For more than 10,000 years people have been living in the area known as present-day Vancouver. The culture discovered by the first European explorers had existed around English Bay and Burrard Inlet relatively undisturbed since roughly 500 CE. The local First Nations' people, lived in villages of large rough-hewn plank houses arranged in rows with totem poles set up nearby marking the families and telling the historical mythology of the tribe.
First Nations' societies were a relaxed class structure with many families often sharing a single plank home divided by hanging mats and centered around a large cooking fire. They were prolific craftspeople with tools, ornaments and carvings made from copper, stone, jade, bone and wood. Dugout canoes were their main mode of transportation, and the ocean and land around Vancouver was richly populated with salmon, shellfish, seal, porpoise, sturgeon, deer, elk, bear and goats. Wild berries, fruit, edible roots and the wapato, a type of potato, grew along the soft banks of the Fraser River. The Marpole gathered and preserved this bountiful cast of edible plants for the cool, wet winters native to the area.
By the 1700s when Europeans arrived in the area, distinct groups of native peoples had set up camps. Looking at a present-day map of Vancouver, the tribes of the region can largely be plotted according to current place names. Some were permanent residents of the region while other tribes came and went, setting up seasonal hunting camps according to the annual running of the salmon.
The Musqueam collected around the mouth of the Fraser River. They seasonally shared many campsites on the North arm of the Fraser with the Squamish who came down from their homes on the shore of Howe Sound to the North. The Squamish also had camps on the sites of present day Horseshoe Bay, West and North Vancouver, Stanley Park and Kitsilano Point. New Westminster, was home to the Kwantlen while the Tsawwassen controlled Delta and Richmond to the South and West. A group called the Tsleil'waututh occupied much of North Vancouver, while the Coast Salish tribes such as the Cowichan, Nanaimo and Saanich also set up seasonal camps along the Fraser River.
