Between 1600 and 1700, westward-migrating Ojibwa around the Great Lakes in northeastern North America, drove out other nations, the Fox, Winnebago and Dakota, living east of the Mississippi River, taking over the rich wild rice growing regions here. For the native peoples living on and along the Canadian Shield, where climate and soil limit farming, the wild rice or manoma crop was the most important harvest of the year. For nations such as the Ojibwa and their Algonkian-speaking neighbours, hunting and fishing provided the staple foods, supplemented by berries, nuts, maple syrup and other plants found in season. Manoma grows in shallow lakes and streams, and it was usually harvested by the women. In years when the wild rice crop was poor, people would go hungry during the long winters.

To the south and east of the Algonkians were the Iroquois-speaking nations. Iroquois towns and villages dotted the St. Lawrence River valley in what is now Quebec. In Ontario were the Wendake (Huron), Petun and Attiwandaronk confederations. South of the Great Lakes were the Erie and the Hodenausaunee, the Five Nations confederacy. While the Iroquois nations did hunt and gathered wild plants, their staple foods were grown by the women on farms. The most important foods were called the "three sisters": squash, beans and corn.

The Italian Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot in English), working for the English king, reaches what is now the east coast of Canada in 1498. The Frenchman, Jacques Cartier, arrives in the St. Lawrence River in 1534. The Dutch colony of New Amsterdam is founded 1621. It later becomes New York. Within decades of the first European settlements, small pox and other diseases introduced by the newcomers kill hundreds of thousands of native Americans. Many villages and towns are completely depopulated.

The Hodenausaunee (Five Nations) aided by traditional Wendake attack the settlements of the Christianized Wendake in 1649. Missionary settlements, of the French Jesuits, like St. Marie on Lake Huron's Georgian Bay, are also destroyed. The French then abandon their missions among the Huron. The Wendake are dispersed. Numbers join the Haudenausaunee, while others flee west of the Great Lakes. The Attiwandaronk and Petun confederations are also broken by the Five Nations' attack and suffer the same fate as the Wendake. European penetration of what is now southern Ontario is delayed for three or four generations.

In 1539, the Spanish captain De Soto lands in Florida. He leads an expedition inland throughout the southern United States. Many Spaniards are killed by native resistance or die from disease. De Soto himself dies near the Mississippi. Rather than turn back, where nothing awaits them but hostile natives, the remnants of his men try to walk to Mexico to the Spanish settlements there. They of course, have no idea how far it is, but are forced to turn back by the mountains and deserts of what is now Arizona and New Mexico. Turning back the survivors are picked up by chance on the Gulf of Mexico near the Mississippi River in 1542 by a passing Spanish ship.

See an original map of the new settlement of Montreal, around 1645