In Canada today the Indian, Inuit, and metis (mixed Indian and French ancestry) peoples are referred to as native peoples. When the first Europeans reached North America, there probably were not more than 200,000 Indians and Inuit in what is now Canada. The population of native peoples in the mid-1990s was more than double that number. The Indian peoples are organized into tribal bands, each governed by a band council. Most bands control a tract of land called a reserve that was defined by treaties made in the past with Great Britain. In the 1960s, '70s, '80s, and '90s, some bands extended their landholdings or were paid for lands by taking the government of Canada to court. The Vikings from Northern Europe arrived on the continent in about AD 1000, but they made no long-lasting settlement. It was not until the beginning of the 17th century that the French established permanent settlements in what are now the Maritime Provinces and Quebec. The British, who had established themselves in their New England colonies, moved into the interior of the continent through Hudson Bay. The fortunes of war brought almost the whole of the continent under the control of Great Britain in 1763. The American Revolution separated it again and brought about the first of many migrations of people to the nation that was to become Canada. Most of these people were of British origin. Unemployment and other problems caused by industrialization in Great Britain, potato famines in Ireland, offers of free land, and simple adventuresome spirit brought thousands of new settlers pouring into British North America. By the time Canada became an independent nation in 1867, the Maritime Provinces, Quebec along the St. Lawrence River, and southern Ontario were well settled, with extensive farmland and burgeoning towns and cities linked by an expanding road and railway network. Population growth from this time until the beginning of the 20th century, however, averaged only 1 percent per year. The flow from Britain and the rest of Europe was offset to a large extent by a flow out to the United States, where the settlement of the West was in full swing. In the years before the beginning of World War I, a new flood of immigrants, many fleeing the unrest in Germany and Russia, came pouring into Canada and took up cheap land offered by the railroad companies on the prairies. Often the isolated communities that were formed were of people from the same country so that many European cultures were transplanted to the new land. During a very rapid expansion of Canadian industry and a massive movement of people from rural to urban centers following World War II, there was another great influx of immigrants--particularly from Italy--to meet the demand for workers in the building trades. As a result, Italianis now the third most important first language spoken in Canada, next to English and French, the two official languages according to Canada's constitution. Upheavals in Africa and Asia, and the changing of restrictive regulations concerning immigration to Canada from the Far East, have caused an inflow of people of Asian origin. These included Indian and Pakistani refugees from East Africa, Vietnamese "boat people," Chinese from Hong Kong, and many more. In the early 1990s there were about 16 million people in the nation whose mother tongue was English and more than 6.5 million whose mother tongue was French. But the federal government and most provincial governments have recognized through legislation the multicultural nature of today's Canadian society. Individual ethnic communities are encouraged through various funding arrangements to keep alive their language and culture. In the early 1990s there were in Canada about 485,000 Italian-speaking citizens, 466,000 who spoke German, 221,000 speakers of Ukrainian, 283,000 Chinese-speaking people,and 194,000 who spoke either Inuktitut--the language of the Inuit--or another native Indian language. This cultural diversity is looked upon as a national asset. The Constitution Act prohibits discrimination against individual citizens on the basis of race, color, religion, or sex.