In northeastern North America, the imposition of early colonial settlement onto Indigenous territory took four distinct forms.1 In Newfoundland, it followed the contours of the dry salt-cod fishery; planned settlements, such as English Ferryland and French Plaisance, co-existed with less formal communities elsewhere. To establish Maine, initial fishing and fur trading posts were overlaid by agriculturally based settlements extending from southern New England. Despite being repeatedly expelled by the Wabanaki, English settlers used deeds and treaties to slowly establish themselves on Wabanaki land.2 In Acadie/Nova Scotia, settlement was largely in enclaves. Acadian households were spread along kilometres of coastal marshlands on the Bay of Fundy. Towns were rare and primarily limited to the fortified centres of Port Royal (under the French until 1710)/Annapolis Royal (under the British from 1710), Louisbourg (1713) and Halifax (1749). More pervasive colonial settlement did not occur until after the American Revolution. Canada – meaning the St. Lawrence region and contiguous areas – was considerably different. There, much as in Acadie, settlement was slow and, though the French later defined the region, initial migration was mixed between French and Indigenous settlers during the 1640s, ’50s and ’60s. Here more than anywhere else, French and Indigenous legal traditions interacted in complex ways. Although these four Euro-American societies may be described as colonies of settlement and made a significant impact on nearby Indigenous peoples, it was not until after the recurrent warfare of the mid-to-late eighteenth century that settler colonialism – manifested through settler sovereignty and territorial control – became suffusive, shaping the region’s overall development and subsequent nature.