From the point of view of Canada's native peoples, this country has 57 founding nations, not just two. Canada's First Nations is an exploration of the experience of these peoples from their first appearance among the giant mammals that once roamed the land to their confrontations with contemporary Canada. Aboriginal peoples have displayed both ingenuity and flexibility in their survival techniques. Their achievements in technology (the toggling harpoon, the canoe), and in the plant sciences (the development of maize, their herbal lore), have come to benefit the world. Their cooperation and assistance was essential for the European exploration and settlement of what is now Canada: the value of this aid in economic terms alone has never been assessed. Relying on archaeological, artistic, and linguistic evidence, Dickason explores Amerindian cultural traditions and values that were influential in developing the country's national and international personality. The book speculates that the rapid spread of aboriginal settlement throughout North and South America and the richness of culture must have been the result of complex trade patterns which included the capability to cross oceans. In the historic period, it is evident that far from being simply overwhelmed, Amerindians often adapted to colonial pressures in their own ways, sometimes mustering for wars in which their guerilla-like tactics were both original and often ferociously effective, but more often diplomatically playing off opposing French, English or American forces. But this is not a history of impersonal forces. It is the record of such people as Pontiac, Joseph Brant, Tecumseh, Abe Okpik, Elijah Harper, Poundmaker, and Big Bear. While the history of Canada's native peoples is also the history of the exploitation of the North American continent, it also reveals the recreation of the native community in the fight for land claims, self-government, and recognition of aboriginal rights.

When I first met Canadian history, as a student in a convent school in the outskirts of Winnipeg, it was generally accepted that Canada was a large new country with little history. In the words of William Lyon Mackenzie King in 1936, when he was Liberal Prime Minister, "if some countries have too much history, we have too much geography." History was perceived as a written discipine, which in the case of Canada meant that it began with the arrival of writing---i.e, Europeans. It wasn't until I discovered that I had Metis ancestry that I began to wonder about Canada before Europeans. As I learned more about that distant and too-often ignored past, my country took on a whole new aspect. Exploring its history became a personal quest, all the more focussed because the heritage of my mixed ancestry had been reinforced during my adolescent years by living on the land in Manitoba's north, hunting and trapping. It was through a series of lucky breaks that I was able to go to university, at Father Athol Murray's Notre Dame College in Wilcox, SK, from there to become a journalist and finally, after being blessed with more good fortune, a professor of history at the University of Alberta. Although now retired, I am still passionate about researching and writing the Aboriginal aspect of Canadian history.

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