Pre-Confederation Canadian History

Intercolonial conflict passed through several distinct stages. At first there was an impromptu quality to much of the conflict that was determined by the size of settlements. When Quebec City was small, it took little more than a couple of boats out of Boston to cause it grief or to capture it. In the 1600s these were settlements of a few dozen people, none of which were ferociously loyal to the towns they defended. Protecting Quebec in 1629 was more like protecting a warehouse than a community.

There is, as well, an entrepreneurial aspect to conflicts in the 17th century and among some of the wars and raids of the 18th century. Privately-funded attacks on enemy colonies were typical of raids out of New England. These were conducted by merchants, investors, and local government officials, not the British Navy. They had personal gain and the protection of their own interests at heart, rather than those of the Empire. Even George Washington’s disastrous invasion of the Ohio Valley on behalf of the Commonwealth of Virginia was not conducted as the business of Britain.

Threaded throughout these two centuries, too, were conflicting imperial agendas. Tensions in Europe regularly spilled over into North America: a continental war could easily become an intercolonial war. Historians of Canada have long pointed to this fact, highlighting the exception of the Seven Years’ War that began in North America before being taken up in Europe. That narrative, however, often overlooks the almost continuous wars between Aboriginal forces and their European neighbours. The background to some of these intercolonial conflicts is, in fact, decades-old struggles between colonial nodes and Aboriginal nations. One difference is that an official European war might produce additional military or naval resources for the colonists to use against their indigenous opponents.

There is also the quality of warfare to consider, specifically the contrast between guerrilla warfare and the use of well-drilled European armies and colonial militia. The character of warfare changed through the 18th century, becoming increasingly European in style and focused much more on the role of professional soldiery and less on the use of terror and fire by both European and Aboriginal participants. The latter style persisted but the standing army was only a revolution away.

Behind all of this lay a growing economic presence in North America. New France had become a functional social and economic colony. By 1759 generations had been born and raised in the St. Lawrence with no firsthand knowledge of France. The same, of course, was true of the diverse settlers and slaves in the Thirteen Colonies. The economic presence, then, was both imperial and local. The creation of successful colonies always carried with it the possibility that local sensibilities would emerge. Some of these, of course, would conflict with those of empire.

Suggested Readings

1. Balvay, Arnaud. “Tattooing and its Role in French-Native American Relations in the Eighteenth Century.” French Colonial History 9 (2008): 1-14.
2. Dewar, Helen. “Canada or Guadeloupe?: French and British Perceptions of Empire, 1760-1763.” Canadian Historical Review 91, no.4 (2010): 637-60.
3. Griffiths, Naomi. “The Decision to Deport.” In From Migrant to Acadian: A North American Border People, 1604-1755 , 431-64. Montréal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005.
4. Wicken, William. “Mi’kmaq Decisions: Antoine Tecouenemac, the Conquest, and the Treaty of Utrecht.” In The Conquest of Acadia, 1710: Imperial, Colonial, and Aboriginal Constructions, 86-100. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

Attributions

This chapter contains material taken from U.S. History created by OpenStax College. It is used under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.

This chapter contains material taken from U.S. History created by Boundless. It is used under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.

This chapter contains material taken from the Wikipedia page, “History of Newfoundland and Labrador,” is used under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 unported license.

Any odds-maker looking at the prospects for French victory against the English in the colonial wars from the 1620s on would have to call it a long shot. The colonies all depended on naval support, and England’s Royal Navy was larger than that of France or Spain by 1660. The population in the English colonies grew at a much faster rate so that by 1760 they were 20 times larger than New France. What settlement existed in New France was stretched out and difficult to defend, certainly compared to the more urban and compact colonies to the south. Many of the young Canadiens who might act as a colonial regiment were off trading for furs in the spring and summer — precisely when they were needed most at home for defence.  Nevertheless, the French record against the British in North America is remarkably good.

This is, however, a two-dimensional view in a three-dimensional world. Aboriginal nations were in an almost constant state of resistance against European intruders in these years. Whether it was the Beaver Wars or the Wabanaki Wars or battles too small to acquire a name, Aboriginal communities in northeastern North America were struggling to adjust to a world in which trade relationships were changing, epidemics were devastating their numbers, and aggressive neighbours (European or Aboriginal) were impinging on their lands. Some of these conflicts become apparent in the historical record only when they folded neatly into intercolonial or inter-imperial wars. While it is true that the French, to take one side, sought out and nurtured alliances with Aboriginal partners in their struggle to contain the British and their colonists, it is also true that Aboriginal nations had their own agendas and welcomed the French into their crusades, regardless of the European context.

The End of the Iroquois Wars

As described in Chapter 5, the Haudenosaunee launched attacks against Canada in the late 1680s, one of which was a spectacular assault on Lachine. The governor, Count Frontenac, responded with raids against the settlements of the Iroquois and those of their English allies. The French forces by this time had adopted guerrilla tactics favoured by the Algonquin and the nations of the Wabanaki Confederacy. The raids were lightning-fast and terrifying. By destabilizing the English colonial frontier, Frontenac hoped to sever the connection between his two enemies, and he was eventually successful. This was a bloody, no-holds-barred campaign in which civilians and children were not spared.

The English colonists responded with a naval assault that captured the Acadian capital of Port-Royal and then a failed attempt to take Quebec. It was in this latter conflict that Massachusetts’ future governor, Sir William Phips, demanded Frontenac’s surrender, to which the latter offered to reply from the “mouths of my cannon and muskets.” Phips’s forces found Quebec a challenging opponent, and they became anxious about the coming winter and freeze-up on the river. They retreated with nothing to show for their efforts. Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville captained several naval sorties into Hudson Bay in an effort to root out the English HBC, but the outcomes of these battles were continually undone the next season.

The European powers were too preoccupied with their own conflicts to wade in on either side, which is much of the reason that there was no decisive result. France and England were consumed with sectarian wars involving, among others, the Protestant alliance between England and the Netherlands against their common Catholic foe, France. The War of the League of Augsburg lasted nine years in Europe and the outcomes in North America were decided at the treaty table in 1697 (in the Treaty of Ryswick), not on the battlefield. This was a theme that was repeated throughout the 18th century when colonial conflicts would be fought mostly by locals and settled abroad by the mother countries after the fact.

A key outcome of the War of the League of Augsburg was the appearance of sharp divisions within the Haudenosaunee League. For the Mohawk, located farthest east, the British position at Fort Albany (formerly Fort Orange) was regarded as part of a deepening pact. They were not about to desert this asset and commitment. That was not the case, however, for the rest of the Iroquois. The League had played a key role in renewing hostilities with the French at Lachine, and they didn’t care one way or the other about agreements made at Ryswick: they had their own agenda. The French felt similarly that Ryswick addressed European issues and that Canadian security against the Iroquois had to be resolved in battle. It took another three years for the two sides to become sufficiently exhausted by war to seek a separate peace. The agreement signed by the Oneida, the Seneca, the Onondaga (whose main village had been levelled), and the Cayuga, on the one side, and the French, on the other, was the Great Peace of 1701. War between the two parties had been almost continuous since 1608 and now, with the exception of the Mohawk (which was a very big exception indeed), Canada could relax a little. For the League, however, it meant that their relationship with the English was compromised. How badly compromised would soon be revealed.

