First Nations of the Canadian Subarctic: A Brief History

The Canadian Subarctic is one of the six cultural regions that define Canada’s cultural, geographical, and historical landscape. The Chipewyan, the Dogrib, the Hare, the Dane-zaa, the Slavey, the Kaska, the Tlingit and the Wet’suwet’en are just a few of the Athapaskan-speaking groups who call the Western Subarctic home. The Innu First Nation people (not to be confused with the Inuit) have occupied the northeastern Subarctic since time immemorial. For the past few centuries, they have been known in the Western world by the names assigned to them by the French, namely, the Montagnais and theNaskapi. Until recently, their cultures and history have been relentlessly downplayed (or even declared non-existent) by dominant white, non-Indigenous Canadian society.

The Subarctic can be divided into two broad regions, the Eastern Subarctic and the Western Subarctic, both immediately south of the High Arctic. Let us begin with the Eastern Subarctic. This portion of the Subarctic ecoregion is also called “Eastern Canadian Shield” and covers a large area that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to Hudson Bay, including much of northern Quebec and Labrador.

The Western Subarctic covers about five million square kilometers (almost two million square miles), making it an extremely culturally and physiologically diversified region. It lies north of the Great Plains and Plateau and extends from Hudson Bay in the east to Bering Strait and the interior of Alaska in the west. The Subarctic itself can be divided into three major regions that are extremely different from each other.

North of the boreal forest, the territories occupied by the Canadian Shield (whose mountains were once as high as those in the Himalayas) are characterized by large areas of permafrost, with low-growing vegetation and virtually no significant trees.

Overall, this is a land rich in copper (Nunavut and the Northwest Territories), gold, iron, and silver (in Quebec and Northern Ontario), as well as uranium (in northern Saskatchewan, in the Northwest Territories, around Great Bear Lake, and Elliot Lake in Ontario). To the west, the territory of Yukon, the province of British Columbia, parts of the Northwest Territories, and Alberta are characterized by the Cordillera (or Western Cordillera). This is a region of extremes, a landscape of boreal forest-covered mountain ranges, alpine tundra, and flood plains, where rivers abound with salmons and run parallel to the Pacific Ocean from Alaska down to Mexico.

The melting of high-elevation ice patches in southern Yukon has uncovered large amounts of caribou dung, as well as the carcasses of wolves, and several examples of spears and arrows lost by the hunters who ventured into these regions thousands of years ago.

Together with local oral histories and the beautiful red ochre pictographs found on the rocks of northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan, such discoveries have allowed Indigenous and non-Indigenous historians and anthropologists to trace the history of the First Nations of the Western Subarctic and to understand their culture and lifestyles. East of the Cordillera and west of the Canadian Shield, the Western Subarctic is characterized by another unique area, the so-called Mackenzie Lowlands, a region of swamps and marshes that occupy northeastern British Columbia and northern Alberta. Most rivers in this area drain into the Pacific Ocean.

The Athapaskan people (also known as the Dene) are a culturally diverse group. The term Athapaskan refers not to the people themselves, but to the (more than twenty) languages they spoke (and still speak), all of which have a common origin. Today they are the third most widely spoken subfamily of North American Indigenous languages in Canada.

The various Athapaskan groups of the Canadian Shield were once all related, both in terms of the languages they spoke (sometimes extremely similar) and the physical proximity of their lands. As was often the case in pre-contact Aboriginal Australia, neighboring groups throughout the whole Subarctic region, from western Hudson Bay to Alaska and southern Alberta and British Columbia, were able to understand each other’s languages and often borrowed certain cultural elements from their neighbors.

The territory of one group bordered the ancestral lands of another, which in turn edged on those of yet another group. The ancestral lands of the Chipewyans (also known as Denesuline) extended west of Hudson Bay and onto the tundra in the west, roughly encompassing what are now Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and the Northwest Territories.

Their livelihood depended on the barren-ground caribou, so much so that they relied on them not just for food, but also for winter clothing and everyday tools such as fishing nets. Just like the Inuit did in the Arctic, the Chipewyan actively modified and domesticated the landscape to trap the large herds of caribou roaming their lands. In addition to navigating rivers and lakes in their light bark canoes and spearing caribou from their vantage point, they often built enclosures to intercept their migratory paths. Hunting brought families together.

