Tracing Ochre: Changing Perspectives on the Beothuk 9781442623859

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TRACING OCHRE Changing Perspectives on the Beothuk Edited by Fiona Polack

The supposed extinction of the Indigenous Beothuk people of Newfoundland in the early nineteenth century is a foundational moment in Canadian history. Increasingly under scrutiny, non-Indigenous perceptions of the Beothuk have had especially dire and far-reaching ramifications for contemporary Indigenous people in Newfoundland and Labrador. Tracing Ochre reassesses popular beliefs about the Beothuk. Placing the group in local, national, and global contexts, Fiona Polack and a diverse collection of contributors juxtapose the history of the Beothuk with the experiences of other Indigenous peoples, including those living in former European colonies as diverse as Tasmania, South Africa, and the islands of the Caribbean. Featuring contributions of Indigenous and non-Indigenous thinkers from a wide range of scholarly and community backgrounds, Tracing Ochre aims to definitively shift established perceptions of a people who were among the first to confront European colonialism in North America. fiona polack is an associate professor in the Department of English at Memorial University.

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EDITED BY FIONA POLACK

Tracing Ochre Changing Perspectives on the Beothuk

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

©  University of Toronto Press 2018 Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-5046-6 (cloth)   ISBN 978-1-4426-2842-7 (paper) Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetablebased inks. ___________________________________________________________________________

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Tracing ochre : changing perspectives on the Beothuk / edited by Fiona Polack. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-5046-6 (cloth). – ISBN 978-1-4426-2842-7 (paper) 1. Beothuk Indians – Newfoundland and Labrador – History. I. Polack, Fiona, 1969–, editor E99.B4T73 2018  971.8’0049733  C2018-900479-7 ___________________________________________________________________________

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

    Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement du Canada of Canada

an Ontario government agency un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario

Contents

List of Illustrations  ix Preface  xi Maps  xiii Introduction: De-islanding the Beothuk 3 fiona polack Part One: Land, Language, and Memory 1 Good and Bad Indians: Romanticizing the Beothuk and Denigrating the Mi’kmaq  33 maura hanrahan 2 When the Beothuk (Won’t) Speak: Michael Crummey’s River Thieves and Bernice Morgan’s Cloud of Bone 54 cynthia sugars 3 “The Ones That Were Abused”: Thinking about the Beothuk through Translation  75 elizabeth penashue and elizabeth yeoman 4 A Clearing with a View to the Lake, the Bones of a Caribou, and the Sound of Snow Falling on Dead Leaves: Sensing the Presence of the Past in the Wilds of Newfoundland  94 john harries

vi Contents

Part Two: Mercenaries, Myths, and DNA   5 Beothuk and Mi’kmaq: An Interview with Chief Mi’sel Joe  117 christopher aylward and chief mi’sel joe   6 The Beothuk and the Myth of Prior Invasions  133 patrick brantlinger   7 Bioarchaeology, Bioethics, and the Beothuk  152 daryl pullman Part Three: Ways of Knowing   8 Towards a Beothuk Archaeology: Understanding Indigenous Agency in the Material Record  177 lisa rankin   9 Historical Sources and the Beothuk: Questioning Settler Interpretations 199 lianne c. leddy 10 Historical Narrative Perspective in Howley and Speck  220 christopher aylward Part Four: Travelling Tales 11 Santu Toney, a Transnational Beothuk Woman  247 beverley diamond 12 Routes of Colonial Racism: Travelling Narratives of European Progress and Indigenous Extinction in Pre-Confederation Newfoundland 269 jocelyn thorpe 13 Unrecognized Peoples and Concepts of Extinction  297 bonita lawrence

Contents vii

14 Shanawdithit and Truganini: Converging and Diverging Histories 321 fiona polack Coda: The Recovery of Indigenous Identity  345 j. edward chamberlin Contributors 363 Index

369

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Illustrations

Maps   1 The island of Newfoundland  xiii   2 Indigenous territories in northeastern North America  xiv Figures   I.1 Sketch by Shanawdithit  8   1.1 “The Spirit of the Beothuk”  41   2.1 Traffic signal box art, St John’s   61   3.1 Elizabeth Penashue  79   3.2 Innu protest   81   3.3 Elizabeth Penashue and Elizabeth Yeoman  82   4.1 Rowsell’s hill and nature trail sign  97   4.2 Red Indian Lake  107   5.1 Miawpukek First Nation powwow  123   6.1 Ottawah: Last Chief of the Red Indians of Newfoundland 136   7.1 William Epps Cormack  156   8.1 Beothuk-related archaeological complexes  185  9.1 Demasduit  209 10.1 James Patrick Howley  221 10.2 Frank Gouldsmith Speck  229 11.1 Santu and Joe Toney  249 11.2 Santu’s Song  260 12.1 “Micmac Indians Packing”  283 13.1 1556 map of La Nuova Francia  303 14.1 Fanny Cochrane Smith and Horace Watson  322

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Preface

Tracing Ochre: Changing Perspectives on the Beothuk is a collaborative enterprise between Indigenous and non-Indigenous thinkers. We came together to produce this book because of our shared conviction that prevailing conceptions of Newfoundland and Labrador’s, if not Canada’s, best-known Indigenous group need to change. Evidence is building that the Beothuk were not a primitive and isolated people. An expanding current of research is also unpacking the colonial mentalities that have shaped perceptions of the Beothuk over centuries. Yet much of this revisionist thinking has yet to enter the wider public domain to a significant degree. Our intention, then, has been to combine our voices in order to further discussion. There are pressing reasons for doing so. As many of us emphasize in the essays that follow, established wisdom about the Beothuk has created significant problems for contemporary Indigenous peoples in Newfoundland and Labrador. Indeed, within the issues at stake here can be seen signs of broader patterns that cause problems for the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada as a whole. Contributors to this volume have First Nation affiliations that include Mi’kmaq, Anishinaabe, and Innu, and national ones encompassing Canada, the United States, Australia, and Scotland. The scholars among us are based in a variety of disciplines and interdisciplines, including English, history, education, anthropology, ethnomusicology, medical ethics, archaeology, Indigenous studies, and gender studies. I am immensely grateful to this diverse and extraordinary group of people for agreeing to participate in Tracing Ochre, for entering so generously and productively into conversation, and for writing their thought-provoking essays. Particular thanks to Christopher Aylward, whose doctoral

xii Preface

dissertation I co-supervised and whose thinking about the Beothuk has helped deepen my understanding of the First Nation’s place in Newfoundland and Labrador’s Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures as well as my appreciation of the far-reaching impacts of historiography. I would also like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for its support. Receiving a SSHRC Standard Research Grant in 2007 for an interdisciplinary research project juxtaposing the lives and after-lives of two women each mistakenly termed “last of her race” by European settler cultures, the Aboriginal Tasmanian Truganini and the Beothuk Shanawdithit, constituted the first and most important step in the path culminating in my editing of this book. A SSHRC Connection Grant also allowed Tracing Ochre’s contributors to gather in St John’s to share drafts of our chapters in June 2013 – a meeting that was essential to the formulation of this volume. Lianne Leddy has my particular gratitude for collaborating on writing the SSHRC grant application and helping design and run the workshop. Memorial University has also given extensive help in both direct and indirect ways, and graduate students Ian Moffatt, Lori-Ann Campbell, Kerry O’Neill, Heather Gogacz O’Brien, and Elizabeth Hicks provided stellar assistance. Peter Ramsden’s aid in devising maps for this volume is much appreciated. Thanks to the University of Toronto Press, especially Douglas Hildebrand, for supporting and shepherding Tracing Ochre, and to the anonymous peer reviewers whose comments helped strengthen the collection. UTP and the American Anthropologist have graciously facilitated the publication of Daryl Pullman’s essay in both book-chapter and journal-article form. Finally, on a personal note, my love and gratitude to Rob Finley and Susannah Polack-Finley.

Map 1  The island of Newfoundland. Map: Peter Ramsden

Map 2  Indigenous territories in northeastern North America. Map: Peter Ramsden

TRACING OCHRE Changing Perspectives on the Beothuk

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Introduction: De-islanding the Beothuk fiona pol ack

Islands have long exerted a tenacious hold on European imaginations. The Western tendency to bestow meaning on discrete and bounded entities may well have something to do with this. As historian John Gillis observes, “we not only think of our individual selves as islands, but conceive of nations, communities, and families in the same insular fashion, ignoring that which connects in favour of stressing that which separates and isolates.”1 Such patterns of comprehension have made places surrounded by water especially amenable to colonial fantasies of total control.2 Pondering the enormous cultural significance of that quintessential island tale, Robinson Crusoe, Michel de Certeau suggests that Defoe’s castaway is so compelling because he constitutes the space on which he is marooned as a blank page upon which he can assert his will.3 The supposed separateness of islands has also caused them to be deployed as scientific laboratories, and lent their real and imagined histories a metaphorical resonance which those of continents lack. That the Indigenous Beothuk people inhabited the island of Newfoundland is therefore worthy of note. In keeping with the established cultural imaginary of islands, the Beothuk have long been characterized by Europeans and their descendants as isolated from other Indigenous peoples, incapable of change, and, via a Darwinian-inflected term, labelled extinct.4 Explorer William Cormack helped establish this tradition of “islanding” the Beothuk in an obituary he published in the London Times in 1829. Reflecting on the death of Shanawdithit, the woman he presumed to be the last of her people, Cormack stated: “There has been a primitive nation, once claiming rank as a portion of the human race, who have lived, flourished, and become extinct in their own orbit.”5

4  Fiona Polack

Newfoundland’s achievement of responsible government in 1855 created another impetus for conceiving of the Beothuk in these terms: it facilitated their appropriation into narratives of settler-culture nationhood. Although the annihilation of the supposedly distinct Beothuk has evoked repeated expressions of heartfelt guilt, especially in the literary realm, it has also facilitated assertions of non-Indigenous “Indigeneity.”6 As Terry Goldie acerbically suggests, European newcomers and their descendants in Newfoundland have seemingly operated on this principle: “We had Natives. We killed them off. Now we are Natives. In a paradoxical equation, the claims of guilt allow a belief in the white as ‘indigenous.’”7 After Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, the Beothuk became incorporated into a wider national narrative. On the one hand, Newfoundland’s physical separateness made it possible to attribute blame for the decimation of the Beothuk to the island’s settlers, a move in keeping with both mainland notions of Newfoundlanders’ inferiority and islanders’ aforementioned feelings of guilt.8 However, the Beothuk could also be deployed to lend greater heft to Canadian history. Cynthia Sugars suggests that “the Beothuk genocide has come to function as an originary national trauma.”9 Enhanced by the machinations of the island imaginary, the commonly accepted history of the Beothuk has proved central to the formulation of settler-­ culture identities at both the local and national levels. A seemingly endless array of poems, plays, novels, films, songs, works of art, public monuments, and even business and street names attest to and perpetuate this tradition.10 Colliding Cultures Emphasizing the role of cultural imaginaries in figuring the Beothuk should not obscure the incontrovertible fact that the arrival of Europeans in Newfoundland was cataclysmic for the Indigenous group. The island was an early and key site in the encounter between Natives and newcomers in North America. Not only did Norse visitors settle temporarily on Newfoundland’s northern peninsula in the eleventh century,11 but the island featured prominently in the second wave of European exploration that commenced near the end of the fifteenth century. Indeed, John Cabot visited in 1497, just five years after Columbus’s first voyage. Illnesses imported by Europeans, forced relocation away from reliable food sources, and outright genocidal violence all took a profound toll on the Beothuk. Over time their population

Introduction 5

was perilously reduced in size from the hundreds or thousands who inhabited the island when Cabot first sighted it,12 and their culture was decimated. Colonial over-exploitation of their territory’s resources compromised not just the Beothuk’s food supply but also the roots of their spiritual beliefs.13 Donald Holly and Todd Kristensen contend, for instance, that birds were central to Beothuk cosmology.14 Thus the overharvesting by Europeans of avian species – most notoriously the Great Auk, which was entirely eradicated from Newfoundland by the midnineteenth century – likely had manifold deleterious effects.15 Attacks on the Beothuk and attacks on the Auk were at times even directly related. Jeremy Gaskell notes that one of the last recorded encounters between Europeans and Beothuk chronicles the former shooting at the latter as the Beothuk endeavoured to land on Funk Island to pursue their custom of gathering eggs and birds. In his book Who Killed the Great Auk? Gaskell comments that this attack allowed the Beothuk’s “assailants to continue their work of destruction [of the Auk] without further interruption.”16 The impact of colonization on the Beothuk became especially severe in the eighteenth century. While both English and French people settled on the island earlier than this,17 for around the first two hundred years following Cabot’s visit, most Europeans visited seasonally. Drawn by the bountiful marine resources of the North Atlantic, fishing crews from Spain, Portugal, France, and Britain would spend the summer months catching and processing cod before returning home for the winter. Ralph Pastore argues that this gave the Beothuk periods of unimpeded access to valuable materials, such as metal objects left in unattended fishing stations, and reduced the need for them to interact directly with the invaders.18 However, in the eighteenth century, by which time the Iberian fishery had long since declined, a series of French military losses resulted in Britain coming to dominate the industry; at the same time, increasing numbers of people from the British Isles began to settle permanently on the island and compete directly with the Beothuk for resources. While fascinating insights into relations between the Beothuk and the French have emerged in recent years, contributors to this volume focus primarily on the impact of British colonialism in Newfoundland.19 As the increase in British settlement from the 1700s might be expected to predict, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries figure particularly prominently in this history.20 Escalating violence between settlers and Beothuk prompted several expeditions putatively aimed at

6  Fiona Polack

conciliation; Lieutenant John Cartwright’s in 1768, which failed to find anyone at all, was the first. Lieutenant David Buchan’s in 1811 is especially well known. Unlike Cartwright, Buchan and his men did meet with Beothuk at Red Indian Lake. After an apparently friendly initial exchange, the encounter resulted in the killing of two marines and the British party’s hasty retreat down the Exploits River; Mi’kmaq21 oral history suggests that Buchan placed gunpowder in Beothuk hearths before leaving.22 Settler John Peyton, Jr’s foray up this same waterway in 1819, in a party including his father (who had already “rendered himself infamous for his persecution of the Indians”),23 also looms large in the history of intercultural contact. Peyton undertook his journey after receiving Governor Charles Hamilton’s permission to attempt to retrieve property the Beothuk had taken from him, and encouragement to “capture one of the Indians alive.”24 The colonists’ expedition led to the abduction of Demasduit, who became known to settlers as Mary March, and the murder of her husband, Nonosabusat. While Peyton later testified at his trial for this killing (of which he was acquitted) that only one Beothuk man died at Red Indian Lake, Shanawdithit subsequently revealed that Nonosabusat’s brother was also mortally wounded by the settlers.25 There were other, indirect, casualties, too. Demasduit and Nonosabusat’s infant died two days after its mother’s abduction. Demasduit herself succumbed to tuberculosis within a year. The final European-led expeditions in search of the Beothuk were undertaken by Newfoundland-born but Scottish-raised William Cormack in 1822 and 1827. As James Howley notes: “Of all those whose names are connected with the Aborigines of Newfoundland, there is not one whose name stands out more conspicuously.”26 Cormack hired Mi’kmaq guide Sylvester Joe on the first occasion, and three other Indigenous guides on the second,27 but encountered no Beothuk on either trek; Mi’kmaq oral history suggests that those leading him might have deliberately prevented Cormack from doing so.28 However, just prior to commencing his second journey, Cormack was instrumental in founding the Beothuk Institution. Its aims included “opening a communication with, and promoting the civilization of, the Red Indians of Newfoundland; and of procuring, if possible, an authentic history of that unhappy race of people.”29 After his return, and under the Institution’s auspices, Cormack had Shanawdithit brought to St John’s in 1828; forced by lack of food to surrender to settlers in Notre Dame Bay in 1823, she had been living as a domestic servant with the Peyton family for the preceding five years. In St John’s, Cormack questioned

Introduction 7

Shanawdithit and annotated a series of maps and drawings she made for him (including Figure 0.3).30 Bankruptcy forced Cormack from Newfoundland in January 1829, and his attention turned away from the Beothuk. Shanawdithit died less than six months later, the record of her internment describing her as “very probably the last of the aborigines.”31 In fact, Shanawdithit was not the last of the Beothuk – Santu Toney’s early-twentieth-century testimony about her Beothuk father is just one attestation of that. However, by 1829, centuries of European colonization and violence had unquestionably brought about the complete collapse of the Beothuk world.32 Presently … In the spring of 2013 the St John’s Telegram published a front page article with the headline “Beothuk Not Extinct.”33 In it, the Miawpukek First Nation’s chief, Mi’sel Joe, refutes European assumptions that the Beothuk ceased to exist in 1829. He does so on the grounds that Mi’kmaq oral history tells of intermarriage between the Beothuk and the Mi’kmaq, and recounts that the Mi’kmaq helped Beothuk flee the island of Newfoundland. He further claims that DNA testing will confirm Mi’kmaq beliefs that the Beothuk are not “all gone.” Other local and national media rapidly picked up the Telegram story.34 It also elicited a heated rebuttal from Ingeborg Marshall, author of A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk. In a letter to its editor, Marshall professes to being “very disappointed” with the Telegram’s headline article. She asserts that the Beothuk were a unique cultural and ethnic group, and that “even if a few Beothuk were absorbed by the Mi’kmaq, after six generations or more with no new Beothuk ‘blood’ infusion, the percentage of Beothuk gene material in today’s Mi’kmaq offspring would be 1.5 per cent or less.”35 Her letter concludes, though, with a plea for funding of further DNA research; like Chief Joe, she believes it will reveal conclusive information about interactions between the Beothuk and other Indigenous groups. Dakota scholar Kim TallBear has persuasively outlined the dangers of prioritizing DNA findings in determining Indigenous identity. As she suggests, “indigenous peoples’ ‘ancestry’ is not simply genetic ancestry evidenced in ‘populations’ but biological, cultural, and political groupings constituted in dynamic, long-standing relationships with each other and with living landscapes that define their people-specific identities and, more broadly, their indigeneity.”36 However, leaving

Figure I.1  One of Shanawdithit’s sketches, which William Cormack captioned “Captain Buchan’s visit to the Red Indians in 1810–11 when the two marines

were killed.” Reproduced by permission of the Rooms Corporation of Newfoundland and Labrador, Provincial Museum Division.

10  Fiona Polack

aside for now the fraught question of what role genetic research should play in determining a First Nation’s existence,37 this recent media controversy reflects the fact that long-standing settler-culture assumptions about the Beothuk are currently being openly questioned by Indigenous people in Newfoundland.38 Given that they continue to inhabit the same island upon which the Beothuk once flourished, the Mi’kmaq are, as might be anticipated, at the forefront of this interrogation. Indeed, because they have had the most to say publicly (as well as the prosaic issue of contributor availability), this volume focuses more closely on the relationship between the Beothuk and the Mi’kmaq than that between the Beothuk and any other Indigenous group. Nonetheless, Innu elder Elizabeth Penashue’s39 comments in chapter 2 about kinship between the Innu and the Beothuk are an important reminder that, while they are not as comprehensively canvassed here, Innu perspectives on the Beothuk also clearly diverge from those currently prevalent among non-Indigenous people.40 That Mi’kmaq views about the Beothuk should only now be attracting widespread interest attests to the tenacity of assumptions about Indigenous people in Newfoundland. As Dennis Bartels and Alice Bartels suggest, “the belief that the Mi’gmaq [sic] were relative newcomers to Newfoundland, and that they were historically tainted with the murder of the Beothuk, was an important part of an ethnic boundary that from the mid-nineteenth century to the late-twentieth century separated ‘savage/uncivilized’ Mi’gmaq from ‘civilized’ Newfoundlanders of English or Irish descent, and from the ‘extinct/noble’ Beothuk.”41 Indeed, when Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, no provision was made for Mi’kmaq communities on the island.42 To quote Bartels and Bartels again, “Newfoundlanders were, of course, aware that there were Mi’gmaq living in Newfoundland, but they were not acknowledged as Aboriginal. Aboriginality was exclusively reserved for the ‘extinct’ Beothuk.”43 As Bonita Lawrence cogently observes in chapter 13 of this volume, federal recognition can have both negative and positive ramifications. Unquestionably, though, the decision to exclude Indigenous people in the new Canadian province from the Terms of Union entrenched notions of the Mi’kmaq as inauthentic, and contributed to those of Aboriginal descent feeling ashamed of their ancestry and endeavouring to conceal their origins. As Jacqueline White Snook puts it, “there was so much that was hidden from us and we didn’t know it was hidden from us. Like our grandparents, for instance[,] [who] started hiding and their parents before that and it was just because they

Introduction 11

were afraid of repercussions.”44 Exclusion from the Terms of Union also left Indigenous people in Newfoundland and Labrador with the difficult, lengthy, and often divisive task of having to prove their identity if they wished to access government services and programs. In 2011 only four out of ten had registered Indian status – the lowest proportion of any province or territory in the country.45 Notwithstanding this tenacious suppression of Indigeneity, in recent decades the cultural landscape in Newfoundland and Labrador has shifted in some respects. In consonance with a worldwide resurgence of Indigenous identity, cultural reclamation and campaigning for recognition commenced in the province in the early 1970s.46 As Joane Nagel notes of the American Indian cultural revival more generally, around this period there was “a steady and growing effort on the part of many, perhaps most, native American communities to preserve, protect, recover, and revitalize cultural traditions, religious and ceremonial practices, sacred or traditional roles, kinship structures, languages, and the normative bases of community cohesion.”47 She also observes that this cultural renaissance was accompanied by “a parallel proliferation of Indian organizations and political activism.”48 Such phenomena were clearly apparent in Newfoundland and Labrador from the 1970s and have gone on to produce some tangible political results. In 1984, for instance, the people of Miawpukek (Conne River), on Newfoundland’s south coast, were registered under the federal Indian Act,49 and finally, in 2008, an agreement in principle was signed between the Federation of Newfoundland Indians and the Canadian government to create a landless First Nation band. This second initiative had an extraordinary, and unanticipated, effect in that over 100,000 people applied for band membership.50 In short, then, after years of suppressing their family and community histories because of the social costs of proclaiming them, the Mi’kmaq are reasserting their identity and having some significant political successes. It is against this backdrop that Chief Joe’s comments about interconnections between the Beothuk and the Mi’kmaq enter into public discourse. At the same time as Indigenous community leaders are voicing their perspectives, scholars are also subjecting established notions of the Beothuk to greater scrutiny. While DNA-based studies have (problematically, in light of TallBear’s arguments) attracted the most news coverage,51 over the last fifteen years or so important insights have emanated from academics working in a variety of disciplinary, multidisciplinary, and interdisciplinary contexts: examples range from ethnomusicologist

12  Fiona Polack

Beverley Diamond and linguist John Hewson’s collaborative study of Santu Toney’s Beothuk song52 to archaeologist Priscilla Renouf’s work on Indigenous movement across the Strait of Belle Isle.53 The ambitious scale of Christopher Aylward’s 2014 interdisciplinary doctoral thesis tracking “The Beothuk Story” in European historiographic, archaeological, and other contexts, as well as in First Nations’ oral accounts, makes it by far the most extensive and compelling revisionist undertaking to date, and one that helps establish the parameters for subsequent work, including this book.54 The essays in this volume reflect and further augment such scholarship, as well as draw attention to earlier but neglected work along the same lines. As part of the process of revisiting assumptions about the Beothuk, the hugely influential work of James Howley and Ingeborg Marshall is being reassessed. Howley’s The Beothucks or Red Indians was published by Cambridge University Press in 1915. The Newfoundland-born surveyor, geologist, and museum curator’s text is not a monograph but rather an edited collection of a wide range of primary and secondary documents; Richard Budgel describes it as “more published archive than narrative history.”55 Because it presents so many disparate, and in some cases otherwise inaccessible, archival fragments in a single location, The Beothucks or Red Indians has been an invaluable resource for scholars during the last one hundred years. However, as Christopher Aylward argues in his essay in this volume, Howley was by no means a neutral editor; his preconceptions caused him to reject, for example, American ethnologist Frank Speck’s proposition that Santu Toney, whose father was Beothuk and mother Mi’kmaq, had an important story to tell. As Aylward further details, Howley also gave unjustified weight to certain settler versions of events. Early in the twentieth century, Speck suggested that Mi’kmaq oral histories of the Beothuk were of value56 and also warned that “we should be careful, I think, not to overestimate the peculiarity of the position of the tribe simply because it became extinct under rather tragic circumstances, or because so little is known of it.”57 However, Howley did not share these beliefs, and it is the Newfoundlander’s perspective that has prevailed over the last century. Ingeborg Marshall’s History and Ethnography of the Beothuk, published in 1996, has proven even more significant than The Beothucks or Red Indians. Described by historian Jennifer S.H. Brown as a “remarkable book” that “will surely stand for years to come as the definitive work on the subject,”58 A History and Ethnography was painstakingly researched over

Introduction 13

twenty years. Its source materials include Beothuk artifacts, information recorded from captives such as Shanawdithit and Demasduit, archaeological data, and unpublished and published documents.59 Marshall synthesizes already existing and new evidence in the service of constructing a definitive history in the first part of her book and an authoritative ethnography in the second. On the basis of this work and other contributions,60 Marshall, who is now in her late eighties, has long been publicly perceived as the leading authority on the Beothuk. A History and Ethnography is irrefutably a monumental achievement. Indeed, virtually all of the contributors to Tracing Ochre make reference to information it contains. However, Marshall’s unwavering commitment to traditional, positivist Western approaches to history does influence some of her conclusions. While the author acknowledges in her Introduction that much of the European archive on which she draws is compromised by its ethnocentricity and that “the Beothuk voice is nearly absent from the records,”61 she still confidently claims to present “an authentic record of events.”62 As her recent altercation with Chief Joe in the pages of the Telegram shows, Marshall is also reluctant to acknowledge that contemporary Indigenous people might have a different way of conceiving of the past. Historian Charles Martijn makes a related point in a review article on A History and Ethnography. Noting Marshall’s tendency in the book to present the Mi’kmaq and the Innu as interlopers on the island of Newfoundland, he suggests that her perspective “is tinted by Eurocanadian concepts of land use which are predicated on ‘permanent occupation’ and ‘sedentary settlement.’ These do not apply in a narrow sense to traditional land exploitation practices within the Atlantic Provinces. Her recourse to this type of argumentation [is] blinkered by contemporary political boundaries.”63 To be fair, significant theoretical and methodological advances relevant to thinking about the Beothuk have occurred in the academic realm in the twenty years since A History and Ethnography was published. The development of transnational approaches to interpreting the past and the rise of Indigenous methodologies are proving especially important in helping redress the limitations of earlier perspectives. Regarding the former, historians Antoinette Burton and Tony Ballantyne argue that scholars are “increasingly interested in how areas of the globe that were once thought to be distinct have actually been interconnected for a very long time.”64 They remind us that the European empires that began to be fashioned around the 1500s (and by which Newfoundland was subsumed exceedingly early) created expansive webs that “functioned

14  Fiona Polack

as systems of exchange, mobility, appropriation and extraction.”65 The effects of imperialism might have been unevenly distributed, and local factors certainly influenced how events unfolded in particular places (and could in turn affect the system as a whole), but European colonial systems were world-encompassing. To give but one example of how concepts travelled, the term “Red Indian” was first applied to the Beothuk before becoming ubiquitous across the British Empire.66 (The “red” reflected, as do the words “tracing ochre” in the title of this collection, the group’s long-established practice of daubing their bodies and possessions with red ochre.)67 Transnational approaches to history are helping diffuse the effects of parochialism and resituate Newfoundland history in a wider context. The essays by Patrick Brantlinger, Bonita Lawrence, J. Edward Chamberlin, Fiona Polack, Lianne C. Leddy, Beverley Diamond, and Jocelyn Thorpe in this volume all deploy them. The rise of Indigenous-centred scholarship is also facilitating research challenging established views of the Beothuk. As Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith comments in the 2012 edition of her seminal Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples: “In recent years much more is being published that explicitly focuses on indigenous research methodologies, indigenous knowledge and indigenous practices, and increasingly these studies are written by indigenous scholars.”68 Indeed, Tracing Ochre is the first book to feature the contributions of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars of the Beothuk side by side. The development of Indigenous methodologies is prompting researchers to deploy different conceptual frames from those traditionally used in the academy. All of Tracing Ochre’s contributors are sensitive to the ways in which the prioritization of European epistemologies, often underscored by the hubristic assumption that the non-­ Indigenous perspective encompasses all available knowledge,69 has shaped commonly accepted histories. Consequently, we, and a great many others, are examining neglected and new sources of evidence, including Indigenous oral histories, and reading non-Indigenous written records against the grain. Indigenous methodologies are also creating a greater awareness of the problems caused by concepts of “authenticity” as they have been applied to Aboriginal peoples. As archaeologist Lisa Rankin points out in her essay in this volume, there is increasing acceptance that “the blended identities that emerged in the colonial era also resulted from Indigenous agency and choices, the product of both colonial domination and Indigenous resistance.” It is important to note that an increasing appreciation of Indigenous perspectives does

Introduction 15

not deny that the respectful sharing of different kinds of knowledge between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities is valuable. As Chief Mi’sel Joe puts it in his chapter: “You have good information that I need, and I probably have information that you need. We can all agree to put all that stuff together … I think if we can all learn to do that, we’ll be so much better off all the way around.” A Larger World In the recent anthology Who Is an Indian? Race, Place and the Politics of Indigeneity in the Americas, editor Maximilian Forte argues that “Who is an Indian?” is “arguably one of the worst questions to be posed to or against Indigenous peoples.”70 As Forte suggests, it is often the product of an obsession with racial purity and control, and attempts to make objective what is in fact an arbitrary construct.71 The same might also be said of the question “Who (if anyone today) is Beothuk?” And, indeed, someone reading this volume in search of a definitive answer will come away disappointed. What they will find instead are chapters that cast long shadows over the very category “Beothuk” as it has been commonly understood, and that emphasize long-standing interrelationships between Indigenous peoples in what is now Newfoundland and Labrador. Contributors do this by looking closely at the local, national, and global colonial circumstances under which assumptions about the Beothuk were first formulated and have continued to be maintained. They also draw our attention to conceptions of the term very different from those in widest circulation. As we learn from Innu elder Elizabeth Penashue and Elizabeth Yeoman’s chapter, for instance, linguistic categories in Innu-aimun do not necessarily create distinctions between the terms “Beothuk” and “Innu.” Penashue and Yeoman’s prompt to reconsider how meaning is created through patterns of thinking and language is a vehicle for taking us back to the notion of de-islanding the Beothuk. Just over twenty years ago, Tongan scholar Epeli Hau’ofa wrote of the problems that colonial perceptions of the Pacific islands as small, remote, and separate from each other had caused inhabitants of his region. He argued that his ancestors actually inhabited “a large world in which peoples and cultures moved and mingled unhindered by boundaries of the kind erected much later by imperial powers.”72 We will never know for certain all the intricacies of how the past unfolded in Newfoundland. It is time, though, to countenance seriously the possibility that the Beothuk

16  Fiona Polack

world was also wider than has previously been assumed. Doing so is an essential step in opening a new kind of conversation between those of different heritages in Newfoundland and Labrador, and, by extension in Canada as well. In the process of unsettling preconceptions about the past we make new stories about the future possible. Navigating This Book The genre of the edited book has the advantage of allowing for a variety of perspectives to be articulated, and diverse subject matter to be considered, within the confines of a single volume. This anthology’s contributors approach our shared goal of re-envisioning the Beothuk through different means and by drawing on a variety of local, national, and/or global evidence. Nonetheless, to be receptive to the notion of reconceiving of the Beothuk in the broadly collaborative context of working together on a joint publication, contributors have a priori been open to the idea that long-established traditions of Western knowledge construction, grounded in tenets such as positivism, rationalism, and assumed objectivity (particularly key notions in those disciplines, including history, archaeology, and anthropology, which have held sway in considering the Beothuk), might have their limitations in approaching the histories of Indigenous peoples. The authors gathered here often raise questions, challenge underlying assumptions, and draw attention to grey areas; all, I think, would concur with Frederic W. Gleach’s point in his essay on “controlled speculation” that “there is no One True Way to historical understanding.”73 This shared openness has proved an important factor in bridging the different disciplinary and interdisciplinary backgrounds of the scholars involved in Tracing Ochre. As Myra Strober notes: “Although disciplines have habits of mind, there is nonetheless room for individual difference … Discipline is not destiny.”74 This is not to say, though, that there are not productive resonances in this volume between the chapters of those with different disciplinary and interdisciplinary training. Indeed, the respective sections of the book have been deliberately structured to create discrete conversations around related subjects between scholars of different formation; each also quite consciously juxtaposes chapters by Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors. In the first section of Tracing Ochre, “Land, Language, and Memory,” Maura Hanrahan, Cynthia Sugars, Elizabeth Penashue and Elizabeth Yeoman, and John Harries consider commemoration of the Beothuk

Introduction 17

in contemporary Newfoundland and Labrador. In the opening chapter, Maura Hanrahan, a scholar of Mi’kmaq descent with an extensive background in interdisciplinary studies, is concerned with the long and continuing history of settler-culture romanticization of the Beothuk, as well as its negative impact on contemporary Indigenous communities in the province. She looks especially closely at the work of the Beothuk Institution, in both its early-nineteenth century and present-day incarnations (it is now known as the Beothuk Institute), and situates its activities within historical and political context. Reflecting on the statue of Shanawdithit the organization unveiled at Boyd’s Cove in 2000, she concludes with a call for a model of public commemoration that foregrounds Indigenous cultural landscapes. The following chapter, by literary scholar Cynthia Sugars, maintains the focus on romanticization by exploring the importance of Beothuk language to non-Indigenous people. Sugars’s essay, drawing on Newfoundland literature, implicitly highlights barriers to settler-culture engagements with Indigenous language. Since the early nineteenth century, poets, novelists, and dramatists have produced a steady, ever-expanding, stream of writing about the Beothuk, and their work has had a powerful influence in shaping public perceptions. Sugars concentrates on the ways in which Beothuk words are deployed in this oeuvre. She contends that words from the fragmentary lexicons gleaned from Beothuk captives are used in these texts to figure the Beothuk as a kind of ultimate but lost transcendental signified: a people whose absence haunts, but also paradoxically helps validate the legitimacy of, contemporary settler culture. Chapter 3 presents Innu elder Elizabeth Penashue’s record of her visit to the same Boyd’s Cove site discussed by Hanrahan in the opening chapter of Part One. For Penashue, the statue of Shanawdithit is a reminder of pain, but its location also comfortingly evokes nutshimit (which very roughly approximates the term “the bush”); Boyd’s Cove is self-evidently already an Indigenous cultural landscape from her perspective. However, as Elizabeth Yeoman, a professor of education engaged in an ongoing collaboration with Penashue on translating the latter’s diaries from Innu-aimun into English and French, reflects in the same chapter, nutshimit is not easily rendered into English. Together, Penashue and Yeoman prompt us to consider the often fraught but essential task of endeavouring to transport meaning across cultures. The concept of nutshimit is just one example here. Crucially, we also learn that, for Penashue, the word “Innu” can, depending on its context, encompass a range of different communities – from the Beothuk,

18  Fiona Polack

to the Innu of Labrador and Quebec, to Indigenous people everywhere, to human beings in general. As Yeoman points out, “to take Elizabeth [Penashue’s] text and its translation seriously we must understand the Beothuk as Innu – not because of new DNA, linguistic or archeological evidence, but because the categories are different in Innu-aimun.” Part One concludes with a return to the notion of haunting raised by Cynthia Sugars. John Harries, a social anthropologist, is also interested in how Newfoundland’s settler culture imagines the ghosts of the Beothuk. However, drawing on phenomenological approaches such as affect and thing theory, he wants to begin in a “slightly different place” to Sugars. Rather than prioritize socio-political concerns, although he does not deny their importance, he is interested in the affective mechanisms by which material phenomena can evoke “absent presences.” He explores the possibility that ghosts can unsettle our narrations of history, even as we try to domesticate them within our narratives. Part Two of Tracing Ochre is titled “Mercenaries, Myths, and DNA.” It begins with a wide-ranging conversation that took place on the Miawpukek First Nation reserve in 2011 between Saqamaw Mi’sel Joe and then doctoral candidate Christopher Aylward. The two discuss the divergent structures of knowledge and understandings of the past that have been characteristic of Newfoundland’s respective Mi’kmaq and non-Indigenous communities. During their talk, Chief Joe expresses his conviction that the idea of Beothuk extinction is “the biggest myth [that] has ever been played in Newfoundland.” He argues that through their intermarriage with Mi’kmaq, and likely with Innu and settlers as well, the Beothuk are “still alive.” He welcomes DNA testing both because he believes it will confirm for non-Indigenous people what the Mi’kmaq already know, and also because he feels that the respectful sharing of different kinds of knowledge between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities is immensely valuable. Chief Joe and Aylward begin their exchange by discussing the Mi’kmaq mercenary myth: the suggestion that Mi’kmaq people were first brought to Newfoundland by the French to attack Beothuk. In the following chapter, American literary scholar Patrick Brantlinger situates non-Indigenous stories of this kind in global context. Brantlinger considers how accounts of violence by the Mi’kmaq, the Innu, and the Inuit against the Beothuk, irrespective of their accuracy, could be used to normalize European depredations, and were part of a much larger pattern. He explains how the widespread conviction that “savages” were always prone to try to exterminate each other was founded in colonial-era notions about the power of

Introduction 19

race conflict to shape history. Philosopher Daryl Pullman also explores legacies of such race-focused thinking in his essay. In reflecting on the fate of Beothuk bones taken from gravesites in the name of “science” during the imperial era, Pullman unpacks the bioethical questions surrounding the contemporary treatment of Beothuk remains housed in institutions in Canada and the United Kingdom. His chapter gives us additional context for reflecting on Chief Joe’s remarks about DNA testing, and opens up questions about whether (and if so how) repatriation of Beothuk remains held in Scotland should be pursued. Part Three, “Ways of Knowing,” interrogates key sources of scholarly knowledge about the Beothuk. In tandem with providing an overview of currents in archaeological research, Lisa Rankin argues that her discipline has not been very effective at conveying a sense of Beothuk agency. She identifies a range of reasons for this, including that archaeological interpretation of the past on the basis of the material record limits the stories that can be told about mobile hunter-gatherer cultures which tend to leave few remnants; Rankin also suspects that the use of “strident archaeological language” has made it difficult to communicate a sense of the Beothuk as active rather than passive. Anishinaabe-kwe historian Lianne Leddy examines the approaches used by influential historians of the Beothuk, including nineteenth-century commentators such as William Cormack, and carefully situates their work within the broader British North American context. As Leddy notes, when read in this way, the timing of the assumed Beothuk demise takes on new import. The 1820s and 1830s were key in establishing Indigenous people as rapidly disappearing “romantic savages.” James Fenimore Cooper’s seminal Last of the Mohicans was published in 1826 and George Catlin’s influential “salvage portraiture” was undertaken in the 1830s. Leddy delineates how the received history of the Beothuk served and serves an explicitly colonial purpose and concludes that it should not be taken at face value. Christopher Aylward’s “Historical Narrative Perspective in Howley and Speck” also examines the assumptions and sources informing key works on Beothuk history. Its chief concern is with two texts published in the early years of the twentieth century: James P. Howley’s canonical The Beothucks or Red Indians: The Aboriginal Inhabitants of Newfoundland (1915) and Frank Speck’s much less well known Beothuk and Micmac: Indian Notes and Monographs (1922). Aylward contrasts Howley’s heavy reliance on information from settler sources, most notably the Peyton family, with Speck’s use of material from Indigenous informants such as the Mi’kmaq John Paul and Louis

20  Fiona Polack

John. He also draws on correspondence between Howley and Speck to highlight just how divergent their perspectives on Beothuk history were, and speculates about why Howley’s book should have proved more influential than Speck’s. The essays in Part Four, “Travelling Tales,” examine how and why concepts of extinction are conveyed in Newfoundland and around the globe. They also emphasize the ways in which Indigenous individuals and communities have contested them. The section opens with ethnomusicologist Beverley Diamond’s essay on Santu Toney, who was born in Newfoundland in the mid-nineteenth century to a Beothuk father and Mi’kmaq mother. Diamond usefully places what we know of Santu’s peripatetic life into wider historical context and, in the process, builds a convincing case that “Beothuk history must be cast as intensely interactive and complex.” She argues that the experiences of the Beothuk have been more in keeping with those of other northeastern Indigenous peoples than has widely been acknowledged. Jocelyn Thorpe is also interested in how people and stories travel. She begins her chapter by pondering how it is that, before she moved to Newfoundland in 2010, she mistakenly believed it was devoid of Indigenous people. She contends that nineteenth- and twentieth-century travellers’ accounts provided one important avenue through which notions of Indigenous extinction in Newfoundland became widespread. She also suggests that this dominant narrative helped enforce the idea that the island was open for non-Aboriginal settlement, tourism, and resource development. In the next chapter, Indigenous studies scholar Bonita Lawrence (a Mi’kmaq) considers other ways in which ideas of extinction come into being. Drawing on evidence from a wide array of places and historical moments, Lawrence shows how colonial (including contemporary Canadian) definitions of Indigeneity “are a central means through which both denial of recognition and concepts of extinction are maintained.” Importantly, though, she also examines how Indigenous peoples have managed to withstand official pressure to “disappear.” Fiona Polack’s chapter, which follows, addresses an Indigenous Australian story of survival with particular relevance to relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Newfoundland and Labrador. Polack, whose background is in literary and cultural studies, parallels figurations of the supposed “last” Beothuk, Shanawdithit, and the “last” Aboriginal Tasmanian, Truganini. Paying particular attention to intersections between gender and race, she

Introduction 21

examines how the women were imagined in remarkably similar ways up until the late twentieth century. From the mid-1970s, however, a revitalized Indigenous community in Tasmania began assertively, and effectively, reclaiming Truganini as one of many ancestors, and contesting her characterization as last of the line. Tracing Ochre concludes with J. Edward Chamberlin’s meditation on “The Recovery of Indigenous Identity.” As its designation as a “coda” hints, this essay is different in tone from those that come before. However, it also resonates with the preceding chapters in multiple ways and retroactively opens up different layers of meaning within them. Chamberlin, a professor emeritus of English and comparative literature, details instances of Indigenous resistance from Australia, Southern Africa, and the Caribbean. Along the way, he reflects on the ambiguous nineteenth-century ideas about progress and degeneration that were the backdrop and impetus for European accounts of “vanishing” Indians. Most importantly, he argues that storytelling – in a sense of the term broad enough to encompass oral and written texts, as well as dance and music – can be at the same time a mode of recovery and a map of possibility. The message with which Tracing Ochre concludes, then, is that cultures assumed lost can potentially be reclaimed through their traces. Given the scale of the devastation visited upon the Beothuk by Europeans, such a revival is likely impossible in their case. However, just beginning to allow for its infintesimal possibility can open a space from which to destabilize entrenched, complacent, and harmful patterns of thinking. NOTES 1 John Gillis, Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2004), 2. 2 Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith, eds., Islands in History and Representation (London: Routledge 2003), 6. 3 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press 1984), 134. 4 Appropriately enough, islands, especially the Galapagos Islands, were key to the development of Darwin’s theory of evolution. See, for instance, Frank J. Sulloway, “The Evolution of Charles Darwin,” Smithsonian Magazine, December 2005, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ the-evolution-of-charles-darwin-110234034/?no-ist.

22  Fiona Polack 5 [William Cormack], “Died, at St. John’s, Newfoundland,” The Times (London), 14 September 1829, 5, The Times Digital Archive 1785–1985. Lianne Leddy’s epigraph to her chapter in this volume quotes further from this obituary. 6 For more on these phenomena, see Mary Dalton, “Shadow Indians: The Beothuk Motif in Newfoundland Literature,” Newfoundland Studies 8, no. 2 (1992): 135–46; Richard Budgel, “The Beothuks and the Newfoundland Mind,” Newfoundland Studies 8, no. 1 (1992): 15–33; Carl Leggo, “Who Speaks for Extinct Nations? The Beothuk and Narrative Voice,” Literator 16, no. 1 (1995): 31–49; Paul Chafe, “Lament for a Notion: Loss and the Beothuk in Michael Crummey’s River Thieves,” Essays on Canadian Writing 82 (2004): 93–117; Cynthia Sugars, “Original Sin, or, the Last of the First Ancestors: Michael Crummey’s River Thieves,” English Studies in Canada 31, no. 4 (2005): 147–75; Fiona Polack, “Memory against History: Figuring the Past in Cloud of Bone,” English Studies in Canada 35, no. 4 (2009): 53–69; Herb Wyile, “Beothuk Gothic: Michael Crummey’s River Thieves,” in Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte, eds., Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2009), 229–49. 7 Terry Goldie, Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press 1989), 157. 8 Jennifer Bowering Delisle elaborates on Canadian attitudes towards Newfoundlanders in her book The Newfoundland Diaspora: Mapping the Literature of Out-Migration (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2013). 9 Sugars, “Original Sin,” 148. 10 A sampling of poems about the Beothuk published before 1950 includes: George Webber, The Last of the Aborigines: A Poem in Four Cantos (St John’s: Morning Post, 1851); Arthur English, “The Last Boeothic,” Newfoundland Quarterly 2, no. 3 (1902): 4; Robert Gear MacDonald, “The Passing of the Bœothuk,” From the Isle of Avalon (London: Frank H. Morland 1908), 20; Edwin Abel, “Shannanditti,” New Poems on Newfoundland, and Other Verses (1934), 18; Walter Bugden, “Matheoduc: The Beothic Cry,” The Sheaves: Poems Inscribed to Newfoundland and its People (St John’s: Gray and Goodland 1937), 10. Pre-1950 examples of fiction include the unattributed Ottawah, the Last Chief of the Red Indians of Newfoundland: A Romance (London: E. Appleyard 1847); Arthur English, The Vanished Race (Montreal: Garand 1927). Cynthia Sugars lists more recent literary texts focusing on the Beothuk in this volume, and Polack discusses Ken Pittman’s documentary Shanaditti: Last of the Beothuks (National Film Board of Canada, 1982)

Introduction 23 at length in her chapter. Other films include Finding Mary March, directed by Ken Pittman (Red Ochre Products in association with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1988), and Stealing Mary: Last of the Red Indians, directed by Tim Wolochatiuk (Windup Filmworks 2006). Songs about the Beothuk include Great Big Sea’s “Demasduit’s Dream” (from the album Turn, 2000). Arguably the most widely circulated artistic representations of Beothuk individuals are Lady Hamilton’s miniature of Demasduit and William Gosse’s of Shanawdithit (which were based on Lady Hamilton’s portrait). Gerald Squires’s sculpture of Shanawdithit at Boyd’s Cove is discussed in the chapters by Maura Hanrahan and Elizabeth Penashue and Elizabeth Yeoman. Beothuk Energy manufactures, supplies, and operates offshore wind farms, and Beothuk Data Systems is an information technology firm in St John’s – it is located, ironically, not far from the Beothuck Building in Crosbie Place. Newfoundland’s coat of arms even features two Beothuk figures. 11 According to the Icelandic sagas, the Norse abandoned the island because of hostility from the Indigenous population whom they encountered there and called “skraelings.” Opinions differ on the relationship of this Aboriginal group to the present-day Beothuk. For more on this, see Lisa Rankin’s essay in this volume. 12 As Ingeborg Marshall points out in her A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk (Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queen’s University Press 1996), “any attempt at estimating the size of the Beothuk population is fraught with uncertainty” (283). She suggests that estimates derived from land-support capacities and the population densities of other similarly positioned Indigenous groups would put it between 500 and 1,600 (284). Historian L.F.S. Upton states that around 2,000 Beothuk inhabited the island in the fifteenth century in his “The Extermination of the Beothucks of Newfoundland,” Canadian Historical Review 58, no. 2 (1977): 133–53. 13 See Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2006) for a potentially comparable account of the effect of the loss of the buffalo on the Crow Nation. 14 Todd J. Kristensen and Donald H. Holly, Jr, “Birds, Burials and Sacred Cosmology of the Indigenous Beothuk of Newfoundland,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 23, no. 1 (2013): 41–53. 15 Some commentators connect the effects of the demise of the Beothuk and of the Auk to the contemporary Newfoundland psyche. In an opinion piece published under the title “Extinct Auk and Beothuk Kindred Spirits” in the Northeast Avalon Times in September 2016, ornithologist Professor Bill Montevecchi states that “the co-occurrences of the extinct flightless bird

24  Fiona Polack and the extinct indigenous people has [sic] captured my imagination since I first set foot on Funk Island 40 years ago.” Tying the fates of the Auk and the Beothuk via the language of extinction can imply that the Beothuk were a biological “species” rather than a sophisticated human cultural entity. However, it can also highlight just how catastrophic European colonization was for both human and non-human life forms. 16 Jeremy Gaskell, Who Killed the Great Auk? (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000), 115. 17 The first English settlement was at Cupids in 1610. The most significant French settlement in the seventeenth century was at Plaisance. 18 Ralph Pastore, “Fisherman, Furriers and Beothuks: The Economy of Extinction,” Man in the Northeast 33 (1987): 47–62. 19 See, for instance, Peter Bakker and Lynn Drapeau, “Adventures with the Beothucks in 1787: A Testimony from Jean Conan’s Autobiography,” in William Cowan, ed., Actes du Vingt-cinquième congrès des Algonquinistes (Ottawa: Carleton University 1994), 32–45; Ronald Rompkey, ed., French Visitors to Newfoundland: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Travel Writings, trans. Scott Jamieson and Anne Thareau (St John’s: Institute of Social and Economic Research 2013); Christopher Aylward, “The Beothuk Story: European and First Nations Narratives of the Beothuk People of Newfoundland” (PhD thesis, Memorial University, 2014). These scholars suggest the Beothuk had better relationships with the French than the English. Jean Conan’s account of interacting favourably with the Beothuk after he was shipwrecked provides particularly important evidence of this. 20 As Charles Martijn points out in “An Eastern Micmac Domain of Islands” (Cowan, ed., Actes du Vingtième congrès des Algonquinistes, 208–31), records of contact between non-Indigenous and Indigenous people in and around Newfoundland prior to the 1600s “are usually so brief and vague in their descriptions that it is almost impossible to identify specific native groups” (213). For an exhaustive account of European historiography relating to the Beothuk, see Aylward’s “The Beothuk Story.” 21 Because of the diverse approaches taken by contributors to usage of the terms Mi’kmaq and Mi’kmaw, we have opted to use the former exclusively. We apologize to readers who find this approach imprecise. 22 Frank Speck, Beothuk and Micmac: Indian Notes and Monographs (New York: Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, 1922), 50. 23 This statement by John Bland, and others along the same lines, are recounted in W. Gordon Handcock’s entry for John Peyton in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 6, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/peyton_john_6E.html.

Introduction 25 24 James P. Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians: The Aboriginal Inhabitants of Newfoundland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1915), 93. 25 She indicated this in the story map (reproduced here in Fig. 0.3) that she drew for William Cormack. 26 Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians, 232. 27 These guides were Mi’kmaq, Innu, and Abenaki: ibid., 189. 28 Chief Mi’sel Joe commented on this at the Tracing Ochre workshop in St John’s, June 2013. 29 Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians, 189. Maura Hanrahan discusses the Beothuk Institution at length in her chapter. 30 See Fiona Polack, “Reading Shanawdithit’s Drawings: Transcultural Texts in the North American Colonial World,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 14, no. 3 (2013), doi: 10.1353/cch.2013.0035. 31 Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians, 232. 32 This phrase was first used by Ralph Pastore in his article “The Collapse of the Beothuk World,” Acadiensis 19, no. 1 (1989): 52–71. 33 Steve Bartlett, “Beothuk Not Extinct,” Telegram, 6 April 2013. 34 The original Telegram story was reprinted verbatim in the Labrador papers the Aurora and the Labradorian on 15 April 2013, and recast by Sue Hickey for the Grand Falls-Windsor Advertiser (18 April 2013) and the Springdale Nor’wester (25 April 2013). Tristin Hopper published “Local Post: Extinction of Newfoundland’s ‘Lost People’ Is a Myth, First Nations’ Chief Says” in the National Post on 18 April 2013. 35 Ingeborg Marshall, Letter to the Editor, “Disappointed with Story on Beothuk,” Telegram, 11 April 2013. 36 Kim TallBear, “Genomic Articulations of Identity,” Social Studies of Science 43, no. 4 (2013): 510. 37 See also Kim TallBear’s Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2013); Daryl Pullman also discusses DNA research in his chapter. 38 Challenges are occurring in a range of discursive contexts. First Nations artists from within and outside Newfoundland are also confronting established ideas about the Beothuk. See, for instance, Mi’kmaq Jerry Evans’s short film Vistas: Red Ochre (National Film Board of Canada 2009); ­Anishinaabe-Canadian artist Rebecca Belmore’s video installation “March 5, 1819” (2000), which revisits the taking of Demasduit; and Omaskêko Cree Duane Linklater’s “Beothuk Building” exhibition (Or Gallery, Vancouver, 2012). 39 Elizabeth Penashue’s Innu name is Tshaukuesh. However, she chooses to publish under the name Elizabeth Penashue.

26  Fiona Polack 40 In addition to addressing questions, such as those that have arisen in the Mi’kmaq context, around the probability of the Beothuk having sought refuge with the Innu after they came under pressure from European colonists, much more remains to be said about how contemporary settler perceptions of the Beothuk have affected the Innu. As Colin Samson notes in his book A Way of Life That Does Not Exist: Canada and the Extinguishment of the Innu (St John’s: ISER Books 2003), the spectre of the Beothuk has often been raised when the future fate of the Innu is debated. Samson observes that “several twentieth-century commentators” remarked that the Innu needed to “apply themselves to work in a cash economy … [or] they would go the way of the extinct Beothuks of Newfoundland” (142). 41 Dennis Bartels and Alice Bartels, “Mi’gmaq Lives: Aboriginal Identity in Newfoundland,” in Ute Lischke and David McNab, eds., Walking a Tightrope: Aboriginal People and their Representations (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2005), 253. 42 The Innu were similarly excluded. Historian David MacKenzie suggests that Newfoundland government officials may have been persuaded by the arguments of Canadian bureaucrats that Indigenous people in Newfoundland and Labrador were better off not being brought under the Indian Act, since this would extinguish the citizenship rights they currently possessed as Newfoundlanders. However, MacKenzie also comments that the negotiators from Newfoundland were deeply ignorant about Aboriginal matters, and that neither side seemed to see the issue as a priority. See MacKenzie, “The Indian Act and the Aboriginal Peoples of Newfoundland and Labrador at the Time of Confederation,” Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 25, no. 2 (2010): 161–82. 43 Bartels and Bartels, “Mi’gmaq Lives,” 252. Bonita Lawrence argues that “denying status to Newfoundland Mi’kmaq would have offered the federal government the perfect opportunity to observe just how long Native people could hang on to their identities without either access to their traditional lands or legal status as Indians” (81). See Lawrence, “Federally Unrecognized Indigenous Communities in Canadian Contexts,” in Maximilian Forte, ed., Who Is an Indian? Race, Place, and the Politics of Indigeneity in the Americas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2013): 71–91. 44 Jacqueline White Snook, “Jacqueline White Snook Talks about Her Childhood and Being Called ‘Jacky-Tar,’” Reviving a Nation: Newfoundland Mi’kmaq Oral Histories and Photographs, https://revivinganation.wordpress. com/2012/04/18/jacqueline-white-snook-talks-about-her-childhood-andbeing-called-jacky-tar/ (accessed November 2017).

Introduction 27 45 Statistics Canada, “Aboriginal Peoples in Canada: First Nations People, Métis and Inuit,” National Household Survey 2011. Catalogue no. 99-011X2011001, p. 10. 46 See, for instance, my comments in chapter 14 about the parallels between Indigenous activism in Tasmania and Newfoundland in the 1970s. 47 Joane Nagel, American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996), 6. 48 Ibid. 49 For more on the history of Mi’kmaq campaigns for recognition, see Jenny Higgins, “Mi’kmaq Organizations and Land Claims,” Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage, 2008, http://www.heritage.nf.ca/aboriginal/mikmaq_ claims.html (accessed November 2017). 50 See Joe Friesen, “Surge in Newfoundland Native Band Has Ottawa Stunned, Skeptical,” Globe and Mail, 14 April 2014, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-moves-to-tighten-aboriginalmembership-criteria/article17954032/ (accessed November 2017). Of the 104,000 people who applied for status, only 18,044 had been granted it by early 2017. However, the enrolment process has been highly contentious and, at the time of writing, looks likely to be legally challenged. See Garrett Barry and Geoff Bartlett, “Mi’kmaq Group Rallying Support for Qalipu Court Action,” CBC News, 24 February 2017, http://www. cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/mikmaq-first-nationassembly-qalipu-watchdog-challenge-1.3997088 (accessed November 2017). 51 See, for example, Randy Boswell, “Group of Icelanders May Carry Beothuk Genes,” Telegram, 19 November 2010; Randy Boswell, “Researchers Turn over New ‘Leif’ in Viking History,” Edmonton Journal, 19 November 2010; Traci Watson, “American Indians Sailed to Europe with Vikings? Centuries before Columbus, a Viking-Indian Child May Have Been Born in Iceland,” National Geographic News, 23 November 2013, https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/11/101123-native-american-indian-vikingsiceland-genetic-dna-science-europe/ (accessed November 2017). 52 Beverley Diamond and John Hewson, “Santu’s Song,” Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 22, no. 1 (2007): 55–70. 53 M.A.P. Renouf, “Prehistory of Newfoundland Hunter-Gatherers: Extinctions or Adaptations?” World Archaeology 30, no. 3 (1999): 403–20. 54 Aylward, “Beothuk Story.” 55 Budgel, “Newfoundland Mind,” 15. 56 Speck, “Beothuk and Micmac,” 18. 57 Ibid., 12.

28  Fiona Polack 58 Jennifer S.H. Brown, “The Vanished Beothuk,” review of A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk, by Ingeborg Marshall, Canadian Literature, 8 December 2011, https://canlit.ca/article/the-vanished-beothuk/ (accessed November 2017). 59 Marshall, History and Ethnography, 5. 60 See, for instance, Ingeborg Marshall, “Beothuk and Micmac: Re-examining Relationships,” Acadiensis 17, no. 2 (1988): 52–82; Ingeborg Marshall, Reports and Letters by George Christopher Pulling relating to the Beothuk Indians of Newfoundland (St John’s: Breakwater 1989); Ingeborg Marshall, The Beothuk of Newfoundland: A Vanished People (St John’s: Breakwater 1989). 61 Marshall, History and Ethnography, 7. 62 Ibid., 8. 63 Charles Martijn, review of A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk, by Ingeborg Marshall, Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 12, no. 2 (1996): 109. 64 Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds., Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2005), 1. 65 Ibid., 3. 66 Barrie Reynolds, “Beothuk,” in William C. Sturtevant, ed., Handbook of North American Indians (Washington: Smithsonian Institution 1978). 67 For more information on Beothuk uses of red ochre, see: http://www. heritage.nf.ca/articles/aboriginal/beothuk-beliefs.php. 68 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed. (New York: Zed Books 2012), xiii. 69 This hubris is especially striking when one considers the geographical size of Newfoundland and the relative smallness of its population – to say nothing of the fact that the Beothuk tended to try to avoid Europeans. Much must have inevitably occurred outside of the purview of colonial observers. 70 Forte, ed., Who Is an Indian? 234. 71 Ibid., 7. 72 Epeli Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” in Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu, and Epeli Hau’ofa, eds., A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands (Suva: University of the South Pacific 1993), 8; While the question of exactly when the Mi’kmaq initially arrived in Newfoundland remains open in scholarly circles, historian Charles Martijn makes a highly persuasive case that Mi’kma’ki has long encompassed a “domain of islands” including “portions of the Gaspé Peninsula and New Brunswick, all of Prince Edward Island and mainland Nova Scotia, as well as Cape Breton and parts of southern Newfoundland” (208).

Introduction 29 73 Frederic W. Gleach, “Controlled Speculation and Constructed Myths,” in Jennifer S.H. Brown and Elizabeth Vibert, eds., Reading beyond Words: Contexts for Native History, 2nd ed. (Peterborough, ON: Broadview 2003), 42. 74 Myra Strober, Interdisciplinary Conversations: Challenging Habits of Thought (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2010), 66.

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1 Good and Bad Indians: Romanticizing the Beothuk and Denigrating the Mi’kmaq maur a ha n rah an

Objects of romantic racism, the Beothuk of Newfoundland loom large in islanders’ imaginations and public commemoration in what is sometimes called the Newfoundland nation. This chapter critically analyses how this phenomenon “squeezes” potential room offered to the surviving Indigenous peoples of the island, the Mi’kmaq, limiting scope for the realization of their goals. The Mi’kmaq are an eastern Algonquian people with a vast homeland, called Mi’kma’ki, extending from the Gaspé peninsula through the Maritimes, the Magdalen Islands, Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, and parts of Newfoundland.1 Academics were slow to develop interest in the Newfoundland Mi’kmaq,2 and government was slow to extend rights and recognition to them. Indeed, the Indian Act was not applied in the new province when Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949.3 Conne River, home to Miawpukek First Nation, became a federal reserve in 1987,4 while thousands of Mi’kmaq elsewhere in Newfoundland began the process of registering with the Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation under Canada’s Indian Act in 2011; these developments have been the result of a forty-year struggle led by the Federation of Newfoundland Indians.5 The chief vehicle for this discussion is the modern-day resurrection of the Beothuk Institute, specifically the Institute’s construction of a life-sized statue of Shanawdithit in Boyd’s Cove on Newfoundland’s northeast coast. Commemoration of Shanawdithit is part of the ongoing colonial history of Newfoundland and serves to bolster the Newfoundland (settler) nation, just as Indigenous monuments contribute to nation building in Quebec, Australia, and elsewhere. Indeed, for internally colonized Indigenous peoples, there has been no “formal closure to the colonial era”;6 public monuments and memorials serve to perpetuate colonialism.

34  Maura Hanrahan

The Original Beothuk Institution The Beothuk Institution was first created in 1827 after several failed attempts by the British, beginning in 1768, to initiate peaceful contact with the Beothuk.7 The Newfoundland-born, Scottish-educated William Eppes Cormack was key to the Institution’s founding.8 In 1822 Cormack decided to explore the interior of the island with the intention of making friendly contact with “that unhappy race of people,” the Beothuk.9 As Lianne Leddy asserts, Cormack’s trekking was not divorced from resource development, as evidenced by his extensive records of the geological formations he saw. Cormack, who was to become celebrated as the first European to journey across the interior of the island, was guided by the Mi’kmaq Sylvester Joe. Mi’kmaq oral history says that Joe knew that meetings would likely end in tragedy, so he helped conceal the Beothuk during this trip.10 Cormack certainly did not encounter any Beothuk. Cormack needed funds and support for a second expedition so he founded the Beothuk Institution at Twillingate.11 The organization’s purpose was to initiate communication with the Beothuk in order “to promote their civilization” and to develop an “authentic” history of them.12 Cormack secured elite patronage for the Institution, including that of John Barrow, secretary to the Admiralty in London.13 The founding of the Beothuk Institution enabled Cormack to set off on a second trek in 1827, in which he was guided by Mi’kmaq chief John Louis, as well as the Abenaki John Stevens and the Innu Peter John;14 the composition of this group is evidence of the ties between First Nations. Cormack was tormented by the apparent extinction of the Beothuk and commented: “On discovering, from appearances everywhere around us, that the Red Indians – the terror of the Europeans as well as the other Indian inhabitants of – Newfoundland – no longer existed, the spirits of one and all of us were very deeply affected.”15 It is possible that small numbers of Beothuk or Indigenous people with some Beothuk descent may have been hidden by sympathetic Mi’kmaq and Innu in the Maritimes and Labrador respectively.16 In any event, Cormack did not locate them. This failure meant that the Beothuk Institution could not meet its stated objective. Cormack regretfully reported to the Institution: “But it is to be lamented that now, when we have taken up the cause of a barbarously treated people, so few should remain to reap the benefit of our plans for their civilization.”17 The Institution was left with its other stated goal: the care of the captured Shanawdithit and, in Cormack’s words, “extracting a history” from her.

Good and Bad Indians  35

Shanawdithit had been taken by William Cull in 1823 and was living with the Peyton family on Exploits Island.18 Dorset-born John Peyton, Sr had come to Newfoundland as a young man to fish and trap. In 1797 Magistrate Bland of Bonavista wrote that Peyton had “rendered himself infamous for his persecution of the Indians” and that “the stories told of this man would shock humanity to relate.”19 Bland wanted Peyton expelled from the Exploits region and, although the reasons are unclear, Peyton did go back to England temporarily. However, he returned to Newfoundland in 1812 with his teenaged son, John Jr, who was to lead the expedition that resulted in the murders of Demasduit’s relatives at Red Indian Lake in 1819. In a commentary on the state of the law in nineteenth-century Newfoundland, John Peyton, Jr was appointed justice of the peace for northern Newfoundland six years after that incident. In turn, Shanawdithit became the elder Peyton’s domestic servant.20 In a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, she and John Peyton, Sr lived in the same household for five years. Shanawdithit must have suffered great anguish as the months and then years passed: she was all alone, with no one to speak her language, and she likely knew that most of her relatives had died. Further, she shared a house with a man whose behaviour towards her people had horrified even an experienced magistrate. The fates of Peyton, Sr and Shanawdithit were inextricably bound together; both died in 1829, Shanawdithit in her late twenties and Peyton at the age of eighty. Shanawdithit came under the “paternal care” of the Beothuk Institution in 1828.21 The organization moved her to S. John’s where she stayed with Cormack for four months until he left Newfoundland permanently. Cormack taught Shanawdithit English and interviewed her at length about the Beothuk language, culture, and recent history. By mid-1829, however, Shanawdithit was dead, one of countless Indigenous victims of tuberculosis. She had been treated by William Carson, a Scottish immigrant to Newfoundland who posed as a physician but had never qualified as one.22 Given the nature of the disease, however, Shanawdithit likely would have died regardless. As for the Beothuk Institution, the organization folded, its objectives glaringly unattainable.23 Remembering Shanawdithit and the Beothuk Full responsible government was not achieved in William Carson’s lifetime but “from his deathbed he urged his followers to persist.”24 Because of his radical and ultimately successful agitation for local

36  Maura Hanrahan

government, Carson was memorialized as “the greatest Newfoundland reformer” by Joseph Smallwood, Newfoundland’s first premier, in the Encyclopedia of Newfoundland.25 In keeping with this dominant narrative, we can envision the final Beothuk survivor passing stewardship of the island to her doctor as she dies, after which, he, too, passes it on. This motif of the passing of responsibility for Newfoundland from Beothuk to settler has proved persistent. It is most recently and explicitly echoed in Bernice Morgan’s novel Cloud of Bone, in which Shanawdithit literally breathes her story into Kyle, a Newfoundlander who deserts the British navy during the Second World War.26 Settler remembrance of Shanawdithit is repeatedly marked by such instances of romantic racism – the tendency of members of the dominant group to project their fantasies onto members of oppressed groups.27 Indeed, in a 1999 survey, readers of the St John’s Telegram deemed Shanawdithit to be the most notable Aboriginal person of the past 1,000 years, with a remarkable 57 per cent of the votes cast.28 In Morgan’s Cloud of Bone, and in other literature such as Sid Stephen’s Beothuck Poems, and in music, such as David Campbell’s “Beothuk Song,” the Beothuk emerge as good, noble people worthy of admiration.29 As Lianne Leddy and Fiona Polack concur in their chapters, Shanawdithit’s status as female feeds into this. A feminized victim, Shanawdithit figures as Newfoundland’s noble lost daughter, a martyr, the central player in a tragedy that taps into guilt and sadness felt and expressed by settler Newfoundlanders in and beyond the arts. Shanawdithit is hardly alone in being depicted in this manner. In his Generall Histoire of Virginie, John Smith claimed to have attained salvation through the interventions of an “Indian Princess” called Pocahontas.30 Retold by Disney and many others, Pocahontas’s story is rooted in similar European conquest myths, such as the old Scottish ballad “Lord Bateman and the Turkish King’s Daughter.” Thus, as Rayna Green says, Pocahontas came to stand for the New World and for native nobility;31 this resonance at least partly explains the story’s appeal to settlers. Similarly, Nancy Ward or Nanyehi, a Beloved Woman, was a Cherokee delegate to the Hopewell, South Carolina, land negotiations between her people and the United States government.32 Ward does not have the same level of popular cachet as Pocahontas but she too is “tangled in threads of legend.”33 She appeared in such notable works as Teddy Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West.34 Settler Americans dubbed Ward “the Cherokee Rose,” “the Pocahontas of the West,” and a Cherokee “princess and prophetess.”35 She is exalted in this way because,

Good and Bad Indians  37

as Theda Perdue has explained, in promoting peace with the United States and agreeing to land cession, she is seen as a cooperative woman who conformed to the expectations of male leadership, Indian and settler alike.36 Significantly, Perdue states, “other less cooperative Beloved Women are merely unnamed, shadowy figures.”37 Like Shanawdithit, Ward is de-contextualized, de-politicized, and divorced from her own people, seen solely through a settler lens, her political decisions and decision-making strategies in the face of such a huge power imbalance rendered invisible. If Newfoundland had not been settled by Europeans, the Beothuk might have survived in some form as a collective cultural entity.38 The Beothuk did experience sometimes desperate food shortages but they might have mitigated these through expanded seasonal transhumance, a strategy employed by other Indigenous groups, or through tighter alliances with the Mi’kmaq or Innu, who were able to survive. Mi’kmaq oral history recalls mainly positive relationships with the Beothuk and some Mi’kmaq families are believed to have Beothuk as well as Innu ancestry. Without the Europeans, the Beothuk would not have faced violent conflict with invaders, suffered loss of access to the marine resources on which they depended, and been stalked by tuberculosis. John Harries describes islanders’ grief-laden romance with the Beothuk in this way: “There is a strong mystical element for some people to be in a spot where you think these people lived, fished, hunted ... and to know no people to be there anymore.”39 As Michael Crummey writes in the introduction to his novel River Thieves, “only the land is still there.”40 Yet people are still there – non-Indigenous (as well as Indigenous) – and their presence is not unrelated to the fact that there is no Beothuk community left. The lingering emotions, guilt and sadness, are usually individualized; indeed, as Harries says of Newfoundlanders and the Beothuk, some people, but not all, feel guilty. The guilt is more understated than the sadness – when it is in evidence at all. The imbalance is worth exploring but this rarely happens. The emphasis on sadness places the Beothuk squarely in the past and frames the story as something that happened long ago. In the form of laments and dirges, the story of the Beothuk is absorbed into the Newfoundland narrative but is not seen as part of the active present on the island. In this way, the telling of the Beothuk story is, damagingly, de-politicized. It is not acknowledged that the story of Beothuk-settler relations is a lived history, ongoing and very much part of the contemporary reality.

