Pre-Confederation Canadian History

Figure 2.8 Mound-builder societies produced functional and graceful structures, including the Great Serpent Mound in the Ohio Valley.

Early in their encounters with Aboriginal peoples, European newcomers struggled to conceive of and understand a continent teeming with (what was to them) mysterious peoples with highly unusual ways of doing things. Often the Europeans rejected the possibility that these civilizations could have arisen independently of Europe or Asia. Where the evidence to the contrary was inconvenient to their own worldview, Europeans sometimes simply stopped seeing it. Consequently, the myth developed that pre-contact Aboriginal societies were unsophisticated, unchanging, and primitive. This suited the newcomers’ agenda, but it was nothing like the truth.

Early Agriculturalists in the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys

The southeastern portion of North America was an early centre of agricultural development that fostered the growth of a large, long-lasting, and influential culture known as the Mississippian (ca. 500-1400 CE). This culture originated in the Mississippi River Valley and spread out to encompass an area that includes the lower Great Lakes region to the north, the Carolinas to the east, and northern Florida to the south. This culture emerged from the late Woodland Period as a significantly more sedentary culture of large-scale, corn-based agriculture. Surplus agricultural production allowed Mississippians to stave off famines and sieges, support a dense population that included a large group of specialized artisans, and engage in trade with non-farming neighbours.

Politically, Mississippians were organized as a chiefdom, a form of organization based on a hierarchy of chiefs that followed the leader of the most important group. Within the chiefdom existed a high level of social stratification, with a noble class at the top. Socially, the Mississippians appear to have practised matrilineal descent patterns, meaning that familial relations focused on the mother’s family, with property, status, and clan affiliation being conferred through the female line. A person’s most important relations were his or her mother’s parents and siblings; the father’s relations were relatively unimportant. Boys looked to their mother’s brother as an important male figure rather than to their father, and uncles passed political power and possessions to their nephews and maternal relatives rather than to their sons. This system’s main advantage is that descent and clan affiliation were beyond doubt; a child’s paternity may be uncertain, but a clan can be sure of a child’s maternity. Matrilineality is relatively common among indigenous peoples of North America (though it is not universal), and it may explain the important roles that women often played in Aboriginal political systems. (Note that this is not, however, the same thing as matriarchy, which is a political system in which authority resides with females. Nor can it be assumed that the Mississippians were matrilocal, which means that married couples reside in or in close proximity to the family/parents of the wife.[footnote]As one author writes, “Kinship and residence in Mississippian societies have been more assumed about than understood.” Patricia Galloway, “Where have all the Menstrual Huts Gone? The Invisibility of Mentrual Seclusion in the Late Prehistoric Southeast,” Reader in Gender Archaeology, eds. Kelly Hays-Gilpin and David S. Whitley (Oxford: Routledge, 1998): 197-211.[/footnote])

The religion practised by the Mississippians is known as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex. Important religious symbols included a snake (sometimes depicted as a horned serpent), a cross-in-circle motif, and a warrior-falcon hybrid. These symbols were closely related to cosmology and to elites and warriors, giving the religion a socio-political aspect that reinforced the social status and authority of the elite — including the high chieftain, lesser chiefs, and the priests. In time, elements of this iconography found their way across much of southern Canada.

One key feature of the Mississippian culture was that they were mound builders. They produced thousands of earthworks used in a variety of manners, including burial mounds for the elite. The chief, his family, and perhaps other members of the chieftain class lived atop some of the mounds in longhouses. Other mounds — some of the largest — appear to have been centres of worship or temples.

Figure 2.9 The Cahokia Mounds is now a State Historic Site in Illinois.

The largest and most important Mississippian centre was Cahokia (ca. 600-1400 CE) located just across the Mississippi River from what is now St. Louis, Missouri. Cahokia was a walled complex made up of 120 mounds that housed perhaps as many as 30,000 people, making it a very large city for its day, certainly as large as contemporary Lisbon, Portugal. It had many of the features one would look for in contemporary towns and cities anywhere, including community plazas, which were located throughout the complex. A woodhenge (a circle of wood posts) was built for astrological observations, with poles in the henge marked to indicate the sun’s rising point on the solstices and equinoxes, making it a kind of community calendar or town-square clock. Cahokia’s mounds took tremendous effort to build; labourers moved about 1.5 million cubic metres of earth in their construction. The largest of the mounds, today called Monk’s Mound, is approximately 10 storeys high, covering an area of 5.6 hectares at the base. The top of the mound, the focal point of the city, housed a huge structure that may either have been a temple or the residence of the paramount chief of the Cahokia chiefdom.

Cahokia became a centre of power in part because of its location near the confluence of the Mississippi, Illinois, and Missouri Rivers. This confluence allowed the chiefdom to control much of the regional commerce, giving it access to a great variety of trade items from many regions. Cahokians participated in trade networks stretching as far as the Great Lakes to the north and the Gulf Coast to the south. The town began to decline around 1300 CE and slowly dwindled in size and importance, although some aspects of it remained in the 1500s. Scholars have speculated that overhunting, deforestation, a little ice age, and the rise of competing centres to the south contributed to Cahokia’s demise. The Ohio Valley, into which the French ventured in the 1600s and 1700s, carried many traces of the influence of the Mississippian culture; “Caouquias” appears on one of the first maps of the area, drawn in 1718 by Guillaume de L’isle. The Laurentian Iroquois of the St. Lawrence Valley and what is now southwestern Ontario (as well as the nearby Haudenosaunee or Five Nations Iroquois) would certainly have been influenced by this indigenous empire.

Figure 2.10  The extent of Mississippian cultures, ca. 1300.

The Interior Plateau

A different model of high-density population in the pre-contact era is Keatley Creek, an important site above the Fraser Canyon in present-day British Columbia, which was well removed from the Mississippian and Mesoamerican cultures, which it mostly preceded. The Stl’atl’imx people who lived there from about 2800 BCE established an economy based on the salmon runs in the river below their plateau village. A large cluster of kekuli (pit houses) — as many as 115 house-sized depressions, the largest about 20 metres across — suggest a population of several hundred. Archaeologists cannot agree on the cause of its abandonment between 800 and 1,200 years ago. Old caricatures of Aboriginal societies as small, unsophisticated nomadic hunter-gatherer societies are challenged and overturned by this kind of evidence. It also provides a challenge to the model of agriculture-led town development. Keatley Creek in this respect has more in common with the Norte Chico culture of Peru (with which it was contemporary) that it does with Cahokia. Like the Mississippian tradition, Keatley Creek was a source of cultural diffusion and would have influenced many of its neighbours — by example or by force.

The Pre-Contact Era

The two centuries before the arrival of French exploratory missions in the 1530s witnessed enormous changes in Aboriginal North America. The “little ice age,” beginning in the late 1200s, had severe impacts on farming communities. From the middle of the 14th century there was widespread abandonment of the Mississippian cities and villages, and the archaeological record reveals extensive evidence of famine and dispersal of populations. Much of the desperate and violent conflict that took place between Iroquoian peoples of this period — and the peace between the Five Nations that eventually emerged — has been ascribed to the unsettled environmental conditions of the time.

The Plains

Westward and northward movement of horticulturalists and farmers brought new populations into what is now southern Manitoba and Alberta. Some may have attempted to recreate the semi-urban environment of previous Mississippian generations as far north as the Bow River. Others introduced maize farming near the Red River and the Tiger Hills, with limited success.[footnote]James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life (Regina: U of R Press, 2013).[/footnote] Just below the 49th parallel on the Great Plains were more successful agriculturalists. Among the most important of these was the Mandan, whose villages along the Missouri and Knife Rivers survived until the smallpox catastrophe of the 1830s. Like many of their Siouan-speaking relations, they migrated into the region from areas associated with the Mississippian cultures. The Mandan villages acted as the commercial hub of an enormous wheel of Plains culture, one that extended into the lowlands around Hudson Bay. It included, as well, peoples who engaged in some corn farming and the harvesting of wild rice in what is now southern Manitoba and the western Lake Superior lowlands. The more nomadic peoples of the Plains in this period hunted large game, pursuing the herds on foot before the return of the horse in the post-contact period. Dogs pulling travois were an important asset; sometimes wolves were put to the same task. The Lakota, Cree, Assiniboine, and, further west, the Niitsitapi (Blackfoot), Shoshones, Gros Ventre, and Kutenai were participants in this shared Plains culture, as were later arrivals the Anishinaabeg (also called Plains Ojibwa or Saulteaux).

Although the hunting economies of Plains peoples evolved in many respects over the 8,000 years before contact, there were also some remarkable continuities. One of these is the buffalo jump phenomenon. Some 12,000 sites have been identified in Alberta alone, with the best known today being Head-Smashed-In (not far from present-day Lethbridge), which first came into use about 5,700 years ago. Buffalo jumps were kill sites, where herds of bison were driven off steep cliffs. If the fall didn’t crush their skulls or necks outright, they would be sufficiently stunned to allow for slaughter by hunters. The bodies would then be dragged to a nearby campsite and processed; every part of the animal was used to provide clothes (the hides), tools (the bones), and bowstrings (the sinew). Head-Smashed-In was in use for thousands of years, into the historic period, when Blackfoot, disguised as coyote and wolves, would drive buffalo along established “drive lanes” to the cliff. Excavations at Head-Smashed-In have unearthed a deposit of skeletons, primarily of bison, measuring more than 10 metres deep. But Head-Smashed-In is only one of many jump sites that dot the Prairies; another is Clay Banks Buffalo Jump in southwestern Manitoba, which was used by the Sonata and Besant cultures as early as 2,500 years ago.[footnote]Olive Patricia Dickason, “A Historical Reconstruction for the Northwestern Plains,” in The Prairie West: Historical Readings (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1992): 51.[/footnote]

Warfare was endemic on the Plains. War was waged for three main reasons: to gain prestige, to obtain goods, and for revenge. The strategy and tactics of Plains warfare revolved around the concept of counting coup.[footnote]Anthony McGinnis, Counting Coup and Cutting Horses: Intertribal Warfare on the Northern Plains, 1738-1889 (Evergreen, CO: Cordillera Press, 1990).[/footnote] Coup was an action that demonstrated bravery and skill. The most highly valued coup was to touch a live enemy and live to tell about it. Killing an enemy was coup, too, but demonstrated valour to a lesser degree; after all, the live man is still a threat, while a dead one can do no harm. Touching a dead enemy was also a lesser form of coup. After a battle, warriors returned to the settlement to recount their stories, or “count coup.”

Religious beliefs on the Plains tended to hold the bison as a central figure of the sacred Earth. Most groups kept “medicine bundles,” a collection of sacred objects holding symbolic importance for the group. Often, religious celebrations centred on the medicine bundle. The concept of annual world renewal was an important one in Plains religion, and one of the chief renewal ceremonies celebrated by many Plains peoples was the sun dance. The sun dance was sponsored by an individual who wished to give to his tribe or to thank or petition the supernatural through the act of self-sacrifice for the good of the group. Celebration of the sun dance varied in detail from group to group, but a general pattern existed. It usually occurred in the summer and involved erecting a large structure with a central pole, symbolizing the Tree of Life. Large groups would gather to give thanks, celebrate, pray, and fast. The individual sponsoring the sun dance would pray and fast throughout the celebration, which lasted up to a week. He was the celebration’s lead dancer, and the dance would continue until his strength was completely gone. Often, the dance involved some kind of bloodletting or self-torture. Participants might pierce their skin and/or chest muscles and attach themselves to the central pole by piercing pegs and lengths of leather, dancing around or hanging from it until the pegs were pulled free. Another variation involved piercing the muscles of the back and dragging buffalo skulls behind the dancer until the weight of the skull ripped the pins out of the dancer’s flesh. The scars that the dancer carried after the celebration were a mark of honour. At the end of the sun dance, the world was renewed and replenished.

