Pre-Confederation Canadian History

The Iberians

Three decades after Columbus’s voyages, the Spanish were in control of a vast quilt-pattern of indigenous empires. Their military prowess had been sharpened in the reconquista and their tolerance for non-Catholics dulled by the Inquisition. The colonization of Cuba began in 1511 and from there the attacks on Mexico began. In 1518 a small force led by the conquistadore Hernán Cortés began the process of conquering the Mayan city states of the Yucatan, then liberating tribute-paying provinces of the Aztec Empire (which sent 200,000 of their own troops against the Aztec capital). Smallpox was Cortés’ other, hidden ally and it would kill thousands upon thousands, enabling a Spanish victory. In 1521 the Aztec capital fell and the Spanish took on the administrative mantle of the ousted regime.

Figure 3.7 A Spanish representation of the conquest of Cusco and the capture of Atahualpa, ca.1538.

Similarly, a conquistadore mission under Francisco Pizarro (ca. 1476-1541) made three attempts on the Incan Empire of Peru. Pizarro succeeded in 1532 after holding the last Sapa Inca, Atahualpa, hostage for ransom and then executing him. Again, the Spanish appropriated the indigenous administrative structure and many of its legal practices, adapting some while replacing others. This system of conquest allowed the Spanish to take advantage of existing labour supplies and to easily divert local wealth to Spain. The Spanish Crown clearly had an interest in this process and quickly began centralizing its control of the new territories.

In 1524 the Spanish Council of the Indies was created, and New Spain was divided into four viceroyalties. One of these, also called New Spain, would play a role in the geopolitical struggle for North America, as it included Mexico and Central America, gradually extending into California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Its wealthy capital was Mexico City (the former Tenochtitlan).

The economic systems of Spanish America were also strictly controlled hierarchical and economic endeavours. Native labourers were provided through the encomienda system, which was a grant from the king given to an individual mine or plantation (hacienda) owner for a specific number of natives to work in any capacity in which they were needed; the encomenderos, or owners, had total control over these workers. Ostensibly, the purpose was to protect the natives from enemy tribes and instruct them in Christian beliefs and practices. In reality, the encomienda system was hard to distinguish from chattel slavery. The repartimiento, which granted land and/or indigenous people to settlers for a specified period of time, was a similar system.

In the Portuguese territory of Brazil, economic development centred on sugar rather than silver and gold. As the Europeans subdued local populations, increasing numbers of sugar plantations emerged along the Atlantic coast. Most of the labour on the sugar plantations came from native slaves, though they aggressively resisted control by the Europeans. In fact, many of the plantations failed in part because of the resistance of the natives. Vulnerability to imported diseases was a further factor, reducing the viability of enslaving Aboriginal peoples. By 1600, Africans, who had developed immunity to European diseases over centuries of interaction between the two continents, were replacing indigenous peoples as slaves on the sugar plantations. Around the same time, African slaves found themselves shipped to the Pacific coast of South America where thousands worked in silver mines, such as the gargantuan operation at Potosí in Peru (now southern Bolivia).

This was the beginning of what became understood as triangular trade. European ships sailed to African slave markets, purchased large numbers of humans whose lives were to be given over to hard labour in the fields, shipped them across the Middle Passage (during which time huge numbers died), and sold them to plantation owners. Sugar and other crops, as well as mineral wealth, were then loaded onto ships, which promptly made the return trip to European markets and merchants. This model and variations on it would inform every colonial enterprise in North America and is explored in Chapter 6.

Countermove: The Dutch

Because Spain and Portugal were the first to found colonies in the Americas, the patterns they established served as the template for other European empires. The biggest challenges that they faced in administering their colonial holdings were those of time and space. Communication between colony and the imperial centre was difficult, and it took months for messages, orders, and news to travel across the Atlantic. The distance between Europe and the Americas played a very important role in shaping colonial administration along with patterns and methods of imperial control. The ways in which the Iberian powers politically and economically administered their colonial holdings were also a reflection of the relationship between “mother country” and colony: the American holdings were settlement colonies shaped in the image of Spain and Portugal. Spaniards and Portuguese set up a direct system of governance that exerted tight control over the colonies just as absolutist monarchies at home tightly governed their own people. The Spanish and Portuguese colonies benefited the mother country economically and colonial trade was tightly controlled. This was the model that the Dutch and other European intruders in the Americas sought to emulate.

However much they wanted successful colonies, the Dutch also wanted to weaken the Spanish (and to a lesser extent, the Portuguese) hold on the Americas. This created a dual focus for the Netherlanders: build and disrupt. The Dutch concentrated on weakening their Spanish competitors through piracy in the Caribbean, something for which they seemed to have a true knack. As for the Portuguese, the Dutch took them on more directly, conquering small but important lands in Brazil. Ignoring the Treaty of Tordesillas, the Dutch established a colony on the Hudson River around 1614 and held onto that position until the 1660s. Their colonial economy was a mixed one, but one aspect — the fur trade with the Haudenosaunee — would bring the Dutch into conflict with New France.

Attributions

Figure 3.7
Cusco battle by Noh-var 2 is used under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.

