Canadian folklore

Canadian folklore is the traditional material that Canadians pass down from generation to generation, either as oral literature or "by custom or practice". It includes songs, legends, jokes, rhymes, proverbs, weather lore, superstitions, and practices such as traditional food-making and craft-making. The largest bodies of folklore in Canada belong to the aboriginal and French-Canadian cultures. English-Canadian folklore and the folklore of recent immigrant groups have added to the country's folk.

The classic definitions of folklore were created by Europeans such as William Thoms, who coined the term in 1846 to refer to "manners, customs [...] of the olden times". The study of folklore grew out of the European concept of folk, often understood to mean "common, uneducated people mostly in villages or rural communities". This definition falls short of capturing the formal aspect of much aboriginal tradition. Even 19th century folklorists collecting and attempting to translate aboriginal oral literature recognized the immense challenge of bridging the culture gap. Ethnographer Horatio Hale wrote in 1874 that creation myths and myths explaining the origin of sacred ceremonies, "were, in a certain sense, articles of religion and were handed down with scrupulous exactness." As one aboriginal chief explained,

It is very difficult for a stranger to rightly understand the morals of their stories [...] And when you have learned all that language can convey, there are still a thousand images, suggestions and associations recurring to the Indian, which can strike no chord in your heart. The myriad voices of nature are dumb to you, but to them they are full of life and power.

Among many aboriginal cultures, "storytelling" was normally restricted to the long winter evenings. The Cree were one culture with a strict belief in this regard: "During the summer, no stories founded on fiction were ever told; the Indians believing that if any 'fairy' tales were told during that season when they were supposed to use their time to best advantage, the narrator would have his life destroyed by the lizard, which would suck his blood."

Aboriginal folklore and mythology are sometimes collected and studied according to language families, such as Algonquian, Athabaskan, Iroquoian, Kutenai, Salishan, Siouan, and others. Classification schemes for indigenous languages of the Americas can vary. Large language families can include aboriginal cultures in geographically distant areas, for example, the Algonquian language family includes the M'igmaw of the modern-day Maritime provinces as well as the Odawa people of the Ottawa River region.

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