First Nations of the Canadian Atlantic Provinces: A Brief History

Over the years, Canada’s Atlantic provinces have been the scene of clashes between different cultures, battles and wars, forced relocations, and residential schools. The Mi’kmaq and the Wolastoqiyik First Nations people, who have inhabited this area since time immemorial, were (and still are) important players in the history of this vast coastal region. They were not just victims, as colonial propaganda often portrayed them. When they sided with the French against the British, for instance, or when they joined the Wabanaki Confederacy, they were more than just pawns in a bigger game: they were active players, focused on their interests and actively influencing Canada’s history.

Canada consists of ten provinces and three territories. The so-called Atlantic provinces include four of Canada’s ten provinces, all of which are located in the eastern part of the country, bordering the Atlantic Ocean. These are Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. As of 2023, they are home to more than 2,000,000 Canadians, with Prince Edward Island having the smallest population of all Canada’s provinces, followed by Newfoundland, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia—the latter being the most largely populated of the Atlantic Provinces. The provinces, with their diverse landscapes and climate, represent a transitional area marked by several ecoregions.

This is a land of coastal islands and lighthouses, forests of red spruce, white and yellow birch, and sugar maple. It is also a land dotted with salt marshes (New Brunswick), steep plateaus and cliffs (Nova Scotia), waterfalls (Cape Breton Island), rugged coastlines (Newfoundland), and patches of permafrost (southeastern Labrador).

Some areas, however, encroach into the Eastern Subarctic and Arctic. Most of Labrador, for instance, falls within the so-called Taiga Shield ecozone. Much of its coastline, along with Newfoundland, lies in the Subarctic region, while the northernmost part of Labrador is usually considered part of the Canadian Arctic. The Torngat Mountains (the name comes from the Inuktitut and means place of spirits) are the perfect example of the diversity of Atlantic Canada. Among the oldest mountain ranges on Earth, they lie between eastern Québec and Newfoundland and Labrador. At the northern tip of Newfoundland and Labrador, they fall within the Arctic Cordillera region, with a low Arctic climate dominated by long winters and short, moist summers. Permafrost is continuous.

The first people to reach the shores of Nova Scotia did so around 10,600 years ago, after the gradual but steady retreat of the vast glaciers that had covered almost all of Canada for thousands of years. Archaeologists call them Palaeoindians and most of the archaeological sites related to the so-called Early Paleoindian Period have been discovered in Nova Scotia and southern Ontario, in the Great Lakes region, between Lake Huron and Georgian Bay. Some of them, however, have also been found in northern British Columbia. Rising sea levels are likely to have destroyed many of these sites on the eastern coastlines of Canada. There is evidence that people reached Saglek Bay, up the Labrador Coast, around 6,000 years ago.

Finally, around 5,000 years ago, they reached Newfoundland, the last province to be occupied, when sea levels were still relatively low and Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland were not separated by water. About 4,000 years ago, this area was penetrated by another Indigenous group. These were the Tuniit, originally from Alaska, who would later settle on the island of Newfoundland. This happened about 2,000 years ago. Then came the Thule. The ancestors of modern Inuit, who never moved or settled south of northern Labrador.

The latest significant group of outsiders to permanently settle in what are now the Maritime Provinces were the French. They renamed this region Acadia (in French Acadie), from “Archadia,” the name Giovanni da Verrazzano gave to the North American Atlantic coast north of Virginia (and today split between Canada and the United States) when he landed there in 1524.

As of today, Acadia has no fixed and accepted geopolitical borders. What it does possess is a sense of cultural unity—a sense of common history and distinctness from the rest of Canada, as well as a distinct linguistic culture. Francophone Acadian communities occupy a large area that includes present-day Nova Scotia, northern and eastern New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island (that was known as Isle Saint-Jean until the French lost it to the British with the 1763 Treaty of Paris), Cape Breton Island (ceded to Great Britain in 1763 and formerly known as Ile-Royale), and the Gaspé Peninsula, as well as the Kennebec River area in Maine.

The Mi’kmaq are probably the most influential and well-known First Nations group of the Atlantic provinces. Their ancestral territories, which they call Mi’gma’gi (or Mi’kma’ki), consist of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island in their entirety, as well as northern and eastern New Brunswick and the coastal areas of the Gaspé Peninsula in present-day Québec. Today, many Mi’kmaq live off-reserve, and some important Mi’kmaq communities can be found in Newfoundland and New England, especially in Maine and the Boston area.