The East

Northeastern Aboriginal peoples were diverse and complex in many respects. Economically, they relied on both hunting-gathering and farming, as well as trade. Iroquoian-speakers — the Wendat (Huron), Tionontati (Pétun or Tobacco), and Attawandaron (Neutral) of southwest Ontario and the Laurentian Iroquois (which included the people of Stadacona and Hochelaga), as well as the Erieehronon (Erie), Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, Seneca, and Cayuga, whose territories were south of Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence — built their societies around the planting and harvesting of the “three sisters” (corn, squash, and beans). Farming led to larger population numbers, bigger villages, more elaborate political structures to manage internal decision making and diplomacy (or war), and the capacity to store large quantities of surplus crops in the event of famine and for trade purposes. The 500 years before contact were marked by political transformations that produced confederacies and leagues among the Iroquoians, the most successful and largest of which were the Haudenosaunee (also known as the League of the Tree of Peace and Power, or the Five Nations Iroquois) and the Wendat Confederacy. These alliances were an effective means of reducing the prospect of long-running blood feuds between many bands and clans, although the creation of confederacies may have simply increased the scale of warfare between a few larger groupings.

The other eastern peoples were mostly Algonquian-speakers. These include the Abenaki, Mi’kmaq, and Maliseet (subsequently known as the Wabanaki Confederacy) in what are now the Maritimes and much of modern New England; the Innu (also known as Montagnais) on the north shore of the St. Lawrence and in the north-central Ungava Peninsula; the Nippissing (whose lands surround the lake bearing their name); and the three closely aligned factions of the Anishinaabe group: the Algonquin, Odawa, and the Ojibwe. The existence of Algonquian alliances hint at conflict with others; many of these peoples shared a common dislike of the Iroquois long before the arrival of Europeans. Several claim to have driven them westward out of the northeast and the Gaspé and perhaps out of the St. Lawrence Valley in the years before contact and shortly thereafter. Principally foraging horticulturalists, these Algonquian-speaking peoples were highly mobile. They made extensive use of the resources of the land and the sea, with the Mi’kmaq establishing an eastward position in southern Newfoundland.

All peoples of the northeast participated in extensive networks of commerce. Many participated in a system of exchange with shells (sometimes called “wampum”). The shells, which themselves were highly valued, had a currency value but were often assembled in strings, on belts, and otherwise in patterns that served as mnemonic devices to record the details of treaties or other agreements. Similarly the Mohawk — whose homeland was along the Hudson River in what is now New York State but who are now mostly settled in Ontario and Quebec — were noted traders in flint, a commodity that made them wealthy and powerful, not least because it was used as part of the Aboriginal arsenal.

Warfare played an important role in the northeast as it did on the Plains. It was the chief way to gain power and prestige, and revenge was its primary driver. A cycle of war was ensured because each group sought to avenge those killed in earlier wars or skirmishes in what became called the Mourning Wars. Acceptable outcomes of war could take several forms: killing the enemy, taking captives, and taking trophies of some sorts, often in the form of beheadings and/or scalping (a practice that may have been introduced to the region by Europeans). Captives would be taken back to the victors’ town, where they would be handed over to the women who had lost family members to war. Ultimately, one of two fates awaited a prisoner: either being tortured to death (which could last many hours or even days) or being adopted by one of the families whose warrior-males had died in battle or were prisoners themselves. The captive who withstood the torture by showing strength and singing his “death song” so as to have a good death, would be held in high esteem and sometimes spared. Occasionally, the torturers would consume the flesh of those tortured after they had died, in order to ingest the strength of the enemy, a practice that many cultures shared. At the very least, Iroquoian and other cultures echoed sacrificial practices conducted on a large ritualistic scale by the Aztec and Mayan peoples.

The Beothuk may have been an exception to many of these models and cultures. What little is known about these original inhabitants of Newfoundland and Labrador is discussed in Chapter 7. One distinctive element of their culture that would have a lasting impact on European perceptions of Aboriginal peoples was their practice of liberally applying red ochre over their bodies. It was this custom that led to newcomers describing them as “red Indians,” an appellation that wound up being much more broadly used.

People of the Far Northwest

The Pacific Northwest region was utterly separate from the Plains and other cultural zones. Its peoples were many and they shared several cultural features that were unique to the region.

By the 1400s there were at least five distinct language groups on the West Coast, including Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Wakashan, and Salishan, all of which divide into many more dialects. However, these differences (and there are many others) are overshadowed by cultural similarities across the region. An abundance of food from the sea meant that coastal populations enjoyed comparatively high fertility rates and life expectancy. Population densities were, as a consequence, among the highest in the Americas.

The people of the Pacific Northwest do not share the agricultural traditions that existed east of the Rockies, nor did they influence Plains and other cultures. There was, however, a long and important relationship of trade and culture between the coastal and interior peoples. In some respects it is appropriate to consider the mainland cultures as inlet-and-river societies. The Salish-speaking peoples of the Straight of Georgia (Salish Sea) share many features with the Interior Salish (Okanagan, Secwepemc, Nlaka’pamux, Stl’atl’imx), though they are not as closely bound as the peoples of the Skeena and Stikine Valleys (which include the Tsimshian, the Gitxsan, and the Nisga’a). Running north of the Interior Salish nations through the Cariboo Plateau and flanked on the west by the Coast Mountain Range are societies associated with the Athabascan language group. Some of these peoples took on cultural habits and practices more typically associated with the Pacific Northwest coastal traditions than with the northern Athabascan peoples who cover a swath of territory from Alaska to northern Manitoba. In what is now British Columbia, the Tsilhqot’in, the Dakelh, Wet’suwet’en, and Sekani were part of an expansive, southward-bound population that sent offshoots into the Nicola Valley and deep into the southwest of what is now the United States.

Figure 2.11 The Salish Sea (as Georgia Strait is now widely known) was an ecologically and culturally rich zone occupied by related but unallied peoples.

Most coastal and interior groups lived in large, permanent towns in the winter, and these villages reflected local political structures. Society in Pacific Northwest groups was generally highly stratified and included, in many instances, an elite, a commoner class, and a slave class. The Kwakwaka’wakw, whose domain extended in pre-contact times from the northern tip of Vancouver Island south along its east coast to Quadra Island and possibly farther, assembled kin groups (numayms) as part of a system of social rank in which all groups were ranked in relation to others. Additionally, each kin group “owned” names or positions that were also ranked. An individual could hold more than one name; some names were inherited and others were acquired through marriage. In this way, an individual could acquire rank through kin associations, although kin groups themselves had ascribed ranks. Movement in and out of slavery was even possible.

The fact that slavery existed points to the competition that existed between coastal rivals. The Haida, Tsimshian, Haisla, Nuxalk, Heiltsuk, Wuikinuxv (Oowekeeno), Kwakwaka’wakw, Pentlatch/K’ómoks, and Nuu-chah-nulth regularly raided one another and their Stó:lō neighbours. Many of the winter towns were in some way or other fortified and, indeed, small stone defensive sniper blinds can still be discerned in the Fraser Canyon. The large number of oral traditions that arise from this era regularly reference conflict and the severe loss of personnel. Natural disasters are also part of the oral tradition: they tell of massive and apocalyptic floods as well as volcanic explosions and other seismic (and tidal) events that had tremendous impacts on local populations.

The practice of potlatch (a public feast held to mark important community events, deaths, ascensions, etc.) is a further commonality. It involved giving away property and thus redistributing wealth as a means for the host to maintain, reinforce, and even advance through the complex hierarchical structure. In receiving property at a potlatch an attendee was committing to act as a witness to the legitimacy of the event being celebrated. The size of potlatching varied radically and would evolve along new lines in the post-contact period but the outlines and protocols of this cultural trademark were well-elaborated centuries before the contact moment. Potlatching was universal among the coastal peoples and could also be found among more inland, upriver societies as well.

Horticulture (the domestication of some plants) was another important source of food. West Coast peoples and the nations of the Columbia Plateau (which covers much of southern inland British Columbia), like many eastern groups, applied controlled burning to eliminate underbrush and open up landscape to berry patches and meadows of camas plants that were gathered for their potato-like roots. This required somewhat less labour than farming (although harvesting root plants is never light work) and it functioned within a strategy of seasonal camps. Communities moved from one food crop location to another for preparation and then, later, harvest. A great deal of the land seized upon by early European settlers in the Pacific Northwest included these berry patches and meadows. These were attractive sites because they had been cleared of huge trees and consisted of mostly open and well-drained pasture. Europeans would see these spaces as pastoral, natural, and available rather than anthropogenic — human-made — landscapes, the product of centuries of horticultural experimentation.

Summary

More than 500 identifiable groups emerged in North America during the pre-contact era (that is, from 1000 to 1492 CE). Although tremendously diverse, the groups within each region of the continent shared many common features, including subsistence strategies, kinship relations, political structure, and elements of material culture. And although there were common economic and cultural features across North America and some that were shared in Meso-America and South America as well, this does not in any way indicate a single monolithic Aboriginal culture. In the northern half of North America alone the number of tongues spoken, artistic techniques perfected, songs and dance styles, architectural and engineering experiments, and systems of government can barely be calculated.

Attributions

Figure 2.8
The Great Serpent Mound, courtesy of Richard A. Cook/Corbis, is in the public domain. This image is available from the U.S. National Library of Medicine website.

Figure 2.9
Views of the remains of a mound at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, courtesy of Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, is in the public domain. This image is available from the U.S. National Library of Medicine website.

Figure 2.10
Mississippian cultures HRoe 2010 by Ras67  is used under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.

Figure 2.11
The Salish Sea by Arct is used under CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.

The telling of Aboriginal history in Canada often begins with a discussion of human migration routes into the Americas, which reflects the long-standing misperception that was held by Europeans that Aboriginal societies were primitive, usually migratory, and unlikely to have been in the Americas for very long before the 15th century. This misperception, of course, served European empires in the Americas very well because it justified the dispossession of native peoples from their lands.

Twentieth-century historians and archaeologists worked hard to remedy this situation and to magnify the many Aboriginal voices that said, in chorus, that they had been here “since time immemorial.”

Occupying the Americas

Human occupation of the Americas is itself a complicated tale. However, there is general agreement among scholars that modern hominids were hereabouts some 12,000 to 14,000 years before the Present Era (BPE).

Scientists and archaeologists hold several theories regarding the origins of Aboriginal peoples in the Americas. By far the oldest and most widely accepted of these theories is the Bering land bridge migration model. This theory posits that during the last ice age (approximately 50,000-10,000 BPE), humans were able to migrate from Siberia to Alaska over land. Evidence suggests strongly that for as many as 100,000 years, sea levels were much lower than they currently are and the Bering Strait — the body of water that separates Siberia from Alaska — was an open plain of land and glaciers (which scholars call Beringia). During a period of several millennia, about 10,000-14,000 BPE, as many as four distinct migrations are thought to have occurred over the land bridge. People migrated from Siberia, Eurasia, and coastal Asia, following the megafauna of the Pleistocene (to about 12,000-11,000 BPE).

