page_title: Innu
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Innu / History
context_page_description: The Innu are the Indigenous inhabitants of an area in Canada they refer to as Nitassinan, which comprises most of the northeastern portion of the present-day province of Quebec and some eastern portions of Labrador.
  Their ancestors were known to have lived on these lands for several thousand years as hunter-gatherers. They used portable tents made of animal skins. Their subsistence activities were historically centred on hunting and trapping caribou, moose, deer, and small game.
  Their language, Innu or Ilnu, is spoken throughout Nitassinan, with certain dialect differences. It is part of the Cree language group, and is unrelated to neighboring Inuit languages.
  In 1999, Survival International published a study of the Innu communities of Labrador. It assessed the adverse effects of the Canadian government's relocating the people far from their ancestral lands and preventing them from practising their ancient way of life.
context_section_description: The Norsemen referred to the Innu as skrælingjar in Greenlandic Norse. They referred to Nitassinan as Markland.
  
  The Innu were historically allied with neighbouring Atikamekw, Maliseet and Algonquin against their enemies, the Algonquian-speaking Mi'kmaq and Iroquois nations. During the Beaver Wars (1640–1701), the Iroquois repeatedly invaded their territories from areas near the Great Lakes, enslaving women and young warriors, and plundering their hunting grounds in search of more furs. Since these raids were made by the Iroquois with unprecedented brutality, the Innu themselves adopted the torment, torture, and cruelty of their enemies. The Naskapi, on the other hand, were usually in conflicts with the southward advancing Inuit in the east.
  Samuel de Champlain befriended members of this group who insisted that he help them in their conflict with the Iroquois, who were ranging north from their traditional territory around the Great Lakes in present-day New York and Pennsylvania. On July 29, 1609, at Ticonderoga or Crown Point, New York, (historians are not sure which of these two places), Champlain and his party encountered a group of Iroquois, likely Mohawk, who were the easternmost tribe of the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy.  A battle began the next day. Two hundred Iroquois advanced on Champlain's position as a native guide pointed out the three Iroquois chiefs to the French.  Champlain fired his arquebus and legend says he killed two of them with one shot before one of his men killed the third. The Iroquois then supposedly turned and fled.  This was to set the tone for French-Iroquois relations for the next 100 years.
  The Innu of Labrador and those living on the north shore of the Gulf of Saint-Lawrence in the Canadian Shield region have never officially surrendered their territory to Canada by way of treaty or other agreement. As European-Canadians began widespread forest and mining operations at the turn of the 20th century, the Innu became increasingly settled in coastal communities and in the interior of Quebec. The Canadian and provincial governments, the Catholic, Moravian, and Anglican churches, all encouraged the Innu to settle in more permanent, majority-style communities, in the belief that their lives would improve with this adaptation. This coercive assimilation caused a decline in the Innu people's traditional activities (hunting, trapping, fishing). Because of these social disruptions and the systemic disadvantages faced by Indigenous peoples, community life in the permanent settlements often became associated with high levels of substance abuse, domestic violence, and suicide.
caption: Reindeer hunting in Labrador
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