The War of the Spanish Succession

Within a year the peace in Europe was shattered. England and France were once again at war. In North America, conflict followed quickly. In this relatively short period of time, however, much had changed. Frontenac had completed building a chain of forts deep into the Mississippi Valley and his plans for a more integrated New France were gaining ground. The forts were established both for trade and to consolidate military alliances with Aboriginal nations. The Great Peace gave the French some room to manoeuvre in the Ohio Valley and build a presence and forge a role with the Council of Three Fires. Moving the principal western post from Michilimackinac to Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit (Detroit) created opportunities for closer connections with the Potawatomi and the Miami (another Algonquian-speaking group, one that had been displaced by the Haudenosaunee during the Beaver Wars and was at this time returning to the Ohio Valley). The fort attracted conflict almost immediately, especially between the Council (which regarded the Miami as intruders in their zone of influence) and various Iroquois who were now able to participate in regional trade under the protection of the Great Peace. Diplomacy on the part of the French was essential to taking advantage of the western forces that could be mustered in another war with English colonists, but this endeavour was neither smooth nor particularly successful.

As well, years of war had hardened New France. Canadien soldiers emerged as ferocious guerrilla fighters who could more than hold their own against the Haudenosaunee and take the battle to the enemy’s doorstep with impunity. The administrative structure of New France was also militaristic.  Frontenac had put his stamp on the whole of the colony in this respect and was able to deploy resources without difficulty. This simplified the business of building alliances with Aboriginal nations. While the individual British colonies had to work out their own alliances piecemeal, New France could speak with one voice when it came to the Wabanaki Confederacy or the peoples of the Pays d’en Haut.

These were important differences. While the French were establishing outposts throughout Aboriginal territory and extending their commercial and military influence, they were not claiming land for their own exclusive use. New Englanders, New Yorkers, and other English colonists, however, were much more aggressive in this respect, enlarging their frontiers inch by inch in smaller conflicts with native populations. It was for this reason that the Wabanaki Confederacy aligned so strongly with the French. The presence of priests in their communities gradually and successfully introduced Catholicism, giving the Wabanaki another reason to despise their Protestant English neighbours.

The War of the Spanish Succession (also known as Queen Anne’s War) began officially in 1702. The first five years were dominated by failed New England attempts to retake Port Royal (which had been handed back to France at Ryswick) and highly effective assaults by the French-Wabanaki alliance on New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The attack on Deerfield, Massachusetts, a village of hardly 300 people, saw more than a hundred prisoners being marched off to Caughnawaga (a.k.a Kahnawà:ke and Kahnawake), a mostly Iroquois mission village near Montreal where many were adopted into their captors’ population. New England responded with raids on Acadia, which had roughly the same impact.  It wasn’t until 1710 that a British force was brought into the struggle and was able to capture Port Royal (renamed Annapolis Royal). In 1711 Britain once again attempted to take Canada. Seven regiments along with 1,500 colonials sailed into the St. Lawrence. Ten of their ships were sunk and the expedition failed.

The Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 ended the war and settled the disposition of territorial prizes, mostly to the disadvantage of New France. On balance, the French were right to claim victory on the battlefield, but the French colonies did badly at the bargaining table. The treaty resulted in the relinquishing of French claims to mainland Acadia, Hudson Bay, and Newfoundland, including the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon. France retained Île Royale (Cape Breton Island) and Île Saint-Jean (Prince Edward Island); the Acadians remained a question mark for the British throughout their new possession, now called Nova Scotia. This outcome was, of course, very bad news for the Wabanaki Confederacy, as it was now sandwiched between two regions of British colonization.

Figure 6.8 European claims and spheres of influence in North America, 1702

Attributions

Figure 6.8
QueenAnnesWarBefore by Magicpiano is used under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.

It is easy to imagine the colonial world of North America as sharing many common features, made up as it was of Europeans who had gone into self-imposed (or sometimes imposed) exile from their home countries. In fact, the colonies were each organized around very different cultural and economic principles. Even among the first English-speaking colonies there were significant differences. In some instances they were also complementary.

Mercantilism and Colonialism

One of the unifying features of the North American colonial world was mercantilism, an economic doctrine that held that a nation’s power depended on the value of its exports. The role of government in a mercantilist age is to control all foreign trade to achieve a highly positive balance of exports over imports. Under mercantilism, nations sought to establish colonies to produce goods over which the home economy had monopolistic control. Mercantilists believed that colonies existed not for the benefit of settlers, but for the benefit of the imperial centre. Britain and France embraced mercantilism, hoping to run trade surpluses, so that gold and silver would pour into London and Paris. Governments took their share through duties and taxes, with much of the remainder going to merchants.

This accumulation of wealth enabled the building of remarkable navies and land armies. It led to a  level of ostentatious living that had not previously been witnessed, including building palaces for monarchs and ruling classes, evident in the grand manorial estates of the era. It also stimulated the growth of a class of merchants, or bourgeois, based in port towns and wherever manufacturers converted colonial raw materials into value-added products. These port towns with access to colonial materials became prosperous hubs of activity protected by the monarch. The loyalty to the Crown by the merchant class was to prove pivotal in the evolution of European absolutism in the 17th and 18th centuries. It allowed Louis XIV of France to neuter the political threat posed by a troublesome aristocracy while intensifying a network of national economic and military purpose. It also required the establishment of banking systems to both preserve and lend out the hard currency coming into the home countries. In the 18th century, these changes were key to the emergence of both modern capitalism and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.

Colonial Self-Sufficiency

For the colonies mercantilism had rather different consequences. Royal domination of New France from 1663 created a highly centralized and decisive colonial government, which was clearly an extension of Louis XIV’s absolute power. Under Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the first Minister of the Marine (a court position that placed him in charge of the French Navy and New France), efforts were made to maximize the profitability of Canada by reducing its demand for supplies from France. That meant, first and foremost, establishing a viable, modestly self-sufficient compact colony that could feed itself. At the same time, Colbert made sure that the manufacturing sector in New France remained dependent on French exports. The impressive iron forges at Saint-Maurice (built in the 1730s) were the exception that proved the rule: Canada was dependent on French manufacturers and was organized so that the principal economic activity was trading in fur, the staple product desired most from the colony by the French market. As a result, Canada developed a tightly governed economy under mercantilism with infrastructure that reflected its needs: docks and harbours, storehouses for furs, and a workforce just large enough to trade furs, fight local wars, and develop a farming sector that could meet subsistence needs. This was where colonial capital was spent, rather than on, say, wool or hemp production and mills (with skilled workers from France) that would turn raw materials into cloth or rope.