Figure 2.5 The separation of Siberia from Alaska about 10,000 years ago can be seen in this short film from the American National Climatic Data Center. (Click on the map if using web version of book.)

The greatest supporting evidence of the Bering land bridge theory is the extensive homogeneity of the North American Clovis culture, so named for the archaeological site in New Mexico where it was first identified. The Clovis people were long considered to be the first to inhabit the Americas. Archaeologists theorize that the Clovis came over the land bridge and down a glacier pass to the east of the Rocky Mountains sometime between 12,000 and 11,000 BCE, eventually spreading through much of North America and into South America. Everywhere they went, Clovis people littered their camps and settlements with stone tools and weapons that bear some trademark features and suggest close cultural links.

A second theory focuses on Pacific sea travel. The coastal migration theory suggests that some people arrived in the Americas by following the coast of Asia and Beringia, down the western shore of North America, all the way to South America. The coastal migration theory is bolstered by the fact that the rich marine environment would have supported maritime people well. Travel by boat would also be much faster and easier than the route overland, thus allowing people to spread throughout the Americas much more quickly. The most compelling evidence supporting this model comes from archaeological sites in South America that predate the North American Clovis sites. Sites like Monte Verde in Chile date to 14,800-12,500 BCE; Taima-Taima in western Venezuela dates to 13,000 BCE. These two sites contradict the notion of “Clovis first.” However, there are far fewer archaeological sites that support the coastal migration theory compared to the Clovis sites; there may be more but, due to rising sea levels in the intervening millennia, the coastline of the Pleistocene era now lies under the Pacific Ocean. Barring breakthroughs in submarine archaeology, further evidence of earlier coastal migration at the source is lost to us.

Although the two theories might seem to be at odds with each other, most historians and archaeologists now accept that both are probably correct, and that human migration to the Americas occurred over a very long span of time, over land and by sea. It is, however, important to note that conclusive evidence in support of either theory continues to elude us; these are still hypotheses only.

What is almost certain is that — however they got here — the original human inhabitants of the Americas came from Asia. Genetic evidence strongly supports this: mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and DNA haplogroups show evidence of multiple migrations from Asia, starting at about 30,000 BPE.[footnote]Jason A. Eshleman, Ripan S. Malhi, and David Glenn Smith, “Mitochondrial DNA Studies of Native Americans: Conceptions and Misconceptions of the Population Prehistory of the Americas,” Evolutionary Anthropology 12 (2003): 7-18.[/footnote] There are two important points to note in this regard:

1. There is currently no conclusive archeological proof of human existence in the Americas before about 20,000 years ago, but the DNA evidence points to a considerably earlier period of settlement.
2. There is no genetic indication of migration from Europe or Africa, so the suggestion (which has been around since the late 15th century) that the Aboriginal peoples must have some roots on the other side of the Atlantic is utterly unproven. This point is important because for hundreds of years after the arrival of Europeans, efforts were made to explain the presence of Aboriginal people as the “Lost Tribes of Israel,” wayward Welshmen, or some other European offshoot. DNA studies have exploded this thesis: not one study has shown conclusive proof of European genetic markers among the Native American population before 1492.

Figure 2.6 World map of human migrations based on studies of mitochondrial (matrilinear) DNA. Dashed lines are hypothetical migrations. Numbers represent thousand years before present (BPE). The blue line represents area covered in ice or tundra during the last great ice age. The letters are the mitochondrial DNA haplogroups (pure motherly lineages); haplogroups can be used to define genetic populations and are often geographically oriented.

Indigenous people throughout the Western Hemisphere talk of their origins in oral histories, stories, and myths that link them intimately to the places they inhabit. The land, the stories commonly assert, was made for “the people,” and they were made to inhabit the land. Every group has an origin story, and they vary widely while having elements of consistency. Sometimes, groups have multiple origin stories that tell differing versions of creation and the founding of the group. Origin stories often begin with a “First Person” (or First Peoples), a mythical man or woman who founded the group. These First People often are created from, or emerge from, the natural world itself. For example, the first Iroquois and Wendat/Huron fell from the sky. An elderly couple of great virtue survive various trials to give birth to the peoples of the Earth, according to the Mi’kmaq. Animals play important roles in these stories as well. In the creation story of the Haida, Raven arranges things nicely and then releases the first humans from a clamshell; the Cree tell of the Earth mother’s offspring/agent Wisakedjak (a shape-changing and benign trickster whose name is widely mispronounced as “Whiskey-Jack”) who peoples the world. And there are stories that involve a singular creator, such as the Blackfoot figure Napi, who moulds the world and everything in it from a lump of mud. The oral traditions of the Lenape/Delaware and Iroquoian peoples, along with records from the Anishinaabe Midewiwin scrolls, refer to “Turtle Island,” a useful convergence of origin tales that has acquired broad acceptance among Aboriginal peoples since the 1970s.

These origin stories encapsulated and shaped the worldview of each group, establishing their people’s purpose in this world as well as their relationship to the spirits and the world around them. In other words, origin stories are key to establishing a group identity and a deep connection with the region the people inhabit. It is also the case that these stories are invoked by Aboriginal peoples as sufficient to their needs as regards history. Whether ancient peoples crossed Beringia or paddled in proto-kayaks along the west coast is perhaps interesting but no more proven and demonstrable than an allegory of cultural birth on an island of mud.

The Paleo-Indian Period

The time between the arrival of humans in the Americas until 10000-9000 years BPE is known as the Paleo-Indian period. During this time, humans spread throughout the Western Hemisphere, supporting themselves with similar subsistence patterns and technologies. Paleo-Indians were nomadic hunter-gatherers. They moved as frequently as once or twice a week, hunting the big game of the Paleolithic: the megafauna. These included now-extinct creatures such as the mammoth, mastodon, short-faced bear, enormous versions of the modern-day sloth, the very muscular dire wolf, and upsized editions of moose and beaver.

Paleo-Indian technology included knapped, or chipped, stone tools such as scrapers, knives, and projectile points, such as the Clovis point. These were made from a variety of materials including bone and antler, obsidian, quartz, chert, and flint. Throughout the Paleo-Indian era, the spear was the most common weapon. At first, humans used spears as thrusting weapons, which required very close engagement between the hunter and game, a dangerous prospect when dealing with giant prey and predators. Sometime during the Paleo-Indian era, humans developed new kinds of technology, including a lighter throwing spear and an implement to propel this spear much farther: the atlatl. The atlatl, or spear thrower, was one of the most important items in the late Paleo-Indian tool kit. It was a long, thin piece of wood with a notch at the end. This notch was designed to receive the end of a spear or dart. The atlatl acted as an extension of the throwing arm, enabling the spear thrower to greatly increase the velocity and range of the cast.

Paleo-Indians probably lived in groups that anthropologists call bands, small groups of related individuals, typically no bigger than 100 to 150 people. This setup allowed for a simple leadership structure, probably with one individual at the head of the group. It also allowed for easy mobility, and hunter-gatherers such as Paleo-Indians lived with only transportable and reproducible possessions. One of the greatest problems of living in such a small group, however, was finding a suitable mate. Anthropologists think that regional Paleo-Indian bands came together yearly in the summer months to celebrate religious rituals, pass along news, and exchange young women and men to ensure genetic diversity among their groups.

The Archaic and Woodland Periods

From 10000 to 9000 BPE, Earth’s climate began to warm, and the North American environment changed. A warming world created opportunities for plants to thrive and diversify; it also created large bodies of water as glaciers and ice caps melted. Over the next 6,000 to 7,000 years, native cultures developed and diversified during the Archaic and the Woodland periods, 10000-3000 BPE and 3000-1000 BPE respectively.

Paleo-Indians adapted to the world around them, learning to rely more on a diet rich in plant materials. For reasons as yet unknown, megafauna began to die out, and Aboriginal people had to rely more on bison and other relatively smaller game animals for meat. It was near the start of this period, around 9000 to 7000 BPE, that West Coast societies started organizing themselves around salmon fishing. The Nuu-chah-nulth of Vancouver Island, for example, began whaling with advanced long spears.

The Maritime Archaic is another expression of North America’s Archaic culture of sea-mammal hunters in the subarctic. They prospered from approximately 7000 BCE to 1500 BCE (9,000-3,500 years ago) along the Atlantic coast of North America. Their settlements included longhouses and boat-topped temporary or seasonal houses. They engaged in long-distance trade, using as currency white chert, a rock quarried from northern Labrador to Maine.

It was, as well, during the Archaic and Woodland periods that the peoples of the Americas also began to domesticate plants, leading to one of the most important transformations in human history: the development of agriculture. The Archaic agricultural revolution got underway in Mesoamerica (the area between Central Mexico and Costa Rica) and in coastal Peru by the Caral-Supe (also called Norte Chico) civilization. In Oaxaca, Mexico, people tended squash vines in order to use the hard fruit as containers. Eventually, more tender forms of squash became a food source. Following the domestication of beans, around 6000 BPE, Mesoamerican peoples became more sedentary. Finally, maize (or corn) was domesticated sometime around 5500 BPE. Over thousands of years, the tiny teosinte seed pod, measuring about four centimetres long, was transformed though cultivation into much larger, nutritionally rich ears of corn.

The domestication of maize completed the Mesoamerican triad: corn, beans, and squash. The “three sisters” provided an ideal diet. Aboriginal agriculturalists all over the hemisphere grew these crops as their principal foods until many years after European contact. This combination of plants proved ideal as they supported one another in growth. The corn grew tall and provided a “pole” for the beans to grow up and around, and the large squash leaves provided shade that retained moisture and inhibited the growth of weeds. As well, beans, which are “nitrogen fixers,” returned nitrogen back into the soil that the corn crops stripped out during growth.

Figure 2.7 Teosinte, the ancestor of corn, is shown on the left. In the middle is a teosinte-maize hybrid. Modern corn is on the right.

It was a diet that served the Mayan civilization exceedingly well. Agricultural societies, where they are successful, witness significant population growth and a degree of urbanization. The farming societies of Mesoamerica produced some of the largest and most elaborate city states in the Americas, comparable to European, African, and Asian civilizations in many respects. Architectural styles were elaborate, city layouts were complex and aesthetically stunning, and artistic and scientific knowledge was peerless, especially in the field of astronomy.

Further, from about 200 to 900 CE the Mayan civilization crested on the strength of an infrastructure of priesthoods that was the underpinning of the whole culture. Although the Mayan Empire declined sharply in the eighth and ninth centuries CE, the Aztec Triple Alliance followed with another, more militarized, iteration of Mesoamerican power from the 1300s to the 1500s. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan was, in the late 1400s, one of the largest cities on the planet and possibly the most beautiful, a fact that tells us a great deal about the administrative, creative, technological, and cultural sophistication of these pre-contact civilizations.

Agricultural knowledge and techniques spread from Mesoamerica throughout the temperate parts of the Western Hemisphere in a process called diffusion. Although corn and beans probably came from Mesoamerica, other peoples throughout North America contributed to the body of agricultural knowledge and accomplishment across the continent.

Less successful was the domestication of animals. There weren’t a lot of suitable species available for experiments in domesticated rearing, although turkeys and dogs were notable exceptions. Horses, which may have originated in the Americas, disappeared along with the megafauna some 8,000 years ago. Mountain goats and bighorn sheep are fiercely recalcitrant creatures and almost impossible to contain, let alone domesticate. There was no equivalent of the African cattle to turn into a placid source of milk, meat, and hides. Most significantly, perhaps, there were no pigs or even boars to pen up and dine on.

