Canada's Religions: An Historical Introduction

2. The Religious World of Canada's Amerindians

CHAPTER 2 The Religious World of Canada's Amerindians The origins of Canada'sAmerindianpeople Most historians explain the origins of the people of North America by referring to a series of migrations that would have occurred from Asia, across Beringia, the land currently flooded by the sea at the Bering Straits, and into Alaska. From there the earliest human occupants of North America would have migrated south toward the southern portion of the United States and Central America. These migrations by land were possible because of the Ice Age that prevailed some 40,000 years ago, resulting in the lowering of the sea level, and the emergence of the land of Beringia. When global warming ended this IceAge35,000 years ago, the migrations were interrupted for some 10,000 years as the sea reclaimed Beringia. Then another Ice Age, the last, occurred between 25,000 B.C.E. and 15,000 B.C.E. allowing further migrations from Asia toAmerica. The subsequent melting of the glaciers, after 15,000 B.C.E., not only closed the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska, but also allowed descendants of the people inhabiting the central portion of North America to migrate northwards in the wake of the retreat of the glaciers . This would explain the earliest settlement of the St Lawrence lowlands, that vast valley drained by LakesErieand Ontario, and theSt Lawrence River. This occupation of the northeastern woodlands of the continent isbelieved to have occurred around 8,000B.C.E. Subsequently, around 4,000 B.C.E., the Inuit, a group of later migrants from Asia to Alaska,migrated eastwards acrossthe Arcticto occupymuchofCanada's northernmost coasts. So it was that the ancestors of Canada's Iroquoian and Algonkian 8 Canada's Religions linguistic families of Amerindians arrived in their ancestral lands of eastern Canada some ten thousand years ago. Over time, the Iroquoian nations evolved from exclusively hunting and gathering cultures into ones that engaged more and more in horticultural pursuits, a change that became apparent after 500 C.E. While the Algonkian people continued to live much as they always had, in the fourteenth century C.E. a major cultural change swept through the Iroquoian societies that lived north and south of Lake Ontario. They lived in larger communities and larger houses, developed more elaborate fortifications around their villages, and depended more and more upon horticulture for their sustenance, although fishing and some hunting continued as important activities. As villages and clans grew in size and complexity, more elaborate social organization developed, new group rituals and symbolism developed, and previously autonomous settlements associated to form tribes, which in turn necessitated different political arrangements. Community councils developed into tribal councils. Then some tribes banded together into confederations such as that of the Wenda (Huron) or of the Five Nations. The latter became Six Nations when the Tuscarora joined them in the eighteenth century.Medicineor curing societies appeared, engaged in healing people while weaving together the threads of tribal solidarity. By the time the Europeans arrived in the sixteenth century, there were some 500,000 Amerindian people in Canada, divided into some twelve linguistic families numbering more than fifty distinct languages. The majority inhabited the Northwest coast where six of the twelve language families were found. Of the other six linguistic families, the most prominent in our story will be the Algonkian, the Iroquoian and the Athapaskan; linguistic families that included just about all the Amerindians of Canada east of the Rockies. The Algonkian group spread from the Rockies to the Atlantic, the Athapaskan occupied the unglaciated portion of northwestern Canada east of the Rockies, and the Iroquoian centred in the Iroquois and Huron confederacies of central Canada. Given the early residency of Europeans among the Algonkian and Iroquoian people, their way of life is better known from the accounts of the missionaries and traders. Athapaskans were to become better known during the nineteenth century, while the Inuit people would not become the subjects of extensive reporting until the twentieth. As will be seen in Chapter 3, Canada's Amerindians had some The Religious World of Canada's Amerindians 9 contact with Europeans from the beginning of the sixteenth century, but Europeans became resident in Canada only from the early seventeenth century.During these two centuries ofinitial contact, Amerindian societies in eastern Canada changed extensively. The first European explorers, Cartier and Roberval for example, had noted the presenceof Iroquoian Amerindians in...