MARCH OF THE TITANS - A HISTORY OF THE WHITE RACE
Chapter Fifty Five
Canada
The history of Canada's occupation by Whites was not marked by the prolonged race wars which accompanied the settlement of America. Rather the indigenous peoples - also Amerinds - were pushed out by masses of White immigrants - an almost peaceful conquest which contains huge lessons in itself: not all population displacements are the result of violent conquest, but the end result is the same.
First White Settlements
The first Whites to set foot on what later became known as Canada were the Vikings who established a settlement under Leif Ericson in Newfoundland around the year 1,000 AD. The Vikings did not however stay: either through conflict with the Amerinds or other difficulties, White contact with North America was lost until the 15th century.
John Cabot
In search of a route to the East, the White explorer John Cabot, a Venetian in the service of England, sailed to Newfoundland in 1497. He was soon followed by Portuguese and other explorers who were seeking a water route to Asia through or around North America. In 1576, Martin Frobisher sailed to Baffin Island. In 1585, John Davis found and named Davis Strait. In 1610, Henry Hudson sailed into Hudson Bay. Hudson was marooned there by his mutinous crew, and Sir Thomas Button's unsuccessful search for him (1612-1613) confirmed that there was no western exit from the bay.
Jacques Cartier
In 1534, Francis I, King of France, dispatched Jacques Cartier to seek the Northwest Passage in the region Cabot had explored. Sailing beyond Newfoundland, Cartier found the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. He launched a further three voyages to the gulf (1534, 1535 and 1541) but still failed to find a way around the continent. In 1535, he explored the Saint Lawrence river as far as the modern day city of Montreal, and spent winter at the site of the present day city of Quebec.
English Settlement
During the seventeenth century, European fishermen sailed to the territory to hunt whales and cod which existed in large numbers off the Canadian coast. Most attempts to found settlements however failed, with only a handful surviving past a few winters. One of those that did survive was St. John's harbor in Newfoundland, and in 1583, that territory was officially annexed to England.
First Amerind Trade Contacts
In the 1600s, permanent English communities grew up around Newfoundland's Avalon peninsula, and French communities grew up on the island's south coast. The first commercial contact with Canadian Amerinds was also started: the primary trade being animal furs. Initially then, there was little conflict between the Whites and the Amerinds in Canada: the White population was simply too small and spread out.
As in virtually all of the new lands, the White arrival brought with it new diseases previously unknown to the locals. Although exact figures are unknown (as the Amerinds themselves kept no records) a large number of Canadian Amerinds died out as a result of diseases to which they had no resistance between the years 1500 and 1700.
French and British
From 1600 however, the French started seriously competing with the British for land in North America. A huge region, to become known as New France, was claimed by the French: this territory stretched from the St. Lawrence River basin, Acadia (now the Maritime provinces), the island of Newfoundland (shared unwillingly with the English), and later Louisiana (along the Mississippi River valley, right down to the Gulf of Mexico).
Although France formally claimed these territories, relatively few White Frenchmen actually settled there: the Amerinds continued undisturbed, mostly engaging in trade with the scattered French outposts and no more. In 1604, a French commercial colonizing operation, based on the fur trade, was set under one Pierre du Guast, in Acadia. It did not do well, with half of the settlers dying of malnutrition in the first year, and it was a long time before the settlement was anywhere near self sufficient.
In 1608, Samuel de Champlain, another White Frenchman, founded a settlement at Quebec on the Saint Lawrence River. Thereafter French settlers began to concentrate on that area at the expense of other regions: the origin of the Quebecois or French Canadian settlement.
The Company of One Hundred Associates
The French government, under the able hand of Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII, established a huge commercial enterprise, the Company of One Hundred Associates in 1627. This company had the sole purpose of exploiting the trade potential of the entire New France region.
Under the company, the Canada colony continued to grow and more settlements were founded, notably at Montreal in 1642. As part of their internal arrangements for the fur trade, the French had entered into a formal alliance with a number of Amerind tribes, known as the Huron confederacy. The Hurons were however severely beaten and scattered by another Amerind tribe, the Iroquois, in 1649. New France's fur trade was devastated, and Montreal and Quebec were exposed to attack. The danger was so great that for a time the French considered abandoning New France.
However, other fur trading partners were found, and the colony survived, with much of the interior having been mapped and explored, if not settled by Whites, by the 1650's.