38  Maura Hanrahan

The use of a political lens makes it apparent that the settler population of today benefits from the demise of the Beothuk through land use and exploitation unimpeded by the assertion of Beothuk Indigenous rights, including, for instance, over the once extremely lucrative Buchans mine near Red Indian Lake. To put it bluntly, dead Indians do not file messy land claims, as the surviving Innu of Labrador and the Mi’kmaq of Miawpukek have done. Dead Indians do not protest large-scale hydroelectric development, as the Inuit and Innu of Labrador have recently done. Accordingly, as Thomas King has pointed out, “whites have always been comfortable with Dead Indians”; dead Indians, he claims, are useful as North American antiquities, paralleling Greek marbles and Chinese dynasties, and, as such, provide the northern continent of what is often called the New World with an interesting and colourful past.41 As peoples of the past, Indigenous people, like the Beothuk, are no longer threatening or “inconvenient,” the word King uses in the title of his 2012 book, The Inconvenient Indian. Yet the political struggles of living Indigenous people continue. In the case of land claims and natural-resource development, Indigenous nations are trying to reclaim part of what they lost post-European contact so they can rebuild their communities. Even when land claims are settled, the land returned to Indigenous nations is normally a small fraction of what was held for hundreds or thousands of years; this pertains also to royalties and other benefits. Yet the advantages they gain from Beothuk extinction are neither identified or understood by settlers and are absent from settler narratives. The Modern Beothuk Institute The problematic representation of Shanawdithit continues to the present day, with official sanction. The Beothuk Institute was re-­established in the fall of 1997 and by 2008 had over seventy members.42 The contemporary Institute’s mandate is to “create, maintain and enhance public knowledge, understanding and appreciation of the history and culture of the Beothuk people.”43 Like its predecessor, the new Institute enjoyed elite support at the time of its founding, with former government minister Dr Phil Warren as its chair. The province’s vice-regal couple, Lieutenant Governor Arthur House and his wife, Mary, acted as its patrons. The date of the Beothuk Institute’s re-founding impels us to examine the contemporary political context. After a large-scale public build-up, Cabot 500, the government of Newfoundland celebration of the 500th

Good and Bad Indians  39

anniversary of Giovanni Cabot’s presumed landing at Bonavista, Newfoundland, took place in the same year. In 1997 Newfoundland solidified its status as Britain’s oldest overseas colony, as the doorway to the “New World,” and as a settler society and state.44 In this, the government was fulfilling goals that had been envisioned a century before when the trans-island railroad was built, bisecting Mi’kmaq and, formerly, Beothuk land. As in the other British dominions with marginalized Indigenous populations – Canada, New Zealand, and Australia – the Newfoundland elite set out to build “a British nation” on capitalist principles and concepts, such as private property, and constitutional government. According to their racialized and gendered vision, the idealized members of this society would be “sober, white, English-speaking patriarchs who would be assisted by saintly, cultured, nurturing women.”45 Cabot’s accidental stumbling upon the island of Newfoundland, if it happened at all, was commemorated by a re-enactment in a replica ship, the Matthew, and a visit from Queen Elizabeth II to Bonavista.46 Cabot 500 spokespeople were at pains to dispel the event’s association with notions of discovery, claiming that “the celebrations haven’t been saying that Cabot discovered North America. We’ve been referring to this as a landfall and arrival.”47 They did admit that mass media was emphasizing the “discovery” element – and, indeed, the celebrations were to take place on 24 June, which remains a statutory holiday, Discovery Day, in Newfoundland. The work of the new Institute was commemorative, its first goal being to construct a statue of Shanawdithit in the woods near the Beothuk Interpretation Centre at Boyd’s Cove, Notre Dame Bay. According to the Institute, this project “was initiated by artist Gerry Squires[,] whose vision of a lone Beothuk woman standing strong and proud against an oncoming storm near Exploits Island inspired him to create a statue to commemorate the Beothuk.”48 Growing up in Newfoundland, I heard numerous stories of people seeing or feeling a presence in the woods, invariably attributed to a Beothuk person. Squires’s experience along these lines is perhaps the most famous. A nationally renowned painter, the late Gerald Squires was in a stormbound boat when he saw a vision of someone standing onshore. He knew the image was stress-induced and illusory, according to a newspaper report in The Pilot.49 But he said of his statue that “it was important for me to do this project to fulfill the fascination I have with the Beothuk and I can say now that is done. But also to help us as Newfoundlanders care about our past.”50 Here, Squires located the Beothuk firmly in the past, in keeping with public

40  Maura Hanrahan

discourse, and claimed Beothuk history as his own. Squires’s original vision has been interpreted or reinterpreted as a Beothuk encounter, of which the new Institute has taken ownership with Squires’s apparent sanction. Artists can, of course, “break the shackles of history in [their] creative or meditative moments” but Squires did not do so in this case.51 Instead, he contributed to the colonial history of Newfoundland by firming up the Beothuk element in the narrative. Squires’s fantasy of the presumed last member of the Beothuk people was fulfilled with the unveiling of the statue in 2000. The media release announcing the event came from the government’s Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation, which had supported the statue through a $40,000 grant; the Government of Canada contributed an unknown amount of funding as well through its Millennium Partnership Program.52 At the launch, Minister Charles Furey opined that the statue was overdue as well as “a provocative reminder that we were not the first to call Newfoundland and Labrador home.”53 In this, he seems to be referring to settler-Newfoundlanders, those of European descent, rendering the Mi’kmaq of the island and their Indigenous cousins in Labrador invisible; Furey’s narrative omits non-Beothuk Indigenous realities. The pervasive tone of lament continued through remarks made by federal government representative George Baker, who said: “It is important that we continue to learn from all the experiences, the celebrations and the tragedies of our past. The Beothuk people will not be forgotten by Canada.”54 Innu elder Elizabeth Penashue reflects on her experience at the launch in her contribution to this volume, but the process of honouring was not directed at the Innu or Mi’kmaq. Commemoration of Indigenous people in Newfoundland was and is reserved solely for the Beothuk. The statue itself (Figure 1.1) was cast from approximately three hundred kilograms of bronze and is over six feet in height, validating the oft-repeated notion that the Beothuk were tall – a feature that assists in imbuing them with an aura of nobility. The height is the first thing one notices about the statue standing among the mixed woods near the Interpretation Centre. The stated purpose of the centre is to display “exhibits and artifacts [that] foster an appreciation for this unique, and now vanished culture.”55 According to its web page, the statue of Shanawdithit, located at the end of a 1.5-kilometre trail, “evokes the tragedy of the Beothuk’s demise.”56 The stone Shanawdithit is holloweyed and, with her arms stiffly by her sides, holds an awkward pose. She is alone – without her family and friends, completely decontextualized

Good and Bad Indians  41

Figure 1.1  The Spirit of the Beothuk, by Gerald Squires. Reproduced by permission of Provincial Historic Sites, Department of Business, Tourism, Culture and Rural Development, Government of Newfoundland and Labrador.

and entirely a symbol. In this statue, the politics of colonization “play across” the politics of memory, to use Rosanne Kennedy and Susannah Radstone’s description of Australia’s ongoing settler-colonial story with its parallels to Newfoundland.57 The solitary statue further imprints on settler minds the image of a dying race, a lone woman, a potential life-giver, the only survivor of a people, whose impending doom is implied. With the Indians dead or dying, the land is empty and the space is available for the solidification of, in this case, Newfoundland national identity. Besides the Australian parallel, there is also the Canadian one. The 1893 Jacques Cartier Fountain and the 1890 La halte dans la foret monument are, according to Sarah Wilkinson, sites of nation building, although settler society fails to see this.58 These monuments celebrate

42  Maura Hanrahan

major heroic figures in settler-Canadian history and act to entrench the Canadian settlement narrative with its focus on French and English perspectives;59 like the Shanawdithit statue, they place Indigenous people irrevocably in the past. Shanawdithit, for instance, is permanently located deep in the quiet woods of Newfoundland, the only authentic setting for Indigenous people. This does not leave room for surviving Indigenous peoples, including the Mi’kmaq, a cultural collectivity that has survived massive economic, technological, and cultural change over hundreds of years, and many of whose members today live in towns and cities, like the majority of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians. In a study of the commemoration of Irish soldiers in the First World War, Ann Rigney calls for an integrated study of collective remembrance that includes the dynamic interplay between social and cultural processes.60 Political questions have to be at the centre of such endeavours, given the larger context of ongoing colonialism. Advancing this notion, Wilkinson quotes Onondaga/Iroquois artist Jeff Thomas with reference to the monuments in Canada: “I look at the monuments first, as a way of whitewashing history and commemoration and bypassing talking about the realities of what actually happened to Indigenous people not only here, but in other parts of the world.”61 Good and Bad Indians: Beothuk and Mi’kmaq Commemoration of the Beothuk should be respectful, and not cause harm to other Indigenous people. But romantic racism directed at the Beothuk has implications for Mi’kmaq. With attention consistently focused on the Beothuk, the Mi’kmaq in Newfoundland suffer by comparison. This was true as far back as the early nineteenth century, when William Cormack referred to the Beothuk as “the interesting aborigines.”62 More recently, Sid Stephen has written that the Mi’kmaq “had been brought to the island wholly for the purpose of hunting down the Beothuk.”63 Indigenous lawyer Jerry Wetzel says that the denigration of the Mi’kmaq is rooted in this widespread “Mi’kmaq mercenary myth.64 Their place as the “bad Indians” has compromised the Mi’kmaq struggle for rights recognition. Although it is deeply entrenched in Newfoundland culture, there is no evidence for the enduring assertion of Mi’kmaq complicity in the destruction of the Beothuk. It is, in fact, disproven by Charles Martijn, whose research has demonstrated that Newfoundland was always part of the Mi’kmaq domain

Good and Bad Indians  43

of islands.65 Further, the Mi’kmaq mercenary myth is in direct opposition to Mi’kmaq oral history, which holds that there was a great deal of intermarriage between Mi’kmaq and Beothuk as well as Innu. Marriages and alliances were inevitable between small neighbouring Indigenous nations and have been alluded to in the literature as far back as Frank Speck in 1922.66 The Mi’kmaq mercenary myth is part of a global phenomenon. As Patrick Brantlinger explains in his chapter, there are recurrent stories in southern Africa, Australia, and other locales of prior invasions and constantly warring savages, stories that disadvantage contemporary Indigenous peoples. As a child in Newfoundland, I heard stories that portrayed the Mi’kmaq as particularly bloodthirsty. Our elementary school textbook legitimized these stories, blaming the Mi’kmaq for the demise of the Beothuk.67 One tale concerned Noel Boss, a Mi’kmaq, who was renowned among Mi’kmaq as a good hunter but was alleged to have embarked on a strikingly cruel campaign against the Beothuk.68 According to William Eppes Cormack, “it is said of this Noel Boss, that he boasted of having killed 99 Red Indians in his time, and wished to add one more to the number so as to complete the hundred.”69 Notably, Cormack claimed that Shanawdithit feared Noel Boss, and conventional wisdom came to hold that this extended to all Mi’kmaq.70 The mythical number of ninety-nine is interesting; the narrative possesses many of the characteristics of urban legends (or, in this case, their rural counterparts). As Leddy says in her chapter, it is a mistake to be uncritical of settlerhistorians’ interpretations; Jocelyn Thorpe further adds that knowledge production has never been innocent and is not innocent now. The depiction of Mi’kmaq as “brought over” frames them as immigrants to Newfoundland, interlopers – in other words, non-­Indigenous and illegitimate. Indeed, the persistence of the Mi’kmaq mercenary myth enabled Newfoundland’s former premier Brian Peckford to claim that his European ancestors arrived on the island before the Mi’kmaq, thus delegitimizing Mi’kmaq claims of long-standing land use, occupancy, and tenure.71 The notion of perennial conflict between the Mi’kmaq and the Beothuk is deeply rooted in Newfoundland culture. Historian and ethnographer Ingeborg Marshall, a prominent member of the Beothuk Institute, claims that Beothuk who spoke to whites or Mi’kmaq were punished by their people.72 She has also stated recently that the Mi’kmaq were said to be “victorious every time there was a confrontation with the Beothuk, who were really chased out of their traditional land,”73

44  Maura Hanrahan

although she admits that she can’t confirm whether this is a fact. In her work Marshall emphasizes concepts of distinctiveness; she told a central Newfoundland newspaper that “the Beothuk were a distinct cultural group with their own language, belief system and ways of life.”74 Distinctiveness, however, does not equal inter-ethnic separation and/ or conflict, as Marshall implies.75 Marshall’s view mirrors conventional wisdom in Newfoundland, and contradicts Mi’kmaq history, which emphasizes the interrelatedness of the two peoples while also admitting occasional conflict – a point that should lend credence to Mi’kmaq accounts. The supposed Beothuk demise fixes that group in time, a time when there were Indians who spoke only their mysterious languages and lived in wigwams. The survivors, and, allegedly, the victors, the Mi’kmaq (or jackatars),76 were, as described in 1857, “a much despised and neglected race ... of almost lawless habits.”77 Because of these negative ideas, the Newfoundland Mi’kmaq felt and internalized shame, transmitting it from one generation to the next. The Mi’kmaq as interloper theme continues through Newfoundland’s ongoing story. During Cabot 500, government officials implied that the Indigenous people of the province were outsiders, a group to be invited into and – one hoped – integrated into the larger society: “Overtures were made to the Aboriginal people of Newfoundland and Labrador to take part. Efforts were made to integrate them into the mainstream celebrations.”78 Authenticity and Survival The Mi’kmaq struggle for recognition has been complicated by persistent notions of authenticity, propelled by representations of the Beothuk, including the Shanawdithit statue. Julie Cruikshank has written that a First Nations person cannot wear jeans or eat pizza and continue to be seen as authentic.79 The expectation that Indigenous cultures can survive multiple blows, such as language loss, shrinkage of land bases, residential schooling, technological change, urbanization, and the elimination of self-government, unscathed is peculiar. Polish, Norwegian, and Ukrainian Canadians do not wear typical seventeenth-century peasant dress and their right to call themselves Polish, Norwegian, or Ukrainian Canadians is unquestioned and supported through the federal government’s multiculturalism policy. In Newfoundland, people identify as Irish Newfoundlanders although they may never have been to Ireland and certainly do not speak Irish Gaelic. They do not fish from

Good and Bad Indians  45

schooners as their grandfathers did but there is no questioning of their right to call themselves Newfoundlanders. In Newfoundland and Labrador, only the Innu are seen as authentic and this is because their public representation is deeply pathological; Stephen Claxton-Oldfield and Sheila Keefe documented consistently negative media images of Innu over a decade ago and these representations continue.80 The image of alcoholic Innu with their neglected, gassniffing children corresponds exactly to one of the widely accepted and long-standing notions of genuine Indianness in present-day Canada.81 The Beothuk and the Mi’kmaq Today The Beothuk, who can be seen as the natural allies and the kin of the Innu and the Mi’kmaq, sharing Algonquian language roots, have become weapons used against the surviving Indigenous people. How does this work? As Bonita Lawrence explains in her chapter in this book, while denial of recognition is generally maintained so that states can have untrammeled access to Indigenous peoples’ lands and resources, myths of extinction are a central means through which denial of recognition occurs. Because they have been portrayed as opposing groups, as long as the Beothuk are seen as “authentic,” the Mi’kmaq cannot be; they will always be measured against the deceased Indians. As noted above, when Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, it was decided not to implement the Indian Act in the new province. Canada wanted to promote assimilation of Indigenous people in the late 1940s, and Newfoundland’s negotiators posited that there were few Indians left in Newfoundland.82 This meant that the Indigenous First Nations of the province – the Mi’kmaq and the Innu – were denied recognition of their Aboriginal rights. Although the Indian Act is a problematic piece of colonial legislation, formal recognition would have enabled them to access programs and services, establish reserves, and file land claims. The struggle for government recognition by Mi’kmaq post-1949 has been long and hard. It has involved advocacy, litigation, tithing to fund the litigation, and attempts to tell the Newfoundland Mi’kmaq story through the publication of elders’ stories, websites, and other publiceducation processes. One of the most enlightening examples of the good Indian/bad Indian dynamic is the increasingly sad story of the creation of Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation. Although the Newfoundland Mi’kmaq fought for decades to be recognized by the government of Canada through the Indian Act,

46  Maura Hanrahan

the dominant public narrative is that thousands of Newfoundlanders recently discovered a single Mi’kmaq ancestor from two centuries back and that this constitutes the Newfoundland Mi’kmaq.83 While there are such individual cases, this emphasis obscures the history of how the Qalipu band came to be; it renders invisible the long story of the dozen community-based Mi’kmaq bands that have been active for decades. Further, in the case of those who have recently learned of their ancestry, the salient question is why? What are the circumstances that led to patterns of invisibility and denial? In this context, it is politically easy for governments to deny land to the Mi’kmaq of Newfoundland. The story of the Beothuk has been reduced to the story of their extinction.84 When Mi’kmaq talk about the Beothuk being among us today, perhaps they are really echoing Santu’s assertions of intermarriage between all neighbouring Indigenous peoples. Cormack himself refers to encampments made up of Mi’kmaq and Innu; the camps also included Abenaki.85 With some government funding, the Beothuk Institute has an ongoing DNA project aimed at determining the relationship between the Beothuk and the Maritine Archaic Indians, as well as that between the Beothuk and the province’s surviving Indigenous people. As of April 2013, the Institute planned to take DNA samples from the province’s Indigenous people, although one of its members, Ingeborg Marshall, is uncomfortable with the claim that some Mi’kmaq have Beothuk ancestors.86 Even if a few Beothuk were absorbed by the Mi’kmaq, any descendants would now have “Beothuk gene material” totalling “1.5% or less,” she said in a newspaper interview.87 But the more salient point is that DNA is a red herring, from which cultural survival in any form cannot be inferred. The focus on DNA obscures the political history of the island and the ongoing colonization project, which is a reality surviving Indigenous people must cope with.88 As Kim TallBear warns us, the emphasis on DNA or “blood” can permanently undermine legitimate Indigenous land and resource claims as well as the ongoing struggle for a return to Indigenous sovereignty.89 Genetic narratives, in TallBear’s words, can reconstitute history and identity as understood by Indigenous people. Land rights and governance systems are built on these understandings. But, as TallBear warns, modern science could conclude that certain descendants do not have sufficient genetic linkages to their lands, thus bringing their rights into question. Besides the Institute’s project, some Newfoundlanders who identify as part of the settler population have, I have heard, been getting their

Good and Bad Indians  47

DNA tested in a search for Beothuk markers. They claim or suspect Beothuk ancestry, in most cases usually through an unnamed female ancestor. Besides the human urge to satisfy curiosity, the purpose of such DNA testing is not obvious; there is no identifiable Beothuk community which claimants might join. In the absence of such a community, it would be an injustice to reduce Beothuk identity to a few genes. However, even though DNA does not speak to cultural practices, beliefs, and perspectives, Peyton Barrett of the Beothuk Institute has said that “we hope the first phase of testing will tell us who the Beothuk were.”90 Again, the political lens is necessary. What are the potential political implications? Given the history of the Newfoundland Mi’kmaq, it is probable that the use of Beothuk DNA might be used by settlers to circumvent Mi’kmaq claims to the island. Despite the presence of identifiable and overlapping Mi’kmaq communities in Newfoundland, settlers with Beothuk DNA could reassert the conventional wisdom that the Beothuk were here first, the Mi’kmaq imported. In addition, if Beothuk DNA is extant, settlers would be relieved of the burden of being participants in genocide.91 Given the context and history, any Beothuk descendants would likely be viewed as the real Indigenous people of the island, in contrast to the Mi’kmaq whose tenure of this land is actually unbroken. This is precisely the kind of scenario to which TallBear asks us to be alert. Commemoration Done Differently There are other approaches to commemoration than those I have criticized here. Some agencies have attempted to incorporate Indigenous world views into their strategies and programs. When it was founded in 1911, Parks Canada promulgated the idea that its parklands were devoid of people, ignoring Indigenous land-use patterns and echoing the European legal concept of terra nullius that enabled colonization in the first place.92 But in the 1990s the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada (HSMBC) recognized that historical and anthropological frameworks did not reflect the “values inherent in the history of Aboriginal people.”93 Until that time, commemoration focused on the analysis of physical resources, such as the ancient Mi’kmaq petroglyphs at Kejimkujik, Nova Scotia. Then Susan Buggey wrote “An Approach to Aboriginal Cultural Landscapes,” in which she stated that “the orientations of the two cultural constructs (Indigenous and western) differ radically, the one rooted in experiential interrelationship with the land and

48  Maura Hanrahan

the other in objectification and rationalism.”94 Parks Canada responded by involving Indigenous people in planning. Through consultation with the Mi’kmaq of the region, the commemorative focus at Kejimkujik Park in Nova Scotia moved from the single-resource type to the whole park area; that is, the entire cultural landscape – including habitation sites, travel routes, hunting and fishing grounds, and burials – became the new focus. This allowed for an emphasis on and exploration of the relationship between Mi’kmaq and the land. While this altered approach does not equal a return of the land to the Mi’kmaq, it is a step forward. Even closer to home, the Nunatsiavut government and Parks Canada co-manage the new Torngat Park in Northern Labrador. In small ways, Parks Canada and the HSMBC and their Indigenous partners are attempting to break the shackles of colonial history. Although there is no extant Beothuk community, commemoration using this approach is still possible. The statue of Shanawdithit standing alone in the woods, completely de-contextualized, seems contrary to an approach based on Indigenous understandings of landscapes. It might be argued that its construction and placement are ineffective as well as disrespectful. Viewing the Beothuk as well as the Mi’kmaq through an Indigenous cultural-landscape framework would likely counter the conventional wisdom that has reduced the Beothuk to a one-dimensional construct – that of noble victim – and also allow a move away from the perceptions that cause such harm to the Mi’kmaq of Newfoundland. NOTES 1 Charles A. Martijn, “Early Mikmaq Presence in Southern Newfoundland: An Ethnohistorical Perspective, c. 1500–1763,” Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 19, no. 1 (2005). 2 Ibid. 3 Maura Hanrahan, “The Lasting Breach: The Omission of Aboriginal People from the Terms of Union between Newfoundland and Canada and Its Ongoing Impacts,” Royal Commission on Renewing and Strengthening Our Place in Canada (St John’s: Government of Newfoundland and Labrador 2003). 4 Roderick Joachim Jeddore, “Investigating the Restoration of the Mi’kmaq Language and Culture on the First Nations Reserve of Miawpukek” (PhD thesis, University of Saskatchewan, 2000), 8.

Good and Bad Indians  49 5 Maura Hanrahan, “A Story of Invisibility: The Reaction of the Print Media to the Formation of Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation,” Native Studies Review 21, no. 1 (2012): 83–102. 6 Ruth B. Phillips, “Settler Monuments, Indigenous Memory: Dis-­ membering and Re-membering Canadian Art History,” in Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin, eds., Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2003), 284. 7 Ingeborg Marshall, A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1996), 193; Olaf U. Janzen, “The Royal Navy and the Interdiction of Aboriginal Migration to Newfoundland, 1763–1766,” International Journal of Naval History 7, no. 2 (2008), http://www.ijnhonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Janzen.pdf (accessed November 2017). 8 The tradition of the Newfoundland elite sending their sons to Britain for their education continued into the twentieth century. G.M. Story, “William Eppes Cormack,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 9, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/cormack_william_eppes_9E.html (hereafter DCB). 9 William Eppes Cormack, “Report of Mr. W.E. Cormack’s Journey in Search of the Red Indians in Newfoundland,” Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal 6 (1828–9): 318–29. Project Gutenburg edition, http://www.gutenberg.org/ cache/epub/13762/pg13762.txt (accessed November 2017). 10 I will return to the contested topic of Beothuk-Mi’kmaq relations later in this chapter. 11 Marshall, A History and Ethnography, 447. The modern-day reincarnation of the Beothuk Instutution is called the Beothuk “Institute.” For more on this body, see Lianne Leddy’s chapter in this volume. 12 Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians, 182. 13 Ibid., 189. 14 Marshall, A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk, 195. Note that the Montagnais are now known as Innu. 15 Ibid. 16 The story of Santu Toney, initially documented by anthropologist Frank Speck and discussed in this volume by Beverley Diamond, lends credence to this idea. Santu had a Beothuck father and a Mi’kmaq mother and spent the bulk of her life on the eastern seaboard of the United States and what are now the Maritime provinces. 17 Cormack, “Report of Mr. W.E. Cormack’s Journey.” 18 W. Gordon Handcock, “Peyton, John,” in DCB, vol. 6. 19 Ibid.

50  Maura Hanrahan 2 0 Ibid. 21 Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians, 186. 22 Patrick O’Flaherty, “Carson, William,” in DCB, vol. 7. 23 “The Beothuk (‘Boeothick’) Institution,” Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage, http://www.heritage.nf.ca/articles/aboriginal/beothuk-­institution. php (accessed November 2017). 24 Ibid. 25 “Carson, Dr. William (1770–1843),” in Joseph Robert Smallwood, ed., Encyclopedia of Newfoundland and Labrador, vol. 1 (St John’s: Newfoundland Book Publishers 1981), 362, http://collections.mun.ca/cdm/ref/collection/cns_enl/id/774 (accessed November 2017). 26 Bernice Morgan, Cloud of Bone (New York: Random House 2007). For more on Morgan’s novel, see Fiona Polack, “Memory against History: Figuring the Past in Cloud of Bone,” English Studies in Canada 35, no. 4 (2009): 53–69; and Cynthia Sugars’s chapter in this volume. 27 Wini Breines, Young, White, and Miserable: Growing up Female in the Fifties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1992); Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (London: Verso 1990). 28 Will Hilliard, “Readers Salute the Last Beothuk,” Telegram, 1 January 2000. 29 For more information on literary representations of the Beothuk, see Mary Dalton, “Shadow Indians: The Beothuk Motif in Newfoundland Literature,” Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 8, no. 2 (1992): 135–46; Terry Goldie, Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press 1989); and Cynthia Sugars’s chapter in this volume. 30 Rayna Green, “The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of Indian Women in American Culture,” Massachusetts Review 16 (1975): 698–714. 31 Ibid., 698. 32 Theda Perdue, “Cherokee Women and the Trail of Tears,” Journal of Women’s History 1, no. 1 (1989): 14–30. 33 Ben Harris McClary, “Nancy Ward: The Last Beloved Woman of the Cherokees,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 21 (1962): 352. 34 Vicki Rozema, Footsteps of the Cherokees: A Guide to the Eastern Homelands of the Cherokee Nation, 2nd ed. (Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair 2007). 35 Micheline E. Pesantubbee, “Nancy Ward: American Patriot or Cherokee Nationalist?” American Indian Quarterly 38, no. 2 (2014): 177. 36 Perdue, “Cherokee Women,” 18. 37 Ibid.

Good and Bad Indians  51 38 We must admit the possibility of Bartlett’s Harbour and environs on ­Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula as such an entity. 39 Sue Hickey, “Exploring the Beothuk Spirit,” Advertiser (Grand Falls-­ Windsor, NL), 74, no. 80, 11 October 2010, A3. 40 Michael Crummey, River Thieves (Toronto: Doubleday 2001), n.p. 41 Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America (Toronto: Doubleday 2012). 42 Dave Cooper, “Keeping History Alive,” Pilot, 5 March 2008. 43 Ibid. 44 The official name of the province was still Newfoundland; it was changed to Newfoundland and Labrador in 2001. 45 Kurt Korneski, “Race, Gender, Class, and Colonial Nationalism: Railway Development in Newfoundland, 1881–1898,” Labour/Le Travail 62 (fall 2008): 106. 46 The actual name of Cabot’s ship was the Mateo but it was anglicized for this exercise. 47 Kenneth Williams, “Cabot 500 Celebrations Dispel Discovery Notion,” Windspeaker 15, no. 3 (1997), http://www.ammsa.com/node/21131 (accessed November 2017). 48 Ibid. 49 Christy Boyd, “Fulfilling a Fascination with the Beothuk,” Pilot, 28 August 2013, http://www.lportepilot.ca/News/Local/2013-08-28/­article-3364171/ Fulfilling-a-fascination-with-the-Beothuk/1 (accessed November 2017). 50 Ibid. 51 Phillips, “Settler Monuments,” 299. 52 The remainder of the $180,000 required was raised through corporate and private donations. Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation, “Beothuk Institute Announces the Completion of a Beothuk Commemorative Statue,” news release, 16 February 2000 (St John’s: Government of Newfoundland and Labrador 2000). 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Beothuk Interpretation Centre, http://www.seethesites.ca/the-sites/ beothuk-interpretation-centre.aspx (accessed November 2017). 56 Ibid. 57 Rosanne Kennedy and Susannah Radstone, “Memory up Close: Memory Studies in Australia,” Memory Studies 6, no. 3 (2013): 238. 58 Sarah Wilkinson, “The Living Monument: A Consideration of the Politics of Indigenous Representation and Public Historical Monuments in ­Quebec” (MA thesis, Concordia University, 2011).

52  Maura Hanrahan 59 As Phillips reminds us, the term First Nations was adopted to enable Indigenous peoples to insert themselves into the settlement narrative. See Phillips, “Settler Monuments, Indigenous Memory.” 60 Ann Rigney, “Divided Posts: A Premature Memorial and the Dynamics of Collective Remembrance,” Memory Studies 1, no. 1 (2008): 89–97. 61 Wilkinson, “The Living Monument,” 32. 62 W.E. Cormack, Narrative of a Journey across the island of Newfoundland in 1822 (Edinburgh: Printed for A. Constable, 1824), http://www.mun.ca/rels/native/beothuk/beo2gifs/texts/HOW19b. html#page151 (accessed November 2017). 63 Sid Stephen, Beothuk Poems (Ottawa: Oberon 1976), 1. 64 Michael G. Wetzel, “Decolonizing Ktaqmkuk Mi’kmaw History” (LLM thesis, Dalhousie University, 1995). 65 Charles A. Martijn, “An Eastern Micmac Domain of Islands,” in W. Cowan, ed., Actes du Vingtième Congrès des Algonquinistes (Ottawa: Carleton ­University 1989). 66 Frank Speck, Beothuk and Micmac (New York: Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, 1922). 67 Frances Briffett, The Story of Newfoundland and Labrador (Toronto: Dent 1949). 68 Probably Basque, which is a Mi’kmaq surname, especially in present-day Nova Scotia. 69 Ibid., 179. 70 It is interesting that Shanawdithit knew Noel Boss’s name and called him Mudty Noel (Bad Noel); this suggests some familiarity with Mi’kmaq. 71 Premier Brian Peckford of Newfoundland is quoted in an article by Pat Doyle in the St John’s Evening Telegram, 10 December 1987: “The Micmac people were no more Aboriginal to the island of Newfoundland than were the Peckfords, who came here in 1791.” 72 “CrossTalk: Beothuk Expert Ingeborg Marshall Is Our Guest,” CrossTalk (St John’s: CBC Radio, 27 May 2013). 73 Ibid. 74 Sue Hickey, “Funding Needed to Complete Beothuk DNA Research,” Advertiser (Grand Falls-Windsor, NL), 77, no. 31 18 April 2013, A3. 75 “Crosstalk,” CBC Radio. 76 There is no agreement on the origins of the term but it is derogatory. It refers to the mixed-blood descendants of Europeans, especially French or Acadian and Mi’kmaq. 77 Henry Lind, Diary of Rev. Henry Lind of Sandy Point, June 25, 1857–Jany. 8, 1958, qtd. in George Morley Story, W.J. Kirwin, and John David Allison

Good and Bad Indians  53 Widdowson, eds., Dictionary of Newfoundland English (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1999), 272. 78 Williams, “Cabot 500 Celebrations Dispel Discovery Notion.” 79 Julie Cruikshank, The Social Life of Stories: Narrative and Knowledge in the Yukon Territory (Kearney: University of Nevada Press 1998), 68. 80 Stephen Claxton-Oldfield and Sheila Keefe, “Assessing Stereotypes about the Innu of Davis Inlet, Labrador,” Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science 31, no. 2 (1999): 86–91. 81 Anne G. Godlewska and C. Drew Bednasek, “Cultivating Ignorance of Aboriginal Realities,” Canadian Geographer, 54 no. 4 (2010): 424. 82 Wetzel, “Decolonizing Ktaqmkuk Mi’kmaw History.” 83 Hanrahan, “A Story of Invisibility.” 84 Donald H. Holly, “The Beothuk on the Eve of their Extinction,” Arctic Anthropology 37, no. 1 (2000): 79–95. 85 This mixing continues today with a remarkable number of Indigenous people, including some of my relatives, having an admixture of Inuit, Metis, and First Nation ancestors. My circle of friends includes people of mixed Innu and Plains Cree descent, people of Inuit and Anishinaabe ancestry, and others. Cormack, Narrative of a Journey, 151. 86 Sue Hickey, “Funding Needed to Complete Beothuk DNA Research.” 87 Ibid. Here again is the notion of separation between the Beothuk and Mi’kmaq, ignoring Mi’kmaq history and the work of Frank Speck, who did ethnographic research with the Newfoundland Mi’kmaq in the 1920s. 88 For a different view, see Chief Mi’sel Joe’s comments in his chapter. 89 Kim TallBear, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2013). 90 Ibid. 91 This would be true of the Mi’kmaq as well, of course. 92 The agency has undergone several name changes through its one hundred years. 93 Susan Buggey, “An Approach to Aboriginal Cultural Landscapes,” Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, Parks Canada (Gatineau, QC: Government of Canada 1999), http://www.pc.gc.ca/docs/r/pca-acl/images/Aboriginal_Cultural_ Landscapes_e.pdf (accessed November 2017). 94 Ibid., 2.

2 When the Beothuk (Won’t) Speak: Michael Crummey’s River Thieves and Bernice Morgan’s Cloud of Bone c yn thi a sugars

True history: ... lives in the sound of words whose meaning is forgotten. Sid Stephen, “Shawnadithit” (from Beothuck Poems)

Sid Stephen’s 1976 collection of poems about the Beothuk opens with a Genesis-style speech act, initiating – or is it articulating? – the creation of the world: “In the beginning / there was only the sea.”1 The Beothuk in this narrative are represented as “the people,” the originary humans who will somehow go on to spawn and inspire generations of Newfoundlanders, maybe generations of Canadians too. The book forms part of what is now a long-standing mythos, in which the Beothuk are imbued with a transcendental mystique that allows a glimpse into absolute origins, outside of recorded time. Such an “origin myth” consigns a kind of secondary primacy upon the colonial settler, who claims a “firsting” via the absent Aboriginal. As Jean O’Brien explains in her study Firsting and Lasting, the actual “first” inhabitants “are made to disappear, sometimes through precise declarations that the ‘last’ of them has passed, and the colonial regime is constructed as the ‘first’ to bring ‘civilization’ ... to the region. Non-Indians stake a claim to being native – indigenous – through this process.”2 In this case an Indigenous “firsting” is figured as being inherited by subsequent settlers, or, as Colleen Boyd and Coll Thrush express this dynamic, Indigenous ghosts “serve as stand-ins for European ancestral dead, providing a spectral genealogy linking settlers to new places.”3 Settler descendants can then claim insight into a fantasied rendition of Beothuk truth and mysticism,

When the Beothuk (Won’t) Speak  55

which is encapsulated in the trace remnants of Beothuk language. What does it mean, after all, for “true history,” as the epigraph above puts it, to be encapsulated in an unintelligible word? This rendering of fetishized Beothuk presence as embodied in the Beothuk word will form the subject of this chapter. The Beothuk have had a unique significance in Newfoundland – and, indeed, Canadian – cultural history. They have served as symbolic ancestors whose apparent absence accrues a resonance as figures who are at once originary and beyond articulation.4 For this reason, the Beothuk inspire fantasies of atonement on the part of the “inheritors” of this history at the same time as they contribute to the construction of a foundational loss in Newfoundland culture. It is this loss that countless artists and writers have attempted to conjure in some way, often through a recurring fixation on the “last” Beothuk or the final days of the people through whom, it is often felt, those in the contemporary world can access Beothuk “truth” and relate it to their present context.5 The fascination with the Beothuk that held sway among historians and ethnographers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries resurfaced in a post-1960 wave of fictional and poetic treatments that was marked by a search for historical ancestors, local antiquities, cultural memory, and settler-Indigenous crossover. As Mary Dalton and Carl Leggo rightly note, these works are ultimately about the presentday subject rather than the Beothuk, since there is no way to write a literary account of the Beothuk that does not emerge from a non-Beothuk imagination.6 A character in Derek Yetman’s The Beothuk Expedition states that he seeks “the chance to make amends,” and one can see this in all of these contemporary fictions.7 Indeed, many of these works seek a form of postcolonial expiation and, ultimately, settler belonging, often forged through a meditation on colonial trauma. But more than this, these works indulge in a fantasy of memorialization. As Fiona Polack points out, they express an underlying anxiety about “the annihilation of a way of remembering,” even as they “suggest the existence of a ‘pure, complete and transcendent’ kind of remembrance.”8 The Beothuk, in effect, have become the focus of both postcolonial guilt (over past atrocities) and postcolonial desire (for origins/authenticity/ memory). The two novels that I will discuss in this chapter – Michael Crummey’s River Thieves (2001) and Bernice Morgan’s Cloud of Bone (2007) – turn to Beothuk history as a constitutive element in Newfoundland identity, an inherited and “originary” loss that has settled at the heart of the island’s

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culture.9 It is for this reason, as Crummey maintains, that his focus is not the Beothuk viewpoint per se but rather the settlers’ implication in and response to the tragedy that was unfolding before them. Polack is right to observe that Crummey’s approach is unique in its “challenge to the notion that Beothuk perspectives are readily accessible to sympathetic contemporary authors.”10 Throughout the novel, Crummey refrains from providing a Beothuk perspective on events. However, there is something else that fills in for this absence of Beothuk consciousness, and that is embodied Beothuk language. A striking element of Crummey’s novel is the way he conjures Beothuk words specifically as bearing some kind of holistic relation to pre-conquest, and pre-symbolic, existence. In some sense, they precede the Beothuk themselves, standing as clues to an ancient and primal past which has been lost to memory (if it can ever be said to have been available to remembering) and can be reconstituted through trace forms only. While there are numerous poetic and fictional works that invoke the Beothuk story, both River Thieves and Cloud of Bone stand out for their overt romanticizing of the idea of Beothuk speech and language, although they do so in very different ways. Both novels, to be sure, emphasize settler participation in and response to the Beothuk tragedy through an elegiac overlay. Of central interest in this chapter, however, is the way they both take as their subject the “last” of the Beothuk, as this applies not only to the loss of a race of people but also to the loss of a particular lexicon. I’m interested, therefore, in the fantasy of the Beothuk word – in which words stand in for people. However, there is a difference in how each writer perceives the author’s ability to access Beothuk language. In Crummey’s novel, one might say, the Beothuk refuse to speak; in Morgan’s they speak rather too much. This approach conforms to the spectral nature of Indigenous presence that one finds in so much settler-colonial literature, in which Indigenous peoples are figured as haunting cyphers of settler-colonial preoccupations (see, for example, the theoretical work of Bergland, Boyd and Thrush, Goldman, and Sugars).11 What interests me in these two works is an extension of this phenomenon, whereby Beothuk language, specifically, is held up as a kind of uber-cypher that transcends its own spectrality. The basic post-structuralist tenet is that language is “an inscription of absence”;12 in other words, a symbol is a representation, not the thing itself. As Robert Hass puts it in his poem “Meditation at Lagunitas,” “a word is elegy to what it signifies.”13 In these literary works, the Beothuk are conjured, through words, as a palpable absence.

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But there is a twist on this when Beothuk words themselves are invoked as existing somehow outside this absence. Authors engage with the artificial nature of their own words in conjuring the Beothuk, but they use Beothuk words to traverse this gap. In these instances, Beothuk words (standing in for the people) are used to close up this rift in signification to yield up something that will authenticate the present-day observer in his/her relation to the lost Beothuk. The Beothuk become a kind of “origin of origins,” the ultimate transcendental signified, who are accessed through the invocation of the Beothuk “word” itself. As a form of what James Clifford terms “salvage ethnography,” in which the other is “saved in the text,” here the Beothuk other is preserved through a very particular form of textual conjuring.14 It is as though the essence of the Beothuk – and something beyond them that they represent – is imagined as being embodied in their speech. Although such conjurings of authenticating language would seem to bring us closer to the past since these words appear to close up the rift between word and thing, and between historical time periods, there is in fact a melancholic distancing that emerges through the attempt, which brings with it the necessity of ceaseless repetition. As I have argued elsewhere about the haunting effect of Indigenous place names, “the words stand out in all their infuriating materiality – expressly because they are now only material traces, embodying a history that does not live on in the [present-day] speaker’s mind. The words, and the colonist, are now both exiles.”15 The words, while failing to render up a coherent haunted history, nevertheless, through their indecipherability, bolster the melancholic loss at the core of the settler fantasy. *** The interest in Beothuk language began in the early nineteenth century, as white settlers such as William Cormack, aware of the radical and violent depletion of the Beothuk population, desperately sought to effect communication between the two groups. As a result, the colonial authorities offered a reward for any captured Beothuk who could be trained as mediators and they encouraged the few Beothuk who lived in captivity to produce vocabularies of their language. The vocabularies that exist are inadequate in facilitating any kind of symbolic exchange; they are lists of nomenclature with no sense of grammatical or connotative function. Like the people, the words are lost to memory, which means that they can also be imagined in fetishized ways.

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Research on the vocabularies was initially undertaken in the interest of charting an ethnographic genealogy. Beothuk words were imagined to provide clues to the origins of Indigenous habitation of North America. Ethnographers compiled and collated vocabularies from different language groups, comparing Beothuk words with Algonquian patterns, as well as Mi’kmaq, Inuit, and Scandinavian ones, in an attempt to chart the racial origins of the Beothuk, often in questionable ways. The early fascination with Beothuk language and lexography is evident in the documents compiled in James Howley’s The Beothucks or Red Indians, which contains a detailed lexicon and various treatises on what can be gleaned from the vocabularies.16 Howley lists five Beothuk vocabularies that were compiled in the 1700s and 1800s: Reverend John Clinch’s vocabulary from the end of the eighteenth century; Reverend John Leigh’s, which was gathered from Mary March in 1819/1820; W.E. Cormack’s, taken from Shanawdithit in 1828; that of Mrs Jure (John Peyton, Sr’s servant), also taken from Shanawdithit in around 1828; and a late appearing vocabulary provided by a Dr King from the mid-1800s.17 The documents that Howley reproduces show how a number of ethnographers at the turn of the century were attempting to merge the various vocabularies into a systematic pattern. W.E. Cormack, for example, surmised that the Beothuk vocabularies suggested a European origin rather than a North American one.18 Others sought to compare Beothuk language with that of other Indigenous groups, including various Algonquian, Montagnais, and Inuit dialects. Often this quest sought to establish the Beothuk as precursors of other Indigenous populations – as remnants of originary Aboriginal ancestors, who, through their isolation on the island, preserved an authentic aboriginality, making them distantly linked to and distinctive from other Indigenous groups. Indeed, the mystique of the Beothuk became more resonant the more the vocabularies exceeded taxonomy. In many accounts, Beothuk (linguistic and racial) genealogy is retroactively figured as being sui generis owing both to the people’s asserted isolation on the island and to their presumed extinction. More precisely, the Beothuk assume a kind of ab-originality as uber-Indigenes who existed in uncontaminated (and apparently pure) isolation and hence provided clues to human evolution. This was the conclusion reached by Albert Gatschet, the ethnographer whom Howley cites with the most approbation. According to Gatschet, “the Red Indians of Newfoundland must have been a race distinct from the races on the mainland ... Their language, I do not hesitate ... to regard as belonging to a

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separate linguistic family” as a result of their having “lived for centuries isolated upon Newfoundland.”19 In recent fictional writings about the Beothuk, a distinct romanticization has set in, and the loss of the Beothuk “word” has come to stand as a synecdoche for the loss of the Beothuk people. This is more than an engagement with Gayatri Spivak’s famous postcolonial question, “Can the subaltern speak?”20 In these works, Beothuk speech acquires an authenticating resonance expressly because the people and the words have been lost to aural memory. As a result, authors feel a certain liberty, but also a distinct debility, in their representations of Beothuk speech. But what are these ostensibly postcolonial narratives using the Beothuk word to accomplish? In a sense, we see here a process of double displacement, by which the ghosts of Indigenous people are replaced by the spectral nature of Indigenous words, which are figured by self-appointed settler “descendants” as aural traces in the landscape that once had authentic presence. Paradoxically, the words embody absence, confirming Boyd and Thrush’s sense that “for all their immateriality, hauntings [are] very much about the tangible world,”21 or, we might say, about a desire for a tangible trace that can be “inherited” in the present. *** A selected list of recent fictional, dramatic, and poetic accounts of the Beothuk would include Peter Such’s Riverrun; Sid Stephen’s Beothuck Poems; Michael Cook’s On the Rim of the Curve; Kevin Major’s Blood Red Ochre; Joan Clark’s The Dream Carvers; Bernard Assiniwi’s The Beothuk Saga; Annamarie Beckel’s All Gone Widdun; Michael Crummey’s River Thieves; Joan Crate’s Foreign Homes; Bernice Morgan’s Cloud of Bone; Kate Story’s Blasted; and Derek Yetman’s The Beothuk Expedition. The well-known television documentary series Canada: A People’s History begins with the last surviving Beothuk, Shanawdithit, in 1829 (the year of her death) and from there stretches back in time to link the Beothuk not only to the beginnings of Canada but to the origins of the world.22 The Beothuk have also been the subject of countless individual poems and have made what might be called “cameo” appearances in other novels. Bernice Morgan’s best-selling novel Random Passage,23 for example, opens with a scene of Beothuk storytelling, while Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams24 concludes with Sheilagh Fielding comparing herself to Shawnadithit. Morgan’s depiction of Beothuk

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oral culture is particularly instructive. In the novel’s opening segment, an old woman tells a parable about a fish and a bird that encapsulates Beothuk-settler relations, but it does so in troubling ways. This scene is set-up as the precursor to the white settlement that is the real focus of the novel (and to the race of Newfoundlanders that the novel establishes as its future), a kind of “back-story” to the main storyline. The novel is interspersed with the diary entries of one of the settlers, Lavinia Andrews, which, we learn at the end of the sequel novel, Waiting for Time, have been rewritten into narrative form by her descendant in the twenty-first century.25 Indeed, the concluding lines of Waiting for Time are the opening lines of Random Passage – that is, the Beothuk parable about the fish and the bird – so the Beothuk “voice” is contained within the narrative frame itself (it is “written” by a white settler). The Beothuk voice is rendered a storytelling fantasy that is posited as outside of European tradition, yet also necessary as an authenticating prologue, contributing to an emergent Newfoundland culture (a Beothuk oral folktale, in effect, is inserted into the written settler narrative). Another example of this idealized mystique of Beothuk language occurs in Sid Stephen’s poem “Shawnadithit” from his 1976 collection, Beothuck Poems. The book delineates the “vanishing” of the Beothuk people from the perspective of a melancholic, modern-day settler. “Shawnadithit” immediately homes in on Beothuk words, beginning with her name: “The meaning of the name / is lost / in the sound / the shift / and fall of / water / on stone steps.”26 The speaker identifies “meaning” as having vanished along with the vanished race of people, yet he identifies its presence in the physical landscape: the meaning is “lost” (but nevertheless present) in the fall of water on stone. This is a common trope – Indigenous language aligned in an essentialist relation with the land – but the words are also figured as people, as the speaker speaks of “the parting syllable.” Words are personified but not given agency, and there is almost a sense that we lament the loss of the cultural artifact, the word, more than the human being. The word thus acquires an emblematic and tangible essence, which encapsulates Beothuk existence. “True history,” the speaker concludes, “lives / in the sound of words / whose meaning / is forgotten.” Yet it is expressly because the meaning has been “forgotten” (if it could ever have been known by settlers to begin with) that the words lend themselves to this romanticized mystique. Similarly, Joan Crate’s imagined rendering of Shawnadithit in Foreign Homes expresses a frustrated desire to crack the linguistic and historical barrier. The settler voice in some of the poems seeks this connection

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Figure 2.1  Where Once They Stood We Stand. Traffic Signal Box Art, Military Road, St John’s, Newfoundland. Photo: Fiona Polack.

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through language: “Did she ever speak? / She is the silence / deep in the permafrost / I try so hard to hear.”27 Although Crate’s Shawnadithit obstructs this connection, she nevertheless is conjured as an embodiment of the speech the present-day settler yearns for. Shawnadithit describes herself as “a suspended sentence,” whose triumph emerges when she flies free, as “language beyond their knowing.”28 Critics such as Mary Dalton have argued that the fact that the Beothuk cannot talk back makes it all the easier for white settlers to lament their fate. Indeed, the profound gaps in our received knowledge of the Beothuk have inspired authors to creatively fill in the missing fragments. But there is something beyond a postcolonial revision that is involved here. For Howley, the Beothuk unveil “the cradle of the human race itself,”29 enabling us, as he puts it, “to go behind the Indians in looking for the earliest inhabitants of North America.”30 This desired glimpse of the “behind” or “beyond” suggests that authors seek in the Beothuk something intangible, something to connect them with a kind of evolutionary sublime, which may ultimately offer a consolation for extinction and memory loss. These narratives dwell in/on the moment of extinction, in the double sense of dwell: they inhabit and obsess. They posit the Beothuk as an evolutionary trace, and Beothuk words as a primal materiality that enables a glimpse into the pre-­symbolic. In literary poststructuralist terms, this is the fantasied moment of authentic essence before the rift in the sign, an idealized state before there was any division between word and thing, reality and memory. In other words, two kinds of loss are being conflated here: the loss of the Aboriginal people, and the constitutive loss within the present-day subject in relation to the ineluctable alterity of the past. Beothuk words are figured as being able to survive extinction since they exist in their own right, independent of a living human speaker. They defeat cultural and historical amnesia, even though settlers may not be able to decode them. Mystically, the words are accorded an existence within the Real, a fantasy that compensates for the trauma of extinction. There is a consolation, then, that something of the Beothuk remains. Paradoxically, this link with a transcendent essence is conjured through an act of naming. *** Michael Crummey’s River Thieves is an historical novel about the infamous capture of Demasduit or Mary March, who was taken by force by an expedition led by John Peyton (Sr and Jr) in 1819. Prior to

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this, in 1811, Governor John Thomas Duckworth of Newfoundland had chosen David Buchan, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, to make contact with the Beothuk in order to facilitate amicable relations with them. A period of extreme violence and hostility had preceded these expeditions, with the Beothuk being reduced to a few desperate, starving pockets of people who had retreated to the interior of the island. It is interesting to consider that many Beothuk kidnappings were ostensibly motivated to produce mediators, who could translate English into Beothuk words, and vice versa. As Bishop John Inglis wrote to W.E. Cormack in September 1827, because the Beothuk language “is necessarily defective,” translators could be enlisted to provide pictorial symbols that might effect communications between the colonists and any remaining Beothuk still living. Hence his comment that Shawnadithit is “clever with a pencil” and thus might be used to assist as an intermediary.31 So even in colonial operations, the settlers were seeking in the Beothuk an entry point into Beothuk language, which is evident in creative writings about the Beothuk today. The words themselves – as stand-ins for the people – become these mediators, or translators, pointing to something pure, essential, and beyond settler reach. River Thieves opens in disembodied time – what we might call the mystical space of Beothuk language. One is tempted to say, “In the beginning was the word,” because that is how the novel begins: “Before all of this happened the country was known by different names.” The “names” that follow are the inferior ones, the English ones – mountain alder, deer moss – the ones that don’t conjure the “real” of the landscape in the way that Beothuk words are imagined to do (in part because they are not as old as “the rivers bleeding from their old wounds along the coast into the sea”). And so the speaker turns to these other words: “A few have survived in the notebooks and journals of the curious ... before the language died altogether. Annoo-ee for tree or woods or forest. Gidyeathuc for the wind, Adenishit for the stars. Mammasheek for each of the ten thousand smaller islands that halo the coastline, Kadimishuite for the countless narrow tickles that run among them ... Each word has the odd shape of the ancient.”32 The phrasing suggests that there is something inherent in the word itself, some connection to a pre-evolutionary state (or a glimpse into some form of proto-linguistic deep time). The speaker acknowledges that the existent vocabularies are merely “skinny” approximations of what these symbols represent. The vocabularies are described as “a kind of taxidermy,” which has ossified the living words “that were once muscle and sinew.” This means that it is Westernized approximations

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of Beothuk words that are bound by the alienation of signifier and signified. Beothuk language, it is implied, is of an ontologically different order, where signifier and signified are integrally and holistically linked. These lost Beothuk words are aligned with the primeval land, which signals a primal assimilation of and by the land – people, words, and land are one – echoed at various moments in the novel when Europeans imagine Newfoundland to be connected to an intangible, unsymbolizable essence. Thus David Buchan, officer and mapmaker, meditates on the way “the country existed somewhere beyond the influence ... of human desire.”33 The ancient words are indexes to the ancient land, yet they can be gleaned only by symbolic stand-ins, the scripted terms transcribed by Europeans, the originals of which “can only be guessed at now ... words that were once muscle and sinew preserved in these single wooden postures.”34 According to Jacques Lacan, “through the word ... absence itself gives itself a name.”35 Here, this precept is inverted: the word, through some strange linguistic alchemy, now gives presence to an absent people. If the Beothuk represent absolute absence, their trace is nevertheless a potent one, embodied in words that offer a glimpse into what Lacan terms “the beyond-of-the-signified.”36 In River Thieves, then, the past is reified by conjuring a more authentic form of naming the world, and the words are themselves metonyms for the absent humans. The words, we are told, stand at the edge of the story that “circles their own death ... dumbly pointing,” an aporia at the narrative’s core that nonetheless secures it. This is a very curious image: the words are personified as witnesses to their own elimination, hovering on the edge of a narrative that at once preserves them and extinguishes them – captured in words but not their words. Structurally, this is framed by the novel’s epilogue, which returns to the Beothuk words as they are embodied in the landscape. “There is no record of the lyrics to these songs,” we are told. As in Stephen’s poem “Shanawdithit,” the words are attributed with the ability to call creation into existence – “They sang creatures through the forest around them” – which suggests that they are mystically appropriated into the land:37 “What remains of them now is the property of brooks and ponds and marshes, of caribou and fox moving through the interior as they were sung two hundred years ago.”38 The sounds of the words have become integrated into the genetic make-up of the wilderness, preserved there but inaccessible to present-day human comprehension. Sound is here materialized, but it is still absent because it has become encrypted. The words, like the Beothuk people, are figured as resisting “capture” by settler technologies, very similar to the conclusion of

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Crate’s poem “Shawnadithit.” The last “word” of River Thieves is this Beothuk present/absent word, unapproachable but nevertheless there, in the air, “where not a soul is left to hear it.”39 Crummey’s goal is to render the Beothuk words beyond the substitutive logic of European language, presenting them as a kind of presymbolic essence constituted as the absolute object of difference and unrepresentability. In a 2001 article in Quill & Quire, Crummey states that, rather than bringing the Beothuk to life, “I was more interested in the absence of the Beothuk, in the fact they have been lost to the book of life.”40 “I felt it would be wrong to write a novel about the Beothuk,” he states in his interview with Read Magazine, “to write as if we know more about them than we do, or to try to give them a voice that is absent from the historical record. Their absence, to my mind, is the point.”41 It is not surprising, then, that River Thieves begins with a scene of haunting, yet constitutive, absence: an evocation, through the inadequacy of language, of Newfoundland’s prehistoric past. In order to conjure the “beyond-of-the-signified” through words, Crummey gestures towards another order of language altogether – a series of transcendental signifiers that exist beyond the realm of the symbolic. The inscrutable figure of Mary March, the Beothuk woman whose kidnapping is the central event of the novel, highlights this alignment of the Beothuk with authentic yet inaccessible speech. Throughout, Mary is “interpreted” as having a different relation to language. At the moment of her capture, Mary’s world is rent by the symbolic utterance of her captor, who speaks his name, John Peyton, as he reaches for her hand.42 Thereafter, Mary’s difference is identified in terms of a different relation to language: “She seemed uninterested or unable to progress much beyond the noun in her own speech, managing only the simplest declarations ... Cassie thought of this as a limitation of the Red Indian mind and language. But there were moments when it seemed a deliberate strategy, a protest of some sort. A refusal to enter their world any further than was necessary for her survival.”43 The only time she makes the leap is to plea for her freedom, “‘Mary go home’”44 – a statement that embeds within it a designation of a lack. Even then, however, she speaks in what comes to be identified as her characteristic mode, “pared to its blunt essentials – subject-verb-object, the relentlessly present tense.”45 Mary never fully learns English (whether by will or not is unclear), and will be remembered as always already perched at the moment of extinction, subject to what Patrick Brantlinger calls a “futureless past.”46

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Yet, as Mary becomes more anglicized, Cassie fears that they are losing touch with the last trace of the Beothuk in her. Her settler-bestowed name, “Mary March,” encrypts the moment of her capture, since it was in the month of March that the Peytons attacked her campsite and took her prisoner. Nevertheless, she refuses to refer to herself by her Beothuk name, using the name Mary “like a protective talisman she carried close to her skin.”47 Cassie yearns to hear Mary’s real name, which she believes will give her a glimpse into “who [Mary] might have been before the Peytons carried her down the river.”48 Mary’s refusal to utter her Beothuk name invests it with a mystical and inaccessible power, which is countered by her frequent repetition of Peyton’s name – her last utterance before she dies – the symbolic patriarchal word that introduces a rift into the holistic world of Beothuk language and culture. Beothuk words are used to enact a further, and perhaps more significant, slippage. If words achieve some kind of Real presence in this novel, the alignment of Beothuk words with settler origins is effected more directly in the interweaving of “authentic” Newfoundland vocabulary. A number of the novel’s chapters are headed by excerpts from the Dictionary of Newfoundland English, in which local terms such as hag and dwall are defined and accompanied by examples of distinct and archaic usage.49 This referencing of a unique and authenticating Newfoundland dialect is validated in its being mapped alongside the Beothuk words the novel invokes at the outset. If Newfoundland English is at one remove from Aboriginal priority, it is nevertheless of an archaic order, requiring similar translation (for readers and for certain characters) in the narrative. It is difficult not to feel as though Newfoundland English functions as a secondary substitute for the Beothuk terms that the narrator struggles to replicate. Furthermore, the slippage between the various meanings of “river thieves” – from the destitute men and women in London who plunder the ships returning from East India,50 to the Beothuk who similarly raid and vandalize the merchant ships and settlements along the Newfoundland coast, to the European imperialists who are stealing the river itself from its original inhabitants – presents a series of substitutions, which, while emblematizing the tenuousness of Newfoundland settler origins, nevertheless imply an equivalence between Beothuk and settler experience through the authenticating effect of archaic language. The Beothuk people and language stand, for the colonists, as a repository of desire. As one of the characters in the novel states, they are “a dream that resists articulation,” a chasm that cannot be

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bridged.51 To the European trappers and merchants in the novel, as to contemporary readers, they are known only by their trace (literally so when the Europeans attempt to track them in the wilderness). They are an “otherworldly” presence, “a deliberate seduction.”52 Their words, their bodies, their landscape evoke a pre-cartographic time and space, as well as the inconceivable moment just prior to NativeEuropean contact, before old met new, before, even, such divisions could be imagined. If the absent Beothuk represent the prototypical signifier without a signified, their language is imagined to fill in this absence, converted into a transcendental signifier which has been lost to human memory but which nevertheless is imagined to exist ... somewhere. *** Bernice Morgan’s Cloud of Bone also represents Beothuk speech as an idealized and semi-mystical modality that operates outside colonial epistemological systems. The book is divided into three segments – entitled “The Sailor,” “The Savage,” and “The Scavenger” – and in an extremely contrived narrative structure focuses on three characters who are united by the “voice” of the dead Shawnadithit. In the first section, a Second World War naval deserter named Kyle is hiding out and starving in the basement of a church in St John’s. In his delirium, he hears a “persistent grumbling” and murmuring that mounts into both a recrimination and confession.53 It emerges that, in the tunnels under the church, Kyle has stumbled into Shanawdithit’s gravesite. As she breathes her story to Kyle, she infuses him with her memories as a way of preserving them. Like Crummey’s Mary March, Shanawdithit, in death, fears that she is in danger of losing her words, and so she speaks them to the sailor, whom she calls “Dogman,” in order to preserve her identity and affirm her existence: “To hold memory I speak to water, to rock, to darkness – speak even to this Dogman.”54 In other texts, it is the landscape’s silence (its otherness) that keeps the word inaccessible to settler comprehension and appropriation. Here the settler is aligned with the physical landscape as a chosen repository of Beothuk speech and memory. He is actively authenticated by the Beothuk speaker, chosen by her as an imperfect yet nevertheless worthy medium for memory. Shanawdithit’s words are thus construed as containing the essence of a past that can only be incompletely memorialized by settler transmission: “Each day I story-talk, calling back what night has stolen, words lifted on memory ...

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Yet they cannot be saved – each night they fall back into the dark river, each night some are lost.”55 The central section of the novel, “The Savage,” is the story that Shanawdithit tells Kyle from her grave, but there is something uncomfortably artificial in this seemingly authenticating voice-over. Shanawdithit speaks in a lofty, archaic style, peppered with Beothuk words, as she relays the account of the last years of her people. Her story, in turn, is a retelling of the stories her grandmother used to tell her. As she falls asleep each night, her grandmother infuses her memory with talismanic words, speaking “into my dreams the secret names of birds and animals.”56 “When you have learned to hear the sounds of present time,” her grandmother tells her, “you will begin to hear the sounds of past time,” suggesting that the words themselves convey a past essence.57 Shanawdithit’s voice speaks of and from the spirit world, which she maintains is beyond the comprehension of the colonizers: “Dogmen do not tell stories as we do,”58 she begins. “They do not know earth as we do ... Dogmen know nothing of good Ash-wa-meet, of Old Caribou and Crow and Firewoman, of evil Aich-mud-yim and Nakhani.”59 She divides history into three eras – what she calls Perfect Time, Old Time, and Evil Time60 – a division that echoes Western configurations of pre- and post-lapsarian historical time (and maps very closely onto the Lacanian Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic). Perfect Time, a “place without memory,”61 evokes a Platonic concept of ideal and shadow Forms, while the last, Evil Time, refers to the era following white contact. Perfect Time, for Shanawdithit, is the realm of the ideal, a space “without pain and without danger,” outside the circuit of desire. It exists in the realm of mythic memory, a pre-lapsarian era that was disrupted when “that evil spirit Aich-mud-yin sprinkled greed on their heads and the people turned to quarrelling ... Perfect Time was over forever.”62 In the novel, a Beothuk’s goal, after death, is to re-enter the realm of Perfect Time – which we might say is also the aim of contemporary literary treatments through the imagined conduit of Beothuk language. When Shanawdithit discovers that she has a talent for drawing, she is scolded by her grandmother for such acts of divining. Because Shanawdithit has separated the mystical union between symbol and thing (signifier and signified) through her drawings, her grandmother regards her art as an act of evil, on par with the alienated thinking of the white man and with Platonic conceptions of the illusory and ideal: “It

When the Beothuk (Won’t) Speak  69

is not wise to make such lifelike shapes,” she warns her granddaughter, “all you have is a body. Its spirit is left behind in Perfect Time.”63 In breaking the perfect oneness between representation and thing, Shanawdithit, in a sense, initiates the destruction of her own people. As her grandmother tells her, “spirits come to take revenge on the one who snatched them from Perfect Time ... Take care what you call into being, Shanawdithit. Those who create are always punished.”64 The sense that somehow Shanawdithit’s fate is self-imposed through her having broken faith with Beothuk mysticism, by symbolically scripting (and hence, potentially, communicating) her cultural world, is disturbing given that this is expressly what settlers would later ask her to do.65 Morgan thus removes any real integrity from Shanawdithit’s artistry, or at least casts it under suspicion. This invented act of betrayal translates into a loss keenly felt by commentators in the present day, who feel that the idealized significance of Beothuk words eludes them. Nevertheless, the narrative’s interest in rendering a world of Beothuk immediacy and plenitude (Perfect Time) that is being eroded (from Old Time into Evil Time), and the gradual forgetting of language that is identified as a part of this process, makes the author’s approach somewhat bewildering. Polack’s reading of the novel as a meditation on “appropriate memory practice”66 as this relates to contemporary Newfoundlanders’ “memories of contemporary cultural events”67 offers a helpful way into this text, whose apparent postcolonial critique, which is set within the context of large-scale global violence (the Second World War, Beothuk genocide, Rwanda civil war), slips back into primitivist romanticization. The alignment of Beothuk voice with an other-worldly sublime is extremely problematic in the final section of the novel, “The Scavenger,” in which the sailor, Kyle, now an old man who has dedicated his life to researching the Beothuk, is given (through an improbable sequence of events) the skull of Shanawdithit by a British anthropologist. As he holds the skull, he hears it speak to him, guiding him into the realm of Perfect Time. The scene takes us back to Shanawdithit’s earlier revelation that the Beothuk believe that “the spirits of all men and all animals live in the skull ... The spirit of every living thing will stay in its skull long after the creature it inhabited has died.”68 Somehow, Kyle has previously been able to hear Shanawdithit’s spirit without being in possession of her skull, but in the end, the skull and spirit are reunited (rather like a reunion of the spirit and its bodily representation in the image). He tucks the skull into his jacket and listens as she talks, still relaying the words of her grandmother, and together they tumble into

70  Cynthia Sugars

the landscape to become subsumed by the moss which “given time, will cover everything.”69 The scene works in illuminating contrast with one in Crummey’s novel in which John Peyton, Sr violates a Beothuk grave and picks up the skull, manipulating it like a ventriloquist’s dummy: “He flapped [the jaws] back and forth and spoke under this mime in a low-pitched voice. ‘Just a dead Indian,’ the skull said. ‘Nothing to bother your head about’ ... putting words so carelessly and callously in the mouth of the dead.”70 Here, the (dead) Beothuk is made to speak as a form of mockery, performing the white man’s prejudice. In Morgan’s novel, the skull speaks of its own accord (though still manipulated by the author), mimicking an idea of an authentic Beothuk voice. Through a form of speech act, Shanawdithit’s voice guides herself and Kyle into Perfect Time, thus effecting the union between present-day settler and Shawnadithit, and the entry into pre-symbolic space, that so many fictional and poetic representations of the Beothuk have attempted. Like the Beothuk words in so many of these texts, Kyle, with Shanawdithit, becomes incorporated and immortalized into the landscape, a process that grants him a form of “aboriginal” authenticity that is at once sentimental and troubling. It is worth noting that Crummey steadfastly refuses to do this with his Beothuk characters. His Beothuk do not speak, nor do they forge psychic bonds with settlers. His novel does invoke a concept of Perfect Time, but white people cannot inhabit it – though they can imagine it. Crummey does represent the Beothuk in terms of what Dalton calls “the unknowable locus of the prehistoric fall of humanity,” yet his reluctance to represent the Beothuk mind by ventriloquizing demonstrates his awareness of the presumption of such appropriation.71 Morgan, by contrast, indulges in this temptation. In both novels, however, Beothuk words, as transcendent ideals, persist somewhere beyond contemporary human access, inhabiting the realm of Perfect Time. *** Kaja Silverman has written of the ways that history sometimes ruptures a society’s master narratives, a central assumption for postcolonial inquiry. But what if the master-narrative is one of rupture, as it has been for generations of authors who fetishize this story of primary loss? What are we to say about a settler culture that revisits again and again a moment, poised on the edge of apparent extinction, and attempts to

When the Beothuk (Won’t) Speak  71

recuperate that experience in a fantasy of a lost word? The Beothuk will not, can not, speak. So why are they being compulsively spectralized as embodied voices? Their words are figured as having mystical power, like speech acts that in the uttering make something happen. And yet these words are powerless to reverse history and, ultimately, to rehabilitate memory. Their value is as a fantasy of verbal power. Beothuk spirits are conjured again and again to be witnesses to their own extinction. There is a horrific and uncanny effect in watching a people hurtling towards their end. It highlights their fate as simultaneously inevitable and contingent. But one can’t help but wonder if there is something more at work – as if Newfoundlanders project onto the Beothuk their own anxiety about an extinction of a way of life, a culture, a people. The compulsion to revisit this moment would seem to suggest so. Paul Chafe’s assertion that Newfoundland culture is obsessed with “the originary moment when what could have been was separated from what is” can apply to any number of crises in Newfoundland’s history.72 It may be that the loss of the Beothuk is being used as emblematic of this broader sense of cultural extinction and memory loss. This rhetorical process manifests as a compulsion to revisit, repeatedly, the moment of trauma for something that it offers the contemporary reader and author. This is common to almost all contemporary novels and poems about the Beothuk. The word becomes the lone survivor. As long as Beothuk words can be summoned as somehow beyond the circuit of desire (even though they are conjured within that circuit), authors and readers can imagine that there is, or once was, or could be, a realm of pure essence, pure memory, in which the “truth” of the Beothuk, and of Newfoundland, resides. The Beothuk fulfil this function, in part, paradoxically, because they will not speak. This longing feeds the repetition compulsion that the Beothuk story initiates: at once a revisiting of an unhealed wound and a salve to make it more palatable. NOTES 1 Sid Stephen, Beothuck Poems (Ottawa: Oberon 1976), n.p. 2 Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2010), xv. 3 Colleen E. Boyd and Coll Thrush, eds., Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture and History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 2011), xvii.

72  Cynthia Sugars 4 This idea of the absolute absence of the Beothuk is, of course, a controversial one, as chapters in this volume attest. Part of the fantasy of the Beothuk has traditionally been related to the sense that they are “extinct,” hence the many formulations of the “last” of the Beothuk in fiction and non-fiction accounts. Critics today suggest that the Beothuk people interacted with other Aboriginal groups in Newfoundland and beyond, and hence notions of the end of the bloodline are not only false but also represent a convenient means to enable contemporary policy makers to ignore the very real claims of present-day Aboriginal people in Newfoundland. 5 For further discussion of this dynamic in Michael Crummey’s novel, see my essay, “Original Sin, or, the Last of the First Ancestors: Michael Crummey’s River Thieves,” English Studies in Canada 31, no. 4 (2005): 147–75. 6 Mary Dalton, “Shadow Indians: The Beothuk Motif in Newfoundland Literature,” Newfoundland Studies 8, no. 2 (1992): 135–46; Carl Leggo, “Who Speaks for Extinct Nations: The Beothuk and Narrative Voice,” Literator 16, no. 1 (1995): 31–49. 7 Derek Yetman, The Beothuk Expedition (St John’s: Breakwater 2011), 95. 8 Fiona Polack, “Memory against History: Figuring the Past in Cloud of Bone,” English Studies in Canada 35, no. 4 (2009): 56, 62. 9 See the following essays for more extended discussion of this connection of the Beothuk to foundational loss: Richard Budgel, “The Beothuks and the Newfoundland Mind,” Newfoundland Studies 8, no.1 (1992): 93–117; Paul Chafe, “Lament for a Notion: Loss and the Beothuk in Michael Crummey’s River Thieves,” Essays on Canadian Writing 82 (2004): 93–117; Mary Dalton, “Shadow Indians”; Polack, “Memory against History”; Sugars, “Original Sin”; and Herb Wyile “Beothuk Gothic: Michael Crummey’s River Thieves,” in Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte, eds., Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2009): 229–49. 10 Polack, “Memory against History,” 55. 11 Renée Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover, NH: University of New England Press 2000); Boyd and Thrush, Phantom Past; Marlene Goldman, DisPossession: Haunting in Canadian Fiction (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2011); Cynthia Sugars, Canadian Gothic: Literature, History, and the Spectre of SelfInvention (Cardiff: University of Wales Press 2014). 12 Priscila Uppal, We Are What We Mourn: The Contemporary English-Canadian Elegy (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2009), 17. 13 Qtd. in ibid, 17.

When the Beothuk (Won’t) Speak  73 14 James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Allegory,” in James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press 1986), 112. 15 Sugars, Canadian Gothic, 14. 16 James Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians: The Aboriginal Inhabitants of Newfoundland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1915). 17 Ibid., 299–300. 18 Ibid., 251. 19 Qtd. in ibid., 316 (emphasis in original). 20 Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?: Speculations on Widow Sacrifice,” Wedge 7, no. 8 (winter/spring 1985): 120–30. 21 Boyd and Thrush, Phantom Past, xvii. 22 Canada: A People’s History (Toronto: CBC Television 2000/2001). 23 Bernice Morgan, Random Passage (St John’s: Breakwater 1992). 24 Wayne Johnston, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (Toronto: Knopf 1998). 25 Bernice Morgan, Waiting for Time (St John’s: Breakwater 1994). 26 Stephen, Beothuk Poems, n.p. 27 Joan Crate, Foreign Homes (London, ON: Brick 2001), 53. 28 Ibid., 45, 50. 29 Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians, xvi. 30 Ibid., xvii. 31 Ibid., 207. It is interesting to note that Morgan’s Cloud of Bone contains a scene in which Shawnadithit is reprimanded (and ultimately punished) for indulging in pictorial representations well before she encounters the white settlers. In the novel, Shawnadithit’s artistry is regarded as a betrayal of the sanctity of “things” (i.e., the essence of the signified). The use of symbols and hence written language, whether in the form of pictures or written words (signs), as opposed to words uttered in speech, is prohibited. 32 Crummey, River Thieves, n.p. Note that this prefatory segment to the novel is unpaginated and is printed in italics. 33 Ibid., 22. 34 Ibid., n.p. 35 Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton 1977), 65. 36 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (London: Routledge 1992), 54. 37 Crummey, River Thieves, 329. 38 Ibid., 329–30. 39 Ibid., 330. 40 Crummey, “Changing History,” Quill & Quire (November 2001): 42.

74  Cynthia Sugars 4 1 Crummey, Interview, Read Magazine (2001): 2. 42 Crummey, River Thieves, 191. 43 Ibid., 204. 44 Ibid., 206. 45 Ibid., 305. 46 Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2003), 2. 47 Crummey, River Thieves, 234. 48 Ibid., 235. 49 Ibid., 3, 127. 50 Ibid., 52. 51 Ibid., 16. 52 Ibid., 15. 53 Morgan, Cloud of Bone, 70. 54 Ibid., 72. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., 101. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., 93. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 94. 61 Ibid., 72. 62 Ibid., 97. 63 Ibid., 127–8. 64 Ibid., 128–9. 65 Polack, “Memory against History,” 61. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid., 65. 68 Morgan, Cloud of Bone, 124. 69 Ibid., 442. 70 Crummey, River Thieves, 278. 71 Dalton, “Shadow Indians,” 136. 72 Chafe, “Lament for a Notion,” 93 (emphasis in the original).

