A dark time in Atlantic Canadian history is the extinction of the Beothuk people. The last surviving Beothuk, Shanawdithit, tried to preserve her people’s history and culture before her death at age of 29.
Shanawdithit was born in 1801 by which time the Beothuk’s numbers had already dwindled precipitously.
While disease certainly played a part this was no mere cruel twist of nature: her people were for centuries hunted down and murdered…
The first ever interaction between North American and European peoples took place almost exactly 800 years before Shanawdithit’s birth when a group of Vikings discovered a group of nine likely Beothuk people, asleep.
The Vikings murdered them in their sleep.
Several months later the Beothuk in turn hunted down the Vikings, killing 22 of them including their leader and driving them back to Greenland.
Eight hundred years later, this first contact echoed through history.
Shanawdithit was seven years old and washing venison in a river when a hunter snuck up on her and shot her.
She was seriously wounded, but was cared for and doted on by her family, like her aunt Demasduit, and made a long and arduous recovery.
Five hundred years after the Vikings’ departure, Europeans returned to Newfoundland.
Portuguese explorer Gaspar Corte Real made contact with the Beothuk in 1500 by capturing 57 of them to sell as slaves in Europe. He never made it home.
There is now a statue of him in front of Newfoundland’s House of Assembly.
In the ensuing years ships came from faraway places like France, Britain, Portugal and the Netherlands and began fishing the incredibly lucrative seas off of Newfoundland.
The European fishers would come in fleets and set up camps on the shore. They would spend the summers fishing, salting the fish and packing it in barrels. In Autumn the fleets would go back to Europe leaving their equipment, their nets, their houses and their tools behind.
The Beothuk went to the abandoned camps and took the equipment and tools left behind.
But the camps weren’t abandoned. The Europeans came back the next year and expected their stuff to have been left alone. They retaliated by hunting down and murdering any Beothuk they could find.
The Beothuk retreated to the interior of Newfoundland and steadfastly avoided attempts at contact –from both settlers and Indigenous peoples– in the next centuries.
Now cut off from the sea they knew, food became scarce. They would take food from snares and traps left behind by white hunters and trappers.
Enraged, the hunters and trappers began hunting them.
Newfoundland’s colonial government as early as 1769 came out aggressively against the murders of the Beothuk, with Governor John Byron declaring “it is his Majesty’s royal will that I express his abhorrence at this inhuman barbarity, and I do strictly enjoin and require all His Majesty’s subjects to live in amity and brotherly kindness with the native s****** on the said island of Newfoundland … all persons found guilty of murdering said native Indians … may be tried for capital crimes.”
This meant that the government policy was that anyone murdering a Beothuk will themselves be put to death. How this worked in practice was debatable..
Shanawdithit and her family were in March of 1819 living by Red Indian Lake for the winter. Nearby a fishing boat had gone missing. Thinking the Beothuk took the boat, John Peyton Jr assembled a group of 8 heavily armed men and headed for a known Beothuk camp nearby.
Peyton’s group ambushed the Beothuk at their camp, and pursued them as they fled into the snow.
As they caught up to Shanawdithit’s aunt Demasduit, she spun to face them and bared her breasts in a desperate attempt to express that she was a mother nursing her newborn baby.
Peyton’s team captured her.
Demasduit’s husband Nonosbawsut returned to negotiate his wife’s release but was murdered.
Demasduit was taken away.
Her newborn baby was left in the snow.
John Peyton Jr and his men were arrested by government magistrates for the murders of the Beothuk and brought to St. John’s, where they were tried before a grand jury.
The jury absolved them of all guilt, declaring “there was no malice on the part of Peyton’s party.”
Despite the not guilty verdict, public sympathy was with Demasduit, and ordinary Newfoundlanders raised money to return her to her people.
Famous Arctic Explorer Captain David Burchan volunteered to transport her to her people.
Demasduit was almost to her home near Ship Cove (now Botwood) when she began to get sick with tuberculosis.
She died soon after, just before making it home.
Captain Burchan built her a coffin and placed it on the shore of the lake that was her home.
Her family brought her body home and placed it in a burial hut beside her husband and child.
At that point there were now only 31 Beothuk remaining.
Shanawdithit was out searching for food with her mother and sister in April of 1823 when trappers stumbled across them. They were all captured.
They were brought to St. John’s but her mother and sister died en route from tuberculosis.
Shanawdithit, it was decided, would go to Exploits Island and act as a servant to a family.
The family she was given to was The Peyton Family — that same family who were absolved of guilt in the murder of her uncle, who captured her aunt and who left her infant cousin in the snow to die.
The Peytons, who had earlier renamed Demasduit “Mary March” because they captured her in March, now renamed Shanawdithit “Nancy April.”
Meanwhile, a wealthy young Scotsman named William Cormack was searching for Beothuk.
As an idle rich youth in Scotland, Cormack heard explorers’ tales and wanted an adventure of his own. He came to Newfoundland with the plan to be the first (white) person to ever cross the island over land, which he achieved with the help of hired Mi’kmaq guides.
He learned from them of the mysterious Beothuk people and their perilous situation.
Cormack decided he finally found his purpose; he would save the Beothuk from extinction.
He hired a large team of young and educated Mi’kmaq (from Nova Scotia), Abenaki (from Quebec), and Montagnais (from Labrador) to track the Beothuk across Newfoundland to find them before it was too late.
Frequently Cormack and his team found traces of the Beothuk graves and artifacts, but never any people.
Cormack only learned of an intelligent young Beothuk woman languishing as a servant in 1828.
He bought her from the Peytons.
The young woman arrived frail and sickly– Shanawdithit had contracted tuberculosis and was dying.
Remarkably, given how quickly it took her mother and sister, Shanawdithit lived a year.
Cormack hired a team of European experts and began a foundation to preserve Beothuk knowledge.
Shanawdithit learned English startlingly quickly, though now English-speaking people also wanted to be taught to speak her language and learn her culture.
The Beothuk were fiercely independent and very different from other Indigenous peoples. Their unique conical homes made of birchbark and insulated with moss were unlike anything seen in North America.
Shanawdithit taught the Europeans about Beothuk dwellings, culture, tools, teachings, ceremonies and values. She taught them her people’s language, her people’s history and culture. She drew diagrams, maps, and pictures. She bitterly railed against the murders of her family.
As a token of appreciation of his kindness, Shanawdithit gave Cormack a lock of her hair and two small stones she had kept from the lake that was her home.
Shanawdithit finally succumbed to tuberculosis in 1829. She was only 29 years old.
Her death, considered to be the last of the Beothuk people, was reported worldwide. In Britain the London Times published a lengthy obituary mourning the loss of her “extraordinarily strong natural talents.”
Cormack was devastated by her death, writing: “the British have trespassed in this country and have become a blight and a scourge to a portion of the human race; under their power a defenceless and once independent proud tribe of men have been extirpated from the face of the earth.”