Figure 6.1 The forges at Saint-Maurice, overlooking the St. Lawrence.

British mercantilism was somewhat different, and it mainly took two forms. First, the English established chartered monopoly firms like the East India Company whose purpose was antithetical to settlement and self-sufficiency. Second, English (after union with Scotland in 1707, British) mercantilism regulated trade. The imperial government placed tariffs on imports and gave bounties for exports of processed goods, and it banned completely the export of some raw materials. The colonies were thus captive markets for English/British industry. English/British mercantilism meant that the government and the merchants became partners with the goal of increasing political power and private wealth, to the exclusion of other empires and the colonies.

Throughout the 17th century, Parliament passed the Navigation Acts to increase the benefit England derived from its colonies.  The Navigation Acts required that any colonial imports or exports travel only on ships registered in England. The colonies could not import anything manufactured outside the British Isles unless the goods were first taken to British ports, where importers paid taxes. The plantation colonies were forbidden to export tobacco and sugar to any nation other than England. This policy continued through the 18th century as well.[footnote]Kenneth Norrie and Doug Owram, A History of the Canadian Economy (Toronto: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), 19-61.[/footnote]

Colonists in English/British and French America recognized the mercantilist limits placed on them. The prospect of free trade was held out repeatedly as a goal of entrepreneurial colonists. Illicit trade between colonists in Acadia and New England, Canada and New York, and the West Indies and Newfoundland was a thriving business and, essentially, free trade by other means. Colonial merchants and traders who eluded mercantilist restrictions were an important part of colonial life in the 18th century. Nevertheless, close economic regulation persisted in Canada long after the Conquest and it was an aggravating factor in the American Revolution. Most importantly, because Canada was not able to provide for itself, it was left wholly dependent on France for a great many manufactured products, especially military supplies. Mercantilism, then, was to prove a fatal miscalculation when it came to times of war.

Attributions

Figure 6.1
Maurice River by primaire is used under a CC-BY-SA 2.5 license.

In accounts of American history, “Thirteen Colonies” is shorthand for the English-speaking colonies arrayed along the east coast of North America, which rebelled against Britain in 1775-83. But the term ignores the existence of two other English-speaking colonies — Nova Scotia and Newfoundland — which continued under uninterrupted British rule. It tends, as well, to confuse matters concerning Canada. The French colony was British war booty after 1763, the most culturally subjugated of all the colonies, but it did not rebel either.

These differences matter because of the critical role the American Revolution played in Canadian history. The creation of the United States of America marked, simultaneously, the destruction of an older polity and a culture of relative colonial autonomy within the empire. The pre-revolutionary society could accommodate both loyalism and democratic urges, but after the Revolution America lost the powerful voice of those who represented loyalty to the Crown. Some of the Loyalists were silenced, and some made their way to Britain; the largest number headed for Nova Scotia and Canada, laying the foundations for a different colonial experiment. To the extent that the British North America of 1783 (pre-Confederation Canada) and thereafter had roots that ran deep in the the Thirteen (revolutionary) Colonies, it is important to understand some of their history as well.

Colonies of Exiles

The first century of English colonial settlement in North America can be characterized as a period in which exiles dominated. Religious sects had arisen in England in the wake of the Reformation, many of them highly critical of the new Church of England headed by the monarch. The Quakers and Puritans were among the more vocal and, although they enjoyed the better part of a century of rising influence in England, by the mid-1600s they were pitted against more powerful forces. The English Civil War (1642-51) led to the execution of King Charles I at the hand of a Puritan-influenced Parliament. The Restoration that followed in 1660 turned the tide against the non-conformists. Charles II took an understandably dim view of the sect he regarded as responsible for the regicide of his father.

The New England colonies established between 1610 and the 1620s were dominated by Puritan settlers. They had chosen exile and the opportunity to build a godly “city on the hill” rather than continue under compromised circumstances in Anglican England. Likewise the Quakers of William Penn’s Pennsylvania considered themselves religious refugees. The Catholics of Maryland, too, left Protestant England in search of asylum.

Many of the earliest settlers in these colonies were criminals. For centuries the British used their colonies abroad as dumping grounds for dissidents, dissenters, and deviants (however defined). The poor, as well, were shipped out in large numbers, many of them as indentured servants serving terms of five to seven years (which some would not survive). In the West Indies, the English developed an economic model based on African slavery, one they later exported to the southern North American colonies. In short, a great many early settlers in these locales were there as refugees, as property, and against their will. As a result, their relationship with England was predictably complex.

From the highest elevation, it might seem as though Aboriginal peoples did little to resist European intrusion. Nothing could be further from the truth. Much of the history of Canada from 1600 to 1867 is marked by continual — and continually shifting — resistance mounted by Aboriginal peoples.

The League of the Great Law of Peace

No Aboriginal nation was to manifest such a key role in the political history of northeastern North America in the 17th and 18th centuries as the Haudenosaunee Five Nations League. The Haudenosaunee allied with the Dutch and then the English, but contained them to their seaboard markets; they tore up Wendake (Huronia) by the roots and became dominant across an area that covered what are now nine American states and all of southwestern Ontario; they expanded their League while exacting tribute from intimidated Aboriginal nations all around them. They became a military, economic, and political force with which to be reckoned.

Haudenosaunee traditions of warfare were never static. Their success arose from an ability to adapt tactics of both conflict and diplomacy in ways that their neighbours could not foresee. The Haudenosaunee were able to do this in part because their councils worked so effectively. Their processes demanded unanimity and they were able to achieve that because avoiding internal fractiousness was valued so highly. Political geography was another source of strength. The League’s territory included unimpeded access to the lower Great Lakes (Erie and Ontario), the St. Lawrence, the Lake Champlain corridor, and the Hudson River. They were a short voyage from New Amsterdam, as compared to the Wendat, who were hundreds of kilometres from the St. Lawrence. The Haudenosaunee could thus play a role as adversary or ally on short notice.

The French earned the enmity of the Haudenosaunee at Ticonderoga in 1610 but there were opportunities to win peace as well, although neither party was especially interested. In 1624 the League struck a peace with the Algonquin and Wendat so that they could turn their efforts against the Mahican (a.k.a. Mohican) whose lands lay along the Hudson River and who enjoyed primacy in the fur trade with the Dutch. Both the French and the Dutch were unhappy with this outcome, but it was a clear demonstration of the commercial goals of the League: they now could enter markets in both New Netherland and New England.