The ramifications of having few domestic animals was significant to the history of Aboriginal peoples. The absence of large draught animals meant that land had to be cleared and prepared by human energy alone. Soil exhaustion could be postponed to some degree by composting or using fallow field practices, but Aboriginal farmers lacked access to the sort of fertilizers that cattle- and chicken-rearing peoples could exploit. Turkeys, which were domesticated, have the advantage of size and ease of capture, but they do not produce as many eggs and thus offspring as prodigiously as chickens. The inability to secure a household source of protein meant that Aboriginal diets necessarily relied more heavily on wild game and fish than was the case in much of Europe, Asia, and Africa. This resulted in a more nomadic or semi-nomadic life for many societies, and that constraint worked against large-scale and concentrated populations. Even the farming communities were obliged to augment their agrarian economy with wild meat and fish, which is much more time-consuming than slaughtering hogs. Further, the lack of dairy animals precluded women from weaning their infants onto cow, goat, or sheep milk, which meant that Aboriginal infants were breastfed longer, which in turn limited population fertility. Finally, the absence of domesticated animals meant that Aboriginal peoples were not exposed to cross-species infections and epidemics. For 10,000 years or so this proved to be beneficial, but after 1492 it was disastrous, the reasons for which are explored in Chapter 5.

Attributions

Figure 2.5
Bering Land Bridge by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is in the public domain.

Figure 2.6
Map-of-human-migrations by 84User is used under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.

Figure 2.7
Maize-teosinte by Gauravm1312 is used under a CC-BY 3.0 license.

The idea that the Americas have no history before the arrival of Europeans derives mainly from the apparent absence of a written record. European, Middle Eastern, and Asian civilizations evolved highly bureaucratic and centralized administrative functions based on the ability to write things down. The influential Canadian economic historian, Harold Innis, described the impact of writing on the building of empires in his 1951 book, The Bias of Communication. He argued that there are two kinds of communications: time-biased and space-biased.

• Time-biased media seek to transcend time. They are heavy and durable, such as clay and stone. They have a long lifespan but they do not encourage the extension of empires. Think here of ancient Egypt or Sumeria as examples. Innis associated these media with the customary, the sacred, and the moral: they’re heavy on gods and proclamations, light on detailed instructions. Time-biased media facilitate the development of social and economic hierarchies. They also favour the growth of religion and the hegemony that religion imposes on secondary institutions, such as education. For Innis, speech is also a time-biased medium. Speech, in the form of oral culture, can be passed down from generation to generation, yet does not encourage territorial expansion. Oral culture is concerned with preserving values and traditional knowledge. Oral cultures emphasize their past and create a collective society rich in tradition, ceremony, and custom.
• Space-biased media, conversely, seek to obliterate physical boundaries. They are light and transportable and can be transmitted over distances. They are associated with secular and territorial societies and facilitate the expansion of empire over land and sea. Paper (and papyrus) is an example of space-biased media: it is readily transported, but has a relatively short lifespan since it degrades and can be easily destroyed or lost. Writing, closely linked with paper, is also an example of a space-biased media. Writing emphasizes the present and the future, and is not localized like oral culture. Writing is grounded in technical knowledge and facilitates the growth of states, political authorities, and decentralized institutions.[footnote]The Libraries and Archives of Canada, Old Messengers, New Media: The Legacy of Innis and McLuhan. Accessed January 5, 2015, http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/innis-mcluhan/030003-1030-e.html.[/footnote]

Many societies — perhaps most or even all — combine elements of both kinds of media, but they also privilege one over the other. Europeans in the 1400s had space-biased media at their disposal, in the form of writing. This gave them the power to pass instructions across long supply lines that wrapped their way around Africa and across the Atlantic. It gave their delegates the ability to devise documents that assigned “ownership” to lands they’d just encountered. And it was the very embodiment of their belief system, bound up in the form of the Holy Bible.

Indigenous peoples in this hemisphere had time-biased media, which put them at a disadvantage in many ways (which we’ll explore in Chapter 3). But the important point is that they did have media; they had a written record, which the Europeans chose to ignore or attempt to destroy where it challenged their own media. Oral tradition was, as well, disregarded and disrespected by Europeans and, from the 19th century on, attacked in schools and in the courts. Consequently, it is a generally, and wrongly, held belief that the Americas (as we’ve come to call them) had no historic record. In truth, writing, media, and historic accounts were widespread.

The Archive of Place

One of the barriers to appreciating the depth of history in what is now Canada is our commitment to the notion of the country being “new” in the so-called New World. In fact, human occupation of the northern half of this continent began at least 14,000 years ago and probably much earlier. That is a long time indeed — long enough for any group of people to establish a profound relationship with their location, with their place. This is no less true of the indigenous peoples of Canada than it is of the peoples of the Steppe, the Gobi, the Orkneys, or Melanesia. Places themselves are a record of memory, most of which is accessible only to those who know how to read it.

In his study of British Columbia’s Chilcotin Plateau, The Archive of Place, William J. Turkel describes the complex of grease trails of the region. This was the extensive system of footpaths carved out of very challenging terrain in order to facilitate communication and commerce between the west coast and the interior plateau. They were called grease trails because of the trade in oolichan grease (a fish oil) that was ported on the backs of hundreds of freight-bearers over hundreds of kilometres. Turkel writes,

For the people of Ulkatcho, as for their Aboriginal neighbours throughout the Chilcotin, memory is everywhere anchored in the landscape, along the grease trails and rivers, of course, but also in the meadows and forests between. For them, there is not a single trail that connects the Fraser [River] with the [Pacific] coast or that unites provinces east and west; rather, there is a dense, lived mesh of trails and a cyclicity and seasonality of travel.[footnote]William J. Turkel, The Archive of Place: Unearthing the Pasts of the Chilcotin Plateau (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007 ), 109.[/footnote]

Each trail, with its multitude of markers, rock cairns, and boundaries signifies to its reader a history of commerce, conflict, stability, and change. In societies with a strong oral tradition, these are stimulants to memory. They act just as a series of volumes on a shelf might.

Across Canada, there are many places similarly invested with meaning and symbols, in many forms. Lobsticks, for example, show up across the country:

Aboriginal inhabitants of the boreal forest would shape a tall and conspicuous white spruce or pine tree by “lopping” most of its branches off. Branches that strategically pointed in the right direction would remain. The top would bush out in a tuft, making it easy to spot. Nearby trees were cut and hauled away, leaving the lobstick in rather lonely splendour. Lobsticks were used in many ways, both practical and symbolic. They were often signposts, chosen and designed to mark trails, portages, and pathways through the boreal forest, berry patches or hunting grounds. [footnote]Merle Massie, “Lobstick: Canada’s next symbol?” ActiveHistory.com, http://activehistory.ca/2012/10/lobstick-canadas-next-symbol/.[/footnote]

Figure 2.1 Petroglyphs found near Peterborough, Ontario.

Figure 2.2 Petroglyphs near Bella Coola, in Nuxalk territory, British Columbia.

Rock paintings (pictographs) and rock carvings (petroglyphs) are other visible records of storytelling and meaning, and a reminder of the long-term human occupation of Canada. These traces of memory are found in many parts of the country. Less durable examples of record keeping include the winter counts maintained on animal hides and other surfaces by several plains nations, especially the Lakota, one of the Sioux nations. Totemic illustrations — on poles, house faces, tipis — often announce clans and lineages, implicitly another record of past events.

The Written Record

Aboriginal written records — of a kind that compares more completely with those of Asia, Europe, and Africa — abounded in Mesoamerica. The Mayan civilizations in particular advanced writing to a point where it included glyphs (symbols for things or people) and syllabics (symbols that represent a sound or, indeed, an entire word). The work of the Mayans rested on the foundations established by still earlier civilizations in the region. Their neighbours and successors, the Aztecs, had their own similar written form of communication.

Scrolls written by Aztec authors and scribes from the period both before and after the arrival of Europeans are known as codexes, or codices. Mayan codexes also exist, although many from both nations were destroyed by Spanish invaders who regarded these remarkable forms of writing as highly suspect, because they believed “the word of God” was written only in Latin, not Nahuatl, let alone hieroglyphics.

Figure 2.3 Maya glyphs in stucco at the Museo de sitio in Palenque, Mexico.

Figure 2.4 An example of Yucatec Maya writing, ca. 11th-12th century CE from Chichen Itza, preserved in the Dresden Codex.

The nearest equivalent or comparable script known in Canada are the birchbark scrolls prepared by members of the Anishinaabeg nation. Some scrolls found in a cave near Burntside Lake in Quetico Provincial Park, Ontario, near the Minnesota border, have been carbon-dated to the mid-16th century. It is likely that they first appeared in the proto-contact period if not the pre-contact period. The scrolls vary in size and shape: most are about 30 centimetres wide and up to 1 metre long. Some show signs of binding and indexing. Images and symbols are drawn on the soft inner surface of the bark and sometimes darkened in black, red, or blue. The subject matter ranges from the banal to the sublime, from simple instructions and maps to spiritual tales and lessons. A secret or at least semi-secret medicine society called Midewiwin was responsible for preserving and reproducing scrolls as they became more fragile or at risk from missionaries and colonial administrators. For that reason, these documents are often called “Midewiwin scrolls.”

The Oral Record

As Innis observed, societies that write on stone but not on paper are more likely to be time-biased. One of the qualities of such cultures is that they are well suited for a strong oral tradition. Certainly these societies move around, but overwhelmingly they move within cycles and retain a deep attachment to a particular locale. They gather annually, in some cases to exchange goods, seek marriage partners, determine group responses to threats or opportunities, and indulge in oratory. Without exception, European observers in the earliest days of contact (and, in some areas, much later as well) commented on the oratorical skills of Aboriginal speakers. Whether in the longhouses of the Haudenosaunee (Five Nations Iroquois) or the seaside camps of the Mi’kmaq, Europeans witnessed the fruit of a long tradition of storytelling that paid close attention to the core elements of a tale, preserving its integrity while allowing for personal style. To be able to tell a familiar tale well and with panache was highly valued among Aboriginal societies. This included “true” stories of history.

Some 50 years ago, when Bruce Trigger was preparing his landmark two-volume history of the Huron/Wendat, The Children of Aataentsic, he demonstrated the value of what came to be known as “ethnohistory.”[footnote]Bruce Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660 (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987).[/footnote] This included extensive and critical use of the oral tradition which, of course, meant working very closely and respectfully with Aboriginal peoples, especially elders. Many years later, Wendy Wickwire demonstrated how the oral tradition — whether living or transcribed years ago — passed the historians’ tests of reliability and verifiability. Comparing the oral record of the Nlaka’pamux with fur trader and explorer Simon Fraser’s written account of contact in 1808, she found both remarkable similarities and revealing differences.[footnote]Wendy C. Wickwire, “To See Ourselves as the Other’s Other: Nlaka’pamux Contact Narratives,” Canadian Historical Review 75, issue 1 (1994): 1-20.[/footnote] After 1492 and for the next 500 years “Old World” epidemic diseases raced back and forth across the Americas, leading to demographic disasters, which in some communities, ruptured and even broke the chain of the oral tradition. This was the worst-case scenario but fortunately, many pre-contact accounts continue to be nurtured.

