruel lack of enthusiasm for what Voltaire dismissed as quelques arpens de neige — “a few acres of snow.” 
The British Take Over
At first, British immigrants did not exactly flock to Canada either. Governor James Murray sympathized with the Québécois, whose bravery he much admired. Although the established church was now Anglican, Catholic privileges and tithes were restored. These were enshrined in the Québec Act of 1774, which also maintained French civil law alongside British criminal law and gave French Catholics seats on an appointed governmental council. But when American revolutionaries invaded Québec in 1775 in the hope of winning the French-Canadians over to their cause, the latter did not rally to the British side until the American soldiers started taking the habitants’ livestock and supplies.
When American Independence was declared, some 40,000 Loyalists — New Englanders and Germans from Pennsylvania, but also some Indians and black African slaves — moved north to Canada. The most resilient settled on Prince Edward Island and in Nova Scotia, around the Bay of Fundy, while a majority migrated to Niagara and the Eastern Townships in southern Québec.
To cope with the rival claims of Loyalists and Québécois, the Constitutional Act of 1791 divided the colony into Upper Canada (Ontario) and Lower Canada (Québec), separated by the Ottawa River. Under lieutenant governors, each province had a parliamentary system modeled on the Houses of Commons and Lords, while Lower Canada’s French language and civil and religious institutions were safeguarded.
The land west of Ontario was written off as one big empty wilderness until Alexander Mackenzie completed the first transcontinental crossing, and Simon Fraser and David Thompson mapped out the rivers and mountains of British Columbia and the Rockies. The Hudson’s Bay Company fought for control of the fur trade with the North West Company, which formed in 1783. The Nor’westers commandeered the French system of forts, depots, and canoe brigades; they inter-married with native peoples and produced new clans of so-called Métis. After years of fierce armed struggle for trading posts around Hudson Bay and lakes Winnipeg and Superior, the Nor’westers threw in their lot with the H.B.C., bringing a wilder, more imaginative spirit to the staid old company.
With great pioneering skill, Upper Canada’s first lieutenant governor, John Simcoe, pushed new highways north from Lake Ontario and west to Hamilton. He established the provincial capital at a trading post, Toronto, in the heart of a malarial swamp, and renamed it York. A landed gentry made up of army officers, government officials, and commercial speculators ran the province, creating a hereditary aristocracy known as the Family Compact. More Americans were lured over the border with land grants; the population rose from 14,000 in 1792 to 90,000 by 1812. French-Canadians were also multiplying rapidly, from 60,000 when New France was abandoned in 1760 to 330,000 fifty years later.
Canada bore the brunt of US hostility in the War of 1812. The Americans were convinced that the British were backing Indian raids on American settlements along the Canadian border. Congress called for nothing less than the conquest of Canada, but Major-General Isaac Brock’s tiny Canadian force, allied with Chief Tecumseh’s Shawnee Indians, routed a half-hearted American invasion along the Niagara frontier. The Americans burned and looted York, provoking a violent British reprisal raid on Washington.
Though greatly outnumbered, Anglo- and French-Canadians fought victoriously side by side at Châteauguay. But after the war, the militia of Louis-Joseph Papineau’s patriotes became the backbone of growing anti-British agitation. With British immigration on the increase, Québécois autonomy was threatened by moves towards one government for Lower and Upper Canada. Landowners such as Papineau feared being swamped by projected improvements of the St. Lawrence trade route. In the general paranoia, the patriotes even accused the British of fostering Québec’s 1832 cholera epidemic. Papineau asked London for guarantees of autonomy for a Lower Canada assembly dominated by French-Canadians. British rejection in 1837 led to riots opposing patriotes and British militia. After a victory at St.-Denis, the French-Canadians were crushed by Governor John Colborne’s troops north of Montréal. Habitants’ farmhouses were burned down, earning Colborne the nickname of Old Firebrand (Vieux Brûlot), and defeat left an even more enduring bitterness than the original British conquest. Papineau fled to the United States.
