CANADA'S INDIAN PROBLEMS 



By Diamond J en nebs 

 Chief, Division of Anthropology, National Museum of Canada 



[With 4 plates] 



If you study a physiographic map of Canada, or, better still, if you 

 travel over the Dominion in an airplane, you will find yourself irre- 

 sistibly compelled to block off the country into four regions, viz, Can- 

 ada east of the Great Lakes, the prairies, the Pacific slope, and the far 

 north. Even then you will not be satisfied, but will begin to subdivide 

 these four regions, to distinguish in eastern Canada, for example, be- 

 tween the fertile lowlands in southern Ontario along with the valley 

 of the St. Lawrence, and the rocky uplands, splattered with innumer- 

 able lakes and rivers, that comprise the largest part of the two prov- 

 inces, Quebec and Ontario. Each region, each subdivision of a region, 

 differs from the rest in climate, in vegetation and in fauna ; and since 

 the less civilized man is, the more deeply he is influenced by his physical 

 environment, so our Canadian Indians, when they first came into con- 

 tact with Europeans, were likewise separable into a number of divi- 

 sions — divisions that corresponded more or less with the geographical 

 ones, but derived from differences in the mode of life, social organiza- 

 tion and religious beliefs. It was due to these differences, in no small 

 measure, that our Indians responded so variously to European contact, 

 and that they vary so greatly today in their adaptation to European 

 civilization. 



Europeans first established a foothold in the eastern part of Canada, 

 where they encountered two types of Indians, nonagricultural, migra- 

 tory Algonkian tribes of the Maritime Provinces and of the upland 

 areas of Quebec and Ontario, and corn-raising, semisedentary Iro- 

 quoian tribes of southern Ontario and along the banks of the St. 

 Lawrence. These Iroquoians were themselves comparatively recent 

 immigrants into Canada. A few centuries before they had lived to the 

 south, either in Pennsylvania or within the basin of the Ohio River, 

 where from neighbors still farther south they had learned to cultivate 

 corn, beans, squash, and tobacco. But during the 300 or 400 years 

 that had elapsed between their irruption into Ontario and Jacques 



^ Reprinted by permission from the America Indigena, vol. 2, No. 1, 1942. 



367 