The Mourning Wars

The peace with the Wendat-Algonquin alliance lasted until 1636, although peace with the French was never assured. Champlain’s principal concern was to ensure the safe passage of the Wendat fur fleet in the spring. To that end he requested more troops from France and ordered the building of fortified settlements (including Trois-Rivières) along the St. Lawrence in 1634. The Haudenosaunee response was to build their own chain of fortified positions from which to better raid the fur brigades. For the next decade the League focused its efforts on harassing and capturing the Wendat-Algonquin fleets. This process intensified in the 1640s until 1647-1648 when the focus shifted to attacks on Wendat villages. Conflict between the Wendat and the Haudenosaunee had not before this time been so comprehensive. The Mourning Wars to that point had been retaliatory and retributory, but not a scorched-earth program. Taking the war into the heartland of the Wendat was a significant change in strategy, against which the Wendat failed badly.

The change in Haudenosaunee tactics reflected new circumstances. If the French were to be starved of furs to the point that they would seek peace and commerce with the League, then clearly their Wendat supply network had to be shattered. If the impact of smallpox and other exotic diseases on the Haudenosaunee was to be survived, then the practice of adopting captives would need to be more vigorously pursued. To that end, clearing out as many captives as could be harvested from a Wendat village and then torching it made sense. The loss of homes and food stores reduced the competition’s ability to serve the fur trade and made it impossible for captives to expect sanctuary at home if they were to run away. The Wendats’ trading partners would look elsewhere for maize and the Five Nations aimed to be the last major farming community in the region. Furs would head across Lake Ontario to the lands of the League, Haudenosaunee numbers would be replenished, and the Dutch and English would have no incentive to look beyond the Mohawk trademarts and merchants.

The largest share of the Wendat exiles wound up in the League. The Tahontaenrat joined the Seneca, the Arendarhonon were absorbed by the Seneca as well but also by the Onondaga, and the Attignawantan were adopted by the Mohawk. These realignments were complex and they had interesting outcomes. Some of the Wendat took their Catholicism with them into the Five Nations and the Mohawk villages in particular; subsequently there was a significant out-migration to the area just south of Montreal where offshoot pro-French and pro-Catholic villages were established. As well, some of the former Wendat became prominent figures within Haudenosaunee political and military life.[footnote]Bruce G. Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s ‘Heroic Age’ Reconsidered (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985): 259-80.[/footnote]

By 1660 the Haudenosaunee controlled the western lands that extended from the former Wendake (Huronia) east to the Ottawa River and south around Lake Michigan through the Ohio Valley. French accounts at the time suggest that the impacts of smallpox in the 1660s — on top of war losses in the 1640s and 1650s — combined with captive adoptions to create a situation in which there were more “foreigners” in Haudenosaunee villages than natives. The League’s purposes and vision did not change in the 17th and 18th centuries, but it is worth noting that by the 1660s the Five Nations was made up of very different personnel. It had, in effect, become an instrument for a more cosmopolitan Aboriginal control of the region.

The Iroquois Wars

For the remainder of the century, the League pursued a complex plan to do two things: secure its southern frontiers against the rival Susquehannock nation and contain the French threat. The League established a truce with the French (1667) and with the northern and eastern Algonquin (1672). Turning their attention to the south, they secured that frontier by 1679 only to discover the French and French allies back in their western lands. This provoked the bloodiest confrontations to date between the Haudenosaunee and the French.

Figure 5.11 Haudenosaunee conquests after the fall of Wendake (Huronia) extended deep into the Pays d’en Haut and south along Appalachia, where tribute states were established.

In 1680 the League returned to raiding Canadian settlements. The French replied with new infusions of troops and, in 1687, a path of devastation across Seneca territory. On July 26, 1689, the Haudenosaunee launched a reprisal attack on the village of Lachine, about 10 kilometres upriver from Montreal. Some 200 French and their allies were killed; the same number captured and marched off to League villages for torture and/or adoption. Lachine was razed.

The tide turned to the advantage of the French with the return of Count Frontenac, who found his forces facing both the Haudenosaunee and the English. Fortunately for Frontenac, the English were ineffectual as warriors and unreliable as allies to the Haudenosaunee. He was able to inflict a telling blow on League villages and food stores in the winter of 1694, an attack that, for once, caught the Haudenosaunee by surprise. The damage was severe and, following further French predations in 1696, the Haudenosaunee began to seek peace. The war with the French would, however, persist until 1701.

In the history of intercolonial conflict in North America the standard practice was to negotiate treaties between the European players and treat the Aboriginal participants as subsidiaries. A treaty with the English was, as far as the French were concerned, binding on the Aboriginal allies of the English. Frontenac broke with that practice in 1697: he regarded the Treaty of Ryswick of that year as having no purchase on the Haudenosaunee and he pressed for a separate treaty. This he won at the Great Peace of Montreal.

Figure 5.12 The Treaty of 1701, signed with pictograms.

From the Haudenosaunee perspective, the 1701 Great Peace reflected a need to reconcile conflicts within the League. It was reckoned that two-thirds of the Mohawk population had gone over to the French side while the remainder continued their staunch loyalty to the British. By winning a peace with the French and their allies, the Haudenosaunee were in a position to whipsaw the English against the French for trade and military support. This was confirmed when the Haudensaunee struck a separate treaty with the English at Albany in the same year. Having given the French permission to build a trading post at Detroit (Fort Pontchartrain), they secured commitments from the English to keep the French out of that very region.

It was this strategy of ostensible neutrality coupled with the Europeans’ fear that the Five Nations could tip either way that the Haudenosaunee used to protect their territory. Signing two treaties with the Europeans underlined, too, the Five Nations’ self-awareness as an autonomous political entity. One obvious goal of the Haudenosaunee — one that other Aboriginal nations did not pursue with as much success or alacrity — was containing the newcomer settlements. So long as the Haudenosaunee were a buffer state between the French and the English, the Europeans were happy with their continued presence. The Five Nations knew this and would find ways to exploit their position in the 18th century.

At the same time, by 1712 it was clear that the League was not the force it had been. Its warrior numbers had been reduced by half, the Mohawk had lost as much as two-thirds of their population to villages nearer to Canada, and the League was divided over whether the English were a threat or a source of support against the French.[footnote]Richard Aquila, The Iroquois Restoration: Iroquois Diplomacy on the Colonial Frontier, 1701-1754 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983), 70-1.[/footnote]

Attributions

Figure 5.11
5NationsExpansion by Codex Sinaiticus is used under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported license.

Figure 5.12
Grande Paix Montreal by Jeangagnon is in the public domain.

Like most instructors, I am never fully satisfied with the textbook I wind up choosing for my students. This one lacks a social history bent, the other is regionally-focussed in ways I don’t like, that one doesn’t say nearly enough about the economy or demography, and some seem geared toward the instructor rather than the student. I have often wanted to tear out the odd-numbered chapters from one text and staple them to the even-numbered chapters from another and then pass a third through a grinder and sprinkle its cheerful spirit of enquiry throughout. Writing a course text myself did not seem to be much of an option. This open text book project made all those scenarios possible.