Perhaps still more remarkable has been the survival in the oral tradition of accounts of megafauna, including a giant beaver that non-Aboriginals understood to be a mythical creature. We now know the stories about gargantuan beavers are true: their skeletal remains have been found throughout Canada, some of them measuring 2.5 metres in length and indicating a body weight of as much as 100 kilograms. These massive rodents became extinct about 10,000 years ago, and yet recollections of their existence appear to have been passed down orally across thousands of generations. The lesson of this scrupulous research seems clear: if you want to know something about the history of Aboriginal peoples you might try listening to Aboriginal historians. A further lesson for Canada as a whole would be to value storytellers more highly.

The Archaeological Record

A further method of reaching into the pre-contact past is by digging it up — literally. Archaeology, as both a science and a school of thought, has evolved a great deal since its emergence in the 18th century. Since that time, it has become increasingly systematic, thorough, and technical. What is called the archaeological record contributes a great deal to current understandings of human experience in what is now Canada and elsewhere in the Americas.

Keep in mind that archaeology originally developed as a technique for studying earlier and long-gone Mediterranean societies like those of classical Rome, Greece, Egypt, and the lands stretching east from Syria through the Euphrates Valley. Its application, too, to sites in Britain and France (e.g., Stonehenge and the Ardèche caves) did not involve any local, living populations. In Europe, the archaeological study of more recent societies is usually described as historical archaeology. The modifier “historical” is, revealingly, not consistently used in North America when it comes to the study of Aboriginal peoples. In the late-19th century, however, much ethnographic work was described as “salvage ethnography,” in that it was presented by its Euro-Canadian practitioners as an effort to “save” evidence of an extinct people, despite the fact that those people were living just down the road. An archaeological dig on Sto:lo or Montagnais territory occurs in close proximity to people whose lives are, in point of fact, continuations of the stories being excavated.

As Trigger has pointedly observed, the “ethnohistorian normally depends upon documentary evidence that was produced not by the people” who are being studied, “but by representatives of a radically different culture.” This is important to keep in mind when assessing the archaeological evidence. It is isn’t just that an authentic Aboriginal record presents special challenges — because an authentic historic record of any kind does — but that the “view from here” is impeded by sources and perspectives offered up by contemporaries and scholars whose perspectives may be entirely different from and at odds with that of indigenous people. In short, archaeology is a filter, not a crystal-clear lens; interpretation and analysis is a necessary part of the science.

Attributions

Audio 2.1
Dance Song of the Thompson River Indians recorded by Professor Franz Boas in the public domain. This recording is saved in the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv.

Figure 2.1
Petroglyphs Two by Lone Primate is used under a CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.

Figure 2.2
Petroglyph Thorsen Creek by Lloyd Guenther is under a CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.

Figure 2.3
Palenque glyphs-edit1 by Kwamikagami is in the public domain.

Figure 2.4
Dresden codex, page 2 by Pimlottc  is in the public domain.

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

– L.P.Hartley (1953)

Writing history does not take place in a vacuum, nor is it a straightforward process. There are issues associated with cause and effect that have not been considered here: questions regarding what actually can be known, the extent to which one may draw lessons from the past, and so on. Two things may be said for certain by way of advice to an undergraduate beginning the study of Canadian history:

1. Just because a community or nation is small or young doesn’t meant that its history is unimportant. This statement isn’t made as a special plea in the face of grand national histories written by British or American scholars. Those great sweeping, heroic accounts are essentially a licence to engage in more sweeping and not-so-heroic escapades. Our story is not that of our leaders; our story is ours, and it matters. One may learn a great deal from a careful study of an 18th-century Newfoundland outport, a textile mill in Victorian Ontario, or a single tenement building in 1860s Montreal. Likewise, the experience of the Plains Cree over 200 years of commercial interaction with Europe reveals a great deal about adaptability and human agency.
2. Good history requires heavy lifting. Historians commit years of their lives to research in archives and libraries trying to produce something worth reading. None, however, would absolve you of your responsibility to read closely, criticize, and analyze. Is the evidence convincing? Do the right witnesses make it to the stand? Are the right questions being asked? You have our permission and you have a responsibility to read the material as if it matters.

Canadian history isn’t one story; it is many. This chapter has reviewed some of the basics of studying history with the hope that it will open you to the possibility of different understandings of the past. What the British writer L.P. Hartley had to say about history is true and valuable. When you travel to other countries you try not to judge or to impose your frame of reference too rigidly on people who do things differently and for reasons you might not easily perceive. In that spirit, welcome to a history that you may claim as your own regardless of how exotic it may appear to be.

 Suggested Readings

1. Gordon, Alan. “The Many Meanings of Jacques Cartier.” In The Hero and the Historians: Historiography and the Uses of Jacques Cartier. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010.
2. Greer, Allan. “National, Transnational, and Hypernational Historiographies: New France Meets Early American History.” Canadian Historical Review 91, no.4 (December 2010): 695-724.
3.  Kealey, Greg S. “Harper and Non-History.” Labour/Le Travail (May 2014): 213-215.
4. McKillop, A.B. “Who Killed Canadian History? A View from the Trenches.” Canadian Historical Review 99, no.2 (June 1999): 269-300.

Attributions

This chapter contains material taken from Reading Primary Sources: An Introduction for Students created by Kathryn Walbert for LEARN NC. It is used under a CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 unported license.

It’s one thing to know about some of the key events in Canada’s history; it’s another to know a thing or two about how our history came to be written.

Part of the challenge is defining what constitutes history. For example, it is often said that Canada is a young country without much history. A response to that claim is that Canada is actually a few years older than the modern states of Italy and Germany. Doing so, however, is to fall into the trap of thinking that a constitution defines a country and its history. Others point out that the existence of New France stretches back to the early 1600s (which makes Canada quite a bit older still) and before that there was not much going on in the way of settlement. But that perspective writes off entirely the Aboriginal, pre-contact experience. In response, some people argue that the history of Canada is limited to the literate societies in Canada, and before the arrival of Europeans there existed only illiterate societies. In other words, they argue that no written record = no history.

This viewpoint is not defensible. In Britain, historians of ancient times don’t fold up their tents when they get into the pre-Roman past. If they did, nothing would have been studied about Stonehenge, for example. The lands that have become Canada are littered with burial mounds, old fortifications, petroglyphs and pictographs, ancient foot trails, bison pounds, and fishing weirs. Intertidal fishtraps in Comox Bay on Vancouver Island have been carbon-dated to at least 800 years before the present; their scale and design are both staggering and beautiful. Oral traditions, moreover, punch a hole through that artificial barrier erected between the colonialist past and that of pre-contact times. This territory that we call Canada has so much history that the greatest challenge is how to organize it and understand it.

Figure 1.9 Fishing weirs like this one from the Cowichan River (ca. 1866) were built by Aboriginal peoples across Canada long before contact. Wood, a readily available building material in northern North America, was used far more widely than stone, but it leaves less evidence behind.

Careless and Wrong: Nationalist Histories

What most people think of as the “proper subject of history” is the story of regimes. And certainly it is easy — and meaningful — to think of historical periods associated with different political organisms. Whether it is New France, Nova Scotia, or Wendake (the Huron Confederacy), each administrative era imposes certain structures on its people and their lives. Harbours get built, systems of land ownership (individual, family, collective) are recognized and sometimes imposed, alliances with neighbours are forged and broken. The little things — the things that mark the course of a lifetime — are also associated with regimes. Think of practices associated with reaching adulthood, marriage, burial, and mourning. Spiritual and religious authority has to reside somewhere, even if it is in a common set of non-institutionalized beliefs. And when regimes change, all those practices can be lost. Or, conversely, their preservation becomes a fundamental creed of the survivor population. In any event, history’s focus on governments, empires, and nation states has a long pedigree.

In Canada the business of establishing a legitimate country with something like a national identity depended on the writing of national histories. The 20th century witnessed a parade of classically trained historians based in the oldest anglophone universities (University of Toronto, McGill, Queen’s), developing powerful narratives of the epic of New France, the Conquest, the Loyalists, the rise of liberal-democratic processes, and the achievement of Confederation. George M. Wrong (1860-1948), Donald Creighton (1902-1979), and J.M.S. Careless (1919-2009) were key figures in this phase of Canadian historiography, and all were based in the Department of History at the University of Toronto.

Figure 1.10 George MacKinnon Wrong.

This National School approach was essentially small-c conservative in its ideology, Anglican in its creed, and mostly capital-C Conservative in its politics.  There were regular challenges from the Left, particularly in the 1930s, but few other historians enjoyed as much influence. Certainly feminist challenges were almost impossible with the absence of women in any university history departments. The situation was even more parlous for non-Whites, non-Christians, and non-nationalists. The National School only began to face serious challenges in the 1960s, by which time there was growing dissatisfaction with it in academic circles.

Generation Gap: The New Social History

The rise of the baby boom generation brought to universities huge numbers of young Canadians who were concerned with the histories of working people, non-Whites, and women. The topics of race, class, and gender — formerly untended — scrambled to the top of the historian’s agenda. The rise of multiculturalism — as a fact and as an official policy — facilitated further the growth of layered histories of ethnicities, each of which had a thing or two to say about gender and social class. As well, the Canadian regions and provinces found they had tales to tell that were either subsumed within the larger national narrative or ran in very different, sometimes contrary, directions. National History School, by contrast, gave centre stage to the accomplishments of elite groups, political leaders, industrialists, and big media. Their representatives in the pages of history books were, of course, all but 100% males and equally white. Their representatives in the history departments of Canadian universities tended to be drawn from the same demographic. Then the ground rather suddenly shifted.

Figure 1.11 Simon Fraser University (top left), the University of Victoria (top right), the U.S. Civil Rights Movement (bottom left), and Florence Bird, Chair of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, 1967-70 (bottom right).

The baby boom generation witnessed the creation of a new cadre of universities. In the western half of the country alone a half dozen appeared: Simon Fraser University and the Universities of Victoria, Calgary, Lethbridge, Regina, and Winnipeg. Each of these became crucibles for new approaches to the field. The civil rights movement in the United States, protests against the war in Southeast Asia, the rise of second wave feminism, and the appearance of what became known as the New Left influenced campuses across North America and beyond. While the Quiet Revolution was underway in Quebec, English Canada was undergoing significant intellectual and cultural challenges as well.[footnote]On intellectual and cultural changes in English Canada in these years, see José Igartua, The Other Quiet Revolution: National Identities in English-Canada, 1945-71 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006).[/footnote] In the field of history all this played out in challenges to the National History School and took the form of the new social history. A rising generation of historians turned their back on themes like nation building, railways, and political biography, and produced scores of books on the history of labour, women, immigrant experiences, and Aboriginal peoples. New thematically oriented scholarly journals appeared, such as Labour/Le Travail, Urban History Review, and Histoire Sociale/Social History, and these were joined by regional historical journals like Acadiensis and BC Studies.

History Wars

The old order of historians didn’t stay quiet about these changes. As the politics of identity gained ground, some scholars began to systematically criticize the fracturing of the historical vision of the country’s past. Fragmentation of the story into smaller identities, they argued, didn’t enhance opportunities to learn a broader range of histories, it undermined the ability of Canadians to learn a common, core story about themselves. By the 1990s the so-called history wars were fully underway. A leading figure in that conflict was Jack Granatstein, a graduate of the Royal Military College of Canada and a distinguished historian based at Toronto’s York University. Foreign affairs historians like Granatstein were particularly disturbed by the rise of histories of sexualities, women’s experiences, counter-nationalisms, First Nations, and many others — all of which appeared to undermine the possibility of a shared national past. Granatstein sniffed at social history as so much “housemaid’s knee in Belleville”;  needless to say, social historians and feminists were outraged. The CBC television series The Valour and the Horror (1992), about three significant battles in World War II, became a lightening rod for this debate, one that even found its way onto the floor of the Senate. Six years later Granatstein would publish Who Killed Canadian History?, a polemical attack on the “fragmenters” within the academy. The provocative title of his book tells you a lot about how desperate the defenders of conventional approaches had become. What that cohort longed for was a singular story of “our great nation,” one that everyone — more or less — could agree to, one that new immigrants to Canada could learn as part of the fitting-in process.

