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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Information ID: #60168 Easy European explorers and Indigenous peoples in Canada

Read the following passage.

A. People lived at L'Anse aux Meadows, at the northern tip of Newfoundland, for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. Archaeologists have found that five Indigenous groups used the site at different times before the Norse came, and one more after them. Around the year 1000 CE, the Norse built eight buildings there, with walls and roofs of sod laid over a frame. The site was not a colony but a base for exploring and for collecting resources wanted in Greenland, such as lumber and furs. No Indigenous group seems to have been on the site at that time, though their old hearths would have been visible to the Norse.

B. More than five centuries later, from 1534 to 1542, Jacques Cartier led three French expeditions into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Along the river lived the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, who grew corn, beans and squash near villages of large longhouses. In July 1534, Donnacona, the leader of the village of Stadacona, protested when Cartier raised a cross. On the second voyage the French spent the winter near Stadacona, and many suffered from scurvy until local people showed them a remedy made from evergreen trees. In the spring, Cartier seized Donnacona, his two sons and seven others and took them to France, where Donnacona died.

C. The fur trade began as a side activity of the fishing industry, because Indigenous people were eager to obtain metal and cloth goods from the Europeans who came to fish. From about 1600 to 1650, the French built trading and family alliances with the Huron-Wendat, Algonquin and Innu, who helped them collect and process beaver furs. Indigenous knowledge of the land and skill as interpreters were invaluable to French explorers. The French also copied Indigenous ways of travel, using the birchbark canoe in summer and snowshoes in winter. From 1690 to 1692, Henry Kelsey travelled with the Cree and reached the Saskatchewan River.

D. Researchers still cannot explain why the St. Lawrence Iroquoians left their lands between 1541 and 1603. Disease brought by Europeans, wars and a changing climate have all been suggested, but none of these ideas has been proved. The fur trade did not shape every meeting either, and the Niitsítapi (Blackfoot) refused to hunt beaver, which they saw as sacred. Some past historians described the fur trade as a mostly unequal business exchange. Historians now stress that it followed First Nations laws and that European traders entered an Indigenous world, where they could travel and trade only with the co-operation of First Nations.

E. Not given in any of the above paragraphs.

Decide which paragraph, A to D, has the information given in each statement below. Select E if the information is not given in any of the paragraphs.

- 1.
Experts cannot say for sure why a whole people moved away from their territory by the early seventeenth century.

- 2.
A local leader objected when a newcomer from Europe put up a cross.

- 3.
Several earlier groups had lived at the Newfoundland location on and off prior to the Norse.

- 4.
The Norse buildings were bigger than the homes of the people who lived along the river.

- 5.
The Blackfoot would not trap the beaver because they believed the animal was holy.

- 6.
Henry Kelsey went inland with the hope of finding a route to the Pacific.

- 7.
People from France copied local ways to travel in both the warm and the cold seasons.

- 8.
The Norse used their base partly to gather timber and animal skins.

- 9.
Many French men fell sick one winter until local people helped them recover.

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