The Labrador Peninsula, also called the Quebec-Labrador Peninsula, is a 1,400,000 km² (541,000 sq mi) block of eastern Canada bounded by Hudson Bay to the west, Hudson Strait to the north, the Labrador Sea to the east and the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the south-east. Politically it holds the Labrador region of Newfoundland and Labrador and Quebec's Nord-du-Québec, Côte-Nord and Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean regions. Physically it is a glaciated plateau of Canadian Shield rock threaded by rivers such as the 900 km La Grande, rising to Mount Caubvick, 1,652 m (5,420 ft), in the Torngat Mountains. Its people are few and spread thin: Labrador itself, which makes up 71% of its province's area, has only about 26,700 residents. They include Inuit on the north coast and in Nunavik, Innu and Naskapi in the interior, Cree around James Bay and settler communities. Their livelihoods have always come from what the land and sea yield: whales and cod, furs and caribou, and, since the 1950s, iron ore, nickel and hydroelectric power.
Red Bay, Cod and the Labrador Straits
People have lived on the Labrador coast for about 9,000 years. On its south-eastern shore, facing Newfoundland across the Strait of Belle Isle, Maritime Archaic peoples and later Paleo-Inuit hunted seals and walrus and fished for salmon. Europeans arrived for the same reason. Between about 1530 and the early 17th century, Basque crews from southern France and northern Spain ran a whaling station at Red Bay, which they called Balea Baya, or Whale Bay. Each season roughly 15 ships and 600 men sailed out to hunt right and bowhead whales and render their blubber into oil. One whaler, the San Juan, sank near Saddle Island in 1565, and its wreck helped make Red Bay a National Historic Site in 1979 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2013.
Cod outlasted the whales. For some 500 years the cod fishery shaped life along Canada's east coast, including the Labrador outports, and the coastal freighters of the Newfoundland Railway and later CN Marine were the only regular link for communities with no road. That economy broke in 1992, when Northern cod stocks fell to about 1% of their historic level after decades of trawler overfishing and the federal fisheries minister, John Crosbie, declared a moratorium. Today the Straits' largest town is L'Anse-au-Loup. Further north, in NunatuKavut, the territory of the Southern Inuit, whose land claim is still before the federal government, Cartwright is the largest of a chain of small fishing communities.
Nain and the Moravian Missions of Nunatsiavut
North of Hamilton Inlet the coast becomes the homeland of the Labrador Inuit. Moravian missionaries from Herrnhut in Saxony first reached it in 1760 and went on to found mission stations at Nain, Okak, Hebron, Hopedale and Makkovik. Nain, established by Jens Haven and fellow missionaries in 1771, is one of the oldest permanent Inuit settlements in Canada; most communities in Nunavut and Nunavik date from the 1950s or later.
Nain had 1,204 residents in the 2021 census, mostly Inuit, and it remains the northernmost permanent settlement in Newfoundland and Labrador. It has no road: people arrive by air, about 370 km from Happy Valley-Goose Bay, or by sea, and snowmobiles and boats do the rest. Since 2005 it has been the administrative capital of Nunatsiavut, the Inuit self-government region created under the Labrador Inuit Land Claims Agreement. That agreement, signed on 22 January 2005 after voters ratified it by more than 75%, covers 72,520 km² of land, including the whole northern tip of Labrador.
The land claim also carries a share in mining. In September 1993 prospectors found a large nickel deposit at Voisey's Bay, about 35 km south-west of Nain. Inco bought it in 1996 for C$4.3 billion, surface mining began in 2005, and the deposit was estimated in 2007 at 141 million tonnes grading 1.6% nickel. In 2018 its owner Vale committed to an underground mine expected to extend production by at least 15 years.
Innu Nitassinan: Sheshatshiu, Natuashish and Uashat
The Innu call their land Nitassinan, "our land", and it covers much of the south-eastern interior on both sides of the Quebec-Labrador border. For generations they hunted and travelled across it, trading with the Hudson's Bay Company post opened at North West River in 1836. In Labrador the Innu became status Indians under the Indian Act only in 2002, and their two communities are now federal reserves. Sheshatshiu, a name meaning "a narrow place in the river", lies about 40 km north of Happy Valley-Goose Bay and became a reserve in 2006. Natuashish, on the north coast, was built in 2002 to replace the Mushuau Innu village of Davis Inlet 15 km away and became a reserve in 2003; it counted 856 people in 2021.
On the Quebec side the Innu live in a string of communities along the Côte-Nord and inland. At Sept-Îles their reserve is Uashat, Innu for "bay", and at Schefferville the Innu community of Matimekosh lies entirely inside the town, with the Naskapi reserve of Kawawachikamach close by. The Naskapi, whose territory lies north of the Innu, speak a closely related language and call their homeland by a name that also means "our land".
