[c. 15,000 BCE - 1496] Pre-Contact and Indigenous Peoples

Before there was a Canada, before the first sails of European ships scarred the horizon, there was the land. A vast, formidable, and breathtaking expanse stretching from one frozen ocean to another. Our story begins in the grip of the last great Ice Age, around 15,000 years ago. Glaciers, kilometres thick, held much of the continent in a frozen fist, and the sea level was dramatically lower. This exposed a land bridge—Beringia—connecting what is now Siberia to Alaska. Across this stark and windswept tundra, small, resilient family groups of hunters made a journey of generations. They were not explorers seeking a new world; they were survivors following the great herds of megafauna. Woolly mammoths, mastodons, and giant steppe bison were their lifeblood, and in pursuing them, these first peoples unknowingly stepped into a hemisphere uninhabited by humans.

Their primary technology was a marvel of deadly efficiency: the Clovis point. Not just a sharpened rock, this was a meticulously flaked, fluted spearhead designed for maximum penetration into the thick hides of Ice Age beasts. Armed with these, they spread southward with astonishing speed, their small bands populating two continents. They moved through an unglaciated corridor that opened like a door between the towering ice sheets, venturing into the plains, forests, and coastlines of a continent slowly waking from its long winter. This was a world of immense danger and incredible bounty, a world they learned to read with an intimacy we can now only imagine. Every track in the mud, every change in the wind, was a sentence in the story of survival.

Around 10,000 BCE, the world changed forever. The great glaciers began their final, groaning retreat, and the climate warmed. The megafauna, unable to adapt to the changing vegetation and new hunting pressures, vanished. The age of the mammoth hunters was over. This could have been an extinction event for humanity here, but instead, it became a catalyst for one of the greatest stories of adaptation in human history. The descendants of the first peoples did not die out; they diversified. They fanned out across the newly revealed landscapes, their cultures blossoming in isolation and adapting with profound ingenuity to the unique challenges and opportunities of their specific regions. Over thousands of years, a stunning mosaic of distinct nations emerged, each with its own language, social structure, and spiritual universe.

On the Pacific coast, from the mists of Haida Gwaii to the shores of the Salish Sea, the land and the ocean provided a spectacular abundance. The defining event of the year was the salmon run, when rivers turned silver and black with millions of fish fighting their way upstream. This reliable, immense food source allowed for something rare among hunter-gatherer societies: sedentary life. People built permanent towns of massive cedar plankhouses, some stretching over 30 metres long, housing entire extended families. Here, wealth was not measured in accumulation but in redistribution. A complex social order evolved around the Potlatch, a lavish ceremonial feast where powerful chiefs would demonstrate their status by giving away or even destroying vast quantities of possessions. This was the engine of the coastal economy and political system. Masters of the sea, they hunted whales from dugout canoes, a terrifying and heroic endeavour, and their artists carved the stories of their lineages and beliefs into towering totem poles, transforming the very forests into a living library.

To the east, beyond the formidable barrier of the Rocky Mountains, stretched the Great Plains. This was a sea of grass, and its singular, defining force was the bison. For nations like the Siksika (Blackfoot), Cree, and Assiniboine, the bison was everything. They were nomadic, their lives following the thunderous migrations of herds that could number in the tens of thousands. Their architecture was the tipi, a brilliant conical dwelling of poles and hides that could be dismantled in under an hour to follow the herds. Their greatest technological achievement was the communal hunt, often executed at a 'buffalo jump' like the one we now call Head-Smashed-In. With breathtaking coordination, hunters would funnel a stampeding herd towards a cliff's edge. The ensuing plunge provided a bounty of meat that would be preserved as pemmican, hides for shelter and clothing, bones for tools, and sinew for thread. Not a single part of the animal was wasted. Life was a cycle of movement, community, and a deep, spiritual connection to the animal that sustained them.

Further east still, in the vast woodlands and along the Great Lakes, life was different again. Here, nations like the Anishinaabe and the Mi’kmaq perfected the birchbark canoe. Light enough for one person to carry yet strong enough to navigate vast, choppy lakes, it was the key that unlocked the region’s labyrinthine network of rivers and lakes for trade, travel, and warfare. But the most profound revolution in the Woodlands came from the south: agriculture. Around 500 CE, the cultivation of the “Three Sisters”—corn, beans, and squash—took hold. These three crops, grown together in a symbiotic relationship, provided a stable and nutritious food supply. This agricultural surplus fueled population growth and the rise of powerful political bodies. The most famous was the Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois) Confederacy. Composed of five, and later six, distinct nations, they were bound by a constitution of peace known as the Great Law. Their society was matrilineal, with property and lineage passed down through the mother’s side. They lived in sprawling, palisaded villages, their homes being the iconic longhouse—a long, bark-covered structure that housed dozens of related families, a living symbol of their social and political union.

And in the far north, across the tundra and sea ice, lived the ancestors of the Inuit and the Dene. In the planet's most extreme environment, they demonstrated perhaps the most remarkable ingenuity of all. They mastered life in the cold, developing technologies perfectly suited to their world. The toggle-headed harpoon for hunting seals at breathing holes in the ice; the sleek, skin-on-frame kayak, an extension of the hunter's own body; and the domed snow house, or igloo, a marvel of engineering that could be built in hours and offered secure shelter from lethal blizzards. Their survival depended on microscopic observation of the natural world and an unbreakable sense of community, where sharing was not a virtue but a necessity.

These were not isolated worlds. For millennia, a complex web of trade routes stitched the continent together. Copper from the Great Lakes was found in Alberta. Obsidian tools from the Rocky Mountains made their way to Ohio. Shells from the Pacific coast were treasured on the Plains. This was a continent alive with exchange, diplomacy, and conflict long before 1496. A brief, almost forgotten visit by Norse sailors around 1000 CE at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland was but a fleeting curiosity. The world of these First Peoples was ancient, complete, and utterly their own. But on the edge of the 15th century, new ships were coming. They were guided by new maps and new ambitions, and their arrival would mark not a discovery, but a collision—a profound and permanent cataclysm that would reshape the continent and the destinies of its peoples forever.