This textbook is a document that exists in the Creative Commons. It is meant to be torn apart, restitched, added and subtracted from, improved, challenged, brought up to date, and even re-imagined. It is a system of storage rooms in which you’ll find information you can use or lock away. My goal has been to (a) provide a familiar framework of pre-confederation Canadian history that raises challenging questions for undergraduates and (b) to build the kind of text that I would want to use in my own classes. To that end, this open textbook is organized along lines that meet most post-secondary learning outcomes in this field while simultaneously leaving my own imprint on the final product. It is, then, both recognizably a survey text for the years to 1867 without being absent of personality. I strove to reassert an Aboriginal perspective on events and in this last regard I hope, humbly and as a non-Aboriginal person, that I have achieved some success. I have, as well, endeavoured to raise the profile of both demographic and environmental history at a time when both fields require our attention. The bottom line, however, is that the instructor and the students are in a position to make this text their own. And I encourage you to do so.

In order to make a resource like this one as widely available as possible one has to make the greatest possible use of other open educational resources (OER). Illustrations, for example, must be free of copyright and exist in the public domain or, if copyrighted, be released under a Creative Commons license. Including material that does not allow for sharing privileges limits the usefulness of the finished product. Meeting this objective structures the process of writing an open textbook in distinctive ways. OER are used liberally but the vast majority of the text is comprised of original material.

Knowing that some sections are likely to be reused more than others (and some possibly replaced more often than others), one makes judgment calls as to the length of sections so as to facilitate both processes. Learning Objectives, Key Terms, Exercises, Short Answer Exercises, a Glossary, and other features are added, knowing that they will be replaced/augmented/tweaked – and that the ability of a user to do so has to be made as easy as possible. The whole, then, is designed for repurposing and re-crafting, a rather different point of departure than one takes when writing a conventional monograph.

Some years ago I worked on a campus where a large patch of lawn was laid down between two busy buildings. There was a nice sidewalk around the edge, but it was obvious from the outset that people were going to walk across that grass. We watched as the path appeared, yellowed, and then became hardpacked – all in the course of only a few months. Then the facilities team showed up and laid the sidewalk where it was meant to go – where users wanted it to go. Interestingly, it was not in a straight line. This open textbook is like that experiment. I encourage you to reuse, remix, repurpose in ways that show us where users want it to go. Be fearless and creative.

Here’s your chance to make history.

John Douglas Belshaw
February 2015

Figure 5.9 A ca. 1660 map of Wendake (Huronia), now dotted with missions and Christian place names. From the Historia Canadensis.

Although Aboriginal populations remained dominant — in numbers and authority — through the 17th century across most of North America, change was upon them. It came so quickly in some instances and with such intensity that it produced a crisis of faith of sorts. Aboriginal peoples began to doubt themselves and their ability to adapt successfully to new forces in their midst. The European agenda of religious conversion took advantage of this trauma, not always with success, but reliably and in ways that worsened the crisis.

The Black Robes

The first of the French missionaries to arrive were priests of the Recollet order. From 1615 to 1629 the Recollets worked with Aboriginal individuals near the St. Lawrence and in Wendake (Huronia). They were understood by Aboriginal groups to be emissaries from the French with exotic spiritual ideas; the missionaries were something to be tolerated but not indulged. The focus of the Recollets was on individual conversions but even more on the needs of French traders living among the Wendat. The arrival of the Recollets’ successors, the Jesuits, changed the missionary approach.

The Jesuits were closely tied to the Compagnie des Cent-Associés and were part of the restoration of French authority after a brief English occupation of the colony. The Jesuit approach was to convert whole communities rather than individuals. They did so by exercising greater control over the behaviour of the coureur de bois and working from within the host-community culture. They studied Wyandot (the language of the Wendat), represented the French enterprise in the field, and attempted (with mixed success) to live among the Wendat according to their hosts’ practices, rather than imposing their own.

Figure 5.10 The Wendat Feast of the Dead entailed moving remains from one ossuary to a new one as village sites moved. Missionaries were both horrified and impressed by this cultural expression of intergenerational connection, so alien to their own experience. By J-F Lafitau, 1724.

The Wendat response to the clerics was mixed. On the one hand, the custom of exchanging community members had been well established in Wendat culture, so sending a few young men to Quebec to learn about the newcomers and accepting a few coureurs de bois or priests into their own villages just made sense. The priests’ agenda of cultural change, however, was not especially welcome. Various attempts were made to encourage the missionaries to return to New France, and plots were considered that would see them murdered by non-Wendat neighbours (and then invoking plausible deniability). But Champlain insisted on missionaries as part of the trading relationship so they were tolerated. Even the priests, however, knew that they were being judged by the Wendat and that they fell well short of being impressive. One report in the Jesuit Relations admits that the Wendat “gazed attentively at the Fathers, measured them with their eyes, asked if they were ill-natured, if they paddled well; then took them by the hands, and made signs to them that it would be necessary to handle the paddles well.”[footnote]Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, 1610-1791, XV (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers, 1898), 163, quoted in Olive Dickason, Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times (Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2002), 106.[/footnote]

The Whirlwind Years

Conditions changed in the 1630s. The Recollets had been replaced in Canada and Wendake (Huronia) by the Jesuits (although they continued in Acadia) at a time when Haudenosaunee hostilities were on the rise, as was smallpox. Of all the pivotal moments in this history none is as consequential as the arrival of exotic diseases. In 1636 smallpox swept through the Wendat villages. Over a five-year period the disease picked away at the Wendat past and future, claiming the lives of elders (who were both the story-keepers and political memory of their community) and children in particular. Wendat people who might find solace or reassurance in traditional shamanic responses increasingly turned to the Jesuits for answers. Whatever good the missionaries might have done in this respect, their efforts foundered as perhaps two-thirds of the Wendat population died in the space of four years. The Jesuit practice of administering deathbed baptisms was interpreted, too, as causing death. This was the closest the Wendat came to drawing a direct connection between the presence of Europeans and the appalling mortality rates associated with virgin soil diseases.

The Wendat system of governance, which emphasized individual freedom, played further havoc with the solidarity of Wendake (Huronia). Only converts to Catholicism were permitted to trade for French muskets and this led growing numbers to look more closely at what the Jesuits had to offer. There were trade goods, yes, but also there was a spiritual commodity on offer: many Wendat were drawn to Christianity because they perceived

… Jesus of Nazareth as a protective spirit who was supposed to bring good fortune to the devotee and to avert misfortune. This utilitarian approach to Christ explains the quick abandonment of the new faith when the Hurons were beset by imported diseases and by Iroquois attacks. Native Christians fared no better than traditionalists, and so, when Jesus failed as a guardian spirit, disillusioned converts reverted to aboriginal practices and beliefs. Their initial view of Jesus explains why there were so many apostates among the Hurons.[footnote]Peter Moogk, “Writing the Cultural History of Pre-1760 European Colonists,” French Colonial History, 4 (2003): 2.[/footnote]

While traditional beliefs among Iroquoian peoples could accommodate different, overlapping, and even contradictory spirit figures, Christianity’s monotheistic intolerance of other divinities meant that converts were effectively removed from their traditionalist kin and neighbours. At death — and keep in mind that 1636-49 saw an astonishing amount of death among the Wendat — families would be eternally lost to one another rather than rejoined in the hereafter. The position of traditionalists hardened against the Jesuits and even against the converts. Those Wendat communities with less exposure to the missionaries pulled back at the very moment when military unity was essential. Wendat women also proved reluctant to embrace Christianity, for a variety of reasons. Its patriarchal values were the most obvious difficulty: a matrilineal tradition would be subverted by a belief system that marginalized female voices.

