The Natives whom they encountered in Canada numbered, as best we can judge, about 200,000 people in the 18th century, in the 10 million square kilometres of this country where nearly 40-million people
now live. Outside the Ottawa Valley and some of the West Coast, tribes were largely nomadic and had few fixed structures, little agriculture and generally lived in tents eating fish and game. They were remarkably agile and possessed a genius for various handicrafts such as the manufacture of canoes, and were splendid woodsmen and hunters.
There have undoubtedly been many abuses of Indigenous people, and there were also a number of illnesses communicated by Europeans who had developed over a long time an immunity to them but that had tragic consequences when contracted by the Natives. We of European descent in Canada have much to lament and to apologize for in Aboriginal policy but with comparatively few exceptions, the errors of our ancestors were not in their intentions but in the clumsiness of their execution.
There were never more than a handful of slaves in Canada, and mainly consisted of those Indigenous tribes who enslaved others. When what is now the province of Ontario was established as Upper Canada in 1791, the governor, John Graves Simcoe, took it upon himself to outlaw the importation of new slaves and announced that any slave who arrived in Upper Canada from any other jurisdiction was automatically emancipated.
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