EN 1101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Inuit, Nass River
18 Nov 2015
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Document Summary
Historical overview - we don"t know exactly when the first aboriginals arrived to the. Americas - but we know that this was more than 10,000 years before the abortive european settlement by the vikings (a 1,000 years ago), or the settlement by the french (400 years ago). There is no single aboriginal culture, nor was there one in the past. Aboriginals have always differed in culture and language. There were no less than 18 linguistic families in north. America alone, each having a number of distinct languages and dialects. The pre-contact linguistic diversity has since diminished - as whole peoples and/or languages disappeared (see overhead). In the first two centuries of aboriginal-settler contact, their relations revolved around the fur trade, in which the two sides were more or less independent. Early on, aboriginal peoples could hold their ground vis-a-vis the settlers.
