Beothuk

The Beothuk were the Indigenous people of the island of Newfoundland at the time Europeans arrived. A small nation of hunters and fishers, they withdrew from the newcomers rather than trade with them, and as settlement spread they lost access to the coast and its food. Their numbers fell steeply, and after the death of Shanawdithit, the last known Beothuk, in 1829 they were declared extinct, though some families and oral histories point to descendants.

Archaeologists see the Beothuk as the latest phase of a people who crossed from Labrador to Newfoundland around 1 CE and passed through three earlier cultural stages of roughly 500 years each. The distinct Beothuk culture is usually dated from about 1500. Around 1000, Norse voyagers led by Leif Erikson met people in northern Newfoundland whom they called skrælingjar; these may have been ancestors of the Beothuk, or Dorset people.

The Beothuk lived across the island, most of all around Notre Dame Bay and Bonavista Bay, in extended family bands of about 30 to 55 people with leaders but probably no formal chiefs. Estimates of their numbers at contact range from about 500 to 2,000, with a figure of 1,000 to 1,500 based on what the land could support. They lived in mamateeks, cone-shaped houses of poles covered with birch bark around a central hearth, with sleeping hollows dug into the floor. They followed the seasons: caribou, driven along fences towards hunters with bows, salmon and seals were their main foods. Their canoes, made of caribou or seal skin, could carry children, dogs and belongings.

Red ochre was central to their identity. At a spring celebration lasting several days they painted their bodies, homes, canoes and tools with it, and newborns were welcomed by being marked with it. Europeans called them "Red Indians" because of the practice. They buried their dead with care, wrapped in birch bark in caves, under rock piles or on scaffolds, with figurines, pendants and model tools as offerings.

After John Cabot's voyage of 1497, European fishermen came to Newfoundland every summer. The Beothuk avoided them, moving inland as settlements grew and returning to abandoned fishing stations to collect nails and metal, which they reworked into arrowheads and tools; one site at Boyd's Cove produced 1,157 nails. Competition for salmon, seals and birds, and trappers' raids on their camps, led to theft, ambushes and killings on both sides, in which settlers with firearms usually prevailed. In 1766 Governor Hugh Palliser reported that settlers killed Beothuk whenever they could, and later proclamations, in 1769 and 1807, forbade such violence. Pushed inland, the Beothuk relied ever more on caribou, and hunger, smallpox and tuberculosis followed.

In March 1819 a settler party led by John Peyton Jr. captured a young woman, Demasduit; her husband Nonosabasut was killed in a fight after trying to negotiate her release. She died of tuberculosis in 1820 while being returned to her people. Her niece Shanawdithit, who in 1823 sought help from a trapper with her starving mother and sister and was taken to St. John's, later worked with the explorer William Cormack, giving him drawings and vocabulary that remain a main source on Beothuk life. She died of tuberculosis there on 6 June 1829.

Historians disagree on how to describe the Beothuk's end. Some see it as an unintended result of colonisation, while others, such as Mohamed Adhikari, argue that settler violence amounted to genocide. The claim that French bounties drove the Mi'kmaq to kill Beothuk is rejected by most historians as the "Mercenary Myth". Some families around Twillingate claim Beothuk descent, and in 1910 Santu Toney, who said her father was Beothuk, recorded a song in the language. DNA from Demasduit and Nonosabasut shows wholly Indigenous maternal ancestry.

Our maps draw an approximate Beothuk territory on Newfoundland from 800 to 1600. The distinct Beothuk culture is dated from about 1500, so the earlier maps show the island's ancestral peoples under that name. Neighbours include the Innu of Labrador and the Dorset people further north.