Why did large numbers of Aboriginal people die after Europeans arrived?
- A long drought in the 1500s
- A volcanic eruption in the Rockies
- European diseases to which they lacked immunity
- Wars between the Vikings and the French
Answer: European diseases to which they lacked immunity
Large numbers of Aboriginal people died from diseases brought by Europeans, because they had no immunity to them. Even so, in the first 200 years Aboriginal peoples and Europeans built strong economic, religious and military ties that laid the foundations of Canada.
Learn more: Aboriginal peoples and the first Europeans
- Explorers called the native peoples “Indians” because they thought they had reached the East Indies.
- The Huron-Wendat (Great Lakes) and the Iroquois were farmers and hunters. The Cree and Dene of the Northwest were hunter-gatherers.
- The Sioux were nomads who followed the bison (buffalo) herds. The Inuit lived off Arctic wildlife. West Coast peoples dried and smoked fish.
- Many Aboriginal people died of European diseases because they had no immunity to them.
- Vikings from Iceland, who had settled Greenland, reached Labrador and Newfoundland about 1,000 years ago.
- The remains of their settlement, l’Anse aux Meadows, are a World Heritage site.
- John Cabot, an Italian immigrant to England, set foot on Newfoundland or Cape Breton Island in 1497 and was the first to draw a map of Canada’s East Coast. He claimed the land for England. English settlement did not begin until 1610.
- Jacques Cartier made three voyages between 1534 and 1542 and claimed the land for King Francis I of France.
- Cartier was the first European to explore the St. Lawrence River and to see present-day Québec City and Montreal.
- The name Canada comes from kanata, an Iroquoian word meaning “village”. Cartier heard it from two captured guides. By the 1550s Canada was on maps.