3 “The Ones That Were Abused”: Thinking about the Beothuk through Translation elizabeth y e oman an d elizabeth p e nas h ue

Elizabeth Penashue1

Shetan Pishum 7 2000 Sitshanishit Eku uiapak masten tuskan eku tshieshtshepaust nitshitshipeitunan nete niuishamukutan tshetshi eimiat nin mak Peter ekute nititutenan. Ne uet uishamukuiat nete pet shashish kanipanikuet innut ute Beothuks akinishaut espish uakashinuat innu ekunu uet nipanitkuet innut. Euakatanit. Kie miste mitshetinanu nete etuteiat kie mitshet uetshet eimut kie tshitatimut mishinikana. Eitenimanit nanat innut pise akinishaut miste ispitentakunu eisishuet. Kie Peter iat miste minekash eimu. Kie pise niuitamak nenu eitistet mishinikana Peter kie niminuetamuan nenu eshi uitamut. Eukun ume nistam eitinanut eku katshi tshistakit eku minuat tshatutanut pimutanu pitshashu etutanut nete shatshuatikinu. Nte tauakupin ntshet innut kie nte kauitshit. Nete mak tekushinanut ekute tshemishut ne innu iskueu tutuanisha unapiska uakinu. Miste minushishu kie miste minuashinu nte tshemishut ne unapiskauakinu inuskueu. Miam nte nutshimit ekun eshinakunit tshemishut. Eku minuat tshatutanut iat pimutanu nete uste itutanu ekute uiatamat nte uatshuakuet nas nte nukunu nenu uitshuau. Kie miste minuashinu nte uatshuakuet. Eukun ume eitinanut. Kie ninan sheshatshit innut ne katshi uatamat nimiste uauinanat nanat innut. Espish miste piuenimat nit innut espish uakatanit kie espish nenekatshianit innut nas tapue nipakanut.

76  Elizabeth Yeoman and Elizabeth Penashue 7 July 2000, St John’s On Saturday morning Peter2 and I went to the place where we had been invited to speak. Long ago, white people killed the Beothuk because they hated the Indigenous people so much. They despised them so they murdered them. There were a lot of people there and many made speeches. Everybody was reading the storyboards that explained what happened and I was glad Peter could translate them for me. After that we walked to where they used to live, a lovely place. Then we walked around looking at everything and saw a statue somebody had made of an Innu woman. It’s a very beautiful statue and a beautiful spot where she was standing. Then we walked further and found an old camp. You could see where they had their tents; it looked like nutshimit, surrounded by trees and green moss on the ground. That’s what we did today. Afterwards we Innu from Sheshatshui talked for a long time about those long-ago Innu. They were the outcasts, the ones that were abused.

Elizabeth Yeoman In this diary excerpt, Elizabeth Penashue describes her visit to the Boyd’s Cove archaeological and commemorative site, where she had been invited to speak at the unveiling of the statue of Shanawdithit by Gerald Squires. Elizabeth is an Innu woman from Labrador. She became an environmental and cultural activist in the 1980s during the Innu protests against NATO occupation of Innu land (see Figure 3.2), low-level flying, and weapons testing. Because of her leadership during the protests and her oral eloquence, Elizabeth became well known nationally and internationally. Among other places, her speaking engagements took her to Europe to testify at the Belgian and Dutch ministries of defence, and to the United States to speak at Harvard. She has also been featured in two documentary films, Hunters and Bombers3 and Meshkanu: The Long Walk of Elizabeth Penashue,4 and received various markers of recognition, including an honorary doctorate from Memorial University and a National Aboriginal Achievement award. Elizabeth has been keeping diaries in Innu-aimun since the 1980s protests. The diary excerpt at the beginning of this chapter is a transcription of what Elizabeth wrote in Innu-aimun and one possible version of it in English. There are many challenges in translating and editing her work and one purpose of this chapter is to discuss how the process of translation might actually open up new ways of thinking about who the Beothuk were and what our relationship to them is or could be.

Thinking about the Beothuk through Translation  77

The word “our” is a tricky one to use in work about identity, race, and nation since it must always be examined, but by “our” we mean all of us living in this country today. When Elizabeth and I discussed the possibility of writing this chapter, we also talked about the purpose of commemorative sites in general and her reaction to the Beothuk site at Boyd’s Cove in particular, so a second purpose of the chapter is to talk about that. In a sense, commemorative sites, statues, storyboards, and monuments are all forms of translation, and ways of reflecting on the past. Elizabeth and I first met when I interviewed her for a radio documentary for the CBC Radio program Ideas, about walking.5 Every year she leads a spring walk of several weeks following traditional Innu hunting routes, using snowshoes and pulling equipment and supplies on toboggans, setting up a new camp almost every night. Although I interviewed her by distance – she was in the studio in Goose Bay and I was in St John’s – somehow we connected and later, when we met in person, she invited me to join her on the annual walk, which I did in 2008. After I returned home, she sent me a large cardboard box full of scribblers and papers, her diaries, and asked if I could help her make them into a book. My first reactions were that the amount of work involved would consume the rest of my life, and that I was utterly unequipped to do it. I didn’t speak Innu-aimun and I knew next to nothing about Innu culture and history. However, I soon came to realize that Elizabeth (and others who recognized the importance of the project) had been trying for at least ten years to get the diaries translated and edited. About a third of them had been translated, some into English and some into French (which I do speak and read), but the translators who had worked on them were no longer available for various reasons. If the project was to be completed in Elizabeth’s lifetime, somebody had to take it on and she was asking me. I knew something about translation and about book publishing and perhaps she saw that I could help her bring her work to the attention of a publisher. As she put it, “You have your meshkanau and I have mine. Your meshkanau is books and mine is the land.”6 I also felt that translating Elizabeth’s diaries might be something I could do as a kind of reparation for my own and my ancestors’ roles in our traumatic intertwined histories. Equally importantly, I liked Elizabeth and it seemed impossible to say no after her extraordinary generosity and hospitality. As I write this, eight years later, I realize that the project did consume my life but in a way I did not foresee: I have learned more from Elizabeth than I ever dreamed I could, and my life has been enriched

78  Elizabeth Yeoman and Elizabeth Penashue

in ways I never imagined. This project of translation has given me a glimpse into a different world and different ways of understanding.7 In fact, Elizabeth translates the diaries herself, reiterating and explaining as she reads aloud to me from the tattered notebooks she writes in whenever she has time: early in the morning in her tent before anyone else is awake, sitting in a truck waiting for someone in Goose Bay, on planes as she travels to speaking engagements. The translation is collaborative in the sense that I write what she says and help her edit the English. Perhaps my most important role is to listen carefully, to create a space for the work to develop. This allows Elizabeth not only to tell me what she wrote but also to reflect on it, to add and edit as she goes along, to take the time she didn’t always have in the hurried moments of writing the diaries. Sophie McCall has described this kind of process very well: “In every communicative act there is a gap – between teller and listener, between writer and reader, between signifier and signified. However, this gap can be a creative space in which new forms of agency and of voice may arise ... A diversity of forms of affiliation is possible and indeed necessary to recognize the struggle of writing and of telling a more just story of Indigenous presence in North America, through the mode of cross-cultural collaboration.”8 Our collaboration on this chapter began with a similar process, but a scholarly book is more my meshkanau than Elizabeth’s. Consequently, when I suggested that I would show her what I wrote, she replied, “Write what you want. I trust you.” As a result, this is not a co-authored chapter in a conventional academic sense. In the following sections, I use theoretical and historical work that is almost certainly not familiar to Elizabeth but I hope I have honoured her trust in me and the conversations we have had about translation, and about the Innu and the Beothuk. Elizabeth’s writing and comments on the topic introduce and conclude the chapter. My sections have been difficult to write not only because I have been afraid of imposing my ideas on Elizabeth and on the Innu language but also because Elizabeth is one of very few Innu elders who are writing in any language. Furthermore, I have not found other Innu writing about the Beothuk to help situate her ideas about the relationship between the Beothuk and Innu within a broader Innu milieu. There are only about three thousand Innu in Labrador. They have lived in two villages – now reserves – since the 1960s: Sheshatshiu and Davis Inlet, then Natuashish when the Davis Inlet people moved to the new location. Considering the size of the communities and the challenges they face – dealing with land claims, with the development of mines and

Thinking about the Beothuk through Translation  79

Figure 3.1  Elizabeth Penashue. Photo: Melissa Tremblett.

80  Elizabeth Yeoman and Elizabeth Penashue

hydro dams on their land, with taking control of their own education system and functioning in an alien legal system and language, and with the high rate of addictions that are a result of traumatic loss – it perhaps isn’t surprising that there is not a lot available on the question of how the Innu perceive their relationship to the Beothuk. This issue isn’t as obviously urgent as many others. However, there are other potential reasons for this silence, too, and ones that align with Elizabeth’s perspective on the Beothuk and pertain to issues of translation. Discussing his interviews with Innu in Labrador in 2013 as part of his doctoral research, Christopher Aylward notes: “All the Innu elders interviewed expressed [the] idea of referring to the Beothuk not as a separate people but rather as Innu living in Newfoundland. None could remember having heard the word ‘Beothuk’ used among members of their community.”9 How, then, to discuss the relationship between the Beothuk and the Innu when the very term “Beothuk” exists only as a term borrowed from English, and one, moreover, that “Innu” already encompasses? Some Translation Issues in the Diaries As Elizabeth and I worked with the diary entry that opens this chapter, we began to think about how difficult it is to translate certain keywords such as “Innu,” “Beothuk,” “land,” and “home.” We use the English words here but they don’t map onto the Innu-aimun in any direct or transparent way.10 Many translation theorists have written about this issue in relation to various languages, especially in cases where the context of the original is very different from that of the intended readers of the translation. For example, Nicole Nolette explores the idea of “countertranslation” as a way of addressing (though not solving) the problem. This could involve using “supplementary explanatory measures” or simply leaving some things untranslated so that the reader must recognize that some things can’t be carried over directly from one language to another and perhaps be inspired to seek out further information.11 Sophie McCall, in a discussion of strategies used by filmmakers Zacharias Kunuk and Hugh Brody to remind viewers that representations are not transparent, points out that at times “the failure of cultural translation ... draws attention to the provisionality of all acts of representation.”12 Elizabeth often uses both of these strategies as we work together and I have used them as well in the edited versions of her diary, for example, leaving the word nutshimit13 untranslated, but adding a discussion of its significance in an appendix.

Thinking about the Beothuk through Translation  81

Figure 3.2  Innu protest against NATO military flight training, Goose Bay, 1989. Elizabeth Penashue is second from right. Photo: Bob Bartel.

When Elizabeth and I began working together, she gave me a piece of paper. She had asked her brother, George,14 to write out a request for assistance with writing in English. The paper said: “You don’t have to write exactly what I say because my English is not that good. But it has to mean exactly what I say.” I think about this constantly as we work, and about what Spivak calls “the mind-changing one-on-one responsible contact”15 essential to becoming “transnationally literate.”16 How can one, in a context of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic collaboration, “mean exactly what someone said”? Two translation challenges have particular significance for this chapter: the word Innu and its variants, and the word nutshimit. In the original Innu-aimun text quoted at the beginning of this chapter, Elizabeth refers to Shanawdithit as innu iskueu (an Innu woman) and to herself and Peter as sheshatshit innut (Innu from Sheshatshui). She also uses the terms nenekatshianit innut (the ones who were abused) and nanat innut (the people of long ago) with reference to the Beothuk. The words

82  Elizabeth Yeoman and Elizabeth Penashue

Figure 3.3  Elizabeth Penashue and Elizabeth Yeoman. Photo: Robin McGrath.

Innu and Innut can refer to the people known in English as Innu, but also more generally to First Nations people and, even more broadly, to human beings, the people, the ones. Jean-Paul Lacasse cites WiliamMathieu Mark, an elder from Unamen-Shipu, as saying, “Innu is what we are called, and the name belongs to us ... it’s the name we’ve always had.”17 Lacasse goes on to say that the word is often used as a suffix to indicate what region a person comes from, as in Uashunnu for someone from Uashat or nutshimiunnu for someone who lives on the land, or in nutshimit. Cree people are also referred to as Mishtashiniunnu (people from Mistissini), Ush-uinipekunnu (people from James Bay), and so on. Lacasse also points out that variations of the word, such as Ilnu, Eeyou, and Iriniu, are or have been used in many Algonquian languages.18 The Mi’kmaq also use a version of the word, L’núk, meaning the people and referring to themselves. Elizabeth does use the word Beothuk in her text as well the first time she introduces them in the diary entry above, but the use of Innu(t) with reference to them in the rest of the entry suggests a sense of commonality that is absent in the English word, Beothuk, and its collocations: extinction and un-­knowability. She also emphasizes

Thinking about the Beothuk through Translation  83

that she felt at home on their land. This is not necessarily to argue that the Beothuk and the Innu have exactly the same heritage, genetic or cultural – though it does seem almost certain that the Beothuk were Algonquian-speaking hunter-gatherers, “simply one end of a continuum of peoples that extended from the island of Newfoundland to the northern portion of the Quebec-Labrador Peninsula.”19 Rather, we want to suggest that the Innu-aimun terms describing identity and belonging categorize things differently than English does, that the categories offer a different way of thinking about relationships among groups, and that this has implications for public pedagogy and commemoration. How we group things, people, places, and events shapes how we think about them and how we imagine the communities we are part of. The use of the word Innu with reference to the Beothuk may or may not have anything to do with shared DNA, language, or culture but it clearly has something to do with a different mode of thinking than the one operating in dominant English-speaking contexts. Language constructs categories and enables or limits the ways we conceive of the world. In English, “they” (the discrete group, Beothuk) are all gone. “We” are still here.20 In Innu-aimun, the Beothuk are Innu, human beings, albeit human beings of long ago or “the ones who were abused.” There may still be a degree of othering, but there is also a sense of connection that is missing in English. For the Innu, the Beothuk (as settlers called them) were human beings who lived on the land, in a way of life and a place that was familiar, beautiful, and homelike. In her translation of the Innu-aimun diary entry, Elizabeth describes the site where the Beothuk lived as “a beautiful place just like nutshimit.” The word nutshimit has been variously translated as “in the bush,” “in the country,” “on the land,” “inland,” and “in the wilderness.” In French it has been interpreted as à l’intérieur des terres and dans la nature. Elizabeth’s annual weeks-long walk in nutshimit has been called the wilderness walk and that has been translated into French as une randonnée sauvage.21 In New Brunswick and Quebec until at least the 1980s, some people still referred to First Nations people as les sauvages or savages and another contributor to this collection, Bonita Lawrence, remembers her mother being referred to as la sauvagesse. This is clearly not the referent in the translation above but nevertheless there is a certain connection. Jean-Paul Lacasse states that nutshimit used to be widely understood as the opposite of uinipek (“the sea”) but currently is more often used as the opposite of the reserve.22 Finally, the late Innu leader Daniel Ashini was quoted as saying “to

84  Elizabeth Yeoman and Elizabeth Penashue

reduce the meaning of the word ‘nutshimit’ to ‘in the bush’ does not describe what it means to us. It is a place where we are at home.”23 It seems to be in this sense that Elizabeth uses the word most often and in her diaries she frequently contrasts life in Sheshatshiu with the peace and happiness of nutshimit. Recognizing the difficulty of translating the word, she often says in English “in-the-bush-in-the-country” as if it were all one word. But it is clear in the diaries that it also means home to her and conveys a sense of continuity of a culture and a way of life. This is the word she uses in describing the Beothuk site at Boyd’s Cove. Translation and Indigenous Languages Various writers, including social theorist Thomas Homer-Dixon24 and linguists Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and Robert Phillipson,25 suggest that we need a diversity of languages as much as we need biodiversity because when languages are lost we lose access to knowledge and values that could help us cope with great challenges. The Beothuk language is lost, except for short word lists obtained from kidnapped Beothuk Oubee, Demasduit, and Shanawdithit. The lists are tantalizing and frustrating as well as heart-breaking in their brevity and in all that they do not say. However, we should also consider what we could learn from languages that are not lost, that are still spoken in this place, and that in some cases (the Algonquian languages of Mi’kmaq and Innu-aimun) were probably related to Beothuk in some way. These languages are virtually invisible in school curricula except in the communities where they are spoken, and even there they are often marginalized. They are also largely invisible in literary and (notwithstanding some notable exceptions)26 film production. I have discussed elsewhere the fact that, despite the existence of numerous works in Indigenous languages, in Canada the “Native canon” is generally understood to exist in English or French, with the exception of the Inuit films of Isuma Productions and other ethnographic and documentary films.27 Nor is translation itself usually visible in written works. Yet thinking about the translation process and making it visible can be a way into new insights and understanding. As translation theorist Lawrence Venuti puts it, “translation is a process that involves looking for similarities between languages and cultures ... but it does this only because it is constantly confronting dissimilarities.”28 Can thinking about the fundamental dissimilarities between English and Innu-aimun that are made visible in an understanding of “wilderness” as someone’s home, and

Thinking about the Beothuk through Translation  85

“Beothuk” as Innu, open up new ways of thinking about ourselves and others? Translation, the Order of Things, and Imagined Communities Michel Foucault in The Order of Things describes how the categories we use to organize information affect the ways we think about the world.29 How have we decided who the Beothuk are (or were), how to categorize them? What are the categories? They seem to be somewhat different in Innu-aimun than in English. Sherry Simon outlines the role of languages in establishing “tabula of relationships,” arguing that translations can report on “areas of interchange between colonizer and colonized and reveal the nature of the interaction ... Languages are understood to participate in the process by which individual and collective selves are fashioned [and] brought to bear on the relations between self and other.”30 Thus translation can enable new ways of understanding who the inhabitants of Newfoundland and Labrador are and how we might relate to each other. It provides new insights into how communities are shaped by the ways we think, talk, and write about ourselves and “establish the tabula of [our] relationships.”31 We have seen how Elizabeth Penashue uses the word Innu(t) to refer to the Beothuk, to human beings in general, to Indigenous people, and to the Innu of Labrador and Quebec. These layers of meaning are a challenge for translation but they seem to suggest an “imagined community” that includes the Beothuk.32 Rinaldo Walcott describes the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the theft of their lands as two of the three “key rupture[s] implicated in the invention of the Americas”33 – the third one being the Middle Passage and slavery. A province founded on Terms of Union that made no mention of Indigenous peoples, and a widespread belief that most or all of the Indigenous people on the island of Newfoundland were dead and gone, on the one hand recognized that there was a genocide but on the other falsely implied that there was no need to address past ruptures or traumas in the present because the people living there now have no connection to those who came before. Unfortunate but convenient. This is a very different way of thinking about an imagined community from one that includes the Innu and other Indigenous people still living here as well as the Beothuk. To take Elizabeth’s text and its translation seriously we must understand the Beothuk as Innu – not because of new DNA, linguistic, or archaeological evidence, but because the categories are different in Innu-aimun. Rethinking who the Beothuk were and

86  Elizabeth Yeoman and Elizabeth Penashue

therefore what our present day relationships to them are or could be might be an important part of reconciliation. An imagined community in which the Beothuk are part of a larger and still living cultural group enables new ways of thinking about who we all are. Of course, this is not simple. Peter C. Van Wyck has shown this eloquently in The Highway of the Atom, a moving and beautiful book that tells the story of Canada’s uranium industry and its impact on the Dene from whose lands the uranium was taken. As he puts it: “[Stories from the north] are inaccessible ... But, more than this ... many from elsewhere have not had ears with which to hear them. It seems clear as well that voices from the North seldom gather sufficient force to rise above the colonial din of southern settler life.”34 It seems to me that the same can be said about the stories of the Innu and the Beothuk. There is the issue of having ears to hear the stories, and there is the challenge of translation. Lawrence Venuti discusses the value of translation and its difficulties: “A translated text should be the site where linguistic and cultural differences are somehow signaled, where a reader gets some sense of a cultural other, and resistancy, a translation strategy based on an aesthetic of discontinuity, can best signal those differences, that sense of otherness, by reminding the reader of ... the unbridgeable gaps between cultures.”35 But are they unbridgeable? And do the difficulties of building bridges, and of telling stories from the North, mean we shouldn’t try? Elizabeth expresses her sense of the importance of trying in diary entries such as “I’m always writing my journal. When I’m gone, my journal will still be there. It’s an important story, deserving of respect,”36 and (during a speaking tour) “the plane has just taken off and I feel nervous but I’m trying to be strong. I wonder why I’m so afraid of flying. I’m doing important work, speaking in so many places, trying to help people. If I die, it’s only me, not the people I’m trying to help and protect.”37 More effort to translate, to make available insights and stories from other cultures, especially Indigenous ones in Canada, and to make the translation process visible could contribute to new understandings of who we are and what our relationships with each other and with the past are and could be. In the final section of this chapter, we turn to another kind of translation of Indigenous history: commemorative sites. Memorials and Remembering Boyd’s Cove, and other sites that represent painful histories, offer possibilities for rethinking and reworking historical and present-day

Thinking about the Beothuk through Translation  87

relationships. But how might one assess the effect of these sites of public pedagogy? Community engagement with public history can be particularly difficult and controversial in situations in which remembrance practices concern histories of oppression and violence, and shifts in benefit and privilege that are often part of overcoming oppression. Is it only because we think the Beothuk are all gone that the Boyd’s Cove site is not particularly controversial, or generally not seen as sacred in the sense that a Holocaust memorial, for example, might be? Or is it because Gerald Squires’s commemorative statue shows a strong and healthy young woman, emerging peacefully from the forest? The memorial does not represent Demasduit being torn violently away from her murdered husband and child, Shanawdithit wandering alone among the dead and dying, or the kidnapped child Oubee dying far from home. Vanessa Andreotti, Cash Ahenakew, and Garrick Cooper argue that “scholars and educators working with indigenous ways of knowing are called to translate these into the dominant language, logic and technologies in ways that are intelligible and coherent (and, very often, acceptable or palatable) to readers and interpreters in the dominant culture.”38 Perhaps the statue of Shanawdithit at Boyd’s Cove is such a “translation,” comforting for the dominant community. However, it reminded Elizabeth Penashue simultaneously of hatred, suffering, and murder, and of her ancestors’ peaceful lives in nutshimit. The hatred is not gone. In recent times, for example, people posting online at the Happy Valley Goose Bay SPCA Facebook page have made comments such as “as far as I’m concerned if a bomb went off and wiped this community [Sheshatshiu] off the face of the earth [there] would not be too many tears.”39 Other contributors to this anthology also note the now notorious description of the Innu by a CBC radio host, the late John Furlong: “Expressionless, silent, brooding, uncommunicative. It comes across as menacing and arrogant, but it’s just the way they are. It’s not the way we are. It’s just the way they are.”40 Roger Simon, Sharon Rosenberg, and Claudia Eppert suggest that there are two common approaches to remembering trauma. The first is a strategic approach, in which remembrance practices and commemorative sites are intended to advance the interests of a specific ethnocultural group or to promote an agenda such as material reparation, the honouring of treaties, or a public apology. The second approach is based on the idea of a “difficult return” in which we are seen as both honouring the dead and living in relation with them. “Living in relation” means, among other things, living with what cannot be redeemed,

88  Elizabeth Yeoman and Elizabeth Penashue

with what “must remain a psychic and social wound that bleeds.”41 Both approaches might contribute to the development of a historical consciousness and an imagined community that bears witness and fosters justice and reconciliation. We could think of both translations of Indigenous stories and the establishment of commemorative sites and memorials in this light. James E. Young concludes that “the best ... memorial ... may not be a single memorial at all – but simply the never-to-be-resolved debate over which kind of memory to preserve, how to do it, in whose name, and to what end.”42 He sees memorials and commemorative sites as part of a process, not as an easy way of resolving the complexities of our histories and memories. Commenting on a design competition in Germany that failed to find a suitable memorial to Holocaust victims, Young observes: “Better a thousand years of Holocaust memorial competitions in Germany than any single final solution to Germany’s memorial problem.”43 One entry in the contest, from Horst Hoheisel, was a proposal to blow up the Brandenburg Gate, one of Germany’s best-known historic landmarks, grind its stones to dust, sprinkle the dust over the gate’s former site, and cover it over with granite plates. Young asks, “How better to remember a destroyed people than by a destroyed monument?”44 Hoheisel has designed other Holocaust memorials in a similar vein and Young has also discussed similar projects by other artists. These “counter-memorials” are intended to be places for contemplation and remembering rather than monuments that, Young argues, simply displace memory. Hoheisel has specialized for most of his career in the design of negative monuments or counter-memorials. Clearly, he knew that his proposal to destroy the Brandenburg Gate would be rejected and his intention was to provoke debate. However, he has completed other negative monument design projects or counter-memorials commemorating the Holocaust. In one of them, a more explicitly pedagogical one about remembering the Jews of Kassell, Hoheisel visited schools, gave each child a stone, and asked them each to research the life of a Jew who had been deported from Kassell during the war. Afterwards, the stories were wrapped around the stones, placed in bins, and taken to the Kassell railway station to become a permanent installation on the platform from which the Jews were deported.45 It would be difficult to do this kind of project as a memorial to the Beothuk but perhaps records like the brief word lists recorded by others and Shanawdithit’s maps and drawings, oral histories, or the archaeological sites themselves might inspire other ideas for memorials that ask us to live in relation with what cannot be

Thinking about the Beothuk through Translation  89

redeemed. Perhaps as well – to return to the opening theme of translation of Innu-aimun and the idea of an imagined community in which the Beothuk are part of a larger and still living group – the study of Innu, Inuit, and Mi’kmaq language and history might be a kind of countermemorial too, and so might explorations of different kinds of translations, with the emphasis on incommensurability and strategies such as partial translation and supplementary measures. Maura Hanrahan’s chapter in this book also recommends involving Indigenous people in planning commemorative projects, parks, and so on, and emphasizing “entire cultural landscapes” and the relationships of the people to the land rather than decontextualized approaches. This chapter began as a piece about translation and what new insights learning and translating an Indigenous language might yield into how we think about the Beothuk. Since the topic of the translation was the commemorative site at Boyd’s Cove, writing the chapter also led us to think about a different kind of translation, the rendering of historical memory and imagined community in concrete and visual terms through historic sites and memorials. Interpretive sites like Boyd’s Cove exist partly to generate funds for ongoing archaeological explorations but people visit them for other reasons too, one of which is to remember. Hoheisel has said that a Holocaust memorial in Germany “could not just be about remembering the ... victims ... it has to deal with the perpetrators.”46 This seems key to our exploration of what the equivalent of such a memorial might be in Newfoundland or Labrador or anywhere in the Americas where Indigenous people were dispossessed and massacred. What might such a site represent for the Indigenous peoples of the province and beyond, and how might it also be a site where non-Indigenous people could learn and remember, a site of “difficult return”?47 As Hoheisel has pointed out, memory does not work the same way all over the world or across all cultures.48 Elizabeth Penashue49 I think the person who made the statue and the people who made this place have good hearts. They know that we should never forget the people who lived here. I’ve walked many miles in nutshimit and this place reminded me of it. When I walk in nutshimit I think of my parents, who always put their tent in a beautiful place like this. When I open my tent in the morning I remember my mother doing the same. In Boyd’s Cove, the traces of the tents are still there and so are the spirits

90  Elizabeth Yeoman and Elizabeth Penashue

of the people.50 I think they did the same things we did a long time ago. I could imagine them canoeing, portaging, putting up their tents. No skidoo, no bush plane, just canoes and taking all your stuff with you, hunting. Nitenimau tshekuentshe tutuekupin nenu unapiskeikan tshitshue minuashinikupin utei. Tshetshi tshisituanit nanat Innut. Nete shashish kapimuteian nutshimit eukun miam tshekat eshinakuak. Nitshisituaut nanat nikanishit. Miam eukun eshiniman nte uiatiman espish minuast. Tshieshtshepaushit nuteniman nipitshuiatshuap nitshisituau nana nikau miam ekun tipit. Ekun miam etentiman ume uiatiman Beothuks. Etshitatiman ekun etentiman taut nte eutatshakushit. Nete shashish ekun isishuepet Innut. Ekun ishinakunupin nete ninan shashish. Nimamitunenimaut nanant Innut pimishkakupit kie pikitauakupit kie manikashuakupit. Tante nete shashish apu ut tat kapipit kie skidoo, muk tshiam pimishkapit pustapit uiutuau kie muk tshiam nituipit.

NOTES 1 Elizabeth Penashue often uses the Innu name Tshaukuesh in her diary and among family and friends. However, she publishes and speaks publicly under the name Elizabeth Penashue. 2 Peter Penashue is Elizabeth’s son. A former Conservative cabinet minister, president of the Innu Nation, and leader in the 1980s anti-NATO protests, he and other members of the family often accompany Elizabeth on speaking trips to translate for her. 3 Hugh Brody and Nigel Markham, Hunters and Bombers (Montreal: NFB 1991), DVD. 4 Andrew Mudge, Meshkanu: The Long Walk of Elizabeth Penashue (Black Kettle Films 2012), DVD. 5 Elizabeth Yeoman, “The Least Possible Baggage,” CBC Radio Ideas, 4 November 2004, produced by Marie Wadden. 6 Meshkanau (or meshkanu) means “road” or “path.” 7 The translated diaries will be published by the University of Manitoba Press in 2019. 8 Sophie McCall, First Person Plural: Aboriginal Storytelling and the Ethics of Collaborative Authorship (Vancouver: UBC Press 2011), 213.

Thinking about the Beothuk through Translation  91 9 Christopher Aylward, “The Beothuk Story: European and First Nations Narratives of the Beothuk People of Newfoundland” (PhD thesis, Memorial University, 2014), 282. 10 I have written an article about the complexities of translating the diaries. See Yeoman, “The Pedagogy of Translation: Learning from Innu Activist Elizabeth Penashue’s Diaries,” Journal of the Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies 10, no. 2 (2012), http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/ jcacs/article/view/36276. 11 Nicole Nolette “Partial Translation, Affect and Reception: The Case of Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner,” Inquire: Journal of Comparative Literature 2, no. 1 (2012), http://inquire.streetmag.org/articles/53. 12 McCall, First Person Plural, 75. 13 See discussion of this word in the next section. 14 George Gregoire, author of the memoir Walk with My Shadow (St John’s: Creative Publishers 2012). 15 Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1999), 383. 16 Ibid., 378. 17 My translation from the French. 18 Jean-Paul Lacasse, Les Innus et le Territoire (Montreal: Septentrion 2004), 247. 19 Ralph Pastore, “The Beothuks,” https://www.therooms.ca/the-beothuks (accessed November 2017). 20 Again, the use of the words “we” and “our” is complicated. When Newfoundland and Labrador entered Confederation in 1949, there was no mention of Indigenous people in the Terms of Union. (For more detail, see “Aboriginal People and Confederation” at http://www.heritage.nf.ca/ law/aboriginal_confed.html.) The island of Newfoundland has often been constructed as a place populated almost exclusively by Irish and English settlers. Thus “we,” in opposition to Beothuk, refers to the white population of the island. 21 Sadia Rafiquddin, “Réflexions d’une Randonnée Sauvage,” http://www. mcgill.ca/files/_nea/216098_Bilingual%20Invitation%20-%20Sadia%20 Rafiquddin%20-.pdf (accessed November 2017). 22 Lacasse, Les Innus et le Territoire, 249. 23 Colin Samson and James Wilson, Canada’s Tibet: The Killing of the Innu (Survival International 1999), 19. 24 Thomas Homer-Dixon, “We Need a Forest of Tongues,” Globe and Mail, 3 July 2001, http://www.homerdixon.com/2001/07/03/we-need-a-forestof-tongues/ (accessed November 2017).

92  Elizabeth Yeoman and Elizabeth Penashue 25 Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and Robert Phillipson, “A Human Rights Perspective on Language Ecology,” in Angela Creese, Peter Martin, and Nancy Hornberger, eds., Ecology of Language, vol. 9 of Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd ed. (New York: Springer 2008), 3–14. 26 Such as Igloolik Isuma Productions films including Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner and Before Tomorrow, directed by Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Madeline Ivalu respectively. 27 Elizabeth Yeoman, review of First Person Plural, by Sophie McCall, Canadian Journal of Native Studies 31, no. 2 (2012). 28 Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London and New York: Routledge 2008), 264. 29 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House 1970), xxiv. 30 Sherry Simon, ed., Changing the Terms: Translating in the Postcolonial Era (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press 2000), 11. 31 Foucault, The Order of Things, xxiv. 32 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso 1991). 33 Rinaldo Walcott, “Pedagogy and Trauma: The Middle Passage, Slavery and the Problem of Creolization,” in Roger I. Simon, Sharon Rosenberg, and Claudia Eppert, eds., Between Hope and Despair (London: Roman and Littlefield Publishers 2000), 135. 34 Peter C. Van Wyck, The Highway of the Atom (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2010), 16. 35 Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 264. 36 30 December 2000. 37 10 December 2000. 38 Vanessa Andreotti, Cash Ahenakew, and Garrick Cooper, “Epistemological Pluralism: Challenges for Higher Education,” AlterNative Journal 7, no. 1 (2011): 44. 39 CBC Radio, Radio Noon, “Racist Comments against the Innu People of Sheshatshui,” 22 May 2012, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/­ newfoundland-labrador/sore-feelings-linger-in-sheshatshiu-after-facebook-tirades-1.1221881 (accessed November 2017). 40 John Furlong, CBC News, 6 October 2013, http://www.cbc.ca/news/ canada/newfoundland-labrador/furlong-trouble-in-natuashish-comesfrom-the-top-1.1912842 (accessed November 2017). 41 Simon, Rosenberg, and Eppert, eds., Between Hope and Despair, 5.

Thinking about the Beothuk through Translation  93 42 James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press 2000), 119. 43 Ibid., 92. 44 Ibid., 90. 45 Ibid., 102–3. 46 “A Conversation with Horst Hoheisel,” Habitus: A Diaspora Journal (November 2001). http://habitusmag.com/2011/01/2684/a-conversationwith-horst-hoheisel/. (Accessed 2 November 2013. Site now discontinued.) 47 Simon, Rosenberg, and Eppert, eds., Between Hope and Despair, 5. 48 “A Conversation,” 3. 49 This section is not from Elizabeth Penashue’s diary. She dictated it in English as a conclusion for this chapter and then translated it into Innu-aimun. Thanks also to Max Penashue for help with translation when Elizabeth was in nutshimit. 50 A long time ago, the Innu said that, when people die, their spirits are still there in the place where they lived and I believe that.

4 A Clearing with a View to the Lake, the Bones of a Caribou, and the Sound of Snow Falling on Dead Leaves: Sensing the Presence of the Past in the Wilds of Newfoundland1 john h ar r ie s

A Clearing with a View to the Lake In July 2007 I drove to Millertown, on the shores of Red Indian Lake, and met with Albert Taylor. Together we went to Indian Point, a curve of gravelly beach backed by meadow and then forest. Indian Point is a place long associated with the Beothuk, storied, excavated, and looted for artifacts.2 Away from the beach there was a little log cabin, painted red with a sign over the door that read “visitor and interpretation centre.” In the cabin was a display of replica arrowheads, combs, and pendants stained red with ochre. Away from the cabin, down a path leading into woods, were full-size replicas of a mameteek, a conical structure of birchbark, overlaid with grey branches and chinked with moss, and a smokehouse of vertical logs, stained red, with a roof of branches and birchbark. Albert had been born and raised in Millertown, although as an adult he had lived many years in Toronto before moving back home. He had a profound interest in the local history of the area. Until 2006 he had been a member of the “Red Indian Lake Heritage Society,” which had been responsible for the creation of the small interpretation centre and replica smokehouse and mameteek at Indian Point. As we drove, I asked him how he came by his interest in local history and the story of the Beothuk. He told me that when he was a boy, ten or eleven years old, he went to the “old high school” in Millertown. In the school there was a copy of one of “Howley’s original books.”3 He used to spend “recess times and afternoons … going through this book of all Howley’s maps

Sensing the Presence of the Past  95

and everything.” Inspired by the book, he “scoured the lake” looking for the places written into the history of the Beothuk and their violent encounters with settlers. “Wilfred’s Brook,” he said, gesturing out the window as we drove, “that was a known site.” He went on: “When I was a boy, I used to go back in the cove, go into the woods about two or three hundred feet. There was a clearing, where I used to go rabbit catching on, because it was such a great place to go rabbit catching. I am totally convinced it was a Beothuk site. Because it was about from this rock to them trees, long, and oval in shape, and around its edges – it was all a grassy place, there were no trees on it – there were knobs, and valleys … They dug valleys to put their mameteeks in and other things, right?” It was Howley’s book and the “vivid memory” of finding places that bore the signs of previous inhabitation that inspired the boy, now a man in his sixties, to nurture an interest in the Beothuk and to carry on seeking out places where once they lived. The site he remembered finding all those years ago had been destroyed by logging, but there were others that he had discovered by walking. We left the car and Albert led me on just such a walk. We headed down the beach away from Indian Point and then followed a straight path up into the forest. He told me that we were walking along the bed of a railway which once carried lumber from Millertown to Lewisporte. We turned from the railway bed and cut through the woods, pushing away branches, until we came to a clearing of ferns and deadfall trees. “Here,” announced Albert, is what he thinks was “a mameteek site.” He went on: “All around this lake I found twenty-five sites like this. There is no spruce or fir in a circle of twenty, to thirty, to forty, to fifty feet in diameter. Yet there is always these willow-type trees here in the middle.” It was these features – the circular clearing, the growth of birch and willow, the slight depression in the ground – that, to Albert, suggested this to be a site where once the Beothuk had lived. Traces of Ochre The title of this volume is Tracing Ochre, so let me tell one more story similar to my account of the walk into the woods near Millertown. This one is about traces of ochre. Roughly four years after my trip to Indian Point, I was staying with Tony Stuckless at his little house in Point Leamington, Notre Dame Bay. Like Albert, Tony had an abiding interest in the history of the area. Unlike Albert, he cultivated this interest privately. He did not join organizations or committees, but he did write

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the story of the Stuckless family and he was much given to talking with those who shared his interest in local history. He would also go looking for signs that the Beothuk had once been there, inhabiting the very bays and coves that he had known from childhood. Point Leamington is, like Indian Point, a storied landscape. The most famous of these stories has to do with the killing of Thomas Rowsell, himself a notorious “Indian” killer.4 As the story goes, “Rowsell was caught off guard while dipping salmon from his weir at South West Brook. He was ambushed, murdered ... beheaded, stripped of his clothing and his body pierced with arrows.”5 The local story has it that he was buried at a spot still marked by a big spruce tree growing close to the water. He is memorialized by a “nature trail” that follows the course of the brook and then winds to the top of a hill overlooking the bay. The trail bears Rowsell’s name, but the painting on the sign ­(Figure  4.1) at the beginning of track is of a Beothuk man, buckskin clad, with a feather in his hair. There is another story that follows this. After the killing of Thomas Rowsell, his “friends,” apparently, “waged a war of extermination on the Indians.”6 At Moore’s Cove they found a Beothuk encampment. They waited behind rocks and as the Beothuk returned the settlers opened fire with buckshot. The canoes drifted away lifeless.7 Tony’s house was near to where the brook tumbles into the sea and thus close to the spot where, as the story goes, Thomas Rowsell was ambushed and beheaded. There was a bank of earth where the dirt road to the cluster of houses had been cut. Tony had dug into this earth and found some of it to be curiously red. He wondered if this red earth could actually be traces of ochre. And so he wondered if the very ground upon which the house was built held within it signs of the Beothuk having been here before him, before Point Leamington, before Thomas Rowsell and his salmon weir. Before all that. In my company he dug into the bank again, looking for the red earth. He pulled some out and we turned it in our hands. I wasn’t sure, I told him. He wasn’t sure either. He was sure, however, that this land held secreted within it signs of absence. Traces of the Past It is these experiences and others like them that have inspired this chapter. It is about how it is that people may sense the presence of past lives in their sensuous communion with the world. Usually in anthropology and other social sciences, we swiftly pass through and beyond the

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Figure 4.1  Rowsell’s Hill and nature trail sign, Point Leamington, Notre Dame Bay. Photo: John Harries.

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stuff of the world, barely noting its presence, on our way to discussing its cultural and social significance. This stuff, the trees, the earth, and the things residing in the earth, are, in the words of Jean Baudrillard, “shamed mute and passive,”8 awaiting their capture in the “webs of significance we ourselves have spun.”9 There is, however, a vein of scholarship that argues for emancipation of the object from the “tyranny” of the subject.10 According to Bill Brown, this emancipation begins in the recognition of the “thing,” as a strange material presence distinct from the “object.” For Brown the notion of the thing refers to “what is excessive in objects, as what exceeds their mere materialization as object or their mere utilization as objects – their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence … Temporalized as the before and after of the object, thingness amounts to a latency (the not yet formed or the not yet formable) and to an excess (what remains physically or metaphysically irreducible to objects).”11 Thing theory, as well as other more-or-less phenomenological approaches advocated by the likes of Chris Tilley12 and Tim Ingold,13 invites us to shift our attention away from what Alexandre Lefebvre calls “the productivist, engineering character of the independent subject”14 and, in so doing, attend to the things themselves “as they communicate … varied possibilities of temporal experience.”15 In considering the clearing with a view of the lake or the red soil taken to be ochre as assemblages of things, I am considering a peculiar type of thing which we may call the trace. Traces are those things which are both of the present and the past, but neither wholly one nor the other. The “trace,” as Emmanuel Levinas argues, is the “mark of the past in the present.”16 It is, therefore, both the thing-in-itself and something other, which has left its mark upon the thing. To quote Levinas, “a stone has scratched a stone, the scratch can, to be sure be taken as a trace, but without the man who held the stone the trace is but an effect.”17 This man who held the stone, this other who has left his mark as a scratch, is both present in, yet somehow exceeds, the thing. So the thing in-it-self, even as it is present, available to our senses, is haunted by an absence. Jacques Derrida elaborates on Levinas’s notion of the trace. For Derrida, the trace refers to a deferral which haunts the modernist metaphysics of presence. “The trace,” Derrida writes, “is the opening of the first exteriority in general, the enigmatic relationship of living to its other and of an inside to an outside: spacing. The outside, ‘spatial’ and ‘objective’ exteriority which we believe we know as the most familiar thing in the world, as familiarity itself, would not appear … without difference

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as temporalization, without the nonpresence of the other inscribed within the sense of the present, without the relationship with death as the concrete structure of the living present.”18 What makes sense to me in this is the idea of the trace as the “nonpresence of the other inscribed within the sense of the present.” Trace for Derrida evokes the notion of a track, like the footprints of someone left in fresh fallen snow, a signifier that hinges on the tension between presence and absence, now and then, here and there, ourselves and others. Thought of in this more tangible way, the notion of the trace becomes sensible to our everyday experience of dwelling with the past. There is a passage in Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life in which he describes visiting the “marvellous” Shelburn museum in Vermont, a reconstructed nineteenth-century village, teeming with “everything from cooking utensils and pharmaceutical goods to weaving instruments, toilet articles and children’s toys.”19 What particularly entrances de Certeau are, however, “the marks of active hands and labouring patient bodies for which these things compose the daily circuits, the fascinating presence of absences whose traces were everywhere.”20 For de Certeau, this “village of abandoned and salvaged objects” drew his attention “to the ordered murmurs of a hundred past or possible villages, and by means of these imbricated traces one began to dream of countless combinations of existences.”21 So it was also for Albert and Tony. Both of them were in the habit of exploring the local landscape, of walking along beaches and into the woods, of digging into the earth and turning over stones, looking for something that would reveal the absent presence of a people who had come before. They were, in other words, looking for traces: enigmatic signatures on the land that may suggest that once, many years ago, the Beothuk had been there, at this very place, and so, in a sense, still dwell within the earth, trees, and water, even as they have gone. In seeking out traces on the land, they were, in part, seeking to know better the history of the local area. Beyond that, however, they were seeking a felt intimacy with the past. “You hear people talk about spiritual things,” mused Albert as we walked along the old railway bed, “but in a place like this, there is something in the feeling of the place.” Feeling the Presence of the Past There is a tendency to be slightly condescending about such talk of feeling the nearness of the past as one walks through the woods or

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discovers a peculiarly red patch of soil in the ground near one’s cabin. It is, in a sense, neither fish nor fowl, neither “history” nor “memory.” History should be recovered from the enigmatic assemblage of traces to realize its fullness as a correct description of what was. Memory, proper memory, assumes an organic continuity of a sort, if not the organic continuity of the embodied consciousness moving through time and space, then the organic continuity of the “peasant” community in which, to quote Pierre Nora, “the remnants of experience still lived in the warmth of tradition, in the silence of custom, in the repetition of the ancestral.”22 To feel the presence of the past seems a bit naive. You can know the history of another. You feel the memories that are your own, which somehow inhere in you by virtue of your unfolding being in the world. But to feel history, that is actually a delusion of a sort which, by eliciting the sense of an empathic connection with lives not your own, to quote Vanessa Agnew, “claims a kind of universalism that conceals hidden ideologies.”23 Really what we should do is forget about feelings, or at the very least disentangle these feelings from fact and subject them to critical scrutiny so we can reveal their sociopolitical conditions of possibility. And so we have. Various studies have looked at all sorts of lieux de mémorie – from national memorials commemorating those slain in battle,24 to reconstructed villages replete with period detail,25 to officially sanctioned and sign-posted historic sites26 – to reveal the secret unintentional intentionality of ideological production that lurks beneath the smooth façade of historical verisimilitude. Yet there are traces, like an old iron stove found collapsed on the forest floor: landscapes of ruination, to evoke a popular turn of phrase,27 which “foreground the materiality of things”28 and the “absent presences which haunt these things.”29 The trace is, therefore, not reducible to being an effect of the covert operation of an inchoate ideological intention, any more than it can be “disambiguated”30 and so become properly known as sign of the primordial conditions of its becoming. Nor should we fetishize the traces as things-in-themselves that somehow constitute the irreducible material basis of various interested and encultured interpretations: the trace as being “good to think,” as Claude Lévi-Strauss famously said of the animals and plants that populate Indigenous myths in North America.31 This is not to reject outright any of these propositions, it is simply to suggest that we may begin a consideration of how the Beothuk come

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to haunt contemporary Newfoundland at a slightly different place. In doing so, I ask slightly different questions concerning the presence of the Aboriginal past in Newfoundland. This is not an inquiry into the quality of historical consciousness of Newfoundlanders or into the social, cultural, or political “significance” of the island’s history. Rather, following Nadia Seremetakis, I will consider where it is that historicity can be found and how it is that “memory is stored in specific everyday items that form the historicity of a culture” and “create and sustain our relationship with the historical as a sensory dimension.”32 I started out by saying that I wanted to consider how it is people can sense the presence of past lives in their communion with things. But specifically I want to consider how it is that some people I met in Newfoundland feel the presence of the Beothuk. This may be part of a more general inquiry into what Frank Ankersmit calls “the historical sensation,”33 but there is something about Newfoundland and its history that makes the question of how we feel the presence of past lives all the more complex. Without belabouring this complexity, there is something that confounds me about the otherwise excellent passage from Seremetakis and that is the reference to the historicity of a culture. Maybe I am misreading her, but in a place like Newfoundland, where a people have been dispossessed and finally have “disappeared,” leaving only traces behind, whose historicity are we talking about? Is it that of the Beothuk? Or present-day Newfoundlanders? Or both? Or neither? Or indeed is it something else altogether, finally eliding the claims to be of a culture? But we are getting ahead of ourselves. To make sense of such questions, a little needs be known about the way people in Newfoundland go about knowing and feeling the Indigenous occupation of “their” island. Newfoundland and the Beothuk Mostly, though not entirely, people agree that the Beothuk are extinct as a culture.34 The date of their passing is usually given as 6 June 1829, when Shanawdithit died of tuberculosis in a hospital in St John’s.35 In the years that followed Shanawdithit’s death there were no reliable reports of an encounter with a living Beothuk, and after “careful investigation and enquiry” the colonial government of Newfoundland, in the shape of Admiral H. Prescott, were “persuaded that the race was extinct.”36

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The Beothuk may be gone, but they are not forgotten. Their memory lives on in present-day Newfoundland in many ways. Academics have studied the archives and the remnants of the past to write scholarly works describing the lives of the Beothuk and speculating as to the reasons for their demise.37 Writers have penned poems, plays, and novels, clothing the bare bones of historical fact with romantic imaginings of the idyllic life and tragic death of a people.38 There are museums and interpretation centres that display what the Beothuk left behind: blue trade beads, fishhooks fashioned from stolen European iron, and containers stitched of birchbark.39 There is a Beothuk musical,40 a feature film,41 and at least two shorter documentary films.42 In addition to these public memorials, there is also a more private realm of reminiscence. People tell stories, passed down through generations. Stories like that told to me by a man I met on the beach in Caplin Cove, Trinity Bay, back in 2006. He spoke of how the “Indians” used to come to the beach while the villagers slept to steal the fish from the flakes and make a “mess” in the bottom of the boats. Or another I heard in 2014 from an old man in Beaumont, who remembered hearing a story back when he was a child of how a fisherman, this was years ago even then, had spied a Beothuk standing on top of headland and took a shot, spraying him with lead. He “tickled his arse for him,” the old man chuckled, enjoying the turn of phrase. “He tickled his arse.” Others, like Albert and Tony, remember the Beothuk in their close association with the landscape, finding in the wilderness the faint traces of history. Some collect these traces – the worked pieces of stone and metal, the beads and bits of bone – bringing them home and storing them in toolboxes. Remembering the Beothuk Since 2006 I have been researching the ways in which the Beothuk are remembered in contemporary Newfoundland. My research began as, to borrow a phrase from Jeffrey Olick and Joyce Robbins, a “sociology of the mnemonic practices”43 by which a memory of the Beothuk is constituted within and across a variety of social and institutional fields. This research has consisted of talking to those who are actively cultivating a memory of the Beothuk in themselves and others. These people have included provincial archaeologists, museum curators, authors, painters, and academics, as well as those who simply knew the stories or keep collections of artifacts in toolboxes. Some of these people were

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Mi’kmaq, others were descended from people who came from England and Ireland many years ago, even back to the time when the Beothuk could still be encountered. One thing that intrigued me during these conversations was how deeply people felt about the Beothuk. For some perhaps this was scholarly interest, but for most the study of the Beothuk was described as a “passion” born of sympathetic feeling for the extinct Native people of Newfoundland. From a distance, knowing what we know of Newfoundland’s history, which is but one episode in the history of the dispossession of the First Nations peoples of present-day Canada by European settlers and their descendants, this passion may seem paradoxical, even offensive. Such expressions of fellow feeling may be dismissed as a self-indulgent poetic of postcolonial regret, a “lugubrious tut-tutting over the tribe’s last days,”44 as Patrick O’Flaherty characterized the ways in which Newfoundland’s poets and novelists wrote of the Beothuk. Certainly, critical studies of Newfoundland’s literature have argued that this romantic preoccupation with the demise of the Beothuk may have more to do with expressions of settler nativism, made possible by the denial of a First Nations presence on the island, than it has to do with any heartfelt concern with the legacy of colonial violence.45 As Mary Dalton caustically observes, “dead Indians / are safer / in poems, museums / archaeo- / logical pamphlets, / bone pendants and ochre,”46 much safer than living First Nations peoples, the Mik’maq of Newfoundland and the Innu and Inuit in Labrador, who have the capacity to actively unsettle claims to Indigeneity and territorial sovereignty advanced by white “natives.” There is much merit in this critique of the preoccupation with the Beothuk in Newfoundland’s public culture. It does not, however, wholly address the question of the presence of the Beothuk, or how people feel their presence in the sensuous encounter with the landscape and with small things found. When I asked those I met in Newfoundland how it was they came to have this passion for a people whom they could never meet, they would often tell me stories of just such encounters with the Beothuk. Of course, they did not meet the Beothuk as a living people. What they did encounter were traces of the Beothuk: some bone pendants displayed in a glass case in the old Newfoundland Museum down on Duckworth Street, blue beads and splinters of bone found under a mound of stones near Charles Brook, or a story heard by a boy (now an elderly man) as he sat quietly and listened to the old fishermen “spinning yarns” down on the beach at Caplin Cove.

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These were stories which described the enduring presence of the Beothuk and how the narrators came to recognize, even feel, this presence. Though the details of the stories varied from person to person, in all cases the presence of a vanished people was constituted in the movement between the materiality of the lived present, in essence stuff that could be seen and handled, and the narration of history. For example, I asked Don Locke, who had for years explored the lakes and rivers of the island’s interior to discover Beothuk sites and recover Beothuk artifacts, how he grew interested in these people, an interest that became, in his words, “the biggest part of my life.” He answered as follows: I was a woodsman. As a boy I went with my father, who was a woodsman, and my grandfather, who was a woodsman and a trapper. They lived on the river really. And I got to know the river like my parents and grandparents did. Now in school the first text we had was on the Beothuk. And I was fascinated by it. So I went to ask my grandfather about it and he started to tell me all the stories about it. Because he was here in the 1880s. His people were here when the Beothuks were here … He said, “Old Neddie Gates, he used to say he gave them a good scallywagging.” That’s what they called it. But he never did say that he killed anyone. But then he also told me the story about the woman baring her breasts, but they shot her, you know. That must have been passed down through him, but that’s history I found afterwards. That’s real history … So anyway, I was going to go out and find out what was going on the river. First thing when I finished school I got a canoe and motor, small motor, and a truck, cause, you know, I had to go to work. And I started out on the river … And I went to St John’s to see if I could get any information on it at the libraries and that. And I went out there and I wanted some information about John Cartwright, the first one that went up the river with a group of men, and you can read about that. They went down the basement of the library, or someplace. So anyway, they came back and they had the written diary. So they laid it out in front of me and I went through that. And I could picture all the places where they were because I knew the river. And I could go over there to the places they mentioned and that and I’d find them. And I realized [that] a lot of ... the Beothuk campsites ... were ... where I would go myself if I was staying on the river.

This is a rich and complex account, which bears several similarities to Albert Taylor’s narrative of how he became interested in the Beothuk

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when a boy. At its heart is the movement between being on the river and in the woods and learning the stories about the Beothuk as they have been passed down through his family or written in an old diary. In this movement, stories and landscapes of trees and water become one and the same, each enfolded within and revealing the other. The conclusion of Don’s account is telling. He opens Cartwright’s diary and as he read he “could picture all the places where they were” because he “knew the river.” Moreover, there is the hint that he knew the river as a Beothuk, for the very sites where they camped were the sites where he would make camp as he hunted, fished, and trapped along the Exploits. This sense of presence, realized in the materiality of the landscape, artifact, and bone, is, however, haunted by the fact of absence. On the shores of Red Indian Lake, Paul O’Neill writes, “we track Beothuk blood, we stop to listen for whispers of old acts indelible, we seek traces and find ourselves alone.”47 All we have are scant remains and faint marks of long-ago habitation. For those who know the stories, these traces betoken the presence of the Beothuk. Yet the Beothuk are not there. So one can feel the immanence of the peopled past in the communion with the landscape, but this communion is not copresence, not quite. Walking along the shores of Red Indian Lake, one can feel that the Beothuk were once here but they are not here. There are whispers or murmurs, as de Certeau heard at Shelburn village, but in fact all is silence. There is, then, an ambivalent quality to the trace. It is, in Derrida’s words, “a survival whose possibility in advance comes to disjoin or dis-adjust the identity of itself to the living present.”48 The trace, like the remains of the “disappeared” discussed by Ewa Dománska, “resists the dichotomous classification of presence versus absence.”49 It is both of the past and the present, but belongs to neither. It is presence and absence: here but not quite here or somehow insufficiently here, lacking and haunted by that lack. We know people in what they left behind, in stories and slight signs, but we also know that we do not know them. Only in the acts of imagination does the trace exceed itself. The ambivalent movement between presence and absence is arrested, and the being of the absent other is fully realized as a living presence. For example, in 2008 I was talking to Desmond Canning, a young man who, ever since he could remember, was interested in the Beothuk. Like Don, Desmond was a woodsman, as was his father and his father before him. And like Don, Desmond’s feeling for the Beothuk was realized in his intimate relationship with the woods and the water. “You learn about things in school,” he said to me, “and you learn about it going to

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university and this here, but to really experience, experience truly how these Beothuk people lived you’ve got to be close to the land. You’ve got to be to places where they actually lived to understand them.” Sometimes, when he was close to the land, Desmond could imagine the Beothuk to be there as they once were. He would go salmon fishing up the Exploits River and he would think to himself, “Imagine one time they’d be coming up on their canoes in the fall of the year and it would be a sight to see … they paddling their canoes and no doubt they’d be singing.” Or one time he was down at Boyd’s Cove catching whitefish. He was “just walking around humming” to himself and looking through the debris of the beach when he “came across a vertebrate column” and “a couple of ribs.” They may have belonged to a moose shot not so long ago by a white hunter. But then again, maybe they were the bones of caribou slaughtered hundreds of years ago as it swam from one island to another. And he thought: “Just imagine this could have been the place where the Beothuk killed a caribou or butchered them and cooked the meat and it just feels like, well, this is history.” Often these imaginings find form and substance. Some of this is wildly conjectural, but much of it is informed by a careful and methodical consideration of the traces, be they signs of the landscape, artifacts, or writings describing encounters with a living people. Don Locke, for one, paints vivid depictions of Beothuk life as he imagined it was lived hundreds of years ago along the rivers and lakes of the interior. These are not landscapes of absence and abandonment. These are peopled landscapes alive with small details of everyday deeds: hunters paddling along the shore, clothes being washed, skins being prepared, men and women gathered around a fire. These are scenes of blue water and blue sky and green trees. Pictures of peace and natural contentment. One finds similar pictorial strategies, slightly more soberly rendered, in museums and interpretation centres. On the trail behind the Beothuk Interpretation Centre at Boyd’s Cove there is signboard near a small, fast-running stream. The picture on the signboard shows the Beothuk standing waist deep in the steam catching white fish with their hands (much “as we did when we worked on the site in May” reads the accompanying text that accompanies the image). Of course, as those I talked to made clear, this is simply the imagination. It is not real. It is at a best an educated vision of a reality that once was. There is much debate, sometimes acrimonious, concerning

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Figure 4.2  Red Indian Lake. Photo: John Harries.

the relationship between the reality of what was and these imaginings of what was, a debate that finally has as its site the trace, which is simultaneously insufficient yet excessive to this imaginative project of seeing the past. The Beothuk are only present in the frame of brightly realized depictions of the past. These realizations may incorporate and, in so doing, seek to exceed the trace by rendering it whole and arresting its ambivalent movement, but the erasure of ambivalence is an illusion. In the words of Don Pelly, who also is a Beothuk enthusiast as well as guide and woodsman, “we’ll never know it … Well the science I mean, they can uncover more sites and they can dig up more artifacts and they can do a whole lot of things but still it’s not going to cover the ground. You’ll never know it all. But everywhere you turn you come up against that brick wall. You can’t really know.” On the shores of Red Indian Lake nothing really fills the emptiness. There is water, stones, and trees, stands of birch and tamarack. Maybe a few things have been left behind, enigmatic signs of past lives to be discerned by those with patience and an educated gaze. Maybe we can

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even feel the presence of a people in communion with these signs. But the Beothuk are not there. Not really. The Sound of Snow Falling and the Enfoldment of Time As we talked, Don Pelly told me a story. It was a ghost story of sorts. It is set on the shores of South Twin Lake, in the interior of central ­Newfoundland, and it went like this: I was down there one day in late November, and that’s about seven miles by boat down from the main lodge there. And I was just stood up in a box of trees there by the ... brook in the northeast end that Cormack had noted. And … there was a little bit of snow falling, real late in the evening, just before the sun was setting. And a little bit of snow coming down, and the dead leaves were there, and you could hear the snow, tick, tick, tick on the leaves as it falls right? And all of a sudden this emotional spasm comes over you like – like oh Jesus … almost like a – like a spiritual thing, you know. Now this might sound foolish but ... that happened. I’ve been down there in a situation when that’s happened, you know.

After he told me this story he also said that this was no more than his mind playing tricks on him. That if he had not been so interested in the Beothuk, had not spent years reading about them and searching for traces of them along the shore and in the forests of the interior of Newfoundland, he would never have felt the “emotional spasm” alone in the woods as the snow fell. So it was the imagination, the full and brightly coloured rendering of the past, that led him to feel the absent-presence of someone in the wintry forest. But there is something else here. The sound of snow falling, tick, tick, tick, on dead leaves. It is this something else that returns us to the question of “how can,” to quote Eelco Runia, “the subliminal, mysterious, but uncommonly powerful living-on, the presence, of the past be envisaged?”50 Stories are important. As Don Pelly, Desmond Canning, Don Locke, and Albert Taylor make clear, without the stories – the old tales spoken and the old books – they would have never felt the Beothuk to be so near and close: never been able to close their eyes and imagine them paddling their canoes upriver in the fall of the year. But this sense of presence is not brought about by stories; rather, this sense of presence resides in the sensuous communion with traces: red earth, a clearing

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of sapling maples and birch, or the sound of snow falling on dead leaves. This last example – the sound of falling snow – may seem different to the others. We may think of the trace as some mark left by human endeavour, from which we, as Alfred Gell would have it, can abduct the agency of an absent other.51 In the sound of snow there would seem no such mark. This is, however, to consider the trace as a wholly material thing, a piece of evidence that is waiting to reveal itself as such, rather than that which draws the past into near-presence in the moment of sensing. What these traces are of is an empirical question, which, although important in some contexts, is not truly at issue here. What is important is that these sensuous moments, which both exceed and are insufficient to representation, are ones when the geometric time of historical narration, neat-ironed flat (to borrow an image from Michel Serres), crumples like an old handkerchief to become topological time in which two points, held distant geometrically, may “suddenly become close, even superimposed.”52 The trace, the slight mark – the scratch on a stone that Levinas describes – which betokens the presence (and absence) of another, is an enfoldment of time53 into the sensuous materiality of the thing. This is not a matter of bringing the past into the present. It is, rather, to quote Levinas, “an insertion of space in time”54 so as that the orderly distinctions between past and present, between self and other, become blurred and momentarily fall away. The stories told to me by those who felt the presence of the Beothuk were stories precisely of such moments: the moment when you stand up in a box of trees and hear the snow falling, or come across a clearing in the woods which recalls the form of encampment. I said that Don Pelly’s story is a ghost story of sorts. It is one of several ghost stories I was told when talking with various people about the ways in which they remembered the Beothuk. These ghosts are immanent within things and landscapes, the “less-regulated” and “excessive” places where, in Tim Edensor’s words, “involuntary memories may be stimulated.”55 They haunt the mounds of stones and stands of spruce, the tumbled-down foundations and kelp-covered boulders, which enfold time into space and bring the past and the present, the living and once were living, into proximity.56 Yet these Beothuk ghosts are not simply of these things and landscapes, for even as they are present they are also absent. So they exceed the materiality of the trace, even as they are immanent within it, and open up the haunted spaces where

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others whisper to us in languages we do not quite understand and we feel the presence of someone else, another people, close but not close enough, alone in the wintery woods. NOTES 1 Funding for fieldwork in Newfoundland was provided by the British Academy and the International Council for Canadian Studies. Drafts of this paper were presented at seminars at Bishop’s University, Lennoxville, Quebec, and the Department of Anthropology at Durham University and I would like to thank the participants at those occasions for their encouragement and helpful comments. I would also like to thank Joost Fontein for his comments and conversations about these issues, and Fiona Polack for her patience and insightful suggestions on how to improve the chapter. Finally, I would also like to thank those whom I met in Newfoundland, particularly Albert Taylor, Desmond Canning, Don Locke, Don Pelly, and Tony Stuckless for their hospitality and intellectual generosity. 2 Indian Point has been extensively explored by those looking for signs of Beothuk occupation. Frank Speck made “a pilgrimage” to “the country of the Beothuk” in the summer of 1914, in hopes of “resurrecting some material traces of their existence.” Among other places he visited was “Red Indian Point,” where he discovered “a number of wigwam-pits,” including one large rectangular pit which he surmised must mark the “location of the wigwam of the chief.” Frank Speck, Beothuk and Micmac (Delhi, SSM Books International 2009 [1922]), 12, 22. Subsequently, there have been a series of excavations and surveys of the site, including by Helen Devereux in 1970 and Laurie McLean in 2009. For an excellent overview of archaeological work at Indian Point, see: NL Archaeology, “Archaeology and the Beothuk at Indian Point, Red Indian Lake,” Pt. 1, 11 December 2015, and Pt. 2, 23 December 2015, https://nlarchaeology.wordpress.com/category/millertown/ (accessed November 2017). 3 “Howley’s book” refers to James P. Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1915). 4 Ibid., 267. 5 Amy Louise Peyton, River Lords: Father and Son (St John’s: Flanker Press 2005), 10. 6 Howley, The Beothuks, 283. 7 Peyton, River Lords, 10–11.

Sensing the Presence of the Past  111 8 Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, ed. Jim Fleming, trans. Philip Beitchman (London: Pluto Press 1990), 11. 9 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books 1973), 5. 10 Ewa Dománska, “The Return to Things,” Archaeologia Polona 44 (2006): 171–85; Bjørnar Olsen, “Material Culture after Text: Re-membering Things,” Norwegian Archaeological Review 36, no. 2 (2003): 87–104. 11 Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 5. 12 Christopher Tilley, The Materiality of Stone (Oxford: Berg 2004). 13 Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge 2000); “Materials against Materiality,” Archaeological Dialogues 14, no. 1 (2007): 1–16. 14 Alexandre Lefebvre, “Temporal Exposé, Passages from Benjamin,” Journal for Cultural Research 7, no. 1 (2003): 55. 15 Lefebvre, ““Temporal Exposé,” 45. 16 Robert Eaglestone, “Derrida and Holocaust: A Commentary on the Philosophy of Cinders,” Angelaki 7, no. 2 (2002): 30. 17 Emmanuel Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer 1987), 106. 18 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge 1994), 70–1. 19 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press 1988), 21. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989): 7. 23 Vanessa Agnew, “History’s Affective Turn: Historical Reenactment and Its Work in the Present,” Rethinking History 11, no. 3 (2007): 309. 24 Thomas Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper, eds., The Politics of War, Memory and Commemoration (London: Routledge 2001). 25 Carla Corbin, “Representations of an Imagined Past: Fairground Heritage Villages,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 8, no. 3 (2002): 225–45. 26 Diane Bartel, Historic Preservation: Collective Memory and Historical Identity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 1996). 27 Tim Edensor, “Waste Matter –The Debris of Industrial Ruins and the Disordering of the Material World,” Journal of Material Culture, 10, no. 3 (2005): 311–32; Yael Navaro-Yashin, “Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (2009): 1–18. 28 Edensor, “Waste Matter,” 325.

112  John Harries 2 9 Ibid., 327. 30 Agnew, “History’s Affective Turn,” 309. 31 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press 1963), 89. 32 Nadia Seremetakis, The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1996), 3. 33 Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 109–41. 34 It should be noted that, as some of the chapters of this book discuss, the claim that the Beothuk are extinct, although still the dominant assumption within conventional narratives of Newfoundland’s history, is becoming increasingly contested. Owing to the complexities that surround the notion of “extinction,” I use the image of “vanishing,” which suggests the disappearance (or perhaps annihilation would be a better word) of a distinct and ongoing cultural presence on the island of Newfoundland. 35 Howley, The Beothucks, 231–2. 36 Ingeborg Marshall, A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1996), 224; Howley, The Beothucks, 229. 37 Marshall, A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk; Howley, The Beothucks; Fredrick Rowe, Extinction: The Beothuks of Newfoundland (Toronto: McGrawHall Ryerson Rowe 1977); Ralph Pastore, “The Collapse of the Beothuk World,” Acadiensis 19, no. 1 (1989): 52–71; Ralph Pastore, “Fishermen, Furriers, and Beothuks: The Economy of Extinction,” Man in the Northeast 33 (1987): 47–62; Donald H. Holly Jr, “The Beothuk on the Eve of Their Extinction,” Arctic Anthropology 37, no. 1 (2000): 79–95. 38 See Cynthia Sugars’s chapter in this volume for further information. 39 There are displays of Beothuk artifacts in “The Rooms,” the Provincial Museum of Newfoundland and Labrador, the Beothuk Interpretation Centre at Boyd’s Cove, and the Mary March Provincial Museum at Grand Falls. Smaller local heritage centres and museums also have displays about the Beothuk, including those at Botwood, Twillingate, Millertown, Robert’s Arm, and so on. 40 Shanadithit: The Musical, by Eleanor Cameron-Stockley (n.d., unpublished manuscript). This piece of musical theatre played to audiences in Twillingate and St John’s in and around 1999 and 2000 and intermittently in the years that followed to tourists visiting Cameron Hall Theatre in ­Twillingate. 41 Finding March March, directed by Ken Pittman (Red Ochre Productions in association with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1988).

Sensing the Presence of the Past  113 42 Shanaditti: The Last of the Beothucks, directed by Ken Pittman (National Film Board of Canada 1982); Stealing Mary, directed by Tim Wolochatiuk (Windup Filmworks 2006). 43 Jeffrey Olick and Joyce Robbins, “Social Memory Studies: From Collective Memory to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices,” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 105–40. 44 Patrick O’Flaherty, The Rock Observed: Studies in the Literature of Newfoundland (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1979), 77. 45 See Richard Budgel, “The Beothuks and the Newfoundland Mind,” Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 8, no. 1 (1992): 15–33; Mary Dalton, “Shadow Indians: The Beothuk Motif in Newfoundland Literature,” Newfoundland Studies 8, no. 1 (1992): 135–46; Terry Goldie, Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1989), 156–8; Jennifer Delisle, “Nation, Indigenization, the Beothuk: A Newfoundland Myth of Origin in Patrick Kavanagh’s Gaff Topsails,” Studies in Canadian Literature/ Études en littérature canadienne 31, no. 2 (2006): 23–45. 46 Mary Dalton, “Dead Indians,” in Clyde Rose, ed., Land, Sea and Time, Book Three (St John’s: Breakwater 2002), 60. 47 Paul O’Neill, “Red Indian Lake,” in Rose, ed., Land, Sea and Time, 18. 48 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, xx. 49 Ewa Dománska, “The Material Presence of the Past,” History and Theory 45 (2006): 345. 50 Eelco Runia, “Spots of Time,” History and Theory 45 (2006): 310. 51 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon 1998), 12–27. 52 Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press 1995), 59. 53 Ming-Qian Ma, “The Past Is No Longer Out-of-Date: Topological Time and Its Foldable Nearness in Michel Serre’s Philosophy,” Configurations 8 (2000): 235–44. 54 Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” 105. 55 Tim Edensor, “The Ghosts of Industrial Ruins: Ordering and Disordering Memory in Excessive Space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23 (2005): 387. 56 Michael Mayerfeld Bell, “The Ghosts of Place,” Theory and Society 26, no. 6 (1997): 813–36. There is an extensive and growing literature on ghosts, or the spectral, and the capacity of ghosts to confound modernist ontologies of presence and, in so doing, unsettle the taken-for-granted sense of occupation and ownership in postcolonial settler societies.

114  John Harries See: Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs, “The Postcolonial Ghost Story,” in Peter Buse and Andrew Scott, eds., Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan 1999), 179–99; Marlene Goldman and Joanne Saul, “Talking with Ghosts: Haunting in Canadian Cultural Production,” University of Toronto Quarterly 75, no. 2 (2006): 645–55; Michael O’Riley, “Postcolonial Haunting: Anxiety, Affect and the Situated Encounter,” Postcolonial Text 3, no. 4: 1–15. For an article critical of the “haunting trope in Canadian cultural production,” see Emilie Cameron, “Indigenous Spectrality and the Politics of Postcolonial Ghost Stories,” Cultural Geographies 15, no. 3 (2008): 383–93.

5  Beothuk and Mi’kmaq: An Interview with Chief Mi’sel Joe c hr istophe r ay lward an d c h i e f m i ’ s e l j o e

Miawpukek First Nation, Conne River, Newfoundland, 18 August 2011 Chief Mi’sel Joe is Traditional saqamaw and the Newfoundland district chief for the Mi’kmaq Grand Council. The spiritual leader of his people, he is a member of the Atlantic Policy Congress, the First Nations Trust Fund, the Newfoundland Museum Advisory Committee, the Aboriginal Capacity and Development Research Centre, and the National Aboriginal Advisory Group of Heritage Canada. He also holds a community seat at the United Nations (Human Rights). In May 2004 he was awarded an honorary doctorate of laws, honoris causa, by Memorial University in recognition of his contribution to the economic, social, and political development of the Mi’kmaq people of Newfoundland and Labrador. I’ve known Chief Joe since the early 1990s, when I documented on film a number of Miawpukek’s emerging infrastructure and cultural initiatives. As part of my oral-history research into Native views on the history of Newfoundland’s Beothuk people, on 18 August 2011 we sat down at his home in Conne River to discuss the Mi’kmaq and the Beothuk. CA: Growing up in Conne River, what did you learn in school about the history of the Beothuk people? MJ: In terms of what we learned in school, it was a very short paragraph, about us being brought from Nova Scotia by the French to kill the Beothuk people.1 Of course, when you get home, you ask your grandparents, and they say, “No. Who else are you going to blame it on?” We weren’t writing the history. There was always someone else writing the history. So we grew up with that. And

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you know, actually, at a time I think I might have even believed that. And when you get out in the world, and you start talking to other people, you say, “No, that’s not how it was.” I guess when you looked at the history and they talked about the fight between the Beothuk and the French, they said they brought Canadian Indians in to be part of that. But we were already here. We’ve always been here. So there was some of that fighting going on, and killing going on, and Placentia was a part of that. None of our people was a part of that.2 Now, our people have not always lived along the coast of Newfoundland. A lot of our people lived inland. They travelled on the coast. Because if you go up the coast from here, you find places like White Bear Bay, which was again, in a way, almost like Conne River. It was like a grocery store. And on way up the coast, Burgeo was another place where people lived, a place where there was similar places like Conne River – where there was a place where you have salmon and direct access to the interior. Our people lived there. Apart from that, our people lived inland. If you look at the earlier maps of Newfoundland, all the interior was marked by Mi’kmaq names.3 Recently, it’s been changed. They’ve been changing that. But of course, our people in Nova Scotia understand; they very quickly caught on to “Hey, we can have much larger boats than birchbark canoes.” And they started capturing English and French sailing vessels to start sailing them back and forth from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland. The story then comes about in the 1600s, a group of English sailors, I believe, met a group of Mi’kmaq sailors off the coast of Newfoundland, and the Mi’kmaq sailors drew an accurate map of Newfoundland for them. But at the same time, they were saying this was the first time they were arriving in Newfoundland in the 1600s, which is ludicrous, because if I went to some place for the first time, how in God’s name could I draw you an accurate map? And that map is still around.4 CA: What is your general impression of what most people in Newfoundland and Labrador think of as the history of the Beothuk people, and particularly how it relates to the history of the Mi’kmaq people? MJ: To some degree it’s changing, the view that we were brought here to kill the Beothuk. But in other hard-core cases, they still want to believe that we were responsible for the demise of the Beothuk people.

