Aboriginal Peoples circa 1823

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Distribution and Location of Aboriginal Peoples circa 1823

The period of time covered by the map is one of enormous regional contrasts:

• The Atlantic Coast
• Lower and Upper Canada
• The Western Interior
• Athapaskan Groups in the North
• The West Coast
• The Northeast

The factors that eventually led to the transformation of Aboriginal peoples from self-directed entities to a state of poverty and dependence are plainly visible in the early 19th century, particularly in eastern and central Canada.

In the main, these factors were related to the close relationship all the aboriginal groups had with their resource base. Either singly or most often in combination, the following factors eroded the basis for their traditional lives:

• the destruction of part of their food supply, particularly big game which also provided clothing
• the destruction of valuable fur bearers which could have been exchanged for necessities
• the restriction of seasonal movements due to European settlement
• the lack of opportunity to undertake migration to resource-rich areas
• the painfully slow, often unsuccessful adoption of new subsistence strategies on small parcels of unproductive land

Once the original relationship with the land was broken, and especially once groups lost most of the land they once controlled, they were left vulnerable to social disintegration and transformation.

The Atlantic Coast

Through the European settled parts of Eastern Canada, Aboriginal peoples lived in small groups, had small families and lived on small parcels of land. On the Atlantic coast large game and fur bearers had been destroyed and traditional Aboriginal seasonal movements to alternative resources had been disrupted by European settlement.

Cut off from coastal resources through European settlement, and decimated by disease and hostile encounters with settlers, the Beothuk of Newfoundland were nearing extinction. Shanawdithit, the last-known Beothuk in 1823 was captured with her mother and sister at the point of starvation and brought to St. John's, where all three died from tuberculosis.

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Portrait of Demasduit (Mary March), Painted in 1819 by Lady Hamilton

With few exceptions, the Micmac and Maliseet were destitute and confined to reserves or to undesirable areas where the transition to agriculture was difficult, especially for a people who had no prior experience in such a spatially-restrictive way of life. Winter starvation and freezing were common because game animals, the traditional source for winter food and clothing, were gone.

Lower and Upper Canada

Along the St. Lawrence River, in the settled parts of Lower Canada, Aboriginal conditions were marginally better than those in the East Coast because most groups practiced some agriculture. In contrast to the St. Lawrence lowlands and the Atlantic Coast where Aboriginal groups were of similar linguistic origin and had lived in these areas for hundreds of years, in Southern Ontario all but the Ojibwa groups and some of the Ottawa and Wyandot were refugees from the newly-created United States.

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Sketches of Algonquian Indians working with a canoe and beaver trap along Lake Huron, Ontario

Most of the southern Ontario groups were traditionally agriculturists. Part of their food quest, the part contributed mainly by men through hunting, fishing and trapping, was gradually being curtailed by European settlement. The more mobile Algonquian groups began to practice some agriculture, but, for the most part, they still moved seasonally north of the settled areas for fishing and hunting. Still master of their land, the Algonquian groups of northern Ontario and Quebec had been involved in the fur economy for over 200 years.

The most complex of the Upper Canada settlements was the Six Nations Reserve which contained large fragments of what had once been nine distinct societies speaking three different languages and a number of dialects. Among their many problems, these groups also had to develop social and political institutions that would permit them to live together with a minimum of strife.

By the early 1800s, fur and game resources were exhausted creating severe winter food shortages. In central Quebec, seasonal movements were undertaken to northern caribou grounds, and in both areas the Aboriginal peoples turned increasingly to small game.

These changes in the resource base required that winter hunting groups become smaller and operate in greater isolation from one other. Along the international border west of Lake Superior, the Ojibwa were expanding along the fringe of the forest toward the large game resources of the grasslands, a movement fiercely resisted by the Dakota.

The Western Interior

In the western interior, food animals were still plentiful enough to be hunted on the prairie (bison, elk and pronghorn antelope), and on the tundra (caribou). On the Prairie edge and in the northern woodlands overhunting was beginning to cause a decline in bison, moose and caribou. Beaver stocks were dangerously low everywhere except in the Athabasca country.

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Blackfoot Indians Crossing the Bow River, Alberta, by S.P. Hall

Cree-Assiniboin expansion along the northwestern edges of the prairies and into the headwaters of the Athabasca River caused some population dislocations of resident Athapaskan speakers. Their increasingly long movements into the grasslands for bison, brought them into frequent and often bloody contact with the fiercely independent Blackfoot.

Although the plains groups had been subject to variety of epidemic diseases, their populations were still resilient enough to recover. Their social institutions were also strong enough to combine a traditional way of life with a trade based on hides, grease and pemmican.

Athapaskan Groups in the North

By the late 18th century, trapping had become an important activity among the more southern Athapaskan groups, and by the 19th century, among the groups along the Mackenzie River. Northwest of this area into what is now Yukon Territory, Aboriginal inhabitants were still outside direct European contact. Throughout the country of the Athapaskans, all Aboriginal groups followed a fairly traditional way of life based on hunting (principally caribou) and fishing, to which trapping had been added as part of the normal seasonal cycle.

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Photograph of Athapaskan women's costumes and ornaments

The West Coast

On the West Coast and in the mountainous interior, European contact was relatively recent. The lucrative trade in sea otter pelts had all but disappeared as the animal had been hunted to near extinction, but food resources based on fishing along the coast and fishing and hunting in the interior were still plentiful.

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An Indian salmon weir and dugout canoe on the Cowichan River, 1866, a typical native food system along the Pacific coast

Throughout the area sedentary village life was common, some with populations up to 1500. Although, epidemic diseases had already reduced some of the aboriginal groups along the coast, this was still the most densely populated area of Aboriginal peoples in Canada.

The Northeast

Only the Inuit groups on the Labrador coast, eastern Baffin Island and the Caribou Inuit south of Chesterfield Inlet had steady contact with Europeans. Hunting of sea mammals was important everywhere, supplemented regionally by caribou and fishing. It is doubtful if direct or indirect contact had much of an impact on any of the Inuit groups at this time except for those on the Labrador coast and the shores of Hudson Bay. Similarly, the Naskapi in the northern interior of Quebec, who were mainly caribou hunters, had very little contact with Europeans.

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Seal hunting by the Inuit included waiting and listening at seal-holes on the ice, as portrayed by Captain G. Lyon during a search for the North West Passage, 1821 to 1823