In the same year, hatred of the high-handed Tory oligarchy in Upper Canada provoked a rebellion among small farmers and tradesmen beset by economic depression. Their champion, newspaper editor and first mayor of Toronto, William Lyon Mackenzie, proposed a US-style republic. Heeding his call of “Up them, brave Canadians, get ready your rifles and make short work of it,” a few hundred irregulars gathered at Montgomery’s Tavern north of Toronto. But a Tory militia led by bagpipes put down the so-called Mackenzie Rebellion in a skirmish lasting just a few minutes. Short work indeed.
Governor General “Radical Jack” Durham was sent to put the house in order; he proposed a unified assembly governing Canada’s domestic affairs. He scorned the Québécois for “retaining their peculiar language and manners. They are a people with no history and no literature.” But Lower Canada’s pragmatic Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine accepted the British framework as a means of asserting the Québécois’ right to equal representation. In the new United Provinces of Canada set up in 1841, he formed a delicate alliance with Toronto reformer Robert Baldwin. Immigration increased to meet an ambitious public works program of canals to bypass the St. Lawrence rapids and cross the Niagara peninsula, as well as of new cities, mines, and roads.
But the big news was railways. The first, in 1836, was the Champlain and St. Lawrence Railroad, a few miles of track between Montréal and Lake Champlain. By 1854 more than 250 miles joined Niagara and Windsor. The dream of a transcontinental railway with freight revenues drew financiers to the Grand Trunk project to join up Montréal, the Great Lakes, and the western hinterland. But initially they had to content themselves with luring American trade to the St. Lawrence by linking eastern Canadian cities to Portland, Maine.
Choosing a permanent capital for these United Provinces wasn’t easy. In the perennial Anglo-French conflict, bilingual Montréal was too troublesome, while English-speaking Toronto or French-speaking Québec City would favor one community at the expense of the other. Royal Engineer officers sent watercolors of likely sites for Queen Victoria’s approval. The choice went to Bytown, a puny lumber depot renamed Ottawa after the river on which it stood, diplomatically situated between Upper and Lower Canada.
To the east, and remote from the centers of power, the people of Newfoundland and the Maritime Provinces lived in small, isolated communities with no unifying geography comparable to the Great Lakes or St. Lawrence River. Newfoundland turned its back on the hostile interior to reap the harvests of the sea. Always psychologically closer to London than to Ottawa, Newfoundland did not become part of Canada until 1949. Yankee Loyalists struggled valiantly with a region they called Nova Scarcity. The British had scattered Nova Scotia’s French Acadians, some to the nearby islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon (still French today), others as far as Louisiana, while a small nucleus remained in New Brunswick. The potential of Prince Edward Island’s fertile soil was squandered by absentee land speculators who milked it only for the rent and left the settlers no motivation to develop it.
Even farther away, the west was still administered as a separate empire by the H.B.C. until gold discovered on Queen Charlotte Island in 1852 and on the Fraser River six years later prompted Britain to set up a new colony to control the influx of unruly American fortune-hunters. The company’s chief officer, James Douglas, became first governor of British Columbia. The company kept upper Canadian farmers from migrating to the Prairies by depicting a sub-Arctic wasteland, but British surveyors found the valleys of the Saskatchewan, Assiniboine, and Red rivers to be fertile and ideal for agriculture. The western trek began. The nation was taking shape.
Confederation
The British North America Act of 1867 created the Dominion of Canada. John A. Macdonald, an Ontario Tory, was the first Prime Minister. To resist a turbulent United States torn by civil war, Anglo-Canadians wanted a strong central government delegating little more than municipal affairs to the provinces. French-Canadians insisted on a federal system with stronger provincial governments, to protect specific Québécois interests in property and civil rights. Henceforth, national unity always played second fiddle to ethnic, religious, and above all economic regional interests.
Only the promise of a transcontinental railway brought Nova Scotia immediately into the Confederation, with British Columbia joining in 1871, and Prince Edward Island in 1873. Rupert’s Land was bought from the H.B.C. in 1869, but incorporating Manitoba was not so easy. Led by Louis Riel, Métis descendants of Indians and French fur traders waged an armed struggle for land rights on the Red River in the face of the expansion-hungry railway builders. An impassioned politician as well as a fiery military leader, Riel won local Anglo-Saxon support for his proposed Manitoba Act guaranteeing equal French and English language rights in school and church. But the execution of a troublemaker from Toronto brought in a retaliatory force of Ontario troops, and Riel fled to the United States. The Métis were driven off their fertile land and back to hunting on the plains.
