Editing First Nations in Canada (section)

===European contact===
{{See also|Hudson's Bay Company|North American fur trade}}
[[File:Langs N.Amer.png|upright=1.5|thumb|alt="Colour-coded map of North America showing the distribution of North American language families north of Mexico"|[[Indigenous languages of the Americas|Linguistic areas of North American Indigenous peoples]] at the time of European contact.]]
Aboriginal people in Canada interacted with Europeans as far back as 1000 AD,<ref name="Woodcock"/>{{rp|Part 1}} but prolonged contact came only after Europeans established permanent settlements in the 17th and 18th centuries. European written accounts noted friendliness on the part of the First Nations,<ref name="Woodcock" />{{rp|Part 1}} who profited in trade with Europeans. Such trade strengthened the more organized political entities such as the Iroquois Confederation.<ref name="wolf"/>{{rp|Ch 6}} The [[Population history of indigenous peoples of the Americas|Aboriginal population]] is estimated to have been between 200,000<ref>{{Cite book|last1=Wilson|first1=Donna M|last2=Northcott|first2=Herbert C.|title=Dying and Death in Canada|publisher=University of Toronto Press|location=Toronto|year=2008|page=25|isbn=978-1-55111-873-4}}</ref> and two million in the late 15th century.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Thornton|first=Russell|title=A Population History of North America|editor=Michael R. Haines |editor2=Richard Hall Steckel|publisher=Cambridge University Press|location=Cambridge|year=2000|page=13|chapter=Population history of Native North Americans|isbn=0-521-49666-7}}</ref> The effect of European colonization was a 40 to 80 percent Aboriginal population decrease post-contact. This is attributed to various factors, including repeated outbreaks of European [[infectious disease]]s such as [[influenza]], [[measles]] and [[smallpox]] (to which they had not developed immunity), inter-nation conflicts over the fur trade, conflicts with colonial authorities and settlers and loss of land and a subsequent loss of nation self-suffiency.<ref name="dying">{{Cite book|author1=Wilson|author2=Northcott|title=Dying and Death in Canada|year=2008|pages=25–27}}</ref> For example, during the late 1630s, smallpox killed more than half of the [[Wyandot people|Huron]], who controlled most of the early [[fur trade]] in what became Canada. Reduced to fewer than 10,000 people, the Huron Wendat were attacked by the Iroquois, their traditional enemies.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Robertson|first=Ronald G|title=Rotting Face: Smallpox and the American Indian|publisher=Caxton Press|location=Caldwell, Idaho|year=2001|isbn=0-87004-419-2|pages=[https://archive.org/details/rottingfacesmall0000robe/page/107 107–108]|url=https://archive.org/details/rottingfacesmall0000robe/page/107}}</ref> In the Maritimes, the Beothuk disappeared entirely.

There are reports of contact made before [[Christopher Columbus]] between the first peoples and those from other continents.
Even in Columbus' time there was much speculation that other Europeans had made the trip in ancient or contemporary times; [[Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés]] records accounts of these in his ''General y natural historia de las Indias'' of 1526, which includes biographical information on Columbus.<ref name="Madrid">{{Cite book
 | last = de Amezúa
 | first = Agustín G.
 | title   =Introduction to the facsimile reprint of ''Libro de Claribalte''
| publisher = Spanish Royal Academy
 | year = 1956
 | location = Madrid
}}
</ref> Aboriginal first contact period is not well defined. The earliest accounts of contact occurred in the late 10th century, between the Beothuk and [[Norsemen]].<ref name=Middleton/> According to the [[Sagas of Icelanders]], the first European to see what is now Canada was [[Bjarni Herjólfsson]], who was blown off course en route from [[Iceland]] to [[Greenland]] in the summer of 985 or 986 CE.<ref name=Middleton>{{Cite book
|title=The Norse Discovery of America
|first=Arthur Middleton
|last=Reeves
|author-link=Arthur Middleton Reeves
|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=HkoPUdPM3V8C&pg=PA7
|publisher=BiblioLife
|format=Digitized online by Google books
|page=191
|year=2009
|access-date=April 15, 2010
|isbn=978-0-559-05400-6}}</ref> The first European explorers and settlers of what is now Canada relied on the First Nations peoples, for resources and trade to sustain a living. The first written accounts of interaction show a predominantly Old world bias, labelling the indigenous peoples as "savages", although the indigenous peoples were organized and self-sufficient. In the early days of contact, the First Nations and Inuit populations welcomed the Europeans, assisting them in living off the land and joining forces with the French and British in their various battles. It was not until the colonial and imperial forces of Britain and France established dominant settlements and, no longer needing the help of the First Nations people, began to break treaties and force them off the land that the antagonism between the two groups grew.