Where does Canadian fiction find its beginnings? Not so far back as about 11500 BC when Indigenous people, the first inhabitants of the land that would become Canada, moved across the Bering Plain to settle in the new land. Not so far back as about 1000 AD when the Vikings set up a small settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in what would become Newfoundland. Not so far back as the late fifteenth century when Jean Cabot sailed to Newfoundland, or the sixteenth century when Jacques Cartier sailed to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1534, or even the early seventeenth century when Samuel de Champlain founded Port-Royal in Acadia in 1605 and Quebec City in 1608. Canada was a young country, beckoning settlers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to plunder its plentiful natural resources for their own benefit. Fishing, forestry, and furs attracted many ravenous newcomers, the land itself seeming void of a cultural life. Canada was a country which, according to its possible Portuguese derivation, meant “nothing here.”