In the period before contact with the Americas, the countries of England and France, as they appear on the map today, had not yet taken shape. For much of the Middle Ages, both regions faced invasions by Germanic and Scandinavian tribes from northern and central Europe and almost continuous internal instability. It was the principal goal of monarchs in England and France to consolidate their power; their expansion across the Atlantic can only be understood within this context. However, they lagged behind the Portuguese, the Spanish, and the Dutch because of the almost constant state of war across the Channel as well as the emergence of the Protestant Reformation in the early 16th century.

England and France at War

Figure 3.6 Pieter Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death (ca. 1562) represents the plague years. England and much of Europe were traumatized by epidemics and war.

While the Black Death (the plague) ravaged Europe in the 14th century, England and France descended into the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) over the question of who would succeed to the throne of France. The lengthy conflict had a significant political impact for both sides. In England, it strengthened the role of Parliament simply because Edward III (r. 1312-1377) and his successors had to turn to the representative assembly repeatedly for funds. As these meetings occurred, the two levels of Parliament — the House of Lords and the House of Commons — began to take shape. A corresponding national assembly did not appear in France because Phillip VI (r. 1328-1350) and his successors considered it repugnant; instead they worked assiduously to build a strong monarchical regime. These years of conflict had the added effect of catalyzing what would later be called “national” identities in both countries.

The Hundred Years’ War also brought on a period of domestic strife in England. The War of the Roses ended when Henry Tudor (1457-1509) (subsequently Henry VII)  defeated his rival in 1485. In the Tudor dynasty, the monarchy became the main political force in England. The powers of Parliament waned, as did that of the lesser royals, called the aristocracy. Henry VII’s governing council also dealt with recalcitrant nobles by using the Star Chamber, which was a judicial body that undermined traditions of English common law, and by promoting the interests of the middle class. Merchants, heavily concentrated in England’s port towns, favoured policies that enabled and protected trade; their concerns thus became the concerns of the Crown as well. And merchants favoured seaborne trade.

It was under Henry VII, then, that England made its first official foray into overseas exploration. In May 1497 (some historians claim it was seven years later), the king allowed John Cabot (ca. 1450-1499), a Venetian mariner living in London, to sail under the English flag in an attempt to find a northern route to Asia.[footnote]William Gilbert, “Beothuk-European Contact in the 16th Century: A Re-evaluation of the Documentary Evidence,” Acadiensis  XXXX, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2011): 24-44; R. A. Skelton, “CABOT, JOHN,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography 1 (University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003). Accessed November 30, 2014, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/cabot_john_1E.html.[/footnote] Cabot reached what he called Newfoundland in June of that year and claimed it on behalf of the king. He made a second voyage in 1498, funded in part by Henry VII who expected to reap the financial rewards of the journey. However, after Cabot’s death, his crew, led by his son Sebastian, failed to find any precious metals, so Henry lost interest in overseas exploration.

While Spain and Portugal began the process of colonization, England found itself in the midst of a political and religious crisis for much of the 16th century. Events at home took precedence over any further state-sponsored oceanic voyages. However, Cabot’s voyages gave England a chip they could play when it came time to match other European claims to the North American mainland.

Religion and Politics in the 16th Century

Through most of the medieval period, secular leaders in England and France relied on a connection to the Roman Catholic Church to underwrite their legitimacy. By the early 16th century, however, the Church itself had come under fire. The intellectual currents of the Renaissance played a role in this change, but so too did the practices of the Church, including clerical immorality, clerical ignorance, and clerical absenteeism. The Church’s failings led Martin Luther (1483-1546), a Catholic priest in Germany, to spark the Protestant Reformation in 1517. Protestant sects arose throughout northwestern Europe, including in England and France (where they were often called Huguenots). Breaking with Rome was a serious business and the decision to become Protestant or remain Catholic in many cases had as much to do with power struggles as it did with faith.

The English Reformation began officially under Henry VIII (1491-1547) who ruled from 1509 to 1547 and was driven by court politics. Henry’s break with the Pope led Parliament to pass legislation that made the king the head of the new Church of England and required all priests in England to swear allegiance to the king’s church. In terms of doctrine, the new Church, also called the Anglican Church, made few changes. In terms of economic power, however, Henry VIII gained an advantage when he dissolved all the monasteries in England and confiscated their wealth as a means to build his treasury and weaken that of the Vatican.

The English Reformation did not come about without local resistance. Henry’s successors kept the country divided and in a state of civil war until the late 16th century. Under Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603), some stability was achieved — enough to allow for the emergence of new sects of Protestants to appear, including the Puritans and the Quakers, both of which would play a pivotal role in the colonization of North America in the 17th century.