The railway literally created new cities like Winnipeg and Vancouver, which was the western terminus. Against all the experts’ advice, the Canadian Pacific Railway Company’s general manager, William Cornelius Van Horne, built tracks around Lake Superior and west across the Prairies to meet Andrew Onderdonk’s Chinese laborers working their way east through Kicking Horse Pass in the Rockies. The transcontinental dream became reality when the tracks were joined in 1885. But along the way, scores of laborers had died hacking through the mountains, buffalo were exterminated, and Indians and Métis were dispossessed of their lands.
These were booming times. Less spectacular than the completion of the C.P.R. but economically vital, the first hydroelectric installation began functioning on Niagara Falls in 1895. A year later, gold was struck in the Klondike, opening up the Yukon to 100,000 panhandlers and camp followers. The Prairie Provinces profited from soaring worldwide wheat exports.
Presiding over this new prosperity was the country’s first French-Canadian Prime Minister, Wilfrid Laurier, an elegant, eloquent Liberal. Completely bilingual, he was determined to forge Anglo- and French-Canadians into one nation, comparing them to the waters of the Ottawa river and Great Lakes meeting below the island of Montréal: “parallel, separate, distinguishable, and yet one stream, flowing within the same banks.” Visiting London for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, he charmed his hosts by declaring: “I am British to the core.” He was knighted on the spot.
But Laurier saw the limits of British support when the British and American negotiators of the Alaska boundary tamely accepted the US claims to a southern coastal “panhandle,” which denied Canada sea access to the Yukon goldfields. He asserted greater national autonomy by taking over British military installations and shipyards at Esquimalt on Vancouver Island and Halifax, Nova Scotia. When Alberta and Saskatchewan acceded to provincial status in 1905, and the country’s mining, lumber, paper, and pulp industries burgeoned, Laurier championed a new transcontinental railway that would take a more northerly route to serve them — the state-owned Canadian National Railway (C.N.R.).
Laurier’s conciliatory efforts did not diminish Anglo-French Canadian differences. Conflicts raged over the denial of equal rights to Catholic schools in Manitoba, and a Prohibition referendum (blocked only by wine-drinking Québécois). The Québécois were slow to jump on the wagon of industrial progress. Political leader Henri Bourassa and influential editor Jules-Paul Tardivel insisted on time-honored rural traditions. “Our mission is to possess the soil,” they said, not to pursue “American” obsessions with industry and money. They resented the sending of Canadian troops to South Africa to support the British in the Boer War, and were no more enthusiastic about the Anglo-French alliance in World War I. Bourassa said “The real enemies of French-Canadians are not the Germans but English-Canadian anglicizers, the Ontario intriguers or Irish priests.”
The Twentieth Century
Under Tory government, the country supported Britain with 500,000 men in World War I, losing over 60,000 on the battlefield. Emotional European nationalism spread to Canada. Citizens of German and Austrian origin were dismissed from public service, the German language was banned in schools, and Berlin, in Ontario, was renamed Kitchener.
But the war was good for the economy, supporting arms manufacture, the railways, and especially agriculture’s huge wheat exports. Trade union membership expanded from 166,000 in 1914 to 378,000 in 1919, being emphatically more radical in the west, where workers chose to assert their new organizational strength by calling for a proletarian revolution. In Vancouver and Calgary, they cheered the Bolshevik victory in Russia. The government blamed the 1919 general strike in Winnipeg on “enemy aliens,” but the leaders were in fact British immigrants. In classic Canadian style, the campaign for a united national union movement fell victim to narrow regional interests: those of Ontario’s tiny Communist Party and the Catholic Union in Québec.