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You know, when you look at it, if you got any common sense at all, look at Botwood, Exploits Bay, where the Bay comes in, where the Beothuk people came down from the mainland during the spring hunt. They came down to gather fish, salmon, seals, everything that would help them through the winter. That was part of their diet. So when they started showing up and there were nets across the river and shacks being built by Europeans, it was the same as somebody putting a padlock on their grocery doors. They didn’t have access any longer to those areas, and even if they did, by the time they got there, a lot of those things were already gone. And then the only place they had was to go was back inland. And there was a bounty on their heads too, as well. People followed them back inland. And it’s been proven that the Peytons actually murdered some of them, because they actually went out and took something of what he considered to be his. Traditionally in any Aboriginal society, years ago if you found something on the land, and nobody was using it, it was yours if you wanted to use it. And if you were finished with it, you put it back, so if somebody else wanted to use it. And if they found nails and stuff like that on the land, they would probably use it. But it was their grocery store that they were being barred from. And they were basically followed back and driven back until they had no place to go. CA: It’s interesting that you name the Peytons. There was clearly a conflict of interest between what they were doing in terms of the commercial salmon fishery and what the Beothuk needed at that point in order to survive, and there exists considerable historical documentation concerning conflict between the Beothuk and members of the Peyton family.5 Yet this aspect of the history is not as commonly known among Newfoundlanders as the story involving Beothuk conflict with the Mi’kmaq. Why do you think that is? MJ: Because it’s convenient. CA: What do you mean? MJ: I think my grandfather was right: Who else are you going to blame it on?6 CA: You were talking this morning about the fact that Newfoundland, from a Mi’kmaq perspective, belongs to a much larger territory that includes Gaspé, New Brunswick, and other areas of Atlantic Canada. MJ: Yes, the seven districts of the Mi’kmaq nation are pretty big when you look at switching from Newfoundland all the way to

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eastern Quebec, and then down into Maine and Massachusetts even. So the district was really large, and it was all governed by one chief, Grand Chief Membertou.7 Then much later, in Newfoundland, in 1860, the grand chief decided that Newfoundland was to become a district by itself, so they appointed the first chief in Newfoundland, which was Ruben Lewis, in 1860. And so the rest of the district remained within the governance of the grand chief from Cape Breton or Nova Scotia. CA: But Newfoundland didn’t? MJ: Newfoundland was a district by itself, governed by one district chief. The Grand Council is made up of district chiefs from each reserve across the nation, from Newfoundland to Quebec. CA: A central focus of the 2003 Queen v. Ken Drew case was trying to establish that Mi’kmaq people were here in Newfoundland prior to Europeans, which was difficult, because there was no archaeological proof.8 MJ: No. I remember there was no burial sites to go back to. And our history is oral history. And even when you go to court, the courts don’t want to deal with oral history. They want written history. And we never wrote our history; it was all passed down generation after generation. Storytelling was a part of how we lived. Storytelling was part of our entertainment. But in those stories was the story of past, present, and future. I grew up spending a lot of time with my grandfather and my uncles. I grew up in a time – I’m sixty-four years old – so I had a glimpse of a life that’s not lived anymore. And so I had a better sense of who I was, and still am. And unfortunately, the younger people today don’t have that same thing. They do, but it’s a little bit faster, a little bit more modernized than what I had. My first trip into the country was with my grandfather and my uncle. I wasn’t very old. I couldn’t have been more than five or six years old, but I remember it. And I remember waking up in the morning inside the tent and listening to my grandfather and my uncle, sitting by the fire, drinking tea, and talking Mi’kmaq. And at home, my mom could speak the language. My dad not so much, but my mom did. And when my grandfather and grandmothers came to visit, they sat there and spoke for hours in their language. We could hear it and listen to it. But today, you don’t have families doing that any longer. CA: Why do you think the oral history has been contested – not just in courts of law, but within history generally? Why do you think that is?

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MJ: It’s just, to me, it’s just a non-Aboriginal mentality. If I say that I went out today and picked alder leaves to cure my headache, a scientist’s going to say, “Well there’s no written evidence of that, that it can do that.” If I say we have a magical medicine that’s made up of seven plants from the land and it will cure things that ail you, scientists will say, “Well, we have no written evidence of that. There’s no testing of that.” Well, we’ve been testing that for hundreds of years. We know, but it’s not written. So it’s got no credibility. CA. And yet among the Mi’kmaq people, it does. MJ: Yes. And today there’s people are now finding out that things we’ve been using for years as medicine, they’re saying, “Yeah, it’s okay. We’ve tested that now.” Our scientists are saying, “Yes, that’s good for you.” Like blueberries, for instance, blueberry leaves. We used them back in the 40s and 50s to fight off tuberculosis in our family. No one in our family got tuberculosis, even though there was tuberculosis around. My mom nursed her own mother and sisters through tuberculosis. But in my own family, we were out eating lots of those things every day. Because we were told to eat blueberries, eat blueberry plants and that stuff. That’s the only greens we ate during the summer months. We were like little animals; we were out in the woods eating everything that was green that we were told was good for us. Whether they knew it was good for tuberculosis or not, I don’t know. But we did. I remember me and my brothers saying, “They’re carrying all those people away to those fancy places; why can’t we go? But we couldn’t go because we weren’t sick.” [He laughs.] CA: Yet that attitude towards Indigenous knowledge seems to be changing. Look at your holistic healing conference in 1994.9 It seems that more and more people are becoming interested in this sort of culture-based knowledge. What do you think about this movement away from strictly empirical thinking – knowledge based on scientific proof – to considering what other people from other cultures have learned through alternative means? MJ: I think it’s changing. Lay people are starting to use things that we’ve been using for years and finding that it is good for you. Along with the written information saying that blueberry leaves are much better for you than the blueberries themselves. We use the leaves for tea. We have all kinds of plants that we’ve always used. There’s also a greater understanding of the spiritual well-being of a person now. There’s a greater acceptance of a community’s wellbeing, spiritually and physically. You know, when you look after

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your neighbours, look after your community, everybody seems to be so much healthier, to laugh more, to be more outgoing. So all those things are part of how we survived during the times when there was absolutely nothing here. We were the poorest of the poor, but we didn’t know that. We were happy enough. We took care of each other. If I was hungry, we knew damn well that our neighbour was hungry. But if we had a bellyful, we knew that our neighbours had a bellyful. So everybody took care of everybody else. I still remember when my Dad came home with a moose, my job was to take little pieces of moose in my backpack and go around and make sure that family members had some of that moose meat that he lugged home on his back. CA: I have a general question about oral history with regards to the Beothuk people. We’ve had one account for a very long time – that the Mi’kmaq were brought to Newfoundland by the French. But that’s changing now. People are starting to suspect that there might be more to the story. In addition to the European version of history, with regards to the Beothuk, there’s also the experience of the Mi’kmaq people, who lived here for a long time and who also knew them. From what has been passed down, have you heard any stories of the Beothuk from the perspective of people within the Mi’kmaq community, with regards to individual people or historical events? MJ: Nothing any more than at a time when they were at the worst time in their life, probably, there were people helping them to escape, either through intermarriage, or helping them to escape into Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. There’s even stories of a woman who escaped to Nova Scotia, married a Toney, and then lived in the U.S.10 You know it’s not uncommon for our people to go and raid looking for women, and it’s not uncommon for them to do the same thing. When the Europeans arrived here, they said there was fighting among Aboriginal people. God almighty, if you look at the history books of Europeans, that’s all they ever did. [heh] Off with their head. [He laughs.] So, of course, there was little fights between our people and the Beothuk people. There was fights between our people and the Mohawk people and there was probably fights between our people and the Malecite people. But they weren’t fights over land. They were fights over survival. You happen to be on my hunting territory, and that’s how we feed our community. So you better move on to your own.11

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Figure 5.1  Miawpukek First Nation powwow. Photo: John Nick Jeddore. Reproduced by permission of Miawpukek First Nation.

In our case, in Miawpukek, hunting and trapping areas were assigned by the community for people. And there was enough respect for their territories if my grandfather happened to cross over a Jeddore trapline, if he had to shoot a caribou, he would let a person know I was crossing over your territory and I had to take a caribou. And so the same thing would happen. It’s the way we lived. CA: The territories were distinct, weren’t they? Weren’t the Mi’kmaq concentrated on the south and west coasts of Newfoundland, and the Beothuk more in the Exploits and central areas, at least towards the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries? MJ: But you know, there’s evidence of Beothuk people all over Newfoundland, as well as our people, all over Newfoundland, and there was enough of a connection that not only did Beothuk people use red ochre, but our people used it as well. If you married into a Beothuk family, you took on the traits and the customs of that family, and the same thing around.12 You brought that into it. Some things we can only guess at, and some things we hear glimpses of in oral history. But I like to believe that our people coexisted with the Beothuk people in Newfoundland. Yes, we had fights over women. We still do. There’s nothing strange about that. We don’t fight with Beothuk anymore, but we have enough Beothuk blood in our families that it’s still here.

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CA: You talk about intermarriage. Is that commonly known in Conne River, for example, that there are families who have Beothuk ancestry? MJ: Are there specific families? Yes, in Conne River we have at least four families with that connection. And I’m sure it’s in other people too, because some of them are linked together anyway. When we look back to your genealogy, the founders of these families came across from Labrador, down through Beothuk territory, and down into Conne River. If you look at these people today, they look no different from the Innu, who we used to call the Mountaineer. It didn’t happen overnight. It took years and years for that to happen. Even the young kids of those families, there’s no mistaking who they are. I think the older people understand that. The younger people may not understand that as much and maybe think there is no significance of that. I think the older people understand that. CA: Do you think there’s any significance to that? MJ: Absolutely. CA: Why? MJ: I think it’s important, not because of anything to do with any legal land claims or anything else, but as the fact that they’re still alive. CA: What do you think of the idea of the Beothuk as being extinct? MJ: That’s the biggest myth has ever been played in Newfoundland, and is still being played, that the Beothuk people are extinct. They’re not. They’re still around. They’re here in Conne River. They’re in Flat Bay. They’re in Grand Falls, in all parts of Newfoundland. Anywhere where people, even European people, have lived. They [Europeans] weren’t all murderers. They weren’t all bad. They [Beothuk] were taken in. They were married, men, women. And in that case, they’re still around. Even if you went to Labrador, I think you’d find there are Beothuk people in Labrador too as well. CA: Yet you don’t generally hear about this. Why do you think that is? MJ: I find this hard to understand. How do you populate and how do you grow? You don’t always marry into your own clan. Europeans know that. Well, unless you’re royalty. They married sisters and brothers themselves. That’s how they kept going. [He laughs.] They figured they were being stronger that way. But our people married outside of the clan. They married outside of the community. And if you could marry into a different clan, then you did, because you maintained your strength, and you grew that way. CA: So intermarriage was a common practice among the Mi’kmaq people, was it?

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MJ: Absolutely. CA: And yet, when you look at the history of the Beothuk, a main thread in that history – again, a history that’s written primarily from a European perspective – is that these people kept to themselves, had little to do with others, and in some cases were even thought to fear other people. MJ: No. The Beothuk people were warriors like our people was. They had a system in place where they had a group of people that were warriors. They went out and fought to protect their lands, their territories, no different than our people. If our people on the land met a group of warriors from the Beothuk people, of course there was a fight. There was fights among our own people for different pieces of property where you hunt and live and made a living from. CA: I was just going to follow up on the idea of intermarriage. So it is known among the Mi’kmaq people that there was intermarriage with the Beothuk? That’s no secret? MJ: No. Intermarriage took place with Beothuk people. You got to keep in mind, tuberculosis damn near wiped out this community at one time. And today we’re faced with intermarriage with non-Aboriginal people as well as that, because of that. When you get short of women, what do you do? You go looking for women, and you bring them into the community. But intermarriage took place between Mi’kmaq people and Beothuk people without a doubt. Not just here, but in other parts of Newfoundland as well, without a doubt. CA: It seems to be relatively recently that people are beginning to acknowledge that maybe there are some Beothuk descendants still living. Why is that? MJ: I think part of that would be government. CA: What do you mean? MJ: You know, if all of a sudden, there was proof positive that there were Beothuk people still around – and government have always said the only Aboriginal people in Newfoundland that would have an Aboriginal right and title to this island would be the Beothuk people – if all of a sudden there was proof positive that there was Beothuk people still around, descendants of Beothuk people still around, all hell would break loose. So you have to keep telling this story that they’re all gone. If I made a statement that there were no Mi’kmaq people in Newfoundland – we’re all intermarried, we are no longer Mi’kmaq people – I’d have to maintain that as a government, as long as we live. And government will always maintain that,

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until someone proves them differently. And even then you’ll probably have a fight on your hands like you’ve never seen. Because then they’ll say, “Well you’re so watered down at this stage, there’s no Beothuk left.” You know, until our own scholars start to write about our own history, over and over, keep telling the same stories over and over again, it will still be a myth to a lot of people. And that’s what’s going to take place. Go back to 1985, when we took education away from the church: I was asked quite bluntly by a priest, “If you get your hands on education, what are you going to do with the money? Are you going to buy cigarettes and booze? Because you know absolutely nothing about education.” And the only response I can remember thinking of was, “Well, we can’t do any worse.” And we didn’t. We did take it. It took a short space of time, a couple of months, I remember, to get the church to say, “Yes, you can have education.” There was a big ceremony. They came down and signed the land, the church, the education. But we didn’t get it because they thought we could do it. We got it because they thought we couldn’t do it, and they said, “See? You can’t do it. You don’t know what you’re doing.” And since 1985, we’re producing scholars like Shane MacDonald and Tammy Drew and other people, and those are the people that are going to make the difference in the world.13 Those are the people who are going to continue to tell the right story. They’re our scholars. And we are writing our history now. CA: So that’s changing. MJ: Absolutely. CA: And you see that as being of primary importance. MJ: Absolutely. I remember back in 1982 or ’83 I heard chief Dan George for the first time reciting his version of Oh Canada. He was asked to do a piece for Canada’s bicentennial celebration. And he gave them his version of Oh Canada. The last part that he recited, I remember it, he says, “Before I pass into the spirit world, I will see our people living in the house of law and government, ruling and being ruled.” And that’s what’s taking place here. As our people move out into the world and become lawyers and doctors and every profession you can have, and eventually end up being part of government, those are things that are going to change the world for us, somewhere along the way. Part of Dan George’s message was, “We’ve been beaten. All of our authority has been taken away from us. We’ve been mocked

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in your motion pictures. You’ve given your whiskey and made us drunk. And when we got drunk we forgot who we are. We forgot our pride and dignity. But one tool that we have to be thankful for that comes from the white man is the education system that taught us how to read, write and do all those things.” So that’s what we have to do. That tool, that one tool that they didn’t think would make a difference, is making a difference, and that’s education. So when we took over our school, that was the tool we were looking for, and we got that. I guess it’s, when you look back at history, it’s been said over and over again, we were less than human. We weren’t real people. We weren’t allowed a boat until the 60s. Not us in Newfoundland, but if you lived on a reserve, we weren’t allowed a boat until the 1960s. If you lived on a reserve, I know there was fences around the reserves in Membertou and on Lennox Island, places like that. Indians weren’t allowed out at night. If you were caught outside the fence at night, you were arrested for it. And if you wanted to go to university, you had to give up your status as an Aboriginal person. So it’s to keep you as much back in time as possible, and not allow you to move forward. And that’s why I think of Chief Dan George’s words that are so powerful, so motivating to me that I continue to think that way. That the more people we educate, not only our own people but also other people, about who we are, our chances of survival are so much greater. CA: So Chief Dan George felt that was important, the ability to read and write, even though he came from an oral culture? MJ: He didn’t say that. He didn’t say read and write. He called it education. We had every tool we needed for survival, but we didn’t have that one. Our history was never written. It was always an oral history. But once we manage to grasp this tool and use it to our benefit, things changed. This community changed because of that.14 And other communities have changed because of that. So our only chance of survival is to follow Chief Dan George’s advice, to take that tool that’s not considered a tool, and use it and become stronger and live by it. Be proud of who you are. Know your roots. Know where you come from, and defend it, because you have to defend it. If you say you’re an Aboriginal person today in Newfoundland, you have to defend that. CA: What do you mean? MJ: Well, you know, most people say, “Ah, they’re all gone. Even the Mi’kmaq people. They’re so watered down there’s no Indians anymore.”15 So you have to be prepared to defend that even today.

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CA: How do you feel about the issue of mitochondrial DNA testing? Scientists have extracted a sample from Demasduit’s tooth, and now they have a map of at least part of the DNA region – called HVR 1 – where they’ve charted her mitochondrial DNA.16 What’s your take on the issue of DNA testing? Do you see that as important? MJ: I see that as extremely important. And if I were sitting in government, I’d be a little bit afraid of that. CA: Why? MJ: Because it would prove without a doubt that Beothuk people are still around. To me, that connection is through the DNA testing. There are members of our band who’ve had DNA testing done recently. CA: What was the outcome? MJ: It shows that there are traces of Beothuk ancestry in their DNA. And on the West Coast, in Bay St George, there are at least a half dozen people who have done DNA testing, and it has shown that they have Beothuk blood. And those are people I know personally. Families who come from Conne River who now live in St Albans have also had testing done, and it was positive. We are hoping to have the majority of the community DNA tested to see where there are traces of Beothuk people in our community. We said, “By all means, let’s do it. Let’s put it to rest once and for all.” I’ve got no fear of that whatsoever. I think it would prove beyond a shadow of a doubt our own genealogy and where we’ve come from, but also prove that there’s a connection to Beothuk people as well, and further, going back to the Maritime Archaic. We’re all related to the Maritime Archaic, the Beothuk and the Mi’kmaq – all Aboriginal people in Atlantic Canada. CA: So you see genetic testing as a positive thing? MJ: I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. CA: The Mi’kmaq people have been saying, through their oral history, that yes, there has been intermarriage with the Beothuk. Now there’s a test, an empirical, scientific test that can prove, ostensibly, what some Mi’kmaq people have been saying all along. How do you feel about that? Is there any contradiction there? MJ: It goes back to I guess our earlier conversation, where nothing is valid unless it’s confirmed by scholars, like the medicines or anything else. Unless it’s done by scholars and professional people, it’s not valid. So it just proves what we’ve been saying all along is true. And finally somebody sitting in the house of law and

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government, if you want to call it that, and the major universities in that field say, “Oh yeah, that’s true. It’s okay.” [He laughs.] It used to annoy me like you wouldn’t believe, but not any more. It makes me laugh at the stupidity of it. [He laughs.] CA: A lot of these issues we’re talking about are centuries behind us now: Membertou with his mass conversion in 1610, the arrival of Europeans, their interaction with Beothuk people who, according to many historical sources, disappeared when Shawnadithit died in 1829. We’re in 2011 now. That’s almost 200 years since Shawnadithit passed away. And yet the history is still of interest to people. It’s still significant. Why is that? MJ: Because it never ever got settled. People should really realize it’s the Europeans who have kept that alive. But we never settled that in any way. It was never proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they were the last, or that we were the ones who be the cause of the demise of the Beothuk people. So they [Europeans] deliberately themselves kept that alive, whether it be through shame, I don’t know. But it’s stayed alive, and will stay alive, until some scholar says, “Here’s how it is.” You know, I seen people get upset with me when I talked about the Beothuk people and what happened, that we weren’t responsible for their death and all those other things that took place. And I’ve seen people, young people, get upset and say, “Well, you can’t blame us for what happened 200 years ago.” I say, “I’m not blaming anyone. I’m just talking about history. I’m talking about history that actually took place. It’s your history and my history.” I talk about how our history started when we took control of the steering wheel. The past is past. You can’t do a damn thing. You can dwell on it all you want, but it don’t get you anything. It gets you knowledge. It helps you plot a good future so it never happens again. But at the same time, it’s a part of your history. So the more you talk about your history and my history, the richer you’re going to be, the more powerful we’re going to be. So I think it’s important because it’s an unanswered question that never got answered for 200 years. It’s still not answered. So it will stay important. I think it’s my duty, and your duty, and everybody else’s duty to keep it alive until it do get answered, one way or another. And there’s no fear on our part of that question. If it comes out that, “No, you’re part Siberian,” it’s still a question that got answered. So that’s what needs to happen. It still needs to answer the question. There’s nothing more I hate than asking a

130  Christopher Aylward and Chief Mi’sel Joe

question and not getting an answer. It’s like typical government. If you ask them for something, they’ll find ways around it without really answering the question. And that’s what’s been going on for 200 years. Not just from government, from everyone. CA: Thanks, Chief Joe. Before we wrap up, do you have anything else with regards to this discussion that you’d like to go on the record? MJ: The only thing I think that’s important, really important for all of us, is that we learn how to be respectful of each other, and communicate with each other. And by talking to each other, in a respectful way, whether you’re a scholar or whoever you are, you have good information that I need, and I probably have information that you need. We can all agree to put all that stuff together. This is a damn good place to live, at this stage, in Newfoundland. I think if we can all learn to do that, we’ll be so much better off, all the way around. NOTES 1 Frances B. Briffett, The Story of Newfoundland and Labrador, rev. ed., eds. P.R. Blakeley and M.C. Vernon (Toronto and Vancouver: J.M. Dent and Sons 1954), 24. Patrick Brantlinger and Maura Hanrahan also refer to Briffett in their chapters. 2 Scholars have identified this idea that the Mi’kmaq were brought to the island by the French in order to exterminate the Beothuk as the Mi’kmaq mercenary myth. Despite its pervasiveness in the Newfoundland educational system, by the late 1970s, scholars had discredited the myth and determined to trace its origins. See L.F.S. Upton, “The Extermination of the Beothuk of Newfoundland,” Canadian Historical Review 58, no. 2 (1977): 147; Ralph Pastore, Newfoundland Micmacs: A History of Their Traditional Life (St John’s: Newfoundland Historical Society 1997); Dennis Bartels, “Time Immemorial? A Research Note on Micmacs in Newfoundland,” Newfoundland Quarterly 75, no. 3 (1979): 6–9. 3 John Hewson, “Micmac Place Names in Newfoundland,” Regional Language Studies Newfoundland (St John’s: Memorial University of Newfoundland Folklore and Language Archive 1978), 1–2. 4 In his discussion of early Mi’kmaq presence in Newfoundland, Pastore acknowledges the likelihood that a group of eight Indians described by the English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold, who said the group were

Beothuk and Mi’kmaq  131 manning a Basque shallop in 1602 somewhere off the New England coast, were Mi’kmaq. Gosnold describes the group as drawing the “Coast thereabouts” with a piece of chalk and being able to “name Placentia of the New-found-land.” Pastore, Newfoundland Micmacs, 10. As Pastore points out, Gosnold’s report is significant in that it is the earliest account of Mi’kmaq knowledge of the island. 5 For a discussion of the role of John Peyton, Jr and his father, John Peyton, Sr in the death of the Beothuk man Nonosabasut in 1819, see James P. Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians: The Aboriginal Inhabitants of Newfoundland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1915), 102, 105; Ingeborg Marshall, A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1996), 165–6. For a discussion of John Petyon, Sr ’s violent dealings with the Beothuk, see John Bland, “Letter of Mr. John Bland addressed to Governor ’s Secretary,” 1790, in Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians, 56–8; George C. Pulling, “A Few Facts by G.C. Pulling Respecting the Native Indians of the Isle of Newfoundland, Anno Domini 1792,” 1792, in Ingeborg Marshall, Reports and letters by George Christopher Pulling relating to the Beothuk Indians of Newfoundland (St John’s: Breakwater 1989), 136–7. 6 Some scholars have identified John Peyton, Jr as a possible source of the Mi’kmaq mercenary myth. See Upton, “The Extermination of the Beothuk of Newfoundland,” 147n.37; Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians, 26; Pastore, Newfoundland Micmacs, 19. 7 Charles A. Martijn, “Early Mi’kmaq Presence in Southern Newfoundland: An Ethnohistorical Perspective, c. 1500–1763,” Newfoundland Studies 19, no. 1 (spring 2003): 44–102; idem, “An Eastern MicMac Domain of Islands,” Actes du Vingtième Congrès des Algonquinistes, ed. William Cowan (Ottawa: Carleton University 1989), 208–31. Martijn’s view corresponds with the Mi’kmaq idea of their territory, Mi’kma’ki, as stretching “west from Ktaqamkuk [Newfoundland] to Kespe’kewaq (Gaspé) including the Maritime Provinces and Maine.” Miawpukek Mi’Kmaq, Miawpukek Mi’kmaq (St John’s: K and D Printing 1997); James Y. Henderson, “Mikmaw Tenure in Atlantic Canada,” Dalhousie Law Journal 18, no. 2 (1995): 225. 8 See Her Majesty the Queen v. Ken Drew, 2003, PCNL 1025. Miawpukek legal counsel Shane MacDonald feels that the band lost this case largely because so little weight was accorded the Mi’kmaq oral history presented. 9 The Conne River Band hosted their first powwow in Conne River, preceded by a holistic healing conference in Native medicinal practices, in July 1994.

132  Christopher Aylward and Chief Mi’sel Joe 10 Frank G. Speck, Beothuk and Micmac: Indian Notes and Monographs (New York: Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, 1922), 55–70. 11 For opposing interpretations of Mi’kmaq/Beothuk relations, see Ingeborg Marshall “Beothuk and Micmac: Re-examining Relationships,” Acadiensis 17, no. 2 (1988): 52–82; Ktaqamkuk Ilnui Saqimawoutie, Freedom to Live Our Own Way in Our Own Land (Conne River: Conne River Indian Band Council 1980), 4–13; Marshall, A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk, 80. 12 See Frank Speck, “Comparative Ethnological Notes,” including his Table of Ethnological Comparisons, in Beothuk and Micmac, 30–46. 13 Shane MacDonald is director of justice and legal counsel for the Miawpukek First Nation; Tammy Drew is Miawpukek’s general manager. 14 In 1986 the Conne River band council assumed control of the community’s school, and Mi’kmaq language and culture are now integrated into the curriculum. A number of successful initiatives have been launched in the aquaculture, agriculture, lumber, and tourism industries, providing employment opportunities for local people. As listed in Miawpukek Mi’kmaq, local government services and organizations sponsored and operated by the band council include policing, health care and social services, child care and family services, education (St Anne’s School), fisheries management, and public works. Economic-development projects include Conne River Tourist Services, Miawpukek Cable Vision, and Miawpukek Crafts. 15 See William MacGregor, Report on a Visit to the Micmac Indians at Bay D’Espoir: Colonial Reports, Miscellaneous, No. 54 (London: Darling and Son 1908), 6–7; Stanley St Croix “The Micmacs of Newfoundland,” 1937, in Joseph R. Smallwood, ed., The Book of Newfoundland (St John’s: Newfoundland Book Publishers 1989), 286. 16 See Melanie Kuch et al., “A Preliminary Analysis of the DNA and Diet of the Extinct Beothuk: A Systematic Approach to Ancient Human DNA,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 132 (2007): 594–604.

6 The Beothuk and the Myth of Prior Invasions patr i c k bran t l in ge r

At the time of first contact, the population of the Beothuk of Newfoundland may have been as little as 500 or as large as 20,000.1 The best estimates today claim it may never have been greater than 1,600.2 Whatever the case, the earliest accounts by Europeans emphasized that the Beothuk were small in number and that they lived in the remotest recesses of Newfoundland, away from the coast. Both of these details were said to have resulted from their encounters with their Indigenous enemies, the Mi’kmaq from Nova Scotia and the Inuit and Innu from Labrador.3 The Mi’kmaq in particular were seen as “the implacable enemies of the Red Indians.”4 Yet, as early as 1766, Governor Hugh Palliser declared that the “barbarous system of killing prevails amongst our People towards the native Indians ... whom our People always kill, when they can meet them.”5 “Our People” meant the English colonists. Among modern accounts, Frank Speck in Beothuk and Micmac expressed scepticism that “the Micmac-Montaignais aided in the remorseless activities against the Beothuk.”6 But The Story of Newfoundland and Labrador by Frances Briffett, a text used in Newfoundland schools as recently as the 1970s, claims that there was a “terrible war of extermination” between the Mi’kmaq and the Beothuk, with the wellarmed Mi’kmaq getting the best of it.7 The most recent major study of the Beothuk is Ingeborg Marshall’s 1996 A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk. In her chapter on relations of the Beothuk with their “native neighbors,” Marshall is much less sceptical than Speck about the early accounts of Mi’kmaq and Inuit violence against the Beothuk, even though these accounts come from just a handful of English sources.8 In his 1977 book on the extinction of the Beothuk, Frederick Rowe is more concerned to show the inadequacies of many of the accounts of

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massacres by English settlers than he is to dispel stories of Mi’kmaq, Inuit, or French violence.9 Yet, like Speck, he is sceptical about the veracity of many of the early accounts. The reports that describe what the English did to the Beothuk are sometimes eyewitness or even participant versions, but that does not necessarily validate them. The accounts that emphasize Mi’kmaq, Innu, and Inuit violence follow a pattern common on almost all colonial frontiers, the contact and conflict zones formed by the expansion of European empires from the Renaissance forward. This pattern expresses the myth of prior invasions. Before the arrival of Europeans in many parts of the world, there were indeed countless wars and invasions. But the ideological utility of emphasizing and sometimes fabricating such invasions for excusing the violence of European imperialism is apparent. Whether factual or not, stressing prior, non-European invasions serves the ideological function of normalizing European violence. Besides violence, disease, of course, also contributed to the vanishing of the Beothuk. And the French invaders (fishermen, fur trappers) may sometimes have treated the Beothuk cruelly, further reducing their population and perhaps causing them to be secretive and vengeful by the time English settlement began.10 Yet, according to the myth of prior invasions, supposedly the Europeans, whether French or English – the worst of them anyway – were only repeating what the earlier invaders of Beothuk territory, the Mi’kmaq, Inuit, and perhaps the Innu from Labrador, had already been doing. Race War and History A report in the London Times concerning Captain David Buchan’s 1819 expedition offers a clear example of the myth of prior invasions. The Times speculated that the Beothuk may have already been “exterminated by the Esquimaux Indians, who, to obtain the furs with which they are covered are known to invariably murder them at every opportunity.”11 Just how Buchan or any other European could know what took place between the Inuit and the Beothuk, much less what motivated the former to attack the latter, is unclear, to say the least. The Inuit obviously obtained furs without murdering the Beothuk in just the same way that the Beothuk obtained furs. Because the Beothuk were difficult or even impossible to locate, there was no way that Buchan or any other European could have observed any encounters between that elusive people and the Inuit.

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Another possibility countenanced by European settlers was that the Beothuk, even before the arrival of Europeans, were being killed off by the Mi’kmaq in what Briffett called “a terrible war of extermination.” Once the French came, went this theory, perhaps they encouraged the Mi’kmaq to attack the Beothuk. In one version, the French brought the Mi’kmaq over from Nova Scotia and gave them guns to hunt down the Beothuk. According to William Cormack, founder of the Beothuk Institution in 1827, the French offered bounties to the Mi’kmaq for bringing in the heads of the Beothuk they killed.12 As L.F.S. Upton remarks, this was “a very comforting explanation, since it relegated the English to the minor role of finishing off what others had begun.”13 So here again is the myth of prior invasions doing its “comforting” work. Like Frederick Rowe, Upton doubts that the French were in any major way responsible for the extermination of the Beothuk, and he also declares that it is “highly unlikely that the Mi’kmaq played any significant part in the destruction of the Beothucks.”14 But the tale about the French placing a bounty on the heads of the Beothuk was “sedulously repeated” and “received wide currency,” in part through the 1848 publication of the fictional Ottawah: Last Chief of the Red Indians of Newfoundland, first published in London, republished in Philadelphia, and translated into German (Figure 6.1).15 Whether Inuit, Mi’kmaq, or even the French, the general assumption was that savages always behaved like savages. The Beothuk were no exception: when they met with violence, they sought revenge one way or another. For early European observers, savages followed the general pattern of history, which was invariably one of race war. Race conflict, not class conflict, was the great engine of history. This idea did not emerge from social Darwinism towards the end of the 1800s; instead, it has much earlier origins in assumptions about history and human behaviour. It was supported, for example, by early archaeological findings; because they were made of stone or metal, among the most common relics from the remote past were weapons. It was also supported by what seemed most important to ancient historians and writers such as Homer and Virgil – wars, the stuff of epics. In a sense, social Darwinism put the capstone on the general theory of the pervasiveness and importance of race war. On this model, as Walter Bagehot argued in Physics and Politics (1872), for the victors war led to progress; weaker tribes and, hence, races, were often exterminated, or anyway enslaved and sometimes assimilated by the stronger ones. Supposedly with the advent of civilization – at least, civilization as embodied by

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Figure 6.1  Illustration from Ottawah: Last Chief of the Red Indians of ­Newfoundland. Image courtesy of the Centre for Newfoundland Studies, ­Memorial University Libraries.

The Beothuk and the Myth of Prior Invasions  137

the English – came the possibility of teaching savages to stop being savages. So the early accounts in Newfoundland also include narratives by Buchan, Cormack, and others engaged in attempts to make peaceful overtures to the Beothuk and, if possible, to treat them kindly, thereby illustrating the virtues of civilization. These attempts at conciliation, however, most notoriously evident in the treatment of Demasduit, involved trying to capture a Beothuk or two, bringing them to St John’s, teaching them a little bit of English, and then returning them to their people – peaceful overtures in intent, no doubt, but kidnapping cannot be called peaceful. As Upton notes, by rationalizing genocidal violence, the early accounts about violence unleashed against the Beothuk by various groups (Inuit, Mi’kmaq, Innu, and French) are “very comforting.” According to the myth of prior invasions, European invaders – whether English, French, or any other nationality – are only behaving like previous savage invaders. But supposedly the Europeans – the English, at least – are also the bearers of civilization and Christianity and, hence, of the possible salvation of the savages they are decimating. Meanwhile, without being bearers of civilization, the savage invaders who first started the extermination of the Beothuk or the Bushmen or the Tasmanians or the Mound Builders themselves may be suffering the fate they inflicted on those whose territories they were the first (or possibly second or third) to invade. One implication is that the prior invaders deserve the same fate they inflicted on their predecessors: turnabout is fair play. Without exactly admitting it, however, many European colonizers – whether English, French, Dutch, Spanish, or Portuguese – saw the goal of so-called civilization as liquidating savages along with savagery. The myth of prior invasions was compounded by uncertainty about definitions of race and culture. As recently as 1977, Frederick Rowe unwittingly adds to the problem by referring throughout his study to the Beothuk as a “race,” rather than merely as a culturally distinct branch of the Algonquian peoples. Like the first Tasmanians, the Beothuk, from the beginning of European settlement, were understood to be both very primitive and perhaps a totally unique “race,” different from the savages who surrounded and allegedly often attacked them.16 This loose usage of “race” suggested that with their extinction a biologically unique branch of the human species may have disappeared. Possibly even an entirely separate species had been wiped out. At least the idea that they might be distinct “races” or even species earned groups

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that appeared to be on the short road to total extinction – the Tasmanians and Beothuk in particular – a special sort of morbid attention. However that may be, in his 1768 narrative, Lieutenant John Cartwright declares that the Beothuk “are not only secluded thus from any communication with Europeans, but they are … effectually cut off from the society of every other Indian people.” He continued: “The Canadians [Mi’kmaq and other groups from the mainland] have generally a strong hunt that range[s] the western coast of Newfoundland, between whom and these natives reigns so mortal an enmity … that they never meet but a bloody combat ensues. This is the case with all savage nations; occasioned by mutual fears, and not being able to understand each other’s language.”17 “Savage nations” supposedly worked overtime to exterminate each other, and often enough to exterminate themselves through such savage practices as war, infanticide, cannibalism, and widow murder.18 Before the advent of civilization, race war was what constituted all of history. Donald Holly writes that around 1900 “the Beothuk figured prominently in the debate as to the identity of the ancient ‘Red Paint People’ of Maine. After years of archaeological investigation at ‘Red Paint’ sites, Charles Willoughby … concluded that the Beothuk represented a surviving branch of these people who had been driven eastward by invading tribes from the west.”19 Others including Frank Speck disagreed with the “Red Paint” thesis, but not with the view that the Beothuk had been driven to Newfoundland by “invading tribes.”20 Whether true or false regarding the “Red Paint” people, Willoughby’s theory is yet another version of the myth of prior invasions. But there was never any reason to suppose that relations between primitive societies always involved enmity and war. Amicable relations were perhaps just as prevalent, if not more so. In the case of the Beothuk, Mi’kmaq, and other Indigenous groups in Newfoundland and northeastern Canada, writes Holly, “stylistic similarities in tool types and the wide distribution of exotic raw materials throughout the Strait of Belle Isle region, for instance, indicate far-flung trade and exchange networks in prehistory” (134).21 And trade meant at least relatively friendly, cooperative relations. In any event, most observers believed that the Beothuk were, like the Mi’kmaq, a branch of the Algonquians and yet isolated for so long that they were relatively unique. Others theorized that the Beothuk had originally come from Norway or possibly Iceland.22 Harbingers of the later European invasions, the Norwegian ancestors of the Beothuk

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had run up against the savagery of Mi’kmaq, Inuit, and “the Mountaineers” from Labrador and were already nearly exterminated before the English arrived. What is more, the Norwegian possibility gave the Beothuk story a twist that made it similar to stories on some other imperial frontiers according to which a white race had set down roots and even established a civilization before savage invaders destroyed it and members of the white race along with it. The further bizarre speculations that the ancestors of the Beothuk had been Basques – the word “Beothuk” resembles the Basque word for “codfish” – or perhaps even Tartars operated in a similar fashion, though with less possibility that these ancestors had established a civilization in the New World.23 Maybe the Basques or Tartars were half-civilized, but that didn’t really matter. Again, the extinction of the Beothuk had begun long before the arrival of either the French or the English; most of the bloodletting had been done by Mi’kmaq, Innu, or Inuit. During the first half of the nineteenth century, “race” was applied loosely to any group or society that appeared different from other groups or societies around it – different, that is, in some or all of these ways: appearance, customs, language, beliefs, and the spaces they occupied. It may be that, in part because of their use of ochre to colour their skin and clothing, leading to the epithet “Red Indians,” the Beothuk were perceived as more distinct from the Mi’kmaq and other Algonquian societies than they in fact were. Despite its vagueness, race was a way of distinguishing between human populations that nineteenth-century observers invested with great significance. In Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Tancred; or, the New Crusade (1847), the Jewish sage Sidonia says: “All is race; there is no other truth.” Three years later, Dr Robert Knox declared in The Races of Men that “race is everything: literature, science, art, in a word, civilisation, depend on it.”24 For both Disraeli and Knox, though there might only be one human species (Knox doubted this proposition), races were very unequal. Disraeli credited the “Saxon race” with being superior to most others, though at the top of his racial hierarchy was the “Arabian race,” and the most superior branch of that race were “the Hebrews.” Members of the “Arabian race,” Disraeli’s protagonist learns from “the Angel of Arabia,” have in the past founded all of the great religions and empires (299). Being idealistic, Tancred accepts what the Angel says about how those empires and religions were founded: by “faith” as well as by the sword. Being a hard-headed realist (or so he considered himself), Knox states that superior races dominate inferior ones through war,

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slavery, and other means of control such as establishing aristocracies, and if the superior races don’t wish to enslave or otherwise lord it over the inferior ones, then they exterminate them. Explicitly for Knox and implicitly for Disraeli, conflict between races, often amounting to genocide, is the key to history and, hence, to progress. According to Knox, “the races of men” are unchanging and hierarchical. Miscegenation is possible, but its effects are not lasting. In southern Africa, the “Saxon Hollanders,” as Knox calls the Boers, are busily exterminating the “Bosjemen” and “Caffres,” which are “inferior races.” For him, whites cannot live peaceably, side by side, with blacks. The superior whites must kill them, enslave them, or both. Although Knox is quite explicit about both extermination and slavery, he nevertheless adds that the inferior races in southern Africa “mysteriously had run their course, reaching the time appointed for their destruction.”25 Perhaps the only aspect of his theory of race war that is mysterious is why God (or Nature) should have created races that were doomed to destruction at the hands of other races. At any rate, Knox thinks the future will be just like the past, consisting of “the approaching struggle of race against race.”26 A political radical who condemned “Saxon” imperialism and violence against the “coloured races,” Knox nevertheless believed that “the inferior types of mankind” were doomed. Meanwhile the “dark races” are “feebly contending against the stronger races for a corner of [the] earth … [but] destiny seems to have marked them for destruction.”27 Knox’s gloomy view of history as perpetual race war until the “inferior” races have been liquidated is in part a reflection of what he had witnessed in southern Africa, where he was stationed for two and a half years, 1817 to 1820, and where the Boers were struggling with the British and both of those white “races” were in turn struggling with all of the “dark races” for territory. It is also a reflection of the little that was then understood about the history of southern Africa before the Dutch and British invasions. In a far more optimistic vein, the Reverend Charles Kingsley attributed the founding of the British Empire (and, hence, the founding of modern civilization) to race war. In the early going, the Teutonic (or Germanic) barbarians, ancestors of the English, had toppled the decrepit Roman Empire, itself the product of race war and slavery. A branch of the barbarians had invaded the British Isles, forced the Romans out, and driven their previous inhabitants to Wales, Ireland, Scotland. There was still a problem involved in subduing the Celtic “fringe,” emanating from Ireland, but that was, Kingsley

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thought, minor. Next came the great surge of the great Anglo-Saxon race over the oceans. In his self-proclaimed “epic” 1855 novel, Westward Ho!, Kingsley produces another version of the myth of prior invasions, and this time it is his version of the rise of what he viewed as the greatest empire history has ever known. Towards the beginning of his novel, Kingsley writes: It is to the sea-life and labour of Bideford ... and many another little western town, that England owes the foundation of her naval and commercial glory. It was the men of Devon, the Drakes and Hawkinses, Gilberts and Raleighs, Grenvilles and Oxenhams, and a host more of “forgotten worthies,” whom we shall learn one day to honour as they deserve, to whom she owes her commerce, her colonies, her very existence. For had they not first crippled, by their West Indian raids, the ill-gotten resources of the Spaniard, and then crushed his last huge effort in Britain’s Salamis, the glorious fight of 1588 [i.e., the destruction of the Spanish Armada], what had we been by now, but a Popish appanage of a world-tyranny as cruel as heathen Rome itself, and far more devilish?28

From Kingsley’s chauvinistic perspective, this is by far the grandest possible version of the myth of prior invasions, the defeat of the dastardly Spaniards who had been first to sink their claws into the West Indies and South America. The aspect of British history that Kingsley’s “epic” deals with is recent; the full version down to the Elizabethan era had consisted mainly of waves of invaders of different races (or, at least, different nationalities) conquering and colonizing Britain: Picts, Celts, Britons, Romans, Danes, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, down to the Normans. This model of how history worked through race conflict was easily transferred to the far reaches of the empire: Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, and Newfoundland. It would also be the model for the foreseeable future, although thoughts about the future led some Victorian intellectuals such as George Eliot and H.G. Wells to worry about whether the Anglo-Saxon race would forever be the superior, all-­conquering and all-virtuous race it had so far proven itself to be.29 Kingsley was not among these worried intellectuals. To imperialists like Kingsley, the history of the British Empire in India only proved the case that the Anglo-Saxon race was the greatest, strongest, and most humane history had ever known. Accounts of the formation of Queen Victoria’s “jewel in her crown” also offer

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obvious versions of the myth of prior invasions. India was a motley of races, religions, languages, and cultures many of which had been subdued and brought under the authority of the Moghul Empire. But when the British arrived (again, along with the French), the Moghul Empire was falling apart at the seams. British commerce, in the guise of the East India Company, and British conquest, in the guise of the army of the East India Company, gradually made inroads into what the British tended to see as the rottenness of most or all Indian societies and polities until Britain had taken over almost the entire subcontinent. The Indian Mutiny, which by some early accounts was the last gasp of the old Moghul Empire, only demonstrated the righteousness and rightness of British rule. Sir John Seeley, James Anthony Froude, and many others chalked up the British conquest of India to progress and the advent of civilization in one of the many dark places of the earth. At just about the same time that Robert Knox was writing, Marx and Engels, in The Communist Manifesto, were asserting that the key to history was class conflict. But they understood such conflict as having originated in race war. “You know very well where we found our idea of class struggle,” Marx told Engels in 1882; “we found it in the work of the French historians who talked about the race struggle.”30 In Britain, one manifestation was the idea of the “Norman yoke,” according to which the Norman invasion of 1066 led to the establishment of an aristocracy that dominated and oppressed the Anglo-Saxon masses down to the present. And another was the idea that the Anglo-Saxons had for ages, and rightly so, dominated the Celtic race who occupied Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Both of these configurations seemed to explain the present-day existence, and conflict between, lower and upper classes. All appeared to be the outcome of race and of one invasion after another. Tasmanians, Zulus, and Mound Builders Because the assumed complete extermination of the Tasmanians is similar to the assumed complete extermination of the Beothuk, as Fiona Polack discusses in her chapter, and also because it raised a good deal of humanitarian consternation and belated hand-wringing (see, for example, Anna Johnston and Mitchell Rolls),31 it is not surprising to find the myth of prior invasions at work in Australia. In the case of Tasmania, according to the myth the Aborigines there had been driven out of the mainland by more powerful groups of savages. James Bonwick,

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in one of his generally sympathetic accounts of the Aboriginal Tasmanians, writes that the “fringe of Blacks, around the Indian Ocean, having more or less frizzled hair, would seem to point to a common centre” or place of origin. But “on the Australian continent, the remains of several races, from the dwarfish Negrillo to the Malay, [suggest that] the Tasmanians may have been but one of a succession of races.” What is more, writes Bonwick, there are “evidences of a similar succession in the British Isles, indicating ancient restless movements of peoples driven westward by war or famine. We may, then, hesitate to call the Tasmanians an indigenous people.”32 By this logic, they are refugees from “war or famine” on the mainland, perhaps driven to the south by stronger, more ferocious savages. While modern historian Lyndall Ryan writes that the Tasmanian Aborigines migrated into the southernmost part of Australia around 40,000 years ago, she does not speculate that they were driven there by “war and famine.” Moreover, she does not view them as a “race” distinct from the mainland Aborigines. She grants that their hair is generally different from that of most mainland groups, but that hardly makes them a race apart or, as Bonwick suspects, more like the “blacks” who “ring” the Indian Ocean than are the mainland Aborigines.33 In any event, like Bonwick, other early supposed experts about the mainland population often speculated that they also had been driven by more powerful, more warlike “races” across the seas to Australia. Thus Russell McGregor writes that evolutionary anthropologists Baldwin Spencer and F.J. Gillen, in their 1927 study The Arunta: A Stone Age People, treat all human history “as a series of collisions between discrete racial entities, from each of which one race emerged victorious both physically and culturally.”34 The idea was that the Australian Aborigines may have been driven south out of what is today New Guinea, or Melanesia, or both by more ferocious – that is, in Darwinian terms, “fitter” – tribes. Another anthropologist, A.P. Elkin, speculated in the 1930s that the first inhabitants of the Australian continent were the ancestors of the Tasmanian Aborigines, but that those who were not exterminated had been driven to the Tasmanian peninsula (as it then was) by the “Australoid invasion.”35 And so the myth goes: whether or not the Tasmanians were a different race from the mainland Aborigines, being on the losing end of race war was supposedly their history and what drove them into the liminal territory they now occupied. They had always been the victims of savage behaviour; perhaps the Tasmanians had been well along the road to

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extermination before the British arrived. There was even the notion that the Tasmanians were so savage and dysfunctional that they were the main cause of their own extermination, a notion that was repeated in regard to the mainland Aborigines in false claims that they were cannibals, practised infanticide, and were constantly at war with each other, and that when anyone died in a clan or tribe, they sought revenge by killing someone in another clan or tribe.36 Moreover, the additional myth of the total extinction of the Tasmanians by 1876 was also ideologically useful because it suggested that the situation was better for Aborigines on the mainland, even though massacres and official extermination campaigns as in Queensland came closer to the definition of genocide in the 1948 United Nations Convention than did what happened in Tasmania.37 The assumption of the complete extermination of the Beothuk may also have been useful in a similar manner, but the vanishing of the Beothuk seems to have received much less publicity than did that of the Tasmanians. That may be partly because the Tasmanian situation came to a head in the 1830s, heyday of abolitionism and evangelical humanitarianism in Britain and elsewhere, and also because Darwin and other scientists paid close attention to it. The myth of prior invasions is also evident in writings about Africa. By 1800, European settlement in southern Africa had led to warfare with the Xhosas, which continued intermittently for the better part of the nineteenth century. Boer farmers had commenced “commando” raids against Bushmen and Hottentots, seeking their extermination or enslavement. The mixed-race Griquas had acquired horses and guns, thereby posing another military threat on the Boers’ frontiers. And Robert Knox was in southern Africa when the Zulu kingdom was beginning to form under the leadership of Shaka. It must have seemed virtually self-evident to Knox from his experience there that race war was what constituted history. It seems likely, too, that while in southern Africa Knox learned that the Xhosas, Zulus, and other Bantu peoples had been the first invaders and therefore the first exterminators of the weaker races they encountered, the Bushmen and Hottentots. As I point out in Dark Vanishings, “the invading and exterminating Bantu ‘horde’ myth in white South African discourse goes back at least to the 1830s and such works as Robert Godlonton’s Narrative of the Irruption of the Kafir [sic] Hordes into the Eastern Province of the Cape of Good Hope,” which places blame for the 1834–5 war between white, mainly British settlers and the Xhosas on those “hordes.”38

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In 1910 South African historian George Theal wrote that the Bushmen were driven into the mountains and deserts by “constant war” with the invading Bantus. Their extermination was well under way before the arrival of the British and even the Dutch. As to the Hottentots, they had been residing near the centre of Africa or perhaps even as far north as Somaliland, until “they were driven [south] by a more powerful people, of a black colour, who came down from the north or north-east” (just what “black” people existed “north or north east” of Somaliland Theal does not speculate). Theal further claims that Shaka and the nineteenth-century Zulu Empire had many precedents, with many “despots” before them spreading “desolation over wide tracts of land, [and] that cannibalism as practised in Basutoland and in Natal … was no new custom with sections of the Bantu family.”39 Perhaps the best-known examples of the myth of prior invasions in regard to Africa can be found in the romances of H. Rider Haggard, including King Solomon’s Mines (1885), She (1887), and Allan Quatermain (1887). All three are “lost world romances,” as Allienne Becker calls them, in which early civilizations, founded by members of a Caucasian or perhaps a Semitic race, are either destroyed by “hordes” of savage, black Africans or manage to survive despite the savagery that surrounds them. In the first tale, three Englishmen, accompanied by noble savage and Zulu warrior Umbopa, venture into the unknown realm of Kukuanaland, where they discover black savages occupying the area in which an ancient civilization had once flourished. If they ever did know anything about their civilized predecessors, the Kukuanas have lost that knowledge. The Englishmen discover a vast trove of diamonds, which suggests to them that they have also discovered the remains of King Solomon’s “golden Ophir” (Haggard’s choice of diamonds instead of gold may have been prompted by the recent discovery of diamonds at Kimberly in southern Africa). In She, the almost immortal, fair-skinned femme fatale Ayesha rules over a savage, semi-dark skinned race of cannibals, the treacherous Amahaggers. Ayesha resides among the ruins of Kör, which, the English adventurers learn, was probably the predecessor of an ancient Egyptian civilization far to the north. Ayesha herself is Egyptian in race. And in Allan Quatermain, the hero discovers the kingdom of the Zu-Vendis, a civilized, white-skinned people in the middle of darkest Africa. In the first two romances, a civilization founded by a supposedly advanced, light-skinned race has been overrun by black savages. In all three, Haggard is at least distantly elaborating upon what he

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experienced in his five years in southern Africa and also on what he thought he knew about the Zulus. And he is writing about what almost all Europeans believed was the origin of “Great Zimbabwe” and the many other ruins that dotted the landscape in southeastern Africa, just as the mounds did in North America. When in the early 1870s German traveller Karl Mauch stumbled upon the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, he immediately assumed they could not have been built by black Africans, but only by a superior, white or at least lighter-skinned race. This common notion only began to be debunked by archaeologists in 1906 and persisted long after in South African discourse.40 Haggard had many imitators, including Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan; even the most recent movie versions of Haggard’s tales continue to paint Africa as “the dark continent” and black Africans as cannibal savages engaged in constant warfare among themselves. Their supposed savagery provided plenty of justification for “the Scramble for Africa” that occurred among the European powers after the Berlin Conference of 1885. In the African context, the myth of prior invasions was enhanced by stories about the Zulus, including Haggard’s first writings, collected in his non-fiction book, Cetawayo and His White Neighbours (1872). Like many others, Haggard was mightily impressed by the initial victory of the Zulus over British forces in 1879 (many of those forces were African recruits; they eventually defeated the Zulus). Haggard was also impressed by accounts of the Zulu mfecane, or empire building, which came about through warring against other “tribes” and which was interpreted by Europeans as another instance of race war, even though the “tribes” were mainly Bantus. At the heart of these accounts was Shaka, the Zulu “Napoleon,” who was typically portrayed as both a military genius and a bloodthirsty monster.41 Under Shaka’s command, Zulu impis, or regiments, drove all resistant African tribes before them, causing widespread devastation and extermination. So the Zulus became a prime example of savages warring against other savages as well as of race war. When they were finally defeated by the British forces, supposedly civilization and peace came to Natal, and many lesser tribes were supposedly saved from complete annihilation. The myth of prior invasions is evident also in many early attempts to account for the often enormous artificial mounds that dotted the landscape of the United States. In his introduction to The Beothucks or Red Indians, James P. Howley writes that the “Mound Builders” were perhaps overwhelmed by “swarms of more savage and more warlike hordes.”42 It was frequently asserted that the present-day Huron or

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Chippewa were too primitive and savage to have built them. Instead, as Roger Kennedy notes, many speculated that they must have been “the creation of Hindus, Welsh, Egyptians, the Lost Tribes of Israel, or even the Japanese: The Indians whose culture was being destroyed in the nineteenth century could not be the same people as those who accomplished such prodigies. Sometimes it was insisted that these savages were the descendants of the barbarians who had swept down upon kindly Mound Builders. So, this solacing story went, the new Americans, redressing an ancient crime, were agents of delayed retribution. Better than that – theirs was retribution at the hands of a master race.”43 Thomas Jefferson, himself of Celtic descent, thought that the Mound Builders had probably been Welsh. Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, surmised that they were one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. In his 1830s best-seller Antiquities and Discoveries in the West, Joseph Priest “added Polynesians, Greeks, Romans, and Chinese to the list of alternative mound builders – anyone would do but Indians.”44 Meanwhile the mounds were being levelled to make way for farms and cities at a rate that almost kept pace with the decimation of Native Americans by white Americans. In The Vanishing American, Brian Dippie writes: “Late in the eighteenth century and throughout most of the nineteenth, the ‘myth of the mound builders’ flourished. Its principal tenets were that a vanished race, probably white, had thrived in the valley of the Mississippi centuries ago, constructed the mounds that dotted the region, then perished at the hands of the ‘red savages.’”45 William Cullen Bryant’s 1832 poem “The Prairies” memorializes the builders of “the mighty mounds” to be seen in Illinois: A race, that long since passed away, Built them; – a disciplined and populous race Heaped, with long toil, the earth, while yet the Greek Was hewing the Pentelicus to forms Of symmetry, and rearing on its rock The glittering Parthenon.

The territory of the Mound Builders, however, was then invaded by “the red man”: The roaming hunter tribes, warlike and fierce, And the mound-builders vanished from the earth.

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So if the new race of European invaders makes “the red man” vanish “from the earth,” it is only doing what the “warlike and fierce” Indians had done to the Mound Builders. As Dippie notes, the “myth of the mound builders” served several ideological functions. It gave the fledgling United States an archaeological past at a time when it had only a few decades of history. One patriotic writer asserted that the new nation was unique in forming “a perfect union of the past and present; the rigor of a nation just born walking over the hallowed ashes of a race whose history is too early for a record, and surrounded by the living forms of a people hovering between the two.”46 More importantly, President Andrew Jackson found a perfect rationalization for his policy of Indian removal in the story that the Indians had removed, indeed exterminated, the Mound Builders. In 1885 George Boyce, president of the Manitoba Historical Society, speculated that the Mound Builders “had a faculty not possessed by modern Indians.” They belonged “to a different race from the present Indians.” He deemed the Indians not capable of building mounds and refused to see them as “agriculturalists,” which presumably settled people like the Mound Builders surely were. The fact that many Indian societies grew crops did not interfere with his argument. Boyce also speculated that the Mound Builders had their origins in Mexico or perhaps even Peru. “The Aztecs gave themselves out as intruders in Mexico,” Boyce writes. “They were a bloody and warlike race” that exterminated the “civilized race” they found there. These were the Toltecs. But a branch of this “civilized race,” that is, the Toltecs, Boyce further speculates, had migrated into the Mississippi valley and as far north as Manitoba, where they built the mounds that he took to be proof of their advanced civilization and racial differentiation from the Indians of the United States and Canada, who had in turn exterminated the Toltec Mound Builders.47 Besides the vanishing of the Mound Builders, whoever they were, the myth of prior invasions was applied to many other cases involving Native Americans. A well-known instance occurs in fiction, in James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans (1826). At the time of the “French and Indian Wars” in the mid-eighteenth century, the population of the good Mohicans or Delaware Indians, according to Cooper, is dwindling away rapidly mainly because of the actions of all of the bad Indians who have waged war against them. Yet, as supposedly in the case of the Beothuk, the French also have a hand, the wrong hand, in

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this warfare, while the British forces and Natty Bumppo are allied with the good Indians, the vanishing Mohicans. In any event, the myth of prior invasions appears in many contexts throughout British and, indeed, European writing about relations between colonizers and colonized. It is a “comforting” myth, because it says that whatever the British – or French or Spanish or Dutch – colonizers are doing is just repeating history. That history, moreover, consists so far only of savages doing to other savages what savages always do to each other. But with the coming of the Europeans comes the advent of civilization. It seemed inevitable that some populations – whether small ones like the Beothuk or the Tasmanians or large ones like mainland Australian Aborigines or like Native Americans in general – would be obliterated from the face of the earth. But that was just the way progress worked. As other contributors to this book attest, including Mi’kmaq leader Chief Mi’sel Joe, the efficacy of the myth of prior invasions makes it a tenacious one. Indeed, in the context of the decimation of the Beothuk, and perceptions of surviving Indigenous peoples in Newfoundland and Labrador, the “myth’s” consequences have been all too real. NOTES 1 L.F.S. Upton, “The Extermination of the Beothucks of Newfoundland,” in J.R. Miller, ed., Sweet Promises: A Reader on Indian-White Relations (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1991), 69. 2 Sean T. Cadigan, Newfoundland and Labrador: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2009), 22. 3 For clarity, I use the contemporary terms “Mi’kmaq,” “Innu,” and “Inuit” in this chapter to refer to the Indigenous inhabitants of the territory now known as the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Other variants of all three designations have circulated. The Mi’kmaq, for instance, have also been known as the Micmac, the Innu as the Naskapi and the Montagnais, and the Inuit as Eskimo or Esquimaux. 4 Upton, “Extermination,” 81. 5 Qtd. in ibid., 74. 6 Frank Speck, Micmac and Beothuk (New York: Museum of the American Indian 1922), 47. 7 Frances Briffett, The Story of Newfoundland and Labrador (Toronto: J.M. Dent 1949), 52.

150  Patrick Brantlinger 8 Ingeborg Marshall, A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1996), 42–61. 9 Frederick W. Rowe, Extinction: The Beothuks of Newfoundland (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson 1977), 4–5. 10 See the extracts from Harrisse and Sir David Kirke in James P. Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians: The Aboriginal Inhabitants of Newfoundland (Toronto: Prospero 2000 [1915]), 22–3. 11 The Times, qtd. in Howley, The Beothucks, 105. 12 Howley, The Beothucks, 183. 13 Upton, “Extermination,” 80. 14 Ibid., 82. 15 Ibid., 80; E.J. Devereux, “The Beothuk Indians of Newfoundland in Fact and Fiction,” Dalhousie Review 50 (1970–2): 350–62. 16 See, for example, the reference to “this strange, mysterious race” in Howley, The Beothucks, xix, even though he believes the Beothuk to be an offshoot of the Algonquian Indians. 17 Qtd. in Howley, The Beothucks, 35 (my emphasis). 18 See Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2003). 19 Donald H. Holly, “A Historiography of an Ahistoricity: On the Beothuk Indians,” History and Anthropology 14, no. 2 (2003): 128. 20 Ibid., 128–9. 21 For more on archaeological evidence of amicable relations, see Lisa Rankin’s chapter in this volume. 22 Howley, The Beothucks, 89, 174. 23 Ibid., 299, 252. 24 Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred; or, the New Crusade, vol. 10, Bradenham ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1934), 153; Robert Knox, The Races of Men: A Fragment (Miami: Mnemosyne 1969), 90. First published 1850. 25 Knox, The Races of Men, 66. 26 Ibid., 24. 27 Ibid., 147. 28 Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho! (New York: Dodd, Mead 1941 [1855]), 12. 29 See Patrick Brantlinger, Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2011), 180–202. 30 Qtd. in Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976 (New York: Picador 1997), 79. 31 Anna Johnston and Mitchell Rolls, “Reading Friendly Mission in the Twenty-First Century: An Introduction,” in Anna Johnston and ­Mitchell

The Beothuk and the Myth of Prior Invasions  151 Rolls, eds., Reading Robinson: Companion Essays to Friendly Mission (Hobart, Australia: Quintus Publishing 2008). 32 James Bonwick, Daily Life and Origin of the Tasmanians (London: S. Low and Marston 1870), 3. 33 Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines: A History since 1803 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin 2012), 34. 34 Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press 1997), 53. 35 A.P. Elkin, The Australian Aborigines, 3rd ed. (Garden City, NY: Anchor 1964 [1938]), 10. First published 1938. 36 A recent version of blaming the Tasmanians for their own extinction has cropped up in Keith Windschuttle’s 2002 attempt at genocide denial, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Vol. 1. Van Diemen’s Land, 1803–1947 (Sydney: Macleay Press 2002). 37 Henry Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History (Ringwood, Australia: Viking Penguin 2001). 38 Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, 91. 39 George McCall Theal, The Yellow and Dark-Skinned People of Africa South of the Zambesi (London: Swan Sonnenschein 1910), 35, 59, 172. 40 Henrika Kuklick, “Contested Monuments: The Politics of Archeology in Southern Africa,” in George Stocking, ed., Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1991), 158–62. 41 Dan Wylie, Savage Delight: White Myths of Shaka (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press 2000). 42 Howley, The Beothucks, xviii. 43 Roger G. Kennedy, Hidden Cities: The Discovery and Loss of Ancient North American Civilization (New York: Free Press 1994), 30. 44 Ibid., Hidden Cities, 237. 45 Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas 1982), 17. 46 Qtd. in Dippie, The Vanishing, 17. 47 George Boyce, The Mound Builders: A Lost Race (Winnepeg: Manitoba Free Press Print 1885).

7 Bioarchaeology, Bioethics, and the Beothuk dar yl pul l man

At the time of this writing the skeletal remains of twelve Beothuk individuals are in storage at Memorial University in St John’s, Newfoundland, and those of another ten are in the archives of the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec. Most of these are presumed to have been gathered from various sites on the island of Newfoundland throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.1 However, the best-known and most widely discussed Beothuk remains reside in the stores of the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. These are the skulls of Nonosabasut and his wife, Demasduit, both of whom came to untimely ends through contact with European colonizers. The two skulls were retrieved by William Cormack (Figure 7.1) in 1827 from the cemetery where they had been laid to rest by the few surviving members of the Beothuk.2 Cormack subsequently sent them along with other funerary objects retrieved from that site to his mentor, Robert Jameson, a professor of natural history at the University of Edinburgh. The collection of the University Museum to which Jameson added Cormack’s contribution was later incorporated into the holdings of the National Museum of Scotland where the skulls of Nonosabusat and Demasduit reside to this day.3 In recent years various individuals and groups have expressed renewed interest in the status of these Beothuk remains. While some wish to study them in order to advance our understanding of such issues as the origins of the Beothuk and their relationships to other Indigenous peoples, others have lobbied to have the remains repatriated to Newfoundland for internment in a manner respectful of the group’s traditional culture.4 In this respect the controversy about the Beothuk remains represents just one more chapter in a long-standing

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and still ongoing debate about the repatriation of ancient remains more generally.5 This chapter reflects upon the status of Beothuk remains and considers some of the ethical issues and challenges involved in managing their disposition. “Of all forms of cultural appropriation practiced in the last century or two,” says philosopher Geoffrey Scarre, “it would be hard to think of any that has caused greater pain or offense to subaltern communities than the removal and retention of their human physical remains for purposes of study or exhibition.”6 A growing sensitivity to the nature and extent of this offence has resulted in a concerted effort in many quarters to repatriate ancient remains. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was passed in the United States in 1990 “to address the rights of lineal descendants, Indian tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations to Native American cultural items, including human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony.”7 As of September 2014 (the last date for which updated statistics are available), NAGPRA had facilitated the return of over 50,518 human remains and more than 1 million funerary objects. While no equivalent legislation exists in Canada, over the past two decades a number of museums and professional groups have issued their own ethics guidelines that advocate for repatriation of human remains and cultural items to descendant communities.8 In what follows I situate the current controversy about whether and how to repatriate the Beothuk remains within the larger contemporary repatriation debate that has been raging for almost fifty years. While recent calls for repatriation and reburial have included all of the known Beothuk remains mentioned above, my primary focus will be the skulls of Nonosabasut and Demasduit. These skulls are of especial interest for several reasons. First, while the vast majority of skeletal remains (Beothuk or otherwise) are anonymous, we know the identities of the persons to whom these skulls belonged. Second, we know as well the circumstances of their deaths, the care afforded their remains by their own people, and the manner in which the skulls were subsequently obtained and transported from Newfoundland to Scotland. Furthermore, these particular skulls have been the focus of recent bioarchaeological and anthropological studies.9 Finally, the fact that the Beothuk are now widely held to be an extinct people raises questions as to who has the authority (or responsibility) to speak for them when issues regarding repatriation arise.

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Admittedly, the foregoing details make the skulls of Nonosabasut and Demasduit somewhat exceptional among skeletal remains and among those of the Beothuk in particular. Inasmuch as it is important to guard against using the exception to establish the rule about the repatriation of ancient remains in general, it could be perilous to extrapolate too quickly from this particular case to draw conclusions that may not apply as readily to other examples. Nevertheless, the lessons learned from considering the ethical management of Nonosabusat and Demasduit’s skulls may cast some light on the broader issues of repatriation of other Beothuk remains, as well as those of other Indigenous peoples still held elsewhere. Nonosabusat, Demasduit, and Cormack While the details of the events that resulted in the capture of Demasduit and the subsequent killing of her husband, Nonosabasut, in March 1819 are still open to interpretation, the general sequence of events that led ultimately to their deaths is not in dispute.10 There was an encounter on the ice of Red Indian Lake when a group of settlers came upon a small community of Beothuk who were camped along the shore. All the Beothuk fled into the woods, except for Demasduit, who, having recently given birth, was unable to keep up. Seeing that she had been run down on the ice and captured by the settlers, Nonosabasut turned back, intent on securing her release. In the ensuing violent exchange, Nonosabasut was killed. Demasduit was then taken captive in the paradoxical hope that she might eventually serve as an emissary to her people, aiding in normalizing relations between the Beothuk and the colonizers. How Demasduit’s captors could realistically have believed that she would be willing to aid them in this way is difficult to comprehend. The historical record indicates that settlers had often treated the Natives with hostility in previous encounters.11 Indeed, Demasduit had just witnessed the violent killing of her husband at the hands of her captors, who had then forcefully separated her from her newborn child and the rest of her community. Perhaps these European settlers simply believed that Native “savages” were so unlike themselves that they were incapable of imagining Demasduit’s perspective. Whatever these settlers’ hopes for Demasduit’s future role in building bridges to her people, those plans were frustrated when she contracted tuberculosis and died in January of the following year. Her body was subsequently returned to the site of her initial capture on Red Indian

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Lake where a burial hut was discovered that contained the remains of several adults and children. One of the adult bodies was that of Nonosabasut, and one of the children was thought to be his and Demasduit’s infant, who had reportedly died within days of Demasduit’s capture. Demasduit’s body was left at the site, where it was later found by the Beothuk and laid to rest with the remains of her family and others of her people.12 Nonosabasut’s and Demasduit’s repose was brief. The gravesite where they had been interred was discovered little more than seven years later, in late fall of 1827, by William Cormack and his party. Cormack, recent founder of the Beothuk Institution, had embarked on a journey into the interior of Newfoundland hoping to make contact with the Beothuk people. The expedition was unsuccessful in that regard because no recent evidence of Beothuk occupation could be found. But Cormack did come across the gravesite from which he extracted the skulls and associated grave goods.13 Why Cormack retrieved these two particular skulls along with the accompanying funerary objects (there were apparently several other skeletons at the grave site) or why he sent them along to Professor Jameson in Edinburgh is not clear.14 Although the museum register acknowledges their addition to the collection, until recently they seem not to have been the objects of extensive study.15 The University of Edinburgh was influential in the early nineteenth century in advancing the theories of polygenism and hereditarian views of phrenology that were in vogue at the time. Phrenology, and the associated pseudoscience of craniology, held that the size and shape of the skull were indicative of mental capacity and character. Indeed Samuel G. Morton, the leading American exponent of phrenology, also studied at Edinburgh around the same time as Cormack.16 Morton went on to lead a popular effort to develop an empirical method by which to discover human temperament and intelligence and to explain their distribution among racial groups. He amassed an extensive skull collection in support of his work as colleagues from around the world collected specimens for him, often accompanied with data about sex, race, occupation, and personality traits to aid Morton in the comparison of specific metric attributes with known behavioural patterns.17 This could possibly account for Cormack’s selection of these particular skulls since he had detailed knowledge about the persons to whom they belonged. But this is largely speculative, and there is no definitive evidence that the skulls of Nonosabasut and Demasduit were ever intended for use

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Figure 7.1  William Epps Cormack. Image courtesy of Archives and Special Collections, Memorial University.

