People

Canada is a huge country, the second largest in the world in fact. The Aboriginal people of Canada are a varied multicultural group of communities. Depending on where they live, their traditions and customs might be different (very different or just slightly different) from other Aboriginal peoples. Their relationship with their specific environments, in their traditional geographic territories within Canada, has shaped, in part, their traditions and culture. For example, the Aboriginal people who traditionally live in the coastal regions have developed a special relationship with the sea. The sea usually plays a central role in the culture and traditions of costal Aboriginal communities. The coastal Aboriginal people honour the see and the creatures that live in it. The sea provides them with food, it is a focal point for certain spiritual practices, it is an inspiration and the subject of a great deal of artistic expression, and so on.

Much as the sea is very important to the Aboriginal people of the coastal regions of Canada, the particular defining environmental features of any other given region of the country play a central part in the traditions and culture of the Aboriginal people living there. The people of the inland mountain regions and the inland plains of Canada honour the mountains and the plains, and the creatures that live there, just as the coastal people honour the sea. The mountains and the plains are also a provider of food, spiritual expression and artistic inspiration to the people who live there.

As different as the traditions, cultures and lifestyles of the Aboriginal people of Canada might be, depending on their specific regional environments, the one thing that they all have in common is their understanding of the need to respect their specific regional environments and to live in harmony with nature. By living in harmony with nature, which in part means to take from nature only what is needed and not permanently and irreversibly damage it, the Aboriginal people of Canada demonstrate an understanding of the fact that nature will take care of them (in essence provide the necessities of life for them) if they take care of nature in return.