William Lyon Mackenzie King, who became leader of the Liberal Party after Laurier’s death, made Canada progressively more independent of Britain. At the Imperial Conference of 1926 he won the acknowledgement that Canada was autonomous in external affairs and thus not subject to a common, British-dominated policy for the whole Empire. This led to the 1931 Statute of Westminster, which effected the equality of Britain and the Dominions, thus consecrating Canada’s full autonomy in home and foreign affairs. The governor general in Ottawa became the symbolic representative of the Crown rather than of the British government. But the provinces insisted that the Constitution remain with London rather than let Ottawa infringe on their prerogatives.
At the same time, the country came more and more into the American economic and cultural orbit. The boom years of the 1920s saw the growth of a “branch-plant economy;” with American automobile, rubber, chemical, and clothing factories springing up around the Great Lakes at Hamilton, Oshawa, Windsor, and Montréal. The boom in American popular culture inundated Canada with radio, movies, and mass-market magazines. Québec, in particular, tried to resist the invasion, even going so far as to ban adolescents from cinemas. Apart from the Group of Seven, a spirited band of Ontario painters who were seeking a distinctive “national” style, most Canadian-born artists — actors, musicians, and writers — felt obliged to seek fame and fortune in New York, London, or Paris.
Canada’s Great Depression was felt first by farmers in the Prairie Provinces, unable to get rid of their surplus from the wheat glut of 1928. Even the drought in 1929 did not ease matters, and ten more years of bad harvests meant they would not recoup their losses. Other sectors of the economy — timber, fisheries, mining, and construction — ground to a halt as production outstripped demand. Spirits were raised by the escapist fare of the new Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission, today’s C.B.C. — Hollywood extravaganzas, and home-grown media stunts, not the least of which was the hullabaloo surrounding the Dionne quintuplets, born in Ontario in 1934.
Trans-Canada Airlines, the forerunner of Air Canada, started up in 1937, and air travel became vital for covering the vast distances, fighting forest fires, and carrying provisions and wages to remote corners of the far north. Natural enough, then, that involvement in World War II began with a British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, using Canada’s safer skies to prepare pilots for combat. At the outbreak of war, Canada’s reputation for welcoming immigrants and refugees from all over the world was tarnished by the blocking of Communists and Jews from Hitler’s Germany. Asked how many he would allow in, Justice Minister Ernest Lapointe said: “None is too many.” After 1941, citizens of Japanese origin were interned and had their property confiscated.
In 1940, Mackenzie King and Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a joint American-Canadian defense pact, and a year later integrated their countries’ economies for the duration of the war. War was again good for business. Out of a population of 11,500,000, more than a million were directly working in war-allied industries, most of them in brand-new factories. Over 730,000 men and women served in the armed forces, which suffered 43,000 losses. In 1942, without adequate Allied naval and air support, the high-risk amphibious raid of 5,000 Canadian troops on Dieppe proved disastrous (almost 1,000 killed, 2,000 captured). With more careful Allied planning a year later, Canadians played a distinguished role in the Sicily landings and Italy campaign, as well as the D-Day invasion of Normandy in 1944.
Social policies made important advances during and immediately after the war. In 1944 Saskatchewan elected the first socialist government in North America — the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (C.C.F.). The Liberal government responded by appropriating much of the C.C.F.’s reform program. But native peoples and Inuit did not win the right to vote in federal elections until 1960.
Economically, the country was closer than ever to the United States. The consumer boom accentuated dependency on America’s Canada-based branch-plant manufacturers of cars, radios, TVs, and refrigerators. The United States was also Canada’s main customer for raw materials and energy in what was a veritable explosion of industrial achievement. North Manitoba nickel and Labrador iron were replacing depleted resources south of the border; huge oil strikes were made near Edmonton, Alberta, in 1947; a uranium reactor started up in Ontario in 1952; and hydro-electric plants mushroomed all across the country. The St. Lawrence Seaway was opened in 1959. Six years later, drivers could cross the entire continent on the Trans-Canada Highway.
The national culture fared less well. A Royal Commission on the Arts and Letters was spurned by Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent as a futile body for “subsidizing ballet dancers.” While there was more cultural aid promised than ever delivered, one positive result was the foundation of the highly creative National Film Board.
