What role do the Inuit, Metis, and First Nations play in Canada?

Indigenous peoples are the original inhabitants of the land now called Canada and include three constitutionally recognised groups: First Nations, Inuit, and Métis. Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 affirms their existing aboriginal and treaty rights. The 2021 census counted approximately 1.8 million Indigenous people in Canada, or about 5 per cent of the population.

First Nations are the descendants of the original peoples of what is now southern Canada. There are 634 recognised First Nations communities speaking more than 50 distinct languages from 12 language families. Major nations include the Cree, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Mi'kmaq, Innu, Dene, and Coast Salish peoples. The Indian Act of 1876 governs the federal relationship with most First Nations and remains in force, though it has been heavily amended.

The Inuit are the Indigenous peoples of the Arctic, living across Inuit Nunangat, which spans the Inuvialuit Settlement Region in the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Nunavik in northern Quebec, and Nunatsiavut in Labrador. Nunavut, created on April 1, 1999, is a public government in which Inuit form the majority. The Métis are people of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry whose nation emerged in the prairies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Métis Nation is centred on the historic homeland from Ontario through to British Columbia.

Indigenous peoples have shaped Canada from the fur trade through the negotiation of treaties, the building of the country, and the work of reconciliation following the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's 2015 report. The Royal Proclamation of 1763, the Numbered Treaties of 1871 to 1921, the modern land-claim agreements beginning with the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement in 1975, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act of 2021 form the legal infrastructure of this relationship.