Pre-contact Mi’kmaq largely depended upon the sea for survival. They would also adapt their lifestyle and diet to the change of seasons and season-related food availability too. The risk of starvation, in fact, especially when hunting and in the months of February and March, was always looming. As mentioned by McMillan & Yellowhorn, “to ensure success in the hunt, they held an ‘eat-all’ feast, during which those present gorged themselves until they consumed every scrap of available food–certainly inducing them to do well on the next hunt.” 

The Mi’kmaq respect for the land and its waters went hand in hand with their need to ensure survival and avoid winter starvation. Unsurprisingly, their many myths tell stories of ancestral figures closely linked to the Earth and its resources.

Just as the Inuit worshipped the sea goddess Sedna, mother of all sea mammals, and the Anishinaabeg tell the story of Nanabush, trickster and shapeshifter, the traditions of the Mi’kmaq and Maliseet people focus on the figure of Glooscap (also spelled Kluskap). An ancestral hero and trickster of enormous proportions and supernatural powers, he was responsible for shaping the Earth as we know it today, manipulating the course of rivers, taming the winds and the wild animals that roamed the landscape. All this was done to make life easier for human beings so that they could thrive on the Earth and live off the land.

With the Mi’kma’ki located close to the Atlantic Ocean, the Mi’kmaq were among the first Indigenous peoples to consistently interact with the Europeans. They were also the most prepared since sporadic encounters had occurred long before their first official contact with French explorer Jacques Cartier (1491-1557) in 1534.

Throughout the 17th century, both the Mi’kmaq and their neighbouring Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) partnered with the French in the fur trade and were drawn into a much larger game of long-standing European alliances and hostilities. The British, in fact, had already secured the support and loyalty of the Iroquois and they would often use and manoeuvre them against the French and their Indigenous allies.

The Mi’kmaq eventually joined the Wabanaki Confederacy, a confederation of all the major Eastern tribes (and French allies), which included Maliseet (Wolastoqiyik), Abenaki, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot (Panawáhpskewi).

While the Passamaquoddy’s ancestral lands lie across the Canada-USA border, between New Brunswick and Maine, today the Penobscot Nation’s homelands lie in the U.S. state of Maine, along the Penobscot River. It was not until 1758, with the fall of the French fortress of Louisbourg, that the Mi’kmaq made peace with the British.

It is worth remembering that many Mi’kmaq people were Catholics, which further increased friction with the overwhelmingly Protestant British. Starting with the Boston Treaty of 1725-26, however, the Mi’kmaq signed several treaties to foster friendship and maintain peace with the British Crown. Many Mi’kmaq and Maliseet still maintain the Catholic faith, a testament to the impact of French culture on the Indigenous peoples of the Atlantic provinces.

Maliseet is the name used by the Mi’kmaq for their neighbors, who prefer to call themselves the Wolastoqiyik (pronounced “wool-las-two-wi-ig”). Today, the Wolastoqiyik population is divided into seven bands and, according to the 2016 census, there are 7,635 people claiming Maliseet ancestry in modern Canada. Their ancestral lands lie along the St. John River in New Brunswick and the St. Lawrence River in Québec, as well as across the border, in the United States, in present-day Aroostook County, Maine.

As was the case in Australia, where the so-called “coming of the grog” (alcohol) had a serious impact on Aboriginal people’s physical and mental health, European food and drinks killed off many Wolastoqiyik men and women.

In the early 1600s, the St. Lawrence and St. John rivers were rich in cod. They soon became the centers of the fishing industry, attracting not only fishermen, but also British, Dutch, and French fur traders who immediately began to engage with the Mi’kmaq and the Wolastoqiyik (largely known as Malecite back then).

The French soon established permanent settlements along the St. Lawrence—at Tadoussac for instance, and Fort La Tour. Like the Mi’kmaqs, the Wolastoqiyiks also became embroiled in the territorial disputes between the French and the British in Québec. As more and more settlers poured in, displaced them, and forced them onto reserves, British and French colonialism wreaked havoc on the lower Saint John and severely curtailed Wolastoqiyik agriculture on the riverbanks.