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in craniological research. Be that as it may, Morton went on to publish in 1839 his voluminous Crania americana, in which he concluded that races were not varieties of humankind but rather separate species. Such thinking helped justify both slavery and the extermination of Native peoples in antebellum America and has contributed to the ongoing antipathy among Indigenous groups with regard to bioarchaeological and anthropological research.18 Whether Cormack intended that the skulls of Nonosabusat and Demasduit might contribute to the burgeoning field of phrenological study, or had sent them along to Jameson simply because he thought his former professor, mentor, and then curator of the university museum would be interested in adding Native artifacts to the museum’s collection, the skulls currently reside in cardboard boxes, warehoused in the archives of the National Museum of Scotland.19 Irrespective of Cormack’s motives and intentions, the wider historical context in which he retrieved Nonosabusat and Demasduit’s remains, together with the established shameful record of the manner in which Native burial sites have been desecrated all over North America throughout the greater part of the past two centuries, cannot be ignored when addressing the ethical issues pertaining to the repatriation of these skulls, and of the status of Beothuk remains more generally. Science versus Culture in the Repatriation Debate Drawing on the historical record, a compelling case can be constructed that would seem to tip the ethical scales decidedly in favour of repatriating the remains of Nonosabusat and Demasduit back to Newfoundland for burial in a manner deemed respectful of them and their traditional culture. Indeed, in recent years there have been numerous calls from various quarters to bring these remains back to Newfoundland.20 However, there are other ethical considerations at play in the repatriation debate and they have ensured that the question of whether to repatriate or not still remains open. Especially relevant are the interests of science and, more specifically, the potential of skeletal remains to answer questions about ancient culture and customs, the relations of ancient peoples to one another and to their present-day descendants, the diseases from which they may have suffered, their migratory movements across continents and between continents over the millennia, and so forth. Such scientific interest extends beyond knowledge relevant only to the history and culture of Indigenous peoples to include information that

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could be relevant to the general human community as well. “Human skeletal remains are a unique source of information on the genetic and physiological responses our ancestors made to the challenges posed by past natural and sociocultural environments,” states Phillip Walker, a leading American physical anthropologist. “Consequently, they provide an extremely valuable adaptive perspective on the history of our species.”21 He goes on to make an ethical case against uniform repatriation: “As caretakers of this fundamental source of information on the biological history of our species, we need to promote the long-term preservation of skeletal collections and in this way ensure that future generations will have the opportunity to learn from them and in this way know about and understand that history.”22 Hence archaeologists, anthropologists, and other academics often argue that repatriation robs all of humankind of opportunities to learn valuable lessons about a past we all share, and may even provide important new insights about our collective present and future.23 The nature of the tensions inherent in the repatriation debate was summarized somewhat awkwardly by the director of the Natural History Museum in London in 2006 when that museum agreed to return the remains of eighteen Aboriginal persons to the Australian government.24 Although the museum had held some of those specimens for many decades, the repatriation agreement included a three-month waiting period in which scientists could conduct further studies before sending the remains back, since it was generally understood that the bones would be cremated upon their return and thus would no longer be available for further investigations. “We are a science-based organization” stated the director of the museum, “but we do not believe that the scientific values should trump all other claims; nor do we believe that the ethical, religious, and spiritual claims should necessarily trump the scientific value.”25 Problematic in this last statement is the director’s characterization of the tension between the values of science, on the one hand, and those of ethics, religion, and spirituality, on the other. In fact, the tension is not between science and ethics per se but rather between the ethical values associated with the pursuit of scientific knowledge and the ethical values represented in honouring the claims of Indigenous culture, be they religious, spiritual, or otherwise. The interests of Indigenous cultures have often been violated in the very process of collecting skeletal remains for the purpose of scientific study or display. Thus Scarre characterizes the ethical tension here as that between knowledge and

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justice. He surmises that “most people’s moral intuitions will lead them to give precedence to justice over knowledge, when these two values come into conflict.”26 Of course, satisfying the demands of justice entails identifying an individual or community to whom reparations are owed or can be made, which could be problematic when the aggrieved peoples in question are now presumed extinct. Clearly, there is ongoing interest in the knowledge to be gained from studying Beothuk bones. In recent years a number of studies have been undertaken, primarily on the skulls held in Scotland. Social anthropologist John Harries has written of visiting Nonosabusat and Demasduit’s remains, but his concern was not so much the bones themselves but rather what the presence of the bones represents in what he describes as the “post-colonial uncanny.” “What is important,” writes Harries, “is not the skulls, but the idea of the skulls.”27 Harries’s perspective stands in stark contrast to that of bioarchaeologists who do in fact value the very bones themselves. “Bioarchaeologists do not view human remains primarily as symbols,” states Walker; “instead they value them as sources of historical evidence that are key to understanding what really happened during the biological and cultural evolution of our species.”28 Indeed, Walker maintains that skeletal remains are perhaps the most valuable source of historical data available: “In contrast to the symbolic problems inherent in historical reconstructions based on written records and oral histories, human skeletal remains provide a direct source of evidence about the lives and deaths of ancient and modern people, that is, at a fundamental level, free from cultural bias ... In certain respects, bones do not lie.”29 This is not the place to engage in a protracted discussion of historiography and the relative merits of various sources of historical information, whether they are direct (“objective”), indirect (“subjective”), “free from cultural bias,” or otherwise. But inasmuch as the mysterious origins of the Beothuk and the details of their demise have been the source of much speculation over the years, the possibility of providing some definitive answers through an examination of these skeletal remains is compelling.30 Suffice it to say that in recent years there has been a growing interest in studying the bones of Nonosabasut and Demasduit for a wide range of purposes. S.M. Black, I.C.L. Marshall, and A.C. Kitchener have examined the skulls to gather further pathological information including injuries they each may have suffered prior to their deaths.31 Their detailed examination helps to confirm some of these details while raising other fascinating questions, including the possibility that

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Demasduit may have suffered a blunt-force trauma to her skull prior to her death, and the different manners in which the Beothuk appear to have treated their respective skeletons after death. However, the greatest bioarchaeological interest lies in DNA analysis.32 One recent study conducted DNA testing on teeth extracted from each skull.33 Although the results were not conclusive, Melanie Kuch et al.’s preliminary analysis suggests there could be a common ancestral population for both the Beothuk and the current-day Mi’kmaq who still reside in Newfoundland. Establishing such a link could have implications for the question of who has the right and authority to speak for the Beothuk (a topic to which we will return). Kuch et al.’s research also provides insights into the Beothuk diet and the sources of their drinking water. However, it does not confirm speculation that the Beothuk might have been of admixed European and Native American descent owing ostensibly to earlier contact between the Beothuk and European visitors.34 Further to the latter intriguing point, a recent study conducted by a team of Icelandic and Spanish researchers examined unique samples of mitochondrial DNA present in the Icelandic gene pool. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is passed on largely intact from one generation to the next through the maternal line. By examining the mtDNA of certain present-day Icelanders, the researchers discovered a possible genetic link between North American Indians and the Vikings who had visited more than one thousand years ago.35 While this study did not include a comparative analysis of the Icelandic samples and DNA extracted from Beothuk remains, the publication of their preliminary results has fuelled local speculation that the Vikings, who are known to have spent time in Newfoundland over a millennium ago, may have taken at least one Beothuk woman with them when they returned to Iceland. The theory holds that this woman then became the matriarch of a line of Norse-Native descendants.36 The next step in confirming that hypothesis would be to conduct a comparative DNA analysis, which would require extracting additional samples either from the skulls of Nonosabusat and Demasduit or from other known Beothuk remains. It is because of the continuing interest in such questions that leading Beothuk scholar Ingeborg Marshall has opposed repatriation and reburial. Although she is very familiar with the circumstances under which the various skeletons were collected and stored, and has written sympathetically about the history and eventual demise of the Beothuk people, she nevertheless believes that repatriation at this point would be a mistake since it would result in a tremendous loss to science.37

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The ongoing scientific interest notwithstanding, the fact remains that many maintain that the bones of the Beothuk and the skulls of Nonosabasut and Demasduit in particular should be returned to Newfoundland for reburial. Among them is Chief Mi’sel Joe of the Conne River Mi’kmaq band in Newfoundland. In an interview with CBC News, Chief Joe indicated he was not opposed to scientific investigation but stated that enough time has passed and enough studies have already been conducted and it is now time to return the bones. In the same news story a spokesperson for the Canadian Museum of Civilization (CMC) stated that the museum would be willing to return the remains in its possession, but it has never received a formal request to do so.38 However, it is not clear who would initiate such a formal request when the remains in question are from a people now presumed extinct. How then to mediate between ethical claims regarding the need to preserve Beothuk skeletal remains in order to answer questions that may be relevant to a history we all share, and the ethical demands to treat these remains with dignity and respect? This is not to say that conducting scientific research necessarily violates the dignity of Indigenous peoples. Archaeologists and anthropologists have documented numerous instances in which they have worked closely with Native communities in conducting their research, including research on skeletal remains.39 Perhaps there is a middle ground here as well that can honour both sets of values. But how do we adjudicate between competing demands when the skeletal remains in question belong to a people who are now thought extinct? Should a present-day Indigenous community have the authority to speak on behalf of the Beothuk, or is Native ancestry even necessary? Who speaks for the Beothuk in this regard? Legal and Ethical Alternatives As indicated earlier, unlike the United States, which has introduced formal legislation in order to oversee effectively all aspects of the appropriation and repatriation of human skeletal remains, Canada has no comparable legal protocols.40 Although it has been noted that in Canada there is generally a tradition of cooperation rather than antipathy between Indigenous communities and archaeologists, the fact that the Beothuk have not existed as a cultural community for nearly two hundred years makes cooperation and negotiation with them somewhat problematic.41

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We must reflect further on the matter of extinction, for there are those who question whether the Beothuk are in fact extinct. Chief Mi’sel Joe, for example, maintains that there is a genetic connection between the Beothuk and present-day Mi’kmaq,42 and, as noted previously, recent bioarchaeological research has indicated there could well be such a connection.43 Whether such a connection would be sufficient to establish the present-day Mi’kmaq as lineal descendants of the Beothuk remains an open question. Most federally recognized tribes in the United States require that those who seek to claim membership along with its attendant rights must demonstrate a certain level of Indian blood quantum ranging from 1/2 to 1/32.44 The blood-quantum standard is highly controversial and is considered by many a perpetuation of long-standing racist attitudes, practices, and standards.45 Consequently, many American Indian tribal nations have no minimal blood-quantum requirement, relying solely on lineal descent.46 Under NAGPRA lineal descent plays a central role in establishing property rights over various cultural goods including skeletal remains and funerary objects.47 Paradoxically, establishing lineal descent between the Beothuk and the Mi’kmaq or any other current-day peoples would likely require further bioarchaeological testing of extant remains. Indeed, if we continue far enough down the path that establishes cultural rights on the basis of genetic identity, additional bioarchaeological research might lead to the somewhat bizarre conclusion that some contemporary Icelanders have a claim on ancient Beothuk remains. Various commentators have discussed the problems of conflating biology with culture.48 Irrespective of whether a genetic link could be established between present-day Mi’kmaq (or Icelanders for that matter) and the Beothuk, the fact of the matter is that Beothuk society and culture have apparently ceased to exist. Any act of repatriation would be largely symbolic in an attempt to show respect for what we surmise were the values central to the dignity of those people when they did exist. More than that, however, repatriation could be an attempt to honour the fundamental values and dignity we all share as human beings. Honouring such fundamental values requires no particular distinct connection to the Beothuk, biological, cultural, or otherwise. Simply being a human being and recognizing the fundamental humanity we all share (whether living or dead) is sufficient. I will return to this consideration later. What about the scientific values inherent in conducting further bioarchaeological research on Beothuk remains? Repatriation and reburial of all extant remains could effectively ensure that no further

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research would ever be conducted to confirm or reveal new details about Beothuk life and culture, to examine potential biological links to present-day Mi’kmaq or other Native peoples, to explore potential links with the Vikings or others who may have visited this continent centuries ago, or perhaps even to address other historical, biological, or related issues that future scientific and technological advances might make possible. Given that the peopling of North America is still an area of ongoing scientific investigation, the Beothuk remains could be instrumental in helping to unravel aspects of that story.49 Such questions have far-reaching implications that potentially transcend Native culture and values to affect a historical and biological record in which we all have a stake. Although the NAGPRA legislation in the United States has resulted in the repatriation of thousands of human remains in recent years, some of the most controversial applications of that legislation have involved attempts to repatriate remains for which a clear link to a present-day tribal community cannot be established. The most celebrated case in this regard is that of Kennewick Man, also known as the Ancient One. Discovered on the banks of the Columbia River in 1996 in an area being excavated by the Army Corps of Engineers, this almost complete skeleton was described initially as having distinct Caucasoid features. It was also deemed to be more than nine thousand years old. Thus the discovery led to much speculation that perhaps the ancestors of present-day Native Americans had not been the first to cross the land bridge from Asia to North America but rather were preceded by white-skinned Caucasoids in an earlier migration. Such a finding could have significant implications for Native land claims based on the assumption of prior occupation.50 Potential political impacts notwithstanding, archaeologists concurred that Kennewick Man represented a monumental discovery that demanded extensive study by experts. It is not surprising, then, that the scientific community was shocked when the Army Corps of Engineers announced plans to honour a NAGPRA request initiated by representatives of five local northwestern tribes for repatriation of the remains, even though there was no evidence at the time linking these tribes to the skeleton in any obvious biological manner. Nevertheless, the tribes claimed a cultural association with the bones based on their own oral history which maintains that they have been occupying that territory for more than ten thousand years.51 In an attempt to block repatriation of the Kennewick skeleton, eight prominent anthropologists filed suit against the Army Corps. That case

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dragged on for six years, and although the secretary of the interior, who oversees NAGPRA, agreed in 2001 that the skeleton was culturally affiliated with the various tribes, the courts eventually decided in 2004 in favour of the anthropologists. That ruling set aside considerations of cultural affiliation and concluded instead that the defendants had not demonstrated that Kennewick Man was the biological ancestor of any Native Americans now living.52 In a more recent development, however, a team from the University of Copenhagen sequenced the genome of Kennewick Man and compared it to worldwide genomic data. They concluded that Kennewick Man is closer to modern Native Americans than to any other population worldwide, and that several Native American groups for whom genome-wide data are available appear to be descended from a population closely related to Kennewick Man.53 These findings were instrumental in leading to the repatriation of the Ancient One to the Colville-Umatilla Confederacy. The skeleton was subsequently buried in a private, traditional ceremony on 18 February 2017.54 NAGPRA remains a controversial piece of legislation and has received mixed reviews from parties on both sides of the repatriation debate. Some believe that NAGPRA’s reliance on property law rather than human-rights legislation leaves too much control in the hands of museum curators.55 But new rules now allow tribes authority to claim “unaffiliated remains” that cannot be linked to an existing people.56 Inasmuch as the judicial process by which disputes are adjudicated under NAGPRA leaves little room for negotiation, however, there are concerns that application of such rules might mean that ancient remains like those of Kennewick Man will be lost to science after all. The skeletal remains of the Beothuk now housed in museums in Canada and Scotland are not nine thousand years old, but like Kennewick Man they belong to a people whose biological and cultural origins and relations to current-day peoples are in dispute. As such, any decision about their ongoing disposition could have far-reaching implications. Although Canada does not have legislation comparable to NAGPRA and has been criticized by Indigenous scholars on that count, major institutions like the CMC do follow a quasi-legal process if and when a request for repatriation is initiated.57 That process includes honouring any treaties and/or self-government agreements previously negotiated between tribes and the federal government, and any requests are considered in light of the internal policies of the CMC.58 The process followed by the CMC requires that requests for repatriation come from

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“an Aboriginal government or individuals establishing a demonstrable link to the material.”59 This again leaves the Beothuk remains in limbo since there is no existing community that could meet that standard. Although NAGPRA now allows tribes to make requests for unaffiliated remains, there is no such legal provision in the Canadian context. But, even if a provision did exist either legislatively or otherwise, it would apply only to those remains now held in Canadian institutions, and not to the most famous Beothuk remains, namely the skulls of Nonosabusat and Demasduit which still reside in cardboard boxes, deep in the archives of the National Museum of Scotland. Towards an Ethical Response In this concluding section I propose what I take to be a compromise on the question of the repatriation of Beothuk skeletal remains that seeks a middle ground between the ethical concerns represented by those who argue against repatriation in the interests of continuing scientific research, and the ethical concerns of those who favour repatriation. As noted earlier, Scarre characterizes this as a tension between knowledge and justice.60 The presumed Beothuk extinction is a key consideration in how the tension between these two sets of values is mediated. As it pertains to the interests of knowledge, it means that repatriation of all existing remains could result in an end to any future bioarchaeological investigations into aspects of Beothuk history and culture, their relationship to other peoples including the present-day Mi’kmaq and possibly the Vikings before them, and perhaps even to the ongoing study of the peopling of North America more generally. Such knowledge has relevance to a history we all share to some degree, and it has relevance as well to future generations – Indigenous or otherwise – who will be affected by decisions made today. Hence a decision to repatriate all existing Beothuk remains could foreclose the opportunities of future generations and should not be taken lightly. Conversely, Beothuk extinction has relevance to considerations of justice, too, in that there are no Beothuk survivors either to demand that justice be served or to receive whatever reparations might be made in its name. Nevertheless, we might concur with Chief Mi’sel Joe that repatriation is just the right thing to do.61 Here we can invoke considerations of human dignity that trade upon the common humanity we all share, irrespective of whether a direct biological or cultural link to this

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now extinct people can be established.62 Although Indigenous peoples were commonly viewed as less than fully human during the period of colonization in order to justify their extermination or the appropriation of their lands and resources, such benighted views have been set aside (at least in principle if not in practice) in the present day. The United Nations 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights is predicated on the inherent dignity and equality of every member of the human family. The demands of universal justice serve the interests of all humanity and we all have a stake in ensuring that such injustices are redressed. Sarah Tarlow is an archaeologist who has devoted much of her academic career to working with and thinking about ancient remains. Tarlow maintains that when present-day peoples – including archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians – study ancient remains, the peoples represented by those remains are given existence in the present.63 For this reason she does not refer to “the dead” when speaking of ancient peoples, but rather to “past peoples” who have a presence with us now by virtue of the manner in which we interact with them. Accordingly, Tarlow sees archaeologists and historians as “providing material for the cultural after-lives of past peoples.”64 In Tarlow’s view, working with ancient remains provides for a kind of ongoing existence for these peoples that would be lost to some degree if all such remains were reburied. This point has especial salience in the case of a people like the Beothuk who are presumed to be extinct. By working with their remains, investigators allow these past peoples to continue to contribute to and have existence in the ongoing story we all share. At the risk then of positing a compromise that aims at satisfying everyone but pleases no one, I propose that as an initial step in addressing the issue of the ethical treatment of extant Beothuk skeletal remains, the government of Canada should make overtures to Scotland to have the skulls of Nonosabusat and Demasduit repatriated to Newfoundland. Representatives of the government of Newfoundland and Labrador should then return these skulls to the local Indigenous community for reburial. Several considerations inform this aspect of the proposal. First, these skulls are the most well known of the extant skeletal remains, largely because we know a great deal about the lives and deaths of these two individuals and the subsequent treatment of their remains. As such, the stories of Nonosabasut and Demasduit figure prominently in the history of Newfoundland, not only for other Native peoples whose ancestors endured the brutality and hardships of colonization which still affect them today, but also for Newfoundlanders more generally

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for whom the extinction of the Beothuk still carries significant meaning.65 Knowing as we do the details of this history, there is something particularly poignant in John Harries’s account of visiting the archives in Edinburgh to view the skulls and watching as they were retrieved from the warehouse in which they are unceremoniously stored in cardboard boxes with hundreds of other specimens.66 In reading Harries’s account I was reminded of my reaction when I first saw the reports of the Taliban destruction of the ancient Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001. One needn’t be a Buddhist to take offence at such desecration, nor does one need to be a Beothuk, a Mi’kmaq, or any other Aboriginal person to be offended by what seems to be, from a certain perspective, a rather callous (although not careless) handling of human remains of persons whose individual stories figure so prominently in the history of their own people as well as the broader history of Newfoundland. This is not to suggest in any way that the systematic extermination of an entire people is on the same moral plane as the defacing of ancient statues, but rather to illustrate that there are certain offences that transcend culture to affect all compassionate human beings irrespective of ethnicity, culture, or creed. The skulls of Nonosabusat and Demasduit have been studied extensively, and we can agree with Chief Joe that it is time for them to be brought back. A process that involved first the federal government in negotiating repatriation of these particular remains to Canada, and then the government of Newfoundland and Labrador in returning the skulls to the Native peoples who reside on lands once occupied by the Beothuk for reburial in a manner deemed respectful of their culture, could have significant symbolic meaning for these Indigenous peoples and for Newfoundlanders and all Canadians more generally. What then of the other twenty-two skeletons stored in museum archives in Newfoundland and elsewhere? For reasons articulated previously, my tentative conclusion in this regard is that some of those remains could be retained for future bioarchaeological research, although exactly how many and which ones would need to be determined by persons with the relevant expertise. Deciding this could be part of a negotiated process involving representatives of local First Nations peoples who currently reside on lands previously occupied by the Beothuk. Including such geographically related Aboriginal representatives would be consistent with the rationale used by NAGPRA in determining who has standing when dealing with unaffiliated remains.67

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Numerous First Nations representatives have acknowledged that there is room for negotiation on such matters, even among those who are highly critical of the manner in which Indigenous remains were appropriated in the first place. Chickasaw lawyer James Sa’k’ej Youngblood Henderson, for example, is passionate about First Nations law and jurisprudence that treats the protection of human remains as “a sacred inheritance.”68 He notes as well that the interests of knowledge often conflict with a First Nations need for healing and restoration. Nevertheless, he speaks approvingly of an idea suggested by Cree scholar Willie Ermine, who calls for an “ethical lodge” that occupies the space between the values at tension in this debate and that serves as an intermediate zone for discussion and negotiation about the appropriate disposition of the remains of First Nations peoples.69 There is perhaps an ethical lodge to be found in the present case as well. Ermine describes the ethical space that exists between the clashing world views as a “cooperative spirit between Indigenous peoples and Western institutions, [which] will create new currents of thought that flow in different directions of legal discourse and overrun the archaic ways of interaction.”70 He is under no illusion that this process will be easy. “Shifting our perspectives to recognize that the Indigenous-West encounter is about thought worlds may ... remind us that frameworks or paradigms are required to reconcile these solitudes,” he says. “Configuring ethical/moral/legal principles in cross-cultural cooperation, at the common table of the ethical space, will be a challenging and arduous task.”71 There will, of course, be many practical barriers to overcome in moving towards repatriation of any remains. Not the least of these is the lack of funding and other resources necessary in order to respond to any request of this nature.72 However, given Canada’s less than honourable record of dealing with First Nations people in general, and how the Beothuk figure in the history of Newfoundland in particular, a strong ethical (if not political) argument can be made for both the federal and provincial governments to devote the necessary resources to move such initiatives along. Postscript Since the initial drafting of this essay there have been several developments with regard to the status of the Beothuk skulls. Chief Mi’sel Joe has twice travelled to Scotland to make overtures to the Scottish authorities. Although he has been allowed to perform a sweetgrass ceremony

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over the skulls, Scottish authorities have rebuffed requests by both Chief Joe and the government of Newfoundland and Labrador to repatriate them. According to media reports, the Scottish museum requires a request from the federal government. The government request must also have the support of a national museum and be supported by “a community descended from the original owners.” A spokesperson for the National Museum of Scotland states: “The community of claimants would need to demonstrate that it is a direct genealogical descendant of the community whose remains are under claim and/or that it continues to share the same culture.” The federal heritage minister has notified the director of the National Museum of Scotland that Canada will make a formal demand to have the skulls returned.73 NOTES 1 Ingeborg Marshall, A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1996), 412–15. 2 Ibid., 196. 3 John Harries, “Of Bleeding Skulls and the Postcolonial Uncanny: Bones and the Presence of Nonosabasut and Demasduit,” Journal of Material Culture 15, no. 4 (2010): 403. 4 “Calls Made to Repatriate Beothuk Remains,” CBC News, 23 June 2012, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/story/ 2012/06/22/nl-beothuk-repatriation-623.html (accessed November 2017). 5 D.H. Ubelaker and Lauryn Guttenplan Grant, “Human Skeletal Remains: Preservation or Reburial?” Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 32 (1989); Devon Abbott Mihesuah, ed., Repatriation Reader (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press 2000); Andrew Lawler, “Grave Disputes,” Science 330 (2010). 6 Geoffrey Scarre, “The Repatriation of Human Remains,” in J.O. Young and C.G. Brunk, eds., The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation (West Sussex, UK: Blackwell 2009), 72. 7 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, Pub. L. 101–601, 25 Stat. 3001–3013 (1990), http://www.nps.gov/nagpra/ (accessed November 2017). 8 Janet Young, “Responsive Repatriation: Human Remains Management at a Canadian National Museum,” Anthropology News (2010); Lawler, “Grave Disputes.”

170  Daryl Pullman 9 April May Reed, “Mitochondrial DNA Analysis of Nonosabasut, a Beothuk Indian Chief” (MA thesis, Ball State University, Muncie, 2001); Melanie Kuch et al., “A Preliminary Analysis of the DNA and Diet of the Extinct Beothuk: A Systematic Approach to Ancient Human DNA,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 132 (2007); S.M. Black, I.C.L. Marshall, and A.C. Kitchener, “The Skulls of Chief Nonosabasut and His Wife Demasduit – Beothuk of Newfoundland,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 19 (2009); Harries, “Of Bleeding Skulls and the Postcolonial Uncanny.” 10 James P. Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians: The Aboriginal Inhabitants of Newfoundland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1915); Marshall, History and Ethnography; Harries, “Of Bleeding Skulls and the Postcolonial Uncanny.” 11 Marshall, History and Ethnography; Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians. 12 Marshall, History and Ethnography; Black et al., “The Skulls of Chief Nonosabasut and His Wife Demasduit.” 13 Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians; Marshall, History and Ethnography, 196. 14 Marshall, History and Ethnography, 196. 15 Black et al., “The Skulls of Chief Nonosabasut and His Wife Demasduit”; Harries, “Of Bleeding Skulls and the Postcolonial Uncanny.” 16 Phillip L. Walker, “Bioarchaeological Ethics: A Historical Perspective on the Value of Human Remains,” in M.A. Katzenberg and S.R. Saunders, eds., Biological Anthropology of the Human Skeleton, 2nd ed. (New York: John Wiley and Sons 2008), 8. 17 David Hurst Thomas, Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity (New York: Basic Books 2000). 18 Ibid.; Robert E. Bieder, “The Representation of Indian Bodies in ­Nineteenth-Century American Anthropology,” in Mihesuah, ed., Repatriation Reader. 19 Harries, “Of Bleeding Skulls and the Postcolonial Uncanny,” 408. 20 “Calls Made to Repatriate Beothuk Remains.” 21 Walker, “Bioarchaeological Ethics,” 13. Emphasis added. 22 Ibid., 24. 23 Lawler, “Grave Disputes”; P.M. Landau and D.G. Steele, “Why Anthropologists Study Human Remains,” in Mihesuah, ed., Repatriation Reader. 24 Maev Kennedy, “Aboriginal Remains Return to Tasmania after 20-Year Fight,” Guardian, 12 May 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/ may/12/australia.maevkennedy (accessed November 2017). 25 “Museum Returns Aboriginal Remains,” BBC News, 17 November 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/6157572.stm (accessed November 2017). 26 Scarre, “The Repatriation of Human Remains,” 82.

Bioarchaeology, Bioethics, and the Beothuk  171 2 7 Harries, “Of Bleeding Skulls and the Postcolonial Uncanny,” 412. 28 Walker, “Bioarchaeological Ethics,” 16. Emphasis added. 29 Ibid., 14. 30 Richard Budgel, “The Beothuks and the Newfoundland Mind,” Newfoundland Studies 8, no. 1 (1992). 31 “The Skulls of Chief Nonosabasut and His Wife Demasduit.” 32 See also Lisa Rankin’s chapter in this volume for discussion of Vaughan Grimes’s new research in this area. 33 Kuch et al., “A Preliminary Analysis of the DNA and Diet of the Extinct Beothuk.” 34 Reed, “Mitochondrial DNA Analysis of Nonosabasut.” 35 Sigríður Sunna Ebenesersdóttir et al., “A New Subclade of mtDNA Haplogroup C1 Found in Icelanders: Evidence of Pre-Columbian Contact?” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 144 (2011). 36 R. Boswell, “Group of Icelanders May Carry Beothuk Blood,” Telegram, 19 November 2010. 37 “Calls Made to Repatriate Beothuk Remains.” 38 Ibid. The Canadian Museum of Civilization was officially renamed the Canadian Museum of History in 2013. 39 Ubelaker and Guttenplan Grant, “Human Skeletal Remains”; Walker, “Bioarchaeological Ethics.” 40 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. 41 Young, “Responsive Repatriation”; Lawler, “Grave Disputes.” 42 Tristan Hopper, “Extinction of Newfoundland’s ‘Lost People’ Is a Myth, First Nations Chief Says,” National Post, April 18, 2013, http://news. nationalpost.com/2013/04/18/local-post/ (accessed November 2017). 43 Kuch et al., “A Preliminary Analysis of the DNA and Diet of the Extinct Beothuk.” 44 Kimberly TallBear, “Genetics, Culture and Identity in Indian Country” (paper presented at the Seventh International Conference on Ethnobiology, Athens, Georgia, 23–27 October 2000), http://www.iiirm.org/publications/Articles%20Reports%20Papers/ Genetics%20and%20Biotechnology/ISEPaper.pdf (accessed November 2017). 45 Pamela D. Palmater, Beyond Blood: Rethinking Indigenous Identity (Saskatoon: Purich Publishing 2011). 46 The Cherokee of Oklahoma, for instance, do not have a minimum quantum. See C. Sturm, Blood Politics: Race, Culture and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma (Berkeley: University of California Press 2002), qtd. in Ryan W. Schmidt, “American Indian Identity and Blood Quantum in the

172  Daryl Pullman 21st Century: A Critical Review,” Journal of Anthropology 2011 (2011), doi: 10.1155/2011/549521. 47 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. 48 Eric Juengst, “Group Identity and Human Diversity: Keeping Biology Straight from Culture,” American Journal of Human Genetics 63 (1998); Paul Brodwin, “Genetics, Identity and the Anthropology of Essentialism,” Anthropology Quarterly 75, no. 2 (2002); Daryl Pullman and Laura Arbour, “Genetic Research and Culture: Where Does the Offense Lie?” in J.O. Young and C.G. Brunk, eds., The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation (West Sussex, UK: Blackwell 2009). 49 D. Reich et al., “Reconstructing Native American Population History,” Nature 488 (2012). 50 Hurst Thomas, Skull Wars. 51 Ibid.; D.P. Lackey, “Ethics and Native American Reburials,” in C. Scarre and G. Scarre, eds., The Ethics of Archaeology: Philosophical Perspectives on Archaeological Practice (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press 2006). 52 Ibid. 53 M. Rasmussen et al., “The Ancestry and Affiliations of Kennewick Man,” Nature 523 (2015). 54 C. Rosenbaum, “Ancient One, Also Known as Kennewick Man, Repatriated,” Tribal Tribune, 18 February 2017, http://www.tribaltribune.com/ news/article_aa38c0c2-f66f-11e6-9b50-7bb1418f3d3d.html (accessed November 2017). 55 Margaret M. Bruchac, “Constructing Indigenous Associations,” Anthropology News (2010): 5. 56 Lawler, “Grave Disputes,” 166. 57 James S. Youngblood Henderson, “The Appropriation of Human Remains: A First Nations Legal and Ethical Perspective,” in Young and Brunk, eds., The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation. 58 Young, “Responsive Repatriation.” 59 Ibid., 9. 60 Scarre, “The Repatriation of Human Remains,” 82. 61 “Calls Made to Repatriate Beothuk Remains.” 62 Daryl Pullman, “There Are Universal Ethical Principles That Should Govern the Conduct of Medicine and Research Worldwide,” in A.L. Kaplan and R. Arp, eds., Contemporary Debates in Bioethics (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell 2014). 63 Sarah Tarlow, “Archaeological Ethics and the People of the Past,” in Scarre and Scarre, eds., The Ethics of Archaeology. 64 Ibid., 202.

Bioarchaeology, Bioethics, and the Beothuk  173 65 Budgel, “The Beothuks and the Newfoundland Mind”; Harries, “Of Bleeding Skulls and the Postcolonial Uncanny.” 66 Harries, “Of Bleeding Skulls and the Postcolonial Uncanny,” 408. 67 Lawler, “Grave Disputes.” 68 Youngblood Henderson, “The Appropriation of Human Remains,” 57. 69 Ibid. 70 Willie Ermine, The Ethical Space of Engagement.” Indigenous Law Journal 6, no. 1 (2007): 194. 71 Ibid., 201. 72 Young, “Responsive Repatriation.” 73 Dean Beeby, “Ottawa Backs Request for Return of Beothuk Remains from Scotland,” CBC News, 25 August 2017, http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/beothuk-repatriation-mi-kmaq-newfoundland-1.3734419 (accessed November 2017); Peter Cowan, “Indigenous Leaders Unite for Return of Beothuk Remains, Inclusion in MMIWG Inquiry,” CBC News, 26 May 2017, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/indigenousleaders-roundtable-1.4132582 (accessed November 2017).

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8 Towards a Beothuk Archaeology: Understanding Indigenous Agency in the Material Record li sa r ank in

A substantial body of archaeological research concerning the Beothuk peoples of Newfoundland has accumulated over the past century. While interesting, much of the literature has perpetuated negative stereotypes of a primitive, isolated culture inhabiting a marginal landscape. The foregone conclusion to this story is that the Beothuk simply vanished, unable to cope with European colonialist endeavours. While it is doubtful that archaeologists actually believe that the Beothuk past was so passive, there are reasons why this narrative has endured. Foremost, archaeology is a discipline that interprets the past predominantly from the surviving material record. Mobile hunter-gatherer peoples like the Beothuk leave few remnants, limiting the story we can tell. Methodological advances have allowed archaeologists to increase the types of data they use to interpret the past, but, for the Beothuk, these data remain limited. Furthermore, archaeological remains are often organized with the assistance of documentary records, ethnography, and environmental details which are then filtered through active and changing theoretical discourse. Unfortunately, the body of coincident materials is also flawed. Historical documentation, for example, lacks Indigenous voice, having been created by a colonizing population that failed to recognize Indigenous agency.1 As a result, this “colonizers’ history” supports a plot of Beothuk decline. The ethnographic record is non-existent, since it was believed that the Beothuk ceased to exist. Even Indigenous testimony from the nineteenth century2 has failed to resonate with archaeologists who grapple with the role of oral histories in archaeological interpretations. Instead, archaeologists place primacy on the material record with which they are most confident, addressing issues of the Beothuk past as they relate to changing use of technology,

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subsistence practices, and the influence of the environment on cultural practices.3 Unfortunately, this material focus is generally accompanied by a strident archaeological language that makes it difficult for nonarchaeologists to recognize Indigenous creativity, cultural change, continuities, and agency even when that is the point the authors are trying to make. Finally, I would suggest that the Beothuk narrative of extinction adopts a theme of failure that permeates the scholarship of Newfoundland’s past. The island’s populations, Western or Indigenous, are frequently portrayed as geographically, economically, and socially marginal, ensuring that decline is a common outcome of new stress.4 This theme has been applied to all of the pre-contact Indigenous occupants of the province,5 but it also mimics the negative grand narratives common to culture-contact stories for decades.6 Importantly, archaeologists revisit the past frequently in search of better-nuanced understandings that can be brought to light through new theoretical perspectives, data, and methodologies. Attempts to comprehend the Beothuk past are ongoing and increasingly sophisticated. In recent decades, archaeology has moved from data collecting and describing towards a more engaged, reflexive, and inclusive narrative. This is changing the way we understand the Beothuk’s culture, identity, and history, and how they managed European encounters. Deconstructing Culture Contact Over the course of the twentieth century, the archaeological discipline changed radically, rejecting descriptions of artifacts and sites in favour of sophisticated research concerning the ways past societies operated, the processes through which they changed and persevered over time, and the ways in which change and continuity were experienced and precipitated. Culture-contact studies exploring the interactions between European and Indigenous societies altered with each new interpretive insight. Early studies highlighted acculturation, or the way in which Indigenous people adopted European ways or life and lost their own.7 This approach reinforced the idea that Indigenous societies had no agency to control their lives. It also entrenched negative narratives and focused on Indigenous subordination,8 assimilation, or, in the case of the Beothuk, extinction or ethnocide.9 James Howley’s collection of Beothuk documents supports this view – that the Beothuk were persecuted to extinction by culturally and materially superior Western settlers.10 The work marks a starting point for archaeological

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investigations of the Beothuk, yet it continues to permeate the popular imagination a century later.11 By the mid-twentieth century, archaeology had shifted towards a much more particularistic and methodologically precise study of culture contact broadly labelled ethnohistory. This approach attempted to describe how both Europeans and Indigenous peoples approached contact. For archaeologists, this framework resolved several explanatory dilemmas. First, it allowed archaeologists to better “bridge the gap” between prehistory and historical studies.12 Achieving coherence between prehistory, which is interpreted through the past material record, and historical studies, which draw largely from documentary evidence, was a methodological breakthrough which provided a more robust data set for the study of culture contact. It also provided researchers with a much larger temporal framework from which to examine the contact process. This is significant because it is impossible to interpret contact-induced culture change without understanding what each culture was like in the preceding era. More importantly, creating coherence between prehistory and historical studies allowed for a particularistic cultural context when explaining the process of culture contact and change. Ethnohistorians abandoned the premise that culture contact was a normative process, focusing instead on the culturally specific results of interaction and allowing both Indigenous and European participants to respond to contact in different ways concomitant with the circumstances of their interaction. Finally, researchers began to comprehend the limitations of historical documentation. Documents failed to provide all the information necessary to interpret the past appropriately, were almost always written by people who had little understanding of the Indigenous culture, and were inherently biased because they were written for specific purposes and audiences. This provided a new relevance for archaeological data which could be used to fill in the gaps of the record and help balance the bias within it.13 Ethnohistorical approaches did not put an end to negative accounts of contact. Unfortunately, archaeology continued to play a secondary role to documentation because the material data was so limited. As a result, biased documentary descriptions of Indigenous cultures were used, often at face value, to explain the archaeological record of both the recent and distant past. This top-down approach to historical interpretation limited the explanatory potential of the archaeological record and ensured that Indigenous cultures appeared static and changeless throughout their history. Furthermore, documentary bias was not

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sufficiently explored or accounted for. Although the motivations of the authors were now questioned, little was done to address the process of colonial-document archiving, maintaining the status quo.14 Nonetheless, ethnohistoric approaches elevated the study of culture contact, providing new directions for research and new explanatory potential, and setting the scene for the more inclusive and self-reflexive historical studies. Beothuk ethnohistory was dominated by Dr Ralph Pastore, an archaeologist and historian at Memorial University, and independent researcher Ingeborg Marshall. Under their guidance the story of the Beothuk became more nuanced. Historical documents were carefully assessed, whole regions of Newfoundland were scrutinized for archaeological sites, excavations were undertaken, and collections were analysed.15 Pastore and Marshall concluded that the Beothuk’s demise was a multifaceted process. In their narrative the Beothuk’s small but sophisticated population dwindled after centuries of success. The presence of Europeans remained the biggest factor in this decline for they introduced diseases and occupied the Beothuk’s prime resource-gathering locales.16 However, the context of the early European colonial endeavours was also a factor. According to Pastore, the nature of the early European seasonal fishery meant that there was little need for Beothuk and Europeans to forge social or economic ties.17 The seasonal visits by Europeans were focused on the pursuit of offshore fish stocks and little attention was paid to terrestrial resources. This reduced the need for European fishers to interact with Newfoundland’s Indigenous people. When Europeans returned home for the winter, Beothuk were free to “pilfer” abandoned fishing stations for exotic European commodities without direct encounters with foreigners.18 Lacking sustained interaction in the early stages of colonization, the Beothuk and Europeans never developed the social relationships or economic ties that could have helped manage prolonged contacts when colonial immigration began.19 When settlers did arrive, the Beothuk abandoned their traditional territories and sought a life of isolation in regions of the island with a much more marginal food supply, beyond the reaches of Western enterprise.20 A final blow came from Mi’kmaq immigration to Newfoundland, which increased competition for limited local resources. Meanwhile, the migration of Inuit into southern Labrador displaced ancestral Innu and severed the long-term connections of the Beothuk to the outside world.21 The ethnohistoric approach therefore recognized that it was not a single event that led to the Beothuk’s demise but a

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series of circumstances and decisions including “the ecology of the island and its surrounding seas, the extension of the European migratory fishery to the region, and the ultimate colonization of the island by Europeans.”22 This was a sophisticated narrative, detailing the transformation of Beothuk culture over a long period and providing an interpretation of the changes in Beothuk culture through various stages of European colonization. Furthermore, it provided a balanced view of the documentary evidence and accounted for all the data at hand. Nevertheless, it supported wholeheartedly a narrative of decline and only just began to address Beothuk choice and agency. The Beothuk’s decline hinged primarily on the resource stress and isolation they suffered when abandoning the productive coastline for the marginal environments of the interior.23 This environmental determinism not only supported the narrative of marginality common to Newfoundland history24 but also reflected the emphasis that archaeologists placed on economic, environmental, and technical explanations of culture change at the time.25 While other interpretations of culture contact have since emerged,26 Pastore’s narrative remains the dominant archaeological interpretation of the Beothuk in popular accounts.27 The work undertaken by Marshall and Pastore was occurring just as the archaeological discipline was embracing new social and humanist theory.28 This infusion of new perspectives enhanced culture-contact studies by emphasizing the role of cultural continuity as well as cultural change.29 The new perspectives also stressed individual and group agency and decision making;30 the importance of situating interpretations within appropriate cultural, historical, and temporal contexts;31 and reflexive research.32 Several approaches to culture contact emerged from this realignment. Among those important to Beothuk studies were the concepts of resistance and postcolonialism. Resistance models suggested that cultural survival was dependant on a population actively resisting the domination of another culture through conflict or avoidance.33 The Beothuk appear to have employed both strategies, occasionally using violence and hostility towards Europeans while physically removing themselves from Western settlement.34 Postcolonialism entered the archaeological milieu predominantly as critique, challenging the colonial knowledge about, and representation of, Indigenous “others,” while championing the role of Indigenous agency in the colonial process.35 It laid the groundwork to incorporate Indigenous perspectives and participation in the historical process.

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Archaeologists have largely embraced the critique in hope of constructing better narratives of the historically lived experiences of Indigenous people.36 With the passing of Pastore in 2002, no new large-scale archaeological research on Beothuk culture has emerged, although Donald Holly has made numerous contributions exploring the colonial-era Beothuk’s world view and agency as they relates to the longer-term historical process.37 For example, Holly et al. suggest that the failure of the Beothuk and Europeans to solidify social relations during the early contact period stemmed from the unpredictable and unique nature of each encounter.38 This instability ultimately informed Beothuk reactions to the European presence much later in the colonial period. Furthermore, Holly views the Beothuk transition from coast to interior settlement as an active form of resistance.39 The movement allowed the Beothuk to live free from European hostility and provided them with a safe place to retreat following skirmishes, a place where they could develop and reimagine their own cultural practices.40 Thus the Beothuk’s relocation to the interior was a decision to manage their destiny. This decision and others did not prevent their extinction, but, for Holly, the Beothuk were actively negotiating their place in the world even as it collapsed around them.41 Ultimately another narrative of extinction, this new work demonstrates that the Beothuk made active choices to maintain and support their culture until it was no longer possible. Yet this dynamic interpretation has not yet achieved popular recognition outside of the archaeological discipline. For this to occur, archaeology must reposition itself again. The Issues of Archaeology Archaeology has struggled to develop narratives which are accessible to the general public and Indigenous populations. There are multiple reasons for this, but the use of an opaque disciplinary language is a substantial barrier. Often dehumanized, it tends to make audiences apathetic towards the discipline because the history is unrecognizable.42 Ultimately, the language we choose to use is not simply about the way we classify, compare, and contrast archaeological data. It also reflects contemporary social and political circumstances, while also revealing our own authoritative bias. Postcolonial critique has increased awareness of these disciplinary shortcomings and is leading to a more

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accessible and inclusive archaeology. While we cannot reject disciplinary terminology, archaeologists can choose words wisely and define their limitations. Scott Neilsen suggests defining terminology clearly and succinctly, eliminating excessive disciplinary jargon, and returning the emphasis of the narrative to the people that occupied the past to ensure a more relatable story.43 Archaeological stories could be made more relatable through the inclusion of Indigenous voice.44 In the case of the Beothuk, Indigenous testimony has been challenged because it speaks to a time before living memory. Testimonials may also have been deemed inauthentic owing to the colonized and/or multi-ethnic background of the informants.45 This inadvertently devalues the recent past and treats colonized people as if they are somehow less Indigenous and authentic than their pre-contact ancestors.46 But archaeology is beginning to recognize that the blended identities that emerged in the colonial era also resulted from Indigenous agency and choices, the product of both colonial domination and Indigenous resistance.47 By situating this recent decision making into a longer-term historical context, both continuities and changes in culture and identity can then be understood. As this concept is normalized within the archaeological discipline, more recent Indigenous stories are foregrounded. Furthermore, the narrative of Indigenous societies from the distant past can be connected to the present. For Beothuk research, this concept may offer new ways to reinterpret the past and ultimately legitimize the testimony of those Beothuk descendants such as Santu Toney who did not live as pre-contact Beothuk had. Putting the Pieces Together: The Archaeology of Beothuk History Often overlooked in popular narratives of the Beothuk is their ancient past. Though fragmentary, archaeological data on this subject may be used to demonstrate a nearly two-thousand-year continuum of Beothuk occupation in Newfoundland – a history that endures through the period of initial contact with Europeans and well into the colonial era. Over centuries of occupation, Beothuk people imbued the island with cultural meaning, they endured and adapted to new circumstances, and they raised families and passed on their knowledge to new generations. The archaeological story of the Beothuk tells us about a dynamic population, capable of great change and of remarkable continuity. In order to share what we know about the Beothuk past within the discipline, archaeologists use a series of categories, or complexes, that

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denote specific time periods, places, and styles of material culture that are scientifically relevant. In chronological order from the oldest, the four complexes most likely associated with Beothuk include: the Cow Head complex (dating from approximately 2,000 to 1,100 years before present); the Beaches complex (1,200 to 800 years before present); the Little Passage complex (800 to 400 years before present); and the Beothuk period (400 to 170 years before present) (see Figure 8.1 for locations of major archaeological sites).48 These complexes do not equate directly with any contemporary Indigenous population but offer a way for archaeologists to postulate broad relationships between peoples of the past and present. The Cow Head complex (based on the name of the first archaeological site where this culture was uncovered) is only tenuously connected to the Beothuk. The limited number of associated archaeological sites that have been recovered to date do not provide enough evidence to fully support or refute this connection and significant arguments have been made for and against a Beothuk ancestry.49 Most of the known sites associated with the Cow Head complex are located on the west coast of the northern peninsula. Most are small campsites used for acquiring a specific type of food or material, such as the rock needed to make the stone tools, but some more substantial residential sites do exist. From the recovered remains it is assumed that these people followed a generalized subsistence and settlement structure, moving from the coast to the interior of Newfoundland seasonally as different food resources such as seal, fish, birds, and caribou became abundant. The coastal margin, located somewhat inland from the outer coast, may have been a favourite place to live. This location provided easy access between coastal and interior resources. Importantly, it was not occupied by Dorset Paleoeskimos, a people of an entirely different ethnic background that inhabited the outer coast of Newfoundland at the time.50 There is some evidence suggesting that there was more than one Cow Head community occupying the northern peninsula and that each group had access to different resource-procurement sites.51 Nevertheless, the limited number of sites dating to this period suggests that the population was small. Archaeologically, we have connected the people that occupied the northern peninsula two thousand years ago and the more recent Beothuk based on continuities in the stylistic and material elements of their lithic, or stone-tool, assemblage over many centuries. The tools abandoned by the Cow Head population had specific, recognizable

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Figure 8.1  Beothuk-related archaeological complexes on the island of Newfoundland. Sites are representative samples of known sites, to indicate the extent and density of site distributions of each complex. Underlined locations are mentioned in the text. Map: Lisa Rankin.

forms such as notched projectile points used in hunting, and were generally made of local stone.52 Some of the stylistic elements of these tools continued into more recent times, as did the choice of stone used in their manufacture.53 If we consider this ancient population to be ancestors of the Beothuk, it is interesting to note that this population had ties to communities on the mainland. Jim Tuck has suggested that the Cow Head people migrated to the island from Labrador,54 while Latonia Hartery links the migration to the Quebec north shore.55 Even though their origins are debated, it is generally agreed that these people came to Newfoundland

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from elsewhere, and there is a small collection of material that suggests that these off-island ties were maintained for some time. For example, fragments of ceramic vessels, more commonly associated with mainland woodland communities, were recovered from the Gould site in Port au Choix.56 As well, small amounts of exotic tool stone, known as Iceberg and Ramah chert that hail from the Labrador coast, have been discovered at several sites, suggesting possible connections to northerly mainland communities. Furthermore, tool stone from the island of Newfoundland has been found at sites dating to similar periods along the Quebec north shore.57 Two thousand years ago these people had connections to a larger world and were far from isolated. Instead, they were part of broad social networks emanating throughout the eastern subarctic. The archaeological successors to the people of the Cow Head complex are known to archaeologists as members of the Beaches complex.58 Their descent from the Cow Head population remains tenuous, but similarities in the style of some of their tools, and the continued use of local tool stone, suggests a connection.59 Beaches complex sites, though limited, have been found along the northeastern and northwestern coasts of Newfoundland, with a smattering of sites elsewhere on the island. Given the number of sites known, we can assume that the population of Beaches residents was small but perhaps larger than it was during Cow Head times. Poor preservation has restricted what can be said of their lifestyle, but it is generally accepted that they followed a seasonal round similar to that of the Cow Head communities, moving from coast to interior seasonally in order to hunt both seal and caribou. Holly noted that most of their settlements were located along the north coast, and therefore suggested that harp seal must have been a significant subsistence resource for these communities.60 Interior occupation may have been more limited. Tools made by the Beaches population are similar to tools used in Labrador during the same period.61 Tuck has suggested that this, along with occasional presence of Ramah chert from Labrador, reflects the broad connections that the Beaches people had to people living on the mainland.62 The settlement area of the Beaches population is nevertheless distinct from that used by their predecessors. Perhaps the distribution of their sites across the north coast and scattered throughout the rest of the island demonstrates that people had explored, and settled in, regions where they could live comfortably over the intervening period, including places once occupied by the Dorset until their departure

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approximately one thousand years ago. However, other archaeologists believe that the Beaches sites reflect a new wave of immigration to Newfoundland from the mainland which had no connection to earlier settlement.63 If this is the case, then the Beaches population established a new settlement system on the island, perhaps choosing locations for settlements on the north coast because of the predictable nature of the harp-seal migration. They would also have brought with them different, or overlapping, connections to mainland populations. More work must be done before this issue is resolved. Nonetheless, there is little debate that the Beaches population was well connected, that the places they settled would have been imbued with cultural meaning, and that they were ancestors of the historic Beothuk. Evidence suggests that the group known archaeologically as the “Little Passage” were the descendants both of the Beaches people and of the pre-contact ancestors of the Beothuk. Some sites, such as Boyd’s Cove and Robert’s Cove 1, located in the bottom of Notre Dame Bay, show a direct transition from one archaeological population to the next since site use is uninterrupted and radiocarbon dates continuous.64 An analysis of the dimensions of projectile points produced by both groups also suggests a direct technological connection between the populations.65 Little Passage sites are prolific and found in all the major bays of the island. Settlements are located on the exposed outer coasts, sheltered inner bays and islands, and the interior.66 Pre-contact Beothuk sites have also been identified on the Quebec north shore and at Red Bay, Labrador, demonstrating the breadth of their communities and likely connections to ancestral Innu.67 This does not suggest that their population was ever substantial. Similar to earlier sites, the settlements are small, often containing not much more than a scattering of stone tools and the fragmentary bones of animals butchered and consumed on site. In Newfoundland most of the sites are clustered in sheltered bays, providing opportunity for hunters to monitor both interior resources such as caribou and outer-coast resources such as harp seal.68 This prime location allowed for rapid movement to key hunting territories when necessary and also offered access to a diversity of marine and terrestrial food locally such as seal, sea birds, otter, caribou, beaver, fish, and shellfish.69 Pre-contact Beothuk were semi-sedentary, generalized hunter-gatherers moving to different locations to access resources when necessary, although the pattern likely varied for groups occupying different regions of the island.70 They also travelled for ceremonial purposes, often bringing their dead to be buried on islands.71

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Once Europeans arrived in Newfoundland in the early sixteenth century, archaeologists begin to refer to the Indigenous inhabitants of the island as Beothuk, the name they called themselves. The direct development of Beothuk culture from Little Passage was best established at Boyd’s Cove, where numerous Little Passage-style tools such as projectile points continue to be manufactured in an uninterrupted sequence – though becoming smaller with broadening notches over time.72 These traditional implements are found alongside goods of European manufacture such as iron, copper, glass, and trade beads that were repurposed by the Beothuk for their own use with iron nails (for example, hammered into projectile points, awls, and scrapers).73 It appears that the Little Passage and contact-period Beothuk also used the same type of dwelling structures – pit houses – found at Boyd’s Cove.74 Early Beothuk settlements are found in the same protected inner-bay locations as those of their pre-contact kin. These settlements continued to offer access to a wide range of fish, bird, and sea and land mammals for subsistence, and travel to the outer coast and interior for other subsistence resources would have continued. William Gilbert suggests that some Beothuk relied more intensively on interior caribou resources.75 The Russell’s Point site, located on the shores of Dildo Pond in the nearinterior, appears to have been a semi-sedentary settlement occupied by Little Passage and Beothuk that focused on caribou hunting. It seems likely that all Beothuk also used a wide range of plants in their daily lives. Historical documents identify significant use of bark and wood for the manufacture of everything from utensils to canoes,76 and ethnobotanical analyses from six different Beothuk sites has identified the use of twenty-four different kinds of plants including edible fruits and berries and fir needles used for bedding.77 The Beothuk system of land tenure also included the use of coastline and islands for interment of the dead.78 The early contact period is poorly documented, but the archaeology suggests that Beothuk life was not severely disrupted by the presence of seasonal European fishermen, and most settlement areas continue to be occupied. Travel to bird islands and harp-seal hunting locales on the outer coast in the summertime may have become more difficult, but the seasonal European fishermen had little need of the protected inner bays occupied by the Beothuk. Given that the Beothuk were able to scavenge desirable European commodities from seasonally abandoned shore stations, and occasional shipwrecks, much contact must have been indirect.79 Nevertheless, contacts did occur and were highly unpredictable

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and stressful.80 Some interactions appear to have been friendly, encouraging trade and good relations – and may have resulted in the cache of trade beads found at Boyd’s Cove81 – but others were hostile.82 As Holly et al. note, European fishers came to Newfoundland from all over Western Europe flying different flags, speaking different languages, and not always returning to the same harbours.83 Thus the Beothuk would not have been able to count on the same experience from year to year or place to place. This social unpredictability would have been dangerous and stressful, leading to a strategy of avoidance and informing later Beothuk decisions once European settlement was initiated.84 In the seventeenth century, Europeans began to colonize the island and inner bays because these offered easy access to lumber and salmon resources, as well as trapping and hunting.85 By the late seventeenth century, Trinity Bay was well populated. Within a few decades, Bonavista and Notre Dame Bays were populated as well. Region by region, Beothuk settlement consolidated at important locations and pushed deeper into the bottoms of bays and interior, limiting the population’s mobility.86 Despite thriving at Boyd’s Cove for nearly two hundred years after initial contact, the Beothuk abandoned this settlement.87 Resistant to the Europeans’ presence, and uninterested in forging relationships with them, they attacked European settlements, burning equipment and sometimes killing livestock.88 It was a campaign against loss of access to traditional settlement areas.89 In an atmosphere of hostility, the Beothuk retreated to the interior of the island. The interior had been part of the Beothuk settlement system for centuries and was likely considered safe.90 Holly notes that Beothuk aggregation in the interior may have reinforced traditional world views while creating new customs that placed the Beothuk in opposition to Europeans.91 In this manner a new ideology was actively constructed to cope with contacts.92 Even though the interior was known, Beothuk settlement did require adjustments. Not only had they lost access to coastal settlements and food resources, but they would have lost much of their sacred geography – places of myth and narrative relevant to their culture for centuries.93 Still, the interior allowed Beothuk to live as they chose, to practise their ceremonies, and to engage in a vibrant social life. To accommodate the settlement shift, new aggregated communities such as Wigwam Brook were formed.94 Adapting their architecture to the environment of interior Newfoundland meant the creation of substantial mamateeks surrounded by tall earthen walls,95 and living in one location for much of the year.96 Tools, now largely made from European commodities,

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show that the Beothuk had not rejected all things European, just the Europeans themselves.97 European commodities were reimagined for the Beothuk world, with sails used as tent covers and nails for hunting arrows, blending traditions of both cultures. To feed themselves on the more limited selection of interior resources, caribou hunting intensified. Though not visible archaeologically, deer fences (for steering caribou towards slaughter) and elaborate food-storage facilities were built.98 These features were not signs of Beothuk desperation but signs of resistance, and of the choices they made in the interest of cultural survival. Peter Rowley-Conwy also points out that the Beothuk never completely abandoned the coast.99 Beothuk canoes were sometimes spotted by Europeans and trips to raid European settlements could have provided the opportunity to collect coastal resources.100 Though these were likely dangerous journeys, the Beothuk continued to inter their dead in coastal locations, often with pendants representing sea birds that were once such a prominent part of their diet.101 Todd Kristensen and Donald Holly believe that this practice was still relevant to the Beothuk because it was necessary in order to transport the souls of the dead to their island afterworld.102 Thus the Beothuk maintained both physical and mythical connections to their past traditions and identity even while new cultural norms were established. Ultimately, Beothuk choices to resist European ways, as well as violence, disease, and European encroachment, resulted in demographic decline to the point where the Beothuk are no longer archaeologically recognizable. In 1829 the last known Beothuk, Shawnadithit, passed away. But was that really the end of her people? Oral histories from the nineteenth century and contemporary Indigenous stories speak of Beothuk continuity, the population having been absorbed by neighbouring Mi’kmaq and Innu. There is no real reason to believe that this is not the case. M.A.P. Renouf draws on the long history of interconnection between people in Newfoundland and the mainland to suggest that this may be a possibility.103 For perhaps as much as two thousand years, the Beothuk and their ancestors had participated in a wide interaction sphere.104 Such interaction should have acted to unite small populations of hunter-gatherers in times of need. There is no real reason to assume that the Beothuk did not take advantage of this historically visible system when necessary. Thus extinction may be too big a concept. The question remains, however, how we should recognize this process and these people archaeologically. For this we need to look to future research.

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Future Directions Archaeological approaches to Beothuk history are being reinvigorated by new methodological and theoretical approaches. These can be employed in multiple ways. Most obvious would be the discovery and examination of new archaeological sites, which would add muchneeded data to the slim material record. However, new approaches also allow us to revisit extant archaeological data and situate them within contemporary interpretive frameworks. One hopes that this will expand our understanding of Beothuk world views by incorporating aspects of agency, decision making, and social and ceremonial life that the archaeological record has not been able to address. The documentary data can also be revisited. More can be done to understand how and why documents were created. In the process of learning about those who crafted the documents, we may, indirectly, learn more about Beothuk culture. More significantly, archaeology can offer insight into the validity of the documents and recover what is not recorded. We only need pose the right questions. Similarly, we can revisit the oral histories related by Indigenous people themselves, who, as Chief Mi’sel Joe’s comments in this volume illustrate especially clearly, have a quite different understanding of the fate of the Beothuk. As archaeology continues to engage with identity formation, this idea is gaining popularity.105 Should Indigenous populations agree, we may gain new insights into Beothuk history through new techniques in archaeology borrowed from the fields of biology and chemistry.106 Vaughan Grimes, a bioarchaeologist at Memorial University, has recently initiated research to extract DNA and conduct isotopic analysis on fragmentary collections of Beothuk bone housed in numerous institutions. Contemporary principles of inclusivity require that any new research on Beothuk bone be approved by all Indigenous peoples in the province. Having garnered this support, Grimes and his team are undertaking Beothuk research that is the first of its kind. It will add new information about changes and continuities in Beothuk diet and territoriality over time, as well as about ancestry and descent. As this new data is generated, it can be merged with extant research to support or refute our current interpretations of Beothuk movements, access to different food sources, and links to other Indigenous populations. The results may cause us to reinterpret Beothuk history yet again.

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Conclusion The archaeological story of the Beothuk is ultimately one of long-term success. The mere fact that they survived in Newfoundland for as much as two thousand years undermines our interpretations of their marginality. Furthermore, the Beothuk were not the primitive and isolated culture of our mythology. They were vibrant, resilient, and independent: making choices, meeting challenges, and responding to change with creativity. All of this is supported by the archaeological record. In saying this I do not wish to diminish the pain the Beothuk must certainly have experienced as their numbers, and therefore their culture, dwindled in the early nineteenth century, but the archaeological record suggests that we can also celebrate their achievements. NOTES 1 Neal Ferris, The Archaeology of Native-Lived Colonialism: Challenging History in the Great Lakes (Tucson: University of Arizona Press 2009); Todd Kristensen and Reade Davis, “The Legacies of Indigenous History in Archaeological Thought,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 20, no. 3 (2013). 2 See Lianne Leddy’s chapter in this volume; James P. Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians: The Aboriginal Inhabitants of Newfoundland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1915); Frank G. Speck, Beothuk and Micmac (New York: Museum of the American Indian 1922). 3 Kristensen and Davis, “Legacies of Indigenous History.” 4 Amanda Crompton, “Confronting Marginality in the North Atlantic: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives from the French Colony of Plaisance, Newfoundland,” Historical Archaeology 49, no. 3 (2015): 54–73. 5 Jim Tuck and Ralph Pastore, “A Nice Place to Visit … but: Prehistoric Extinctions on the Island of Newfoundland,” Canadian Journal of Archaeology 9, no. 1 (1985): 69–80; William Fitzhugh, Environmental Archaeology and Cultural Systems in Hamilton Inlet (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology 1972). 6 Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2003); Ferris, NativeLived Colonialism. See also Bonita Lawrence’s chapter in this volume. 7 Alistair Paterson, A Millennium of Culture Contact (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press 2011), 42. 8 Ferris, Native-Lived Colonialism, 11.

Towards a Beothuk Archaeology  193 9 Paterson, Millennium of Culture Contact, 43. 10 Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians. 11 See Christopher Aylward’s chapter in this volume. 12 Paterson, Millennium of Culture Contact, 169. 13 Ibid., 31; Bruce Trigger “Ethnohistory: The Unfinished Edifice,” Ethnohistory 33, no. 3 (1986): 257–8. 14 Ferris, Native-Lived Colonialism, 13. 15 Ingeborg Marshall, “Beothuk and Micmac: Re-Examining Relationships,” Acadiensis 17, no. 2 (1988): 52–82; Ingeborg Marshall, Reports and Letters by George Christopher Pulling (St John’s: Breakwater 1989); Ingeborg Marshall, A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1996); Ralph Pastore, “Fisherman, Furriers and Beothuks: The Economy of Extinction,” Man in the Northeast 33 (1987): 47–62; Ralph Pastore, “The Collapse of the Beothuk World,” Acadiensis 19 (1989): 52–71; Ralph Pastore, Shanawdithit’s People: The Archaeology of the Beothuks (St John’s: Atlantic Archaeology 1992); Ralph Pastore, “Archaeology, History and the Beothuks,” Newfoundland Studies 9, no. 2 (1993): 260–78. 16 Marshall, History and Ethnography, 61–79; Pastore, Shanawdithit’s People, 61–72; L.F.S Upton, “The Extermination of the Beothuk of Newfoundland,” Canadian Historical Review 58, no. 2 (1977): 144–53. 17 Pastore, “Fisherman, Furriers and Beothuks,” 59–60; Pastore, “Collapse of the Beothuk,” 57. 18 William Gilbert, “Beothuk-European Contact in the 16th Century: A ReEvaluation of the Documentary Evidence,” Acadiensis 40, no. 1 (winter/ spring 2011): 24–44; Peter Pope, “Scavengers and Caretakers: Beothuk/ European Settlement Dynamics in Seventeenth Century Newfoundland,” Newfoundland Studies 9, no. 2 (1993): 279–93. 19 Pastore, “Fisherman, Furriers and Beothuks,” 57–8; Pastore, “The Collapse of the Beothuk,” 54. 20 Pastore, “The Collapse of the Beothuk,” 67–70; Pastore, Shanawdithit’s People, 57–8. 21 Pastore, Shanawdithit’s People, 60–1. 22 Ibid., 72. 23 Tuck and Pastore, “Nice Place to Visit,” 78; Pastore, “The Collapse of the Beothuk,” 68; Pastore, Shanawdithit’s People, 58. 24 Crompton, “Confronting Marginality,” 1. 25 Kristensen and Davis, “Legacies of Indigenous History,” 1. 26 William Gilbert, “… Great Good Done: Beothuk-European Relations in Trinity Bay 1612–1622,” Newfoundland Quarterly 77, no. 3 (1992): 2–10;

194  Lisa Rankin Donald H. Holly, Jr, Christopher Wolff, and John C. Erwin, “The Ties That Bind and Divide: Encounters with the Beothuk in Southeastern Newfoundland,” Journal of the North Atlantic 3 (2010): 33–44; Laurie McLean, “Beothuk Iron – Evidence for European Trade?” Newfoundland Studies 6, no. 2 (1990): 168–76. 27 Pastore, “Collapse of the Beothuk”; Pastore, Shanawdithit’s People. 28 Ian Hodder, “The Contribution to the Long-Term,” in Ian Hodder, ed., Archaeology as Long-Term History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987), 1–8; Ian Hodder, The Archaeological Process: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell 1999), 1–19; Ian Hodder, “The Social in Archaeological Theory: An Historical and Contemporary Perspective,” in Lynn Meskell and Robert Preucel, eds., A Companion to Social Archaeology (Oxford: Blackwell 2004), 23–42. 29 Ferris, Native-Lived Colonialism, 10. 30 Marcia-Anne Dobres and John Robb, “Agency in Archaeology: Paradigm or Platitude?” in Marcia-Anne Dobres and John Robb, eds., Agency in Archaeology (New York: Routledge 2000), 3–17. 31 John Bintliff, “The Contribution of an Annaliste/Structural History Approach to Archaeology,” in John Bintliff, ed., The Annales School and Archaeology (New York: New York University Press 1992), 1–33; Ferris, Native-Lived Colonialism, 18–28; Kenneth Sassaman, “Agents of Change in Hunter-Gatherer Technology,” in Dobres and Robb, eds., Agency in Archaeology, 148–68. 32 Matthew Liebmann, “Introduction: The Intersections of Archaeology and Postcolonial Studies,” in Matthew Liebmann and Uzma Z. Rizvi, eds., Archaeology and the Post-Colonial Critique (New York: Altamira Press 2008), 1–20. 33 Paterson, Millennium of Culture Contact, 43; Laura Sheiber and Judson Byrd Finley, “Mobility as Resistance: Colonialism among Nomadic HunterGatherers in the American West,” in Kenneth E. Sassaman and Donald H. Holly, Jr, eds., Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology as Historical Process (Tucson: University of Arizona Press 2011), 167–86. 34 Donald H. Holly, Jr, “The Beothuk on the Eve of Their Extinction,” Arctic Anthropology 37, no. 1 (2000): 79–95; Marshall, History and Ethnography, 442–3. 35 Liebmann, “Introduction,” 2. 36 Ferris, Native-Lived Colonialism, 28. 37 Donald H. Holly, Jr, “Environment, History and Agency in Storage Adaptation: On the Beothuk in the Eighteenth Century,” Canadian Journal of Archaeology 22, no. 1 (1998): 19–30; Holly, “Beothuk on the Eve of Their

Towards a Beothuk Archaeology  195 Extinction”; Donald H. Holly, Jr, “Places of the Living, Places of the Dead: Situating a Sacred Geography,” Northeast Anthropology 66 (2003): 57–76; Holly, Wolff, and Erwin, “The Ties That Bind,” 31–44.” 38 Ibid., 41–2. 39 Holly, “Environment, History and Agency”; Holly, “Beothuk on the Eve of Their Extinction,” 86. 40 Holly, “Beothuk on the Eve of Their Extinction,” 86. 41 Ibid., 91. 42 Eldon Yellowhorn, “The Awakening of Internalist Archaeology in the Aboriginal World,” in Ronald F. Williamson and Michael S. Bisson, eds., The Archaeology of Bruce Trigger: Theoretical Empiricism (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2006), 194–209; Natasha Lyons, Where the Wind Blows Us: Practising Critical Community Archaeology in the Canadian North (Tucson: University of Arizona Press 2013); Scott Neilsen, “Archaeology beyond the Horizon” (manuscript, Labrador Institute, Goose Bay, NL). 43 Neilsen, “Archaeology beyond the Horizon,” 36. 44 See Chief Mi’sel Joe and Christopher Aylward’s chapter in this volume, as well as that of Elizabeth Penashue and Elizabeth Yeoman; Christopher Aylward, “The Beothuk Story: European and First Nations Narratives of the Beothuk People of Newfoundland” (PhD thesis, Memorial University, 2014). 45 Matthew Liebmann, “The Rest Is History: Devaluing the Recent Past in the Archaeology of the Pueblo Southwest,” in Maxine Oland, Siobhan M. Hart, and Liam Frink, eds., Decolonizing Indigenous Histories: Exploring Prehistoric/ Colonial Transitions in Archaeology (Tucson: University of Arizona Press 2012), 19–44. 46 Liebmann, “The Rest Is History.” 47 Kent Lightfoot, Indians, Missionaries and Merchants: The Legacy of Colonial Encounters on the California Frontiers (Berkeley: University of California Press 2006). 48 The sources for this map are: Robyn D. Fleming, “Robert’s Cove 1 (DjAv05): A Transitional Recent Indian Site on the Northeast Coast of Newfoundland” (MA thesis, Memorial University, 2010); Latonia Hartery, The Cow Head Complex and the Recent Indian Period in Newfoundland, Labrador and the Quebec Lower North Shore (St John’s: Copetown Press 2007); Donald H. Holly, Jr, “From Space to Place: An Archaeology and Historical Geography of the Recent Indian Period in Newfoundland” (PhD thesis, Brown University, 2002). 49 Latonia Hartery, The Cow Head Complex; Dominique Lavers, “The Recent Indian Cow Head Complex Occupation of the Northern Peninsula,

196  Lisa Rankin ­ ewfoundland: A Geochemical Investigation of Cow Head Chert AcquiN sition” (MA thesis, Memorial University, 2010); Tuck, Newfoundland and Labrador Prehistory. 50 M.A.P. Renouf, Michael A. Teal, and Trevor Bell, “In the Woods: The Cow Head Complex Occupation of the Gould Site, Port au Choix,” in M.A.P. Renouf, ed., The Cultural Landscapes of Port au Choix: Precontact HunterGatherers of Northwestern Newfoundland (New York: Springer 2011), 264–6. 51 Lavers, “Recent Indian Cow Head,” 172–6. 52 Tuck, Newfoundland and Labrador Prehistory, 67. 53 Ibid., 73. 54 Ibid., 68. 55 Hartery, Cow Head Complex. 56 Michael Teal, “An Anthropological Investigation of the Gould Site (EeBi42) in Port au Choix, Northwestern Newfoundland: New Insight into the Recent Indian Cow Head Complex” (MA thesis, Memorial University, 2001); Renouf, Teal, and Bell, “In the Woods,” 264. 57 Hartery, Cow Head Complex, 41–4. 58 Carignan, Beothuk Archaeology in Bonavista Bay (Ottawa: National Museum of Man Mercury Series, no. 69, 1977). 59 Tuck, Newfoundland and Labrador Prehistory. 60 Holly, “From Space to Place,” 75–7. 61 Stephen Loring, “Princes and Princesses of Ragged Fame: Innu Archaeology and Ethnohistory in Labrador” (PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts, 1992), 456. 62 Jim Tuck, “Prehistory of Atlantic Canada” (manuscript, Department of Archaeology, Memorial University, St John’s, 1988). 63 Fitzhugh, Environmental Archaeology, 195; Hartery, Cow Head Complex, 51; Stephen H. Hull, “Tanite uet Tshinauetamin? A Trail to Labrador: Recent Indians and the North Cove Site” (MA thesis, Memorial University, 2002), 178; Lavers, “Recent Indian Cow Head”; Teal, “Gould Site,” 110. 64 Pastore, Shawadithit’s People, 33; Robyn Fleming, “Roberts Cove 1,” 13. 65 John C. Erwin et al., “Form and Function of Projectile Points and the Trajectory of Newfoundland Prehistory,” Canadian Journal of Archaeology 29, no. 1 (2005): 46–67. 66 William Gilbert, “Russell’s Point (CjAj-1): A Beothuk/Little Passage Site at the Bottom of Trinity Bay” (MA thesis, Memorial University, 2002); Donald H. Holly, Jr, “Revisiting Marginality: Settlement Patterns on the Island of Newfoundland” (MA thesis, Brown University, 1997); Teal, “Gould Site,” 6. 67 Jean-Yves Pintal, “Contributions à la Préhistoire Récent de Blanc Sablon,” Recherches Amérindiennes au Québec 19, nos. 2–3 (1989): 33–44; Jean-Yves

Towards a Beothuk Archaeology  197 Pintal, “Aux Frontières de la Mer: La Préhistoire de Blanc Sablon” (Collection Patrimoines Dossiers, Municipalité de Blanc Sablon, Gouvernment du Québec, 1998); Doug Robbins, “Regards Archéologiques sur les Béothuks de Terre-Neuve,” Recherches Amérindiennes au Québec 19, nos. 2–3 (1989): 21–32. 68 Peter Rowley-Conwy, “Settlement Patterns of the Beothuk Indians of Newfoundland: A View from Away,” Canadian Journal of Archaeology 14 (1990): 24–6. 69 Jennifer Cridland, “Late Prehistoric Indian Subsistence in Northern Newfoundland: Faunal Analysis of Little Passage Complex Assemblages from the Beaches and Inspector Island Sites” (MA thesis, Memorial University, 1998), 246. 70 Cridland, “Prehistoric Indian Subsistence,” 264; Holly, “Space to Place,” 127; Holly, Wolff, and Erwin, “Ties That Bind,” 33. 71 Todd J. Kristensen and Donald H Holly, Jr, “Birds, Burials and Sacred Cosmology of the Indigenous Beothuk of Newfoundland, Canada,” Cambridge Archaeology Journal 23, no. 1 (2013): 44. 72 Pastore, Shawnadithit’s People, 31. 73 McLean, “Beothuk Adoption of Iron,” 25; Laurie McLean, A Guide to Beothuk Iron (St John’s: NAHOP 2003) 6–17; Pastore, Shawnadithit’s People, 30–1. 74 Pastore, Shawnadithit’s People, 21. 75 Gilbert, “Russell’s Point, 90.” 76 Marshall, History and Ethnography, 319–67. 77 Michael Deal and Aaron Butt, “The Great Want: Current Research in Beothuk Palaeoethnobotany,” in Sarah L.R. Mason and Jon G. Hather, eds., Hunter-Gatherer Archaeobotany: Perspectives from the Northern Temperate Zone (London: Institute of Archaeology 2002), 15–27. 78 Kristensen and Holly, “Birds, Burials and Sacred Cosmology,” 49. 79 Pope, “Scavengers and Caretakers,” 286–8. 80 Holly, Wolff, and Erwin, “Ties That Bind,” 41. 81 William Gilbert, “Divers Places: The Beothuk Indians and John Guy’s Voyage into Trinity Bay in 1612,” Newfoundland Studies 6, no. 2 (1990): 147–67; Gilbert, “Great Good Done”; McLean, “Beothuk Iron,” 9. 82 Holly, Wolff, and Erwin, “Ties That Bind,” 41. 83 Ibid., 37. 84 Holly, “Beothuk on the Eve of Their Extinction,” 83–4; Holly, Wolff, and Erwin, “Ties That Bind,” 41–2. 85 Holly, “Beothuk on the Eve of Their Extinction,” 82; Holly, “Places of the Living.”