The epidemics served to make the Wendat more vulnerable to Haudenosaunee attacks, and the loss of thousands of children meant that the stock of warriors was not going to be replenished in a hurry. The Haudenosaunee Five Nations League was able to acquire rifles from their Dutch trade partners and thus posed an even more fearsome danger than before. There was a brief peace in the late 1630s that evaporated in the 1640s as the Haudenosaunee launched wave after wave of attacks on their neighbours. From the European perspective, these Beaver Wars were about acquiring better hunting grounds or, similarly, unimpeded access to trade networks that would deliver pelts to their Hudson River corridor. The League’s own demographic crisis probably mattered more. Like the Wendat they had lost large numbers to disease (and significant numbers in conflict with the Confederacy) and one way of rebuilding the population was by means of raiding for captives. The evidence is clear that large numbers of Wendat women and children were marched and canoed across southern Ontario in these years into the villages of the League.[footnote]Olive Patricia Dickason, Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times, 3rd edition (Don Mills: OUP, 2002), 100-113.[/footnote]

It is easy to imagine the Wendat in a reactive state under these circumstances. Their society had collapsed in the space of 40 years from one of regional economic, cultural, and political dominance to insignificance. And yet every step along the way was connected to a vision of sustaining and advancing Wendake (Huronia). Accepting missionaries and French trade was bound up in consolidating commercial primacy and acquiring European goods with the continuance and expansion of gift-giving diplomacy and influence; conversion was motivated by a desire to keep kin together in the afterlife or to gain better access to French weaponry.

The retreat from Wendake (Huronia) in 1649-50 took the majority of the Wendat in one of four directions: some joined with the Tionontati and Attawandaron to the south (although that ended badly with further Haudenosaunee raids); some aligned with their longstanding trade partners in the Council of Three Fires (the Anishinaabeg in particular) and came to have considerable influence in developments in those communities; many fled to New France where they were to live under the watchful eye of the Jesuits near Quebec and provide generations of warriors in defence of the Laurentian colony; still others joined up — willingly or not — with the Haudenosaunee, where common elements of their traditional culture would have a good chance of surviving and, if so inclined, they would have a chance to avenge themselves on the French.

Attributions

Figure 5.9
Carte Huronie en 1660 by ChristianT is in the public domain.

Figure 5.10
Huron Feast of the Dead by Neufast is in the public domain.

The significance of the Columbian Exchange and the sharing of foodways, technology, and cultures that resulted can hardly be overstated. While a profound social and economic revolution shook the Eastern Hemisphere as the influx of crops and mineral wealth made merchants and monarchs wealthy, the Western Hemisphere struggled to adapt to new diseases, animals, and neighbours. The arrival of new technologies — iron tools, copper pots, rifles, axes — both broadened the Aboriginal world and narrowed it. As one scholar puts it, there was a “shift in subsistence strategies brought about by the fur trade as [pre-contact] exploitation of the total environment gave way to the specialized pursuit of fur-bearing animals.” Under these circumstances, food supplies sometimes suffered and Aboriginal peoples turned to the fur trade posts “to offset the increased danger of famine that this switch in emphasis entailed.”[footnote]Olive Dickason, Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times, 3rd edition (Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2002), 117.[/footnote] This dependence was something that the French and the English encouraged.

Similarly, traditional ideas about the structure and inhabitants of the world were put aside as Europeans and Aboriginal peoples encountered and ultimately learned from each other. Genetic histories and futures, too, were inextricably intertwined. What is most important to note, however, is that these changes and adjustments did not occur in a short period of time. They are underway even now. There is a tipping point in the history of Aboriginal North America, that moment at which the issue at stake is not the quality of the relationship between two peoples but how to strategize survival in the face of a European imperialism that was, ironically, bankrolled by Aboriginal gold and silver and fed by New World potatoes. The shifting boundaries of conflict between the many peoples of North America is the subject of the next chapter.

Suggested Readings

1. Gilbert, William. “Beothuk-European Contact in the 16th Century: A Re-evaluation of the Documentary Evidence.” Acadiensis XXXX, no.1 (Winter/Spring 2011): 24-44.
2. Moogk, Peter. “The ‘Others’ Who Never Were: Eastern Woodlands Amerindians and Europeans in the Seventeenth Century.” French Colonial History 1 (2002): 77-100.
3. Moussette, Marcel. “A Universe under Strain: Amerindian Nations in North-Eastern North America in the 16th Century.” Post-Medieval Archaeology 43, issue 1 (2009): 30-47.
4. Noel, Jan. “Fertile with Fine Talk: Ungoverned Tongues among Haudenosaunee Women and their Neighbors.” Ethnohistory 57, no.2 (Spring 2010): 201-23.
5. Reid, John G. “How Wide is the Atlantic Ocean? Not Wide Enough!” Acadiensis XXXIV, no.2 (Spring 2005): 81-87.

Attributions

This chapter contains material taken from U.S. History: The New World: 1492-1600/Exploration and Conquest of the New World/The Clash of Culture created by Boundless. It is used under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.

This chapter contains material taken from Transforming Indigenous Foodways by Ian Mosby. It is used under a CC-BY-NC-SA 2.5 Canada license.

Aboriginal diplomacy in the years between 1530 and 1867 was complex and fluid. Alliances between First Nations were formed, served for a while, and then sometimes shattered or slowly dissolved. Looking back along the timeline one might get the impression that these alliances were in many instances short-lived, showing instability or even fickleness among partners. One need only look at the brief shelf life of European alliances (or, indeed, any in the 20th century) to see, however, that Aboriginal agreements were reasonably durable. For the European intruders, the character of these alliances might not have been clear, nor was their purpose always obvious. In an era when European nation states were increasingly emphasizing common language and culture (or enforcing the same on subject groups) the fact that Algonquian-speakers did not automatically share a common purpose or that Iroquoian-speakers were clearly at odds was perplexing for some of the newcomers.

The Wabanaki Confederacy

The area described now as the Maritimes, Newfoundland, Maine, Vermont, and the Gaspé Peninsula was among the first to experience sustained contact with Europeans. The Abenaki, Mi’kmaq, Wuastukwiuk (Malecite), Pasamaquoddy, and Penobscot (Western Abenaki) together covered much of this territory and somewhat more. They shared many cultural features and traditions, including a suite of common ancestral stories. They also shared common enemies in the Mohawk of the Haudenosaunee League. Wabanaki tradition indicates that they invited the French deep into their territory along the St. Lawrence with an eye to positioning them against the Iroquois enemies.