When the time was right, groups of up to 600 people would pack up their light conical tipis, their moose and caribou skins, or their summer lean-tos, and follow their chief, the most experienced hunter on their mission to intercept caribou herds. The chief, male or female, had earned his/her status through his/her skills and not through family ties. Sometimes hostilities broke out among the Athapaskans, but most fights occurred between the Athapaskans and the Cree.

Culturally similar to the Chipewyans were the Dogrib people (also known as Tilcho or Tłı̨chǫ), stationed between two major lakes, the Great Bear and the Great Slave, east of the Mackenzie River. Their neighbors were the Hare (also called Sahtú or North Slavey), who occupied the lands between Great Bear Lake (Sahtú), and the Mackenzie River and they spoke a language substantially similar to that of the Dogrib. Their livelihood depended mainly on hares, hence their name.

The Great Bear and Great Slave Lakes, as well as parts of northwestern Alberta and northeastern British Columbia, were home to the Slavey (also known as Dene-thah and Dene Tha’), who, unlike their neighbors, relied on both fishing and hunting (mainly moose and woodland caribou). Moose and woodland caribou were also part of the diet of the Mountain Athapaskans: on their lands in the Mackenzie Mountains, they hunted or snared mountain goats.

To the south, the Slavey were neighboured by the Dane-zaa (known for decades by their Western name “the Beaver Indians”), a term which means “real people.” Unlike other First Nations, the Dane-zaa managed to survive the colonial period, but many of them were forced to relocate onto reserves, sometimes from their traditional lands around the Peace River in present-day British Columbia and Alberta.

The diet of the Cordillera Athapaskans was more varied than that of the Athapaskans of the Shield because their lands were characterized by a more varied ecosystem. In addition to caribou, goats, moose, and mountain sheep, they could also rely on plant food and on the fish they would catch in the waters of the Yukon and Mackenzie Rivers, especially salmon, whitefish, and Arctic chars.

The Tlingit people are one of the most important and influential First Nations from the Canadian Cordillera. They lived in what are now British Columbia, Yukon, and Alaska, both inland and in coastal areas. Hence their name, “Tlingit,” which means “people of the tides” in the Łingít language.

Their culture, artworks, and rich oral literature exerted a great influence on many other Cordillera Athapaskans, especially the Tutchone of present-day southern Yukon and the Tahltan, whose ancestral lands lie along the Stikine River plateau. Altogether, they encompass about 11% of British Columbia’s territory.

Like that of the Tutchone, the Tahltan, and the Kaska, Tlingit society was organized through a matrilineal clan system and divided into two moieties: Wolf and Crow. Each clan was further divided into various family groups. All children took their mother’s kinship group. Along with the Gwich’in and Han, the Tutchone belong to the Athapaskan peoples of the northeastern Cordillera.

The Gwich’in, who relied mostly on caribou hunting to survive, occupied present-day Yukon, the Northwest Territories, as well as Alaska. The Yukon River Plateau, close to the Yukon-Alaska border, was Han territory.

The Wet’suwet’en, a branch of the Carrier (Dakelh) people, also adopted the matrilinear system. The area now known as British Columbia was occupied by the Carrier (or Dakelh) people. Once again, the term does not refer to a single group but to the many bands living in the central interior of present-day British Columbia, a territory of about 76,000 km sq. (approx. 29,000 sq. miles) bordered on the west by the Pacific Coast and to the east by the Rocky Mountains range.

The lands of the Montagnais and Naskapi people are called Nitassinan. While the Naskapis’ ancestral territory stretches east of Hudson Bay, from the interior of Quebec to the central Labrador coast, the Montagnais were located along the St. Lawrence River, occupying a territory that stretched from the northern shores of the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the lower St. Lawrence.

In the 1980s, these two Algonquian-speaking groups asked the world to adopt the term Innu (which means “people” and should not be confused with “Inuit”), the name they call themselves by today. While the term Naskapi is of unknown origin, the name Montagnais is derived from the French word for “mountaineers” or “mountain people,” and reflects their close fur-trading relations with the French. The Montagnais were the first to encounter the early French settlers and explorers, who considered them more “civilized” than the Naskapi.

In 1603 during his first voyage to Canada and up the St. Lawrence River, French cartographer and explorer Samuel de Champlain (1567-1635) managed to secure a strategic alliance with the Montagnais against the Iroquois (also known as the Haudenosaunee): it was the beginning of a trading and business relationship that would last for decades.