The influx of Whites remained however tiny: in 1663, New France had only 3,000 White settlers. In that year the French government disbanded the Company of One Hundred Associates, and established New France as a province of France ruled directly by a governor general in Quebec.
French Fight First Race War in Canada
This constitutional development marked a sea change in the demographics: a military force some 1,200 strong, arrived in 1665 to put an end to the Iroquois threat, and the French engaged in their very first racial war on North American territory. After severely beating the Iroquois, who were forced to sue for peace, the French army established an increased military presence.
Of the original 1,200 strong army, some 400 soldiers stayed on to settle in the country. This was followed by the French government formally sponsoring White immigration, including that of some 700 unmarried White women: by 1681, there were 10,000 settlers reported on the census in the territory, an increase of 7,000 in 11 years.
In 1664, a new French company, the Company of the West Indies, was formed to organize the fur trade. The British soon established a rival company; in 1670, the Hudson's Bay Company was given a monopoly by the British government to trade in the Hudson Bay area. In 1682, French explorers, traders and missionaries had penetrated as far south as the Gulf of Mexico, and by 1700, the French had built a series of forts linking the Saint Lawrence settlement with the town of Louisiana at the mouth of the Mississippi River.
The Mutis
Increased French governmental control - particularly in the issuing of fur trading licenses - led a number of young Frenchmen to spend more and more time away from the main settlements in the forests: soon they started intermarrying with Amerinds. It is estimated that by 1680, as many as 10 percent of all Frenchmen in New France were living outside the settlements, and a large number of these had taken Amerind wives. Their mixed-race descendants stayed in the fur trade and became the Mutis (French for "mixed") group which is still officially classed as a native people by the modern Canadian government.
The British and Amerinds Make War on the French
Growing rivalry between France and Britain led to a series of wars in the 1680's known as the French and Indian Wars. At the time, Britain and France were involved in a general war in Europe, and the after effects played out in the colonies in North America.
The British had managed to ally themselves to the long time French foes, the Amerind Iroquois, and together forces from these two groups attacked the French settlements along the Saint Lawrence River between 1689 and 1697 (known as King William's war). After ten years of inconclusive battles which descended into virtual guerrilla warfare, the warring parties signed a peace treaty (the Peace of Ryswick) in 1697. This treaty confirmed each territory's borders as they were before the conflict had started.
In 1701, the Iroquois made a comprehensive peace with New France and remained neutral in future conflicts between Britain and France.
In 1702, a new war, Queen Anne's War, broke out between France and Britain, which ended disastrously for France: beaten, she was forced to cede major parts of her North American territories to the British, losing Newfoundland, Acadia and keeping the interior regions.
White Population Growth
In the peaceful decades that followed, New France's White population continued to grow and prosper, from 18,000 people in 1713, to 40,000 in 1737, and 55,000 in 1755. However, new France's population never reached the size of the thirteen British controlled colonies in the south: this was because the French fur traders for the greatest part let the Amerinds do the actual catching of the animals, with the French only buying the pelts and exporting them to Europe.
In this way employment was never created for masses of White settlers, unlike the situation in what became the United States of America.
The French and Indian War
With the outbreak of the conflict between France and Britain known as the French and Indian War, Britain moved decisively against French interests in North America. In 1755, the British took control of Novia Scotia, seizing the 100 year old French colony of Acadia. The 7,000 French inhabitants were scattered; some went back to France, others retreated into the interior while some went south to the town of Louisiana, where their descendants became known as Cajuns, some of whom mixed with local Amerinds.
In 1764, the British allowed some of the Acadians to return, and several thousand did take up the offer. However, the British did not have everything their own way: through clever alliances with Amerinds and skillful defense tactics, the French armed forces of a few thousand men forced Britain to deploy an army of over 20,000 men for several years before all the major French settlements were overrun.
Finally in 1759, Quebec was taken by the British, and Montreal fell the next year. By the year 1760 Britain had established her supremacy over the French in Canada - but the Amerind tribes, who had largely sided with the French, fought on.
Amerind Wars
In 1763, Amerind forces attacked the western outposts of the former territory of New France, where British troops had recently replaced the French. (Most of these posts were in the central parts of New France, which now form the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin.) The Amerinds in these areas resented the British occupation, as they saw that unlike the White French, the British were intent on seizing the land for White settlement.
The result was that Amerind tribes in these regions joined the war against the British, even though many had been neutral during the war with the French. In this way Britain found itself switching from fighting the White French into fighting a race war with the Amerinds of Midwest America.
