The History of the World · Grades 10–13 · College · University
The Peoples Within the Nation: Canada's First Peoples at Their Own Records
History · Level band: Grades 10–13 · College · University
English edition — the language editions of the history classes are outstanding and will follow the site's translation pattern; none is fabricated here.
The peoples within Canada — at their own records
Status: Researched draft — cultural review pending
How to read this entry: Documented Fact = the fact stands in a named source — the people's own published histories and testimony, commissions, court records, censuses. Tradition — the people's own account = what a people's own record carries, standing as a witness family in its own right. Debated / Claim = a disputed point, labelled where it stands. Every people below is a subject with its own arc. The order is the land's: east to west, then north — the order of the shore a ship would meet them, and of the sun.
1. Mi'kmaq and Wolastoqiyik — the dawnland nations
Documented Fact. The Mi'kmaq of Mi'kma'ki and the Wolastoqiyik of the great river that bears their name governed the Atlantic shore in districts and family hunting territories long before 1604, living the seasonal round between coast and interior. Their diplomacy with the Crown is the Maritimes' founding law: the Peace and Friendship Treaties (1725–1779), made nation to nation, which surrendered no land — a fact the nations' testimony maintained through two centuries of official forgetting until the Supreme Court confirmed it in R v Marshall (1999), enforcing the 1760–61 treaties' protection of a moderate-livelihood fishery. The answer at Burnt Church in the judgment's first seasons — boats burned, traps cut, a Mi'kmaw fishery defended on the water — is the present tense of the same treaties. Mi'kmaw scholarship and testimony (the Mi'kmaq of Elsipogtog, Listuguj, Membertou and the other communities; the Union of Nova Scotia Mi'kmaq's published histories) carry the record forward; the fishery dispute's legal file stands open.
2. The Beothuk — a people the record closes, at their own last witness
Documented Fact. The Beothuk of Newfoundland lived by the coast's seals, salmon and shellfish and the interior's caribou, in a seasonal round the settler occupation of the coast broke piece by piece. What survives of their own voice survives through one woman: Shanawdithit, taken in 1823, who taught William Cormack the fragments of language and drew the drawings — dwellings, tools, the river country, her people's story as she could give it — on which the Beothuk record in the Chronology rests. She died on 6 June 1829. The Chronology carries the Beothuk entries (the 1768 baseline; 1819, the killing of Nonosbawsut and capture of Demasduit; 1829) at Class A, peoples-register EXTINCT. This page does not retell them; it marks what their presence in a Canada dossier means: the nation that inherited Newfoundland in 1949 inherited a completed extinction in its own territory, documented substantially by the extinguished people's last witness teaching her captors' language-keeper. No restricted knowledge is involved in saying so; the drawings and the word-lists are the published record, and they are hers.
3. Innu and the peoples of Nitassinan and Nunavik's shore
Documented Fact. The Innu of Nitassinan (the Québec–Labrador peninsula) lived in family hunting territories across the interior, on caribou above all; missionization, the fur trade, and — in the twentieth century — enforced settlement, the flooding of hunting lands by hydroelectric projects built without their consent, and the relocation of the Mushuau Innu to Davis Inlet (1967) and then Natuashish (2002) mark the colonial record in their country, documented in Innu testimony to commissions and in the Canadian Human Rights Commission-era reporting on Davis Inlet's conditions. The Innu Nation's own published record — its land claim, unextinguished, and its testimony — stands as the authority this doorway points to; Labrador's Inuit of Nunatsiavut, whose land-claim agreement came into force in 2005, stand beside them in §11's northern frame.
