First Nations, Inuit and Early Contact in Northern North America

Before the ships

Long before 1450, the lands that are now Canada were home to many Nations with their own languages, governments, laws, economies and spiritual traditions. In 1450 a person travelling from the Atlantic to the Arctic could have met:

• the Mi'kmaq in Mi'kma'ki (today's Maritime provinces and Gaspé), the Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet), and the Beothuk of Newfoundland;
• the Innu of the Labrador peninsula and the Inuit of the Arctic, whose Thule ancestors had spread east across the Arctic in the centuries before;
• the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, farming peoples at villages such as Stadacona (Quebec City) and Hochelaga (Montreal);
• the Wendat (Huron) Confederacy around Georgian Bay, and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy south of Lake Ontario;
• Anishinaabe peoples (including Algonquin, Ojibwe, Odawa) across the Ottawa valley and the upper Great Lakes, and the Cree across the northern forests;
• and many more Nations across the Prairies, the mountains and the Pacific coast.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the Great Law of Peace

The Haudenosaunee ("People of the Longhouse") Confederacy united five Nations: Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca. (The Tuscarora joined in the early 1700s, making Six Nations.)

• According to Haudenosaunee oral history, the Peacemaker, with Hiawatha (Ayenwatha) and Jigonsaseh, brought the Great Law of Peace (Kaianere'kó:wa) to end a time of blood feuds. The date of the founding is debated: Haudenosaunee tradition and some scholars place it centuries before European contact (one estimate, linked to a remembered solar eclipse, is 1142), while other scholars suggest the mid-1400s or later, up to about 1600.
• Structure: chiefs (Royaner, often called sachems in older English sources) of each Nation sit in the Grand Council at Onondaga. Decisions require consensus.
• Women's role: Clan Mothers select the chiefs and can remove a chief who fails his duties. Families trace descent through the mother's line.
• Records: agreements are recorded in wampum belts, such as the Hiawatha Belt that represents the union of the five Nations.

The Great Law is a working constitution that the Haudenosaunee still follow today. Some historians argue that it influenced American founders in the 1700s; that claim is debated, but the Confederacy's sophistication is not.

Wendat society

The Wendat Confederacy (Wendake, around Georgian Bay) included tens of thousands of people in palisaded villages of longhouses. Women owned and farmed the fields of the Three Sisters (corn, beans and squash), which produced a surplus. Wendat villages were a trade hub: they traded corn and goods north to Anishinaabe and Cree peoples for furs, fish and copper. When the French arrived, they needed the Wendat, not the other way round.

First contacts

• The fishery: after John Cabot's voyage of 1497 (his exact landfall, in Newfoundland or Cape Breton, is uncertain), Basque, Portuguese, French and English fishers came every summer for cod. Basque whalers worked from Red Bay in Labrador in the 1500s. Fishers traded metal goods for furs with Mi'kmaq, Innu and other peoples: the beginning of the fur trade.
• Jacques Cartier (1534 to 1542): in 1534 at Gaspé he met people from Stadacona led by Donnacona, and took two of Donnacona's sons, Domagaya and Taignoagny, to France. In 1535 they guided him up the St. Lawrence to Stadacona and Hochelaga. That winter, Stadaconans showed the scurvy-stricken French how to make a cure from a tree they called annedda (probably eastern white cedar). In 1536 Cartier seized Donnacona and others and took them to France, where most of them died. His 1541 to 1542 attempt at a colony failed.
• The word Canada comes from the Iroquoian word kanata, "village", which Cartier recorded.
• The Arctic: Martin Frobisher's English voyages to Baffin Island (1576 to 1578) clashed with Inuit, and took Inuit people to England, where they died soon after.
• By the time Champlain arrived (around 1603), the St. Lawrence Iroquoians had disappeared from the valley. Historians debate why: war with neighbours, disease, or both.

Alliance and the fur trade, 1600 to 1650

Samuel de Champlain helped found Port-Royal (1605), where the Mi'kmaw leader Membertou became an ally, and Quebec (1608). To get furs, the French needed alliances with Indigenous trading partners: the Innu (Montagnais), Algonquin and Wendat. Alliance in Indigenous diplomacy meant obligations: gift exchange, marriage ties and military support. So in 1609 Champlain joined his allies in a raid against the Mohawk near Lake Champlain, where French guns killed Mohawk leaders. This deepened long-term conflict between the French and the Haudenosaunee.

Further south, the Haudenosaunee traded with the Dutch at Fort Orange (Albany). Haudenosaunee tradition records an agreement with the Dutch, around 1613, represented by the Two Row Wampum: two peoples travelling side by side, each in its own vessel, neither interfering with the other. Historians debate the authenticity of a written Dutch version of this agreement, but the Kaswentha principle is central to Haudenosaunee understandings of their relationship with settler governments, including Canada, today.

Missionaries, epidemics and war

French Recollet (1615) and then Jesuit (from 1625) missionaries lived among the Wendat. The Jesuits' annual reports, the Jesuit Relations, are rich but biased sources: written to raise money and support in France, they describe Wendat life in detail while judging it by Catholic values.

From 1634 to 1640, epidemics including smallpox, against which Indigenous peoples had no prior immunity, killed perhaps half of the Wendat. Many Wendat blamed the missionaries, who were present wherever sickness spread. Weakened, and divided between Christian and traditional factions, the Wendat faced Haudenosaunee armies equipped with Dutch guns. In 1648 to 1649 the Haudenosaunee destroyed key Wendat villages, and the Wendat dispersed. Survivors became the Huron-Wendat Nation at Wendake near Quebec City and the Wyandot nations in the United States, and many were adopted into Haudenosaunee communities. These communities continue today.

The Haudenosaunee wars of this period are sometimes called the "Beaver Wars". That name suggests fur was the only cause. Historians also point to mourning wars (raids to take captives to replace people lost to disease and war), politics, and alliance obligations: a reminder to question labels.