The French monarchy had little political reason to turn to Protestantism in the early 16th century. Enjoying relative religious stability in the 1520s, King Francis I (r.1515-1547) looked for possible ways to catch up with the Spanish in the realm of overseas exploration and colonization. In 1524, he sponsored a voyage by the Florentine navigator, Giovanni da Verrazzano (1485-1528) to stake a claim in the New World and discover the Northwest Passage. During his voyage (1523-24), Verrazzano explored the Atlantic coastline from modern-day South Carolina to New York. A decade later, Francis sponsored two voyages by Jacques Cartier (1491-1557). While Cartier failed to find a northern route to Asia, he did survey the St. Lawrence River and made valuable contacts with the local population. Nevertheless, the discoveries did not inspire Francis to support a permanent settlement in the western Atlantic at that time.

Soon the window of opportunity slammed shut. Protestant factions began springing up across France at mid-century, leading to religious riots. The worst of these occurred on St. Bartholomew’s Day, August 24, 1572. Shortly after the marriage of Margaret of Valois to Henry of Navarre, Catholics led by Henry of Guise viciously attacked Protestants in Paris. Sectarian civil war ensued. A group of Catholic moderates finally ended the strife when they concluded that domestic tranquility was more important than religious doctrine. Moreover, the last man standing in a three-way conflict over religion and succession was the Protestant Henry of Navarre. After he ascended to the throne as Henry IV (r. 1589-1610), he joined the Roman Catholic Church. Nine years later he issued the Edict of Nantes in 1598, which granted the Huguenots liberty of conscience and worship and brought stability to the country. Henry IV’s tentative nod to religious toleration put France at last in a position to renew efforts at exploration and transatlantic trade.

Attributions

Figure 3.6
Triumph of death by Quibik is in the public domain.

A map of the world in 1400 reveals a patchwork of small countries and kingdoms, most of them heavily centralized, but few of them truly expansive. There are exceptions, such as the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (and its successor state, the Poland-Lithuanian Alliance), which extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and the Ottoman Empire, which included all of the Balkan Peninsula and what is now Turkey. China’s borders under the Ming Dynasty, although huge, were a fraction of what they had been under the Mongol and perhaps a fifth of their size today. Absolutist monarchical regimes with powerful religious institutions were globally the norm. In this respect, the Aztec Empire was hardly different from its contemporaries headquartered in Beijing, the Mali Empire in west Africa, or 15th century England under Henry Tudor. A few of these nations, however, had begun exploring the possibility of expanding trade networks by sea.

Figure 3.4 A model of Zheng He’s flagship beside one of Columbus’s ships. Both are built to the same scale.

The early leader in economic expansion was the Ming Dynasty under the admiralship of Zheng He (1371-1433). His fleet was one of the largest the world would see for many years, and his flagship was the largest vessel on the planet — one that dwarfed European craft. In the first half of the 1400s, Zheng pushed the maritime boundaries of Ming influence all the way to the east African coast: Chinese dialects were becoming rooted in every port town around the Indian Ocean, and piracy was virtually extinguished by Zheng’s naval policing.

Around the same time, Portuguese navigators began pushing into the South Atlantic, inching one degree of latitude a year farther south from about 1450 onwards. To put this in perspective, official European maps in the first half of the 1400s extended the world no farther south than Morocco. Africa was, apart from its Mediterranean flank, virtually unknown to Europeans. By 1488, advances in navigational instruments like the compass and the astrolabe, better ship design (like the caravel), and growing confidence allowed the Portuguese to round Cape Horn and enter the Indian Ocean. Three maritime traditions — that of Portugal, the Ming Dynasty, and the Arab ports — were now in contact. With gold pouring into Lisbon, other European nations took note. Spain in particular wanted a piece of the action but could never assert quite enough power over the Portuguese fleets to break through that monopoly around west Africa. That left the Spanish, for the time being, with only one direction in which to look.

Spain in the Americas

The year 1492 is a watershed in human history. The changes it brought to the Americas (which we explore in some detail in Chapter 5) were far-reaching and we still can feel the effects today. In Europe, 1492 had significant economic repercussions as well, as Spanish expeditions secured huge bounty in the form of precious metals. In the space of two generations, port cities that faced the Atlantic were booming. Navies grew to monstrous size, as did the industries that supported them — everything from making sails to producing dyes for uniforms to twisting enormous lengths of rope. Merchant wealth rose on a wave of price inflation, and this emergent class of traders and manufacturers began to flex a little political muscle. At the same time, it was still the age of absolutist monarchs whose power, it was thought, derived from heaven (a concept known as the divine right of kings). This understanding of the nature of power must be understood in its particular historic context: the Spain that ventured into the western Atlantic had only very recently been transformed politically and culturally in a manner that put religious identity first.

Spain was divided since the eighth century between a Muslim south and a Christian north. The marriage of the 18-year-old Isabella of Castille to her first cousin Ferdinand II of Aragon in 1469 began a rapid process of consolidating Spain into its current shape. What was left outside the boundaries was the Emirate of Grenada, the last toehold of what had been an extensive Muslim empire across Spain and Portugal. After a decade of bitter fighting, Grenada fell to the Catholic monarchs on January 2, 1492, and the reconquista was complete. In the space of barely 30 years, Spain was transformed, and the changes had come about under the sword and the Bible of a stridently Catholic kingdom. The country was militarized, police forces were introduced, religious tolerance fell to a low ebb, and religious chauvinism ran at full tide.