Relations with the French were thereafter very good, although the same could not be said of the English. The Pequot War in New England in 1637 gave the Penobscot cause for alarm. Their neighbours, the Naragansett, had sided with the English against the Pequot whose main village was razed by the colonists with hardly a soul left alive. The brutality of the English disturbed even the Naragansett, but they carried on with their alliance, to the disquiet of the Penobscot. Subsequently in 1675-78, large-scale conflict broke out again in Metacomet’s War (or King Philip’s War). This began as an attempt to push the rapidly growing English Puritan colonists back into the sea. An imbalance of numbers (there were already more than 80,000 New Englanders and Metacomet’s alliance was down to fewer than 10,000, thanks mainly to pandemics earlier in the century) and the hostility of neighbouring Aboriginal peoples such as the Mohawk doomed the crusade from the outset.[footnote]Harold E.L. Prins, “Children of Gluskap: Wabanaki Indians on the Eve of the European Invasion,” in American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture, and Cartography in the Land of Norumbega, Emerson W. Baker, Edwin A. Churchill, Richard D’Abate, Kristine L. Jones, Victor A. Conrad, and Harald E.L. Prins, editors (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994): 95-117.[/footnote]

Some 3,000 Naragansett Confederacy people died in this war and others were shipped off into slavery in the West Indies. It is believed that a large number fled north into the Penobscot and Pasamaquoddy territories. If the foundation of a Wabanaki Confederacy wasn’t already laid in 1678 it certainly was soon thereafter. The Wabanaki Confederacy viewed the English as their principal threat and conducted effective land and sea attacks for the next hundred years, earning the long-term enmity of the British regime in Halifax as well as that of their old enemies, the Puritan colonists of New England. In the 18th century, the Wabanaki Confederacy would prove to be the most important and valuable ally of the French. Catholic missionaries moved into their territories and spent at least as much time evangelizing the Wabanaki peoples as they did ministering to the Acadians. At no point in the century of conflict that followed Metacomet’s War were the Wabanaki doing the bidding of the French, however much the English might have thought that was the case. The Wabanaki agenda was consistently the preservation if not the restoration of their lands in the face of English colonial growth.

The Haudenosaunee League of Five Nations

No political organization in Aboriginal North America was to play as important and as lasting a role in the post-contact period as the Haudenosaunee. Known to the French as the Iroquois and to the English as the Five Nations, the Haudenosaunee alliance came together sometime around 1450, which makes it significantly older than Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Original members of this cultural and ceremonial organization or League — the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca — resolved long-standing differences by acceptance of the Great Law of Peace. The number of Haudenosaunee villages was not great at the time of contact, nor were they located close to one another. All were well fortified, an indication that peace between the League members hadn’t eliminated external threats. The Onondaga villages were the geographical centre of the Five Nations and they hosted the main council. Being a matrilineal culture, the council received much direction from the women in the community, a practice that was evidently recommended by the Great Peacemaker in the mid-1400s. This prophet arose in the Wendat villages of the north and he made it his goal to end the Mourning Wars between the Iroquoian-speaking peoples. In this he succeeded only partially, as the Wendat, Erieehronon (Erie), Tionontati (Petun or Tobacco), and Attawandaron (Neutral) remained on the outside of the League. The Five Nations were, however, increased to six in 1722 when the Tuscarora abandoned North Carolina and moved north to join the Oneida.[footnote]Richard Aquila, The Iroquois Restoration: Iroquois Diplomacy on the Colonial Frontier, 1701-1754 (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1983): 29-42.[/footnote]

As a military organization, the League was highly effective. During the Beaver Wars (ca.1630-1701) they were able to expand their influence over much of the lands west of  and some to the east of Appalachia. Indeed, it was the extension of League influence into the Carolinas that brought them into contact with the Tuscarora, a branch of the family that had been lost sight of, perhaps for centuries. The initial impetus of the Great Peace, of course, predates the arrival of the Europeans and so it has to be seen in the context of pre-contact circumstances. Although the Five Nations were arrayed across what is now upstate New York, their presence extended in the 17th century into the lands north of Lake Ontario. Their conflict with Algonquian-speakers to the east and north, and spectacularly with the Wendat to the west had its roots long before the Dutch and French ingratiated themselves into North American affairs. The strength of the French-Wendat-Algonquin alliance, however, catalyzed Haudenosaunee mobilization. A century of relative success in the conflicts that followed enabled the Haudenosaunee to play a critical role in regional politics.

The Wendat Confederacy

The French called them the Huron, a term that either described the way they wore their hair or was derived from an Algonquin description. The Wendat (or Wyandot) were a loose but effective federation of four Iroquoian-speaking tribes or nations. The Arendarrhonons (People of the Rock), Attingueenougnahak (People of the Cord), Attignaouantan (People of the Bear), and the Tahontaenrat (People of the Deer) joined in an alliance probably in the 1500s. Archaeological evidence suggests that some of their lands were at one time along the north shore of Lake Ontario, but in the 16th century they coalesced around Georgian Bay.[footnote]James F. Pendergast, “The Confusing Identities Attributed to Stadacona and Hochelaga,” Journal of Canadian Studies (Winter 1998): 3-4.[/footnote] By the time of Champlain’s visit to their villages in 1615, there were some 25,000 to 30,000 Wendat in Wendake, also known as the Huron Confederacy or Huronia.

Fear of Haudenosaunee attacks in the continuing Mourning Wars may have motivated the Wendat to relocate to new territories. Relocation to Georgian Bay could have arisen, too, from commercial interests as that locale is at the confluence of several key water routes running north, south, and east. As agricultural people, the Wendat moved from time to time to new, fresh farmland but this was an arduous business that involved dismantling and rebuilding longhouses, erecting new palisades, disinterring and reburying the dead, and so on. A long-distance move, therefore, was not undertaken lightly. Whatever considerations took them to Georgian Bay, the outcome was economically favourable. They were able to trade surplus maize, other food crops, tobacco (usually obtained from the Iroquoian Tionontati to the south), squirrel skins (traded on from the other Iroquoians in the region, the Attawandaron), and manufactured products like fishing nets for meat, hides, and, of course, furs. As their population grew they became the dominant military force in the region as well. They had the commercial and physical power to lay claim to extensive trading zones and to charge tolls for passage along the many canoe routes through the interior. As the French would discover, trade in and around Wendake (Huronia) was conducted in Wyandot (a variant of Iroquois), by Algonquin, Anishinaabe, and other trading peoples. This was a sure sign of who held the most influence in the trade networks.[footnote]Bruce G. Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s ‘Heroic Age’ Reconsidered (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985): 157-61.[/footnote]

As the dominant trading hub in the region, the Wendat had a close relationship with the Algonquin and Innu (Montagnais) Their alliance — less formal and more functional — was a thorn in the side of the Haudenosaunee and governed much of what the French could do in the St.Lawrence for the better part of a century. For example, when, in 1626, the French established a pact with the Attawandaron, the Wendat moved quickly to sabotage it and force the French traders back into Wendat-controlled channels.