Cree Villages of Eeyou Istchee and the La Grande Dams
The western third of the peninsula, draining to James Bay, is Eeyou Istchee, the land of the East Cree. Its villages grew around fur-trade posts. The Hudson's Bay Company founded Fort George in 1803, and as Cree families settled there it grew from about 750 people in 1940 to almost 2,000 by 1980. Hydroelectric power rewrote its later history.
In 1971 Quebec created the James Bay Development Corporation to dam the La Grande River and divert neighbouring rivers into it, without consulting the roughly 5,000 Cree and 4,000 Inuit of northern Quebec. On 15 November 1973 the Quebec Association of Indians won a Superior Court injunction blocking the work until the province negotiated an agreement. The result was the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement of 1975, a land claim settlement covering economic development, land and Indigenous institutions, which the Naskapi joined in 1978. The project now has an installed capacity of 15,244 MW and flooded about 7,000 square miles of Cree hunting land. Its biggest plant, the Robert-Bourassa station, generates 5,616 MW from 16 units commissioned between 1979 and 1981. The altered river flow eroded Fort George Island, and its people were moved to a new village on the south shore of the La Grande, now called Chisasibi, "great river".
Kuujjuaq and the Inuit of Nunavik
The northern tip of Quebec, on the Ungava Peninsula and around Ungava Bay, is Nunavik, the Inuit homeland on the Quebec side. Moravian missionaries Benjamin Kohlmeister and George Kmoch reached an Inuit camp on the Koksoak River on 25 August 1811, and in 1830 the Hudson's Bay Company opened Fort Good Hope there, renamed Fort Chimo the next year from an Inuit greeting. In 1980 the settlement took the Inuktitut name Kuujjuaq, "great river". With 2,668 residents in 2021 it is the largest Inuit village in Nunavik and the administrative capital of the Kativik Regional Government.
Iron Towns of the Labrador Trough, From Schefferville to Sept-Îles
In the first half of the 20th century geologists found some of the largest iron ore deposits in the world in western Labrador and the adjoining part of Quebec, a belt known as the Labrador Trough. Mining created whole towns. The Iron Ore Company of Canada founded Schefferville, first called Knob Lake, as a company town in 1954, and between 1951 and 1954 it built the Quebec North Shore and Labrador Railway, 578 km from Schefferville south to the port of Sept-Îles on the St. Lawrence. Iron mining at Schefferville ceased in 1982 and most of its roughly 4,000 non-Indigenous residents left; the town is still reachable only by air or by rail.
The southern deposits produced Labrador City, founded in the 1960s for Iron Ore Company of Canada workers, and its twin, Wabush. In 2021 they had 7,412 and 1,964 people respectively, and together they are known as Labrador West. Ore concentrate still travels by rail to Sept-Îles, a city of 24,569 that depends heavily on the iron trade and has some of the highest average wages in Quebec.
Roads came late. The 1,149 km Trans-Labrador Highway links Labrador West with Quebec's Route 389; its Goose Bay to Cartwright Junction section opened only in 2009, as gravel, and paving finished in July 2022.
Churchill Falls, Muskrat Falls and Happy Valley-Goose Bay
The Churchill River, called Mishta-shipu, "big river", by the Innu, is Labrador's largest river. Construction of the Churchill Falls project began in 1967, and lakes on the plateau were flooded to form the Smallwood Reservoir, held back by 88 dikes totalling 64 km, with a catchment of about 72,000 km². The water drops more than 305 m to 11 turbines in a powerhouse carved from granite 300 m underground. Commissioned between 1971 and 1974 at a cost of almost C$1 billion, the 5,428 MW Churchill Falls station is the second-largest in Canada, owned 65.8% by Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro and 34.2% by Hydro-Québec, which buys most of its output under a long-term contract. Its workers live in the purpose-built company town of Churchill Falls.
The reservoir came at a cost to the people who used the land first. The plant was built without any agreement with the Innu, and its flooding of more than 5,000 km² destroyed Innu burial sites and hunting grounds and disrupted caribou migration routes. A compensation agreement was initialled in 2010. Downstream on the same river, the 824 MW Muskrat Falls station synchronised its first unit to the grid in 2020 and was built to send power to the island of Newfoundland through a transmission link of about 1,100 km, which passed its final test in 2023.
Happy Valley-Goose Bay itself was born of a different need. In 1941 Eric Fry chose a sandy plateau near the mouth of the Goose River for an air base, which became a refuelling stop for aircraft ferried to Europe in the Second World War. Labourers from the coast settled nearby, and the town, incorporated in 1973, had 8,040 residents in 2021, the largest in Labrador. NATO low-level flight training at CFB Goose Bay ended in 2006, but the base, operated under contract by Serco, remains one of the town's largest employers.
Across all these communities, the 2011 census found Labrador to be 55.1% white, 18.5% Inuit, 15.6% Métis and 8.6% First Nations. The ocean that feeds the coast and sets its climate is covered in our guide to the Labrador Sea, while the inland sea that receives the La Grande, by way of James Bay, and the other western rivers is explored in our guide to Hudson Bay.