One arm of this movement took the form of the Inquisition. To consolidate their victory and begin the process of “purifying” their kingdoms, the monarchs issued orders for all Jews and Muslims to make a choice: convert to Christianity or leave Spain. The newly reformed Spanish identity was thus unquestionably Christian, and all subjects of the Crown were to belong to the Catholic fold. It was in this context that Christopher Columbus (himself aggressively Catholic) received support for a voyage to the West, ostensibly in search of an avenue to India that would not trespass on Portuguese routes to the south. In 1492 when he set sail, commercial, military, and religious ambitions were in play in Spain; Columbus’s voyage was much more than a harmless geographic survey.

Three ships left Spain in September 1492 with fewer than 90 men, a year’s provisions, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the size of the Earth. Scholars all over Europe argued that Columbus grossly underestimated the distance to Asia. Columbus’s misunderstanding, along with an egotistical demeanour and demands for great personal rewards from his expedition, made him an unpopular business partner and a difficult master at sea. On October 12, 1492, with mutiny a real likelihood, the small Spanish fleet sighted an island in the chain later named the Bahamas. Columbus returned to Spain in 1493, convinced that he had reached Asia. He described a tropical paradise and brought back enough gold and other valuables to secure permission for a second voyage.

The Caribbean quickly became the base for further Spanish reconnaissance. Within 25 years, European explorers and cartographers had sketched a remarkably accurate outline of the Caribbean and the eastern coasts of North, South, and Central America. For a time, Columbus himself served as governor of “the Indies,” the name used by the Spanish for the Americas. His critics accused him of harsh rule and mistreatment of the colonists, who called him “the tyrant of the Caribbean.” In fact, Columbus was arrested and returned to Spain in chains, where he was stripped of his titles and office for misrule. Columbus went to his grave believing that his voyages had taken him to Asia. Others, however, argued that he had reached a previously unknown land mass, a “New World.”

While the Spanish were busy establishing themselves in the Caribbean, Vasco da Gama (ca. 1460-1524) had made contact with India and thus won the Iberian race to tap into the spice trade. Another emissary of the Spanish throne, Ferdinand Magellan (ca. 1480-1521), confirmed Columbus’s mathematical errors and fundamental cartographical ignorance in late 1520 when his fleet entered the Pacific Ocean. Magellan’s fleet became the first to successfully circumnavigate the globe, returning to Spain in 1525, but the voyage took an incredible toll: of the original five ships and 237 men, only one ship and 18 men survived, and Magellan was not one of them.

The first challenge to Spanish hegemony in the New World came with the Treaty of Tordesillas, which divided what the Europeans knew of the Americas between Spain and Portugal. Part of Brazil fell within the Portuguese area of claim, leading to a growing struggle for control in the region between the Iberians. Later, other European nations entered the region, creating further complications. Some, like the Dutch, took a primarily economic interest in the American hemisphere, shaping their models of colonial administration largely around trade and piracy as opposed to conquest and plantations.

Figure 3.5 The Cantino World Map was prepared in Lisbon around 1502. In only a decade, Spanish and Portuguese landfalls in South America and the Caribbean were extensive.

Attributions

Figure 3.4
Zheng He’s ship compared to Columbus’s by Lars Plougmann is used under a CC-BY-SA 2.0 license.

Figure 3.5
Hochelaga village – circa 1535 – Project Gutenberg etext 20110 by Project Gutenberg is in the public domain.

In Chapter 2 we considered the very deep history of human occupation in the Americas. Here, we do the same for the Europeans.

Northwestern Europe to 1491

The earliest human-made or anthropogenic tools discovered in France have been dated to more than 1.5 million BPE, but that does not mean that there has been continuous human occupation of the region. The area’s multiple climate zones and various entry points made it a crossroads for human traffic over millennia. Neanderthal populations appear around 300,000 BPE but are thought to have gone extinct around 30,000 BPE. Modern humans (in this case, Cro-Magnons) became the dominant hominid species. They enjoyed a long run, but glaciation scoured humans and other fauna from much of northwestern Europe until about 15,000 years ago. It was only then — about the same time humans were appearing in the Americas, if not some years later — that humans returned to northern France and the British Isles.

The emergence of agricultural societies in the Neolithic, about 4,000-6,000 BPE, occurs at about the same time teosinte cultivation emerged in Mesoamerica. At about 2800 BCE, people in what is now France began working in bronze; evidence suggests that it was about 2150 BCE before Britons began to do the same. The so-called Iron Age, however, did not arrive for another 1,000 to 1,200 years.

The experience of the British Isles in the pre-contact period illustrates processes at work across Europe. What leaps out is the succession of cultures that arrived in Britain and established dominance. Indigenous British populations were subjected to repeated influxes of newcomers from the mainland of Europe, the most consequential waves beginning with the Romans about 2,000 years ago. British culture was strongly influenced by successive invasions, including the Germanic arrivals of the fifth century CE and repeated incursions and immigrations from Viking homelands from the eighth century through to the 10th century (one arm of which would carry on across the Atlantic). And while the British Isles would sustain many localized seagoing, fishing economies, the core economic activity was agriculture. This was true in France as well, and the number of hunter-gatherers in both territories was insignificant.

