Canaan is a name doing several jobs at once, and separating them matters because they are often confused.
Geographically it names a region attested in Egyptian and Mesopotamian records long before the Bible, an area of city states under Egyptian oversight in the late Bronze Age, with a shared material culture, a shared alphabet in development and shared gods. In that sense the Israelites are Canaanites: the archaeology of the early highland villages shows continuity with the surrounding lowland culture rather than the arrival of a distinct people from elsewhere, and the earliest Hebrew is a Canaanite dialect.
Theologically it names the land promised to Abraham's descendants and, in the conquest narratives, a population to be dispossessed. Those narratives are among the most difficult texts in the Bible, and their historicity is a separate question from their effect: they have been read as a warrant for settlement and conquest repeatedly, in medieval Europe, in colonial North America and southern Africa, and in modern political argument.
Archaeologically the picture does not support a single rapid conquest. The destruction layers do not line up with the biblical sequence, several named cities were unoccupied at the relevant period, and most reconstructions now describe a gradual emergence of an Israelite identity within Canaan. The atlas records both the text and that assessment rather than choosing between them.