Despite an ancient history of their own, Canadian Aboriginal peoples cultures have sometimes been written about as if their history began with the encroachment of Europeans onto the continent. This is because the First Nations, Inuit and Métis written history began with European accounts, as in documentation by trappers, traders, explorers, and missionaries (cf. the Codex canadiensis).

According to archeological and genetic evidence, North and South America were the last continents in the world to be inhabited by human beings. The most widely accepted theory is that during the last ice age, the Wisconsin glaciation, falling sea levels allowed people to move across the Bering land bridge which joined Siberia to Alaska. At that point, they were blocked by the massive glaciers that covered most of Canada, which confined them to Alaska for thousands of years. Alaska, however, is believed to have been generally ice-free due to low snowfall, allowing a small population to exist. Sometime around 16,500 years ago, the glaciers began melting, allowing people to move south and east into Canada. The exact migration route is uncertain, however two main possibilities have been proposed. One is that people walked south via an ice-free corridor on the east side of the Rocky Mountains, and then fanned out across North America before continuing on to South America. The other is that they migrated, either on foot or using primitive boats, down the Pacific Coast to the tip of South America, and then crossed the Rockies and Andes to populate the rest of the lands. Either or both are possible, but evidence of the latter would have been covered by a sea level rise of hundreds of metres since the last ice age. Regardless of their entry route or method, the descendants of the original paleoindians lived in Canada for 10,000 to 17,000 years before Europeans arrived.

Canada is a land of many cultures and many peoples. Aboriginal peoples have occupied the territory now called Canada for several thousands of years. Everybody else, either by birth or by descent, has been an immigrant — we have all come from somewhere else. It has been said that Canada is a “nation of immigrants.”