Figure 3.2 Pre-contact Europeans developed striking visual records of their history, like the Bayeux Tapestry.

The indigenous Celtic cultures of northwestern Europe and the British Isles continued to be pushed to the margins in the late pre-contact period. In England and Wales that process accelerated with the arrival of the Normans (in large measure the descendants of Viking immigrants to France) in the 11th century. The society that emerged in England — and that was in place in 1492 — was thus a hybridized one dominated by an aristocracy of continental origin and a landscape of often fractious princelings/chieftains with a warrior class and clergy dominating a large agricultural peasantry. The “commoners” were themselves a mix, but in many districts in Britain throughout this period they were essentially ethnically different from their feudal masters. (Everyday artifacts of this relationship are the words used to describe meats: English peasants raised pigs, chickens, and cows, which were transmogrified in the market and on the banquet-hall table into pork (porc), poultry (poulet), and beef (boeuf), words derived from their conquerors’ native Norman French.)

While England’s boundaries were still undefined in this period and Wales resisted English domination, Scotland and Ireland were utterly distinct and their political units were mostly organized around chieftainships. What can be said of these northwestern European peoples in this period is that their political and economic conditions were very unsettled, that they had developed important technologies, and that their identities were necessarily fluid and somewhat tribal.[footnote]For a survey of the repeated and overlapping population tides that washed across Britain, see David Miles, The Tribes of Britain (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005).[/footnote]

The First Voyageurs: the Vikings and Others

Figure 3.3 Danes about to invade England. From Miscellany on the Life of St. Edmund from the 12th century.

In the eighth century, Norsemen, or Vikings, began settling parts of the Faroe, Shetland, and Orkney Islands in the North Atlantic. For nearly four centuries they went wherever treasure was, trading as far as Byzantium and Kiev in the east. In the west they raided Ireland and England, continuing south to the Italian peninsula. Their gun-and-run approach — sailing into a port, seizing its gold, and murdering or enslaving its people before fleeing — belies the fact that they were also settlers. They made homes throughout the British Isles, and they began settling Iceland in approximately 870 CE. One Viking, known to us as Erik the Red (ca. 950-1003), was accused of murder and banished from his native Iceland in about 980. Erik explored to the west and later founded a settlement on a poorly charted, snowy coastline. Knowing that this bleak land would need many people to prosper, Erik returned to Iceland after his exile had passed and coined the word “Greenland” as a branding ploy that he hoped would appeal to the overpopulated and treeless settlement. Erik sailed again to Greenland in 985 and established two colonies with a population of nearly 5,000.

Leif Erikson (ca. 970-1020), son of Erik the Red, and other members of his family began exploring the North American coast in 986 CE. Leif landed in three places, and in the third established a small settlement called Vinland. The location of Vinland is uncertain, but an archaeological site on the northern tip of Newfoundland at L’Anse aux Meadows has been identified as a good candidate. It was a modest Viking settlement and is the oldest confirmed presence of Europeans in North America. The settlement in Vinland was abandoned in struggles between the Vikings and the native inhabitants, who the newcomers called Skraelingar. Bickering also broke out among the Norsemen themselves, and the settlement lasted less than two years. The Vikings would make brief excursions to North America for the next 200 years, though further attempts at colonization were thwarted.

By the 13th century, Viking civilization was in retreat; Iceland and Greenland entered a period of decline during a little ice age. Christianity and the emergence of a unified Christian kingdom in Norway caused division within the Viking world. As well, Europe soon fell prey to a series of devastating epidemic diseases, and what knowledge scholars, sailors, and governments had of Viking explorations was lost or ignored. Apart from the traces left behind at L’Anse aux Meadows and the possibility that some genetic material might have found its way into the Aboriginal communities of the region, the Viking legacy evaporated with their departure. Vinland was a dead end.

Other apocryphal accounts of European encounters with the Americas exist. These include stories of St. Brendan’s voyages from Ireland, Prince Madoc’s expedition from Wales, and the possibility of fishing fleets sailing out of Bristol, England, all the way to Newfoundland. However, none of these stories can be substantiated by evidence; neither can the suggestion that African or Chinese voyages across open seas reached the Americas. There are also tales of classical-era Romans and Egyptians, and even Old Testament “lost tribes of Israel” crossing the Atlantic. Against these unconfirmed tales, there is some evidence to suggest that Inuit sea voyagers may have washed ashore in western Europe, but none of these encounters appears to have had any significant consequences to the Aboriginal North Americans or to the Europeans they may have encountered.

All of this is important to consider against the many efforts Europeans launched after 1492 to claim all or parts of the Americas. Often these claims were made on the strength of long-term connections that simply did not exist in any form other than myth. This is not to say that crossing the Atlantic from east to west was impossible before 1492, although prevailing winds and sea currents made it fiendishly difficult and dangerous. Boats sailing out of the north of Spain and the west coast of France and possibly Portugal as well pursued fish and whales into the North Atlantic and may have done so before Columbus. Indeed, the enthusiasm with which Basque, Bristol, and French whaling and fishing fleets patrolled the Grand Banks in the era of recorded voyages suggests that they were one step ahead of John Cabot’s voyage in 1497 at the very least. Ultimately, European claims were principally made against one another, rather than against Aboriginal occupants whose status as non-Europeans and non-Christians was critical to the very idea of imperial expansion.

