Indigenous Peoples of Canada
Who are part of the indigenous population? How do they live now?
History
About 20,000 years ago, the territory of Canada was inhabited by the ancestors of the Indians who moved from Asia across the land isthmus that then existed at the site of the Bering Strait. Europeans first appeared in Canada as early as 1,000 years ago, when a Norman settlement appeared on the island of Newfoundland. It lasted a little over a year. In the first millennium A.D. fishing boats from the European continent occasionally reached the shores of Canada, but Europeans began to fully develop Canada in the XVII century.
Indians and Eskimos were forced into the northern, sparsely populated areas of Canada. They tried to assimilate the small peoples: they were forbidden to celebrate traditional holidays, to wear traditional clothing, and to disenfranchise those who refused to accept Christianity. Some Indians were enslaved — they were sold to Europeans by other Indians from warring tribes. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, indigenous children were first taken voluntarily, then forcibly to boarding schools where they tried to educate them in the traditions of European culture.
Modernity
Now the Indians of Canada have settled all over the country, have achieved the right to self-government of communal lands, claim to the Pope as head of the Catholic Church, and enjoy many privileges from the state. Indians in Canada are divided into status and non-status Indians: the former are officially registered as Indians and are entitled to privileges.
Where the Eskimos, who prefer to call themselves Inuit, live, the federal territory of Nunavut, in their language "Our Land", was organized in 1999. It covers one-fourth of Canada. There are also Eskimo reservations called Nunangat — in the Northwest Territories, in the provinces of Yukon, Quebec and on the Labrador Peninsula.
According to Statistics Canada's 2016 census, more than 1.6 million people in Canada identify themselves as Indigenous, representing 4.9 percent of the country's population. 977,230 people identified themselves as Indian, 587,545 as Métis, and 65,025 as Inuit.
- discuss their history and culture with them, especially thinking that you know it better than they do;
- admire aloud the exotic appearance or some vivid manifestation of culture (unless you are in a tourist reservation, where this culture is demonstrated on purpose);
- ask to be taught words in the local dialect;
- to emphasize, in principle, that the interlocutor belongs to an indigenous people.
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