For the early northern Aboriginal peoples, the boreal forest was not so much a landscape or resource as a World, a complex natural support system on which they founded their lives. It provided food and materials for shelter, clothing, transportation and medicines. It was the substance of their tools and crafts, the source of their spirituality.

The Aboriginal peoples who made the boreal forest their home saw themselves as part of a world imbued with spirits. The animals, the trees, even the lakes and skies, possessed souls that were akin and yet distinct from their own. Thus the beliefs of the Innu, Cree, Ojibwa and the Algonkians in the east, and the Dene in the west didn't seek the promise of an afterlife, but the guidance of these spirits for life on earth.

As hunters, the Native peoples of the boreal forest were nomadic, and had to carry their belongings with them. The forest provided bark and pitch for their canoes, wood for fuel and skins for clothing. Their clothing became an outlet for artistic expression. Embroidery of moosehair and coloured thread embellished coats, mittens and moccasins. Porcupine quills were worked into floral and geometric designs.

The Ojibwa, whose territory extended outward in all directions from Lake Superior, were one of the many Aboriginal peoples living in the boreal woodlands. A newly born child might be wrapped in a rabbit-skin robe and diapered with absorbent sphagnum moss. Sphagnum has antibiotic properties guarding from infection. The child's first eating bowl may have been carved from spruce. As well, the family wigwamin and its spruce pole structure and birchbark outer covering would also be derived from the trees, themselves. The boughs of the spruce would cover the floor providing a cushion to the hard ground. The bough's smell and needles were a natural repellent to small mammals, reptiles and insects.

Girls learned skills such as hide-tanning, leatherwork and the construction of baskets and cooking pots form birchbark. A well-constructed birchbark pot was leakproof and could be used to boil water over a bed of coals.

Part of a young man's life was to join the hunt, armed with birch arrows, bows strung with animal gut, spears and knives of wood, stone and bone. These hunters and gatherers took only what they needed from the forest, respecting it as an offering to them from the forest. After the hunt, or even after activities such as berry picking, they expressed their gratitude for the goodness of the Great Spirit and Creator.