First nations

Canada has been inhabited by aboriginal peoples, known as the First Nations for about 10 000 years. This is the current title used by Canada to describe the various societies of the indigenous peoples, called Americans in the US. They have also been known as Native Canadians, Aboriginal Americans or Aboriginals and in fact are officially called Indians in the Indian Act, which defines the status of the First Nations, and in the Indian Register, the official record of members of First Nations. Today “Indian” is generally offensive and came about from the very first explorers confusing America with Asia.

The First Nations people of Canada are made up of four main groups excluding the Inuit in the North and Metis. The collective term for all three aboriginal groups is First Peoples. Each of these main groups contained many tribes, each of which had adapted to their environments which were all slightly different. The four main groups were subdivided by the following geographic areas. Among the largest tribes were the Haida, Nootka and Salish. They made glorious totem poles, a trait often attributed to other tribes as well. The plains nations included primarily the Sioux, Blackfoot, the Plains-Cree and the Plains-Ojibwa. These people used tipis as their homes, covered with skins. Their main sustenance was the buffalo, which they used as food and for all their garments. Tribal leaders often wore large headdresses made of feathers, something which is wrongly attributed to all first nations peoples.

The largest group near the St. Lawrence waterway was the Iroquois. They included the Huron peoples of central Ontario and the League of Five Nations, who lived in the USA, south of Lake Ontario. The Algonquins, Mi`kmaqs in the Maritimes, the Innu in Quebec and the Cree and Ojibwa in northern Ontario and Manitoba occupied the North-East Woodlands.

Inuit is a general term for a group of culturally similar indigenous peoples of Arctic. Canadian Inuit live primarily in Nunavut, Nunavik and in Nunatsiavut. The Inuit are traditionally hunters who fish and hunt whale, walrus and seal by kayak or by waiting at airholes in the ice. They use igloos as hunting or emergency shelters. They make use of animal skins in their clothing and Dog sleds that are used for travel pulled by Inuit Sled Dogs, though snowmobiles have largely replaced this mode of travel.

The European arrival caused a great deal of damage to the Inuit way of life, causing mass death and other suffering. Around 1970 Inuit leaders came forward and pushed for the respect for the Inuit territories. One of the resulting landclaims agreements created the Canadian territory of Nunavut, the largest landclaims agreement in Canadian history. In recent years, circumpolar cultural and political groups have come together to promote the Inuit people and to fight against ecological problems, such as the greenhouse effect and resulting global warming, which heavily affects the Inuit population due to the melting and thinning of the arctic ice and possible extinction of arctic mammals. Nunavut premier Paul Okalik took the lead in this regard in a First Ministers` meeting discussing the Kyoto Accord.

The Metis are an ethnic group of the Canadian prairies and Ontario. This community of descent consists of individuals descended from marriages of Cree, Ojibway and Saulteaux women to French Canadian and British employees of the Hudson`s Bay Company. Their history dates to the mid-seventeenth century and they have been recognized as a people since the early eighteenth. There is no generally accepted standard for determining who is Metis and who not, so estimates of the number of Metis vary from 300000 to 700000 or more. The most famous Metis was Louis Riel who led what are usually depicted as two failed rebellions, the Red River Rebellion in 1869 in the area now known as Manitoba, and the North-West Rebellion in 1885 in the area known as Saskatchewan. Reasonable doubts be raised about whether either of these events was a rebellion. For example, the actions considered rebellious in 1869 were undertaken by Riel as the leader of government recognized by Canada as in legitimate control of territory that did not belong to Canada.

Canada negotiated the Manitoba Act with this government. After these rebbelions, land speculators and other non-Metis effectively stripped the Metis of land by exploiting a government program for its “purchase” at unreal, low prices. The Metis are not recognized as a First Nation by the Canadian government and do not receive the benefits granted to First Nations under the Indian Act. However, the new Canadian constitution of 1982 recognizes the Metis as an aboriginal group and has enabled individual Metis to sue successfully for recognition of their traditional rights, such as rights to hunt and trap. In 2003 a court ruling in Ontario found that the Metis deserve the same rights as other aboriginal communities of Canada.