When I was a middle schooler growing up in Montreal four decades ago, I was taught almost nothing about Indigenous Canadian history. “Real history” supposedly began when Europeans showed up in boats to build settlements, spread Christianity, catch fish, and make money. Indigenous civilization, on the other hand, was compressed into a few pages, or even paragraphs—these being largely devoted to Indigenous practices that Europeans found instructive (often life-savingly so) in relation to hunting, foraging, and weathering the elements.