198  Lisa Rankin   86 Holly, “Environment, History and Agency”; Holly, “Places of the Living,” 59.   87 Pastore, Shawnadithit’s People, 34.   88 Marshall, History and Ethnography, 40; Howley, Beothuks.   89 Holly, “Places of the Living,” 59.   90 Holly, “Beothuk on the Eve of Their Extinction,” 84.   91 Ibid.   92 Ibid.   93 Holly, “Places of the Living,” 67.   94 Raymond Joseph LeBlanc, “The Wigwam Brook Site and the Historic Beothuk Indians” (MA thesis, Memorial University, 1973), 159.   95 Pastore, Shawnadithit’s People, 22–3. Beothuk houses, or mammateeks, became larger, more substantial constructions as more people moved into the interior to avoid colonists. At this time, more people began to live in each house and they occupied them year-round.   96 LeBlanc, “Wigwam Brook,” 156.   97 Holly, “Space to Place,” 146.   98 Marshall, History and Ethnography, 219, 309.   99 Rowley-Conwy, “Settlement Patterns,” 23. 100 Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians, 88. 101 Holly, History in the Making, 123; Kristensen and Holly, “Birds, Burials and Sacred Cosmology,” 50. 102 Kristensen and Holly, “Birds, Burials and Sacred Cosmology,” 48–9. 103 M.A.P. Renouf, “Prehistory of Newfoundland Hunter-Gatherers: Extinctions or Adaptations?” World Archaeology 30, no. 3 (1999): 403–20. 104 Ibid., 416. 105 See Christopher Aylward’s chapter in this volume. 106 See Daryl Pullman’s essay in this volume for further discussion of the issues surrounding bioarchaeological research.

9 Historical Sources and the Beothuk: Questioning Settler Interpretations li an n e c . l e ddy

Died, at St. John’s, Newfoundland, on the 6th of June last, in the 29th year of her age, Shawnawdithit, supposed to be the last of the Red Indians or Boeothicks … This tribe, the aborigines of Newfoundland, presents an anomaly in the history of man. Excepting a few families of them soon after the discovery of America, they never held intercourse with the Europeans, by whom they have been ever since surrounded, nor with the other tribes of Indians since the introduction of firearms amongst them … there has been a primitive nation, once claiming rank as a portion of the human race, who have lived, flourished, and become extinct in their own orbit. They have been dislodged, and disappeared from the earth in their native independence in 1829, in as primitive a condition as they were before the discovery of the new world, and that too on the nearest point of America to England, in one of our oldest and most important colonies. − Shanawdithit’s obituary in the Times, 14 September 1829

But we will now leave it to the historians and biographers to relate the subsequent history of the poor benighted aborigines of this island. It is a unique story, and has no exact parallel in other parts of the American continent. The Beothucks were found here by the Cabots on the discovery of the island, and for nearly three and a half centuries continued to occupy this oldest British colony, living in their primitive ignorance and barbarism, under our vaunted civilization, not altogether unknown, but unheeded and uncared for, until this same civilization blotted them out of existence. − James Howley, 1915

200  Lianne C. Leddy The story of the Beothuk, the aboriginal inhabitants of Newfoundland, is tragic. Their population steadfastly declined with the influx of European settlement in the 1700s and by 1829 Shanawdithit, the last of the Beothuk, had died. Conflict with other native groups and disease played a role in their demise, but it was the “ruthlessness and brutality” by the English that ultimately led to their extinction. − Ingeborg Marshall, 1996

The story of the Beothuk has gripped settlers in Newfoundland and elsewhere since the last survivor, Shanawdithit, died in 1829. From her obituary, which was written by William Cormack as a lament for her people as much as for Shanawdithit, to James Howley’s seminal The Beothucks or Red Indians, to Ingeborg Marshall’s exhaustive A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk, the Beothuk people are characterized as tragic, and their demise provides the lens through which their history is written.1 Howley’s work, which was published in 1915, perpetuates the nineteenth-century romantic settler narrative of the “vanishing Indian,” and Ingeborg Marshall’s A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk is not as critical of this interpretation as one might expect given its publication eighty years later. In both of these books, which are still the most influential texts on the subject, the Beothuk are portrayed as being doomed to fail, in keeping with historical views of “vanishing Indians.”2 That said, other scholars, as Lisa Rankin also details, have started to challenge these strongly held beliefs. In his critical examination of the literature on the Beothuk, archaeologist Donald Holly has interrogated the ways in which scholars have emphasized the timelessness and “uniqueness” of the Beothuk. As he mentions, “remote islands, empty deserts and impenetrable forests it seems are especially ripe places for ahistory.” That is, the Beothuk experience has often been typified by isolation “from winds of change.”3 Holly challenges this basis for casting the Beothuk as a unique, racially pure, primitive society, and other anachronistic descriptions that typify their historical and popular representations. This revisionist thinking is long overdue in respect to the Beothuk. While there is over forty years of work in the field of ethnohistory in Canada,4 and a now-extensive body of writing by those who use Indigenous methodologies to answer questions about Indigenous history and contemporary issues,5 scholarly views of Beothuk agency remain predominantly framed by uncritical Eurocentric assumptions. As an

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archaeologist and influential scholar in the development of ethnohistory, Bruce Trigger argues that the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812, marked a change in representations of Indigenous peoples in Canada. After the end of the War of 1812, they6 ceased to be seen as valued allies, and instead the “savage”7 primordial natures of Indigenous peoples were emphasized along with other racially based constructions that served to establish barriers and legitimize displacement.8 Historian A.J. Ray’s discussion of the “so-called space-time equivalency hypothesis” amplifies Trigger’s point. As he suggests, “retreating into the bush [w]as equivalent to moving back in time.”9 This retreat could take the form of dislocation and movement away from settler presence, at which time Indigenous peoples are assumed to have vanished. As Jean O’Brien writes, “the lengthy, complex and contested history of Indian relations is dispensed with in a series of sweeping assertions that dismiss Indians as long gone, replaced by non-Indians who are making modernity.”10 Crucially, she writes, local histories have been used to aid in the historical misrepresentation of Indigenous peoples: “The collective story these texts told insisted that non-Indians held exclusive sway over modernity, denied modernity to Indians, and in the process created a narrative of Indian extinction that has stubbornly remained in the consciousness and unconsciousness of Americans.”11 This statement applies equally to the popular and historical representations of the Beothuk of Newfoundland, despite the ethnohistorical turn in histories of Indigenous peoples elsewhere in what would become Canada. As Bonita Lawrence and Patrick Brantlinger also concur in their chapters in this volume, Indigenous peoples, according to settler accounts, need to vanish in the face of progress. This chapter aims to interrogate some of the typical sources and approaches used in work focused on the Beothuk. I am interested in questioning long-held assumptions that appear in the most influential scholarly literature. The narratives about the Beothuk – Demasduit and Shanawdithit in particular – are consistent with historical views of Indigenous people as archetypal, tragic, and “vanishing” figures throughout North America. This reflects the fact that their stories, and indeed their bodies, are interpreted by those without ethnographic or cultural understanding of their lives. William E. Cormack’s narratives, as well as other recorded accounts, have often been taken at face value by historians, anthropologists, artists, and authors and read as “authentic” documents describing the reality of Beothuk experiences. But this approach ignores the critical, self-conscious turn in both ethnohistory

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and Indigenous studies which has forced scholars across North America to re-evaluate what they “know” about their “subject.”12 As Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues, “the negation of indigenous views of history was a critical part of asserting colonial ideology, partly because such views were regarded as clearly ‘primitive’ and ‘incorrect’ and mostly because they challenged and resisted the mission of colonization.”13 Many scholars now argue that we should be sceptical of settler accounts because they often reflect colonial biases and aims, and, at the very least, historians should beware the ethnocentric tones which typify documents written from European perspectives.14 My approach involves comparing other nineteenth-century North American settler interpretations of the “vanishing Indian” and “noble savage” with material focused exclusively on the Beothuk. The critical, self-conscious perspective employed in ethnohistory and Indigenous history, I argue, can shed new light on the Newfoundland experience. Historians of Newfoundland have traditionally emphasized local economic and environmental forces, as well as the impact of larger North Atlantic markets, on the colony’s history.15 Yet historians have not often drawn connection between Newfoundland state formation and the European invasion of Indigenous territories, although the island had much in common with the other white settler colonies, as Patrick Brantlinger, J. Edward Chamberlain, Bonita Lawrence, and Fiona Polack argue in this collection. In Newfoundland as elsewhere, imperial ventures involved contact, conflict, and ultimately the displacement or subjugation of local Indigenous populations. In short, racially based colonial policies could take root only once local Indigenous peoples began to “vanish.” In this regard, the efforts of Cormack and others to cast the Beothuk as a “vanishing race” and to record the stories of Shanawdithit’s people should be recast as colonial exercises. Cormack’s role as an explorer and his position within the empire was shared by others in the Beothuk Institution, and his gendered colonial gaze on the Beothuk women’s bodies was shared by his contemporaries. In other words, the narrative of the Beothuk has been seen through a lens created by Europeans and the words of Shanawdithit – as recorded by Cormack – may speak as much or more to that story than to her own. The history of Indigenous-settler relations has been shaped by such settler stories and images. Robert F. Berkhofer’s seminal work on the image of Indians in European and American society argues that these conceptualizations changed according to historical and cultural contexts. The shift to the idea of the “romantic savage” from an

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“enlightened savage” by the end of the eighteenth century is essential to contemporary and later historical accounts of Indigenous peoples.16 The 1820s and 1830s were a time of intense literary and artistic representation of these narratives. James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans appeared in 1826 and George Catlin performed his “salvage portraiture” of Indigenous peoples in the west in the 1830s, creating a collection that ultimately included more than six hundred paintings.17 Indigenous peoples were increasingly imagined not only as “romantic savages” – noble, static, and untamed – but as disappearing in the face of modernity. Indeed, as Cooper, Catlin, and their contemporaries thought, North American Indigenous peoples were vanishing, and the Beothuk of Newfoundland were no exception. For Newfoundlanders, Shanawdithit’s death in 1829 represented the “extinction” of what was thought to be Newfoundland’s only Indigenous nation,18 thereby fulfilling the vanishing prophecy in a colony on the verge of obtaining representative government.19 Scholars have shown, however, that while contact diseases like tuberculosis (which is said to have claimed both Demasduit and Shanawdithit) certainly took their toll on First Peoples, Indigenous identity was increasingly regulated and limited through treaties and exclusionary legislation in Canada. These changing demographics were used to legitimize dispossession and settler invasion.20 It is also during the early nineteenth century that non-Indigenous populations increased, and settler imperatives intensified, necessitating Indigenous resistance and negotiation. This was the case elsewhere in British North America. In 1836 Sir Francis Bond Head, lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, had a romantic notion of Indigenous peoples that corresponded with an expansionist colonial view, resulting in a treaty that ceded areas of the Bruce peninsula and, supposedly, allowed Indigenous peoples to live out their last remaining days in peace on Manitoulin Island on Lake Huron. It did not go unnoticed that the Anishinaabek consolidation on that island (which was never as successful as was anticipated by administrators and missionaries alike) would have opened up settlement on farmland on the Bruce peninsula. Theodore Binnema and Kevin Hutchings have argued that Head’s 1846 memoir, The Emigrant, in which he reflected on his time as lieutenant governor from 1836 to 1838, demonstrates the ties between romanticism and settler colonialism.21 Upper Canada was, of course, a different colonial context from Newfoundland.22 But the n­ineteenth-century imperial mentality of regarding Indigenous peoples as disappearing and in need of protection during their last days was

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not bound by geography. Head was far from alone in his representation of a “dying race.” In fact, he was very much a product of his historical context, which, as a colonial administrator, he had the power to shape. William E. Cormack was not an administrator, but he, too, as Fiona Polack concurs in her chapter, was formed by empire. Born in St John’s and educated in Scotland, Cormack is best known for his concern for the Beothuk people, but he was a natural scientist by training. He was well connected with individuals interested in Indigenous peoples within and without the colony. His mentor, Robert Jameson, was a naturalscience professor at the University of Edinburgh and founded the Edinburgh Museum, not coincidentally where much of Cormack’s material findings were sent.23 Cormack’s time in Newfoundland is often defined by his work on the Beothuk, but it is equally clear that he found ways to integrate his interest in the Beothuk with his interest in geology. This becomes important as we examine his activities in the colony. In 1822 Cormack and his Mi’kmaq guide, Sylvester Joe, set out to walk across the island, and, according to Marshall, he “made copious notes on the geological formations and character of the land and identified the flora and fauna of each region.”24 As a result of this journey, Cormack reported his findings to the colonial secretary, Lord Bathurst.25 In 1827 he attempted another trip, but by this time his finances were depleting. It is in that same year that the Beothuk Institution was formed at the suggestion of Judge A.W. Des Barres, with an executive comprised of himself, Bishop John Inglis, and Cormack, the latter serving as president and treasurer.26 It was necessary to raise £250 per year and the group seems to have embarked on a publicity campaign to aid them in that goal.27 When Cormack and his contemporaries became interested in – and fund-raised with – the story of Shanawdithit as the last member of her tribe, they shaped a local iteration of a larger narrative tradition that assisted the invasion of Indigenous territories throughout the world. The Beothuk Institution is often taken at face value by the most traditional historical works and can be seen as stemming from the same humanitarian and salvage imperatives that influenced the establishment of the Aborigines Protection Society ten years later. Cormack’s imperial connections extended to the Society, and, according to George Story, he was an acquaintance or correspondent of some its members, including Sir William Hooker, Michael Farady, and Thomas Hodgkin.28 But the Beothuk Institution’s aims went beyond protecting the Beothuk. A “Report of Mr. W.E. Cormack’s Journey in Search of the Red

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Indians in Newfoundland,” dated 12 January 1828, listed the prime reason for the Institution’s establishment: “the desires of opening a communication with, and promoting the civilization of, the Red Indians of Newfoundland; and of procuring, if possible, an authentic history of that unhappy race of people.” This was followed closely, however, by a concern for “the natural productions of the island; the interior of which is less known than any other of the British possessions abroad.”29 Cormack had an education in the natural sciences, and we know that he had reported on the physical terrain of the island as he travelled. This was as much a trip to discover minerals as it was to find the Beothuk and salvage their history. In effect, Cormack, in his report, constructed the Beothuk as being intimately part of their natural surroundings, but perhaps more than that, he also highlighted how both were to be “mined” as resources. The acknowledgment of the twin goals of the Beothuk Institution also places Newfoundland and Cormack himself within a larger imperial context: more information was needed if the island’s natural resources were to be tapped as they had been in other parts of the world. The Institution’s establishment and Cormack’s exploration activities were happening in the context of extensive mining development in North America. As Suzanne Zeller has written, the formation of joint-stock companies in England for mining exploration and investment in British North America was taking shape in the early 1820s.30 In 1826, for instance, the General Mining Association obtained mineral resources in Nova Scotia.31 These developments were initiated by Cormack’s contemporaries, and his exploration and salvaging activities were not undertaken in isolation. According to Marshall, Judge A.W. Des Barres had encouraged Cormack to establish the Beothuk Institution and chaired its founding meeting on 2 October 1827.32 Des Barres’s position as a product and producer of empire is evident in his role as a judge and as someone who wanted to “open communication with the Beothuk, enlist public support, and raise funds” in addition to gaining knowledge about the island’s resources.33 He was, after all, the son of the first lieutenant governor of Cape Breton, F.W. Des Barres, who had himself mapped other Atlantic colonies and served with Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham.34 The younger Des Barres started his career as the attorney general in Cape Breton but had to seek new employment after it merged with Nova Scotia. He applied for the post of chief justice at Prince Edward Island in March 1824 and also requested consideration for the position of

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assistant judge in Newfoundland that same year.35 When replying to a request for more information and references to support his application, Des Barres identified his position as a man bridging North America and England to defend the fact that he was a product of a colonial system. He extolled the virtues of being such an “insider” by saying that not only did the new Judicature Act of 1824 allow for such an appointment, but that his knowledge of “the peculiar laws and Practice of the colony” combined with his “intimate acquaintance … with Colonial Proceedings” would make him an asset to the court.36 Des Barres was eventually appointed and arrived in Newfoundland later that year. Like Cormack, he represented the bridge between imperial aims and settler practice in Newfoundland. The third member of the executive, Bishop John Inglis, had responsibilities in several colonies in addition to Newfoundland: New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Bermuda.37 His very sphere of episcopal influence reflected the transnational nature of the British Empire, and his position as a colonizing force would have been similar to that of Cormack and Des Barres. In essence, the Beothuk Institution’s executive had three main arms of empire: the extension of British law, resource extraction and surveying, and Christianity. Its dual purpose to find Beothuk survivors and survey the interior of the Island for minerals indicates that it was, in effect, concerned with both social and financial capital. It could appeal to romantics, colonial officials, and prospective mining investors alike. In addition to his connections in the Beothuk Institution, Cormack knew and was apparently a good friend of John McGregor.38 McGregor, who immigrated to Prince Edward Island and later moved to Liverpool in 1827, wrote three sections of “Sketches of Savage Life” for Fraser’s Magazine in 1836. He wrote one about Shanawdithit, where he casts the Beothuk people as mysterious and isolated from European influence, and, crucially, having “passed away from the face of the earth, ignorant of the evil or good of civilization.” He goes on to claim that “their name will be recorded in the annals of the western world as that of a nation who existed in the simplest state of society.”39 McGregor also wrote about Kondiaronk, the famous Wendat chief, and Tecumseh, the War of 1812 warrior. McGregor’s sketches describe valiant, noble, “vanishing Indians,” thereby reinforcing their invented, romanticized histories. These three historical figures have been remembered in ways that obscure not only their real experiences but also those of the peoples they are supposed to represent.

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In his “sketch” of Kondiaronk, McGregor outlines a very specific role for Indigenous people in the process of invasion: “Unless he be maddened or besotted by the intoxicating fluids introduced from Europe, the Indian of North America is a truly dignified and majestic personage. The graceful, the grave, the naturally taciturn, but, on the proper occasion, the eloquent gentleman of nature – the ‘stoic of the woods, the man without a tear’ … no wonder that he pines away in silent anguish, while he beholds his tribe melting away before the advancing encroachments and prosperity of Europeans.”40 In other words, the fate of the “true” “majestic” Indian is – as long as he has abstained from alcohol – to wait stoically until he is swallowed up by the march of colonial progress. Kondiaronk (also known as le Rat), according to McGregor, distinguished himself from other leaders by his “florid, sonorous eloquence, by his intrepidity and skill in hunting, by his daring bravery in war.”41 Thus he was supposedly above such human characteristics as romantic love and instead prone to a vengeful spirit. McGregor claims that, after having killed the French man who tried to spare him, “the undaunted warrior fell immediately after, nearly cut into pieces by the sabres of the French.” In reality, Kondiaronk died of an illness at the Great Peace of Montreal and is buried somewhere beneath the Place d’armes in Montreal.42 Discourses surrounding “noble savages” and “dying races” were often intertwined, as can be seen in the historical treatment of Tecumseh. McGregor describes him as having recovered from a degenerate state induced by rum, vowing revenge on the Americans who mistreated him while he was drunk.43 On this point, McGregor confuses Tecumseh with his brother, Tenskawatawa (it was the latter who recovered from alcoholism and became a spiritual leader and revivalist), but both men sought to protect Indigenous lands from American settler encroachment.44 The War of 1812, for Great Lakes Indigenous nations, represented an attempt to protect their territories from American expansion, but this is not how Tecumseh was remembered by his contemporaries. As historians including Robin Jarvis Brownlie have argued, it was Tecumseh’s alliance with Sir Isaac Brock, his heroism at Moraviantown which resulted in his death, and his contributions to Upper Canadian nation building – and, as we have seen more recently, Canadian nation-building narratives – that have been emphasized, in terms of both literary and historical treatment, as well as in the recent War of 1812 commemorations. His noble death as an ally of the Crown has forever characterized him as a brave warrior in a war that marked the end of Indigenous-settler military alliance.45

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McGregor’s sketches indicate a fascination with Indigenous peoples, especially those who contributed to colonial projects and died noble deaths. Kondiaronk and Tecumseh died while protecting French and English interests, respectively, while Shanawdithit’s tubercular decline occurred only after she was able to provide Cormack with vital information about her people. In this way, she is not unlike other female Indigenous cultural brokers such as Pocahontas and Sacajawea, who, while real historical figures, have been intensely mythologized and remembered for their helpfulness to the project of colonial invasion.46 McGregor does not see her death as violent, but as acceptably feminine. In fact, there are many parallels between the last two Beothuk women. Demasduit and Shanawdithit die in similar ways in captivity, and Marshall has demonstrated how the portraits historically thought to represent each are remarkably similar. Christian Hardy and Ingeborg Marshall argue that all historical likenesses of Demasduit and Shanawdithit can be traced back to Lady Hamilton’s 1819 miniature portrait of the former (Figure 9.1).47 Lady Hamilton, according to Marshall, “portrayed Mary March as an attractive, sensitive young woman with melancholy black eyes and short black hair, who is clad in a skin robe trimmed with fur.”48 In addition to using Demasduit’s captivity name, Mary March, Marshall’s uncritical summary of contemporary descriptions of Demasduit is telling of nineteenth-century bodily othering: according to Marshall, Demasduit was described by those who met her in St John’s as having “a gentle and interesting disposition” and that, physically, she was “very active, tall, with a stout body and small and delicate limbs. Her complexion, initially a light copper colour, became nearly as fair as an Europeans’ [sic] after a course of washing and absence from smoke. Her voice was remarkably sweet, low and musical.”49 Her description echoes that of others relating to Indigenous bodies, especially those that were more common around the time of European contact: tall and hearty, or the much-used “well-formed.”50 In this case, however, Demasduit’s description is gendered. Her vulnerability in captivity (in addition to her protracted illness) signals a submissiveness and a gentleness, both in her disposition and in her limbs. She is not a threat, and is there to be observed. Because Demasduit is non-threatening, there is no reason for her to meet the same violent end as her husband, Nonosabasut, and she is deserving of settler protection. It is therefore not surprising that, of all the Beothuk adults taken captive, not one of them was male.51

Historical Sources and the Beothuk  209

Figure 9.1  Demasduit (Mary March), by Henrietta Martha Hamilton. Image courtesy of Library and Archives Canada (acc no. 1977–14–1).

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What is particularly interesting here is the notion that Demasduit’s complexion was said to have been “whitened” with a combination of washing and lack of smoke. In the later part of the century, termed the “age of light, soap and water,” moral reform and hygienic practices would be used to target immigrant, working-class, and Indigenous peoples alike.52 Even in the earlier half of the nineteenth century, however, the subtext of this description is that because she was kept away from her cultural practices and away from the wilderness, which are, for settler imaginations, two sides of the same coin, Demasduit is raised up to whiteness. No mention is made about her position as a captive with little ability to consent. The description of her short hair is also curious. Why was it kept short? Was it cut after her capture? Was this also tied to concerns about hygiene and cleanliness? Marshall makes note of the hair length, but the reader is left to wonder why it is important. The artistic gaze is also a colonial one, although Lady Hamilton’s position as the governor’s wife is usually glossed over. While she was described as “the kind and constant friend of the Widow and Orphan,” the portrait that became the foundation of all visual likenesses of Beothuk women was, after all, painted in the context of captivity and murder.53 Lady Hamilton’s husband, Sir Charles, had commissioned the expedition that had led to Demasduit’s capture by John Peyton just a few months prior to the painting. Demasduit died as a result of tuberculosis on 8 January 1820 but had reportedly been very ill in the fall of 1819. As tuberculosis is a contact disease that can take years before it results in death, Demasduit would not have been in good health in St John’s, and this would provide a more likely explanation for her weak limbs and melancholy eyes. If we interrogate Lady Hamilton’s position as a colonial figure, the likelihood that she was indeed a “kind and constant friend” is considerably diminished, which also has implications for the portrait itself. Marshall and Hardy have argued that Shanawdithit’s likeness is really that of Demasduit, but this finding has not been questioned and has merely been seen as a case of mislabelling. I argue further that these mistaken identities instead reflect another layer of the settler imagination: they are interchangeable feminized images of some of the last of their “race.” For Newfoundlanders, the death of the supposed last Beothuk woman signified the supposed extinction of the only Indigenous group on the island. For a colony that was in the midst of calling for representative government, there were no remaining Indigenous claims with which to contend. Colonization, therefore, was facilitated not only by

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the marginalization and displacement of the Beothuk but also by their purported extinction.54 While the vanishing narrative was entrenched by Cormack’s publicity campaign to bring attention to Shanawdithit and the Beothuk Institution in the nineteenth century, it continues to have very real political consequences for Indigenous people in the province.55 Although we know that this narrative is historically inaccurate, with the recognition of Mi’kmaq presence, existing work related to cultural and biological hybridity, and the testimony of Indigenous voices throughout Newfoundland and Labrador, the story of the death of the “last Beothuk” is nevertheless powerful and persistent. Cormack and subsequent historians interpreted Shanawdithit’s story purposefully, resulting in an historical and colonial exercise that ties all of the previous “Red Indian” narratives together retroactively. It is a process made more complete by Howley in 1915 and then by Marshall eighty years later. Once Shanawdithit told Cormack that her people were called the Beothuk, the name was then retroactively applied to most “Red Indians” or “Newfoundland Indians” or “savages” seen on the island by many subsequent settler historians. But this was not an exclusively Beothuk space; as we know, it constituted an important part of Mi’kima’ki and existed on the borders of Inuit and Innu territories.56 In fact, Ralph Pastore has noted the cultural similarities between the Beothuk and Innu peoples, suggesting that the Beothuk were of “Algonkian stock, whose ancestors in Newfoundland produced tools typologically similar to the late prehistoric Indian inhabitants of coastal Labrador and the Quebec North Shore.”57 Cormack himself knew that this was a space that was occupied by other Indigenous groups, since he employed a Mi’kmaq guide, Sylvester Joe, and met Innu and Mi’kmaq camps during his travels throughout the interior.58 That said, Indigenous-invader encounters were few and far between until the English expanded north of Bonavista in the early eighteenth century. Some of the contact narratives collected in both Howley and reprinted again in Marshall are several decades apart. The crew of the Grace encountered traces of Indigenous people in 1594, and John Guy traded and ate with them in 1612. Sir Richard Whitbourne recorded a skirmish between Indigenous people and sailors in 1620. According to Marshall and Howley, Indigenous people are not encountered again until they are recorded as having refused to trade with the French in 1694. Cartwright finds evidence of their presence in 1768, although he was not able to find them.59 It is unclear how it can be assumed that these were, in fact, the same people who were encountered time after time. The exclusive use of the

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term Beothuk after Cormack’s writing constructs them not only as the only “legitimate” Indigenous group on the island but also as a nation that was doomed to fail. Their act of “vanishing” facilitated expansion and settlement, a pattern that occurred throughout North America, and continues to have consequences for Indigenous peoples within the province. When the Newfoundland Mi’kmaq submitted their claim for federal recognition in the early 1980s, the province’s response rejected the possibility that these encounters with “Indians” over the course of several centuries could be with other groups: “It is only reasonable to conclude that these ‘Newfoundland Indians’ were Beothuks, as there are no other Indian people native to the Island of Newfoundland.”60 In conclusion, the practice of reading historical evidence without interrogating the settler biases and misunderstandings contributes to a view of Indigenous cultural systems as stagnant, unchanging, and backwards, the very historical lens that scholars, Supreme Court decisions, and, most importantly, Indigenous voices have sought to change. As Maura Hanrahan and Elizabeth Yeoman and Elizabeth Penashue concur in their chapters in this book, this colonial image of tragic, stoic, “noble savages” continues to inform popular views of Indigenous people in Labrador. As recently as 2013, a CBC opinion piece constructed a dichotomy between the Innu and non-Indigenous Newfoundlanders and Labradorians.61 When traditional works such as those written by Howley and Marshall are placed within a larger North American context of invasion predicated on the demise of so-called “noble savages,” it can be seen that this story uncritically relays and relies on an account by Cormack that made the Beothuk people vanish. Because the story itself serves a colonial purpose, it cannot be taken at face value. In doing so, we risk reifying the nineteenth-century settler imagination and uncritically using the “vanishing Indian” to explain the life and stories of Indigenous peoples in Newfoundland and Labrador. NOTES 1 Shawnawdithit’s obituary, The Times, 14 September 1829, 5, The Times Digital Archive 1785–1985 (accessed November 2017); James Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1915); Ingeborg Marshall, A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1996). Marshall (219) states that it was Cormack who wrote the obituary in the Times.

Historical Sources and the Beothuk  213 2 Other works on the Beothuk include Ralph Pastore, “The Collapse of the Beothuk World,” Acadiensis 19, no. 1 (fall 1989): 52–71; L.F.S. Upton, “The Extermination of the Beothucks of Newfoundland,” Canadian Historical Review 58, no. 2 (June 1977): 133–53; Richard Budgel, “The Beothuks and the Newfoundland Mind,” Newfoundland Studies 8, no. 1 (spring 1992): 15–33; Frederick Rowe, Extinction: The Beothuks of Newfoundland (Toronto: McGrawHill Ryerson 1977); Allan Dwyer, “Atlantic Borderland: Natives, Fishers, Planters and Merchants in Notre Dame Bay, 1713–1802” (PhD thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2012). 3 Donald H. Holly, “A Historiography of an Ahistoricity: On the Beothuk Indians,” History and Anthropology 14, no. 2 (2003): 133. 4 Early ethnohistorical works in Canada include, for example, A.J. Ray, Indians in the Fur Trade: Their Role as Trappers, Hunters, and Middlemen in the Lands Southwest of Hudson Bay, 1660–1870 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1974); Bruce Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1976); Robin Fisher, Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774–1890 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 1977); Jennifer S.H. Brown, Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 1980), and Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society in Western Canada, 1670–1870 (Winnipeg: Watson and Dwyer Publishing 1980). 5 See, for example, the works of Indigenous scholars working in Canada including Kathleen E. Absolon Minogiizhigokwe, Kaandossiwin: How We Come to Know (Blackpoint and Winnipeg: Fernwood Press 2011); Jo-Anne Archibald, Indigenous Storywork: Educating the Heart, Mind, Body, and Spirit (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 2008); and Margaret Kovach, Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2009). 6 Although I am an Anishinaabe kwe, I will be using the term “they” to describe Indigenous peoples throughout this chapter. The fact that the patterns and events I am describing are historical is my main reason, rather than an attempt at “objectivity.” In other words, I was not part of the populations being discussed (both in the past and in the specific Newfoundland and Labrador context), and to switch back-and-forth between “we” and “they” would only be confusing. 7 J.R. Miller provides a description of the use of the term “savage” as it was applied to Indigenous peoples. See J.R. Miller, Lethal Legacy: Current Native Controversies in Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 2004), 7–8.

214  Lianne C. Leddy 8 Bruce Trigger, “The Historians’ Indian: Native Americans in Canadian Historical Writing from Charlevoix to the Present,” Canadian Historical Review 67, no. 3 (1986): 320. See also Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s ‘Heroic’ Age Reconsidered (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1985). 9 A.J. Ray, Indians in the Fur Trade, xviii. 10 Jean O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2010), 55. See also Paige Raibmon, Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-­ Nineteenth Century Northwest Coast (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2005); Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas 2004). 11 O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting, xiii. 12 Indeed, the term “subject” is one that Indigenous scholars have critiqued, given the history of scholarly inquiry and its impact on Indigenous peoples. The Tri-Council Policy Statement, for instance, uses the term “participant” rather than “subject” for research involving humans. See Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans, December 2010, 16. 13 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London and New York: Zed 1999), 29. 14 Smith argues that “a critical aspect of the struggle for self-determination has involved questions relating to our history as indigenous peoples and a critique of how we, as the other, have been represented or excluded from various accounts.” Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 28. Many ethnohistorians are now careful to take Indigenous views into account, and more Indigenous historians are critiquing traditional views of history. See Devon A. Mihesua, ed., Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing about American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1998); Susan A. Miller and James Riding In, eds., Native Historians Write Back: Decolonizing American Indian History (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press 2011); Nancy Shoemaker, ed., Clearing a Path: Theorizing the Past in Native American Studies (New York: Routledge 2002). Even undergraduate texts in Indigenous history contain sections that teach students to be critical about sources. See Jennifer S.H. Brown and Elizabeth Vibert, eds., Reading beyond Words: Contexts for Native History, 2nd ed. (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press 2003); Kristin Burnett and Geoff Read, eds., Aboriginal History: A Reader (Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press 2012); Colin G. Calloway,

Historical Sources and the Beothuk  215 First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History, 4th ed. (Boston and New York: Bedford/St Martin’s 2012); Olive Patricia Dickason and David T. McNab, Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times, 4th ed. (Don Mills: Oxford University Press 2009). 15 For a general work about Newfoundland, see Sean T. Cadigan, Newfoundland and Labrador: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2009). Other works about its development include Jerry Bannister, The Rule of the Admirals: Law, Custom, and Naval Government in Newfoundland (Toronto: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History 2003); Peter E. Pope, Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventheenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2004); Sean T. Cadigan, Hope and Deception in Conception Bay: Merchant-Settler Relations in Newfoundland, 1785–1855 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1995); Willeen Keough, The Slender Thread: Irish Women on the Southern Avalon, 1750–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press 2008). For historiographical studies, see Keith Matthews, “Historical Fence Building: A Critique of the Historiography of Newfoundland,” Newfoundland Studies 17, no. 2 (2001): 143–65; Jeff A. Webb, “Revisiting Fence Building: Keith Matthews and Newfoundland Historiography,” Canadian Historical Review 91, no. 2 (2010): 315–38; Jerry Bannister, “‘A Species of Vassalage’: The Issue of Class in the Writing of Newfoundland History,” Acadiensis 24, no. 1 (fall 1994): 134–44. 16 Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Knopf 1978), 78. 17 Ibid., 88. See also Calloway, First Peoples, 320–1. 18 See the Brantlinger, Chamberlin, and Lawrence chapters in this volume for critiques of extinction discourse. See Maura Hanrahan’s chapter for a full discussion of Mi’kmaq Indigeneity in Newfoundland. 19 Newfoundland was granted representative government in 1832. See Jerry Bannister, “The Campaign for Representative Government in Newfoundland,” Canadian Historical Review 5, no. 1 (1994): 19–40; Sean T. Cadigan, “A Colonial State: 1824–1855,” in Newfoundland and Labrador: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2009), 98–124. 20 See Bonita Lawrence’s chapter in this collection. See also Lawrence, “Gender, Race, and the Regulation of Native Identity in Canada and the United States: An Overview,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 18, no. 2 (spring 2003): 3–31. For identity regulation and the Newfoundland context, see Lawrence, “Reclaiming Ktaqumkuk: Land and Mi’kmaq Identity in Newfoundland,” in Julian Agyeman et al., eds., Speaking for Ourselves: Environmental Justice in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 2009), 42–64. For works on Indigenous populations, colonial ­policies,

216  Lianne C. Leddy and disease, see James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life (Regina: University of Regina Press 2013); Mary-Ellen Kelm, Colonizing Bodies (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 1998); Nancy Shoemaker, American Indian Population Recovery in the Twentieth Century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 1999); Maureen Lux, Medicine That Walks (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2001); Don Kerr and Roderic Beaujot, “Aboriginal Demography,” in David Long and Olive Patricia Dickason, eds., Visions of the Heart: Canadian Aboriginal Issues, 3rd ed. (Toronto: Oxford University Press 2011), 158–60. 21 Theodore Binnema and Kevin Hutchings, “The Emigrant and the Noble Savage: Sir Francis Bond Head’s Romantic Approach to Aboriginal Policy in Upper Canada, 1836–1838,” Journal of Canadian Studies 39, no. 1 (winter 2005): 115–38. 22 L.S.F. Upton outlines the differences between colonial processes on the mainland and on the island, such as the lack of missionaries and the settlement patterns established by fishing rather than farming. Upton, “The Extermination of the Beothucks of Newfoundland,” 133. 23 Marshall, A History and Ethnography, 241. John Harries, “Of Bleeding Skills and the Postcolonial Uncanny: Bones and the Presence of Nonosabasut and Demasduit,” Journal of Material Culture 15, no. 4 (2010): 403–21. 24 Marshall, A History and Ethnography, 182. 25 Ibid., 181–2. 26 Ibid., 193. 27 Ibid., 194. They sent statements to the Royal Gazette and to British newspapers. 28 G.M. Story, “William Eppes Cormack,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 9, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, http://www. biographi.ca/en/bio/cormack_william_eppes_9E.html (hereafter DCB). 29 W.E. Cormack, “Report of Mr. W.E. Cormack’s Journey in Search of the Red Indians in Newfoundland. Read before the Boeothick Institution at St. John’s, Newfoundland,” Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, 5–12, http://eco.canadiana.ca/view/oocihm.61101/14?r=0&s=1 (accessed November 2017). 30 Suzanne Zeller, “Nature’s Gullivers and Crusoes,” in John Logan, ed., North American Exploration, Vol. 3: A Continent Comprehended (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1997), 209. 31 Ibid., 210. 32 Marshall, A History and Ethnography, 193. 33 Ibid. 34 D.W. Prowse, A History of Newfoundland from the English, Colonial and Foreign Records (Bowie, MD: Heritage Books 2003 [1895]), 423. Citations refer

Historical Sources and the Beothuk  217 to Heritage edition. R.J. Morgan, “J.F.W. Des Barres,” in DCB, vol. 6. Stephen J. Hornsby, Surveyors of Empire: Samuel Holland, J. F. W. Des Barres, and the Making of the Atlantic Neptune (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2011). 35 Letters from A.W. Des Barres to R.W. Horton, 29 March and 13 May 1824, Library and Archives Canada (LAC), reel B-1708. 36 Letter from A.W. Des Barres to R.W. Horton, 7 July 1824, ibid. 37 Judith Fingard, “John Inglis” in DCB, vol. 7. 38 Ingeborg Marshall, introduction to “Sketches of Savage Life, No. 2: Shaa-naandithit, or the Last of The Boëothics,” by John McGregor, Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 13, no. 75 (March 1836): 316–23, http://www.mun.ca/ rels/native/beothuk/mcgregor.html (accessed November 2017). 39 McGregor, “Sketches of Savage Life, No. 2,” 316. 40 John McGregor, “Sketches of a Savage Life, No. 1: Kondiaronk, Chief of the Hurons,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, 13, no. 74 (February 1836): 170–2. 41 Ibid., 172. 42 William Fenton, “Kondiaronk” in DCB, vol. 2; Gilles Havard, The Great Peace of Montreal of 1701: French-Native Diplomacy in the Seventeenth Century (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2001). 43 John McGregor, “Sketches of Savage Life, No. 3: Tecumseh, Chief Warrior of the Shawanees [sic],” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 13, no. 76 (April 1836): 502–4. 44 R. David Edmunds, “Tecumseh, the Shawnee Prophet, and American History: A Reassessment,” Western Historical Quarterly 14, no. 3 (1983): 261–76. 45 Robin Jarvis Brownlie, “The Co-optation of Tecumseh: The War of 1812 and Racial Discourses in Upper Canada,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 23, no. 1 (2012): 39–63. See also Guy St. Denis, Tecumseh’s Bones (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2005); John Sugden, Tecumseh’s Last Stand (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1985); Edmunds, “Tecumseh.” 46 Clara Sue Kidwell, “Indian Women as Cultural Mediators,” Ethnohistory, 39, no. 2 (spring 1992): 97–107. 47 Christian Hardy and Ingeborg Marshall, “A New Portrait of Mary March,” Newfoundland Quarterly 76, no. 1 (1980): 25–8. 48 Ingeborg Marshall, “The Miniature Portrait of Mary March,” Newfoundland Quarterly 73, no. 3 (1977): 5. 49 Ibid., 6. 50 Christopher Columbus described the Indigenous people he encountered in October 1492 as “very well formed, with handsome bodies and good

218  Lianne C. Leddy faces.” See Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley, Jr, eds., The Diario of Christopher Columbus’ First Voyage to America, 1492–1493 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1989), 67. For contact narratives and first impressions, see also James Axtell, Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural Origins of North America (Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press 2001), 14–45; Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian, 3–22; Paul W. DePasquale, “‘Worth the Noting’: European Ambivalence and Aboriginal Agency in Meta Incognita, 1576– 78,” in Brown and Vibert, eds., Reading beyond Words, 5–38. 51 Tom June was captured as a child. He’s an interesting figure as a captive in that, as an adult, he seems to have had freedom of movement to see his parents. Marshall, A History and Ethnography, 85–6. 52 Mariana Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885–1925 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2008). 53 Phillip Buckner, “Sir Charles Hamilton,” in DCB, vol. 7. 54 O’Brien notes that local extinguishment narratives belied the continued existence of Indigenous peoples throughout New England, and their resistance to colonial policies. See O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting, 145–89. 55 Lawrence, “Reclaiming Ktaqumkuk,” 42–64; Richard Budgel, “The Beothuks and the Newfoundland Mind,” Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 8, no. 1 (1992): 15–33. Dennis Bartels and Alice Bartels, “Mi’gmaq Lives: Aboriginal Identity in Newfoundland,” in Ute Lischke and David T. McNab, eds., Walking a Tightrope: Aboriginal People and Their Representations (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2005), 249–80. 56 M.J. Wetzel, “Decolonizing Ktaqmkuk Mi’kmaw History” (LLM thesis, Dalhousie University 1995); Bartels and Bartels, “Mi’gmaq Lives”; Maura Hanrahan, “The Lasting Breach: The Omission of Aboriginal People from the Terms of Union between Newfoundland and Canada and Its Ongoing Impacts” (St John’s: Royal Commission on Renewing and Strengthening Our Place in Canada, March 2003). 57 Ralph Pastore has noted the similarities between the Beothuk and Innu peoples. See “The Collapse of the Beothuk World,” 52. In Pastore’s work on the Newfoundland Heritage website, he notes the peaceful relationship between the Beothuk and Innu, as well as the spiritual ceremony of the mokoshan that they may have had in common. See Pastore, “The Boyd’s Cove Beothuk Site,” http://www.heritage.nf.ca/articles/aboriginal/ beothuk-boyds-cove.php (accessed November 2017). 58 Marshall, A History and Ethnography, 181–2. 59 Ibid., 229, 250–2. 60 Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, Assessment and Analysis of the Micmac Land Claim in Newfoundland (St John’s, 1982), 114. O’Brien, in

Historical Sources and the Beothuk  219 ­ irsting and Lasting, notes that the politics of recognition are challenging F and the process is “highly contested terrain” (205–6). This is so in many parts of Turtle Island. 61 John Furlong, “Trouble in Natuashish Comes from the Top,” CBC News, 6 October 2013, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundlandlabrador/furlong-trouble-in-natuashish-comes-from-the-top-1.1912842 (accessed November 2017). CBC issued an apology for the piece because it does not live up to its “Journalistic Standards and Practices.” At the time of writing, it remains on their website.

10 Historical Narrative Perspective in Howley and Speck c hr istophe r ay lward

Since its publication in 1915, James P. Howley’s The Beothucks or Red Indians: The Aboriginal Inhabitants of Newfoundland has become a primary source for scholars seeking the answers to a vast array of questions about the Beothuk people: anthropologists, archaeologists, and, most extensively, ethnohistorians. Published in 1922, Frank Speck’s Beothuk and Micmac: Indian Notes and Monographs, which addresses the Beothuk primarily through Indigenous sources, has had, by comparison, a minimal impact. Yet some of Speck’s primary theories about the Beothuk – in particular their origins and fate – are borne out in a series of archaeological developments beginning in the 1970s and continuing to the present day. An analysis of the primary sources of these two texts sheds some light on the reasons behind this schism in interpretation and its pervasive influence on the Beothuk historical and archaeological narratives to follow. Howley’s The Beothucks or Red Indians: The Aboriginal Inhabitants of Newfoundland A geologist by profession, James P. Howley (Figure 10.1) worked as a geological and topographical surveyor for the government of Newfoundland from 1867 until his death in 1918.1 Howley’s interest in the Beothuk was personal rather than professional. A collection of historical documents, folk traditions, journalistic accounts, and descriptions of archaeological findings believed to be Beothuk, The Beothucks or Red Indians: The Aboriginal Inhabitants of Newfoundland constitutes more a compendium of research resources than an ethnohistorical analysis.

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Figure 10.1  James Patrick Howley. Original held by The Rooms Corporation of Newfoundland and Labrador, Provincial Archives Division.

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Since its publication in 1915, the reaction to Howley’s work has been mixed. Described as “les documents fragmentaires et épars, jetés en vrac par Howley” and an “unsatisfactory description of the looting of Newfoundland,” the book has also been praised by more recent scholars for its “strong critical sense,” its comprehensiveness, and its significant contribution to subsequent research efforts.2 L.F.S. Upton commends Howley’s work as “well done,” with the caveat that “if Howley missed a document, so did everyone else.”3 George M. Story describes it as “still the one indispensable work on its subject.”4 Indeed, while taking issue with a number of Howley’s assumptions, Speck himself concedes that “there is a grave doubt if Mr. Howley’s monograph will ever be superseded.”5 Inarguably, the book’s influence has been tremendous, cited as it is, often extensively, by virtually all scholars writing about the Beothuk since its publication. As a compendium of ethnohistorical research documents and materials, The Beothucks or Red Indians represents a significant publishing accomplishment. The number and diversity of sources cited from Howley even today stands as testimony to the debt owed him by researchers. The danger, however, is in assuming that the text is only a compendium, and underestimating or failing to take into consideration Howley’s role as narrator, particularly with respect to editing and commentary. Howley himself openly acknowledges his role as editor, stating in his preface his intent “to sift as much of the truth as possible, and finally make such corrections as are deemed to be necessary.”6 His task he describes as assessing his source material, much of which is “of a very dubious character,” and deciding what to include: “It was no easy task to sift all these divergent stories, eliminate what was useless or unreliable, and get at the actual facts in each case.”7 Particularly problematic for Howley as narrator is his use of members of the Peyton family as sources. First among his “reliable authorities, whose authenticity is beyond question,” Howley counts John Peyton, Jr, a man who had significant dealings with the Beothuk in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including a grand jury investigation for murder: “My old friend, the late John Peyton, Magistrate of Twillingate, his wife, and his son Thomas, were, without exception, the best informed persons of modern times, in fact, they were a fund in themselves from whence was obtained the most direct and trustworthy references in my possession.”8 In his Reminiscences of James P. Howley: Selected Years, published posthumously in 1997, Howley elaborates: “The Peyton Family being the

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most intelligent and best educated persons I came across were the source from whence I gleaned the most reliable information.”9 John Peyton, Jr, whom Howley acknowledges as “the best living authority on the subject of the Aborigines,” proves “delighted to relate his experiences with those poor unfortunate people when he found an interested listener.”10 Eighty years old when he met Howley in 1871, John Peyton, Jr was described at the time by T.G.B. Lloyd, a contemporary of Howley’s, as “very deaf and failing in memory.”11 Howley’s use of members of the Peyton family as sources of Beothuk history raises a number of issues. First is the Peytons’ evident conflict of interest with the Beothuk in the context of the family’s involvement in the Bay of Exploits salmon fishery. Leaving Christchurch, England, in 1770, John Peyton, Sr first sailed with Lieutenant George Cartwright to Labrador.12 He initially settled in Fogo, where he worked in the cod fishery and met his future partner, Harry Miller, who was also from Christchurch.13 Relocating to the Exploits valley, Peyton and Miller embarked on a joint venture in the salmon fishery. By 1800, Peyton was on his own and had gained rights to the entire salmon fishery on the Exploits River, which placed him in direct competition with the Beothuk, who had come to rely increasingly on salmon as a primary food source, driven as they were from the coast by encroaching settlement.14 Fifteen years later, at the age of sixty-eight, Peyton handed these rights over to his son, John Peyton, Jr. John Jr had emigrated from England at the age of nineteen to join his father in 1812.15 Between them, John Peyton, Jr and Sr held the exclusive rights for the Exploits salmon fishery for a total of seventy-nine years.16 The business was a lucrative one. As Thomas Peyton points out, on average, the Peyton family shipped 300 tierces [about 40,000 kilograms] of salmon annually from their headquarters on Lower Sandy Point.17 Writes Peyton, “All our fishes were eagerly sought for in the foreign markets and brought good prices.”18 In private correspondence to Thomas Peyton seeking further information for his upcoming publication on the Beothuk, Howley refers to Thomas, John Peyton, Jr’s son, as “the only really reliable authority now living.”19 In a letter to Roland Goodyear dated 12 March 1910, Thomas concedes that “most of what I shall write about was from information obtained from my father.”20 With regards to the Beothuk and their relationship with settlers, Thomas Peyton reveals an attitude in keeping with that of eighteenth-century narrators preceding him, with an emphasis on conflict and how it affects the interests of the settlers:

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“No doubt but these aborigines were a wild and mischievous race and caused the early settlers much annoyance more particularly at the fishing harbours on the outside settlements, getting on board the fishing boats during the night, cutting off and carrying away their sails and fishing gear and everything movable, nothing was safe.”21 Yet, like his grandfather before him, Thomas Peyton feels compelled to impart what he knows about the Beothuk. His letter to Goodyear concludes as follows: “I could follow writing on the subject of the aboriginies. Having once started the subject I scarcely know when to stop, and fear I have trespassed on your time by writing on subjects that can be of little interest to you.”22 Howley’s attitude towards Native people in The Beothucks or Red Indians is linked to his reliance on the Peytons as a source of authority. Reflecting a colonial narrative perspective similar to that of writers like John Cartwright and William Cormack, Howley introduces the Beothuk as “living in their primitive ignorance and barbarism, under our vaunted civilization, not altogether unknown, but unheeded and uncared for, until this same civilization blotted them out of existence.”23 The Newfoundland experience he contrasts to that of Canada and Acadia, “where the equally barbarous savages were treated with so much consideration.”24 Howley’s language is particularly patronizing in his references to members of “the weaker sex”: he describes Demasduit, who was a young wife and mother at the time she was captured in 1819 by John Peyton, Jr and his father, as “this child of sorrow.”25 Howley’s attitude towards his Native subjects is further revealed in his practice of rarely referring to them by name, even in situations where he clearly knows what their names are. In Howley’s text, Joe Sylvester, the Mi’kmaq who guided Cormack – ostensibly the first white man to cross the interior of Newfoundland – is consistently referred to throughout Cormack’s narrative as “my Indian.”26 Sylvester also remains unnamed by Howley, who adopts Cormack’s habit of referring to him as an “Indian.” In one footnote, Howley draws attention to an agreement he has found among Cormack’s papers “which fully bears out the statement as to the unreliability of his Indian guide.”27 Citing Bonnycastle (1842) and Pedley (1863), in “Capture of three Beothuk Women” Howley likewise describes the capture of Shanawdithit, her mother, and sister in New Bay in the spring of 1823 without ever referring to them by name. According to the account, once the man accompanying them had been shot by furriers, the three women “gave themselves up” in a starving condition to William Cull, who brought

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them to John Peyton, Jr, magistrate for the district.28 After bringing the three women to St John’s, where it became evident that the health of at least two of them was precarious, it fell to Peyton to return them to the Bay of Exploits “with a number of presents, consisting of such articles as were calculated to gratify a barbarous tribe.”29 Following an exchange of correspondence between Peyton and Captain David Buchan, in which the latter refers to the women as “these interesting females,” it is not until William Wilson’s account in 1823, in which it is stated that the furriers “took three Indian females with a view to earning a reward,” that Howley’s reader learns their identity.30 Shanawdithit is the only one of the three who is named; the others are referred to as “the sick woman” and an old woman who “was morose, and had the look and action of a savage,” and “looked with dread or hatred on every one that entered the Court House.”31 In an account originating with a Mr Curtis of Salmonier and related to Howley by the Reverend J. St John, we learn that Shanawdithit’s mother was known among the settlers as “Old Smut” and was “thought to be the instigator of every wicked act the Indians did.”32 Acknowledging his primary sources of these events, Howley concedes, “We are indebted to Mr. W.E. Cormack and to Mr. John Peyton for the subsequent history of the three women.”33 With respect to their accounts of these three women, particularly Shanawdithit, both Cormack and Peyton function as narrators with a vested personal interest in the events in which they are involved. Yet nowhere in his account does Howley acknowledge their stake in the events of the narrative or its implications for what he presents as historical events. An alternative historical perspective within Howley’s monograph comes from Shanawdithit. As a Native subject, Shanawdithit’s own history is narrated in a way that underscores the bias of Howley’s primary sources as well as that of the author himself. Narrated by European men, accounts of Shanawdithit feature language that emphasizes their perception of her primitiveness and inferiority relative to their own cultural and societal frames of reference. Following the death of her mother and sister, Shanawdithit worked for five years as an unpaid domestic servant in the Peyton household in Twillingate before spending the last months of her life at Cormack’s house in St John’s.34 Her move to St John’s was supported by a unanimous resolution by the Beothuk Institution, of which Cormack was founder, that she “be placed under the paternal care of the Institution.”35 In a letter to Cormack, John Stark, the Institution’s secretary, reiterates

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the organization’s obligation to “do all in our power to reclaim a very savage from the verge of continued ignorance.”36 Among the drawings and artifacts created by Shanawdithit during her time with Cormack are sketches of various Beothuk implements and symbols, as well as a series of five maps outlining her own interpretation of historical events.37 Cormack’s transcription of events described by Shanawdithit raises concerns about the interpretation of Native North American speech as mediated by chroniclers who tend to be motivated by their own agenda.38 Nevertheless, the drawings are some of the few Beothuk sources of information that remain concerning their history and way of life. With regards to the drawings, Howley concedes, “Although rude and truly Indian in character, they nevertheless display no small amount of artistic skill.”39 Howley’s discussion of Shanawdithit provides some further insight into his attitudes towards Native people. Reflecting her inferior status as a narrative subject, Howley challenges Shanawdithit’s distinct perspective as a narrator when it does not agree with European accounts of the same events. This is particularly well illustrated in his editorializing of her narratives of violent acts against the Beothuk involving John Peyton, Sr. In what Howley has labelled Sketch V, Shanawdithit illustrates “those brutal murders so frequently recorded” arising out of a raid by a group of settlers on a Beothuk community in the vicinity of Rushy Brook, Exploits.40 The letter A is used to denote the location of the event, on an island on the south side of the river. The first of Cormack’s handwritten notations on the drawing reads, “Accompanied with 2 others old Mr. Peyton killed a woman at A 14 c 15 years ago) on the Exploits River”; the second, “Showing that the murder of them was going on circ 1816.”41 In Howley’s transcription of the first note, which is included in his text on the page opposite the reproduction of the drawing, Peyton’s name is replaced by an ellipsis: “Accompanied by 2 others old Mr ... kills an Indian woman at A 14 or 15 years ago, on the Exploits River.”42 A similar editorial intervention is evident in Howley’s treatment of Shanawdithit’s account of the capture of Demasduit. Included in excerpts Howley identifies as “From W.E. Cormack’s Letter Book” is Shanawdithit’s account of the 1819 event, of which she was herself a witness, being present in the encampment on the north shore of the lake.43 Shanawdithit’s understanding of the motive behind the capture is quite clear: her account describes an armed party of nine Englishmen coming up from the coast to the lake “for the purpose of carrying off

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some Red Indians, instigated by the reward held out by the Governor for a Red Indian man.”44 When the English spy a group of Beothuk upon the ice, they give chase and overtake one woman, whom they seize: “Another Indian then approached; a parley and altercation took place; the whitemen insisted upon carrying the woman with them, in which they were opposed by the first Indian, who in defiance of the muskets and bayonets by which he was surrounded strove to rescue the woman: he was shot on the spot, and the other Indian, who now attempted to run off, was shot dead also.”45 In a footnote to the incident, Howley adds, “This statement does not seem to be correct. Only one man was shot.”46 The drawing by Shanawdithit to which Cormack refers in his account appears in Howley’s book as Sketch No. II, with two titles supplied by Cormack: on the left side of the drawing “2 Different Scenes & times,” and on the right, “The Taking of Mary March on the North side of the Lake.”47 Again, the sketch is accompanied by Howley’s interpretation. In reference to the drawing on the top of the page, which illustrates the events of Demasduit’s capture, Howley accounts for the presence of three red figures by interpreting two of them as representing Nonosabasut, Demasduit’s husband – once when he is negotiating with the English for her return, and second after he has been shot, lying prone on the ice: “It is almost needless to say, this represents the furriers taking Mary March, her husband coming back to the rescue, and his dead body, after being shot, lying on the ice.”48 According to Howley, Shanawdithit’s drawing contains no indication of a second murdered figure, Nonosabasut’s brother, whose murder is also described in her account.49 Interpreted thus by Howley, there exists no discrepancy between this account by Shanawdithit and that narrated by John Peyton, Jr himself, the topographical details of which correspond exactly with Howley’s own experience of the region almost a century later: “All that is shown on this latter drawing relative to the capture of Mary March, corresponds exactly with the story as related to me by Mr. Peyton himself, and so clearly are the topographical details laid down, that I had no difficulty in recognizing the different points, on my last visit to Red Indian Lake a few years ago.”50 As a compendium of various sources concerning the Beothuk, what is particularly valuable about Howley’s work is the openness with which it acknowledges his prioritization of those sources and his own intervention in the narrative. While he relies heavily on members of

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the Peyton family, Howley openly acknowledges this choice and provides a rationale for his decisions. In so doing, he draws attention to the fact that these accounts are not objective but rather told from a distinct (and many would consider problematic) perspective, one that has been shaped largely by the Peytons’ controversial first-hand experience with the Beothuk. Howley is equally candid about his contradiction and modification of Shanawdithit’s account so that it falls in line with those provided by the Peytons. Consequently, whether or not readers leave Howley’s monograph in agreement with his editorial choices, their articulation in the text serves to heighten our awareness that the writing is by no means objective, and that the author has made those choices in a way that reflects his own narratorial bias. Speck’s Beothuk and Micmac With its emphasis on Native rather than European sources, a very different account of the Beothuk is found in the work of Frank Speck (Figure 10.2). An American anthropologist with an extensive background as a researcher into Native North American cultures and languages, Speck published his Beothuk and Micmac: Indian Notes and Monographs in 1922. The book has its genesis in two papers Speck wrote in 1914, “Micmac Hunting Territories in Nova Scotia” and “Hunting Territories of the Micmac-Montagnais of Newfoundland,” which arose from a trip he took to the eastern provinces of Canada in the summer of 1914 to conduct ethnological research.51 The journey included a trip to Red Indian Lake and the Exploits River in search of traditional or material sources of the Beothuk. Drawing on the testimony of Native people in the region, Speck’s work illustrates how interpretation of the historical narrative becomes more complex when one is willing to consider accounts from alternative sources. In contrast to Howley, Speck turns to Aboriginal sources for the information he is seeking on the Beothuk, tracing various interpretations of their experience among Indigenous people as far west as the Penobscot of Maine. Malecite references to the Beothuk, whom they called Me’kwe’isit (“red man”), include several myths and a description of a tribe of red Indians.52 Speck finds a prominent place for the Beothuk in the local legends of the Mi’kmaq, who referred to them as Meywė’dji˙djik, or “red people,” and whom he consults out of a conviction that they “might have a more extended knowledge of the supposedly extinct tribe.”53 The Micmac-Montagnais of Newfoundland’s south and west coasts and interior Speck describes as “our most

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Figure 10.2  Frank Gouldsmith Speck. Reproduced by permission of the ­University of Pennsylvania Archives and Records Center.

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important extant sources of information about the Beothuk.”54 Among the St George’s Bay community, whose ancestors claimed an amicable relationship with the Beothuk, Speck surmises “some culture borrowing and blood intermixture to have taken place.”55 Citing a Beothuk/Mi’kmaq legend known to be common to a number of other Native groups, Speck sees its motive as an indication “that the Micmac and the Red Indians were undoubtedly on friendly terms and that they intermingled.”56 The legend describes hostility arising between two groups as the result of a boy from one group killing a black weasel during the winter, an omen of misfortune. This version of the legend appears under the title “How the Micmac and the Red Indians Became Separated.” Of its source, Speck indicates only that it was “narrated by John Paul at Badger’s Brook.”57 With regards to the possible motive behind its telling, Speck ventures that the myth was used as “a secondary explanation of some historical event,” common as it was among Aboriginal peoples, including the Mi’kmaq and other Wabanaki tribes of the mainland – the latter of whom used it to account for the hostility of the Iroquois.58 In his analysis of Mi’kmaq material culture and nomenclature, Speck emerges as the first European writing about the Beothuk to emphasize ties between them and the Mi’kmaq as well as other Native groups. His extensive discussion of material culture among existing groups – encompassing habitations, canoe construction, dress, decoration, utensils, weapons, and tools – finds a number of examples of Beothuk influence, making a strong case for what he interprets as cultural borrowing among the Mi’kmaq, Montagnais, Beothuk, and the Eskimo.59 In the ancient Mi’kmaq nomenclature of Newfoundland, Speck locates further links to the Beothuk, whom the Mi’kmaq claim to have pitied for their desperate plight in the interior of the island.60 Examples Speck discusses include the Mi’kmaq Meγwė djewa˙´ gi˙ “Red Indian Lake” and Meγwė za´ xsit or “red faced person,” for Hodges Mountain, located northeast of Badger’s Brook.61 Speck’s “Folklore Notes from the Newfoundland Band” presents a number of variants of anecdotes also published in Howley, but in this case related from a Mi’kmaq perspective. A number of interesting discrepancies are found between the two versions, including the Mi’kmaq John Paul’s take on the outcome of Lieutenant David Buchan’s 1811 expedition into the interior: By the next night they [two of Buchan’s party] had not returned, and Buchan told the Micmac and Mountaineer to track them. They started

Historical Narrative Perspective in Howley and Speck   231 on the track and came back to report that the Red Indians’ trail led back toward Red Indian lake. So then the whole party started back and reached the camp at Red Indian point. It was deserted, but the two white men were found beheaded. Then Buchan gave chase, but his party was unable to follow them because there were footprints in confusion all over the lake. So Buchan went to several of their abandoned camps and put gunpowder in all the fireplaces so that they would blow up when the Red Indians came back to light the fires at their old camps. Afterward, of course, a lot of the Red Indians were killed by the device.62

As published in Howley, Buchan’s version of the event makes no reference to his use of gunpowder in abandoned Beothuk camps. To the contrary, it is the vengefulness of the Beothuk that Buchan emphasizes in his summary of the account.63 Speck locates Paul’s narration of this event within the context of family oral history. He notes that Paul had originally heard the story from his grandfather and was himself sixty-eight years old when he told it to Speck in 1914. Acknowledging the centrality of the narrator in the Native oral tradition, Speck emphasizes Paul’s strong character and status within Mi’kmaq society to establish his reliability as a narrative source: “John Paul had been a headman among the MicmacMontagnais of the island and was particularly well-informed in matters of native life. His age, experience, and willingness to work made him invaluable, and I take this occasion to recommend him to others who may undertake similar studies in this region where the younger generation of natives is not well informed nor conservative.”64 While he clearly considered the Mi’kmaq perspective on historical events to be significant, there is no suggestion in Speck’s writing that he actively sought it out. Speck includes Paul’s narrative among what he describes as “historical accounts from Indian sources and some miscellaneous Beothuk lore gathered incidentally in the interior.”65 Other Mi’kmaq accounts Speck cites present discrepancies with some of Howley’s sources around details of the Peytons’ capture of Demasduit. In his written account of the expedition, John Peyton, Jr emphasizes his intent as being amicable. He sets out on the expedition to “open a friendly communication” with the Beothuk and reiterates his goal “to endeavor to be on good terms with the Indians.”66 In contrast, John Paul notes that Peyton and his party “went to the interior to capture some Red Indians.”67 When she is caught, John Paul states that Demasduit “pointed out to the white men her full breasts to show that she had a child, and

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pointed up to the heavens to implore them, in God’s mercy, to allow her to return to her child.”68 In his summary of Peyton’s telling of the event, Howley interprets this gesture as Demasduit’s “appeal to his manhood.”69 Peyton’s written narrative, on the other hand, contains no mention of the gesture. To the contrary, it downplays Demasduit’s resistance and emphasizes her compliance. Having convinced Demasduit that he “would not hurt her,” Peyton notes, “I then advanced and gave her my hand, she gave hers to me and to all my party as they came up.”70 Speck also includes Mi’kmaq stories of amicable dealings between Mi’kmaq and the Beothuk which are absent from Howley’s work. Notes Speck: “In general the idea that the Micmac-Montagnais aided in the remorseless activities against the Beothuk arouses somewhat indignant denial among them.”71 Speck relates one account told to him by Louis John, who insists, “The Micmacs never molested the Red Indians.”72 John’s account concerns his great-grandfather, who was employed by the English to guide them into the interior to capture Beothuk: “When he found a Red Indians’ camp he would tell the poor folk to run, and then he would return and tell the Englishmen that he saw some Red Indians, but that they ran off.”73 In another account, John Paul narrates the story of his grandmother and grandfather encountering a Beothuk couple with a young child on the Exploits River, and, noting that they had no food, leaving a gift of smoked meat for them in their canoe.74 Speck openly acknowledges that his Mi’kmaq sources present different accounts from those featured in Howley’s text. Rather than prioritizing one perspective over the other, however, he suggests that Howley’s inclusion of narrative accounts of the same events “might be considered as variants of those given here.”75 Speck’s emphasis arises from his ethnographic interest in a people who he believed interacted with the Beothuk and shared certain experiences and cultural traits with them. Within the greater scope of the Beothuk narrative, which until this point has been dominated by the European voice, Speck’s uniqueness lies in his recording of this alternative perspective on historical events and proposing that it be considered. Another source of this alternative perspective in Speck’s work is Santu Toney, a Native woman claiming to be a direct descendant of the Newfoundland Beothuk. In addition to providing a unique perspective on Beothuk history, Toney’s account is further significant in that it illustrates the resistance such an alternative perspective can encounter – in this case from Howley himself – when it contradicts the prevalent historical narrative.

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Well aware of Howley’s views concerning Beothuk origins and fate, Speck acknowledges that his initial meeting with Toney in July 1910 near Gloucester, Massachusetts, was “the most surprising occurrence.”76 The ensuing correspondence between Howley and Speck presents two very different views with regards to Santu’s reliability as a source. In two letters dated 12 December 1911 and 18 May 1912, Howley writes to Speck questioning his “supposed discovery of some descendants of the Beothuck.”77 With reference to his own extensive research that he is on the verge of publishing, Howley suspects many details of Santu’s narrative, including her claim that she is Beothuk: “The name of your old woman ‘Santu’ does not sound like Beothuck to me.”78 Questioning her use of Beothuk terminology, Howley determines that Santu’s account is less reliable than that provided to Cormack by Shanawdithit: “The few names you give do not sound to me, much like Beothuk. I never heard of their being called ‘Osayanas’… The name ‘Beothuck’ was obtained from Shawnawdithit, the last survivor? by W.C. Cormack. Had they any other name, she would have told him.”79 In a subsequent letter to Speck, Howley again references his own authority in determining Santu’s reliability as a narrative source: “I should like to interview her myself ... I believe I could determine whether her claim to being descended from the Beothucks were well founded or not.”80 In a visit to St John’s in 1914, the year preceding publication of his book, Howley expresses his “unbelief in Santu’s veracity,” to which Speck responds by challenging the credibility of Howley himself: “Notwithstanding the fact that Mr. Howley’s opinions, based on his extensive knowledge of Newfoundland history and physiography, deserve serious consideration, I hardly think, under the circumstances, that the conclusions of one trained in sciences other than ethnology are sufficient to warrant absolutely casting aside information which may be of value, and which on the face of it does bear some semblance of truthfulness.”81 Suspecting that she was “making her claim for the purpose of gain,” Howley questioned Santu’s motives.82 Speck, on the other hand, though expressing reservations about “the accuracy of her memory,” determined after interviewing her extensively that she was telling the truth to the best of her knowledge.83 Having written an account that outlined his own primary assumptions about the Beothuk, Howley was unwilling to acknowledge a source that potentially contradicted that narrative, with its definitive ending of extinction. At the time of his meeting with Santu, on the other hand, Speck was still in the process of gathering research on the Beothuk. By virtue of the fact that he was still

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in the research stage, it could be argued that Speck’s narrative was, in comparison to Howley’s, still relatively open-ended – a fact that could explain, at least in part, his openness to Santu’s account. According to her account, Santu’s father, a man by the name of Joe Kop, was a “full-blood native” of the Beothuk tribe, also known to the Mi’kmaq as Osa´γαn˙a.84 Taken at a young age by the Mi’kmaq, who raised him and converted him to Christianity, Kop subsequently married a Newfoundland Mi’kmaq woman, and Santu was born near Red Indian Lake. After her mother’s death, Santu at the age of ten left Newfoundland with her father to live with the Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia, where she later married and spent most of her life. Santu met Speck in July 1910 when she was temporarily camped near Gloucester, Massachusetts, with her son Joe, his wife, and their young child, all of whom are featured in photographs in Speck’s book.85 In addition to details about a number of cultural phenomena that have been cited extensively since the publication of Speck’s book, the information Santu provided falls in line with much of what has been postulated by archaeologists concerning the Beothuk’s Labrador connections, and particularly their interaction with other Indigenous groups.86 Aside from her own immediate family’s Mi’kmaq connections, Santu described friendly relations between her father’s people and the Labrador Eskimo and Indians: “Some of her father’s people, she said, when dispersed, joined them.”87 Santu further spoke to Speck of relatives who had intermarried with the Inuit and others with the Mi’kmaq, their descendants being “scattered here and there among the Micmac of Newfoundland and elsewhere.”88 Many of the specific details of Santu’s account, including descriptions of her father’s kayaktype boat and the diet and eating habits of his people, lend credence to concepts of Beothuk cultural exchange and intermingling addressed first by Speck and later by archaeologists like Paul Carignan and M.A.P. Renouf.89 As recorded by Speck, Santu’s account illustrates both the value of an alternative historical perspective and the difficulty of attempting to accommodate that perspective within a historical narrative that already has a fixed conclusion. With respect to Native oral-history research methodology, a further challenge has to do with actually identifying and recording those alternative perspectives within a cultural context that may, for various reasons, discourage individuals from coming forward and sharing their accounts.90 In addition to crediting Santu’s claim about her father’s ancestry, the Mi’kmaq John Paul spoke

Historical Narrative Perspective in Howley and Speck   235

to Speck of the secretiveness of the Newfoundland Mi’kmaq concerning the Beothuk, which he attributed to “fear of retaliation or at least molestation at the hand of the English, such a stir had been raised over them.”91 Living among the Mi’kmaq on mainland Canada and in the United States, Santu possibly was in a position to share her narrative unhindered by such fears. In light of Paul’s observation, however, it is not difficult to imagine how accounts of Beothuk people living among other Native groups in the region may not have made their way into the historical record. Conclusion The appearance of Howley’s and Speck’s work in the early twentieth century signals the most pronounced schism to appear in historical writing about the Beothuk up to that point. Based primarily on accounts by Europeans, Howley’s The Beothucks or Red Indians prioritizes the perspective of members of the Peyton family, whose competition with the Beothuk over the Exploits salmon fishery played a pivotal role in the motivation behind and outcome of key historic events. In the few incidences in which Howley does incorporate the perspective of Native informants, he tends to undermine their narratorial reliability, as in the case of the Mi’kmaq, or openly edits, corrects, and contradicts their accounts, as with the Beothuk, to bring them into agreement with the European version of the same events. Relying primarily on Mi’kmaq informants, Speck presents a very different narrative of the Beothuk. Central to Speck’s text is the account of Santu Toney, a woman of mixed Beothuk/Mi’kmaq descent whose account he shared with Howley, but whom Howley chose to omit from his publication. Giving voice to a Native oral history that presents another narratorial perspective, Beothuk and Micmac acknowledges extensive interaction between the Beothuk and other Native groups, including cultural borrowing and genetic intermingling, proposing an interpretation of Beothuk history that ultimately emphasizes adaptation and assimilation over extinction. With its emphasis on a European world view, Howley’s Beothuk narrative reinforces primary assumptions in earlier historical writing about their hostility to Europeans and other Native groups, in particular the Mi’kmaq, and their extinction with the death of Shanawdithit in 1829. In attempting to understand the Beothuk from a Native perspective, Speck’s narrative, on the other hand, opens up a different and

236  Christopher Aylward

more complex interpretation, one that reframes the extinction question by acknowledging the possibility that the Beothuk may, to a limited extent, endure in the genetic make-up and cultural expression of Native groups with whom they intermingled. It is unclear why Howley’s monograph continues to occupy such a central position in the historical narrative of the Beothuk while Speck’s Beothuk and Micmac tends to be known only to specialists. While Speck was an accomplished academic in Native North American language and culture, Howley was largely self-taught on the subject of the Beothuk. One possible reason for the early popularity of his work is that, by virtue of his status as a prominent and well-respected Newfoundlander, Howley initially drew a greater readership, a readership that was (and continues to be) highly localized, given his subject matter. Another reason for the popularity of Howley’s work may be its reinforcement of themes central to the Newfoundland settler population’s perception of its heritage.92 It is thus possible that Howley’s interpretation, with its comprehensive and eclectic mix of local settler history and amateur archaeology, and its overriding assumption of Beothuk extinction, was generally more accessible and ultimately acceptable to an early-­twentieth-century readership than Speck’s more specialized, anthropological approach, with its reliance on Indigenous sources emphasizing Beothuk agency and survival. Admittedly, none of these factors provides a satisfactory explanation as to why the imbalance in reception of their work has persisted to this day. Whether or not this situation will change as the context of Beothuk scholarship evolves remains to be seen. NOTES 1 Edward Tomkins, “Alexander Murray and James P. Howley: The Geological Survey of Newfoundland,” Museum Notes: Information Sheets from the Newfoundland Museum, no. 11 (St John’s: Newfoundland Museum 1984). 2 Jacques Rousseau, “Le dernier des Peaux-Rouges,” Les Cahiers des Dix 27 (1962): 49; Frederick Johnson, “Problems surrounding the Classification of Certain Culture Complexes in New England,” American Antiquity 3, no. 2 (1937): 164; Ralph Pastore “Archaeology, History, and the Beothuks,” Newfoundland Studies 9, no. 2 (1992): 260. 3 L.F.S. Upton, “The Beothuks: Questions and Answers,” Acadiensis 7, no. 2 (1978): 150.

