In 1535, when Jacques Cartier reached the island that is today
known as Montréal, he discovered that it had "fine ploughed land." This
was the land of the farming peoples who occupied the Great
Lakes and St. Lawrence region at that time, living in villages
of as many as 2,000 inhabitants. Because they sustained the community
by cultivating what they called 'the three sisters'—corn, beans and squash—the
women were highly respected. The men, for their part, fished and trapped
to supplement the basic vegetarian diet. After a few decades in one place,
when the soil was depleted, these peoples moved their villages and cleared
new land. Scattered bands of nomadic hunters lived on the wide belt of
boreal forest and taiga that crosses Canada
from Labrador to the Yukon,
as well as in the forests of what are now the Atlantic
provinces.
Because the environment was ill suited to farming, these groups got most
of their food from the abundant wildlife with which they shared the land.
In the winter, they spread out through the forest to track moose, caribou
and small mammals. When the good weather arrived, they gathered at water's
edge to fish, hunt for birds, collect eggs, and gather roots and berries.
The forest also supplied them with a precious material: birch bark. This
was ideal for making various containers, wigwams and, above all, the indispensable
canoes. Explorer George Catlin was astonished to
see the canoes of the Chippewas "ride upon the water, as light as
a cork."
For their part, the nomads of the western plains truly worshipped the
buffalo, for that animal provided them with everything they needed in
order to live—with the exception, they said, of water to slake their thirst
and poles to construct their tepees. The life of buffalo hunters improved
substantially when the horse, introduced by the Spanish in the 16th century,
made its appearance on the northern plains in the 18th century. The nomads
could then move about more quickly and carry more with them.
On the Pacific
Coast, Aboriginal peoples enjoyed the bounty
of nature. The greatest of all nature's riches was the abundance of salmon.
For the Aboriginal peoples, salmon were nothing less than reincarnated
human beings who would continue to offer themselves to the fishermen so
long as the fishermen returned their bones to the sea. The sea coast of
this region provided its human inhabitants with a profusion of fish, sea
mammals, water birds, edible seaweed and shellfish. Its forests abounded
in priceless resources: wood to build villages and carve boats or totem
poles; goat's wool for weaving; and a wide variety of meat, berries, roots
and mushrooms to vary the diet.
The Inuit of the Arctic occupied vast icy expanses
that offered no protection against the elements, no edible vegetation
and no building materials. The following excerpt from the poem of an Inuit
mother eloquently expresses the precariousness of life in the Arctic:
"The snowstorm wails out there... My little boy is sleeping on the
ledge... His little stomach is bulging round—is it strange if I start
to cry joy?" Yet the Inuit managed to survive in this hostile environment
and create a unique culture that assigns a central role to art. At the
approach of winter, they headed for the pack ice, where the men hunted
seals, harpooning them at their breathing holes. In good weather, they
hunted walruses or belugas along the coasts and harvested the eggs of
seabirds. Then, when summer was ending, all families went inland to hunt
caribou for meat and—more importantly—hides, which were essential for
surviving the intense winter cold. In the Arctic,
dogs truly earned their reputation as man's best friend. Harnessed to
sleds made from whale bones and caribou antlers, they made it much easier
for these nomadic peoples to move about.