4. Haudenosaunee — the Confederacy and the Great Law
Tradition — the people's own account, and Documented Fact together. The Haudenosaunee — Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and (from the 1720s) Tuscarora — were united under the Great Law of Peace by the Peacemaker, Hiawatha and Jigonhsasee, in a founding the Confederacy's own record dates before European contact (the scholarly dating is debated; the law's existence and operation are not). A constitution of condolence, clan mothers' authority to raise and remove chiefs, and consensus among nations — it governed a power that France, Britain and the United States all had to treat with as a sovereign. The American Revolution split the Confederacy (its council fire covered, not extinguished, in the nations' own teaching); Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea) led the Grand River resettlement under the Haldimand Proclamation (1784), and the tract's reduction from some 950,000 promised acres to roughly 5 percent is Six Nations' own published land record. In 1923 the Cayuga chief Deskaheh carried the Confederacy's case for sovereignty to the League of Nations at Geneva — the first Indigenous appeal to an international body from this land — and was refused a hearing; in 1924 Canada deposed the Confederacy Council at Six Nations and imposed an elected council by police occupation. The Confederacy Council sits still. The class The Peoples at Depth I carries the Haudenosaunee whole — language, traditions, treaties, writings, crafts — and this doorway hands off to it.
5. Wendat — dispersal and return
Documented Fact. The Wendat (Huron) Confederacy — farming towns south of Georgian Bay, some 20,000–30,000 people in the standard estimates — was New France's great partner until the epidemics of the 1630s–40s and Haudenosaunee attacks dispersed it in 1649–50. The Wendat did not end: survivors re-formed at Lorette — today's Wendake, at Québec City's door — and westward among the Wyandot. The Wendat historian Georges Sioui writes his people's history as a history of a civilization and its continuance, and his For an Amerindian Autohistory is this strand's standing example of a nation's historian writing the nation. Wendake today is a self-governing Huron-Wendat Nation — the dispersal's answer in the present tense.
6. Anishinaabe — the Three Fires and the treaty heartland
Documented Fact. The Anishinaabe — Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi of the Three Fires Confederacy, and the Algonquin, Mississauga, Nipissing and Saulteaux nations of their wider family — hold the Great Lakes and the shield country: the world of the Robinson Treaties (1850), Treaties 1–5 and 9, the Williams Treaties (1923, settled in litigation only in 2018), and the Algonquins of Ontario claim, still in negotiation over a homeland never ceded by treaty at all. Anishinaabe law and scholarship — John Borrows' work on Indigenous constitutionalism, the testimony of elders in the treaty and annuity cases — stand at the centre of Canada's modern rights record: it was the Robinson–Huron Anishinaabe nations whose $4 annuity, frozen since 1874, became the Restoule judgment and the $10 billion settlement of 2023–24. The class The Peoples at Depth I carries the Anishinaabe at depth beside the Haudenosaunee.
7. Nehiyawak, Niitsitapi, Nakoda, Dakota — the Plains nations
Documented Fact. The plains and parkland nations — Nehiyawak (Cree), the Niitsitapi (Blackfoot Confederacy: Siksika, Kainai, Piikani, with the Tsuut'ina), Nakoda (Assiniboine and Stoney), Dakota and Lakota nations whose territories cross the medicine line — built the bison world: pounds and jumps in use for millennia, pemmican trade, the laws of the hunt, and after the horse a mounted civilization two centuries deep when the treaties came. Their leaders' statecraft is in the treaty record itself — Mistahimaskwa's and Pitikwahanapiwiyin's (Poundmaker's) negotiations and holdouts — and their starvation, resistance and the Battleford gallows are carried whole by Canada — Plains Starvation and the Battleford Hangings and by Chewing Away at the Treaties. The plains' present tense is also theirs: the Treaty Land Entitlement settlements, the urban Nehiyaw majority in the prairie cities, Cree as the most widely spoken Indigenous language in Canada (86,480 speakers in the 2021 census count). Harold Cardinal of Sucker Creek wrote the modern era's opening book here (§9 of the companion page).