The Amerind attacks were however too weak to break the British troops - after several failed attempts to break the British lines the Amerind attackers evaporated and the war fizzled out. The French and Indian War was settled by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, in terms of which all of New France, with the exception of Western Louisiana, was ceded to Britain.
This added 65,000 White Frenchmen to the White British colonies in North America, and virtually doubled the size of the original British colonies in one swoop.
In 1763, the British king George III tried to pacify the Amerinds with a Royal Proclamation which recognized Amerind sovereignty with certain qualifications, and by which Britain undertook to consult with Amerind tribes before allowing White settlers to occupy new lands. The land between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, including Canada outside the lower Saint Lawrence valley, was set aside as a reserve.
The British could not however win: the arrangement was disputed by the White settlers in the American colonies who saw their chances of acquiring new land being destroyed.
New White Immigration
The British also established a governor at Quebec, and a new wave of White immigration started, with large Irish and English settlements being established in Newfoundland in particular. The territory of Nova Scotia had also steadily been gaining White settlers: its capital, Halifax, became the site of the first newspaper in Canada (1752) and of the first elected assembly (1758).
After 1770, migration from the highlands of Scotland produced a substantial Scottish community in the region. In Quebec the French community carried on as before, with very little changes being brought on day to day life by the new British rule.
The American Revolution
Fifteen years after the French had been driven out of Canada, the American colonies came out in revolt against British rule in the American War of Independence. It was only logical that the American revolutionaries would drive against the British in Canada: in 1775, American forces invaded Nova Scotia, Montreal and Quebec.
They found however little support amongst the local White population, who remained loyal to the British crown. The British forces were able to drive the Americans off Canadian territory in 1776.
For the rest of the war, the settlements in Canada were used by Britain as launching pads for its campaigns against the Americans. When the Americans finally won their independence in 1783, Canada remained under British control, and North America was effectively divided into two. The British territory was immediately filled up with some 40,000 loyalists who fled from the Americans. Of this number, fully a third (13,000) were Blacks, mostly escaped slaves who had joined the British cause.
Part of the Amerind Iroquois collection of tribes had also allied themselves with the British against the Americans, and also joined the refugee streams which entered Canada over the next few years. The British rewarded the loyalist refugees with large grants of land in Canada: the tripling of the population of Novia Scotia caused two new colonies to be created out of the territory: New Brunswick and Cape Breton Island.
The influx of loyalists also upset the delicate balance which had been achieved between the French community in Quebec and the British government: soon that territory had to be divided into a French and English region, laying the foundation for a French speaking separatist movement which persisted for longer than two centuries.
Expansion
In the interim large areas of Canada had been opened up by White explorers: Sir Alexander Mackenzie followed the Mackenzie River to the Arctic Ocean in 1789, and in 1793 he reached the Pacific. Simon Fraser reached the mouth of the Fraser River, near modern Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1808, while David Thompson followed the Columbia River to its mouth in 1811.
Russian and Spanish traders then tried to establish settlements on the Pacific coast to capitalize on the fur trade, but the British drove them out after what is now British Columbia was explored and claimed for Britain by captains James Cook (1778) and George Vancouver (1792).
The War of 1812
In 1812, the United States declared war on Great Britain, which was again fighting a global war against France. Both Britain and France had confiscated U.S. ships that were attempting to trade with the other side. The War of Independence only having ended some 39 years previously, the Americans still felt they could take Britain on, and war was declared.
Once again American forces crossed the Canadian American border: but on the other side lay an alliance of British soldiers, state militia and Amerinds (the Shawnhee tribe, whom the Americans had correctly accused the British of arming). The American forces were soundly defeated, and within a few months the British general Isaac Brock had not only thrown the Americans out, but had also captured the city of Detroit.
Launching a counter attack in 1813, the Americans failed in an attempt to capture Montreal after suffering defeats at the hands of the British forces at the battles of Crysler's Farm and Chateauguay. Then the American navy, greatly built up since the War of Independence, defeated a British fleet at Put-in-Bay on Lake Erie and American forces occupied and burnt York (now called Toronto).
Despite this, the British forces once again effectively counter attacked, driving the Americans out and finally sacking Washington DC itself by the end of the war in 1815.
Westward Settlement
After the war, westward expansion continued apace, spurred on by a one million strong wave of White settlers from England, Scotland and Ireland. The west was opened: in 1843, the town of Fort Victoria (now the capital of British Columbia) was established. By the 1840s, Canada's White population was in excess of 1.5 million people: the waves of White immigrants made the Amerind tribes into outright minorities within a few decades.
