The disruption of the Native world that resulted from European expansion into the North American continent took place on four frontiers, and the intruders were many: there were the French anchored on the St. Lawrence; the English centred on Hudson Bay and James Bay; the Spanish in northern Mexico and the American south-west; and the Spanish, English, Russians, and Americans on the west coast. Each frontier was significantly different. All the same, contact was made in similar, recognizable stages right across the continent.
On the east coast, the Native peoples’ earliest encounters were fleeting ones with mariners, and sustained meetings only began at the very end of the fifteenth century with the explorations of John Cabot. Such meetings did not take place in Hudson Bay and James Bay until a century and a half later, starting with the voyages of Henry Hudson in 1610. They did not commence on the west coast until almost three centuries later, in 1774, when the Spaniard Juan Perez probed northward from California as far as the Queen Charlotte Islands.
Masks were central to Native ceremonies throughout Canada, and were used to portray mythical beings and to represent spirits. The nineteenth-century Iroquois False Face mask (far left) represents a crooked-nosed giant who challenged the power of the Creator. Such masks were carved directly into tree trunks from which they were subsequently “freed.” The wooden Dorset Inuit mask (below) is over one thousand years old, and was probably used in religious-magic ceremonies. The matched stone masks (top) were likely intended to be worn one over the other by a single
Performer in the winter rituals known as halait (sacred), and secretly switched to demonstrate the magical powers of the dancer. The unsighted “twin” was collected at the Tsimshian village of Kitkatla in 1879, and the sighted one on the Nass River or at Metlakatla.
A period of time—barely a decade on the west coast, as much as fifty years in the Hudson Bay and James Bay region—usually elapsed between these initial meetings and the beginning of regular contact along the coast. Once regular contact was established, either from ships or as the newcomers built settlements for themselves, European influence expanded rapidly into the interior. Throughout North America, explorers’ accounts make it clear that news of their arrival spread swiftly over long distances. Even remote tribes soon became aware of the presence of the intruders. When the English and Erench first set themselves up on the western shores of Hudson Bay in the late seventeenth century, for instance, their Indian informants gave them accounts of the Spanish, who were described as bearded men with great canoes located several months’ march to the west-south-west, even though none of
“Ceremony of the Pipe,” from the Hudson’s Bay Company’s 1921 calendar. In this highly romanticized picture, the artist has attempted to portray an Aboriginal diplomatic institution that was a central feature of the early fur trade through which economic and political relationships were established and renewed annually. Subsequently, this tradition was continued in the treaty relationships between Aboriginal people and Canada.
These Indians had ever presumably travelled there. Through this information network, Indians living inland quickly learned, too, about exotic European items, and in a relatively short time Native routes were established for long-distance trade. In this way, European trade was carried inland from the coast by the Native peoples themselves well in advance of explorers or traders.
Soon after John Cabot’s voyage to Newfoundland in 1497, Native people throughout the Maritimes would have begun to encounter Europeans fairly frequently. Many of the people of the eastern coast must have concluded between 1500 and 1550 that these seaborne newcomers were transient and unthreatening, yet eager to acquire furs and able to pay for them with attractive new items: iron axes, copper pots, cloth, and decorative beads. By the 1550s, small amounts of European goods had penetrated the whole Algonquian-Iroquoian system of eastern Canada, and people on Lake Huron or Michigan who would never in their lives see a European (or even salt water) had handled the remarkable novelties arriving from the east. The first interest of these strange items may have been symbolic and spiritual; beads, coppers, and ironwares were frequently buried in sixteenth-century cemeteries. Native societies, however, soon discerned the practical value of iron axes and copper pots, and the advantages of metal arrowheads and spear points in both hunting and Native
A Metis buffalo hunter photographed by Humphrey Lloyd Hime, 1858. The prairie Metis developed an economy and society that was very different from that of their relatives who lived in the forest regions of Canada. Buffalo-hunting, farming, trading, the freighting business using Red River carts, and wage labour were all important components of the Prairie Metis economy.
Wars. During the mid-1500s, their growing interest in these goods made it possible for the Europeans to secure a foothold in the local networks of diplomacy and trade. When Alexander Mackenzie made his famous expedition across British Columbia, he learned from the Sekani, who had had no direct contact with the intruders, that “Their [European] ironwork they obtained from the people who inhabit the bank of that river, and an adjacent lake, in exchange for beaver skins, and dressed moose skins. They represented the latter as travelling, during a moon, to get to the country of other tribes, who live in houses, with whom they traffic for the same commodities____”
Disastrously for the Native people, these trading routes also carried European diseases, and measles and smallpox wreaked havoc. The exact tolls of these early epidemics will never be known, but losses of 50 per cent or more occurred during documented outbreaks of disease such as the one that hit the Huron in 1639.
Following in the wake of Native traders who carried their goods far inland came the European overland explorers, sometimes accompanied by missionaries. Because these first explorers only obtained limited glimpses of the country as they were conducted through it by their Native guides, for aU practical purposes much of the changing Native world would lie beyond the view of the intruders for some time to come.
Sustained local contact between Europeans and Aboriginal people began with the establishment of trading posts. And trading posts brought settlements with them. Once again, there were considerable variations in the amount of time that elapsed Between the arrival of the first explorers and the establishment of the first trading posts or missions. Some explorers built posts as they travelled, others did not—in British Columbia, for example, settlements did not follow for more than twenty years; in northern Ontario, for roughly eighty years.
The establishment of trading posts and missions in what is now Quebec changed the relationship between Aboriginal people and Europeans. It meant that there was much more social interaction between the groups, which not only resulted in increasing economic exchanges, but encouraged the rapid growth of a population of mixed ancestry and, eventually, the emergence of a distinct people—the Metis. In many respects the offspring of mixed ancestry became the new brokers between the Europeans and those Native groups that continued to maintain some physical and cultural distance from the intruders. The arrival of missionaries was an added complication, because these men had as their explicit goal the transformation of Native culture into something resembling the Christian European model.
All the same, the role of missionaries was minor before 1821—mainly because of the intensely commercial nature of the early Europeans’ activities. Indeed, except for New Erance, and the Labrador coast, the missionary incursion happened quite separately from that of the fur traders. In most of central and western Canada, missionaries arrived long after the traders had set themselves up. Most were well intentioned by their own standards, and apparently attempted to shield the Aboriginal people from the worst aspects of European culture. Nevertheless, they believed European culture to be the proper, acceptable way of life, and their arrival marked the beginning of a systematic assault on Native religion and beliefs and many traditional social customs, an assault that would be intensified later when governments assumed responsibility for Native affairs.