8. The Métis Nation — a new nation on the plains
Documented Fact. The Métis are not a mixture but a nation — born in the fur trade's meeting of First Nations (above all Nehiyaw and Anishinaabe) and European traders, made a people with its own language (Michif), flag, laws of the buffalo hunt, and homeland centred on Red River. Twice — 1869–70 and 1885 — the Métis formed provisional governments to negotiate their entry into Canada on stated terms; twice the terms were written (the Manitoba Act; the scrip system in the northwest) and twice the land slipped away in the administering. Louis Riel — founder of Manitoba, elected MP, exiled, hanged in 1885 — was recognized by Manitoba statute in 2023 as the province's first premier, a title the record had waited 138 years to print. The Supreme Court's holdings (the 1870 promise failed the Crown's honour, 2013; Métis are within federal jurisdiction, Daniels, 2016) and the self-government agreements of 2023–24 — contested in part by some First Nations, the disagreement carried as the nations' own — frame the Métis file today: a people recognized in section 35's own words, still negotiating what the recognition holds.
9. The Coast nations and the interior of the west
Documented Fact. West of the mountains the nations are many and their records distinct: Haida of Haida Gwaii, whose monumental carving and whose modern record — the Haida–Canada reconciliation agreements and co-governance of Gwaii Haanas — stand in the published record; Nuu-chah-nulth and Kwakwaka'wakw of the island and mainland coasts, whose potlatch the law banned and whose confiscated regalia's return built the U'mista Cultural Centre — the restitution record's Canadian chapter, told by the nations themselves; the Coast Salish nations of the straits; the Gitxsan and Wet'suwet'en of the Skeena and Bulkley, whose house-group law (adaawk, kungax) the Supreme Court ruled must be heard as evidence in Delgamuukw (1997) — and whose hereditary chiefs' stand on unceded land is the present tense of that same law; the Tsilhqot'in of the plateau, who defended their territory in the war of 1864 (five chiefs hanged after surrendering under a flag of truce — exonerated by British Columbia in 2014 and by Canada in 2018, the exonerations part of the record) and who won, in 2014, the first declaration of Aboriginal title in Canadian history; the Secwépemc, Syilx, St'át'imc, Nlaka'pamux and Ktunaxa of the interior; Treaty 8's nations in the northeast. Most of British Columbia was never ceded by treaty (the companion page, §4) — which is why so much of the modern law of title was written here, by these nations, in their own names.
10. Dene and the Mackenzie Valley nations
Documented Fact. The Dene nations of the Mackenzie Valley and the barrens — Tłı̨chǫ, Dehcho, Gwich'in, Sahtu, Inuvialuit at the coast among them — made Treaty 8 (1899) and Treaty 11 (1921) on the oral record's terms of sharing, and said so in court and commission for a century. In 1975 the Dene Declaration asserted Dene nationhood and self-determination in the nation's own words; the Berger Inquiry (1974–77) heard the Valley in its own communities and stopped a pipeline for a generation on the strength of that hearing. The modern settlements — Inuvialuit (1984), Gwich'in (1992), Sahtu (1993), Tłı̨chǫ (2003, the first combined land-claim and self-government agreement in the territories) — and the Dehcho Process, still unfinished, are the Dene record's present tense: nation by nation, on the nations' own negotiating tables.
11. Inuit — Inuit Nunangat
Documented Fact. Inuit — of Nunavut, Nunavik, Nunatsiavut and the Inuvialuit Settlement Region, together Inuit Nunangat — are a circumpolar people whose ancestors, the Thule, crossed the Arctic in the centuries around 1000 CE and whose technology, law and sea-ice knowledge governed the North for a millennium before Ottawa administered it. The twentieth-century record in their homeland — the disc-number system, the High Arctic relocations of 1953–55 (apology 2010), the dog killings the Qikiqtani Truth Commission documented against the RCMP's review, the eastern Arctic schools — is carried in the companion page and in the QTC's own reports, which this doorway names as the authority: a truth commission the Inuit association built for itself, hearing its own people in their own language. The settlements remade the map: the Inuvialuit Agreement (1984), the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement (1993) and the territory of Nunavut (1999) — a public government over a fifth of Canada's land mass, Inuit the large majority within it — Nunavik's James Bay agreement (1975) and Nunatsiavut (2005). Inuktitut stands as an official language; the 2021 census counted 70,545 Inuit in Canada. The class The Peoples at Depth II carries Inuit at depth.