The Iroquois Wars are also known as the Beaver Wars, and for good reason. The competitive fur trade was, in fact, the main cause of the longstanding, intermittent conflicts that deeply impacted the lives of the Wolastoqiyiks and pitted one Indigenous group against another. Beaver pelts were coveted by many. The Iroquois had been trading them with British settlers and merchants for at least two centuries before the conflict erupted.

Together with the other five tribes making up the Iroquois Confederacy of the St. Lawrence River (also known as the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, it included the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca), they realized they had no choice but to expand into a new and richer region, the Ohio Country. Here they clashed with the interests of several Algonquian-speaking tribes, who were also involved in the fur trade, but with the French.

The Iroquois Wars were essentially a colonial product. Both sides suffered immense losses. The alliances both groups established with the French and the British (as well as the relations of the Iroquois with the Dutch, who often supplied them with firearms) only increased hostilities among the various Indigenous peoples involved in the fur trade. The wars officially ended in 1701, with the treaty of La Grande Paix de Montreal (the Great Peace of Montreal Treaty), which had the ultimate effect of solidifying the alliance between the British and the Iroquois Confederacy.

The Beothuk used to live on the island of Newfoundland, along the banks of the Exploits River and on the shores of Lake Beothuk, formerly known as Red Indian Lake. They are now extinct. Most of what we know about the Beothuk comes from those very people who were partly responsible for their demise. Of course, the letters and diaries of British, French, and Dutch traders and explorers can only tell part of the history of the Beothuk. 

What happened before 1497, when Beothuk started to be driven out of their coastal lands, is shrouded in mystery. We do know, however, that they were brilliant sailors, used to traveling for miles and miles on birchbark canoes on lakes and rivers, as well as the ocean.

Birchbark was an important part of Beothuk culture. Light and resistant, it was always available. The Beothuk would go as far as to wrap the bodies of the dead in birchbark before painting them (and their burial sites and objects) in red. The name “Red Indian,” as the Beothuk were known for years, derives precisely from their widespread practice of smearing red paint not only over their bodies and hair but also on their clothing and burial mounds.

For example, a child was found buried face down with a large rock on his back in the burial mound at L’Anse Amour, surrounded by red-stained sand. The paint was usually made from powdered ochre, which the Beothuk would then mix with grease or oil. Archaeological sites are the only other source available to try and pin down the culture of the Beothuk people.

To the Beothuk the coming of European settlers, explorers, and traders meant displacement, increased hostilities, and death by malnutrition and tuberculosis. The latter still plagues many Indigenous communities across North America.

In 1829, tuberculosis killed Shanawdithit (1801-1829), the woman considered the last of the Beothuk. She was more than that, however. At the age of 22, she was captured, alongside her mother and sister, by English furriers, who took them to St. John’s. Her mother and sister weakened and starving, died soon after, and Shanawdithit spent the rest of her life working for merchant and magistrate John Peyton Jr.

During her time there, she drew pictures of her culture and maps of the ancestral lands of her people. Today, they represent an important source of knowledge about Beothuk life, as well as a testament to the devastating impact of colonialism on the First Nations of the Atlantic provinces.

While in the High Arctic and the coldest regions of the Eastern Subarctic survival has depended on Indigenous knowledge of the ice, survival in the Atlantic provinces has always been strictly related to the sea. Burial sites across the Atlantic provinces bear witness to its importance, as people were laid to rest surrounded by harpoons made of whalebone, fish spears, seal claws, and ivory walrus tusks.

For millennia the extremely alkaline sands of the coastal area have preserved the bones of the men, women, and children buried there. This is the case, for instance, for the Port au Choix burial site on the western shore of the Great Northern Peninsula, on Newfoundland. In some areas of Maine, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland, however, archaeologists found burial sites completely empty. McMillan & Yellowhorn call them “boneless cemeteries”: over time, the acidic soil has disintegrated all human remains and only stone objects have survived.

Sea mammals, from seals to walrus and whales, have always represented an important part of the diet and culture of the Mi’kmaqs, Wolastoqiyiks, and Beothuks. When they couldn’t hunt big sea mammals, they would rely on salmon, cod, herring, clams, and other small shellfish. Over the course of thousands of years, rising waters dramatically altered the landscape of the Atlantic provinces. When the waters submerged their lands, the region’s early hunters were forced to move and to change, and to develop more sophisticated tools for hunting sea mammals. And so they did just as their descendants have done thousands of years later, surviving the colonial era, and helping to build Canada as we know it today.