Indigenous peoples in Canada |
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Indigenous North Americas Canadaportal |
The history of the First Nations is the prehistory and history of present-day Canada's peoples from the earliest times to the present day with a focus on First Nations. The pre-history settlement of the Americas is a subject of ongoing debate. First Nation's oral histories and traditional knowledge, combined with new methodologies and technologies —used by archaeologists, linguists, and other researchers—produce new—and sometimes conflicting—evidence.
Many First Nations myths refer to the habitation of North America from time immemorial. There are a number of myths about the world in general and the place of First Nations within that history. [1]
The 1996 Report by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People described four stages in Canadian history that overlap and occur at different times in different regions: 1) Pre-contact – Different Worlds – Contact; 2) Early Colonies (1500–1763); 3) Displacement and Assimilation (1764–1969); and 4) Renewal to Constitutional Entrenchment (2018). [2] [3]
is from a 1.6 million year old tooth found in the Yukon Territory; other early records include 45,500-year-old cranial fragment from the Yukon and a 40,600-year-old antler from Quebec (Gordon 2003). The ancestral origins of caribou prior to the last glaciation (Wisconsin), which occurred approximately 80,000 to 10,000 years ago, are not well understood, however, during the last glaciation it is known that caribou were abundant and distributed in non-glaciated refugia both north and south of the Laurentide Ice Sheet.
— Banfield 1961, Martin and Klein 1984 cited in Wilkerson 2010
is characterized by archaeological complexes containing stone projectile points of triangular, fluted, lanceolate, or stemmed forms, presumably used with throwing and stabbing spears. At least five cultural complexes occur in Alberta, including Clovis and its derivatives, Windust, Cascade, Cody, and Plains-Mountain. These groups appear to have been primarily big-game hunters who often moved over vast areas during their annual rounds while visiting preferred resources. Their stone tools can be found great distances from the sources of their raw material.
— Meyer
The new Canadian government compensated the Hudson's Bay Company £300,000 ($1.5 million)(£27 million in 2010) [120] for dissolving it HBC's charter with the British Crown. The HBC had exclusive commercial domain over Rupert's Land—a vast continental expanse—a third of what is now Canada. [121] By order-in-council dated 23 June 1870, [122] the British government admitted Rupert's Land to Canada through the Constitution Act, 1867, [123] effective 15 July 1870, conditional on the making of treaties with the sovereign indigenous nations providing consent to the Queen.
The federal government at the time argued that the Indian Act was discriminatory and that the special legal relationship between Aboriginal peoples and the Canadian state should be dismantled in favour of equality, in accordance with Trudeau's vision of a "just society." The federal government proposed that by eliminating "Indian" as a distinct legal status, the resulting equality among all Canadians would help resolve the problems faced by Aboriginal peoples. "Following considerable review, and rejecting the recommendations of the much touted Hawthorne Report,11 commissioned to identify the underlying causes of Aboriginal disengagement from Canadian society, of only a few years earlier, the Government of Canada released the White Paper on Indian Affairs in 1969." [170] : 6eliminate Indian status, dissolve the Department of Indian Affairs within five years, abolish the Indian Act, convert reserve land to private property that can be sold by the band or its members, transfer responsibility for Indian affairs from the federal government to the province and integrate these services into those provided to other Canadian citizens, provide funding for economic development and appoint a commissioner to address outstanding land claims and gradually terminate existing treaties
— First Nations Studies Program 2009
Saganash was "among the original architects" of UNDRIP. [277]
Indigenous peoples in Canada are the indigenous peoples within the boundaries of Canada. They comprise the First Nations, Inuit and Métis. Although "Indian" is a term still commonly used in legal documents, the descriptors "Indian" and "Eskimo" have fallen into disuse in Canada, and most consider them to be pejorative. "Aboriginal" as a collective noun is a specific term of art used in some legal documents, including the Constitution Act, 1982, though in some circles that word is also falling into disfavour.
First Nations is a term used to identify Indigenous peoples in Canada who are neither Inuit nor Métis. Traditionally, First Nations in Canada were peoples who lived south of the tree line, and mainly south of the Arctic Circle. There are 634 recognized First Nations governments or bands across Canada. Roughly half are located in the provinces of Ontario and British Columbia.
In Canada, an Indian reserve is defined by the Indian Act as a "tract of land, the legal title to which is vested in His Majesty, that has been set apart by His Majesty for the use and benefit of a band." Reserves are areas set aside for First Nations, one of the major groupings of Indigenous peoples in Canada, after a contract with the Canadian state, and are not to be confused with indigenous peoples' claims to ancestral lands under Aboriginal title.
The CanadianIndian residential school system was a network of boarding schools for Indigenous peoples. The network was funded by the Canadian government's Department of Indian Affairs and administered by Christian churches. The school system was created to isolate Indigenous children from the influence of their own culture and religion in order to assimilate them into the dominant Canadian culture. Over the course of the system's more than hundred-year existence, around 150,000 children were placed in residential schools nationally. By the 1930s, about 30 percent of Indigenous children were attending residential schools. The number of school-related deaths remains unknown due to incomplete records. Estimates range from 3,200 to over 30,000, mostly from disease.
The Métis are an Indigenous people whose historical homelands include Canada's three Prairie Provinces, as well as parts of British Columbia, the Northwest Territories, Northwest Ontario and the northern United States. They have a shared history and culture, deriving from specific mixed European and Indigenous ancestry, which became distinct through ethnogenesis by the mid-18th century, during the early years of the North American fur trade.
A tribal council is an association of First Nations bands in Canada, generally along regional, ethnic or linguistic lines.
Indigenous police services in Canada are police forces under the control of a First Nation or Inuit government.