Land cession treaties were however signed with many of the larger tribes guaranteeing them certain reserved areas. The Fraser River gold rush of 1858, brought new settlers and new interest to the Pacific coast. The colony of British Columbia was formed that year - and for the first time a number of Chinese were allowed in as settlers. At this stage though, the Amerind population on the Pacific coast still outnumbered all other groups.
The Rebellions of 1837
In an attempt to prevent a Canadian War of Independence, the British instituted even tighter controls over Canada than what had been the case with the Americans. Soon however the Canadian settlers began demanding greater freedoms like their neighbors to the south.
The French speaking inhabitants of Quebec, who had existed uneasily with the British from the beginning, demanded complete democratic reform, and when this was denied, an armed rebellion broke out in 1837. In November of that year Canadian republicans - mostly French speakers - defeated a British force at Saint-Denis, but two weeks later the British quelled the rebellion, defeating the main rebel force at the Battle of Saint-Eustache, in which several hundred were killed on both sides. Unrest continued, flaring up once again a year later, which was also suppressed by British force of arms.
In the English speaking parts of Canada there occurred a small rebellion as well: in December 1837 a tiny rebel force tried to seize Toronto. They were quickly defeated by loyal citizens and their leader, William Lyon Mackenzie, was forced to flee into exile in America with a number of supporters.
The Union Period, 1841-1867
Even though the rebellion was successfully suppressed, the British realized that reforms were urgently needed to prevent a recurrence. In 1841, the Act of Union (1840) formally created the province of Canada out of two of the territories formerly known as Upper and Lower Canada (English and French dominated respectively).
The purpose of the union was an attempt to assimilate the French and English speaking populations - an attempt at White unity which partly succeeded with the introduction of properly democratically elected legislatures forming majority party governments based on French and English speaking support bases. Britain retained authority for foreign affairs, defense, and other matters and still appointed the governors, but British North America had full local self-government with one of the broadest electoral franchises in the world at that time: all men could vote provided they held land worth a certain amount.
The Union period saw continued population growth, particularly in the Western territories. In the field of ship building, the abundant supplies of wood created a large ship building industry in Canada.
American Civil War
During the American Civil War (1861-1865), relations between Canada and the Federal government of the northern American states deteriorated because the British openly sympathized with the rebellious Confederates. In 1864, Confederate soldiers even used Canada as a base for a raid on Saint Albans in Vermont. They were arrested in Canada but were set free by a Montreal magistrate, engendering a further rash of bitter recriminations between Washington and Toronto.
Union
The increased threat of yet another conflict with America prompted the various territories making up British North America to seriously consider formal union. In 1864, a meeting of representatives from all the regions met at Charlottetown, deciding upon a confederation form of government, a move which was confirmed in October 1864, at a further meeting in Quebec.
At this Quebec Conference, delegates approved 72 points (known as the Seventy-two Resolutions) which became a draft constitution for a confederal system of government. Confederation did not confer full independence, as many Canadians still were fearful of further American invasions, and wished to keep British interests intact to ward off the threat.
As a result Britain once again retained control of foreign affairs and could theoretically veto any Canadian laws: the concept of a semi-autonomous dominion became the model on which virtually the entire British commonwealth was built. The act of confederation officially became law in July 1867, and the entire country came to be called the Dominion of Canada from that day on. Britain withdrew its last garrisons from Canada in 1871 and Canada achieved full independence in 1931.
Territorial Expansion
Westward expansion was the first major task undertaken by the first Canadian dominion government. In 1869, a fur company, the Hudson's Bay Company, sold to the government the lands now known as the Northwest Territories. This annexation was however violently resisted by the mixed race Mutis, who were correctly concerned that a new wave of White immigration would follow.
The Mutis organized what became known as the Red River rebellion and declared a provisional government for the Red River area. Negotiations resulted in Red River entering the Confederation as the province of Manitoba, with the Canadian government promising to reserve 1.4 million acres of land for the Mutis. Waves of White immigrants then did indeed follow and soon the Mutis became the minority they had foreseen. As a result, many of the Mutis migrated farther west to the Saskatchewan River valley.
The Northwest Rebellion (1885)
A second Mutis rising, the Northwest Rebellion, flared up in 1885, in the Saskatchewan valley as White settlement followed them into this region as well. Supported by a number of pure blood Amerinds (notably the Cree tribe), the Mutis attacked a White force at Fort Carleton, forcing them to retreat south.