Indeed, the multitude of voices that were being heard and broadcast in the 1990s on the subject of Canadians’ past was cacophonous. Early in this century, however, a growing trend toward interdisciplinary studies marked the beginning of the process of synthesis. Ruth Sandwell, a historian of education at the University of Toronto, has addressed the tensions between fragmentation and synthesis in the classroom. She has observed that “history education in the schools has moved away from a much narrower vision of citizenship education as explicitly patriotic narrative.” This opens up opportunities for historians to use their specialized knowledge — even in the narrowest of subfields — to contribute to undergraduate knowledge and social good by focusing on “a disciplinary understanding of what history is and what it does.”[footnote]R.W. Sandwell, “Synthesis and Fragmentation: the Case of Historians as Undergraduate Teachers,” Active History. Accessed January 4, 2015,  http://activehistory.ca/papers/rsandwell/.[/footnote] Rather than build “citizenship” around a history of prime ministers and wars, the key is to “convey the kinds of historical understanding that scholars are suggesting ‘the people’ need in a pluralist democracy.” University of Western Ontario history professor Alan MacEachern takes this a step further and challenges historians to attempt synthesis to develop a national history — even if it comes from a fairly small fragment of the larger field. One of the most difficult specialties that nevertheless holds out much promise for a new perspective on the story of Canada would be a very broad history of childhood.[footnote]The work of Neil Sutherland on English-Canadian childhood is outstanding as is Robert McIntosh’s, but a national synthesis is still needed.[/footnote]

Nothing, of course, stands still for long. The innovators of the 1960s and 1970s have themselves been eclipsed by new approaches. The most advanced and promising of these deal with environmental history. There is possibly no avenue of historical enquiry that is quite so interdisciplinary. Environmental history was once mainly about animals and nature; now it is more concerned with what we think of as nature and how that notion has changed historically. Where it was once informed heavily by geography, lately it has become more influenced by philosophy. One understanding of environmental history is provided by Jan Oosthoek, formerly a professor at Scotland’s University of Stirling.

Attributions

Figure 1.9
Salmon weir at Quamichan Village on the Cowichan River, Vancouver Island by Themightyquill is in the public domain.

Figure 1.10
George MacKinnon Wrong2 by Materialscientist is used under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.

Figure 1.11
SFU Tour by kardboard604 is used under a CC-BY-NC 2.0 license (first); On Golden Pond by Nick Kenrick is used under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license (second); Civil rights movement: 1964 march on washington by Aude is in the public domain (third); Florence Bird: Chair of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, 1967-70  by Harry Palmer. This image cannot be used for commercial purposes without Mr. Harry Palmer’s permission. A copy of this image can be found at Library and Archives Canada (PA-182436). The copyright was granted to Library and Archives Canada by the holder Harry Palmer (fourth).

Video 1.1
What is Environmental History? by Jan Oosthoek is used under a CC-BY 3.0 Unported license.

Where does history come from? Historians use a great many different sources to assemble information on the past. Evidence comes in many forms.

To think like a historian, we must concern ourselves not only with what people did, but also with what they thought they were doing. In every act that humans perform, however simple or banal, they are looking toward the future. Nations don’t go to war for the sake of war; they do so to obtain more territory or to secure borders or to chasten a neighbour in the future. Likewise, individuals make personal choices, such as emigrating or postponing marriage until they are older, because of how their decisions will “pay out” later on.

Peter Moogk, an accomplished historian of New France, encourages us to develop an deep understanding of past societies: “If a historian is not immersed in the culture of the time being studied and has not grasped its internal logic, then that scholar’s reconstruction of past human behaviour will inevitably be superficial and anachronistic.”[footnote]Peter Moogk, “Writing the Cultural History of Pre-1760 European Colonists,” French Colonial History 4 (2003): 5.[/footnote] To study history properly, we must creep around behind people in the past and try to look at the future through their eyes. In order to do so, we must become open to the institutions and instincts of earlier eras and then consult the detritus and records of our predecessors.

The sources that historians rely upon are grouped under two headings (which sometimes overlap). The first group is primary sources, which are original materials that come to us directly from people in the past. Diaries, letters, and reports of government inquiries are good examples of primary materials. The other group is secondary sources, which generally are documents that examine primary documents and provide an interpretation. Both types are discussed below.

Primary Sources

Figure 1.5 Primary sources are often held in archives.

Primary sources are often held in archives, and sometimes in museums. (Often the archives are in a museum.) Archives may be private or semi-private, but the principal archival institutions in Canada are public and are organized by levels of government. The National Library and Archives of Canada is housed in Ottawa, every provincial capital has its own provincial archives, and most cities have one too. Most universities have their own archives, which are sometimes called “special collections,” and large public libraries very often have a room dedicated to primary documents.

In this electronic age of ours, it’s easy to access public archives as they are almost all online. As well, increasingly, historical photographs and maps are available online. Still, there are times when a visit to the physical place is called for. It is typically in an archives that historians do the painstaking detective work that leads to new discoveries about the past.

Reading the Records

Primary documents can get you closer to actual participants in past events, but they are not without problems. Think about it: Has anyone ever lied or embellished a story in his or her diary? Has there ever been an inquiry without a political agenda in the background? Have you ever read a letter and wondered if it reveals the writer’s thoughts or what the writer thinks you will understand by it? Take the Jesuit Relations, for example. These are reports submitted by Jesuit missionaries in New France to their masters back home. There are many truths contained in them, but you have to keep in mind that the Jesuits who prepared the Relations knew that they would be read by people who had the power to cut off their supplies or to send them the reinforcements and materials essential to success. In the reports, were they overly optimistic about the likelihood of religious conversions among the First Nations? Did they dramatize or downplay daily life? Both?

Salt and pepper: comparing two paintings

If letters and reports can be duplicitous, what about paintings and maps? Take a look at Benjamin West’s famous 1770 work, The Death of General Wolfe (Figure 1.6), which hangs in the National Gallery in Ottawa. Clearly it is a very romantic interpretation of what actually took place in 1759, but what truths does it reveal … despite itself?

Figure 1.6 The Death of General Wolfe painted by Benjamin West.

The pepper to West’s salt is The Death of Montcalm by François-Louis-Joseph Watteau, painted in 1800. It, too, hangs in the National Gallery. It shows Montcalm dying on the battlefield, despite the fact that he died in a surgeon’s home.

In order to appreciate and make the most of primary documents, we need to follow some basic practices of critical enquiry. The questions that follow are ones that you should ask of your sources (even secondary sources) and have been posed by the historians whose articles and books you will read.

Identify the Source

• What is the nature of the source? You’ll want to know what kind of source it is — a newspaper, an oral history account, a diary entry, a government document, etc. — because different kinds of sources must be considered differently. For example, you might think about a written description of a fur trade post differently than you would think about a photograph of one, or you might ask different questions of census data regarding poverty in the 1830s and 1840s than you would of the recollections of Irish immigrants who arrived in the midst of the 1834 cholera epidemic. Knowing the type of source you’re dealing with can help you start to think about appropriate questions.
• Who created this source, and what do you know about them? Knowing something about who created the source can help you determine what biases they might have had, what their relationship to the things they described in the source might have been, and whether this source should be considered credible. Keep in mind that someone doesn’t have to be a famous leader or play a dramatic role in history to be a credible source. In terms of understanding the experience of the War of 1812, for example, the writings of a militia soldier may be as valuable or even much more so than the correspondence of General Isaac Brock.
• When was the source produced? Knowing when the source was produced can help you put it into historical perspective. A discussion of slavery in Canada, for example, would obviously be very different in the early 1700s (when most Canadian slaves were Aboriginals), the 1790s (when John Graves Simcoe, lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, introduced an Act Against Slavery), and the mid-19th century (when the “underground railway” was shepherding American slaves north to freedom). If you don’t know when a source was written, you can’t put it in historical context and understand how it connects to historical events. If you’re using a first-hand account that was written some time after the events it describes, you might also take into account the passage of time in your analysis. A record of events produced at the time has the advantage of freshness and a first-hand quality; it has the disadvantage of a limited horizon and none of the benefits of hindsight. A subsequent reminiscence or recollection of events may place things in perspective but it will likely lose a sense of the context of decisions and actions and, of course, it is subject to forgetfulness.
• Where was the source produced? Just as it is important to situate the source in time, it’s also important to identify where the source was produced. If you found a letter describing Acadia, it would matter quite a bit if the letter was written by someone living and working — or even visiting — the colony as opposed to an official sitting in a chateau somewhere in France.

 Contextualize the Source

• What is the historical context for this source? What was going on in the place and time that the source was created? What significant local, regional, or global events might this source relate to? You can look for information about the historical context for your sources in many places. Sometimes sources are packaged along with descriptive information that can help you contextualize them. You can also consult secondary sources (like this textbook) to learn more about the time and place in which the source was created.
• How were the creators of your document(s) connected to their historical context? Gender, race, and social and economic class all matter. So does ideological position. An account of the burning of the Parliament Buildings in Montreal in 1849, for example, will be of value only if you can determine where the creator stood on the issue of the Rebellion Losses Bill. Was he or she opposed? Was the creator involved in the arsonist mob that is described in the source? Figuring out how the author of your primary document fitted into the historical context can help you think more critically and creatively about what he or she had to say.
• Why was the source created in the first place? You’ll also want to know the motivations of the person who wrote the source, which may be easier to guess after you know the historical context. Why do you think this source was created? Was it meant to be a private document or was it intended for others to view? How do you know? If there was an intended audience, who was that audience? Family? The general public? Future generations? What did the creator of the source intend for that audience to get out of it? Was he or she trying to persuade people to a particular point of view? Simply recording daily events? Intentionally trying to deceive the audience? Trying to look good in the eyes of the readers and/or posterity?

Naturally, you’ll want to extract as much factual information as you can from the source. Details are what you’re after. But documents from the past are tricky and they might contain a surprise or two. What is the balance in the document between opinion and verifiable fact? Opinion isn’t entirely without value, because you can then ask why the creator of the document held that opinion. Also, ask what the source is not telling you. What information might be withheld? Ask yourself what you expected to see that you didn’t? For example, it might seem odd to find a letter written on July 1, 1867, that makes no mention of Confederation. Was that date not important to everyone in British North America?

In addition you can look at documents for unintentional messages — revelations of perspectives and prejudices that they so took for granted that they weren’t necessarily aware they were transmitting them to their audience. An example is how women are regularly described in historic documents in a vocabulary of dependence and weakness. Finally, be open to being surprised; documents may disclose much more than the facts. It is often only by confronting the original documents that you may be able to do some justice to the truth of the past .

Just one example comes from the journals kept by the Hudson’s Bay Company’s field officers. These journals covered commerce, day-to-day life in the posts and forts, relations with Aboriginal peoples, and personnel issues. The senior clerk at Fort Rupert on Vancouver Island in 1850 recorded in his journal that he was going to discipline some of his men: “I shall put them in Irons,” he wrote. While that in itself may seem surprising, a look at the original document reveals even more: it shows us that the clerk’s mental stability was in free fall. He was so agitated that the word “Irons” is scrawled in letters nearly two inches tall and it is triple-underlined. The nib of his quill pen nearly tore through the page.[footnote]Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, Fort Rupert Journals 1 (638), 28 April 1850.[/footnote]

Figure 1.7 Hudson’s Bay Company trading post (ca. 1800).

