Migratory Crossroads in the 16th-Century Northwest Atlantic

The coastal northwest Atlantic was one of the first routes of European interaction with the Americas, and an enduring root of colonial interactions. Yet it has rarely been treated as a social, economic, and ecological system which was shaped and controlled by Indigenous communities. Building on the work of archaeologists, particularly Lisa Rankin, this paper argues that we should see the coasts and islands of the northwest Atlantic as a convergence point for three distinct long-distance exchange systems. Along the coast of la Gran Baya, where the Gulf of St. Lawrence meets the Atlantic, each summer a cosmopolitan zone existed where transatlantic, circum-Arctic and continental-riverine exchange routes converged. Here Inuit migrated southward from the High Arctic; St. Lawrence Iroquois sent trading parties into the Gulf of St. Lawrence; and European fishworkers crossed the Ocean Sea in search of cod and furs. In a harbour like Red Bay, Innu and Inuit found themselves at a nexus which bound together places as far-flung as Bayonne, Baffin Island and the coastal towns of Dawnland and Hochelaga.

At the same time, as this paper will show, this convergence of exchange must be overlaid onto deeper migratory systems within Beothuk, Mi’kmaq, Innu, Inuit and St. Lawrence Iroquoian societies. Long-distance exchange routes were not static, nor did they often connect fixed points of settlement. Instead, exchange operated within seasonal cycles of migration and food production. These underlying migratory patterns allowed for the social and economic flexibility which made such interconnections possible and durable. Yet they also ensured that As a result, the three long-distance exchange networks were fused for only a few months every summer, briefly coming into existence before disappearing for most of the year. This paper, in short, hopes to make sense of many moving parts operating at different scales in the sixteenth century.