Balancing domestic interests and relations with the American neighbor became increasingly delicate. The first Prime Minister from one of the Prairie Provinces, Saskatchewan Tory John Diefenbaker, made himself popular with the farmers by negotiating a sale of wheat surplus to China that tripled their incomes — but unpopular with his American neighbor for doing business with the “Communist devil.” In the wake of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis with the Soviet Union, the United States wanted Diefenbaker to accept nuclear warheads on Canadian soil. President John Kennedy attacked Diefenbaker’s hesitation and prevarication, and the Prime Minister was defeated at the next election, after the Canadian Liberals had jumped on the American bandwagon.
Canada celebrated its centenary in 1967 with a World’s Fair, the Montreal Expo. It was an opportunity to assert a more creative side of Québec’s identity amid the province’s growing militancy. Parallel to the worldwide independence movements in the 1960s, Québécois separatists fought elections demanding to be “maîtres chez nous” (“masters in our own home ”). In 1967, De Gaulle declaimed his famous “Vive le Québec libre!” (“Long live free Québec!” from Montréal City Hall, forgetting for a moment that French-Canadian leaders had sided with his Vichy enemies during World War II.
As a progressive minister of justice, who reformed laws against homosexuality, divorce, birth control, and abortion, Pierre Elliott Trudeau was sympathetic to the French-Canadians’ demand to have their language placed on an equal national footing with English. But this sophisticated, bilingual Montréal lawyer opposed what he regarded as Québec’s tribalistic urge to exclude all things English from its own province. Elegant, witty, and cosmopolitan, Trudeau became Liberal Prime Minister in 1968 — and like Wilfrid Laurier before him, just the kind of French-Canadian that Anglo-Canadians love. The Québécois were less enthusiastic. With the introduction of the birth-control pill, the province’s birthrate dropped from the highest to lowest in the nation, causing conservatives to worry at the waning influence of the Catholic Church and the prospect that French-Canadians would drown in a sea of Anglos. When René Lévesque’s separatist Parti Québécois was defeated in the 1970 provincial elections by Robert Bourassa’s Liberals, embittered militants of the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) turned to terrorism. In quick succession, they kidnapped British Trade Commissioner James Cross and murdered Bourassa’s Minister of Labor Pierre Laporte. The country approved Trudeau’s tough reaction; invoking the War Measures Act, he sent in 10,000 troops and arrested 468 militants. The FLQ was outlawed. Despite Lévesque’s victory in 1976, Québec gradually moved away from outright separatism to a militant but more limited program, which preserved the province’s specific culture by imposing the French language in schools, industry, and government. Radicals were delighted by the subsequent westward exodus of Québec’s Anglo-Canadians, but in the process Toronto was to bypass Montréal in population, financial, and even cultural activity.
After a brief respite in private life, Trudeau returned for what he felt was his crowning achievement, the Constitution Act of 1982, the consummation of Canada’s political identity. The act transferred Canada’s constitution to Ottawa by removing the old obligation to refer amendments to London, and incorporated a new Charter of Rights and Freedoms similar to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man.
Despite a referendum vote by its citizens against separatism two years earlier, Québec was defiantly the only province not to sign the new constitution, feeling its cultural specificity had not been guaranteed. Tory Prime Minister Brian Mulroney won the Québécois over in 1987 with an accord recognizing them as a “distinct society.” He appeased the other provinces by conceding important new powers in shared-cost programs, immigration, and appointments to the Supreme Court and Senate. In the 1990s, Québec has remained a part of the Canadian federation by only the slimmest electoral margins. The Inuit and other indigenous peoples have also negotiated concessions for their lands and resources, and in 1999, the immense Northern Territories divided in two. The eastern half, which takes in Baffin Island, the land around Hudson’s Bay, and most of the Arctic islands, is now called Nunavut and essentially functions as an Inuit homeland. The remaining Northwest Territories officially retain the territory’s old name, though many refer to the region as the Western Arctic. The success of Nunavut has led other native groups to settle claims with the Canadian government. 
Canada’s national unity remains a dynamic “work in progress.” 
