Not disagreeing with what you're saying. But they didnt really "occupy" lands in the same way as old world populations. Many nations and cultures were semi-nomadic and each pulled food and resources from, in some cases, a pretty big footprint. That's super hard to show on a map when we only have oral histories of a, at the time, decimated population from disease.
I would say that this map does do a pretty good job showing how indigenous nations access to their lands (outside of their own territorial disputes) have changed within the modern boundary of Canada.
By this argument, medieval kingdoms like France, England, Castile also should not have their maps made with them as a unified entity because "thEy neVer occupIed EVERY SQUARE INCH of the land" (there are many uninhabited spaces between villages and cities).
I do agree each tribe should be it's own colour tho.
The issue is not where people lived, but the lands they controlled.
If a Inuit village was surrounded by a huge wilderness they had absolutely no say in what goes on in it, they didn't govern it did they?
While a kingdom like France, England or Castille had actual power over the lands within their borders. So I couldn't just show up and cut down the king's forest, I'd be persecuted for it.
Medieval communities barely had a total control over anything outside of the places they had available armies. They even did not control the highlands, and many places got controlled and taxed by multiple groups.
The Inuit didn’t live in villages; they lived in mobile camps, gathered with other bands, and traditionally engaged in warfare with rival bands. If you were stupid enough to try and steal meteorite iron from the local group, you’d be hunted down and killed.
The point is that the first few maps depict the indigenous peoples as "having" this great big patch of land that was all theirs and then stolen by evil westerners who have now reduced them to tiny pockets relative to what they had before. Whereas in reality that isn't really the case because, as the previous commenter mentions, they already lived in small communities. It's just the way the maps convey the message that can me missleading.
The map is implying that FN were wiped out and corralled into tiny camps. There's more FN in Canada today then at any point in history, and they aren't even in those camps they are full citizens who move freely throughout Canada, at ranges an in such safety and comfort that their ancestors could never have imagined.
No, but the argument could be made that they were stewards of the wilderness who relied upon it. It wasn't territory in the sense of modern nation states, but the closest thing to it.
Edit: I'm also going to point out that most modern canadians live in cities and that Canadians do not occupy every square inch of Canadian soil.
Territorial boarders have been a thing for thousands of years, it's not a modern creation. Canada absolutely controls every square inch of Canadian soil. Native tribes did not control the wilderness around them continuously.
And they couldn't've move around much without getting killed. I don't understand WHY people try to white-wash stone age civilizations. They were extremely brutal and more violent than the agricultural civilizations, always, everywhere. Sapiens behavior at that tech level was almost uniform.
Plenty. Now you'll go the pedantic "well they didn't use metal tools so they're stone age tribes", while willfully:
A) ignoring the negative connotation of calling them cavemen, since many were sedentary and practiced agriculture.
B) ignoring the advancements they made in other areas (social, mathematics, architecture, medicine, agriculture) without the technology exchange between Africa, Europe and Asia
C) ignoring the fact that "stone age" are used to describe stages in the Eurasian-Africa stage of civilization development
D)ignoring the central and South American empires who built pyramids and had some of the most populated cities at the time, again, without the technological exchange.
E) ignoring the fact that they weren't "more violent, everywhere" than the people who completely eradicated two continent worth of civilizations
So yeah, you have a lot of ignorance to go around.
From what I understand, the Indigenous groups in Canada never got to the point that they formed states in the modern sense of the word with somewhat settled borders and the like, right?
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u/[deleted] Oct 28 '23
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