Chapter 11. Race and Ethnicity
11.5. Race and Ethnicity in Canada
When colonists came to the New World, they found a land that did not need “discovering” since it was already occupied. While the first wave of immigrants came from Western Europe, eventually the bulk of people entering North America were from Northern Europe, then Eastern Europe, then Latin America and Asia. This does not include the forced immigration of African slaves. Most of these groups underwent a period of disenfranchisement in which they were relegated to the bottom of the social hierarchy before they managed (those who could) to achieve social mobility. Today, Canadian society is multicultural, in the sense of being socially and culturally diverse, although the extent to which multiculturalism, as a practice and belief in pluralism, is embraced varies. The many manifestations of diversity carry significant political repercussions as has been discussed throughout this chapter. The sections below describe how several groups became part of Canadian society, discuss each group’s history of intergroup relations, and assess each group’s status today.
Indigenous Canadians
The only non-immigrant ethnic group in Canada, Indigenous people were once the only human inhabitants of North America (numbering approximately 2.8 to 5.7 million north of Mexico (Koch et al., 2019)), but by 2011 they made up only 4.3% of the Canadian populace (Statistics Canada, 2013).
How and Why They Came
The earliest humans in Canada arrived millennia before European immigrants. Dates of the migration are debated with estimates ranging from between 130,000 and 12,000 BCE (Steeves, 2021). It is thought that people migrated to this new land from Asia in search of big game to hunt, which they found in huge herds of grazing herbivores in the Americas. Over the centuries and then the millennia, Indigenous cultures blossomed into an intricate web of hundreds of interconnected groups, each with its own customs, traditions, languages, and religions.
History of Intergroup Relations
Indigenous cultures prior to European settlement are referred to as pre-contact or pre-Columbian: that is, prior to the coming of Christopher Columbus in 1492. Mistakenly believing that he had landed in the East Indies, Columbus named the Indigenous people “Indians:” a name that has persisted for centuries despite it being a geographical misnomer used to homogenously label over 500 distinct groups who have their own languages and traditions.
The history of intergroup relations between European colonists and Indigenous peoples is a brutal one that most Canadians are familiar with. As discussed in the section on genocide, the effect of European settlement was to nearly destroy the Indigenous population. Although Indigenous people’s lack of immunity to European diseases caused the most deaths, overt mistreatment by Europeans was equally devastating.
The history of Indigenous relations with Europeans in Canada since the 16th century can be des