The White government then poured troops westward on the new railroad, and the Mutis were defeated at the battle of Batoche in May 1885, with the rebel Mutis leader being captured and hanged for treason in November of that year.
Further Territorial Additions
The confederation soon expanded: British Columbia joined the confederation in 1871, with other territories being added piecemeal to the Canadian landscape for the next 80 years. The last additions were made in 1949, when the territories of Newfoundland and Labrador were finally added.
Canadian Amerinds Overrun by Immigration
In 1873, Canada created the Northwest Mounted Police, now the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or Mounties, to administer the territories and keep order there. Part of their charter was to negotiate treaties with the Amerind tribes, with the intention of opening the Interior Plains to agriculture.
Eleven numbered treaties were signed with the Amerinds between 1850 and 1929, opening their lands to occupation. In general, the treaties provided some material compensation for transfer of lands to White settlers and provided for the establishment of reserves across the country.
By 1901, Canada's Amerind population was barely two percent of the population - some 100,000 individuals, a stark lesson of how quickly a race can be dispossessed of its land by the forces of immigration alone.
Chinese In Canada
In 1881, Chinese laborers were then imported to work on the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, a private company supported by federal land grants and other assistance. The line was completed in 1885, and several thousand Chinese laborers stayed on in the country, despite the White government's strenuous efforts to keep them out. These efforts even included the introduction of a special Chinese head tax which for many years prevented many Chinese laborers from bringing their families to Canada.
After 1890, the Chinese were joined by Japanese immigrants who soon became prominent in the fishing industry. As in America, White workers objected to the Asian immigrants because they could be paid less and so doing undermined White standards of living. After a few anti-Asian riots, the provincial governments issued restrictions on Asian immigration on a local level. Shortly afterwards the central government enacted the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 - within a year all Asian immigration was halted.
It was only in 1949 that Chinese and Japanese people in Canada were acknowledged as citizens and given voting rights.
The Klondike Gold Rush
In 1898, gold was discovered in the Klondike region of Yukon Territory, and thousands of people rushed there to search for gold. This created a new wave of prosperity, which combined with the increasing industrialization of the country as a whole, served in turn as a further driver for yet more immigration. Within the first ten years of the 20th century, from 1900 to 1910, another one million immigrants flooded into Canada, the vast majority of them Whites from not only the traditional sources of the British Isles, but also from Eastern Europe, drawn by promises of free land.
A not insignificant number of the new émigrés were European Jews who settled into the trades in the large cities, and it was not long before pockets of anti-Semitic agitation started in the urban areas.
The majority of the new White immigrants however settled the open prairies and helped to establish in 1905 the largely farming based new territories of Alberta and Saskatchewan, which were created out of the Northwest Territories.
World War I
As Britain had control over Canada's foreign affairs, the British declaration of war on Germany in 1914 meant that Canada was automatically in the war without being consulted. Nonetheless, Canada eventually provided half a million men to fight in France - out of a population of just under 8 million - and Canadian troops had the unenviable honor of being the first Allied troops to suffer a poison gas attack at Ieper in Belgium - an engagement which saw 6,000 Canadian casualties.
Eventually some 60,000 Canadians died in the course of the war. As with the Australian and New Zealand territories, the First World War saw the final maturing of the Canadian identity.
In 1926, Britain formally acknowledged the equality of the dominions with Great Britain itself, and in 1931, the British Statute of Westminster confirmed that Canada was a sovereign state sharing a common monarch with Great Britain.
Great Depression
The Great Depression which followed affected Canada along with virtually all the Western nations: unemployment climbed to over a third of the population - and for the first time ever Canada officially stopped immigration and even deported non-Canadians who were claiming social welfare. The Canadian economy did not recover properly until the late 1930s, by which time the world was plunged into yet another war.
World War II
As with World War 1, the Canadians naturally sided with Britain when that country declared war on Germany for the second time in 25 years, in September 1939. The Canadian navy participated in the shipping wars of the North Atlantic against German submarines, and Canadian pilots flew in the Battle Of Britain and the later bombing raids over Germany. Canadian soldiers fought in Italy and participated in the D-Day landings in France in 1944. Eventually some 42,500 Canadians died in the course of the war.
As in America, once Japan entered the war in 1941, thousands of Japanese Canadians were arrested without trial, interned for the duration of the war and moved to concentration camps in the interior of the country. The Canadian government seized the property of these Japanese families and sold it at public auction.