Historical Narrative Perspective in Howley and Speck   237 4 W.J. Kirwin, George M. Story, and Patrick A. O’Flaherty, eds., Reminiscences of James P. Howley: Selected Years (Toronto: Champlain Society 1997), xxxv. 5 Frank G. Speck, review of The Beothucks or Red Indians: The Aboriginal ­Inhabitants of Newfoundland, by James P. Howley, American Anthropologist 19, no. 2 (1917): 280. 6 James P. Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians: The Aboriginal Inhabitants of Newfoundland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1915), v. 7 Ibid., v, vi. 8 Ibid., vi. John Peyton, Jr and his father, John Peyton, Sr, along with eight of their men, were implicated in the death of the Beothuk man Nonosabasut, a case that was brought before the Grand Jury on 25 May 1819 and dismissed on the grounds of self-defence. See Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians, 102, 105; and Ingeborg Marshall, A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1996) 165–6. In a subsequent case involving James Carey and Stephen Adams introduced under the heading “The Killing of Two Beothuk,” Marshall relates how Peyton was called in by John Broom, chief magistrate of St John’s, as a witness: “Peyton testified that Carey and Adams were justifiably afraid of Beothuk.” A History and Ethnography, 183. The jury ruled a verdict of “not guilty.” 9 James P. Howley, Reminiscences of Forty-Two Years of Exploration in and about Newfoundland, eds. J.W. Kirwin and Patrick A. O’Flaherty (St John’s: English Language Research Centre, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2009), 104. 10 Ibid., 103. Howley notes that Peyton’s wife, “who had much to do with that other Indian female, Nancy or Shanawdithit, during her residence of nearly six years in her house, seemed rather reticent and disinclined to talk much on the subject.” Ibid., 103–4. 11 T.G.B. Lloyd, “A Further Account of the Beothucs of Newfoundland,” Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Journal 5 (1876): 225. 12 Peyton’s first experience of Native North Americans was in Labrador. As Marshall points out, there are parallels between settlers’ treatment of Native people in Labrador in the late eighteenth century and their conduct on the island of Newfoundland. Ingeborg Marshall, “An Unpublished Map Made by John Cartwright between 1768 and 1773 Showing Beothuk Indian Settlements and Artifacts and Allowing a New Population Estimate,” Ethnohistory 24, no. 3 (1977): 223–49. Citing a previously unpublished 31 March 1766 letter from Newfoundland Governor Hugh Palliser to Lord Egmont, Marshall describes atrocities committed against the Native people of Labrador by “‘the barbarous, savage, lawless Banditte, our Winter Inhabitants of Newfoundland, [who] never spare the life of an Indian; it’s

238  Christopher Aylward their pleasure and diversion to hunt for and kill them’” (ibid., 227). Notes Marshall: “The atrocities that are described in detail in Palliser’s letter sound all too familiar, bearing in mind later accounts of ‘outrages’ committed against the Beothucks” (ibid). In a footnote, Marshall adds, “The atrocities described in detail probably rank with the worst crimes committed anywhere” (ibid., 246n.4). 13 Thomas Peyton to Roland Goodyear, Gander, NL, 12 March 1910, Roland Goodyear’s private papers. 14 Marshall, A History and Ethnography, 64–7. 15 A.L. Peyton maintains that, in keeping with the custom that the right of the river fishery would go to the person who planted the first young person, or “youngster,” there in the spring for the season, John Peyton, Jr arrived in Newfoundland from England at the age of nineteen as the “assignee ‘youngster’” for the main stream of the Exploits. Amy Louise Peyton, River Lords: Father and Son (St John’s: Jesperson Press 1987), 25. In his 12 March 1910 letter to Roland Goodyear, Thomas Peyton writes of John Peyton, Jr: “My father told me he saw the youngsters marched away from the vessels side for that purpose but it was the last time that this mode of tenureship was carried out. He, my father, with several others was intended for the Exploits River.” Peyton to Goodyear, 2. 16 Peyton, River Lords, 13. 17 Thomas Peyton defines a tierce as “three hundred pounds neat.” Peyton to Goodyear, 3. 18 Peyton, River Lords, 3. 19 Howley to Peyton, St John’s, 1 April 1907, Provincial Archives of ­Newfoundland and Labrador, MG 325.5. 20 Peyton to Goodyear, 1. 21 Ibid., 6. 22 Ibid. 23 Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians, xx. See also John Cartwright, “Remarks on the Situation of the Red Indians: Natives of Newfoundland; with Some Account of Their Manner of Living; together with Such Descriptions as Are Necessary to the Explanation of the Sketch of the Country They Inhabit: Taken on the Spot in the Year 1768, by Lieutenant John Cartwright of H.M.S. ‘Weymouth’” (1768), qtd. in Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians, 29–45. 24 Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians, xx. 25 Ibid., 261, 103. 26 There are two exceptions to this practice in Cormack’s published account: “My Indian, Joseph Sylvester,” when he states his guide’s name, and later

Historical Narrative Perspective in Howley and Speck   239 when Cormack decides to name a mountain “Mount Sylvester, the name of my Indian.” Cartwright, “Remarks on the Situation of the Red Indians” (1768), qtd. in Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians, 135, 144. In all other cases, Cormack consistently refers to Sylvester as “my Indian.” When Cormack is later joined by a second “Indian, who told me his name was Gabriel,” he refers to them collectively as “my Indians,” and distinguishes between them with the phrases “the Indian who last joined” and “my other Indian.” Cartwright, “Remarks on the Situation of the Red Indians,” qtd. in Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians, 157–8. 27 Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians, 237. Dated Sunday, 14 September 1822, Cormack’s agreement offers Sylvester, in exchange for guiding him to St George’s Bay and back, one barrel each of pork and flour for his mother; return passage to either England, Scotland, Portugal, or Spain; lodging at Cormack’s house while visiting St John’s; and a letter of recommendation to Cormack’s friends in Prince Edward Island, with the promise “I will always be very glad to perform what Joe reasonably wants of me.” Ibid., 237. With regards to the contract, Howley offers the following: “It is quite evident from the above agreement that Mister Silvester had been showing the ‘White Feather’ and must have contemplated abandoning Cormack to his fate in the far interior, and that in order to retain his services it was necessary to offer him all these extra inducements.” Ibid., 238. 28 Ibid., 169. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 169, 171. 31 Ibid., 172. From Wilson we learn of the three women touring the streets of St John’s dressed “in English garb,” and Shanawdithit, her forehead and arms decorated in tinsel and coloured paper, taking great joy in frightening the people who stopped to look at them. William Wilson, “Newfoundland and Its Missionaries,” (1823), qtd. in Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians, 171–2. 32 Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians, 180. Notes A.L. Peyton: “The mother of the two Beothuk women was prematurely old. She apparently was unattractive and did not impress John’s workmen in the shipyard, who dubbed her ‘Old Smut.’” Peyton, River Lords, 78. 33 Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians, 174. 34 Berton refers to Shanawdithit as “a kind of unpaid servant in the Peyton household.” Pierre Berton, My Country: The Remarkable Past (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1976), 136. Citing John Peyton, Jr as his source, Howley provides a different take on the relationship, writing: “Shanawdithit, was received and taken care of by Mr Peyton, Junior, and family.”

240  Christopher Aylward Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians, 175. That Shanawdithit had reservations about moving to St John’s with Cormack is suggested in a letter sent to Cormack from John Stark dated Twillingate, 16 September 1828. In the letter, which Stark assumes “will be handed to you by the Red Indian Shawnadithit herself” on her arrival in St John’s, he notes: “She asked me if you had any family.” Stark to Cormack, Twillingate, 16 September 1828, qtd. in Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians, 203. 35 Cormack, “Remarks on the Situation of the Red Indians,” qtd. in Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians, 186. 36 Ibid. 37 Shanawdithit, “Shanawdithit’s Drawings” (1829), qtd. in Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians, 238–51. 38 David Murray, Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing, and Representation in North American Indian Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1991), 35, 36. To illustrate that the texts of Eliot’s dying Indians have been “produced for, and shaped by, the cultural expectations of a white readership,” Murray draws on White’s discussion of the Noble Savage, a concept that White feels serves “not to dignify the native, but rather to undermine the idea of nobility itself.” Ibid., 36, 191. 39 Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians, 238. 40 Shanawdithit, “Shanawdithit’s Drawings,” qtd. in Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians, 245. 41 Ibid., 244. 42 Ibid., 245. 43 Cormack, “History of Red Indians in Newfoundland” (1829), qtd. in Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians, 224. 44 Ibid., 228. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., n.1. 47 Ibid., 240–1. 48 Ibid., 241. 49 Despite Shanawdithit’s description of the shooting of Nonosabasut’s brother, Marshall concurs with Howley on this interpretation of her sketch of the event: “A red figure close to the white men and another prone on the ice probably depict Nonosabasut, first haranguing the intruders and then lying dead.” Marshall, A History and Ethnography, 165. 50 Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians, 241. 51 Janet E. Chute, “Frank G. Speck’s Contributions to the Understanding of Mi’kmaq Land Use, Leadership, and Land Management,” Ethnohistory 46, no. 3 (1999): 522.

Historical Narrative Perspective in Howley and Speck   241 52 Speck’s Malecite discussion draws on Mechling. See W.H. Mechling, “Malecite Tales,” Anthropological Series, Geological Survey of Canada 49, no. 4 (1914). 53 Frank Speck, Beothuk and Micmac: Indian Notes and Monographs (New York: Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, 1922), 18. 54 Ibid., 25. With regards to his use of the term Micmac-Montagnais, Speck notes: “The present Indian inhabitants, whose language is Micmac, are the mixed offspring of Montagnais hunters from Labrador and Micmac from Cape Breton Island. Immigration from both these neighboring regions must have commenced at least several centuries ago, because our records from the early part of the nineteenth century show both the Micmac and the Montagnais to have been firmly established in Newfoundland at that time.” Ibid. 55 Ibid., 27. 56 Ibid., 29. 57 Ibid., 27. 58 Ibid., 29. 59 For a detailed summary of Speck’s findings with respect to material culture, see his “Table of Ethnological Comparisons.” Ibid., 44–5. As Speck explains, “the references in the Beothuk column are to Howley’s monograph; the statements referring to other tribes are based mostly on my own field observations.” Ibid., 46. 60 For two opposing interpretations of Mi’kmaq/Beothuk relations, see Marshall, “Beothuk and Micmac: Re-Examining Relationships,” Acadiensis 17, no. 2 (1988): 52–82; Ktaqamkuk Ilnui Saqimawoutie, Freedom to Live Our Own Way in Our Own Land (Conne River, NL: Conne River Indian Band Council 1980), 4–13. See also Marshall, A History and Ethnography, 80. 61 Speck, Beothuk and Micmac, 46, 48. 62 Ibid., 49–50. 63 David Buchan, “Narrative of Lieut. Buchan’s Journey up the Exploits River in Search of the Red Indians, in the Winter of 1810–1811” (1811), qtd. in Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians, 77–90. In his concluding remarks, Buchan writes: “I trust that in this dilemma my subsequent movements will be approved of, for any further attempt at that time, to a subsequent interview would in all probability have produced direful consequences, for their unenlightened minds would look to us for nothing but retaliation, the line adopted by me may tend to remove such an impression from their minds” (90). 64 Speck, Beothuk and Micmac, 78n.45. 65 Ibid., 48–9.

242  Christopher Aylward 66 John Peyton, “John Peyton’s Narrative” (1819), qtd. in Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians, 106, 108. 67 Speck, Beothuk and Micmac, 50. 68 Ibid. 69 Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians, 93. 70 John Peyton, “John Peyton’s Narrative,” qtd. in Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians, 107. See also Thomas Peyton’s description of this event (1910, 5). 71 Speck, Beothuk and Micmac, 47. 72 Ibid., 54. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid., 51–2. 75 Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians, 265–88; Speck, Beothuk and Micmac, 77n.43. 76 Speck, Beothuk and Micmac, 55. In his Introduction, Speck issues a warning with regards to prevalent assumptions about the Beothuk: “We should be careful, I think, in a case of this kind, not to overestimate the peculiarity of the position of the tribe simply because it became extinct under tragic circumstances, or because so little is known of it.” Ibid., 12. 77 Howley to Speck, St John’s, 12 December 1911, Provincial Archives of Newfoundland and Labrador, MG 105.44. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid. 80 Howley to Speck, St John’s, 18 May 1912, Provincial Archives of Newfoundland and Labrador, MG 105.44. 81 Speck, Beothuk and Micmac, 56. 82 Ibid., 79n.48. 83 Ibid., 58. 84 Ibid., 59. 85 For more on Santu, see Beverley Diamond’s chapter in this volume. 86 An example would be Santu’s description of an annual Beothuk ceremony in which every person in the tribe was dyed red as well as the chief’s practice of ordering the red to be washed off particular individuals as a form of punishment. Ibid., 62–4. 87 Ibid., 64. 88 Ibid., 66.

Historical Narrative Perspective in Howley and Speck   243 89 See Paul Carignan, The Beaches: A Multi-Component Habitation Site in Bonavista Bay (Ottawa: National Museum of Man, Mercury Series, Archaeological Survey of Canada, 1975); M.A.P. Renouf, “Prehistory of Newfoundland Hunter-Gathers: Extinctions or Adaptations?” World Archaeology 30, no. 3 (1999): 403–20; M.A.P. Renouf, Trevor Bell, and Michael Teal, “Making Contact: Recent Indians and Paleo Eskimos on the Island of Newfoundland,” in M. Appelt, J. Berglund, and H.C. Gullov, eds., Identities and Cultural Contacts in the Arctic: Proceedings from a Conference at the Danish Museum, Copenhagen, November 30 to December 2 1999 (Copenhagen: Danish National Museum and the Danish Polar Centre 2000), 106–19. 90 Invariably, there are elements of oral history of which the non-Native researcher is unaware, or cannot access, owing to restrictions within many Native cultures on what traditions can be shared with individuals from outside the community. See Linda T. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Zed Books 2012), 174; Johnson, “Problems surrounding the Classification of Certain Culture Complexes in New England,” 161–5. 91 Speck, Beothuk and Micmac, 69. 92 As Lowenthal notes, “heritage the world over not only tolerates but thrives on and even requires historical error.” David Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (New York: Free Press 1996), 132.

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11  Santu Toney, a Transnational Beothuk Woman bev er ley diamon d

Introduction My focus in this chapter is on one individual, Santu Toney, a Beothuk woman whom American anthropologist Frank Speck visited in 1910. Speck compiled and subsequently published information that she shared about the Beothuk1 and made an audio recording of her singing a song – an amazing aural trace.2 While his field notes3 and published writing provide a sketchy account of Santu’s ancestry, he says very little about her adult life but enough to construct some of the contexts in which her life unfolded. Hence, I write less about Santu in this essay than about her probable – indeed almost certain – relationships with other Indigenous people and with settlers with whom she interacted as a craftsperson and entrepreneur. This approach invites reflection about several important theoretical issues that are at the heart of my discussion. But it is important to begin with what we learn from Speck. In his book Beothuk and Micmac (1922), he published a short biographical sketch of Santu: In July, 1910, I happened to talk over ethnological matters with a family of Micmac who were temporarily camped near Gloucester, Mass. The family consisted of an aged woman, her son, his wife and child. They all spoke Micmac. The family name was Toney. On inquiring of the young man, Joe Toney, where he was born, he told me in Newfoundland. Then becoming more interested, I inquired if his mother was a native of Newfoundland, he replied that she was. After a few minutes talk with his mother, he said that she was not a true Micmac, but that her father was an Osa’yana Indian

248  Beverley Diamond from Red Pond, Newfoundland. This naturally startled me, because it referred indirectly to the supposedly extinct Beothuk.4

Santu’s birth date would have been roughly 1840–50,5 making her sixty to seventy years of age when Speck met her in 1910, although he claimed in a news article that she was 100!6 He learned that her paternal great-grandmother may have been a white woman rescued from a shipwreck off the coast but her mother was a Mi’kmaq from Nova Scotia. Her father’s name was Kop (variant spellings are Kope, Cop, Cope), a family name still known among the Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia. Santu’s father participated in red-ochre ceremonies in his childhood, a ritual tradition that protected children from outsiders among other things, one of the many ways that Native Americans dealt with transnational contact, and so we learn that this cultural practice was still ongoing in the early nineteenth century. Her mother died when Santu was quite young, and when she was around ten, probably about 1850, she and her father moved to Nova Scotia. Santu first married a Mohawk man and lived somewhere around the Western Great Lakes. In the 1860s, to avoid her husband being drafted to fight in the Civil War (Iroquois in New York State were recruited), they moved east, where the Mohawk man later died. Santu’s second husband was a Mi’kmaq chief from the Yarmouth area and the father of four or five children.7 Speck described her life in the Gloucester area, where Speck had a summer home: “Living there a while, she had four or five children, and finally, with her youngest son, separated from her husband and since then has been drifting about the New England states with him, earning an uncertain living by basket-making, bead-working, and fortune-telling.”8 Speck followed the family about “from one summer resort to another” where Santu was marketing her baskets and beadwork.9 The song that she recorded for Speck at Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, was her father’s.10 She told him that he knew many songs but that she remembered just this one. While we don’t know much more about her, we can reconstruct some of the context of her life, particularly in relation to what Speck described as her “uncertain living.” There is no question that other historical evidence about Santu is exceedingly thin. Her name does not appear in either Canadian or U.S. census records,11 and the fact that Speck does not offer the name of Santu’s first husband makes the search for her all the more difficult. The Canadian census of 1871 does enumerate a John Kop, age seventyeight, who might well be her father. Her son, Joseph Toney, bears a

Santu Toney, a Transnational Beothuk Woman  249

Figure 11.1  Santu and Joe Toney, from Frank Speck’s Beothuk and Micmac. ­Image courtesy of the Centre for Newfoundland Studies, Memorial University Libraries.

250  Beverley Diamond

very common nineteenth-century name among the Mi’kmaq. Both a John Cope and a Joseph Toney were politically active as signatories to a letter to the British Crown in 1921, protesting a breach of Mi’kmaq hunting and fishing rights.12 But Canadian census records from 1871 to 1911 record eight Joseph Toneys born in different years in the late decades of the nineteenth century; most resided in Pictou County (where John Cope/Kop was also enumerated), not the Yarmouth area where Santu came to reside later in life. A family of Toneys is first listed for Yarmouth in 1891, approximately the same time that steamship service to New England was inaugurated. Birth dates are inconsistent and otherwise unreliable, since many Aboriginal families did not keep precise records and many were transient (hence perhaps counted in one census but not others) or unwilling to be found by enumerators.13 U.S. census records of 1900 and 1910 list two Joseph Toneys in New England, one from New Hampshire, born 1885, and another from Massachusetts, born 1884 – also feasible candidates as Santu’s son – but there is no way to tell which Joseph Toney is the one in question. The aforementioned letter signed by both John Kop and Joseph Toney is indicative of Mik’maq struggles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Colonial records describe government endorsement of Indian land transfers for agricultural purposes, for the sale of timber, for the extraction and sale of minerals, or for railway and telephone rights through reserves.14 A frequent issue about which Indian agents wrote to government officials, on the other hand, was the fact that there were no schools for Indian children.15 The residential-school system would not reach Nova Scotia until the Schubenacadie Residential School was opened in 1930. As noted above, while we do not know many concrete biographical details about Santu, about the networks in which she moved, or about her social and economic activities, we can construct the contexts in which her life most certainly unfolded. This approach raises issues relating to historiography, identity boundaries, and agency. First, methodologically, it raises questions about how contextual evidence might best be used to reconstruct a personal history. My work takes risks by examining likely scenarios that complement and situate the limited factual evidence. It raises hard questions about what counts as evidence and what, on the other hand, is not convincing or even thinkable. As French scholar Michel de Certeau has written, by questioning “the concepts, the historical ‘units’ or ‘levels’ of analysis, that had been adopted up to that point,” one finds “a series of indications to

Santu Toney, a Transnational Beothuk Woman  251

be advanced which had not been studied until then and which, from that point, become ‘recognized.’”16 My small study of intercultural contexts in relation to the kinds of work that we know Santu Toney to have done will allow, I hope, current research on settler colonialism17 – research of urgent importance for those of us who would like to see inequities between Indigenous and settlers in Canada redressed – to be in dialogue with studies of the circumstances faced by individuals at specific historical junctures. In this regard, I focus specifically in this chapter on the circumstances of women participants in the economic marketplace of the northeast – individuals I call “market women” – in the early twentieth century. Second, my approach points to the limitations of representing Beothuk history in isolation from the histories of their neighbours. A rigidly bracketed definition of a “people” has often been called into question in both lived and documentary history along the Atlantic seaboard. Some contemporary Aboriginal people in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador know of their Indigenous family roots but are uncertain whether their ancestry is Mi’kmaq, Innu, Beothuk, or some mixture. Others, including Mi’sel Joe in this volume, are fully aware of intermarriage between Beothuk and Mi’kmaq or Beothuk and Innu and use this knowledge to assert the continuity of Beothuk people to the present day, in spite of the genocidal actions of early colonial governments. In certain cases, DNA evidence has been sought but the ethical and legal complexities of such evidence lead some to regard it as a false promise.18 From an academic perspective, historian Charles Martijn has documented extensive interaction between Beothuk, Mi’kmaq, and Innu people.19 It is also clear from Santu Toney’s conversation with Speck that her family interacted with Inuit, Mi’kmaq, and Innu. Without considering the possibility that clear distinctions among First Nations were simply not important to her, Speck wrote that “the old woman’s memory was so hazy that she could not distinguish between what she intended to claim as applying to the customs of her father’s people and those of the Micmac-Montagnais among whom they lived.”20 Some of her family members emigrated to Greenland and married Inuit there.21 Her marriages to a Mohawk and then a Mi’kmaq man further demonstrate the fluidity of relationships among northeastern First Peoples by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Third, my study raises important questions about agency.22 With reference to several studies that emphasize agency, Robin Brownlie and Mary-Ellen Kelm observe that some “uses of Native resilience

252  Beverley Diamond

and strength” may “soften, and at times ... deny, the impact of colonialism, and thus, implicitly ... absolve its perpetrators.”23 They suggest that scholars who “minimize the extent of the very real and observable damage inflicted on Aboriginal societies” can assert the right of settler governments and religious institutions to intervene and may overdraw the “altruistic intent of the colonizers.”24 On the other hand, a failure to recognize the agency, particularly the intercultural agency of strong Indigenous culture bearers, is equally problematic. It often masks a preoccupation with “authenticity” rather than the mix of traditions that were part of Aboriginal life, certainly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also tends to maintain the problematic position that Indigenous lives are over-determined by history, a position that “has the potential to deny a person a subjectivity that is self-constituting.”25 My study validates the agency of Santu Toney in making the best life she could in the context of the colonial Atlantic region in both Canada and the United States. I will return, however, to a discussion of the colonizing and racist challenges she faced. Her agency is, at best, what media studies scholar David Hesmondhalgh has recently described as “constrained agency”: she used expressive culture but in spaces where “social and psychological dynamics [might] limit ... people’s freedom to act.”26 While Speck was eager to find traces of authentic Beothuk culture in her story, my contextual research leads me to think of Santu not just as a Beothuk woman from Newfoundland but as a transnational Indigenous woman in the early twentieth century. Her life defies several stereotypes. One is the stereotype of Indigeneity as spatially confined and culturally localized. I take issue with ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino, for instance, who defines Indigeneity as an alternative to cosmopolitanism, and implicitly in opposition to it.27 At the same time, paradoxically, another stereotype posits Indigenous people as nomadic, in contradistinction to “settlers.” Those who regarded Indigenous people as transient were unlikely to see them as the victims of colonial invaders, or as “the people whose bodies, territories, beliefs and values have been travelled through,”28 as the Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith puts it. Rather, the transient in the early twentieth century was thought to be en route to disappearance, within a narrative that enabled settler culture to take their land and reject their sovereignty. Historian Jean O’Brien (Ojibwe) has described the techniques of asserting this narrative as “firsting” and “lasting.”29 In her study of over six hundred (oral and written) community histories, she shows how

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settler cultures inscribed themselves as the “first” settlers – the first to be born in a place, the first to build a church or a school – ignoring the Indigenous people who not only came before but were still there. She also describes “New England as thickly populated by ‘last’ Indians throughout the nineteenth century” (the last of a tribe, a community, a place), in spite of all the evidence of a “geography of survival” involving kinship networks across the region.30 Santu Toney was evidence of survival indeed, an entrepreneurial market woman living almost a century after the alleged “last” of the Beothuks – Shanawdithit – had passed. Nonetheless, Speck felt compelled to call her the “last of the Beothuks” in an article he wrote for a Philadelphia newspaper.31 Native American Women and Cross-Border Tourism in the Early Twentieth Century Native American women in the northeastern areas of Canada and the United States have long served as cultural mediators. Several factors intensified and reshaped their intercultural roles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the combination of steamship and railway routes facilitated affordable travel and the growth of a coastal tourism industry in both Canada and the United States, particularly in New England. Art historian Ruth Phillips notes: By the 1840s scheduled rail and steamship services, tourist hotels and resorts, guidebooks, organized tours, and other by products of tourism had emerged at picturesque sites throughout the region. The favored resorts of vacationers were frequently the relatively undeveloped hinterlands to which Native communities had been relegated during the white settlement of the Northeast. Tourism introduced into these areas a regular seasonal clientele eager to acquire appropriate mementos of their sojourns. Taken together, the new conditions of production and sale created an environment in which already existing specialized Aboriginal productions for the curiosity trade could be reborn as “tourist arts” in the full modern sense.32

Rail and steamship travel often enabled Aboriginal artisans to travel to tourist meccas to find their markets, as I describe below. The lives of Indigenous market women such as Santu, however, challenge the dominant ideologies of nation building often associated with the new transportation modes that connected people across the nation. One

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socio-cultural issue often ignored is the economic history of Native Americans, a topic that, as David Usner has observed, “is still a relatively neglected area of study,”33 arguably because settler history has relied on a false image of impoverished Indigenous people rather than a more accurate picture that shows “how persistent and plastic the ideological uses of American Indian livelihood could be.”34 A second broad issue, as Linda Seligmann has observed, is the way in which Indigenous market women disrupt neat distinctions between public and private lives, rural and urban spaces, formal and informal economies, or even local and global market forces. She calls these women “managers of contradictions.”35 While Native Americans had made objects for their own use as well as gifts for non-Indigenous friends and patrons for centuries, the shift by at least some women to a market mentality is well documented in autobiographies and interviews.36 Santu Toney was clearly one of these market women. Rail and steamship travel also enabled the American-based world fairs of the period, as well as new styles of Native American performance in Wild West Shows, Indian Medicine Shows, and Chautauqua entertainment circuits in the northeast. Ironically, these new forums for representing Indigenous cultures emerged around the same time as bans on traditional ceremony and dance were legislated in both Canada and the United States in 1885. Although there is not much documentation of Indigenous discussions about the world fairs, there was undoubtedly widespread awareness of these new venues for staging Indigeneity. At world fairs in both Chicago (1893) and St Louis (1904), Indigenous cultures were framed as “exotic” and “primitive” for a broad public, as Paige Raibmon describes.37 At the same time, such events provided opportunities to demonstrate resilience and raise contemporary issues. As Raibmon writes in relation to the performance by Kwakwaka’wakw from British Columbia who were living “on display” at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893: The participation of Aboriginal peoples in such colonial displays is usually seen as a tragic mark of cultural capitulation, an indication that the performers were reduced by colonialism to performing shadows of their former cultural glory and were no longer “authentic Indians.” The underlying assumption is that, for Aboriginal peoples, cultural change is cultural decline. I explore the alternative meanings of this experience for the Kwakwaka’wakw performers by placing the Chicago performances in the social, economic, political, and cultural context of late

Santu Toney, a Transnational Beothuk Woman  255 nineteenth-century British Columbia. I show how the performances both legitimated and undermined the colonial interests of Anglican missionaries and Canadian government officials. At the same time, they expressed Kwakwaka’wakw cultural persistence and political defiance. In Chicago the Kwakwaka’wakw performed dances that had recently been outlawed by the Canadian “potlatch law.” They used the wages they earned in Chicago to support the clandestine potlatch system at home in British Columbia. The Kwakwaka’wakw performance in Chicago was not simply a commercialized corruption of traditional justice, but, simultaneously, both traditional ritual and modern labour.38

Indian performances were part of other tourist-oriented events, particularly ones featuring Indian “princesses,” those invented personae that female performers sometimes adopted starting in the mid-­nineteenth century. As Bunny McBride has revealed in biographies of Indigenous entertainers, several of the women transitioned to mainstream stages. Penobscot Molly Spotted Elk travelled to Paris as a vaudeville performer, and Lucy Nicolar, another Penobscot from Maine, ran an Indian craft business, studied community history, and played classical music.39 Other times, performers joined Indian Medicine Shows, one of the most famous being the Kickapoo Medicine Show, based in Hartford, Connecticut, which claimed to have over eight hundred Indigenous people on tour.40 A nineteenth-century autobiography of an Abenaki performer from Quebec tells a little of this life: “These shows traveled from town to town, putting on their entertainments of war dance, juggling, vaudeville acts and Indian lectures – chiefly on the merits of their remedies. When interest of the audience had been sustained to the proper pitch members of the group would pass among them, distributing their cures at a dollar a bottle.”41 It is unlikely that Santu Toney saw a Wild West Show since she had moved back east by the time they began.42 There is equally no evidence that Santu was part of the performance worlds described here but she would have almost certainly been aware of them. The power that a performance of a song could have as a tool of intercultural mediation would have been a familiar idea. Santu Toney’s Years in Mohawk Territory We do not know which of the Mohawk (or possibly other Iroquois) communities Santu may have lived in but most likely she resided in

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New York State, given that her first husband was in danger of being conscripted into the U.S. army in the 1860s during the Civil War. Not too far from Ganenkeh or Kanetsiohareke was Sarasota Springs, one of the tourist resorts where she might have sold baskets and beadwork. Resort visitors could visit an “Indian encampment”; such tent villages were always called “encampments,” not “summer residences” or “settlements” or some other term that might acknowledge permanence and land ownership, even though Mohawks were (and are) agriculturalists. Indians went to the springs for medicines and fresh water. Another possible place of residence might have been Akwesasne, where the international bridge between Canada and the United Staets enabled contact with border-crossing travellers. The Jay Treaty of 1794 between Great Britain and the United States (reaffirmed in a number of agreements since, including the repatriated Canadian constitution in 1982) gave Aboriginal people the right to travel freely between the two countries.43 Santu was one of the intercultural mediators as a maker and seller of basketry and beadwork. Recently, Aboriginal scholars describe such “crafts” as much more than economic enterprises. Haudenosaunee artist Jolene Rickard, for instance, notes that “the expression of sovereignty through tradition is part of the continuous journey of life.”44 She illustrates her interpretation by telling a traditional Seneca story about a woman who is embroidering with porcupine quills but whose work is unravelled by a dog whenever she gets up to stir a pot on the stove. The story teaches how the struggle to define oneself through the creating of images of life is ongoing and never complete. Such stories would have circulated in the Mohawk milieu in which Santu worked. Nonetheless, women were often the breadwinners of families and their basketry income was at times quite lucrative. The journals of Henry A.S. Dearborn (published by the Buffalo Historical Society) state that “the wife is more useful and important to the husband than he is to her because she can obtain her own means of support better than he can.”45 Another archival source, from 1925, states that “the sale of ash, hickory splint, and corn-husk baskets was amounting annually to more than $55,000 or an average of $250 of income for each family at [the Mohawk community of] St. Regis.”46 According to McBride, by 1900 two-thirds of Penobscot households depended on the basket trade as their primary source of income.47 The basket trade, however, was far from stable, beset by various challenges such as birch disease. Furthermore, Santu would have been creating baskets and beadwork at a point where older technologies were changing, in part to satisfy aesthetics

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that tourists preferred.48 Baskets without images or with ones incised in the bark gave way to ones involving more work-intensive split-ash decorative weaving. Three-dimensional beadwork with raised, textured designs – a style requiring more materials, time, and skill than earlier styles – developed, particularly among the Mohawk and other Haudenosaunee nations. In relation to early Indian-white exchanges, David Murray has written that “the circulation of goods is also a circulation of signs,” an “interpenetration of different systems of value.”49 Particularly when the exchange of objects was a part of cross-cultural gifting rather than an economic transaction, it was often understood differently by Indigenous artists and settler recipients. Rebecca Kugel notes, albeit about an Anishinaabe rather than a Mohawk incident, that “Leech Lake women sent beaded moccasins to Bishop Henry Whipple’s wife, Cornelia. From an Ojibwe perspective, the act reiterated an alliance, the giving of gifts symbolizing the ties renewed between two female communities. EuroAmericans viewed such acts in quite a different light, understanding ‘articles of Indian manufacture’ as a ‘faint expression’ of Christianized Indians’ gratitude towards their Euro-American benefactors.”50 While late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Indian market women such as Santu were part of a transition to an economically driven form of exchange, remnants of the gifting relationships sometimes remained. It seems, however, that Speck took little interest in the craftwork that Santu created, although he did photograph a plain bark basket, an unusual square design, and an elaborate porcupine quill basket when he later visited the Paul family in Newfoundland. In Beothuk and Micmac, the only craft item he identifies as Beothuk was a knitted “Red Indian” doll that the young daughter of the Pauls played with when he visited them at Badger Brook in Newfoundland.51 Alternatively, it may be that Santu saw no reason to legitimize an “alliance” by sharing a gift with him. Or perhaps her song was the gift. Santu Toney’s Return to Mi’kmaq Territory Santu remarried after her Mohawk husband died and lived in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, with her second spouse, named Toney, described by Speck as a “Mi’kmaq chief.” It is clear that this family, like Mi’kmaq throughout Atlantic Canada, had strong ties with New England. First Nations people in this region and neighbouring states traditionally engaged in a more diversified economy than their non-Indigenous neighbours.

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A physically demanding annual migratory cycle took many to the eel grounds, elsewhere to find good birchbark, and yet other places to pick potatoes or blueberries, to work in a lumbercamp, to serve as a guide, or to take handmade goods to market. As Seligmann notes, the social networks that enable market vendors “draw on long traditions and on ethnically specific means of constituting social life.”52 Numerous sources have documented the role that Aboriginal women in Atlantic Canada played in the market circuits of beadwork and basket selling. Some circuits were intra-provincial, others international.53 For the documentary film and book both titled Our Lives in our Hands, Bunny McBride interviewed contemporary Mi’kmaq basket makers in Aroostook County, Maine, adjacent to the western border of New Brunswick.54 Sarah Lund described her international route: I moved about [between Maine and New Brunswick] ... June and July we’d be making potato baskets in Aroostook. Then in August we’d go to Washington County to pick blueberries. Come September, we’d be back up here for the potato season. After that, if we could find a good rent in Maine, we’d stay through the winter months. If not, we’d go north to the reserve ... Springtime, we’d dig clams in Dalhousie or else pick fiddleheads in Aroostook. In between it all, I’d work in people’s homes for a dollar a day – cooking, cleaning, and just looking after things.55

In Santu’s day, Mi’kmaq basket makers in the Yarmouth area of Nova Scotia took products by rail into Halifax and travelled by steamer to Boston and New York. In an interview that Mi’kmaq elder and museum curator Stephen Augustine did with me in 2006, he explains that women were still at the centre of this activity in the late twentieth century. He observed that his family positioned themselves close to the railway so that baskets could be sent off easily. The women sometimes befriended African American railway staff members to keep their wares and their earnings safe while in transit. The Dominion Atlantic Railway, which began service in 1894, was adjacent to the port of Yarmouth where steamers departed for Boston. Santu thus had easy access to Halifax and Boston. She may have travelled on foot or by train to Gloucester, Massachusetts, a seaside mecca with large resort hotels in abundance in the first decade of the twentieth century. Speck visited her camp there but also met her at a camp at Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, aware of her New England circuit. The canvas tent and log seating depicted in his photos of the Toney family suggest

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that they lived a mobile life, and that is confirmed by Speck’s comment about travelling to see them at other resorts. Santu dressed well for their meeting, donning clothing edged and decorated with a velvet-like fabric and wearing an Indigenous fringed-buckskin belt. Speck heard and probably recorded what people usually regard as the only audio vestige of Beothuk music. As I have written elsewhere, while he listened to this for evidence of “authentic” Beothuk culture, I suspect that, considering the milieux in which Santu worked and the intercultural performance worlds she would have accessed, where music was sometimes used as a political tool, she was conscious of her performance as a form of intercultural mediation.56 Given the relationships that she described with Inuit in both Labrador and Greenland and Mi’kmaq in Newfoundland during her childhood, as well as her contact with settlers in New York State and New England, she undoubtedly was familiar with different kinds of music. I’ve suggested on the basis of style analysis that her “song” (Figure 11.2) seems to have three different sections, each with a different scale and rhythmic style. The first is an aural parallel to the symmetrical double-curve motif used in so much Mi’kmaq artwork, with a mirroring of both pitches and words at beginning and end. Such parallels between visual motifs and sonic gestures/forms have been described by contemporary Mi’kmaq musicians.57 The second part, without obvious accents or metric groupings, has the melodic shape of a particular subset of Innu hymns. Santu told Speck that her father “converted to Catholicism and gave up his belief in the necessity of red dye”58 and so she clearly encountered the Catholic repertoire shared by “the Micmac-Montagnais among whom they lived.”59 The third part uses a major scale and triple metre, and has repeated phrases of text, features that are more often found in Anglo-American traditional song as well as more recent Mi’kmaq repertoire. Listeners for whom I have played the recording often find this last part familiar. One listener thought it resembled “London Bridge,” another was reminded of a lullaby from her childhood, and still others heard the contours of a popular Newfoundland traditional ballad. Are these definitive conclusions? Absolutely not. But it is telling that the style evokes multiple associations related to Anglo sources and experiences. The “song” itself is but a shard of evidence. But, given what we know about cross-border traders in the period, it may be that Santu, who attributed the “song” to her father, sang several songs in succession to demonstrate to Speck her eclectic repertoire, partly derived

Figure 11.2  Santu’s Song. Transcription by Beverley Diamond and John Hewson.

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from her own people and partly from those she encountered on her travels, not unlike the Kwakwaka’wakw at the Chicago World’s Fair, or Lucy Nicolar, who knew Penobscot songs but also played Chopin beautifully. It is not overly imaginative to think that she sang several songs without a break between them. The technology of audio recording was unfamiliar and the contemporary idea of a “track,” each with one song, was unthinkable in the days of wax cylinders. Collector Frances Densmore created guidelines for recording in the early twentieth century and specifically cautions against allowing Native American singers to “run songs together.”60 Santu is arguably one of the first Indigenous singers to use audio recording not to represent a static culture but to bridge cultures,61 as she did with her baskets, beadwork, and fortune telling.62 Issues that Emerge from the Case Study Santu Toney’s life raises many questions that may be impossible to answer definitively but are pertinent for other studies of the history of intercultural, Indigenous-settler, interaction in the early twentieth century. Some questions relate to the transit of culture. Where both objects and humans cross cultural and political borders, as in Santu’s case, how are they exploited? Were objects and people treated in the same or different ways? While Santu travelled and sold baskets and beadwork out of economic necessity, it was the hegemonic settler culture that required she dwell in “encampments,” deprived of a stable home, for much of the year. While she herself was thus rendered “unsettled” in the context of New England’s resorts, the objects she made were increasingly associated with domesticity. The intercultural exchange had an impact on new aesthetics, resulting in elaborate designs of splitash woven baskets and textured beadwork. Contextual knowledge about the designs was rarely transmitted with the objects in the tourism economy. Beyond and even, at times, within those market spaces, however, exchanges had traces of earlier traditions of Indigenous gifting, to mark the ceding or asserting of power, or the validation of alliance, as Murray has elucidated.63 Between Santu and Speck, the gift was surely the song. While he sought evidence of Beothuk authenticity, she was aware of the role of performance in intercultural contexts as surely as Lucy Nicolar and others, whose stories are recounted in Perdue’s anthology, understood that mastery of different styles marked one’s cosmopolitanism.

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This case study also suggests that the study of movement or travel reveals much that studies of dwelling and locatedness obscure. It reveals that colonialism was experienced differently by men and women. It supports Seligmann’s contention that market women played “larger mediating roles – those extending beyond economic functions – in merging disparate social spaces, gendered identities, supposedly separate kin-based, religious or economic values, as well as different ethnicities and language64 genres.”65 It balances the very real history of land removal and invisibility of First Peoples in the northeast with some evidence about their presence and their agency. Contradictory stereotypes of rootedness and, at the same time, impermanance, have plagued considerations of Indigenous transnationalism, but Santu’s story, consistent with those of other Indians in New England, challenges these stereotypes quite profoundly.66 While there is very little information about her life, we do know where she was and what kind of settler/Indigenous social interaction has been documented in such places at that time. Finally, I return to the question of agency. We can find reason to applaud Santu’s entrepreneurship, her intercultural adaptability, her clear skill as an artist, her status as a multilingual cosmopolitan, and her modernity. We must, however, also recognize the enormous colonial burden of settler colonialism on her life. When Speck met her in 1910, she lived what must have been a very difficult and economically uncertain life that required seasonal travel. He suggested as much (albeit minimizing the difficulties) when he wrote that “petty family troubles and present ills consumed her interest.”67 She gave up “home” to find a measure of security in a first marriage to a man who spoke a different language and lived differently from her own people. The designation of Indian spaces as “encampments” rather than as residences on sovereign Indigenous lands, and the identification of her basketry as “souvenirs” rather than both art and an essential technology of life, must have felt like indignities that were difficult to bear. As a child, did she suffer the abuses of residential or boarding schools? Probably not, since such institutions were not operating in Newfoundland when she was growing up, though she may have encountered such schools in Mohawk territory. Did any of her grandchildren attend the notoriously abusive Shubenacadie school in Nova Scotia?68 That, too, is unknown. Yet, while we do not know exactly how the painful challenges of these forms of colonial violence affected her, it is quite clear that she lived in these contexts. Her strength and adaptability demonstrated remarkable

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resilience but the painful toll of colonial attitudes and institutions marked her life equally. A legacy that Santu Toney leaves to us is clear evidence that Beothuk history must be cast as intensely interactive and complex. The Beothuk were not always living in remote and isolated areas but were, at least in some cases, extending their relationships transnationally through both intermarriage and cultural and commercial exchange. These broader cultural and economic dimensions are important “traces of ochre” to keep sight of as we contemplate how best to recast the history of the Beothuk. NOTES 1 The Frank G. Speck Papers (Mss.Ms.Coll. 126) are held in the archive of the American Philosophical Society (APS) in Philadelphia. Consulted for this study were his field notebooks, photographs that were subsequently published, correspondence with Mechling regarding Santu’s “authenticity” as a Beothuk, and newspaper clippings (including an undated article by Speck entitled “Find Three Survivors of Lost Indian Tribe”). See also Frank G. Speck, Beothuk and Micmac (New York: Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, 1922). 2 In Speck, Beothuk and Micmac, he states that Edward Sapir transcribed the song in 1912. Speck writes that he lost touch with Santu and her family in the fall of 1910. The 1912 date seems to refer only to the Sapir transcription of the 1910 recording. The audio recording was part of the APS collection but is no longer listed in their online catalogue. John Hewson describes how a copy of the audio recording was obtained for the Memorial University Folklore and Language Archive (MUNFLA). Hewson and I used the MUNFLA recording to create a new transcription with permission of the APS. See John Hewson and Beverley Diamond, “Santu’s Song,” Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 22, no. 1 (2007): 227–58; Beverley Diamond, Native American Music in Eastern North America (New York: Oxford University Press 2008). 3 Speck’s initial notes about meeting Santu Toney are reproduced in his Figure X. The first page has jottings of Beothuk words, seemingly for items at the encampment. Soon after, however, he writes in fluent prose, some of which makes its way into his 1922 publication verbatim. While Speck is known for wanting to be in the field as often as possible, it is significant that he wrote drafts of subsequent publications in the field. Whether he consulted with his Indigenous collaborators to ensure accuracy, or whether he preferred to write up information that was freshly collected, is impossible

264  Beverley Diamond to tell. At any rate, this practice is arguably more like that of a journalist than a contemporary scholar who would reflect upon information and compare a variety of sources and informants’ versions. 4 Speck, Beothuk and Micmac, 56. 5 My estimate is informed largely by the 1910 photograph with her son and grandchild. The son appears to be in his twenties or, at most, early thirties. It is reasonable that Santu would have first married in her twenties, possibly slightly earlier but unlikely much later. These two observations lead to an estimate of a birth date in the 1840s. Speck’s claim that she was 100 is most certainly inaccurate since it would suggest she gave birth to this young man in her seventies. 6 Frank G. Speck, clipping from unidentified newspaper article, Speck Papers. 7 Speck, Beothuk and Micmac, 59. 8 Ibid., 59–60. 9 Ibid., 57. 10 Hewson and Diamond, “Santu’s Song.” Linguist John Hewson and I made a transcription of text and melody, using audio restoration tools that enabled a cleaner hearing. In “Santu’s Song,” we discuss the strange fact that Sapir started his transcription part-way through the song and we describe the new information we gleaned as well as the problems that remain with transcribing a noisy wax cylinder. 11 A Haudenosaunee genealogy project, http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/ cgi-bin/igm.cgi?db=erikj, was consulted on 13 January 2016, but, with only the name “Santu” to search (even with alternative spellings), it is not surprising that there were no results. “Santu” does not appear in Canadian censuses of 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901, or 1911, or in the records of Births, Marriages and Deaths in Library and Archives (LAC), Canada, http://www. bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/census/1871/Pages/about-census.aspx. U.S. federal census records (http://www.censusrecords.com) were consulted (also on 13 January 2016) for 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880, 1890, 1900, and 1910. The name “Santu” first emerges in those records in 1880 but no plausible birthdates or residence locations are associated with any of the hits. Census records of 1900 and 1910 were also consulted but “Santu Toney” does not appear in any of them. As noted, John Kop, seventy-eight, is listed as a resident of Pictou County in 1871 but he does not appear in later censuses. This man is possibly Santu’s father. 12 Letter to the Crown from Micmack (sic) leaders, asserting fishing and hunting rights, 1921: Indian Affairs Record Group, RG7 G21 322, file 2001, pt. 8 (subsequently renumbered RG10, vol. 71937, Image 216), LAC. John

Santu Toney, a Transnational Beothuk Woman  265 Cope (though clearly not the John Kop who was seventy-eight at the time of the 1871 census) and Peter Toney are signatories and their names appear one after the other. The names are not alphabetical but appear to be grouped, perhaps by region, perhaps by family. 13 A series of family trees compiled by a Mi’kmaq researcher and relevant to the Toney family may be found at www.myheritage.com/site-62351291/ ardy-born-with-3-thumbs. One of these tree diagrams states that Santu Kop married James Toney and that their son Joseph Toney (1886–1960) married Rachel Laborne. There is considerable inconsistency on this site, however, and hence it may not have reliable information. Nova Scotia Historical Vital Statistics (www.novascotiagenealogy.com) provides a death date of 1964 for a Joseph Toney of New Glasgow. 14 Late-nineteenth-century archival records document the pressing issues of Aboriginal people on one hand and Indian Affairs on the other. Many of these issues relate to the confinement and relocation of Mi’kmaq as well as rights to reserve land by external parties. Others pertain to the confinement of Mi’kmaq on reserves (LAC, RG10, vol. 1892, file 1635 [1899], and RG10, vol. 3160, file 363, 417–1 [1910]); to disputes over land and the removal of Mi’kmaq (RG10, vol. 2234, file 45310 [1883], vol. 2903, files 185, 386 [1899], vol. 3103, file 307, 576, vol. 3119, file 327, 352); to rights to access on reserves to extract timber (RG10, vol. 7999, file 274/20–7–6–6) or minerals (RG13, vol. 2377, file 9–12 [1896]); or to the building of telephone lines (RG10, vol. 7999, file 274/31–6–7–23 [1891]). 15 Agent M. Macdonald, for instance, wrote in 1873 about District 4 in Pictou Nova Scotia to request money for schools since there were “no schools and no means of building school houses.” LAC, RG10, vol. 191, file 2621 16 Michel De Certeau, The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press 1988), 117. 17 Paulette Regan, Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 2010); Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2010); Patrick Wolfe, ed., “Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Alternatives in Global Context,” special issue, American Indian Culture and Research Journal 37, no. 2 (2013). 18 See the chapter by Daryl Pullman in this volume. See also Kim TallBear, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press 2013). 19 Charles A. Martijn, “Early Mi’kmaq Presence in Southern Newfoundland: An Ethnohistorical Perspective, c. 1500–1763,” Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 19, no. 1 (2003): 44–102.

266  Beverley Diamond 2 0 Speck, Beothuk and Micmac, 62. 21 Ibid., 64. 22 I am grateful to my former colleague, historian Lianne Leddy (Anishinaabe), for pointing me to the 1990s debate in the Canadian Historical Review about “agency as colonialist alibi.” See Robin Brownlie and Mary-Ellen Kelm, “Desperately Seeking Absolution: Native Agency as Colonialist Alibi,” Canadian Historical Review 75, no. 4 (1994): 543–56; see also Douglas Cole, J.R. Miller, and Mary Ellen Kelm, “Desperately Seeking Absolution: Responses and a Reply,” Canadian Historical Review 76, no. 4 (1995): 628–40. 23 Brownlie and Kelm, “Native Agency,” 545. 24 Ibid. 25 Roger Simon, “Towards a Hopeful Practice of Worrying: The Problematics of Listening and the Educative Responsibilities of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” in Jennifer Henderson and Pauline Wakeham, eds., Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2013), 131. 26 David Hesmondhalgh, Why Music Matters (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell 2014), 40. 27 Thomas Turino, Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2000), 16–19. 28 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous People (Dunedin, New Zealand: University of Otago Press 1999), 78. 29 Jean O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Pres 2010). 30 Ibid., 113. 31 Frank G. Speck, clipping from unidentified newspaper article, Speck Papers. 32 Ruth Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast 1700–1900 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1998), 202. 33 David Usner, Indian Work: Language and Livelihood in Native American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2009), 3. 34 Ibid., 141. 35 Linda Seligmann, ed., Women Traders in Cross-Cultural Perspective (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 21. 36 There is a substantial and growing literature about women who were artisans and market vendors or performers for intercultural audiences; see, for example, Bunny McBride, Molly Spotted Elk: A Penobscot in Paris (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1995); Theda Perdue, ed., Sifters: Native

Santu Toney, a Transnational Beothuk Woman  267 American Women’s Lives (New York: Oxford University Press 2001). These roles continued the long history of other kinds of cultural mediation that Indigenous women undertook. See, for example, Rebecca Kugel and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, eds., Native Women’s History in Eastern North America before 1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 2007). 37 Paige Raibmon, “Theatres of Contact: The Kwakwaka’wakw Meet Colonialism in British Columbia and at the Chicago World’s Fair,” Canadian Historical Review 81, no. 2 (2000): 157–90. 38 Ibid., 160. 39 McBride, Molly Spotted Elk; Bunny McBride, “Lucy Nicolar: The Artful Activism of a Penobscot Performer,” in Perdue, ed., Sifters, 141–59. 40 Brooks McNamara, “The Indian Medicine Show,” Educational Theatre Journal 23, no. 4 (1971): 437. 41 “The Life of John W. Johnson,” Ne-Do-Ba: Exploring and Sharing the Wabanaki History of Interior New England, www.nedoba.org (accessed November 2017). 42 Buffalo Bill Cody attempted to bring a Wild West Show to Niagara Falls as early as 1872 and the first performance is known to have involved local Haudenosaunee singers and dances. The performance of the “grand buffalo hunt” was a disaster since the buffalo (shipped in by train) preferred to lie in the sun than be chased, but that is incidental to Santu’s story. 43 There is a long history of problems in the administration of this treaty but these are beyond the scope of this chapter. 44 Jolene Rickard, “Visualizing Sovereignty in the Time of Biometric Sensors,” South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 2 (2007): 477. 45 Qtd. in Shoemaker, “The Rise or Fall of Iroquois Women,” in Kugel and Eldersveld Murphy, eds., Native Women’s History, 311. 46 Sir William Johnson Papers, box 4.58, State University of New York. 47 McBride, “Lucy Nicolar,” 143. 48 Beothuk birchbark baskets stolen from graves in the early nineteenth century are rubbed with seal fat and red ochre and decorated with chevron- or V-shaped incisions or spruce- root stitching (see Whitehead, Inventory, 43). A century later, Speck published a photograph of a birch-bark box with porcupine quillwork, made by Newfoundland Mi’kmaq elder Aunt Ellen Paul. Speck, Beothuk and Micmac, plate 30. 49 David Murray, Indian Giving: Economies of Power in Indian-White Exchanges (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 2000), 8–9. 50 Kugel and Eldersveld Murphy, eds., Native Women’s History, 175. 51 Speck, Beothuk and Micmac, 34, 57. 52 Seligmann, Women Traders, 7.

268  Beverley Diamond 53 Marie Battiste, “Annie and John Battiste: A Mi’kmaq Family History,” in Ronald Caplan, ed., Cape Breton Works: More Lives from Cape Breton’s Magazine (Wreck Cove, NL: Breton Books 1996), 163–84. 54 Bunny McBride, Our Lives in Our Hands: Micmac Indian Basketmakers (Halifax: Nimbus 1990); Harold Prins and Bunny McBride, Our Lives in Our Hands, dir. Karen Carter, documentary, 1987. 55 Sarah Lund, interview by McBride, Our Lives in Our Hands, 30. 56 Hewson and Diamond, “Santu’s Song.” 57 See Stephen Augustine quotation in Diamond, Native American Music, 27. 58 Speck, Beothuk and Micmac, 64. 59 Ibid., 62. 60 Judith Gray and Dorothy Sara Lee, The Federal Cylinder Project: A Guide to Field Cylinder Collections in Federal Agencies, vol. 2 (Washington: Library of Congress 1988), 9. 61 Among the earliest uses of audio-recording technology were recordings of Native Americans. Passamaquoddy singer Noel Josephs recorded a snake dance for Jesse Fewkes on 18 March 1890. The recording is at the Library of Congress, American Folklife Centre. AFS no. 14.737: A9. 62 I have uncovered very little about what “fortune telling” might refer to in her contexts. McBride describes how “gypsies” in Maine often impersonated Indians to get a piece of the lucrative trade in basketry, leading to the passing of a state law in the 1930s “against impersonating Indians.” McBride, Our Lives in Our Hands, 17–18. Did it work both ways? More plausible, in my estimation, was the likelihood that Santu was a medicine woman who may have ministered to tourists and/or locals. 63 Murray, Indian Giving, 8–9. 64 I would argue that “expressive genres” extended to visual and sonic art in addition to language. 65 Seligmann, Women Traders, 1. 66 O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting, 2010. 67 Speck, Beothuk and Micmac, 58 68 Evidence of the conditions of these institutions may be found in the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools in Canada. www.trc.ca.

12 Routes of Colonial Racism: Travelling Narratives of European Progress and Indigenous Extinction in Pre-Confederation Newfoundland joc elyn t h orp e

These two things I thought I knew for sure about Newfoundland before moving from Vancouver to St John’s in 2010: 1) There are no more codfish; 2) There are no more Indigenous people. I quickly found evidence against both these well-known “facts.” You can buy cod, fresh and local, at The Fish Depot in downtown St John’s.1 And the Miawpukek First Nation is a thriving Mi’kmaq community located on the south coast of the island. Miawpukek became a permanent settlement in the early nineteenth century, but long before that the site comprised part of Mi’kma’ki, the traditional territory of the Mi’kmaq stretching from southern and western Newfoundland through parts of the Maritime provinces, Quebec, and Maine.2 In 2010 Miawpukek members continued to live both on- and off-reserve, while Newfoundland Mi’kmaq not belonging to the Miawpukek First Nation were well into the process of becoming recognized under the Indian Act as members of the Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation Band. Instead of arriving in a place with no more Indigenous people, I showed up in the midst of an energetic reclaiming and resurgence of political influence, cultural practices, and relationships with the land by Mi’kmaq individuals and communities after centuries of repression.3 Indeed, over one hundred thousand people applied for membership in the Qalipu Band, a number that overwhelmed officials and caused concern among some band members who feared that restrictive membership criteria would lead to the casting out of Qalipu members deemed “inauthentic” Indigenous people.4 It is perhaps strange, though certainly not uncommon, to move to a place one knows little about. My interest here, however, lies not in the politics of contemporary relocation but in the history of colonialism and its present-day effects. Why were these the two “facts” I knew

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about Newfoundland from so far away? What stories are embedded in these facts? How and where have these stories travelled, and with what consequences? Never far from my mind as I write about stories is Thomas King’s observation that “stories are wondrous things. And they are dangerous … For once a story is told, it cannot be called back. Once told, it’s loose in the world.”5 In this chapter, I concentrate particularly on the “no-more-Indigenous-people fact,” arguing that it is not by accident that this is what I learned about Newfoundland. Instead, it is a result of the same colonial history that led to the collapse of the cod fishery and to threats to the survival of Indigenous peoples and cultures: a history that is very much alive. This chapter analyses the story of the “no-more-Indigenous-people fact” as it emerged and was repeated in travel and other writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The story emphasizes the “mysterious extinction” of a “mysterious people,” the Beothuk, who consistently figure in the narrative as the island’s only Indigenous inhabitants.6 I argue that the story, which I will here call the Beothuk extinction narrative, travelled in writing throughout and beyond Newfoundland to parts of Europe and North America, and with it travelled the complementary notion that while the landscape of the past belonged to the Beothuk, the present-day Newfoundland landscape was open for non-Aboriginal exploitation through settlement, tourism, and resource development. This story thus supported and naturalized settler and tourist colonialism, and continues to have material effects today. Within the story, white settlers are sometimes represented as responsible for the Beothuk’s extinction, but this responsibility is mitigated by the interpretation of the First Nation’s decline as inevitable, and by the common assertion that the Mi’kmaq, with or without the support of the French, were more at fault. As others in this volume also note, the Mi’kmaq “mercenary myth,” while unsupported by historical evidence and now commonly understood as false, positions the Mi’kmaq as settler invaders rather than as indigenous to Newfoundland, a representation that has clearly unfavourable implications for their claims to land and recognition in the present day.7 The Beothuk extinction narrative has other effects as well: as it continues to travel – the popular CBC series Canada: A People’s History being one modern-day example of its endurance – so too do its colonizing assumptions about white innocence and Indigenous inferiority. Old stories matter in part because they do not simply disappear, but rather appear in new forms in the present, even though as

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a society we often decry and disassociate ourselves from the injustices of the past. Tourism in Newfoundland Before proceeding with the chapter’s central purpose of tracing routes of colonial racism through analysing the journey of the Beothuk extinction narrative in the pages of travel writing, a few background comments on Newfoundland tourism and on the relationship between travel writing and imperialism are in order. Tourism in Newfoundland became increasingly popular around the turn of the twentieth century, thanks in large part to the advertising efforts of the Reid Newfoundland Company, which in 1898 began operating a cross-island railway service between the capital of St John’s and Port aux Basques on the west coast. The opening of this railway, combined with rail and steamship links in eastern Canada and the United States, made it possible by the end of the nineteenth century for affluent American men to travel from urban centres to the interior of western Newfoundland in just a few days. It was these affluent American men whom supporters of tourism in Newfoundland wanted to attract, men with the means and leisure time to journey all the way to the far-flung island, and the desire, promoters hoped, to hunt, fish, spend their money in Newfoundland, and return to invest in natural-resource development.8 As folklorist Gerald Pocius observes, promoters of Newfoundland tourism focused their advertising efforts on three related themes: Newfoundland as a health resort, where fresh air and cool summer temperatures promised to restore the health of nerve-racked men living stressful modern existences; the island as a “sportsman’s paradise,” a land teeming with fish, caribou, and other animals, waiting for the hunter’s rod or gun; and the territory as an untouched wilderness, devoid of people yet full of raw beauty to be appreciated by the lucky few taking advantage of the new rail line.9 The marketing of Newfoundland as a place where visitors could recover from the illnesses associated with upperclass urban life and become reinvigorated through contact with wild nature, including its “game” animals, echoed similar efforts promoting several destinations in Canada and the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, no coincidence given the prominence of antimodernism and romantic tourism at the time.10 Historian Patricia Jasen traces the emergence of North American tourism, demonstrating how, beginning as early as the 1790s with the

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popularization of Niagara Falls as a tourist destination, tourism and romanticism became inextricably linked.11 Jasen describes romanticism, a cultural movement rooted in Europe and popular among the middle and upper classes by the late eighteenth century, as the tendency to value much more than before what its proponents understood as wild nature, as well as to hold a new respect for imagination and feeling and to transfer feelings once associated with religion to the secular realm.12 As people began to seek out places where they might experience the sights and feelings associated with romanticism – for instance, sublime or picturesque landscapes – promoters of tourism exploited images of romantic settings in order to attract tourists, and especially tourist dollars.13 Thus the culture, politics, and economics of the pre-First World War Ontario tourism industry Jasen studies depended upon romanticism, which provided the foundations of the industry and made possible its success.14 Newfoundland tourism promoters such as the Reid Newfoundland Company similarly depended upon the romantic sensibility to market the island as a wilderness destination complete with “hundreds of lakes – all pretty and inviting” and rivers picturesque enough to make attractive sites for landscape paintings.15 Newfoundland appeared in the promotional literature not simply as another wilderness tourism destination but as a particularly attractive place to visit because, unlike well-travelled destinations in the United States and Canada, it had not yet had its natural appeal ruined by tourism.16 If the marketing of romanticism explains the appeal to wilderness by Newfoundland tourism promoters, then antimodernism helps to contextualize the advertising of the island as a health resort and sportsman’s paradise.17 By the late nineteenth century, society’s elites had become fearful of what they perceived as the degenerative effects of modern urban life on the health of the Anglo-Saxon “race.”18 White men, by sitting around at desk jobs instead of leading the physical lives of their frontier-settler forefathers, were becoming over-civilized and “effeminate,” with resulting damage to their bodies and minds and to Western civilization as a whole.19 The remedy, many thought, lay in the rest cure: men could escape the city for the wilderness, become stronger in body and mind through breathing in fresh air and through the exhilaration of hunting and fishing, and return home better equipped to handle their daily responsibilities. Thus travel to wilderness destinations came to be considered pressingly important rather than merely pleasant, and wilderness vacations became increasingly popular, especially among the urban middle classes.20 Newfoundland tourism promotion

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responded to this perceived need by representing the island as a “giant health sanatorium” with “preserves of game – fin, fur and feather – to tempt the sportsman and angler.”21 Imperialism and Tourism It is impossible to consider romanticism, antimodernism, and the tourism they inspired without examining their implication in imperialism and its gendered, racialized, and classed dimensions. The romantic fascination with landscapes deemed “wild” or “primitive” extended as well to the Indigenous peoples who lived in those landscapes.22 Indeed, travel writers seemed to have no qualms about representing lands simultaneously as uninhabited and inhabited by Indigenous people, who often featured in the narratives as uncivilized, dying out, and child- or animal-like.23 Tourists, themselves white and upper or middle class, had the opportunity while travelling to reflect on the nature of civilization, a preoccupying concern among members of their classes in this age of imperial expansion, and usually to find their own culture superior to the “wild” peoples and places they came across.24 Even when tourists expressed antimodern enthusiasm for wilderness and its Native “children,” they did so by drawing from and reinforcing racist stereotypes about Indigenous people and by asserting their own territorial claims to land.25 Promotional materials that attempted to lure tourists to various “sportsman’s paradises” reinforced the idea that North American destinations belonged to financially secure white men. As Tina Loo has argued in the context of British Columbia, practitioners of big-game hunting secured not only moose heads to adorn their dens but their own identities as white, bourgeois, and masculine.26 Though white women did travel to places coded as wilderness, travel narratives were most often written by white men, a symptom of the exclusion of white women from both the genre and from tourismpromotion efforts, not surprising given the repudiation of the feminine in the antimodern quest to reclaim “primitive” masculinity.27 This is not to deny the involvement of white women in imperialism, but only to point out the gendered dimensions of wilderness travel at the turn of the twentieth century. White men of means were the primary targets of advertising and, at least in the case of Newfoundland, the primary travellers as well. Pocius observes that one hotel in Newfoundland advertised in 1907 that it catered to “tourists with ladies in their party,” suggesting that this was an exception to the rule.28 It appears that the

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first travel narrative by a white woman about a trip to Newfoundland was not published until 1935.29 Regardless, Newfoundland tourism and travel writing must be understood as both reflective and productive of the culture of imperialism in which it took place.30 Effects of Newfoundland Tourism Whether in response to promotional materials produced by the Reid Newfoundland Company, to the numerous books that began to be published about successful Newfoundland fishing and hunting trips, or to the articles that started to appear regularly in popular periodicals such as Forest and Stream and Harper’s Weekly, bourgeois white men, including prominent American politicians, did travel to Newfoundland in increasing numbers in the first decade of the twentieth century.31 In 1903 just over one thousand “sportsmen or tourists” visited the island, but by 1913 that number had almost quadrupled.32 Thus, for the first time, the interior of the island became a destination to be consumed by the “tourist gaze.”33 Along with an increase in tourists and travel narratives came changes to wildlife laws. As in other parts of the world, government conservation measures put in place to protect wildlife worked to prevent local people from accessing animals for subsistence, with animals being legally defined as “game” and protected for the pleasure of sport hunters.34 By the early twentieth century in Newfoundland, the law no longer recognized the special rights of “poor settlers” to access wildlife for subsistence, and regulations dictated how much, by what method, and at what time of year wildlife could be harvested.35 These regulations were designed to reduce the killing of caribou by locals for food. Outlawing the use of pits, falls, traps, dogs, and snares, for instance, made shooting with a rifle the only legal way to kill caribou, a method used by sportsmen but not commonly by local Indigenous people or settlers.36 The privileging of hunting for sport rather than support clearly reflects a bias towards the sportsmen who stood to gain from the legal transformation of animals from a resource open to all to a resource open mainly to them. Environmentalist and writer Darrin McGrath suggests that the Newfoundland government stood to gain as well from this transformation through the emergent sport-hunting tourist sector.37 The secondary sources on Newfoundland tourism, however, reflect a different sort of bias: Indigenous peoples are often absent from the analyses, which focus instead on the effects of tourism on non-Native

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settlers.38 Pocius, for example, points out that within travel writing, Newfoundlanders often appeared as “childlike natives eager to act as guides and servants,” yet he describes guides only as “Newfoundlanders” and mentions their English, Scottish, and Irish heritage.39 This seems an incongruous representation, given the consistent references to “Indian” or “Micmac” guides in the primary sources, the broader portrayal in travel writing of Indigenous people as childlike servants, and the fact that, as George Story’s scholarship on Newfoundland guides reveals, the success of nearly all European-instigated trips to the interior of the island depended greatly on Mi’kmaq guides.40 Still, in McGrath’s essay about conflicts over wildlife resources at the turn of the twentieth century, the conflicts appear only to be between settlers on the one hand and tourists and the government on the other.41 Doug Jackson tells another story in his book about the Newfoundland Mi’kmaq, stating that the decimation of the caribou following the opening of the railway and the encroachment of tourists into Mi’kmaq territory had a “most disastrous impact” on Mi’kmaq life.42 White settlers and white sportsmen are not the only actors in the story, and yet it is difficult to understand the different effects that tourism and its supporting game laws had on Indigenous and non-Indigenous people when the literature minimizes the Indigenous presence on the landscape. As the graduate work of Allan Byrne shows, settler “fisherfolk” who did not benefit from the popularity of Newfoundland tourism were certainly romanticized in the travel literature alongside Indigenous people, but not frequently before the 1930s, when cultural tourism became popular.43 Until then, they tended to be ignored.44 While different groups may have experienced the tourist gaze at different points in time, they did not experience it in similar ways. All islanders appeared “backwards” and as the antithesis of modernity, but non-Indigenous Newfoundlanders’ appearance as a “jolly, sea-faring folk” differed substantially from Indigenous peoples’ portrayal as “degenerate,” “unfortunate, and “long-extinct.”45 Representations of Beothuk and Mi’kmaq in Travel Writing and Beyond Another representational division occurred as well, for not all Indigenous people figured into Newfoundland travel writing in the same way. Travel writers most often focused their discussion on the Beothuk and Mi’kmaq but occasionally, usually in a passing reference, mentioned

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meeting Innu individuals also. The Beothuk and Mi’kmaq received much attention in travel literature. In his undergraduate thesis in history, which explores the role of antimodernism in Newfoundland travel writing published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Byrne contends that travel writers deployed images of Beothuk and Mi’kmaq people in order to incite antimodern nostalgia among their readers.46 Indigenous peoples, he says, were depicted by travel writers as personifications of nature and were romanticized as “children of the forest,” representational practices that related more to tourists’ preoccupation with antimodernism than with the actual lives of Native people.47 Other writers have also shown how Indigenous peoples appeared in travel writing as part of nature, and as part of the past, and have demonstrated how this kind of portrayal worked discursively to empty Indigenous lands of Indigenous peoples, thus making room for white settlers or sportsmen.48 But as Byrne also notes, while the living Mi’kmaq individuals who often guided tourists’ trips provided writers with the opportunity to question modernity, the Beothuk, whom early travellers attempted to find and later travellers loved to mourn, gave writers fuel to describe the fate of this “doomed,” “mysterious, long-extinct race,” and versions of the Beothuk extinction narrative appeared frequently in sportsmen’s narratives.49 Byrne does not make much of the distinctions in travel writing between the portrayal of the Beothuk and the Mi’kmaq, focusing instead on how both groups’ representations supported the creation of (masculine) antimodern nostalgia, but the distinctions are also significant. While the flexibility of sportsmen’s representations of Indigenous peoples in Newfoundland supports Patricia Jasen’s point that the image of the “wild man became infinitely malleable” to service the needs of its inventors, in Newfoundland travel writing there also existed remarkably durable and remarkably different narratives about the Beothuk and Mi’kmaq that invite further reflection.50 Consistently, the Beothuk appeared indigenous to Newfoundland but absent from the presentday landscape of travel writing, except insofar as their c­ ultural remains played central roles in travellers’ accounts. The Mi’kmaq, on the other hand, while present on the landscape, regularly figured as non-indigenous to Newfoundland and were often identified as key players in the demise of the Beothuk. The representation of the Beothuk as the true Indigenous inhabitants of Newfoundland and the Mi’kmaq as newcomers is not unique to travel writing but shows up as well in many accounts of the history

