History of Monarchy in Canada - Pre-colonial

Pre-colonial

Further information: The Canadian Crown and Aboriginal peoples

While no indigenous North Americans in what is now Canada had what would be seen today as an official monarchy, some aboriginal peoples, before their first encounters with French and British colonisers, were governmentally organised in a fashion similar to the occidental idea of monarchy. Europeans often considered vast territories belonging to different aboriginal groups to be kingdoms—such as the kingdom of Saguenay, along the north shore of the Saint Lawrence River between the Trinity River and the Isle-aux-Coudres, and the neighbouring kingdom of Canada, which stretched west to the Island of Montreal—and the leaders of these communities were referred to as kings, particularly those chosen through heredity. Many had chieftains, whose powers varied from one nation to the next; in some examples, the chief would exercise considerable authority and influence on the decisions of the group, while in others he was more of a symbolic or ceremonial figure. In the latter cases, considering that many First Nations societies were governed by unwritten customs and codes of conduct, wherein the chieftain was bound to follow the advice of a council of elders, the form of government would have closely resembled a modern constitutional monarchy.