Post War Boom
The end of the Second World War saw the return of the boom years in Canada. Immigration was once again opened up and a combination of immigration from Europe (including many Germans fleeing their shattered homeland) combined with a dramatic increase in the number of births, saw Canada's population jump by 50 percent, from 12 million to 18 million between 1946 and 1961.
During this time, Canada contributed forces to the United Nations campaign to defend South Korea in the Korean War (1950-1953) and in 1950, the government began for the first time a program of foreign aid to selected Nonwhite countries, a policy which has continued to this day.
Quebec
After the war, the French separatist issue once again came to the fore, with a number of compromises being put forward all of which essentially entailed the province of Quebec staying in the union but acquiring special status. By 1970, the main Quebec separatist party, the Party Quebecois (PQ), had won nearly a quarter of the votes in its' home province.
In 1976, the PQ was elected as the provincial government of Quebec and after introducing some pro-French language measures, called a referendum on whether to proceed with further separatist actions. The vote was 60 percent against and the PQ was forced to place its separatist agenda on the back burner. In 1995, the PQ managed to hold a second referendum on the separatist issue: this time it was defeated by less than one percent of the vote (no votes : 50.4 percent; yes votes : 49.6 percent) indicating that ethnic divisions within Canada between White French and White English speakers were far from over.
The French Canadian separatists were accused of racism when one of their leaders made public note that the Nonwhite minorities in Quebec were, virtually to the last voter, opposed to French Canadian separatism.
Black Immigration
The first Blacks to enter Canada did so as slaves: the importation of Black slaves into French Canada from the West Indies was authorized by the French government in 1689. Slavery was abolished about one hundred years later, with Nova Scotia being the first colony to abolish the practice in 1787, followed by Ontario six years later.
When British troops burned Washington, the U.S. capital, in the War of 1812 (1812-1815), they brought back to Halifax many slaves who had sought refuge with them. Escape to Canada meant freedom, and thus it was a major destination of the so-called Underground Railroad, a network of secret routes by which U.S. abolitionists spirited slaves out of the American South.
Despite the apparent freedom offered to Blacks in British Canada, Nova Scotia and Ontario had legally racially segregated public schools until the 1960s. In that decade, Canada opened immigration to new areas, and significant numbers of Blacks (mainly from the Caribbean) and Asians started entering the country.
In 1971 the government started funding Nonwhite ethnic organizations, festivals and second language instruction in schools within Canada itself.
The rise in Black immigration during the last twenty years of the 20th century from the Caribbean and Africa was not accompanied by any great rise in social status: Blacks remain the poorest and worst educated Canadians, being far outstripped by the much more recent Asian immigrants on all fields.
Amerind Territorial claims
Amerind territorial claims also resurfaced in the 1960's, spurred on by the climate created by the broader civil rights movements. In the 1960s, the city of Ottawa introduced a policy to end the special rights and status of Amerinds - but this policy was never implemented, being sabotaged by a Supreme Court decision following a case brought by an Amerind tribe, the Nisga'a of British Columbia.
This court decision held that Amerind rights to the land had been in place at the time of colonization, but the court was divided on whether those rights had been ended by White settlement.
Several treaties were subsequently concluded with Amerind tribes: in terms of one in 1984, the Inuit of the Mackenzie Delta, settled their title to 242,000 square kilometers; and another in 1992, settled the right of the Inuit of the eastern Arctic to 350,000 square kilometers of land and 36,000 square kilometers of subsurface mineral rights.
Further negotiations have sought separate agreements for virtually all the other major Amerind tribes, all of which confirmed their rights to large areas of land. However, not all disputes have been settled peacefully: in more than one case armed standoffs have ensued, with one of the most famous being the Mohawk blockade of Oka in Quebec in 1990.
Racial Consequences of the Settlement of Canada
The racial clashes which accompanied the settlement of Canada were not nearly as marked as those which accompanied the birth of the United States of America. This was because the numbers of Whites settling the area increased at a slower pace than in America, and the change in the demographic make-up was not as quick as it was to the south.
From this a valuable lesson can be learned: the history of Canada proves that armed conflict and violent dispossession is not always needed to engender the change in a territory's demographic make-up: it is possible also to achieve the same end by means of relatively peaceful immigration.
The last quarter of the 20th century has seen Canada become the focus for a large wave of Third World immigration: the extent and consequences of this are discussed in the last two chapters of this book.
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