THE EARLIEST PEOPLES
Apart from a few explorers, trappers, gold-diggers, and oil drillers, most Canadians have preferred to hug the narrow strip along the American border and know little of the northern wilderness. The only people who have embraced all of Canada’s vast territory are the Inuit and other pre-Columbian peoples, even though they now number less than half a million and have never been many more. Canada’s distinctness is better appreciated by a closer look at some of its earliest peoples.
The Pioneers
In the beginning, as far as human beings were concerned, Canada was a void. Siberian hunters crossed the ice of the Bering Strait in several waves. While the earliest, around 70,000 b.c., moved down the Pacific coast to South America, the settlement of Canada began some 15,000 years after, spreading across the continent from the Yukon and, much later, from British Columbia. By 8000 b.c., Indians were hunting caribou in Nova Scotia. Archaeologists believe that the pattern of life in the Stone Age was not so very different from what the first Europeans encountered.
In the Arctic region, the stabilization of the sea level and a dramatic cooling of the climate around 1500 b.c. caused hunters to switch from land mammals to fish, seal, walrus, whale, and ice-dwelling polar bear. At the same time, these ancestors of the Inuit moved out of their skin tents into warmer igloos of hardened snow blocks. They glided over the ice on skates of ivory or antler horn. From the Yukon, further migrations took them north to the High Arctic, south around Hudson Bay to Manitoba, east to Greenland, and down the Labrador coast to Newfoundland.
For the West Coast peoples, as the song says, the living was easy. The fish were indeed jumping; bountiful salmon were barbecued in the summertime, smoked for the winter. Prehistoric techniques for fishing and trapping have continued right into modern times, though bone has been replaced by steel in the weapons. One of British Columbia’s favorite freshwater fishing sites, at Hell’s Gate in Fraser Canyon, has been going strong for 9,000 years. Prairie Indians hunted buffalo by forcing the herds onto marshland, snowbanks, thin ice, or over cliffs — one of these nasty surprises being known to this day as the Head-Smashed-In buffalo jump, near Fort MacLeod, Alberta. Already in 3000 b.c. these people were drying and smoking strips of meat — modern beef jerky. In Ontario and Québec, where encroaching forests gradually dispersed the herds of caribou, the Iroquois ousted the Algonquin and settled down to cultivate maize, beans, and squash, living in rectangular, multifamily longhouses.
The Inuit
These toughest of all Canadians have withstood the hardships of the far north, including its icy deserts and Arctic blizzards, but were nearly wiped out by European diseases — measles, mumps, and smallpox. Estimated at 81,000 in the 18th century, they now number some 27,000, living mostly in the eastern half of the Northwest Territories. They succeeded in having the eastern section of the Northwest Territories officially renamed Nunavut — “Our Land” — and in 1999, Nunavut became the 11th province of Canada. 
Since the 1950s the federal government has gathered most of the Inuit together in village communities, to improve their education, medical care, and general welfare. But more scattered groups in the High Arctic still prefer to live in traditional igloos, better insulated than in stone houses, and with an infinite supply of building materials.
The characteristic snow-block dome measures 4 to 5 m (13 to 15 ft) in diameter at the base. An entrance tunnel with a kitchen alcove on one side, and storage alcoves on the other, leads to the main living area. Light is provided by whale-blubber oil lamps, as well as by the translucent snow walls or a clear-ice skylight. The igloos are often connected by a whole network of tunnels. This proved particularly convenient for the Caribou Inuit practice of co-marriage: two couples would exchange sexual partners, not in a casual way, but as a real alternate marriage, strengthening ties between two interlocking families.
Social solidarity in the Arctic cold, is of course, important. In one group on Hudson Bay, males became mumiqatigiik or dancing partners, a friendship solemnized ritualistically when two buddies hit each other very hard on the face and shoulders, exchanged gifts, and danced together until exhausted. And why do Inuit kiss by rubbing noses rather than with their lips? That way they won’t stick to one another in below-freezing temperatures.