Attributions

Figure 3.2
A detail from the Bayeux Tapestry showing Odo, half brother to William the Great, cheering his troops forward by LadyofHats is in the public domain.

Figure 3.3
Danes about to invade England by Rdnk is in the public domain.

Dr. John Douglas Belshaw is an Open Learning faculty member at Thompson Rivers University, a consultant to the post-secondary sector, and a writer. He has authored, co-authored, and edited several books and articles on the history of British Columbia.

Contributing Historians

Frank Abbott, Ph.D. (Simon Fraser University) Dr. Abbott is an accomplished Canadian History instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

Tina Block, Ph.D. (University of Victoria) Dr. Block is a History professor at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops and a specialist on the links between organized religion and social relations.

 Richelle Gardiner-Hynds, MA Integrated Studies (Athabasca University) Ms. Gardiner-Hynds is a specialist in Canadian women’s history an instructor in History and Women’s Studies at North Island College.

Diane Purvey, Ph.D. (University of British Columbia) Dr. Purvey is the Dean of Arts at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and an expert on the history of education and social history in Canada.

Preparing the first open text on Canadian history has been an exercise in innovation and experimentation. It has had at its heart from the start, however, a singular vision of a resource that will remove a financial barrier to students and will empower teaching faculty. It is a vision that has been shared by everyone on the team responsible for its production at BCcampus. Mary Burgess (now the Acting Director) was engaged from the start and has retained a helpful interest. Lauri Aesoph (Manager, Open Education) has been my closest daily collaborator, ally, critic, and support through this project. Clint Lalonde (Senior Manager, Open Education) took the reins over the larger project while continuing to play the part of technical leader. He was helped throughout in this process by Brad Payne (Web Developer-Technical Analyst) and so was I.

I am also grateful to Thompson Rivers University, Open Learning for encouraging me down this path and for making a substantial contribution to the final product. Ron McGivern, who wears several hats at TRU, gave me the first prod, and I am in his debt.

Rajiv Jhangiani teaches Psychology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and co-authored (along with Hammond Terry) another BCcampus OpenText, Principles of Social Psychology – 1st International Edition. His experiences were important and extremely valuable to the early stages of this project and I happily acknowledge his generousity as a mentor. (Both Kwantlen and TRU are member institutions in the Open Educational Resource University (OERu) which helps explain why there is both enthusiasm and expertise on OERs and OpenTexts at the two institutions, a happy coincidence for me.)

The idea of creating Open Textbooks to support the most heavily-enrolled courses in post-secondary institutions originated with the Provincial Government of British Columbia. The Ministry of Advanced Education invested a significant sum of money through BCcampus to accomplish this goal. Moreover, it continues to invest in this project, which means that more resources will be produced and that the resources already produced will be well maintained and capable of evolution. Good on you, Ministry.

I am grateful to colleagues who provided input, editorial and content suggestions. I am pleased and proud to list their names and brief bios on the About the Author and Contributors page.

Finally and mostly I am indebted to family and friends who encouraged me with their curiousity about the project and their patience. At the head of this list, as always, is Diane Purvey. Thanks, once again.

Canadian History: Pre-Confederation was created by John Douglas Belshaw. This creation is a part of the B.C. Open Textbook project.

In October 2012, the B.C. Ministry of Advanced Education announced its support for the creation of open textbooks for the 40 highest-enrolled first and second year subject areas in the province’s public post-secondary system.

Open textbooks are open educational resources (OER); they are instructional resources created and shared in ways so that more people have access to them. This is a different model than traditionally copyrighted materials. OER are defined as teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others (Hewlett Foundation).

Our open textbooks are openly licensed using a Creative Commons license, and are offered in various e-book formats free of charge, or as printed books that are available at cost.

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Pre-contact North America was home to a numerous and diverse array of peoples, languages, religions, and cultures. Scientific origin theories such as the Bering land bridge and coastal migration suggest that the ancestors of these groups arrived in the Western Hemisphere at least 14,000 years ago. The origin stories of most of the groups provide another, more allegorical view, stressing the intimate relationship between “the people” and the land in which they lived. Paleo-Indians dominate the history of the period between the great ice ages and the era that began some 8,000 years before now when the Earth entered warmer, more congenial phases called the Archaic and Woodland periods.

The development of plant domestication and the beginnings of organized agricultural activities occurred in this phase, along with an eruption of village and urban settlements. The great classical civilizations of the Americas arose and the centre of this continent was dominated by an extensive urban farming complex. Many groups across North America became horticulturalists and agriculturalists, the latter relying primarily on the Mesoamerican triad of corn, beans, and squash. The surplus of food produced by farming enabled the development of large and complex communities and material cultures, as well as the ability to weather famine and siege more successfully. Regional geography also played a role in shaping groups; for instance, groups on the Plains came to be characterized by a reliance on the buffalo hunt while salmon-dependent communities appeared in the interior of British Columbia, and marine mammal hunters on all three coasts.