Secondary Sources

When historians consult the works of other historians, they are using secondary sources. Overwhelmingly these are documents that examine primary documents and provide an interpretation. The shelves of libraries are full of secondary sources, which may come in the form of books or scholarly journals (such as the Canadian Historical Review or Labour/Le Travail). Every article you read on a historical topic is a secondary source (assuming that it’s not just pure invention and fantasy). These are sources that filter primary evidence. Sometimes that’s good; sometimes it’s not. You, as the reader, have to be critically aware of that filter. And keep in mind that the distinction between primary and secondary is not always clear. For example, let’s say that you’re reading a history of New France written in 1800. It’s a secondary source that made use of primary documents, but it is simultaneously itself a primary source, in that it is evidence of how people thought in 1800.

Making Sense of the Past

Teodoro Agoncillo, a historian of the Philippines, captures in a few lines what most historians know (and often say):

There is a great similarity between legal evidence and historical evidence. The only difference lies in the fact that in legal evidence it is the judge who determines whether the account of a witness is acceptable or not… The historian is prosecuting attorney and defence attorney and the judge all rolled into one, and [she or he] is the narrator and the interpreter.[footnote]Teodoro A. Agoncillo, Talking History: Conversations with Teodoro A. Agoncillo (Manila: De La Salle University Press, 1995).[/footnote]

This is why historians say that the facts cannot speak for themselves. Our responsibility is to cross-examine the facts and to lay out clearly what they reveal. As the great British historian E. H. Carr wrote in the middle of the last century,

The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: It is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context. It was, I think, one of Pirandello’s characters who said that a fact is like a sack – it won’t stand up till you’ve put something in it. The only reason why we are interested to know that the battle was fought at Hastings in 1066 is that historians regard it as a major historical event. It is the historian who has decided for his own reasons that Caesar’s crossing of that petty stream, the Rubicon, is a fact of history, whereas the crossing of the Rubicon by millions of other people before or since interests nobody at all.[footnote]E. H. Carr, What is History? (London: Penguin, 1961): 11.[/footnote]

Figure 1.8 E.H. Carr, British historian.

Events and personalities to which we apply importance are a matter of choice. If we want to tell the story of New France from the point of view of the French, that’s one perspective; if we decide, however, to tell that story from the point of view of the Wendat (on whose territory New France impinged) that will be a very different history. In other words, history doesn’t exist independently of the human imagination: it is something that is created.

Attributions

Figure 1.5
Fondos archivo by Archivo-FSP is used under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.

Figure 1.6
Benjamin West 005 by Alexander Shatulin is in the public domain.

Figure 1.7
Indians at a Hudson Bay Company trading post by Tungsten is in the public domain.

Figure 1.8
E.H. Carr by Themightyquill is in the public domain.

The telling of every country’s national story is unique, and there are conflicts in that telling. Who gets to speak? Who does not? What alternative stories are there to be told? And how did it all turn out this way?

Historical writing is never without purpose. As early as the 18th century, historical accounts of New France were being produced that promoted the role of the Catholic Church and the seigneurs (the major landowners) as the custodians of the Canadien culture. These accounts were intended to buttress the position of the Church and seigneurs in the years to come as the authentic voice of Canadien ambitions. In the mid- and late-19th century, nationalist histories covering the whole of the Canadian timeline began to appear. They told the tale of the new nation, the Dominion of Canada, as something that embodied a recognizable vision of the modern state and thus provided historical legitimacy. Titles like Colony to Nation (1946) tell the tale: Canada had been a dependant (= a child) and now had achieved nation status (= adulthood).[footnote]A.R.M. Lower, Colony to Nation: A History of Canada (Toronto: Longmans, Green and Company, 1946).[/footnote]

This metaphor of maturation is commonly used in historical writing on new or newish societies. While doing so might appear benign, think about what it implies. Its purpose is to suggest that past societies were less evolved and that the newer one is better. Ask yourself: Is that an argument that bears serious scrutiny? It’s certainly a good example of how history gets used to support a particular position.

We review four issues in this chapter:

1. What is history? The answer may seem obvious, but it can be complicated. Without having some sense of what is implied by history — and historical writing (historiography) — you’ll miss many of the key issues in the study of the past. It’s something like watching your first foreign film. You know there’s more going on than meets the eye and that the experience would be better if you just knew what it was.
2. Researching history. How historians do their research — historical method — is different from history (that is, the account that you read). Historians find their bricks and mortar somewhere, and they need to organize them in ways that will stand up over time, although history is also often revised as new evidence emerges or research methodology evolves. Not having a sense of this aspect of historical work is akin to studying sculpture without having a clue about how stone is carved or steel is forged.
3. Making histories. Historians use a great many different kinds of sources to assemble information on the past. Evidence comes in many forms.
4. The current state of historical writing in Canada. The field is rife with debates and disagreements, some of which can look like bench-clearing brawls.

What Is History?

In asking what history is, you must also ask, what is historiography? There is a subfield of history, one in which all historians have to have some expertise, that deals with the history of history. Historical writing — and the study of historical writing — is correctly called “historiography,” which encompasses both the doing (the writing of history) and the reflecting on (the study of history).

In the Western tradition, Herodotus (ca. 484-425 BCE) is considered as the Father of History, but the paternity of historical writing is not clear-cut, since storytelling about the past is a very old business. Historical writing in China probably began about 500 years before Herodotus was born, and everywhere human societies have appeared, there have been sagas and chronicles of some kind. Some of these were done with more literary licence than others. Brian Thom points out that the oral tradition of the Hul’qumi’num (of the Coast Salish nations) notes a difference between syuth (true histories) and sxwi’em’ (fables and moral tales). This distinction is made by many cultures and is important to keep in mind: stories from and about the past take different forms and they do so to serve different purposes.[footnote]Brian Thom, “Coast Salish Senses of Place: Dwelling, Meaning, Power, Property and Territory in the Coast Salish World” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, McGill University, 2005), 81. [/footnote] Written and oral histories alike adhere to two basic rules: reliability and verifiability. For the historian whose goal is to deliver as truthful a tale as possible, these rules are the gold standard for evidence.

Figure 1.1 A fragment of the Book of Documents attributed to Confucious (551-479 BCE).

If the source is trustworthy, then it’s reliable. Take the example of Bartolomé de las Casas, who was among the first Europeans in the Caribbean and who spent nearly half a century working as a priest, missionary, plantation owner, bishop, and colonial administrator in Hispaniola, Venezuela, and Mexico. When he wrote of the vicious Spanish conquest of Haiti — “My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write, not believing them myself, afraid that perhaps I was dreaming. But truly this sort of thing has happened all over the Indies, and more cruelly too sometimes, and I am quite sure that I have not forgotten.” — we are inclined to believe him, not least because he wasn’t going to win himself any friends by speaking out.[footnote]Bartolomé de las Casas, History of the Indies, trans. and ed. Andrée M. Collard (Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1971), 121.[/footnote]

Figure 1.2 Bartolomé de las Casas.

If historians can prove the claims made by their source, that’s verifiability. The best biographies go far beyond the personal diaries and letters written by their subject and look to other sources to confirm that the subject did what he or she claimed to have done. Another example, this one drawn from population history, shows some of the challenges of official documents. Bruce Curtis examined the early days of the census of Canada and found that Canada West (Ontario) and Canada East (Quebec) counted people differently.[footnote]Bruce Curtis, The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics, and the Census of Canada, 1840-1875 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001).[/footnote] In the former, people were counted based on where they actually were on census day; in the latter, they were counted based on where they were supposed to be. This means that Canada East’s census takers included locals who were off working in factories in other jurisdictions, perhaps in New England. But in Canada West, anyone who was engaged in migrant work — wandering the countryside and towns looking for a job — or who was a recent arrival in a new town would most likely be overlooked. Without this bit of knowledge in hand, we might be forgiven for assuming that an official source like the census would be 100% reliable; however, thanks to local tax records, church registers, and other documents, we are in a position to verify the official numbers.

Serious historians seek to be both reliable and verifiable, which is why you’ll typically find a torrent of references supporting a scholarly study. The point is to demonstrate that the writer can be trusted because he or she has done the necessary digging and cross-checking. As well, studies that are well supported by references say to the reader, “Feel free to check it yourself and, by all means, use the information I’ve found to further your own studies.” This reflects another tendency in historical research: the desire to share discoveries. Holding back sources raises both suspicion and eyebrows in readers.

Researching History

History just never gets old. Or does it? If historians use only verifiable and reliable sources, surely at some point we should have all the history we’re ever going to need. But a paradox exists about history: it has a stale-date. Our understanding of the past is constantly subject to change. This makes history open to revision, and its practitioners (that is, all serious historians) are sometimes pejoratively called revisionists. There do exist some landmark studies that stand the test of time, but more often than not conclusions reached by historians a generation or more ago are subject to a second (and third and fourth) look. Why is it that history is regularly “freshened up”?

New evidence emerges

Sometimes — although rarely — lost documents are found that shed new light on a historical event. For example, in the article “Reluctant Warriors: British North Americans and the War of 1812,” author E. Jane Errington reveals previously unexamined evidence from the newspapers of the time that Upper Canadians were not the fearless protectors of the homeland that they had appeared to be in earlier accounts and in popular mythology.[footnote]E. Jane Errington, “Reluctant Warriors: British North Americans and the War of 1812,” The Sixty Years’ War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814, eds. David Curtis Skaggs and Larry L. Nelson (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001): 325-336.[/footnote]

More usual is for new evidence to emerge through discoveries made in a different field — say, medicine — that prove to be relevant to historical studies. It is unlikely that Mary Ellen Kelm could have written Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia, 1900-50 without the knowledge that medical research provided toward the end of the 20th century.[footnote]Mary Ellen Kelm, Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia, 1900-50 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999).[/footnote] Cross-fertilization of this kind happens all the time, transforming definitive histories into conditional histories.

Figure 1.3 In this 1896 painting, General Isaac Brock encourages the volunteer Upper Canadian troops in the War of 1812: “Push on, brave York volunteers.” Recent research suggests that Upper Canadian enthusiasm for the war was, in fact, muted.

Ideology matters

Ideologies (i.e., ideas and values that guide our understanding of society and economy and may also drive political and personal agendas) also affect our perception of history. For example, Ian McKay of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, has been the key figure in identifying the importance of liberalism in Canadian history, both as a phenomenon and as a lens through which the past is viewed. (Note that here we are talking about small-l liberalism, as opposed to capital-L Liberalism, which is associated with the Liberal Party of Canada.) Liberalism, as a political ideology, places an emphasis on the individual. Whether in the role of consumer or voter or historical actor, the individual has been promoted as more important to Canadian history and public policy than groups or sub-nations.

Think about how this can affect our view of Canadian history. If the history of Canada is about the rise of the individual in a liberal-democratic state (one in which more and more people get the vote and in which rights are extended more and more broadly to individuals), how does that affect collectivities like First Nations? What about the experiences of French Canadians who, at various times in their history, have demonstrated a strong predisposition for being seen as one nation first and as many individuals second? Or how does this ideology of individualism square with the history of “working-class solidarity”?