The Kwakiutl
For the relative opulence of their way of life, the Kwakiutl of British Columbia’s Pacific coast on and around Vancouver Island count among the aristocrats of Canadian native peoples. For centuries, they have harvested an abundance of fish from the ocean and rivers — not just salmon but halibut, herring, mussels, and clams. From the forests they have hewed red cedar planks for handsomely crafted houses and 22-m (65-ft) canoes to negotiate the coastal waters. Before European textiles arrived on the scene, the Kwakiutl pounded cedar bark until it was supple and soft enough to weave into capes, skirts, and blankets.
The mild climate and generally easy living have given them the leisure to develop artistic talents less apparent among native peoples and Inuit facing harsher conditions. Elaborate decoration has gone into fashioning the simplest everyday objects — clothing, baskets, storage boxes, even fishhooks. Carpentry is the most valued of Kwakiutl skills, and is spectacularly displayed in their totem poles. But this is not an ancient art form. The huge freestanding red cedar poles erected in front of their houses are essentially a 19th-century phenomenon, dependent, for their intricate design, on the chisels, steel axes, curved knives, and other metal tools bartered from Europeans for the skins of sea otters. Size was originally limited to that of the poles and beams used to build the house, to which the carvings were directly attached. Then, as personal wealth diminished with a slump in the fur trade, totem poles became prime symbols of a chief’s prestige, soaring to 26 m (80 ft) and more. While they survive now only in museums, especially in Vancouver (see page 155) the ritual gift giving known as potlatch has re-emerged after years of official prohibition. Derived from the Nootka Indian word patschatl, meaning “to give,” the potlatch traditionally enabled a chief to demonstrate his prestige to neighboring tribes. For a year or more he gathered up his tribe’s surplus wealth — considerable during the boom years of the fur trade — to throw a huge party. In addition to a splendid feast, the host would hand out gifts of oil, carvings, jewels, prized iron tools, and, above all, the coveted Hudson’s Bay Company blanket, sometimes as many as 10,000 of them. While the host tribe’s houses were emptied of everything except bare essentials, the guests would depart knowing that in a year or two they would have to reciprocate if they were not to lose face.
In the 1880s the government banned this apparently wanton impoverishment, but the Kwakiutl, for whom wealth was measured by what they could give away, continued the practice clandestinely, disguising it as the distribution of Christmas presents. Today, potlatch is back in the open, updated with transistor radios and other household appliances; the blankets are now electric.
The Dene National
Nowhere is the clash of traditional values and modern industry more acute than it is in the western Subarctic. Here, some 11,000 native peoples from 20 tribes in the Northwest Territories sharing the Athapaskan language have joined as the Dene Nation. Together with the Métis Association (descendants of intermarried French fur traders and Plains Indians), they are involved in a tussle with private oil and natural gas companies to protect land rights and traditional culture.
Proponents of an Arctic gas pipeline passing through Indian lands in the Mackenzie Valley to northern Alberta argued that the Dene need revenues from the pipeline to escape poverty, and that in any case they no longer have an autonomous culture. They drive cars, wear Western clothes, speak English, and play country-and-western music. But Dene leaders, fearful of the project’s environmental impact, insisted their bush-related culture of hunting and fishing could and should be protected (through more self-government) before the pipeline was laid. Ottawa compromised with a shorter pipeline, one just for oil.
In fact, quite apart from the more tangible facets of Indian life that the Dene Nation is trying to preserve — language, customs, hunting and fishing grounds —the traditional values are what remain vitally important. In the past, native peoples moved around the Subarctic in small bands, with leaders not institutionalized in a sacred or hereditary role, but chosen very pragmatically for specific hunting skills or on-the-spot organizing abilities. A tough environment demanded tough qualities of interdependence and industriousness, sorely tried by contact with Europeans. The fur trade put an end to their semi-nomadic existence as they settled around the trading posts and became fiercely competitive with one another. A collapse of fur prices after World War II, coinciding with a rise in prices for consumer goods, left them dependent on federal welfare.