The Congress of Aboriginal Peoples (CAP), founded in 1971, is a national Canadian aboriginal organization that represents Aboriginal peoples who live off Indian reserves in either urban or rural areas across Canada. As of 2011 more than 70% of Aboriginal people live off-reserve.
The association between the monarchy of Canada and Indigenous peoples in Canada stretches back to the first interactions between North American Indigenous peoples and European colonialists and, over centuries of interface, treaties were established concerning the monarch and Indigenous nations. First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples in Canada have a unique relationship with the reigning monarch and, like the Māori and the Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand, generally view the affiliation as being not between them and the ever-changing Cabinet, but instead with the continuous Crown of Canada, as embodied in the reigning sovereign.
Calvin Murray Sinclair is a former member of the Canadian Senate and First Nations lawyer who served as chairman of the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission from 2009 to 2015. He previously served as a judge in Manitoba from 1988 to 2009, being the first Indigenous judge appointed in the province. Sinclair was appointed to the Senate of Canada on April 2, 2016. In November 2020, he announced his retirement from the Senate effective January 31, 2021.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada was a truth and reconciliation commission active in Canada from 2008 to 2015, organized by the parties of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement.
The following is an alphabetical list of topics related to Indigenous peoples in Canada, comprising the First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples.
The Sixties Scoop, also known as The Scoop, was a period in which a series of policies were enacted in Canada that enabled child welfare authorities to take, or "scoop up," Indigenous children from their families and communities for placement in foster homes, from which they would be adopted by white families. Despite its name referencing the 1960s, the Sixties Scoop began in the mid-to-late 1950s and persisted into the 1980s.
The First Nations nutrition experiments were a series of experiments run in Canada by Department of Pensions and National Health in the 1940s and 1950s. The experiments were conducted on at least 1,300 Indigenous people across Canada, approximately 1,000 of whom were children. The deaths connected with the experiments have been described as part of Canada's genocide of Indigenous peoples.
Janice Forsyth is a Canadian associate professor of Sociology and the director of the Indigenous Studies program at Western University in London, Ontario. A former varsity athlete Forsyth was awarded the Tom Longboat Regional Award for Ontario in 2002.
Criminal sentencing in Canada is governed by the Canadian Criminal Code. The Criminal Code, along with the Supreme Court of Canada, have distinguished the treatment of Indigenous individuals within the Canadian Criminal Sentencing Regime.
The Canadian Indian residential school system were a network of boarding schools for Indigenous peoples. Directed and funded by the Department of Indian Affairs, and administered mainly by Christian churches, the residential school system removed and isolated Indigenous children from the influence of their own native culture and religion in order to forcefully assimilate them into the dominant Canadian culture. Given that most of them were established by Christian missionaries with the express purpose of converting Indigenous children to Christianity, schools often had nearby mission churches with community cemeteries. Students were often buried in these cemeteries rather than being sent back to their home communities, since the school was expected by the Department of Indian Affairs to keep costs as low as possible. Additionally, occasional outbreaks of disease led to the creation of mass graves when the school had insufficient staff to bury students individually.
Cassidy Caron is a Métis politician. She was elected as the president of the Métis National Council on 30 September 2021. As the chairperson of the Métis Youth British Columbia, she served as the Minister of Youth for the Métis Nation British Columbia from September 2016 to September 2020.
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: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) The website was part of the "Peopling of Canada" project supported by the Canadian Studies Program at Canadian Heritage. They also produced a CD ROM under another Canadian Studies Program project with the title: "The Peopling of Atlantic Canada".{{cite report}}
: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) authored by Treaty 8 First Nations (T8FNs) Community Assessment Team and the Firelight Group Research Cooperative.{{cite book}}
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: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) Prepared under contract to: Midwest Regional Office, National Park Service United States Department of the Interior"The Bear had successfully carried the Pack of Life thus far when he met Megis, the shell, who took over the trek down the St. Lawrence River to Montreal, past the Lachine Rapids to Mattawa, on down the French River to Lake Huron, through the Straits of Mackinac to Sault Ste. Marie. Somewhere along this stretch of the journey, the Megis transferred the Pack of Life to the Otter, who carried it along the south shore of Lake Superior to the Keweenaw Peninsula, on to LaPointe in Wisconsin, breaking through a sand bar at Fond du Lac at the west end of Lake Superior and traveling up the St. Louis River westward to Leech Lake." as told by James Red Sky (Eshkwaykeeshik) to Selwyn Dewdney.
At Confederation, there was a superintendent-general of indian affairs—a role held by the secretary of state for Canada and later, by the minister of the interior.
ARTICLES OF A TREATY made and concluded this third day of August in the year of Our Lord one thousand eight hundred and seventy-one, between Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland by Her Commissioner, Wemyss M. Simpson, Esquire, of the one part, and the Chippewa and Swampy Cree Tribes of Indians, inhabitants of the country within the limits hereinafter defined and described, by their Chiefs chosen and named as hereinafter mentioned, of the other part.
Frank Calder et al., suing on their own behalf and on behalf of All Other Members of the Nishga Tribal Council, and James Gosnell et al., suing on their own behalf and on behalf of All Other Members of the Gitlakdamix Indian Band, and Maurice Nyce et al., suing on their own behalf and on behalf of All Other Members of the Canyon City Indian Band, and W.D. McKay et al., suing on their own behalf and on behalf of All Other Members of the Greenville Indian Band, and Anthony Robinson et al., suing on their own behalf and on behalf of All Other Members of the Kincolith Indian Band v. Attorney-General of British Columbia
In time for Canada 150, the country's flagship museum vows to 'never again' tell the story of Canada without Indigenous art.
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