Council of Three Fires

Known in Anishinaabe as Niswi-mishkodewin, the Council of Three Fires was a venerable alliance between the Odawa (Ottawa) of Lake Huron’s north shore, the Anishinaabeg (Ojibwa) of the Sault Narrows between Lakes Huron and Superior, and the Potawatomi of what is now Michigan. Algonquian-speaking and closely related by (sometimes strategic) intermarriage, the Council was a buffer between the expansive Haudenosaunee and the fur resources of the north. They absorbed many refugees from the dying Wendat Confederacy and experienced significant growth in the century that followed. It was an Anishinaabe population boom that drove the Council deeper into Dakota Sioux territory on the western shore of Lake Michigan, onto the Plains (where they adapted and emerged as a distinctive Plains Ojibwa culture), and into southern Ontario, replacing Iroquoian-speaking peoples and gradually pushing back the Haudenosaunee. This last move was, in some measures, a restoration of Wendat claims.

The Three Fires controlled a pivotal part of North America: the upper Great Lakes. This gave them access to the rivers of the north, the Plains of the West, the Mississippi and St. Lawrence river systems, and the economies in each of these regions. Headquartered seasonally at Michilimackinac, the Council generally sided with the French in the colonial wars, although individual member tribes/communities could set their own course and often did so. In 1763 the Odawa leader Pontiac led a challenge to putative British control over the Ohio Valley and the Pays d’en Haut.[footnote]See Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).[/footnote]

The Iron Confederacy

The alliance of Cree, Assiniboine, and Anishinaabeg (a.k.a. Saulteaux, Plains Ojibwa) arose in the 17th century if not earlier. Driven in large measure by the technological advantages acquired during the early days of the fur trade, the Confederacy diffused rifles, metal blades, and metal tools across the Plains from northeast to southwest. The Cree had been at the tail end of trade originating in Canada in the 1600s, but the arrival of the HBC in their territory gave them access to newer and better quality goods. The brief advantage of their rivals (which included the A’aninin or Gros Ventres) who were first to acquire horses was reversed by the better-armed Iron Confederacy. This alliance was as much about economic power as it was about military resilience; the Confederacy could reach deep into the Missouri Valley to raid or trade for horses and also to exchange (at a considerable markup) British goods for the Aboriginal products that mattered most to the Confederacy and, of course, furs.

Chipewyan Solidarity

The Dene nations to the north and west of Hudson Bay were placed into serious peril by the acquisition of guns by their Cree neighbours and enemies. The Chipewyan were the worst affected and earliest to respond strategically. Much of the credit for this repositioning has been attributed to Thanadelthur, a singular character in Chipewyan history. Captured in 1713 during an attack by the Cree, Thanadelthur made good an escape and, finding refuge at the HBC’s York Factory, developed a plan for the survival of her people. She persuaded the English traders that the Chipewyan had direct access to superior furs and copper and that establishing a post in their territory would benefit the company’s bottom line. This plan would only work if the Chipewyan could get breathing room from the Cree, so Thanadelthur turned her attention to a party of Cree who were amenable to seeking peace. The mission that Thanadelthur led north into Chipewyan territory nearly ended in disaster but she is credited with singlehandedly persuading both Aboriginal parties to agree to a lasting peace. The HBC established direct links to the northern peoples, providing them with guns with which they could at last counter the Cree.

Three consequences arose from Thanadelthur’s actions. First, the Chipewyan tightened the loose alliances between their own peoples, building commercial and military solidarity where before there had been little. Second, by driving the Cree back the Chipewyan found themselves expanding into boreal forests; soon they were adapting the canoe-based systems of transportation familiar to their enemies (which superseded their pedestrian and dog-haulage systems wherever it made sense to do so). Finally, better transportation, arms, and mutual support meant that the Chipewyan themselves became expansive, pushing the Dene and other western groups farther inland while exhausting beaver stocks all the way to the Mackenzie River.[footnote]Alan D. McMillan, Native Peoples and Cultures of Canada (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1988): 230-35.[/footnote]

The Blackfoot Confederacy

The Niitsitapi (Blackfoot Confederacy) is of uncertain age. Linguistic evidence (with Algonquian roots) suggests an origin in or near what is now New Brunswick and Maine. The population shifted west at least 400 years before contact with Europeans and so were well established as a Plains culture by that time. The Kanai (or Blood), the Siksika (or Blackfoot), and the Piikuni (also known as the Piegan or Pikuni) occupied the core of the Confederacy, which was enlarged by alliances with the A’aninin and the Tsuu T’ina (or Sarcee) made during the 18th and 19th centuries. The Niitsitapi would come to epitomize the bison-hunting cultures of the northern Plains and were early adapters of horses. Their aggressive defence of their territories and what neighbours complained of as overcharging for access to resources and travel corridors earned them the enmity of the Kutenai in particular, who were forced out of the western Plains and into the cordillera. Niitsitapi leadership, as in many Plains societies, was more corporate and less individualistic than in some eastern woodlands societies. This made the Confederacy better equipped to counter attacks on any member and, in later years, to negotiate with a single voice when it came to diplomacy and, indeed, treaty-making.

Across the Rockies

Alliances emerged and shifted between the Aboriginal peoples of the interior plateau during the proto-contact and early contact periods. Three examples are of special importance.

The Okanagan-Secwepemc-Nlaka’pamux alliance of the early 19th century reflects a process of Interior Salishan consolidation. Years of conflict between the Okanagan and Secwepemc in particular had obliged the latter to tighten their own internal alliances against their southern neighbours. Itinerant Okanagan made contact with Euro-Canadians in Montana in the late 18th century and may have been motivated (and enabled) by new trade goods and access to horses to bind together their erstwhile enemies. By about 1810 the alliance was secured under the military and hereditary leadership of N’kwala.

While the Nuu-cha-nulth and Clayoquot peoples were consolidating their hold on the west coast of Vancouver Island by (sometimes brutal) military means, the Kwakwaka’wakw people of Johnstone Strait were becoming a federation in every way but name. Their raiding parties pushed neighbours farther south, allowing them to colonize vacated territories. By the early 1800s their numbers were rising and the villages were many. In both cases, political realignments were underway before the arrival of Europeans, but it seems likely that the newcomers provided a further stimulus as local leaders sought to establish monopolies in trade.

Finally, and in response to Kwakwaka’wakw raids, the Hul’qumi’num-speaking peoples of the southern Salish Sea abandoned long traditions of village autonomy and established a working alliance in the early 19th century.