The old culture, however precarious, still exists, and Dene leaders, always pragmatic, fought to protect it with a proper land settlement rather than dependence on pipeline revenues in a world where oil and gas prices are just as fragile as fur prices once were. Ironically the Northern natives have begun discussions on building their own pipeline which would supply them with a flow of revenue and a boost toward further autonomy. The official name of the Northwestern Territories hasn’t changed, but it is known among the Dene Nation as Denendeh which means “our land,” and as the negotiations between the native groups and the government continue, this dream moves closer to reality.
The Blackfoot
Our popular image of the North American Indian is conditioned by Hollywood’s stereotype — feather headdress, necklace of scalps, and whooping war dances around the campfire — which in fact derived from the prairie tribes, or Plains Indians, as they are known to American anthropologists. The Blackfoot of Alberta are a classic example. Their name, says the myth, was bestowed on them when an ancestor, on his way to meet another tribe, walked through land burned by prairie fire and blackened his moccasins.
For these great hunters of the Rocky Mountain foothills and prairies, wild game included grizzly and black bear, antelope, deer, elk, wild sheep, and goats, but the only “real meat” was buffalo. Before the early 1700s, when horses appeared on the scene, guile was more important than speed, and hunters stalked the buffalo herd disguised with the skins of wolf and buffalo calves. Horseback hunting brought new skills and prestige to an élite that had been given no other duties. The Blackfoot went to war with Shoshoni and Crow Indians, to the south, for their horses, and were in turn attacked by the Cree from the north for their territory’s great buffalo herds. Buffalo was everything to these tribes — food, clothes, and tents; and twelve to fourteen buffalo skins were needed to construct a single teepee. So the cultural and ecological shock was all the greater when the herds were exterminated in the 1870s. Métis and Cree Indians were devastatingly efficient with their repeater rifles, and the transcontinental railway builders made a deliberate policy of clearing the tracks of migrating buffalo. By 1877, under the Canadian government’s Blackfoot Treaty, the native peoples gave up their hunting grounds to raise cattle on reserves instead.
The Micmac
Like the Denes of the Pacific Coast, the Micmac found a life of relative plenty when they migrated from the Great Lakes to the fishing waters of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick. The Atlantic provided a gourmet diet of oysters, clams, and lobster, and the rivers teemed with salmon, eel, smelt, and sturgeon. They roasted their fish whole, boiled it by dropping hot stones into the cooking water, or ate it smoked.
Like their Algonquin cousins back in the woodlands of Québec and Ontario, they showed a great talent for hunting — moose, beaver, bear, caribou, and seal — with bow and arrow, traps, and harpoon. Before the hunt, the Micmac staged a huge “eat-all” feast to clear out all available provisions, confident the larder would be amply replenished. When they returned, the hunting dogs ended up as the prize delicacy for guests at their ceremonial feasts. The hunters lured the moose with a birchbark “horn” imitating the female call, and if that didn’t work, they poured water from a birchbark receptacle into a pond to reproduce the sound of the female urinating. Once the men had killed the beast, the women had to carry it home to cook. The choice morsel was the head, roasted.
In the 18th century, the Micmac were courted by the French as allies against the British. The French at Louisbourg wrought just as much mayhem among them through smallpox and typhus. Some 12,000 Micmac remain, in 27 reserves in the Atlantic provinces and Québec.
Modern Realities
Today, colorful folklore is being revived as an assertion of the indigenous peoples’ identity. But it is in terms of hard, everyday reality that Indians and Inuit have insisted upon, and won the autonomy of partial provincial status for the Yukon and Northwest Territories. They are continually pressing for a greater share in the profits of the oil, uranium, and other energy resources found on the lands allotted them in the 19th century, before these riches were ever dreamed of.
After years of paternalistic administration of the native peoples’ property, the government now gives them a free hand in running their own businesses, such as hotels and shopping centers financed from oil revenues in Alberta. Native peoples and Inuit prefer to mount their own campaigns against alcoholism, the legacy of centuries of colonial abuse, as an alternative to reliance on government-run Alcoholics Anonymous groups. The Inuit want their own TV system, and demand that local airline schedules use Inuit town names.
Beyond the issues of personal and collective dignity, the earliest peoples of Canada remind us that long before Cabot and Cartier, C.P.R. and C.N.R., Diefenbaker and Trudeau, this land was theirs.