Native Canadians
Is it "aboriginal Canadians" or "first peoples" or "natives" or "Indians" or "First Nations People" or "indigenous people"? They're all correct, with some mild fretting over politically-correct hemlines, which at least has eliminated such clunkers as the English "redskins" and the French sauvages. We still call it "the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs." Aboriginals find demeaning the use of possessives such as "Canada's aboriginals" and "Canada's natives," though "native" is acceptable if used to modify "people" and "leaders" and "communities." They had reasonable lives, developed complex societies, trading partners, religious cosmologies, and diplomatic alliances. By 1492 somewhere between three million and five million people who lived as part of at least five hundred distinct tribes, bands, and other groups. Natives inhabited thousands of tiny, isolated communities in ignorance of one another. Today, there are more than fifty different languages spoken by Indian peoples, most of which are spoken only in Canada and are in decline.
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