Canada

From Indigenous homelands and New France to a confederated dominion that grew into an autonomous, multicultural nation.

Canada's history begins with Indigenous peoples — First Nations, Inuit, and later the Métis — whose ancestors had occupied the land for thousands of years before European contact. Norse mariners reached Newfoundland around the year 1000, but sustained European settlement came with the French, who built New France around the St. Lawrence fur trade from 1608. Britain conquered New France in the Seven Years' War, confirmed by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, and governed a string of British North American colonies until they federated. On 1 July 1867 the British North America Act created the Dominion of Canada, a self-governing federation that swiftly expanded across the continent — an expansion built on railways, immigration, and the dispossession of Indigenous nations through treaties, reserves, and residential schools. Two world wars deepened Canadian autonomy, formalised by the 1931 Statute of Westminster, and the 1982 patriation of the constitution made Canada fully sovereign. Modern Canada is a bilingual, officially multicultural country still reckoning with the legacy of colonialism and the work of reconciliation.