Speaking about the east coast and central regions of Canada which we visited on this wonderful trip we could try to answer Barbara Huck’s challenge to her challenge to imagine a land where people just 500 years ago lived in towns and villages that were very different than we previously believed. The people were not savages, as some of the Europeans erroneously believed. They were members of a thriving civilization. As Huck explained,
“They tilled the soil and grew a remarkable array of crops—corn, squash, melons, beans, and tobacco. Not far away, the lakes and rivers were full of fish and the forests abounded with game. The women of this land did much of the fishing and farming; the men, for the most part, had other interests. While their wives and sisters and mothers planted and tilled the soil and cared for the children, the men travelled far from home, trading north and south, hunting, and as often as not, fighting. Theirs was a powerful nation, with many allies and intentions of expanding across a great river at the edge of their land.”
This all reminded me of what our guides taught us on our trip through the Africa; often the women carry water and other vital goods on their heads, while the men sat around under trees and discussed important matters.
But who were these farmers Huck described in her book? They were not Europeans as we might have thought. They were wholly indigenous. This is how she described them:
“The farmers were Iroquoian—the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk—who by 1500 occupied a large territory south of the St. Lawrence River and would soon unite to become the Five Nations Iroquois. To the north were Innu and their Algonquian speaking allies, from the Mi’Kmaq of the Atlantic Shores to eh Anishinabe of the Upper Great Lakes.
These cultures differed from one another as much as Scots differ from Spaniards today, or Finns from French. Some North American societies were settled and agrarian, others were seasonably mobile; some turned to the sea for their livelihood, others lived off the bounty of the inland plains.
As in Europe today, the societies of 15th century and 16th century North America spoke dozens of different languages. And like their modern counterparts most of these languages could be traced to a handful of common language groups.”
These Iroquois nations got together and created a democratic system of government that the framers of the American constitution were inspired by when they created what is often called the world’s first constitutional democracy. These Indigenous People y were certainly not savages.