Chapter 8. Rupert’s Land and the Northern Plains, 1690–1870
Chapter 8. Rupert’s Land and the Northern Plains, 1690–1870
8.2 Northerners
The carrying capacity of a landscape refers to the quantity, quality, and distribution of resources necessary to support human populations. This is implicitly a reflection of other environmental considerations like climate, water supply, and soil quality, and it is independent of external factors like enemy populations or the presence of predators (e.g., bears, big cats, wolves). The carrying capacity of northern Canada presents severe upward limits on the size of the population that can exist in pre-industrial conditions.
Indigenous peoples in the North typically organized themselves into small family-based groups, all of which harvested food and material resources extensively rather than intensively. As hunter-gatherer-fisher societies rather than farming societies, their survival depended on their knowledge of the landscape, seasonal and immediate weather, travel routes, and the movement of migratory animals. Inuit populations, which faced some of the most daunting environmental challenges on the planet, were necessarily small and isolated, only coming together seasonally and even then not in very large numbers.[1] There are no indications of major population concentrations or villages north of the treeline prior to contact, and the evidence continues to suggest that transmission of trade goods across the Arctic was much, much slower than was the case in the southern half of what became Canada.
Pre- and Proto-Contact
The indigenous social landscape of the Arctic reveals much about the character of human migration. Between 900 CE and 1500 CE the Thule people moved steadily across the Arctic Ocean’s shoreline and islands from Alaska to Labrador. Their advance was slowed but not halted by the Dorset people, whose members may have encountered Norse expeditions before being effectively overwhelmed by the Inuit. Notwithstanding what may well have been a surviving enclave of Sadlermiut to c. 1903, the whole Dorset culture was gone by the early 16th century. The timing of the final collapse of the Dorset may indicate the impact of early European contact and the possibility of yet another disease frontier. In any event, Inuit culture — descended from Thule traditions — dominated the arctic rim of North America from c. 1500 to the present. A hunting and gathering people, they participated in Indigenous trade networks and had a fully developed trade dialect, but were slow to integrate into the European fur trade system. In part this is because, like the Beothuk, they could obtain much of what they needed by raiding and/or picking over fishing and whaling sites abandoned by Europeans. Passing fishing fleets, as well, acted as informal trading partners with the added bonus that they did not represent competition for land resources.
European interest in the North was muted for centuries in part because the landscape did not support significant populations of beaver. However, once th