The Iroquois, along with the Mi’kmaq and the Inuit, were bitter enemies of the Montagnais: throughout the 17th and 18th centuries these groups vied for control of the St. Lawrence River, then the center of the early fur trade. In 1676 a trading post was established at Chicoutimi, on the route to Tadoussac, which by the early 17th century was the most important trading center in the area. Beginning in the 1830s, the Hudson’s Bay Company opened several trading posts on Innu lands. Both groups moved to the Labrador coast in the summer to fish.

While the diet of the Naskapi in winter was limited to caribou, the Montagnais were luckier: having access to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, they could hunt seals, in addition to moose, bear, beavers, and woodland caribou. Like the Anishinaabeg, the Innu loved and respected the game animals they hunted and killed, to the point of making offerings to their spirits, leaving bones and skulls on the ground or hanging from trees. This was the Innu’s way of thanking and honoring the animals that had sacrificed themselves to ensure the survival of their communities.

After a successful hunt, they would organize ceremonial feasts, carefully ensuring that every part of the caribou, including the marrow of its bones, would not go to waste. Innu culture was (and is) extremely sophisticated, as evidenced by their elaborately sewn winter coats, their colorful design, and by their ceremonial painted robes made to please and honor the animals on whose lives and deaths they so consistently relied.

Beginning in the late 18th century, trading posts sprang up throughout the Western Canadian Subarctic on traditional Indigenous lands. In 1786, the North West Company established Fort Resolution on the southern shore of Great Slave Lake in and around Slavey lands. Two years later, in 1788, Fort Chipewyan was built near Lake Athabasca.

In 1794, the North West Company built the Rocky Mountain Fort, which was later renamed Fort St. John by the Hudson’s Bay Company. A year later, the Hudson’s Bay Company built Fort Edmonton, on the North Saskatchewan River next to the rival North West Company’s fort. In 1804 it was the turn of Fort of the Forks, established by the North West Company (later renamed Fort Simpson), on the Mackenzie River.

In 1805, Fort McLeod was built on Sekani lands. A year later the Carrier saw Fort St. James and Fort Fraser built on their ancestral lands. Beaver, bear, lynx, otter, and marten skins were among the most important trade goods, together with firearms. The latter had a profound impact on Indigenous societies, for better or worse: while they made hunting and fishing easier, they also had the effect of transforming traditional Native goods into useless and unremarkable objects.

Athapaskan communities became increasingly dependent on the fur trade, while their ancestral practices and communal activities such as caribou hunting slowly became obsolete. Their lives became less and less mobile. It is worth remembering that while the impact of traders on the ancestral lifestyles of the Athapaskans was largely a consequence of the fur trade, the (mostly Roman Catholic) missionaries who established their missions near the trading posts actively set out to “civilize” First Nations men, women, and especially their children.

Trade relations between coastal and inland groups dated way back before the coming of European traders, but with the coming of the Europeans many Athapaskans, especially those closer to the coast, acted as intermediaries between European traders and other inland groups. Similarly, peoples from the Northwest Coast relied on the Athapaskans of the Cordillera, the Tahltan, the Carrier (Dakelh), and the Tagish, to do business with inland peoples. They traveled and guided Europeans along the so-called “grease trails,” major cross-country trade arteries that wound along the Pacific Coast and into the interior in the Pacific Northwest.

The name of the trails originated from the boxes of oil made from the buttery flesh of Eulachon fish (Thaleichthys pacificus) which were considered a delicacy by the local First Nations, and were used as a bargaining commodity. One such trail, the Nuxalk-Carrier Grease Trail, has recently been revitalized through the joint efforts of the Nuxalk Nation and the Dakelh.

Not all trading relations were peaceful, however. The Gwich’in, for instance, acted as intermediaries with the Inuit but also denied them direct access to trading posts. While for some groups the advent of trade meant stability and more direct access to European goods, for others it meant dispossession, warfare, and land impoverishment.

This, in turn, caused mental health issues that still plague many communities today. The fur trade caused some Athapaskan groups from the Canadian Shield such as the Chipewyan, the Dunne-za, and Slavey, to increasingly lose land and lives in battles against the Cree, with whom relations had been strained for centuries.

Numerous smallpox epidemics, often followed by periods of starvation, did the rest of the damage, along with the series of 19th-century gold rushes in British Columbia, around the Fraser, Thompson, and Bridge Rivers, and in the central Alaska-Yukon area, the latter known as the Klondike Gold Rush. Trading posts were the predecessors of the commercial fisheries and cattle ranches that were established in the 20th century on traditional Athapaskans (Dene) lands and that would once again forever alter the lives of the area’s First Nations.