The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada
1914
The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada
1914
Stephen Leacock, best known for his wit and satire, turned his considerable talents to a weightier subject in this 1914 work: the deep history of Canada's Indigenous peoples before European arrival. Beginning with the geological formation of the continent itself, Leacock constructs a timeline that places Indigenous cultures at the center of the Canadian story, rather than as footnotes to colonial history. He traces the arrival of Aboriginal populations across the Bering Strait, explores the diverse societies that flourished across the land, and examines the relationship between these peoples and the environments they inhabited. The result is a curious artifact: a Victorian-era attempt at respectful historical reconstruction, written when the discipline of anthropology was still in its infancy. The prose carries Leacock's characteristic clarity, but the perspective is unmistakably of its era. For readers interested in how early 20th-century Canadians understood their pre-colonial past, this chronicle offers a fascinating window into historical assumptions and blind spots that would shape the nation for decades to come.
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“We always speak of Canada as a new country. In one sense, of course, this is true. The settlement of Europeans on Canadian soil dates back only three hundred years. Civilization in Canada is but a thing of yesterday, and its written history, when placed beside the long millenniums of the recorded annals of European and Eastern peoples, seems but a little span. But there is another sense in which the Dominion of Canada, or at least part of it, is perhaps the oldest country in the world. According to the Nebular Theory the whole of our planet was once a fiery molten mass gradually cooling and hardening itself into the globe we know. On its surface moved and swayed a liquid sea glowing with such a terrific heat that we can form no real idea of its intensity. As the mass cooled, vast layers of vapour, great beds of cloud, miles and miles in thickness, were formed and hung over the face of the globe, obscuring from its darkened surface the piercing beams of the sun. Slowly the earth cooled, until great masses of solid matter, rock as we call it, still penetrated with intense heat, rose to the surface of the boiling sea. Forces of inconceivable magnitude moved through the mass. The outer surface of the globe as it cooled ripped and shrivelled like a withering orange. Great ridges, the mountain chains of to-day, were furrowed on its skin. Here in the darkness of the prehistoric night there arose as the oldest part of the surface of the earth the great rock bed that lies in a huge crescent round the shores of Hudson Bay, from Labrador to the unknown wilderness of the barren lands of the Coppermine””
— Stephen Leacock