12. The count of the peoples, standing
Documented Fact. The 2021 census counted 1,807,250 people with Indigenous identity in Canada — 1,048,405 First Nations people in more than 630 communities and governments, 624,220 Métis, 70,545 Inuit (census counts, with the remainder reporting multiple or other Indigenous identities) — speaking more than 70 Indigenous languages, 237,420 people conversational in one of them, more than a quarter of those speakers having learned the language as a second language. Against 1871's enumerated trough of 102,358 — different territory, different instrument, the comparison printed with its limits — the counts are the demographic form of the sentence this whole site stands on: the peoples are standing. The class The Peoples Register carries the peoples one by one — who is gone, whose language sleeps and is being reawakened, who is here — and The Fight Goes On carries the present-day contest over the rights this page records. This doorway ends where it began: the nations were here first, they are here now, and their own records — not this page — are where their histories are told whole.
13. The languages — punished, and being relearned
Documented Fact. More than 70 Indigenous languages are spoken in Canada (Statistics Canada), in twelve language families and isolates found nowhere else — Algonquian (Nehiyawewin/Cree the largest, then Anishinaabemowin), Inuit, Athabaskan (Dene), Iroquoian, Salishan, Wakashan, Siouan, Tsimshianic, Haida, Ktunaxa, Michif among them. The schools were built to end them; the 2021 census instead counted 237,420 conversational speakers, and its most consequential figure is the direction of learning: 65,680 of those speakers — over a quarter — learned their language as a second language, up from 2016. Nations run the relearning themselves: immersion nests and schools, master-apprentice programmes, Michif and Pentlatch reawakenings — Pentlatch, whose last fluent speaker died in 1940 on Vancouver Island, was officially reawakened as a living language in November 2023, a return the Chronology's own entries record. The Peoples Register carries the languages nation by nation, at each language's own status — sleeping, reawakening, spoken — and nothing in this doorway invents a word of any of them: the languages belong to their peoples, and their speakers lead.
14. The urban present
Documented Fact. The largest Indigenous populations in Canada today are urban — Winnipeg the largest of any city (102,080 in the 2021 census count), then Edmonton and Vancouver — a fact the reserve-centred colonial file never predicted and the nations' own institutions answer in kind: friendship centres (the movement dates to the 1950s), urban governments and service authorities, powwow circuits and language nests in city schools. The dossier's peoples are not a rural remnant in the national story; they are its fastest-growing population — younger than the Canadian median, growing at 9.4 percent between the 2016 and 2021 censuses on Statistics Canada's count — and their present tense is written in the cities as much as in the 630 communities. The Fight Goes On class carries the contests; this doorway carries the standing.
Sources
The peoples' own published records and organizations' histories (Six Nations of the Grand River land research; the Union of Nova Scotia Mi'kmaq; the Innu Nation; the Huron-Wendat Nation; the Manitoba Métis Federation; the U'mista Cultural Centre; Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami and the land-claim organizations) · Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Final Report (2015) · Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996) · Qikiqtani Truth Commission (2013) · Statistics Canada, Census 2021 (population and language counts) · Supreme Court of Canada: Delgamuukw (1997), Marshall (1999), Manitoba Metis Federation (2013), Tsilhqot'in (2014), Daniels (2016) · Olive Dickason, Canada's First Nations · Arthur J. Ray, I Have Lived Here Since the World Began · Georges Sioui, For an Amerindian Autohistory · John Borrows, Canada's Indigenous Constitution · the Collection's peoples research files behind the classes linked in the text. Full source keys stand in the research dossier behind the companion class.
Read beside this class: Canada: A Nation on Other Nations' Land · The Peoples at Depth I: Haudenosaunee, Cherokee, Anishinaabe, Lakota/Dakota · The Peoples at Depth II: Inuit, Maya, Mexica, Inca · The Peoples Register · Chewing Away at the Treaties · They Signed On — The Long Service
Record: study_materials/world_true_history/canada/RESEARCH_DOSSIER.md (Canada dossier, Phase 3, Volume N), §§1–2 and §§11–12, with the Collection's peoples classes carrying each people in depth. Draft for the owner's approval; not deployed.