After World War II small-l liberal values combined with a moderate form of left-wing collectivism that sought to enhance the condition of the individual by means of a larger, social welfare state. These ideals of democratic rights and a social safety net were a formative influence on nearly three generations of historians. In your lifetime there has been a growing reaction to state-liberalism from the Right. So-called neo-liberalism seeks a return to the “classical liberalism” of the 18th and early 19th centuries wherein the individual operates in a free market unfettered by government regulation and identity-group rights. The Left continues to provide a critique of liberalism/individualism, and it is more supportive of collective identities while at the same time subscribing to the essentially liberal view that individual choice in a democracy is non-negotiable. Just because these perspectives exist happily together in the mainstream does not mean they are not ideologically loaded. Historians writing from any one of these perspectives will take a different view on the past.

Other “isms” have had an effect on historical writing as well. Marxism and Marxist historians draw attention to the economic structures that overlay people’s lives in the past. Environmentalism invites us to look at the history of the fur trade, resource-extraction industries like logging and fishing, and the fabric of cities in ways that recast the environment from something that was acted upon to something that has an impact on human actors. Certainly feminism continues to have an enormous and laudable impact on historical thinking. Theological approaches to the writing of history are much less in vogue now than they once were, but imperialism (which, for centuries, had a strong theological and evangelical component) continues to influence the story of the nation-state in profound and very subtle ways. How scholars see society is one part of this ideological rainbow; how people in the past saw society — ideologically — is another. It’s complicated, but it’s hugely important in the context of how history is presented and written about.

Perspectives on what happened in the past may be informed by our concerns in the present, but that’s not the same thing as saying that the past exists for the benefit of the present. The Maritimes historian George Rawlyk once wrote that “all historical writing is basically autobiographical in nature.”[footnote]G. A. Rawlyk, Ravished by the Spirit: Religious Revivals, Baptists, and Henry Alline (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1984), ix.[/footnote] That is to say, the history we look for reflects the interests of our time and is constrained by the ways that our culture thinks. A society that is interested in the civil rights of women is more likely to ask questions on that topic than one that is not. By the same token, earlier generations of historians looked to the past for answers to questions that most of us today would not care to pose. The Canadian novelist William Gibson contributes this view: “The past changes. Our version of the past will interest the future to about the extent we’re interested in whatever past the Victorians believed in.”[footnote]William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (New York: Berkley Books, 2005): 59.[/footnote] We have concerns and perspectives that are different from past generations and from those that will be nourished by future generations. This does not mean, however, that we have a licence to shop around in the past for vindications of the present. It is in the nature of historical celebrations to claim that it is thanks to historical events that we enjoy the freedoms that we do today, or that without the fur trade, Canada as we know it simply would not exist. This is called the presentist fallacy. What if we view our present dimly due to high unemployment, repressive legislation, massive cuts at the CBC, and environmental disaster constantly on the horizon? Would we then say that these things are the fault of whatever it was that happened 270 years ago or that the fur trade is to blame? Bias can be okay — we can be biased in our search for evidence of adolescent rebelliousness in early Nova Scotia and ignore much else that was going on at that time — but we cannot favour one outcome over another and certainly we cannot favour an outcome in our present.

Methodological approaches evolve

It isn’t enough for a historian to be a bloodhound who sniffs out the rare fact. The historian has to be a capable and versatile analyst. That means that each generation of historians will find a new way of cracking the code of the past. The application of good quantitative historical techniques borrowed from statistical sciences has had a great impact on the telling of history, and has sometimes completely toppled older histories. An example of an evolving approach is presented in Wendy Wickwire’s article “To See Ourselves as the Other’s Other,” which makes the case for using oral histories to examine events that took place centuries ago.[footnote]Wendy C. Wickwire, “To See Ourselves as the Other’s Other: Nlaka’pamux Contact Narratives,” Canadian Historical Review 75, issue 1 (1994): 1-20.[/footnote] More than 20 years before Wickwire’s article appeared, Bruce Trigger made a similar point regarding ethnohistory and the study of the Wendat/Huron First Nation. It is largely thanks to research of this kind that Aboriginal oral traditions have acquired greater and greater respect and credibility in the courtroom over the last two decades.[footnote]For a detailed discussion of these developments, see Bruce Granville Miller, Oral History on Trial: Recognizing Aboriginal Narratives in Court (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011).[/footnote]  Further, demographic historians, especially in Quebec, have devised new ways of analyzing population information held in censuses, birth and death records, and baptismal and marriage records. The end effect is that history is constantly being rewritten with new discoveries, new information, new perspectives, and new conclusions. It all makes for a dynamic field, despite the reputation that history has in some quarters for being dusty, musty, and dull.

Figure 1.4 A page from the “Book of Negros,” which lists the 3,000 African-Americans who departed from New York as freed loyalists in 1783. Documents like this may provide both qualitative and quantitative evidence to historians.

Attributions

Figure 1.1
Shujing NCL 1 by White whirlwind is in the public domain.

Figure 1.2
Bartolomedelascasas by Nagypaja is in the public domain.

Figure 1.3
Push on, brave York volunteers by Scorpius59 is in the public domain.

Figure 1.4
2book0706b by Dr Wilson is in the public domain.

Figure 4.6 The Quebec habitation established by Champlain, ca. 1608.

Tadoussac stands as the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in Canada. Located where the fresh water of the Saguenay River meets the salt water of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Tadoussac was an outstanding site for hunting seals and whales. The Innu (Montagnais) were doing this when Cartier visited in 1535, and the Basques did it in the same century.

The French settlement was established there in 1600 under the leadership of François Gravé du Pont and Pierre de Chauvin de Tonnetuit. Between them they had merchant and naval credentials that made them good candidates for the first fur-trade monopoly granted by a European monarch. This was a promising start but, like Cartier, they barely lasted their first winter. In 1603, Samuel de Champlain visited the site to assess its prospects. It was there that he met the Innu leader Begourat who was preparing an assault on the Mohawk, some 500 kilometres away. (Begourat’s mission foreshadowed another attack on the Iroquois in which Champlain would become involved, six summers later.) Tadoussac wasn’t an ice-free port but it stayed ice-free longer than Quebec so it would have a role to play for many years to come in the development of the Canadien project.

Establishing Canada

After spending some time in Acadia, Champlain began the process of establishing a forward post at Quebec in 1609. With a complement of barely 50 men, Champlain was able to achieve much to sustain the French presence. A fortified settlement — a habitation — was constructed and an alliance established among the Algonquin, the Wendat (Huron), and the French. Iroquet and Outchetaguin, respectively leaders of the Algonquin and the Wendat, initiated talks with Champlain and drew the French into a long-running conflict with the Haudenosaunee to the south. The French had signed an alliance with the Innu (Montagnais) and the Algonquin against the Haudenosaunee five years earlier, so Champlain was following through with an earlier commitment to his allies. The battle at Ticonderoga — in which Champlain’s first shot from his arquebus allegedly killed two Onondaga chiefs — was to initiate a long cycle of conflict with the Five Nations. This alliance shaped local patterns over the long term; when Champlain allied himself with the Wendat, their long-standing enemies, the Iroquois, allied themselves with the Dutch and then the British.

Was Champlain duped into these “Mourning Wars” by manipulative Aboriginal allies who could see that his main reason for being in the St. Lawrence was furs and that he’d do whatever was necessary to secure a steady supply? Possibly. Champlain’s vision for the colony in 1609 did not extend very much beyond exploring opportunities for wealth from trade. He had neither the mandate nor the resources to establish a colony of permanent settlers (as opposed to temporary sojourners who would return to France to enjoy their profits). The choices he made in these years have to be understood, therefore, in the context of a man who had no reason to feel confident in the future of the colony he created.

Figure 4.7 The Wendat and Algonquin armies take the battle to the Onondaga villages in 1609, accompanied by their new French ally, Champlain.

For the first few decades of the colony’s existence, the French population numbered only a few hundred, while the English colonies to the south were much more populous and wealthy. In 1627, France invested in New France, promising land parcels to hundreds of new settlers with the hope of turning what they were now calling “Canada” into an important mercantile and farming colony. Champlain, now in his late 50s, was named governor of New France. Almost immediately the cultural outlines of Canada were being managed: the colony forbade non-Roman Catholics from living there. Cardinal Richelieu’s star was on the ascendant in the French court — he was by 1626 a leading figure in the Catholic Church and was Louis XIII’s chief minister — and he was among the first to see the possibility of a  longer-term commitment to the colony, providing it was a sanctuary for Catholics. Protestants were required to renounce their faith if they wished to establish themselves or stay in New France. Many chose instead to move to the English colonies, a trend that did nothing to increase the size of the French colonies.

Figure 4.8 Early European depictions of the beaver showed a fearsome bipedal creature with massive teeth able to build enormous structures. By the 19th century it had become less menacing and, of course, far less common. (Painting by John James Audubon, 1856.)

The Fur Trade and Settlement

The economic development of New France was based on two staple commodities of the time: during the 16th and early 17th centuries, it was dominated by the Atlantic fisheries, and during the latter half of the 17th and 18th centuries, as French settlement penetrated farther into the continental interior, it was dominated by the fur trade.

Officially, the French Crown articulated a desire for a thriving colony in New France. Practically, there was little interest in (and some fear of) depopulating the countryside of France to seed the St. Lawrence Valley and Acadia. And, of course, colonies are costly. Rather than directly sponsor a colonial enterprise, the Crown opted for what we would today call a “P3 model”: a public-private partnership. Monopolistic trading rights were granted to a company combined with an obligation to settle and manage its colonial claims in North America.

In 1627 responsibility for the whole of New France was handed off to the Compagnie des Cent-Associés, a short-lived experiment with what was essentially a joint-stock operation. Shareholders in France were to be badly disappointed when the company’s fleet was captured the following year by the English and the base of operations in Quebec fell in 1629. The Compagnie struggled on after the restoration of New France in 1632 but the Wendat crisis and continuous raids by the Haudenosaunee took a heavy toll. At the mid-17th century the whole of New France was little more than a cluster of trading posts with a negligible population base, one that was heavily dependent on food shipped from France or purchased from Aboriginal farmers and hunters. In 1645 the Compagnie turned to local merchants in the colony and allowed the Communauté des habitants to pay them for the privilege of managing the unwieldy colony. The monopoly in trade collapsed around 1652, opening a decade of fur trading free-for-all in Canada.

Why was this first half-century of colonial activity in New France so unimpressive in its accomplishments? First, there was the Aboriginal context: conflict between the Haudenosaunee Five Nations League and the Wendat-Algonquin-Innu alliance was something that no colonial minister could control or do much to alter. As well, the colony was dependent on Aboriginal traders in the fur trade as it had neither the manpower nor the permission of the local First Nations to engage directly in trapping. Second, Protestant hostility in the form of fur trade competition and armed raids by Dutch and English enemies was more than the French Crown was prepared to counter. Overall, the Crown saw little to be gained in investing heavily in the colony. But substantial investment was necessary. The short growing season of the northern colonies demanded support in the early years as farmers adjusted to new and alien conditions; subsidies would be needed to encourage emigration and cover the costs of clearing new land until crops started to come in. So long as the purpose of the colony was to harvest furs and minimize loss of life, under-investment in a long-term colonial vision was virtually inevitable.

Attributions

Figure 4.6
Champlain Habitation de Quebec by Jeangagnon is in the public domain.
Figure 4.7
Iroq2 by Sakateka is in the public domain.
Figure 4.8
American Beaver by BrooklynMuseumBot  is in the public domain.