Starting in Africa, our ancestors spread across the world over a period of 150,000 years – 6,000 generations – following the weather and their needs. They spread to the edge of land masses, imagining each time, no doubt, that they had arrived at the edge of the world, then slowly finding their way across to new frontiers. They arrived in south Asia and southern Europe 50,000 and 45,000 years ago. Twenty-four thousand years ago, people arrived on the west coast of North America and began to spread south and also east along the southern fringe of the glaciers. The ice sheets reached almost as far south as Pennsylvania, and as the ice receded, some people pushed northwards, bringing their cultures with them.
In those early days, the Americas were peopled with different nations and linguistic groups who, in contrast to the European wheat culture and the Asian rice culture, the Americas boasted a culture based on corn, or maize, and another one based on the potato, both staples that were indigenous to our continents and both supported with a large variety of vegetables and fish. It also appears that farming cultures were flanked by hunter-gatherer cultures, one being better adapted to the fertile valleys and the other to the hills, and that these peoples would have slowly expanded in unison, sharing and warring with each other in an interdependent economy. The maize crops had been cultivated over hundreds of generations and adapted to the different climates, slowly moving with people and through trade northward from Central America while the potato, sweet potato and a large variety of other crops were present in South America. Their ecology was so dependent on human modification that the Amazon rain forest itself has been considered as a human artifact.
Maize is a plant that is dependent upon human intervention to reproduce, and the domestic crop will die without us. Botanists have found that a central American grass called teosinte is the original wild ancestor, but it is so different that it lends credence to the statement that maize – corn – was simply created by humans.
Although dependent on exchanges, the different peoples of the Americas were culturally fairly autonomous and boasted a large number of languages and cultural roots. This autonomy may be, in part, attributable to the lack of horses and most of the other domestic animals that were used in Eurasia, but it is too easy to mix cause and effect. War was a slow, tedious affair compared to the lightening-fast invasions on horseback or chariot that continuously rocked and challenged the cultural growth of the Eurasian continent. In the Americas, the wars involved a lot more negotiated treaties and understandings. In fact, there is evidence that invaders sometimes came bearing gifts and that war was often based on feuds or a group’s refusal to take responsibility for individual misbehaviour.
Each group of people in the history of the world has told a story of Creation to its children and grandchildren, a way of explaining to curious young minds where we come from. Stories from the Bible help historians identify places and give background to other information learned through archaeology. In the Americas, given the more autonomous nature of the cultures, many different creation myths survived. The Creation story of the Mi’kmaq, the residents of the Gaspé peninsula, describes the first actions of the first man. His explorations outline the geography of North America fairly well. Glooscap explored the continent: “Glooscap then travelled to the direction of the setting sun until he came to the ocean. He then went south until the land narrowed and he came to the ocean. He then went south until the land narrowed and he could see two oceans on either side. He again travelled back to where he started from and continued towards the north to the land of ice and snow. Later he came back to the east where he decided to stay. It is where he came into existence.” This quick summary suggests that the Mi’kmaq people were aware of the basic layout of the continent, which suggests an awareness of the land they inhabit. This is not surprising given that they would have participated in exchanges with neighbouring agricultural peoples who grew maize, and with their continent-wide moieties. Thanks to these community understandings and uses of sign language, it is likely that a young person could have travelled across the continent more safely seven hundred or even a thousand years ago than today.
Contradicting what we learned in school, the early Jesuits documented that Mi’kmaq children took notes in their own script using charcoal and birch bark. While the script survives, no records of the cultures or of their history have been found, and the importance of the writing has been largely dismissed. Historians know that there were written languages in Central and South America, and given the individuality of the different nations, it is easy to dismiss the scribbling of Mi’kmaq children, but it is suggestive of a much more complex culture that spanned the continent.
The Mi’kmaq are members of the Wabanaki Confederacy, and the term Wabanaki means ‘people of the dawn’. These nations lived in the east of the continent, as their name reflects. This identity seems to locate them with regard to others who were not as far to the east, and they seem to have named themselves in that geographic context the people of the rising sun. The Wabanaki Confederacy was located at the extreme east of their world.
In school, again, we were taught that at least North America was fairly empty when the first Europeans began settling – that the people already here were scarce and bordered on being irrelevant. The truth is much different. A huge, advanced civilization, as populous as Europe was based on a simple rule of understanding our place in nature, our belonging to it rather than our ownership. The civilization was as distinct as India’s or China’s. It suffered from a major vulnerability, though. Belonging to the world they developed a different biome from the one ownership developed. The latter led to herding cultures that had greater risks of zoonotic spillover, or the transmission of pathogens between species. Descendent survivors of herding cultures consequently became carriers of pathogens that could devastate non-herding cultures. The belonging to cultures had developed no resistance to the diseases that the survivors of the herding cultures carried. Disease spread through the local civilization reducing its numbers by as much as 90 percent and destroying most vestiges of the culture – but not its memory. The herding descendants simply took ownership of the vacated spaces and often felt that their acquisition was the will of their own god.
When Jacques Cartier first sailed up the St. Lawrence River in the 1530s, he chose names for everything he saw. Often, though, he was obliged to choose the names the places already had. Some of the people who he found were Iroquoian, and they farmed and hunted in the lowlands along the river. He also met Abenakis people who inhabited rougher terrain. Among these latter were the Mi’kmaq, whom he encountered at the location we know as the town of Gaspé. They called it Honguedo, a word which meant where people came to meet. The name reflected their usage of it as a port and centre. Mi’kmaq means ‘friends’ and was not the name they called themselves so much as the name that others called them. Cartier, who was exploring a “virgin” territory for France, saw Mi’kmaqs waving beaver pelts and hailing him using Basque words. To them, his ship represented exchange with Europe, a celebration they had been sharing with the Basque people for some time. Cartier recorded the name Gaspé for this region, a French pronunciation of what the Mi’kmaq called it. Their word was Gespeg, meaning the end of the land, a view of the edge of the world.
The descendants of the African exodus of 6000 generations earlier had broken into groups that followed vastly different routes and histories, travelling around the world and meeting again, in this case at the end of the land. With no possible recollection of having both left a common place so many millennia before, two vastly different peoples were obliged to figure it out – one from the herding culture based on ownership and the other who belonged to a place at the edge of the world.