The Aboriginal world that Europeans contacted after 1492 was not static. It was in the midst of ongoing change and historical processes. Societies like the Mississippian cultures had peaked and were now looking to new models to survive. Ideas and practices were flowing from one part of the continent to another. Everywhere we look in the Americas we find evidence of modified landscapes — anthropogenic change — that were possible only because these were mostly successful and robust societies. The era of contact has to be placed in the context of a history of change and adaptation, and of continuities as well.

Non-Aboriginal peoples in Canada today (and in the United States) continue to hold many mistaken ideas about pre-contact Aboriginal nations. For example, it is commonly believed that at the time of European arrival, the Americas were vast empty lands occupied by handfuls of people who still acquired their food through hunting and foraging, people who could easily just move along to another hunting ground, and then another and another. The facts are that the Americas were occupied by millions of people, and these people had achieved technological development similar to their contemporaries in Europe, Africa, and Asia and had excelled in many specific areas. Their societies, economies, and cultures did not have enormous gaps that were waiting to be filled by foreigners; they were complete and they made sense.

They did, however, have a number of weaknesses that contact exposed and some newcomers exploited. These shall be considered in the chapters that follow.

Suggested Readings

1. Mann, Charles C. “1491.” The Atlantic, 1 March 2002. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/302445/.
2. Neyland, Susan. “Unsettling British Columbia: Canadian Aboriginal Historiography, 1992-2012.” History Compass 11, no.10 (2013): 845-58.
3. Prins, Harold E.L. “Children of Gluskap: Wabanaki Indians on the Eve of the European Invasion.”  In American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture, and Cartography in the Land of Norumbega, edited by Emerson W. Baker, Edwin A. Churchill, Richard D’Abate, Kristine L. Jones, Victor A. Conrad, and Harald E.L. Prins (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 95-117.

Attributions

This chapter contains material taken from Native Peoples of North America by Susan Stebbins. It is used under a CC-BY-NC-SA-3.0 unported licence.

This chapter contains material taken from History in the Making: A History of the People of the United States of America to 1877 by Catherine Locks, Sarah K. Mergel, Pamela Thomas Roseman, and Tamara Spike. It is used under a CC-BY-SA-3.0 US licence.

This chapter contains material taken from the Wikipedia page, “The History of the Native Peoples of the Americas/Mesoamerican Cultures/Aztecs“, is used under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 unported license.

This chapter contains material taken from the Wikipedia page, “Aboriginal Peoples in Canada,” is used under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 unported license.

This chapter contains material taken from the Wikipedia page, “Population History of American Indigenous Peoples,” is used under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 unported license.

Figure 2.12 Pre-contact distribution of Na-Dené languages.

Figure 2.13 Pre-contact distribution of Algonkian speakers.

These brief histories of the Aboriginal Americas reveal that categorization is complicated. Take language, for example, which is often used as a key element of nationality (e.g., French people speak French and live in France and almost everyone in France speaks French). For Aboriginal peoples, there are no political units that encapsulate the whole of the largest and most widespread language groups in Canada. As the maps in Figures 2.12 and 2.13 show, the two most widely spoken language groups before contact — Athabascan or Na-Dené and Algonquian — cover massive areas and include societies that were separated by huge distances. Na-Dené dialects are spoken by Apache and Navajo in the American southwest, as well as by peoples from Alaska’s Tlingit to Alberta’s Tsuu T’ina (or Sarcee) who migrated south onto the Plains in the early 1700s. Similarly the Algonquian-speakers are represented by agricultural societies, bison hunters like the Siksika (Blackfoot), and lowland fisher-hunter peoples like the Cree, the Mi’kmaq, and the Anishinaabe, as well as large populations (some of them agriculturalists) in what is now the United States. Within these two language areas, dialect differences can be very great, but the core elements of the language mostly survive.

Figure 2.14 Pre-contact distribution of Aboriginal language families.

One of the challenges facing anyone interested in Aboriginal language groups is that European contact was a catalyst for migration, generally in a westward direction. European observers were, thus, recording the presence of language groups whose more recent homelands in some cases were somewhere else. Figure 2.14 gives a sense of the huge diversity of language groups in North America but no sense at all of the internal diversity within the broad linguistic categories.

Pre-Contact Societies

Agriculture, horticulture, foraging, hunting, and fishing were key features of the economies of the pre-contact Americas. In Canada, rocky, stingy, or hard-packed soils (like those on the Prairies) made agriculture all but impossible (as did, of course, the climate in many zones). Despite some mastery in metalwork, as evidenced in silver, gold, and copper decorative arts, the knowledge and skills necessary to produce iron tools that would give agriculture a lift were not available. “Digging sticks” used to drill seed holes are far more labour intensive but less demanding on the soil than wooden or metal ploughs. This is not to say that agriculture is the higher form of economic activity in a pre-industrial world. Farming societies have many advantages, such as the ability to achieve rapid and substantial growth, the wherewithal to build villages and armies, political sophistication of a particular kind, and so on. But they also have significant health issues, less flexibility in the event of famine or drought, and are at more risk of being attacked by enemies. The Aboriginal economies were far more adaptable in this respect than their Old World contemporaries.

