National Indigenous History Month

We Have Always Been Here

A scroll across Turtle Island, its histories, and its peoples.

Taiga landscape in Quebec. Photograph by peupleloup, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Before Canada had a name, this land had many. Long before the borders we know, before the maps we read, the peoples of Turtle Island were already here, telling the land's story in languages older than any country.

Boreal forest at first light.
Boreal forest at first light. Photograph by Eberhard Grossgasteiger on Unsplash.

What follows is one way of tracing that presence. It begins not with a date or a discovery, but with a story. From there, the map moves. Ice retreats, voices spread, trade lines cross a continent, and a present-day Canada takes shape on top of nations that never left.

We hope this helps all of us understand who the stewards of this land have always been, and who they still are.

Chapter 1 · Before the map

Sky Woman fell, and the turtle's back became the land.

Sky Woman, 1936, by Ernest Smith (Seneca).
"Sky Woman" (1936) by Ernest Smith (Seneca). Held by the Rochester Museum and Science Center. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

In Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe teachings, Sky Woman fell from a world above through an opening in the clouds. The water birds caught her on their wings. The animals dove deep for soil, and Muskrat returned with a single handful of earth.

They placed it on the back of a great turtle, and the land grew until it became a continent.

That continent is Turtle Island.

Chapter 2 · The long walk

Ancestors crossed where the ocean used to be.

Roughly twenty-five to fifteen thousand years ago, lower sea levels exposed a vast plain between what is now Siberia and the Yukon. Ancestors moved across it slowly, over generations, following caribou and the edges of ice.

At Bluefish Caves in the northern Yukon, cut-marked bones place people on this land at least twenty-four thousand years ago. That is among the oldest evidence of human presence anywhere in the Americas.

Chapter 3 · The people became peoples

Over thousands of years, the people became peoples.

From the high Arctic to the Pacific shore, from the boreal forest to the Plains, ancestors learned the particular grammar of each place. Languages branched into more than seventy distinct tongues across roughly a dozen language families. Governance systems emerged. Ways of living were refined over thousands of years, each one an answer to the specific question a specific place asked.

Keep scrolling. The map fills in as the story does.

Chapter 3 · Interconnections and exchanges

Already connected.

Obsidian from the Rocky Mountains turns up in tool kits a thousand kilometres east. Copper from the shores of Lake Superior moved in every direction. Dentalia shells gathered on the Pacific coast appear in burials deep inland. Argillite from Haida Gwaii. Buffalo robes from the Plains. Tobacco moving north along well-worn routes.

Hover any line on the map to see what travelled it, and where.

Chapter 4 · The land remembers

The places that carry the longest memory.

In Canada, the archaeological record runs deep. Certain sites carry so much accumulated human presence that they have become landmarks for the peoples who made them and for the land itself.

  • Bluefish Caves
  • Head-Smashed-In
  • SGang Gwaay
  • Áísínai'pi · Writing-on-Stone
  • Pimachiowin Aki
  • Wanuskewin
  • Kejimkujik
  • Manitou Mounds
  • Peterborough Petroglyphs

Hover any point on the map to read its story.

Chapter 5 · When others arrived

New France, along the river.

From the early sixteen hundreds, French traders, missionaries, and soldiers worked their way up the St Lawrence and into the Great Lakes. They drew the first European claims across a continent that already had owners.

Chapter 5 · When others arrived

British North America, after 1763.

After the Seven Years' War, the British took the map. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 promised that Indigenous nations would not be dispossessed without their consent. It is a promise that still has legal force today, and one that most of what followed chose to forget.

Chapter 5 · When others arrived

Canada, drawn on top.

Confederation in 1867 drew Canada into the shape we recognise now. The numbered treaties followed across the Prairies. The Indian Act followed in 1876. The residential school system left a mark on one hundred and thirty-nine federally funded sites, and on the families who carry it still.

And yet.

Chapter 6 · Still here

Six hundred and thirty-four First Nations. Four Inuit regions. One Métis homeland.

The peoples who were here before the map was redrawn are still here. They have survived everything that was placed on top of them, and they have not stopped.

Today they are building. In boardrooms and on construction sites, in courtrooms and in language nests, on the land and at the table where the decisions get made.

There is still a long way to go. The gaps are real, the fights are ongoing, and the damage done across generations does not undo itself in a decade. But the direction is forward, and the people doing the work are the same ones who have always been here.

Hover any territory on the map. Boundaries are approximate and should not be taken as legal or definitive.

Chapter 7 · Seven generations on

Who thinks furthest ahead.

The Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace asks leaders to weigh every decision against its impact on the seventh generation ahead. Roughly one hundred and seventy-five years. Long enough that no one alive when the decision is made will see how it lands.

The people who have been on this land for thousands of years are still the ones thinking furthest ahead. It is a way of seeing the land, and a way of choosing who to build and move forward with.

Mountain lake at dusk.
Photograph by Tim Stief on Unsplash.

A country that means to take its future seriously begins by listening to the people who have been thinking about it the longest. Their teachings are not artefacts from a forgotten time. They are still flowing through the daily life of these communities, through how they make decisions, how they manage the land, how they govern.

If this resonates, the work is already underway. The invitation is to come and find it.

What you are looking at

Turtle Island is a name used by many Indigenous peoples for the continent now called North America. The shape on this map runs from the Arctic down through Mexico, because that is what the land has always been, regardless of the borders drawn across it.

Every shaded region is the traditional territory of a distinct Indigenous nation. Many of these areas overlap, because nations have shared, negotiated, and moved across this land for thousands of years.

Every people is still here.
Always have been. Always will be.