Figure 2.15 Copper was widely worked and used in pre-contact North America. On the northwest coast it was fashioned into large and beautifully-finished shields, symbolic of wealth and authority. This Kwakwaka’wakw figure, carrying “a copper,” was carved before the 1880s and is housed at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin.

What is more, everyone participated in commerce. These were trading societies that augmented their output with goods from their neighbours. Sometimes these were raw materials, such as furs or maize, flint or wampum; other times they were crafted goods like clothing, hides, or the much-sought-after sinew-backed bows made by the Shoshone. Everywhere one looks, the archaeological evidence turns up exotic artifacts in village sites, indicating a rich intercommunity and intercultural life that dates back thousands of years. For example, red ochre suitable for rock painting and other uses as a dye was mined for centuries from caves in the Similkameen Valley in southern British Columbia; it shows up in pictographs as far afield as Arizona.

Populations

Given the fragmentary nature of the evidence, even semi-accurate pre-Columbian population figures are impossible to obtain for the indigenous populations prior to colonization. Estimates are extrapolated from small bits of data. Recent research suggests that the 13th century marked a critical break in the demographic history of North America. As the climate changed for the worse and the little ice age began, populations struggled to survive famine and competition for resources intensified. It has been suggested that peak pre-contact population numbers may have occurred two or three centuries before contact.[footnote]James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life (Regina: U of R Press, 2013), 2.[/footnote]

In 1976, geographer William Denevan used the existing estimates to derive a “consensus count” of about 54 million people for the Americas as a whole.[footnote]William M. Denevan, The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976).[/footnote] There is, however, no “consensus.” Estimates for North America range from a low of 2.1 million (Ubelaker 1976) to 7 million people (Thornton 1987) and even to a high of 18 million (Dobyns 1983).[footnote]Douglas H. Ubelaker, “North American Indian Population Size: Changing Perspectives,” in Disease and Demography in the Americas, eds. John Verano and Douglas H. Ubelaker, (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1992), 172-3; Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Popoulation History since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987); Henry F. Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983).[/footnote] The Aboriginal population of Canada during the late 15th century is estimated to have been between 200,000 and 2 million, with a figure of 500,000 currently accepted widely. These numbers are utterly conditional: on the West Coast alone estimates range from 80,000 (ca. 1780) to 1.6 million, although the evidence to support either the low count or the high count is sparse.[footnote]John Belshaw, Becoming British Columbia: A Population History (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010), 72-6.[/footnote] Nonetheless, if the widely touted figure of 350,000 for British Columbia is reckoned as fair, then the national figures would jump up by as much as 200,000 (a 40% increase on the widely accepted figure of half a million)! Thus, there are significant discrepancies.

As we shall see in Chapter 5, the contact experience brought with it terrible disease epidemics that raced ahead of the Europeans in the proto-contact period. It is important to note here that the work of historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and others — often supported by oral testimony from Aboriginal sources — suggests that the pre-contact Americas were not disease-free. Contagious diseases included tuberculosis, hepatitis, and respiratory infections. Syphilis and gastrointestinal illnesses might also belong to this list. And there were, in parts of the Americas, significant numbers of parasites. With the exception of tuberculosis, however, none of these are proper epidemic diseases. Syphilis, for example, spreads only on a one-to-one basis through intimate contact between individuals; influenza, by contrast, can be transmitted by one infected individual to dozens of other hosts at a time by the simple means of coughing. For the most part, then, experience with epidemics was both limited and very different from what Asians, Africans, and European humans witnessed regularly. This lack of knowledge meant that Aboriginal societies were badly unprepared for highly contagious disease epidemics. It does not mean, however, that Aboriginal life expectancies were particularly good. All indications suggest that, as in most human societies, a person was lucky to reach 30 years of age and very fortunate to reach 50. If infant mortality levels were higher in the Americas (and evidence suggests they were) it wasn’t helped by extended breastfeeding practices. Probably in most Aboriginal societies, infants were nursed for four years. This custom has an effect beyond nourishment and hydration: prolonged breastfeeding reduces fertility. Fewer infants may have generated more intensive childcare overall but, obviously, dampened fertility rates placed an upward limit on population growth rates. This would prove a critical weakness when it came time to recover from epidemic depopulations.[footnote]Roderic Beaujot and Don Kerr, Population Change in Canada, 2nd edition (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2004), 21.[/footnote]

Attributions

Figure 2.12
Na-Dene langs by ish ishwar is used under a CC-BY 2.0 license.

Figure 2.13
Algonquian langs by ish ishwar is used under a CC-BY 2.0 license.

Figure 2.14
Langs N.Amer fr by ish ishwar is used under a CC-BY 2.0 license.

Figure 2.15
Kwakiutl chief by FA2010 is in the public domain.