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of the island.51 Until recently, when the Mi’kmaq did figure into the historical literature, they appeared as recent arrivals from Cape Breton Island, hired by the French to help kill off the Beothuk.52 A competing version of history that supports the Indigeneity of the Newfoundland Mi’kmaq has taken hold more recently, with writers asserting that, for many years before contact with Europeans, the Mi’kmaq travelled seasonally throughout Mi’kma’ki, which included parts of what became known as Newfoundland.53 Authors suggest as well that there exists no basis to the Mi’kmaq mercenary myth.54 According to historian Leslie Upton, this myth started to spread widely with well-known Newfoundland explorer William Cormack’s 1828 address to the Beothuk Institution, in which he stated without corroboration that the French had put a bounty on Beothuk heads and that the Mi’kmaq, with Frenchsupplied guns, had “shattered” the Beothuk before white settlers began to do them harm.55 Upton continues on to argue that the story of violent Mi’kmaq and hapless Beothuk became even more popular with the 1848 London publication of Ottawah: Last Chief of the Red Indians of Newfoundland, later reprinted in Philadelphia and translated into German.56 In spite of the fact that contemporary European accounts held that the “last Beothuk,” Shanawdithit, did not die until 1829, Ottawah told the tale of the earlyseventeenth-century Mi’kmaq destruction of the Beothuk.57 As Patrick Brantlinger describes in his chapter in this volume, stories of “savage” warfare predominated in European accounts of colonized peoples and places, rationalizing imperial intervention through the interpretation that the “savagery” of the Natives was causing them to kill one another off anyway.58 The myth of the murderous Mi’kmaq certainly supports Brantlinger’s argument, though in the Newfoundland context the critique of the mercenary myth has focused not on the workings of colonialism in a broad sense but on the myth’s specifically negative impact on Mi’kmaq claims to land and recognition.59 Upton contends that initially the Mi’kmaq received much blame, but by the late 1970s, when he wrote his article, responsibility for “exterminating” the Beothuk had been “laid squarely on the settlers.”60 Yet it was not until many years after that, years of effort by the Mi’kmaq and their allies, that the smear of the mercenary myth faded to the extent that the Mi’kmaq were able to obtain at least some limited recognition of their status as Aboriginal people of Newfoundland, recognition that thus far includes no land base outside Miawpukek. Indeed, Richard Budgel suggests that the discussion of the possible causes of

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the Beothuk’s “extinction,” including the mercenary myth, continues to be one of “surprising vitality in Newfoundland,” and one that has much more to do with present-day non-Indigenous Newfoundlanders than with the Beothuk.61 Even Upton cannot seem to resist providing his own interpretation, offering the questionable suggestion at the end of his article that the Beothuk may have been responsible for their own deaths by not having had enough contact with whites.62 The question of why the Beothuk extinction narrative has continued to be of such interest to non-Indigenous Newfoundlanders (and to people outside of Newfoundland as well) may be helpfully framed by an examination of how and with what effects this narrative appeared in travel writing beginning in the nineteenth century.63 Tellings and Retellings of the Beothuk Extinction Narrative The first published travel narratives about Newfoundland were those written not by sportsmen but by white men of a similarly privileged class who travelled to the Newfoundland interior in search of Indians to civilize, souls to save, and resources to exploit. Excerpts from the journal of Lieutenant David Buchan, who was sent in 1811 by Governor John Duckworth with a party of marines and guides in order to make contact with any “native Indians” they could find, were published in 1818 in a book charting British voyages to “the Arctic regions.”64 William Cormack’s accounts of both his journeys into the interior of the island “in search of the Red Indians” were also published, appearing for the first time in 1824 in the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal. His narratives were reproduced many times in different periodicals, including a nine-part version of his 1822 trip across the island in Forest and Stream.65 Missionary Edward Wix published his travel journal in 1836, apparently pressed by friends in St John’s “who felt a curiosity to learn something of these parts of their own Terra Nova, which were to them still a Terra Incognita.”66 In publishing in 1842 his two-volume tome about his work-related travels in Newfoundland, the geological surveyor of Newfoundland, J.B. Jukes, cited reasons similar to those of Wix for publishing his notebooks: he felt the need to inform the people of England about the island, because they had “very great ignorance of the condition and extent of our Colonial possessions” generally, and particularly of Newfoundland.67 Very likely the most-travelled non-Indigenous Newfoundlander was James P. Howley, who was and remains best known for his 1915

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The Beothucks or Red Indians: The Aboriginal Inhabitants of Newfoundland, in which he compiled and provided commentary on information about the Beothuk from a variety of sources, including accounts such as Buchan’s and Cormack’s mentioned above.68 Howley spent his summers from 1868 to 1909 conducting survey work for the Geological Survey of Newfoundland, first under and then replacing director Alexander Murray (formerly of the Geological Survey of Canada). Howley took extensive notes, but his writing about his Newfoundland surveying journeys did not appear in print until well after his death in 1918. He did prepare a manuscript for publication, Reminiscences of Forty-Two Years of Exploration in and about Newfoundland, the full version of which, over two thousand pages long, did not become publicly available until 2009.69 The published examples above provide a sample of early European travel narratives that discuss the Beothuk and are of interest here both for what they have to say about the Beothuk and for how these early narratives themselves became part of the story that travelled in later accounts. Buchan hypothesized in the journal from his 1811 trip that other people were wrong in surmising from not seeing many that the Beothuk were few in number. He considered it no surprise that, since the “settlers thought they could not do a more meritorious act than to shoot an Indian” whenever possible, the Beothuk would retreat from the coast to the interior of the island, away from the settlers, and subsist on “deer” rather than fish and sea birds.70 Cormack, by contrast, wrote in his account of his 1822 journey that the “Red Indians are not numerous,” though he suspected that government attempts to make contact with the Beothuk were unsuccessful not because the Beothuk had disappeared but because the Mi’kmaq were blocking contact in the interests of keeping the fur trade to themselves.71 By the end of his 1827 excursion, however, his second without meeting the “Indians,” Cormack expressed disappointment that now that the Beothuk Institution had “taken up the cause of a barbarously treated people,” there would be so few left “to reap the benefit of our plans for their civilization.”72 Wix only made the brief comment that his trip strengthened for him the conviction he had formed “that the Boeothic, or Red Indians, the aboriginies of the island, must be extinct.”73 Jukes similarly believed that “the last remnant of them have either perished or have passed over to the Labradore.”74 After the publication in 1842 of Jukes’s Excursions in and about Newfoundland, almost all printed narratives confidently asserted that “the

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race of North American Indians” in Newfoundland was “now nearly extinct” or that the Natives had “gradually disappeared from the island.”75 Howley’s stated goal in writing The Beothucks or Red Indians was to “preserve from oblivion the principal facts relating to this interesting but unfortunate section of the human family.”76 In describing the loss of the Beothuk, writers certainly relied upon the tropes of romantic nostalgia. For example, as one author dramatically stated, “only their graves and the moldering remains of their huts and deer fences have been found. Their fires are extinguished forever, and the record of their fate fills another dark page in the history of the white man’s progress in the New World.”77 While all travel accounts after 1842 took for granted the absence of the Beothuk, not all blamed the Mi’kmaq for the Beothuk’s decline, though many did, often in combination with blaming settlers. H.C. Thomson, for instance, wrote in 1905 that the “Mic-macs” were “even more responsible than the settlers” for the “extermination” of the Beothuk.78 Others considered settlers, and particularly “the rude fishermen who settled in different parts of Newfoundland,” entirely culpable for ruthlessly “hunting and shooting the natives like deer.”79 Sometimes the Beothuk appeared to cause their own demise, as, for instance, in Arthur P. Silver’s narrative about caribou hunting, in which he explained that the Beothuks “were so barbarous and treacherous in their dealings with the early settlers, that they brought on themselves a war of extermination, which resulted in their extinction. After many cold-blooded murders, it became the practice of the white population to shoot an Indian at sight, as if he were a dangerous kind of wild animal.”80 Even when writers did not position the Beothuk as instigators of violence, they often presented the Beothuk’s disappearance as the inevitable outcome of “a contest [where] the weak must go to the wall” when confronted by “the white man, with his superior brains and superior weapons of destruction.”81 The supposedly inherent weakness or “undercivilization” of the Beothuk thus appeared as much to blame for their death as any “war of extermination” by the “whites and the Micmac Indians.”82 Some authors took no position at all on the question, mentioning in their accounts only the name of “the ancient Beothiks – those strange, mysterious people who have vanished,” or that of them “not a trace remains; all that is known of them is that they were a hardy race, living by hunting and trapping.”83 Whether or not the Beothuk figured in travel writing as responsible for their own undoing, they consistently appeared in stereotypically

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romantic form as noble or ignoble savages.84 Regardless of whether they were noble – with the “last man” looking “despairingly on the ruins of his race and the graves of his fathers” – or ignoble – with their “fierce, savage retaliation” against settlers ensuring “their ultimate destruction” – they were imaginary Indians, featuring in travel writing as closer to primitive nature than to European culture.85 Undoubtedly, representations of the Beothuk varied considerably: they were persecuted yet doomed, inoffensive yet treacherous, ingenious yet degenerate, and fierce yet gentle-mannered.86 The variation in their representation depended on the version of the extinction narrative each author chose to tell. They appeared “friendly and tractable” when their “extermination” (by whites and Mi’kmaq) was “to be regretted,” “unhappy” when the “very ancient principle in nature’s laws of the survival of the fittest” made their extinction inevitable, and “revengeful” when they murdered in cold blood those whites who tried to help them, thus, it would seem, deserving death.87 Perhaps, though, it is possible to overstate the flexibility of travel writers’ depictions of the Beothuk, since the most consistent portrayal of them is the most obvious: they are extinct. Whether writers understood the Beothuk’s extinction as mysterious or clear in cause, as inevitable or tragic, they described it as final, as the death of a “primitive race.” Though the currently contentious word “genocide” was not a choice available to travel writers around the turn of the twentieth century, their common selection of “extinction” was not the only word they used that made the Beothuk appear not-quite human.88 The comment that settlers shot “Indians” like “deer” or like “dogs” rather than like people dehumanized the Beothuk and made their “extinction” appear benign, or at least somewhat palatable, particularly when combined with the idea that it was inevitable.89 Correspondingly, although many travel writers bemoaned the atrocities committed by white settlers against the Beothuk, the detailed accounts they constantly repeated were actually stories about inexplicable Beothuk violence against or aloofness towards the white men who were merely trying to find them and give them presents.90 The only detailed accounts that consistently appeared about non-violent Beothuk focused on “captured” women, and these narratives highlighted not the violent circumstances of the women’s detainment but their excellent treatment at the hands of their white male kidnappers. For example, we have the story of a “female … taken by a party of trappers on Red Indian Lake and brought to St. John’s. She was named Mary March from the month in which she was taken. She was treated with great

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kindness and sent back with presents.”91 The only problem, according to travel narratives such as this one, was not that the woman was abducted, or that she was renamed from Demasduit (or that her male companion was killed by the men who apprehended her), but rather that she died on the voyage home before she could tell her people about the kindness of the strangers who looked after her. Shanawdithit also appeared in travel narratives, with writers stating that she “preferred to settle with the colonists” than to return home, presumably because of her good treatment (as an unpaid servant) before she too died of consumption.92 The repetition of these few stories worked to make the Beothuk appear savage, simple-minded, weak, and dying, and the white men who looked for them innocent and even heroic, even as the same travel accounts alluded to some settler violence that remained outside the narratives themselves. Certainly, as discussed above, the portrayal of Indigenous peoples as savage and closer to nature than to culture was a regular feature in romantic travel and other writing, as was the construction of the “savage races” as dying races, representations that justified settlers’ (or sportsmen’s) claims to Indigenous lands: the land was merely free for the taking.93 The resolute finality with which travel writers discussed the Beothuk’s disappearance went hand in hand with the erasure of the Mi’kmaq’s relationships with the island. In New Zealand and Southern Africa, colonial historical narratives focusing on pre-European-contact “displacements and exterminations” had the effect of “discrediting the ‘originality’ of the current indigenous population by depicting them as violent arrivistes who had dispossessed the ‘true’ indigenes.”94 Similarly, Newfoundland travel writing that portrayed the Mi’kmaq as arriving from eastern Canada in the eighteenth century, and proceeding to succeed, displace, and/or murder the Beothuk, negated the possibility that the Mi’kmaq had a justified claim to the island. While clearly the Mi’kmaq were present on the land and knew the territory well – indeed, the success of hunting and fishing trips required their intimate knowledge of the place – travel writing insisted on their position as newcomers to a land whose Indigenous people were gone. Not all authors reinforced the Mi’kmaq mercenary myth, and a few even refuted it; John Millais, for example, wrote that while the Mi’kmaq “were said to have been brought over to help to exterminate the unfortunate Beothicks … I do not believe that this was the real reason of their coming.”95 He hypothesized instead that they came for “the excellent trapping and hunting to be found in the island.”96 Still, just as the Beothuk’s extinction operated as fact in travel writing, so too did the Mi’kmaq’s

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Figure 12.1  “Micmac Indians Packing,” from John Millais’s book ­Newfoundland and Its Untrodden Ways. Image courtesy of the Centre for ­Newfoundland ­Studies, Memorial University Libraries.

foreignness. Both kinds of representation served to open Newfoundland up to the sportsmen for whom the island did appear new, placing into the background the peoples for whom the island was as old as their long-standing relationships with it. The extinguished Beothuk came to appear as a romantic landscape feature to be visited and mourned: for instance, while looking out over “charming spots … where the last of the Red Indians left this world” or admiring Beothuk “relics” such as “skulls, bones, almost an entire skeleton of the extinct tribe … and arrow heads.”97 The Mi’kmaq served a more practical function: to facilitate the knowing and claiming of the land by sportsmen.

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New Genre, Old Story Newfoundland travel writing provided one avenue through which the Beothuk extinction narrative journeyed far beyond the shores of the island, landing where readers and writers lived: in Britain, Europe, Canada, and the United States.98 Stories of Indigenous extinction were not unique to Newfoundland but rather were a central means through which colonial projects came to appear logical and benign. But in an era where European colonialism and its racializing logic are generally seen as unacceptable (even if, as ongoing circumstances such as the almost twelve hundred missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada show, colonial practices continue), what are we to do with stories like the Beothuk extinction narrative that continue to travel? In 2000 and 2001 the CBC came out with its $25-million, 17-episode television series, Canada: A People’s History, complete with a website, teachers’ guides, and two companion books.99 The series begins in Newfoundland in 1829 with Shanawdithit, described by the narrator as “a scullery maid” who “held the key to a great mystery.”100 The mystery, it turns out, is Shanawdithit’s people, who, according to the narrator, “had always been mysterious.” The episode goes on to recount Cormack’s search for the “Red Indians,” with the actor playing him using Cormack’s own words: “On discovering, from appearances everywhere around, that the Red Indians no longer existed, the spirits of one and all of us were deeply affected.” The narrator then states that it “was as if Shanawdithit had stumbled out of a land of ghosts. Unravelling the mystery of her people had become Cormack’s obsession.” Some reviewers of the series suggest that beginning with Shanawdithit signals that Canada: A People’s History tells a different kind of history than narratives that have dominated the past, a story in which a “native tragedy gets top billing” and one which reflects the belief that “Aboriginal peoples are an important part of ‘our’ community.”101 Yet critics have also noted some disheartening continuities with colonial forms of storytelling. Darren Bryant and Penney Clark comment that, by the end of episode two (by which time the discussion of the Beothuk is complete), all words spoken in English have been spoken by Europeans and no named Indigenous character, including Shanawdithit, has spoken.102 Instead, we are to understand Indigenous peoples during the contact era through the words of Europeans.103 No wonder the Beothuk seem so “mysterious.” Cynthia Sugars observes that, in Canada: A People’s History, the Beothuk become connected not only to the origins of

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Canada but to the origins of the world.104 The story, however, is not primarily about, and is certainly not for, the Beothuk, but instead has become “the focus of both Canadian postcolonial guilt (over past atrocities) and postcolonial desire (for origins/authenticity).”105 It is imperative to trace what travels alongside stories such as the Beothuk extinction narrative, to examine how colonial racism works its way into the present in part through stories about the past. We must look, too, to other kinds of stories, stories of Indigenous survival, resistance, reclamation, and resurgence: stories that are all around us, including in this collection. NOTES 1 I do not mean to suggest that there was no collapse of the cod fishery, just that the story is more complex than it first seems. For a detailed analysis, see Dean Bavington, Managed Annihilation: An Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse (Vancouver: UBC Press 2010). 2 “About Miawpukek,” Miawpukek Mi’kamawey Mawi’omi, http://www. mfngov.ca/about-miawpukek/ (accessed November 2017). 3 The Newfoundland Aboriginal Women’s Network is an example of one organization that is doing incredible grass-roots community work (http:// nawn-nf.com/). See also Dorothy Anger, “Putting It Back Together: Micmac Political Identity in Newfoundland” (MA thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1983); Dennis Bartels and Alice Bartels, “Mi’gmaq Lives: Aboriginal Identity in Newfoundland,” in David McNab and Ute Lischke, eds., Walking A Tightrope: Aboriginal People and Their Representations (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2005), 249–80; Bonita Lawrence, “Reclaiming Ktaqamkuk: Land and Mi’kmaq Identity in Newfoundland,” in Julian Agyeman et al., eds., Speaking for Ourselves: Environmental Justice in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press 2009), 42–64; Angela Robinson, “‘Being and Becoming Indian’: Mi’kmaq Cultural Revival in the Western Newfoundland Region,” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 32, no. 1 (2012): 1–31; Janice Tulk, “Cultural Revitalization and Mi’kmaq Music-Making: Three Newfoundland Drum Groups,” Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 22, no. 1 (2007): 259–86. 4 See, for example, “Qalipu Application Process to Start over Again,” CBC News, 5 July 2013, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundlandlabrador/qalipu-application-process-to-start-over-again-1.1359985 (accessed November 2017). For an examination of the role of “authenticity”

286  Jocelyn Thorpe in regulating Native identity more generally, see Bonita Lawrence, “Real” Indians and Others: Mixed-Blood Urban Native Peoples and Indigenous Nationhood (Vancouver: UBC Press 2004), and Bonita Lawrence, “Gender, Race, and the Regulation of Native Identity in Canada and the United States: An Overview,” Hypatia 18, no. 2 (spring 2003): 3–31. 5 Thomas King, The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative (Toronto: House of Anansi 2003), 9, 10. 6 Richard Lewes Dashwood, Chiploquorgan; or, Life by the Camp Fire in the Dominion of Canada and Newfoundland (Dublin: Robert T. White 1871), 242; W. Arthur Babson, “A Summer in Newfoundland – VII,” Forest and Stream 63 (6 August 1904): 111. 7 See especially the chapters by Patrick Brantlinger, Maura Hanrahan, and Christopher Aylward and Chief Mi’sel Joe in this volume. Also, Dennis Bartels, “Time Immemorial? A Research Note on Micmacs in Newfoundland,” Newfoundland Quarterly 75, no. 3 (1979): 6–9; Michael G. Wetzel, “Decolonizing Ktaqmkuk Mi’kmaw History” (LLM thesis, Dalhousie University, 1995). 8 Allan Byrne, “‘Where the Gamely Salmon and Lordly Caribou Abound’: Antimodernism and Tourist Promotion of the Newfoundland Wilderness during the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries” (BA thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2007); Gerald Pocius, “Tourists, Health Seekers and Sportsmen: Luring Americans to Newfoundland in the Early Twentieth Century,” in James Hiller and Peter Neary, eds., TwentiethCentury Newfoundland Explorations (St John’s: Breakwater 1994), 47–78; Susan T. Williams, “Images of Newfoundland in Promotional Literature, 1890–1914” (MA thesis, Memorial University, 1980). 9 Pocius, “Tourists, Health Seekers and Sportsmen,” 55–61. 10 Ibid., 49, 52. See also Patricia Jasen, Wild Things: Nature, Culture, and Tourism in Ontario, 1790–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1995). 11 Jasen, Wild Things. 12 Ibid., 7. 13 Ibid., 13. 14 Ibid. 15 Reid Newfoundland Company, Newfoundland and Labrador: Unrivaled Resorts for the Tourist, Health Seeker and Sportsman (St John’s: Reid Newfoundland Company, c. 1910), front matter; R. Hibbs, Newfoundland for Business and Pleasure: The Country, Its People, and the Opportunity It Offers to Other People (St John’s, 1925). 16 Pocius, “Tourists, Health Seekers and Sportsmen,” 52; Jasen, Wild Things, 29. Of course, all tourism destinations must mark themselves as unique in

Routes of Colonial Racism  287 some way in order to attract tourists. For a discussion of the marketing of uniqueness in the context of national parks, see Catriona Sandilands, “Ecological Integrity and National Narrative: Cleaning up Canada’s National Parks,” Canadian Woman Studies 20, no. 2 (2000): 137–42. 17 For the origins of the term antimodernism, see T.J. Jackson-Lears’s No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880– 1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1981). 18 Peter Boag, “Thinking Like Mount Rushmore: Sexuality and Gender in the Republican Landscape,” in Virginia J. Scharff, ed., Seeing Nature through Gender (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas 2003), 40–59; Jasen, Wild Things, 106–11, 140; Tina Loo, “Of Moose and Men: Hunting for Masculinities in British Columbia, 1880–1939,” Western Historical Quarterly 32 (autumn 2001): 296–319; Tina Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada’s Wildlife in the Twentieth Century (Vancouver: UBC Press 2006), 29–35; Jocelyn Thorpe, “Temagami’s Tangled Wild: The Making of Race, Nature, and Nation in Early-Twentieth-Century Ontario,” in Andrew Baldwin, Laura Cameron, and Audrey Kobayashi, eds., Rethinking the Great White North: Race, Nature, and the Historical Geographies of Whiteness in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press 2011), 193–210; Mariana Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885–1925 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1991). 19 For an early-twentieth-century expression of antimodern thought, see Louis Oliver Armstrong, “Down the Mississaga,” Rod and Gun 6, no. 2 (July 1904): 60–1. 20 Jasen, Wild Things, 105. 21 Pocius, “Tourists, Health Seekers and Sportsmen,” 55; Reid Newfoundland Company, The Golden Age of Newfoundland’s Advancement: Striking Portrayal of Its Progress the Past Fifteen Years (St John’s, 1910), 6. 22 Jasen, Wild Things, 13. 23 Jocelyn Thorpe, Temagami’s Tangled Wild: Race, Gender, and the Making of National Nature (Vancouver: UBC Press 2012), 64–6. 24 Jasen, Wild Things, 3, 13, 16–17. 25 Thorpe, Temagami’s Tangled Wild, 66–8. 26 Loo, “Of Moose and Men.” See also Greg Gillespie, Hunting for Empire: Narratives of Sport in Rupert’s Land, 1840–70 (Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press 2007). 27 On the exclusion of women from travel writing, see Jasen, Wild Things, 24, and Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London: Routledge 1991). For a notable exception in writing about Labrador, see Mina Hubbard, A Woman’s Way through

288  Jocelyn Thorpe Unknown Labrador: An Account of the Exploration of the Nascaupee and George Rivers (Toronto: W. Briggs 1908). 28 Pocius, “Tourists, Health Seekers and Sportsmen,” 59. 29 Katrina Hincks Moore, “The Annieopsquolch Mountains,” Appalachia 79/80 (November 1935): 359–67. 30 European travel writing has been studied extensively for its role in imperialism. See, for example, Alison Blunt, Travel, Gender, and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa (New York: Guilford Press 1994); Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1996); Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1998); Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge 1992); David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1993). 31 Pocius, “Tourists, Health Seekers and Sportsmen,” 68. As James Overton points out, tourists had been coming to Newfoundland (and Labrador) for some time, but the railway construction and improvements to sea transport made it possible for many more visitors to arrive. And Allan Byrne cautions us against considering sportsmen’s writings as completely separate from promotional material, for tourism promoters understood the important role sportsmen had in publicizing the region and worked hard to ensure that prominent sportsmen had positive experiences in Newfoundland. James Overton, “Tourism Development, Conservation, and Conflict: Game Laws for Caribou Protection in Newfoundland,” Canadian Geographer 24, no. 1 (1980): 43; Byrne, “Where the Gamely Salmon and Lordly Caribou Abound,” 16. 32 Pocius, “Tourists, Health Seekers and Sportsmen,” 69. 33 Byrne, “Where the Gamely Salmon and Lordly Caribou Abound,” 5–6. See also John Urry, The Tourist Gaze (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage 2002). 34 Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 2001); Loo, States of Nature; John MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation, and British Imperialism (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press 1988); Darrin M. McGrath, “Salted Caribou and Sportsmen-Tourists: Conflicts over Wildlife Resources in Newfoundland at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Newfoundland Studies 10, no. 2 (1994): 208–25; James Overton, “Tourism Development”; Bill Parenteau

Routes of Colonial Racism  289 and James Kenny, “Survival, Resistance, and the Canadian State: The Transformation of New Brunswick’s Native Economy, 1867–1930,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 13, no. 1 (2002): 49–71; John Sandlos, Hunters at the Margin: Native People and Wildlife Conservation in the Northwest Territories (Vancouver: UBC Press 2007). 35 McGrath, “Salted Caribou and Sportsmen-Tourists,” 211. 36 Overton, “Tourism Development, Conservation, and Conflict,” 44. 37 McGrath, “Salted Caribou and Sportsmen-Tourists,” 217. McGrath also makes clear settler resistance to the new laws, as does Overton in “Tourism Development, Conservation, and Conflict.” 38 Pocius, “Tourists, Health Seekers and Sportsmen”; McGrath, “Salted Caribou and Sportsmen-Tourists”; James Overton, Making a World of Difference: Essays on Tourism, Culture and Development in Newfoundland (St John’s: ISER 1996). Byrne’s “Where the Gamely Salmon and Lordly Caribou Abound,” which I discuss below, is an exception, as is George Story’s article about Newfoundland guides. In it, Story gleans as much as he can from the written historical record about the guides, many of whom are Aboriginal (Mi’kmaq and Innu) and whom Story finds more interesting than the tourists. See George Story, “Guides to Newfoundland,” Newfoundland Quarterly (February 1980): 17–23. 39 Pocius, “Tourists, Health Seekers and Sportsmen,” 70, 65. By contrast, Allan Byrne comments that it was specifically Aboriginal peoples who were romanticized in travel writing as “children of the forest.” Byrne, “Where the Gamely Salmon and Lordly Caribou Abound,” 28. 40 Jasen, Wild Things; Loo, “Of Moose and Men”; Story, “Guides to Newfoundland,” 19; Thorpe, “Temagami’s Tangled Wild.” 41 McGrath, “Salted Caribou and Sportsmen-Tourists.” 42 Doug Jackson, ‘On the Country’: The Micmac of Newfoundland, ed. Gerald Penney (St John’s: Harry Cuff Publications 1993). 43 Allan Byrne, “Selling Simplicity: Lee Wulff, Stanley Truman Brooks and the Newfoundland Tourist Development Board, 1925–1946” (MA thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2008). 44 Pocius, “Tourists, Health Seekers and Sportsmen,” 60. 45 Byrne, “Selling Simplicity,” 38; Ephraim W. Tucker, Five Months in Labrador and Newfoundland during the Summer of 1838 (Concord, NH: Israel S. Boyd and William White 1839), 44; William MacGregor, “Report by the Governor on a Visit to the Micmac Indians at Bay d’Espoir” (London: Darling and Son 1908), 6; R S. Kennedy, “Cruising the Gulf of St. Lawrence,” Travel 61, no. 2 (June 1933): 31. 46 Byrne, “Where the Gamely Salmon and Lordly Caribou Abound,” 37.

290  Jocelyn Thorpe 47 Ibid., 27–8. Stereotypical representations of the Beothuk in particular were not limited to travel writing, but, as Richard Budgel and Mary Dalton show, extend as well to more contemporarily written popular history and literature. See Richard Budgel, “The Beothuks and the Newfoundland Mind,” Newfoundland Studies 8, no. 1 (1992): 15–33; Mary Dalton, “Shadow Indians: The Beothuk Motif in Newfoundland Literature,” Newfoundland Studies 8, no. 2 (1992): 135–46. Consider also a more complex example in Cynthia Sugars, “Original Sin, or, the Last of the First Ancestors: Michael Crummey’s River Thieves,” English Studies in Canada 31, no. 4 (2005): 147–75. 48 See, for example, Bill Parenteau, “‘Care, Control and Supervision’: Native People in the Canadian Atlantic Salmon Fishery, 1867–1900,” Canadian Historical Review 79, no. 1 (March 1998): 1–35; and Thorpe, Temagami’s Tangled Wild, 64–8. On the flexibility of the “noble savage” trope and its effects, see also Kristopher Churchill, “Learning about Manhood: Gender Ideals and ‘Manly Camping,’” in Bruce W. Hodgins and Bernadine Dodge, eds., Using Wilderness: Essays on the Evolution of Youth Camping in Ontario (Peterborough, ON: Frost Centre for Canadian Heritage and Development Studies 1992), 5–27; Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press 1998), 95–127; King, The Truth about Stories, 31–60; Sharon Wall, The Nurture of Nature: Childhood, Antimodernism, and Ontario Summer Camps, 1920–55 (Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press 2009), 216–50. 49 Byrne, “Where the Gamely Salmon and Lordly Caribou Abound,” 33; Kennedy, “Cruising the Gulf of St. Lawrence,” 31. 50 Jasen, Wild Things, 15. See also Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press 1978), 183–96. 51 Sean Cadigan, Newfoundland and Labrador: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2009); Kevin Major, As Near to Heaven by Sea: A History of Newfoundland and Labrador (Toronto: Penguin Canada 2002); Ingeborg Marshall, A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1996); Ingeborg Marshall, The Beothuk of Newfoundland: A Vanished People (St John’s: Breakwater 1989); Ralph Pastore, Shanawdithit’s People: The Archaeology of the Beothuks (St John’s: Atlantic Archaeology 1992). 52 Dennis Bartels, “Ktaqamkuk Ilnui Saqimawoutie: Aboriginal Rights and the Myth of the Micmac Mercenaries in Newfoundland,” in Bruce Alden Cox, ed., Native People Native Lands: Canadian Indians, Inuit, and Metis (Ottawa: Carleton University Press 1987), 32–6. 53 Anger, “Putting it Back Together”; Dorothy Anger, Nogcswa’mkisk (Where the Sand Blows): Vignettes of Bay St. George Micmacs (Port au Port, NL: Bay St

Routes of Colonial Racism  291 George Regional Indian Band Council 1988); Bartels, “Time Immemorial?”; Bartels and Bartels, “Mi’gmaq Lives”; Dennis Bartels and Olaf Uwe Janzen, “Micmac Migration to Western Newfoundland,” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 10, no. 1 (1990): 71–94; Maura Hanrahan, “The Lasting Breach: The Omission of Aboriginal People from the Terms of Union between Newfoundland and Canada and Its Ongoing Impacts,” in Collected Research Papers of the Royal Commission on Renewing and Strengthening Our Place in Canada, vol. 1 (St John’s: Office of the Queen’s Printer, Newfoundland and Labrador, 2003), 195–251; Doug Jackson, ‘On the Country’; Charles A. Martijn, “Early Mi’kmaq Presence in Southern Newfoundland: An Ethnohistorical Perspective, c. 1500–1763,” Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 19, no. 1 (2003): 44–102; David McNab, “The Perfect Disguise: Frank Speck’s Pilgrimage to Ktaqamkuk – The Place of Fog – in 1904,” American Review of Canadian Studies 31, no. 1/2 (spring/summer 2001): 85–104; Adrian Tanner, “The Aboriginal People of Newfoundland and Labrador, and Confederation,” Newfoundland Studies 14, no. 2 (1998): 238–52; Wetzel, “Decolonizing Ktaqmkuk Mi’kmaw History”; Jerry Wetzel, Pat Anderson, and Douglas Sanders with contributions by Huhuette Giard and Pamela White, Freedom to Live Our Own Way in Our Own Land, report of Ktaqamkuk Ilnui Saqimawoutie and the Conne River Indian Band Council, ed. Peter J. Usher (Conne River, NL, July 1980). 54 Bartels, “Time Immemorial?”; Bartels, “Ktaqamkuk Ilnui Saqimawoutie”; Bartels, “Newfoundland Micmac Claims to Land and ‘Status,’” Native Studies Review 7, no. 2 (1991): 43–51; Bartels and Bartels, “Mi’gmaq Lives”; Jackson, ‘On the Country’; Ralph Pastore, “Newfoundland Micmacs: A History of Their Traditional Life,” Pamphlet no. 5 (St John’s: Newfoundland Historical Society 1978); Adrian Tanner, “Do We Owe the Newfoundland Micmacs Anything?” Indian and Inuit Supporter 3, no. 1 (1983): 1–9; Tanner, “The Aboriginal People of Newfoundland”; Wetzel, “Decolonizing Ktaqmkuk Mi’kmaw History”; Wetzel et al., Freedom. 55 Leslie Upton, “The Extermination of the Beothucks of Newfoundland,” Canadian Historical Review 58 (1977): 146–7. 56 Ibid., 147. 57 Ibid. 58 See also Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell 2003). 59 See, for example, Budgel, “The Beothuks.” 60 Upton, “The Extermination of the Beothucks,” 151. 61 Budgel, “The Beothuks,” 16. 62 Upton, “The Extermination of the Beothucks,” 153.

292  Jocelyn Thorpe 63 Cynthia Sugars has shown how the story of the Beothuk has been appropriated into Canadian nationalism as a “foundational trauma” upon which the nation is built. Sugars, “Original Sin,” 150. 64 David Buchan, “Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Newfoundland,” appendix no. 1 in A Chronological History of Voyages into the Arctic Regions by Sir John Barrow (London: Murray 1818), 1. According to John Paul, a Mi’kmaq man who spoke to anthropologist Frank Speck in 1914, one of Buchan’s guides was Mi’kmaq and the other Innu. See Frank Speck, Beothuk and Micmac (New York: Museum of the American Indian 1922), 49. 65 William Eppes Cormack, “Account of a Journey across the Island of Newfoundland,” Edinburgh Philosophical Journal 10, no. 19 (January 1824): 157– 62; and William Eppes Cormack, “Report of Mr. W.E. Cormack’s Journey in Search of the Red Indians in Newfoundland,” Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal 6 (March 1829): 164–9. The first Forest and Stream article is William Eppes Cormack, “Across Newfoundland: Interior Explorations,” Forest and Stream 3, no. 21 (31 December 1874): 321–2. Cormack’s narrative of his first journey was also reproduced in James Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians: The Aboriginal Inhabitants of Newfoundland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1915). And in 1928 a textbook edition was published, intended for use in Newfoundland schools. William Eppes Cormack, A Journey across the Island of Newfoundland in 1822, ed. F.A. Bruton (London: Longmans, Green 1928). 66 Edward Wix, Six Months of a Newfoundland Missionary’s Journal, from February to August, 1835 (London: Smith, Elder and Company, Cornhill 1836). 67 J.B. Jukes, Excursions in and about Newfoundland, during the Years 1839 and 1840 (London: John Murray 1842), vi. 68 Howley, The Beothucks. 69 James P. Howley, Reminiscences of Forty-Two Years of Exploration in and about Newfoundland, eds. William J. Kirwin and Patrick A. O’Flaherty (St John’s: Memorial University of Newfoundland 2009). 70 Buchan, “Journal,” 22. Many people called caribou deer. 71 Cormack, “Account of a Journey,” 162. 72 Cormack, “Report,” 11. 73 Wix, Six Months, 106. 74 Jukes, Excursions, vol. 1, 173. 75 John A. Pearson, “A Sketch of Newfoundland,” Simmond’s Colonial Magazine 3 (1844): 466; Hugh Murray, An Historical and Descriptive Account of British America, vols. 1 and 2 (New York: Harper 1855), 136. 76 Howley, The Beothucks, v.

Routes of Colonial Racism  293 77 “The Red Indians of Newfoundland,” Forest and Stream 4, 15 (20 May 1875): 227. This article was likely written by the Reverend A. Harvey, since an almost identical account was published earlier in the New Dominion Monthly. See A. Harvey, “Record of an Extinct Race,” New Dominion Monthly 8 (1871): 11–14. 78 H.C. Thomson, “Notes on a Journey through the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland,” Geographic Journal 26, no. 2 (August 1905): 198. 79 Jukes, Excursions, vol. 1, 171; Hugh Murray, An Historical and Descriptive Account of British America, vol. 1 (New York: Harper 1855), 136. 80 Arthur P. Silver, “Deer-Stalking on the Newfoundland Barrens,” Badminton Magazine 12 (1901): 381. 81 Reverend M. Harvey, Newfoundland as It Is in 1894: A Hand-Book and Tourists’ Guide (St John’s: Queen’s Printer 1894), 10; J.G. Millais, Newfoundland and Its Untrodden Ways (London: Longmans, Green 1907), 18. 82 Frank G. Speck, “The Beothuks of Newfoundland,” Southern Workman 41, no. 12 (1912): 559. 83 Babson, “A Summer in Newfoundland,” 111; Captain W.R. Kennedy, Sporting Notes in Newfoundland (St John’s: Queen’s Printer 1881), 14. 84 Three of the four themes Budgel identifies as consistent in Newfoundlanders’ popular histories on the Beothuk apply as well to travel writing: the Beothuk as benign primitives, the Beothuk and/or the Mi’kmaq as savages, and early Newfoundland settlers as savages. See Budgel, “The Beothuks,” 17. 85 “The Red Indians of Newfoundland,” 228; Samuel T. Davis, Caribou Shooting in Newfoundland: With a History of England’s Oldest Colony from 1001 to 1895 (Lancaster, PA: New Era Printing House 1895), 87. For an analysis of how the figure of the imaginary Indian has played out on screen, see Reel Injun, the documentary by Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond that explores Hollywood’s role in defining how “Injuns” are seen by the world. See also Daniel Francis, The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press 1992), and Thomas King’s film You’re Not the Indian I Had in Mind (2007; available through National Scren Institute, http://www.nsi-canada.ca/2012/03/im-not-the-indian-you-hadin-mind/ (accessed November 2017). 86 Henry Reeks, “Notes on the Zoology of Newfoundland. Letter 1 – Ornithology,” Zoologist 4, no. 43 (April 1869): 1609; Kennedy, “Cruising the Gulf of St. Lawrence,” 31; Wakeman Holberton, “Caribou Hunting in Newfoundland,” Harper’s Weekly (2 April 1892): 321; Silver, “Deer-Stalking,” 380; Millais, Newfoundland and Its Untrodden Ways, 18; Tucker, Five Months in Labrador and Newfoundland, 44; Jukes, Excursions vol. 2, 126.

294  Jocelyn Thorpe 87 Thomson, “Notes on a Journey,” 198; Davis, Caribou Shooting, 88, 86; D.W. Prowse, ed., The Newfoundland Guide Book 1905 (London: Bradbury, Agnew 1905), 14, 15. 88 When the UN special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, James Anaya, visited Canada in October 2013, he was presented with a letter by former national chief Phil Fontaine, elder Fred Kelly, businessman Dr Michael Dan, and human-rights activist Bernie Farber urging him to consider that Canadian policy over more than one hundred years constitutes genocide of First Nations under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. The letter was accompanied by a submission that Fontaine, Kelly, Dan, and Farber hoped would provide Anaya with the necessary information to begin an investigation, analysis, and discussion of Aboriginal genocide in Canada. This action, combined with Anaya’s statement that Canada faces a “crisis” when it comes to the situation of Indigenous peoples, sparked a good deal of media attention and controversy about the definition of genocide and whether it may be applied to the treatment of Aboriginal peoples in Canada. In 2015 Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools released its findings, determining that Canada’s Aboriginal policy constituted “cultural genocide.” See Michael Bolen, “UN Urged to Declare Canada’s Treatment of Aboriginals ‘Genocide,’” Huffington Post Canada, 18 October 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost. ca/2013/10/18/genocide-first-nations-aboriginals-canada-un_n_4123112. html (accessed November 2017); Susana Mas, “UN Aboriginal Envoy Says Canada Is Facing a ‘Crisis,’” CBC News, 15 October 2013, http:// www.cbc.ca/news/politics/un-aboriginal-envoy-says-canada-is-facinga-crisis-1.2054682 (accessed November 2017); Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (Winnipeg: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015), 1. 89 Murray, An Historical and Descriptive Account, 136; Dashwood, Chiploquorgan, 243. Of course, it is also true that people offer comments such as these to make the opposite point, that while it may be acceptable to shoot deer or dogs like deer or dogs (though the deer or dogs would likely disagree), it is not acceptable to shoot humans this way. Indeed, writers did want to communicate that it was wrong to shoot Beothuk individuals, but, in a context where the Beothuk were dehumanized so thoroughly, these words appear to be more of the same, especially given that writers simultaneously conveyed the feeling that it was a bad thing to do, but not that bad, given the “inevitable” decline and disappearance of the Beothuk.

Routes of Colonial Racism  295 90 For violence, the repetition of Buchan’s narrative stands out particularly, and for aloofness, Cormack’s unsuccessful attempts at making contact with them. Many travel narratives mentioned both. See, for example, Murray, An Historical and Descriptive Account vol. 1, 136; John George Bourinot, “Some Stories of a Lost Tribe,” New Dominion Monthly 3, no. 1 (October 1868): 13–17; “The Red Indians of Newfoundland.” 91 “The Red Indians of Newfoundland,” 227. 92 Patrick T. McGrath, Newfoundland in 1911 (London: Whitehead, Morris 1911), 49. 93 Terry Goldie, Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures (Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1989); Alan Lawson and Anna Johnston, “Settler Colonies,” in Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray, eds., A Companion to Postcolonial Studies (Oxford: Blackwell 2000), 360–76. 94 Lawson and Johnston, “Settler Colonies,” 364. 95 Millais, Newfoundland and Its Untrodden Ways, 217. 96 Ibid. 97 L.F. Brown, “A Yankee’s Impressions of Newfoundland as a Sportsmen’s Resort,” Newfoundland Quarterly 5, no. 1 (July 1905): 11; Reid Newfoundland Co., Newfoundland and Labrador, 43. 98 Tracing the reception histories of these travel narratives is part of my ongoing larger project focused on the history of relationships among different peoples and between people and land. As Peter Mandler’s article makes clear, paying attention to how stories are received as well as told is part of the necessary work of cultural historians. It is one thing to analyse the meaning of texts, but quite another to comprehend the influence of texts on cultural understandings. How many people read this work, and who and where were they? What ideas did they take from it? How did it shape their understanding of themselves and of people and places far from them? Of course, and as Mandler’s essay also shows, these questions are not easily answered, since it is difficult to assess the influence of particular texts simply by measuring their circulation or counting the number of editions created (themselves not always easy tasks for historical works). How might readers have approached academic texts differently from travel articles in popular journals, for example, or travel articles compared to travel books or advertisement pamphlets? How did they make meaning out of what they read? From the Newfoundland travel writing studied in this chapter, it is clear that travel writers read one another’s work. Often they wrote to inform people about the island, either because they felt too little was known about it generally or because they wanted readers to embark upon

296  Jocelyn Thorpe trips to Newfoundland, or both. What readers did learn, and whether they travelled to the island as a result of what they read, remains to be understood. See Peter Mandler, “The Problem with Cultural History,” Cultural and Social History 1, no. 1 (2004): 94–117.   99 Brian Bethune, “Not the Same Old Story,” Maclean’s 113, no. 43 (23 October 2000): 62. 100 Canada: A People’s History, produced by Mark Starowicz (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 2000). 101 Peter Steven, “Canada’s History Unfolds,” Beaver 80, no. 6 (December 2000/January 2001): 46; Kerry Abel and E.J. Errington, “Visual History Reviews,” Canadian Historical Review 82, no. 4 (December 2001): 747. 102 Darren Bryant and Penney Clark, “Historical Empathy and ‘Canada: A People’s History,’” Canadian Journal of Education / Revue canadienne de l’éducation 29: (2006): 1053. 103 Ibid. 104 Sugars, “Original Sin,” 152. 105 Ibid.

13 Unrecognized Peoples and Concepts of Extinction boni ta lawre n ce

At the end of the eighteenth century several private citizens, naval officers, and governors submitted proposals to British authorities to improve the situation of the Beothuk and put an end to hostilities by English settlers. Decades passed before such plans were considered … Measures taken to appease the Beothuk were either ineffectual or came too late to prevent the extinction of the tribe. Stragglers may have led a sequestered existence for a few more years, but the Beothuk as a viable unit had ceased to exist by the late 1820s.1

Introduction For Indigenous peoples, recognition by Europeans has always been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, as soon as Indigenous peoples became known to Europeans, they were inevitably “recognized” as “savages,” a classification that enabled the wholesale appropriation of Indigenous lands and made genocide in all its aspects – from outright murder and enslavement through a range of other policies geared towards Indigenous extinction – permissible. At the same time, in various regions across the Americas, from the late eighteenth century to the present, recognition, or denial of recognition, of a group as “Indian” by settler governments has at times been crucial to the abilities of different groups to survive collectively. Without recognition, making claims against the state for treaties, for redress for land theft, even to reclaim the bones of ancestors, is impossible. For that reason, in contemporary times across the Americas, federal recognition – for better or worse – has become a primary route towards empowerment for many unrecognized Indigenous peoples. However, if lack of recognition has

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frequently meant that an Indigenous group is seen as extinct, it is also the case that colonial definitions of Indigeneity are a central means through which both denial of recognition and concepts of extinction are maintained. Patrick Brantlinger’s comprehensive exploration of extinction discourse has provided us with a sense of the depth and breadth of the consensus among Europeans that Indigeneity could not coexist with modernity and therefore was slated for extinction, globally.2 This discourse rested on colonial definitions of Indigeneity. If Indigeneity signified savagery – being immersed in a pristine, static, primordial state of nature – then by definition Indigeneity was antithetical to survival in a modern world. Furthermore, such colonial definitions ensured that the struggles of Native peoples in the grip of colonial onslaught were read as examples of the disparate ways in which “Native culture” was lost. Those who managed to adapt to the new economic order were elevated to whiteness and those who were reeling and prey to alcoholism and violence were seen as sinking to utter degradation. Thus, when Native people responded to forced change by dying, they became extinct. However, when they responded to forced change by surviving, they were also seen as extinct because the act of survival and change rendered them “no longer Indian” under colonial definitions of Indigeneity. Indeed, the persistence of such perspectives within contemporary government institutions has meant that struggles for recognition in contemporary times still rely on the ability of the group seeking recognition to comply with colonial definitions of Indigeneity. This chapter examines European concepts and classifications of Indigeneity and the different ways in which colonial definitions of Indigeneity enable concepts of extinction to flourish. Such questions of classification and lack of recognition might well have had a central role in the positing of Beothuk extinction in the late 1820s. In their contemporary incarnations, they may also come into play in stifling any possible future attempts to gain recognition by groups with potentially genuine claims to Beothuk identity. Indigeneity and Savagery Robert A. Williams, addressing the uses of law in conquest, has described in detail how the Catholic Church, through developments during the Crusades, had already elaborated a complex body of law relating to colonization by the time Columbus arrived in the Americas.3 He notes that

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the Catholic concern with Bellum justim – the terms through which a socalled “just war” could be waged against infidels – gradually evolved into a “Law of Nations” based on Renaissance notions of “natural law,” whereby failure to abide by universal norms of “friendly relations” (increasingly seen as including relations of trade) was justification for invasion and war.4 Sakej Henderson, in addressing how these laws have applied within an Indigenous context, ultimately concludes that, while the church recognized the existence of certain Aboriginal land rights, such recognition never applied “on the ground” where colonial societies maintained rights of discovery or conquest.5 Sharon Venne, engaging with these contradictory processes, concludes that ultimately questions of Aboriginal peoples’ rights hinged on notions of savagery – that, even though Aboriginal peoples were considered to be human, with rights to their lands and with souls capable of being converted, their nations were considered “savage” and therefore barred from any human standing according to international law.6 The concept of “savagery” has a long lineage in European thought. Robert A. Williams asserts that the idea of a fierce, mythic savage is first found in Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey; he also suggests that it is Hesiod’s retelling of the Legend of the Golden Age of Greece in Works and Days that is the founding textual source for most of Western civilization’s adaptations of the idea of the “noble savage.”7 However, Williams attributes Herodotus’ Histories as comprehensively organizing the diverse mythic concepts into a systematic account of human savagery.8 Through Plato’s dialogue, the notion of the divine origin of the Polis which the savage can never aspire to, and Aristotle’s concepts of natural slavery and the ideal of the savage, these concepts were carried over into Roman civilization and, ultimately, Western philosophy.9 Olive Dickason has noted that the term “savage” comes from the Latin term “silvaticus,” which refers to the forest; as applied to humans it refers to those who live outside of human cultivation, without law or fixed abode.10 She theorizes that the French use of the term “sauvage” denoted that Native people were existing in a state of pre-civilization, and therefore were capable of rising from the lower rank to become fully human, with conversion; indeed, for the priests who always accompanied French merchants to New France, conversion was referred to by the verb “humaniser”: literally to humanize.11 Another perspective on “the savage” has been traced by cultural historian Hayden White to traditions of the monstrous in medieval Europe. He draws particular attention to the figures of the “Wilde Man” and “Wilde Woman,”

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liminal beings situated somewhere between animal and human. White observes that Wilde Man was viewed as “having the soul of an animal, a man so degraded that he could not be saved even by God’s grace itself.”12 Indeed, the medieval church, according to Robert A. Williams, justified its holy wars against enemies of the faith by drawing on these notions of the savage Wild Man.13 Williams notes that, during the Renaissance, there was a revival of the classical Greek idea of the ennobled savage, used as a form of social critique and protest against the vices of modernity; however, the church’s view that savagery was unredeemable except through conversion continued to hold currency. These conflicting views were maintained throughout the colonial invasion of the New World.14 In terms of the Enlightenment, Williams engages with Rousseau’s conflicting concept of the savage; in one sense, Rousseau used the “noble savage” as a means of protesting against the ills of contemporary society, but he also drew upon a darker-sided notion of primitive humans as found in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura,15 where they appear almost as beasts, wandering homeless through the forests without speech, morals, or virtues. Relying on travel literature, Rousseau made distinctions between beast-like savage peoples who were naked and maintained a hard, primitive life, and those who had adopted an intermediate stage of human progress through the creation of tools for hunting, the development of language, and the construction of huts. This second stage of savagery was what Rousseau viewed as ennobled savagery, with virtues that stood in contrast to the evils of modernity; in many respects, it is this view of savagery that he applied to American Indians as a living model of humanity in the state of nature.16 Williams addresses how Hobbes used American Indians as a model of primitive social development, surpassed by a far more advanced European form of property-owning civilization, while Locke employed the same trope to illustrate the harsh conditions of deprivation that characterize primitive humanity’s life in the state of nature. Williams then focuses on Scottish Enlightenment figures such as William Robertson, Lord Kames, and Adam Smith who elaborated a four-stage theory of the development of humanity –those who existed in utmost savagery, those who domesticated animals, those who cultivated the land, and those who developed private property and commerce. As Roy Harvey Pearce argues, the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers for the most part concluded that their society had arrived at the highest stage of development – the age of private property and commerce. While this

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might have involved the destruction of the savage virtues of simplicity, egalitarianism, and martial ardour, civilization, according to the Scots, “had put something higher and greater in their place.”17 Indeed, Scottish Enlightenment perspectives on American Indians could ultimately be characterized by the notion of the Indian as completely savage, in the most primitive sense, without redeeming features. The Scottish Enlightenment philosophers were taken up most strongly by America’s founding fathers. According to Pearce, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the anti-Indian screed in the Declaration of Independence, most clearly developed and articulated an American theory of the savage.18 Robert Williams, however, suggests that ideas about the savage had so permeated European civilization by that point that all the Founding Fathers had already understood and embraced the ideas of savagery that Jefferson articulated.19 Arturo Aldama, in addressing notions of savagery and civilization in the nineteenth century, focuses on the American anthropologist Henry Lewis Morgan, whose theories of social evolution involved three stages of transition – savagery, barbarism, and civilization.20 According to Morgan, the savage can be civilized, but since the process involves multiple stages of technological development, the almost immeasurable distance between savagery and civilization makes this very nearly impossible. Morgan’s work also suggests tremendous differences in stages of civilization among Native peoples, ranging from those whose agricultural practices and material culture rendered them at middle stages of barbarism to those non-agrarian societies whose material culture was less complex and who could be considered to be at the lowest stage of savagery.21 Morgan’s hierarchy enables a justification of historical settler violence against Indigenous peoples because of their supposedly extremely primitive savage nature (albeit through an apparent endless flexibility about what constitutes primitive savagery).22 If we trace the trajectory from the Catholic Church’s laws relating to just war and the Law of Nations through the Enlightenment theorists and anthropological theories of degrees of savagery of Indigenous peoples, it is clear that those Indigenous peoples who exhibited what Europeans saw as an excessive degree of savagery – particularly in their failure to establish trade relations with Europeans –could be warred upon with impunity. Ingeborg Marshall, in her 1996 epic work on the Beothuk, notes that the Beothuk were viewed by colonists as thieves and scavengers, who, by their failure to engage in trade relations or any sort of relationship with Europeans (unlike the Mi’kmaq or Innu),23

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could be marked as the most primitive of savages and therefore subjected to retribution by English settlers without fear of penalty. Indeed, beneath any colonial discourse superficially urging “amicable intercourse” was an absolute conviction that ultimately the Beothuk were “miserable people [deprived of] the blessings of civilization.”24 Slavery, Mercantilism, and Indigeneity While formal classification of “Indianness” has been, for the most part, a nineteenth-century settler-state phenomenon, official omission of Indigenous presence, as well as erasing Indigenous presence through mislabelling it as African, was common throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when slavery was central to British mercantile practice; moreover, these slaving practices had a direct impact on the Beothuk of Newfoundland. Alan Gallay asserts that, throughout the seventeenth century, the drive to control Native labour was at the heart of British imperial development in their American colonies; for example, South Carolina initially exported more slaves than it imported.25 Native slaves were captured, as part of claiming their land, and sold to colonists in the Caribbean (sometimes in exchange for African slaves) or to other British colonies along the Atlantic seaboard. Gallay has noted that, for Caribbean planters, accepting Indian slaves meant avoiding the heavy taxes imposed by the Royal African Company, which held a monopoly on the African slave trade. The trade in Native American slaves to the Caribbean was therefore quite lucrative and intensive but was generally minimized in terms of record keeping.26 Yet in fact the trade in Native American slaves goes back much further, to the years prior to Columbus’ voyage, and, according to Jack Forbes, primarily involved Native people from Newfoundland, presumably Beothuk. Forbes’s research into the European fishing expeditions to the Grand Banks which began in the 1370s suggests that captives from Newfoundland were being carried back to France and Spain as early as the 1470s.27 Indeed, until 1501, when the capture and enslavement of Native peoples of the Caribbean began in earnest, Newfoundland and Greenland were the primary source of Native captives exported to Europe.28 Prior to the successful establishment of sugar plantations in the Caribbean, most Native slaves were sent to Europe, joining a range of captives from all regions of Europe who were commonly enslaved in the Mediterranean world of the fifteenth century.29

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Figure 13.1  La Nuova Francia, 1556 map by Giovanni Battista Ramusio. ­Image courtesy of the Centre for Newfoundland Studies, Memorial University Libraries.

Forbes further notes that relatively large numbers of slaves were captured in “Terranova” throughout the sixteenth century. He argues that these numbers were obscured in the past by two common assumptions: that these slaves were African and that “Terranova” meant “Terranova de Guinea.” However, his research has established that, whenever “Terranova” was used without expressly including “de Guinea,” it invariably referred to Newfoundland. Indeed, Forbes has posited that slavery had already decimated Beothuk communities prior to the eighteenthcentury settler encroachment within their homelands.30 For the British in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, colonial power was mercantile-driven, relating to the triangular trade in slaves, sugar, and commodities with Africa and its Caribbean and New

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England colonies, as well as the fur trade in the northern regions of North America. Systems of classification (or misclassification) were relatively straightforward and driven by expediency; colonial dominance was not yet consolidated in many regions of the Americas, India, or Africa and negotiation rather than naked power shaped some aspects of the colonial encounter. However, with the transition to industrial production, the massive increase in markets in the Americas and throughout Asia, and direct colonial occupation in India, Australia, New Zealand, and West Africa, the sheer scale of the British Empire, the power it wielded, and the complexity of those it ruled represented a quantum-leap forward both in the discursive aspects of power and in the systematic aspects of racial classification. Colonial Classification of the Native Tayyab Mahmud goes to the heart of what this transition to colonial classification meant for the colonized, using the example of India: The high noon of British rule in India coincided with the zenith of racial theories in Europe ... The premise was that each person literally embodied his racial and cultural identity and that bodies were legible. The goal of colonial sciences was to discover the origins and patterns of natives. The key to this knowledge was seen in the study of actual physical characteristics. This mapping of culture within physiology perfectly suited the colonizers’ drive to erect a framework of categories which allowed them to understand India in terms of a hierarchy of races/castes/tribes/nations which had discernable features and definable limits, and to catalogue material evidence of behaviour patterns and political loyalties. The result was the establishment of a framework for the inspection of natives’ bodies, thereby bringing to bear the force of knowledge/power upon them. The colonizer was the subject of this knowledge production; the native only the object who furnished the body on which colonial power was to be inscribed.31

As Mahmud articulates, the British developed an immense colonial apparatus concerned with classifying people and their attributes. Censuses, surveys, colonial disciplines such as anthropology, ethnology, and comparative philology, the rigorous recording of transactions, mapping, marking spaces, establishing routines, and standardizing practices were all tools through which colonial classification could be ensured.32

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Australia is a site where nineteenth-century British racial classification had a tremendous impact, using methods similar to those that Mahmud detailed for India; however, in this context, theories of “primitiveness” were central. Stuart Banner has examined the 1768 voyage of James Cook to observe the transit of Venus and to search for a suspected continent in the South Pacific. According to Banner, Cook’s reports to the British government asserted that the Indigenous people of Australia were much less technologically advanced than other Indigenous people the British had encountered, and that they showed no interest in the material items that Cook attempted to give them. To the British, Australian Aboriginal people were therefore from the start established as a people so primitive that they did not farm or show any interest in trade; clearly, they were savages who could offer no meaningful military resistance. Because of this, terra nullius was put into practice from the moment that settlers first arrived and, once under way, was extraordinarily difficult to reverse, because every British landowner in Australia depended on it.33 The extinctionist logic of the emphasis on primitiveness becomes clear with the debates by British administrators about the status of socalled “half-caste” children. If Indigenous meant “primordial,” then clearly those who were mixed-bloods could not be Aboriginal. According to Deirdre Howard-Wagner, administrators debated heatedly as to whether mixed-blood children should be kept outside of white society with their mothers, or whether they should be removed into camps where they could be trained for menial positions in white society; in either case, these children were clearly no longer truly Indigenous. She points out that this framing of Australian Indigenous people as representing a form of primordial mankind was also used in a range of policies that shut Aboriginal people out of employment and even denied them access to disability or old-age pensions.34 In conclusion, discursive frameworks that differentiated between Indigenous peoples as more or less primitive, whether this hinged on the presence or absence of trading relations or later theories classifying “types” of Indigenous identities, were colonial tools of extinction. The manner in which the Beothuk were hunted and murdered with impunity during the same era that Australian “primitives” were being described as a subhuman species of an otherwise “empty land,” to be pushed aside and moved elsewhere, clarifies this. Even the idea of terra nullius itself, so central in justifying Indigenous dispossession, could be found at work in both Australia and Newfoundland. In fact, these

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ideas travelled directly between the two places. In the early years of the nineteenth century, Francis Forbes acted as chief justice of Newfoundland before accepting a post as first chief justice of New South Wales. As Bruce Kercher and Jodie Young argue, Forbes played a crucial role in applying this concept of terra nullius in both colonies.35 The Indian Act, Recognition, and Legal Extinction Racial classification in Canada has resulted in the tortuous logic of the Indian Act, a body of law geared directly towards Indigenous extinction. This is accomplished by creating, through law, a master discourse that defines the only “true” Indians as being those registered under the Indian Act while simultaneously maintaining numerous categories which ensure that ever-growing numbers of Indigenous peoples are excluded from the act. Those so excluded have been, both historically and in the present, considered to be legally non-existent as Indians; moreover, through that exclusion and the accompanying lack of reserved land has come land loss and forced diaspora. The Indian Act, continuously modified over the years to intensify control over Indigenous peoples, contains a potent, endlessly circular mixture of colonial assumptions: that Indianness is determined by blood, that only “pure” blood secures culture, that culture signifies “authentic” savagery, and that only “authentic savages” can be Indian. Most damningly, since its inception, the Indian Act has been a central means through which different Indigenous peoples can be declared extinct – or never to have existed at all. The Indian Act thus maintains immense control over who is recognized as an Indian in Canada and therefore who is deemed to not exist legally. In the following section, I explore the various ways in which denial of recognition under the Indian Act has had significant implications for a number of communities. For example, there are a number of instances in which First Nations in Canada have ceased to exist, generally through their members being reclassified as “not Indian.” In one example, a First Nation was declared extinct “for the purposes of the Indian Act.” Meanwhile, whole communities have never been recognized at all; some survived the depredations of colonial contact in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, only to be rendered legally nonexistent under the Indian Act centuries later. Others became legally nonexistent when just one part of the nation was provided with reserves; Canada subsequently recognized only those who were reserve residents

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as Indians. In all instances, legal recognition as Indian would not matter if it were not for the hegemonic weight that the Indian Act holds in Canada – and the reality that recognition as Indian, through the provision of reserved lands, has frequently prevented community dispersal and diaspora.36 The Wendat Confederacy The Wendat Confederacy, which expanded throughout the sixteenth century to become a formidable trading network, had long occupied the area known as Wendake, the territory that lay between Georgian Bay and Lake Huron.37 The early colonial history of Wendake was brutal. In 1634 the Confederacy was assailed by disease and divisions brought about by contact with the Jesuits; by 1640, after years of epidemics culminating in a virulent smallpox outbreak, the Wendat, faced with the threatened breakdown of their spiritual order, became more vulnerable to Jesuit influence, particularly when the Jesuits successfully petitioned to have French traders withdrawn and replaced by Jesuit lay employees; at that point, valuable trade items, particularly guns, were provided only to Christian converts.38 Weakened by disease and the divisions brought about by conversion to Christianity, the Wendat Confederacy was shattered by internal conflict and attacks from Seneca and Mohawk war parties in the winter of 1648 and spring of 1649. At that point, the Wendat were forced to abandon their homelands. Many died of exposure and starvation, while several thousands more were taken prisoner by the Iroquois or joined them voluntarily.39 Six hundred Christian Wendat followed the Jesuits back to Quebec and, after numerous relocations, settled at Loretteville, or Wendake. Others settled more locally but were ultimately destroyed by Iroquois incursions. One group, allied with Anishinaabeg peoples, settled in Windsor, Ontario, while another group settled near Sault Ste Marie and in Ohio (where they became known as Wyandot).40 This early colonial history of violent dispersal was then amplified by government policies geared to Indigenous extinction in both Canada and the United States. For example, in the 1830s, the Wyandot were forcibly relocated from Ohio to Kansas as part of the United States government’s policy of “clearing” eastern Native people from the land. Many lost their tribal status in Kansas, but a small group acquired a reserve in northeastern Oklahoma where they continue to live today.

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In Canada, meanwhile, a small number of Wendat remained in the Windsor area where they maintained several reserves; however, in 1790, as part of the process of acquiring land in southern Ontario for white settlement, the British deputy superintendent of Indian affairs acquired title to all Wendat land in the area, except for two reserves. One of the reserves was ceded to the Crown in 1800. In 1836 most of the remaining reserve occupied by the Anderdon band was sold, except for a parcel of approximately 7,800 acres. With the loss of so much land, many Wendat joined their American cousins, while others applied for enfranchisement, until only forty-one families remained on the last Wendat land in Ontario. The forty-one families were finally enfranchised in 1880–1, and their reserve was divided up.41 The Wendat in Ontario ceased to legally exist as Indians at that point. The loss both of their reserves and of their recognition under the Indian Act has not ended the existence of the Anderdon band. They continue to hold their Green Corn festival annually. Moreover, when the Wendat diaspora gathered in 1999 for a Feast of Souls ceremony in their old territory, at present-day Midland, as part of the returning of Wendat bones unearthed in the 1940s and kept at the Royal Ontario Museum, representatives of the Anderdon band attended, as did members of Wendat communities in Quebec, Ontario/Michigan, Oklahoma, and Kansas.42 Yet there is no question that colonial Indian policy in two nations – the forced dispersal of the Wyandot, as they are known in the United States, to Oklahoma, and with the determination of the British in Canada to dissolve the formal links that held the remaining Ontario Wendat together in Windsor – represented settler attempts at a “final solution” to a nation whose early colonization history had already caused its dispersion. That the Wendat survived this “final solution” is a testament to the resilience of Indigenous peoples in the face of colonial violence. The Algonquin Nation The Algonquin peoples have been profoundly divided by Indian Department policies that delayed treaty making until communities were forced off their traditional lands by resource depletion; subsequently, this history has created profound divisions among the Algonquin, between those registered under the Indian Act and those who are considered “non-status.” The Algonquin, whose homeland is the Ottawa River watershed, faced many of the pressures that the Wendat faced, but the military

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advantage they maintained through controlling the primary fur-trade route to both the Great Lakes and the north enabled them to hold back the penetration of Jesuit missionaries for a number of years. Despite being driven at some point out of most of their homelands by Iroquois attacks in the same manner as the Wendat were, the Algonquin regained their homeland and, for most of the French regime, remained supreme in their territories. 43 With the British military defeat of the French, the Algonquin were willing to become partners with the British; however, the demise of the fur trade in eastern Canada after the American Revolution was linked to the needs of the British to begin establishing settlements. As the first step towards this, in 1791 the Ottawa River became the boundary line between the new provinces of Upper Canada and Lower Canada; the Algonquin homeland was thus severed, with two-thirds of the territory now lying in what became Quebec and one-third being part of what became Ontario.44 And, while the next step was treaty making with the Chippewa and Mississauga to the south and west of the Algonquin, the Ottawa River watershed, which had the best stands of white pine in North America, was to become the primary source of pine for British masts as well as oak for the decks of the ships that Britain needed to wage the Napoleonic Wars.45 For that reason, although the Algonquin petitioned the British government at least twenty-eight times for a treaty between 1791 and 1851 as their territories in Ontario were almost completely logged out, no treaty was signed. Instead, in 1839 the Executive Council of Upper Canada asserted British jurisdiction over Algonquin territories.46 As individual Algonquin bands in Ontario were faced with the near destruction of their territories through logging, and the influx of settlers and squatters that followed, they sought to create agricultural settlements and petitioned for reserves within their territories; yet the reserves that were promised were never surveyed. Between 1851 and 1873, three reserves were established in Algonquin territory, two in Quebec and one in Ontario. In Ontario, where increasing numbers of Algonquin had been forced off their land, those who refused to move to the reserve in Ontario or the two in Quebec were no longer recognized as Indians. In this manner, the majority of Ontario Algonquin became non-status Indians and were ignored by Canada.47 Indeed, when nonstatus Algonquin in Ontario began to be registered for the purposes of a land claim, it was discovered that while 1,900 Algonquin were status Indians, almost 5,000 were non-status.48

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What did almost a century of being unrecognized as Indian mean for Algonquin in Ontario? Forced to live on the outskirts of the new white settlements, which regarded the Algonquin as obsolete interlopers, as barriers to enabling settlers to develop the territory fully, they were handy scapegoats for whatever frustrations settlers had to deal with. Frequently their shacks were burned down so that whites could take even the marginal lands that Algonquin individuals and families were squatting on.49 The ongoing threat of violence made the Algonquin attempt, in every way possible, to silence expressions of their culture. Only English was tolerated in their settlements, and traditional songs and ceremonies were ignored as they struggled to survive in the face of starvation, disease, and violence. Yet, despite suppressing their identity over two to three generations, the Algonquin nevertheless clung together, gathering for social events and maintaining traditional practices on the land – fishing, hunting, berry picking, and tending wild rice crops – whenever possible. As was true of the Wendats in Windsor, the decline of community cohesion, coupled with loss of language and most ceremonial practices, marked daily Algonquin identity; nevertheless, the people endured. Treaty 6 First Nations In western Canada, similarly, land loss and the destruction of community identity through withdrawal of Indian status represents yet another way in which the Indian Act became a tool of extinction. Ironically, treaty making in western Canada was the primary means through which subjugation under the Indian Act took place. While most of the treaties negotiated in the west and the north between 1850 and 1922 were viewed by Native peoples as peace and friendship treaties, the British viewed them as being primarily about land cession. The terms of Treaty 6 are in some ways typical of most of the treaties in western Canada; they included one square mile of land for each family of five, or about 128 acres per capita, to be granted collectively as part of a permanent reserve. Additional promises included hunting and fishing rights, farming implements and seeds, rations during times of famine, a school should they request it, a medicine chest, and annual payments of $25 to the chief and $5 to each member of the band. In return for this, Treaty 6 asserted that the chiefs of the North-West Territories, including present-day central Alberta, should surrender 121,000 square miles of their traditional lands.50

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Subordination under the Indian Act involved the classification of each community’s membership as either “Indian” or “half-breed” (sometimes regardless of how individuals saw themselves), with Indians being registered under the treaty and half-breeds offered (in some contexts) scrip for $160 or 160 acres of land per family. These different legal categories under British law frequently bore little resemblance to conditions on the ground. In some regions where Metis hunters had invaded the territories of cohesive confederacies such as the Blackfoot, south of Treaty 6, considerable enmity existed between the groups; however, in most areas of Treaty 6, Cree people viewed the Metis as relations and wanted to have them brought into treaty. On the other hand, in some cases, particularly north of Treaty 6, in the subarctic regions, a strong Metis presence did not exist, so that the category “half-breed” was imposed from above on those considered mixed-blood; always the British have insisted on solid definitions hiving complex Metis identities off from “Indianness” – even where these differentiations between people did not exist.51 And while the 1982 Constitution Act acknowledged the Metis as Aboriginal people, it further strengthened the divisive legal categories forced on Native peoples to mark various experiences of Indigeneity as irrevocably different from one another. Moreover, to be Metis is to be, for the most part, landless. The 1.4 million acres that were to be set aside for the Metis under the Manitoba Act were never surveyed, and outside of the provincially administered Metis Settlements in Alberta, the lands set aside for Metis under the so-called “half-breed commissions” were for the most part lost to land speculators. Metis landlessness is not accidental – indeed, it was by classifying the Metis Nation as distinct from all other Indigenous nations and therefore “not Indian” that the British facilitated a massive land loss for the Metis. And yet these distinct categories of “Indian” and “Metis” have been, at times, completely mutable. For example, in 1885, Treaty 6 communities were facing absolute starvation because of the collapse of the buffalo, which was the primary basis of their economy, and the refusal of the government to issue adequate levels of the emergency rations that had been guaranteed when the treaty was signed. When halfbreed scrip became available, over one thousand people discharged themselves from the treaty to apply for it; in the process, two Treaty 6 First Nations – the Bobtail (Hobbema) and Peeyasis (Lac La Biche) bands in Alberta – ceased to exist.52 By leaving treaty and being classified as “Metis,” these former bands faced inevitable dispersal and, ultimately, landlessness.

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Two other bands, moreover, were profoundly affected in other ways by this process of classification. Large numbers of the Papaschase band and the Michel band left treaty, but not of their own accord. The Papaschase band, located in what is now south Edmonton, had already been illegally reduced to forty square miles, under the pressure of settlers who wanted the band removed because their lands were now situated too close to Edmonton as it expanded. However, the remainder of the band’s land was lost under highly questionable circumstances when three men signed a surrender document on 19 November 1888, at a meeting called with four days’ notice by a government agent. The federal government subdivided the reserve and sold most of the land at auctions in 1891 and 1893; a few land speculators bought most of it and resold it to settlers. The last remaining residents of the Papaschase reserve left the area on 12 August 1887 on the instructions of Assistant Indian Commissioner Hayter Reed. Band members moved to surrounding reserves, and beyond. Their descendants have sued the federal government to settle their land claim.53 Meanwhile, the Michel band, located west of St Albert, established a successful farming community; subsequently, under pressure from settlers, they agreed to a series of land surrenders in 1903, 1905, 1910, and 1918, generally in order to raise money for horses and farm equipment. But corruption in Ottawa meant that the land was sold to insiders at far-below market prices. Faced with a shrinking land base and inadequate resources to farm it, ten Michel band families enfranchised in 1928. Against their wishes, the entire band was forcibly enfranchised in March 1958, and the land was subdivided among families. About 500 descendants of the Michel band regained Indian status in 1985 and reconstituted the band; in 2001 they sued the federal government, alleging illegalities in the loss of the reserve and early land surrenders.54 The Newfoundland Mi’kmaq If Native peoples under treaty have faced extinctionist logic through the dissolution of “Indian” bands coupled with Metis landlessness, still another set of experiences, this time of the Newfoundland Mi’kmaq, have indicated what happens to communities whose lands are taken when they are, quite arbitrarily, left out of the Indian Act. While the struggles of the Newfoundland Mi’kmaq for recognition are addressed elsewhere in this book, they represent a unique example of a nation which was to have come under the Indian Act when Newfoundland

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joined Confederation only to have recognition as Indian subsequently withheld. It has been speculated that Canada’s reason for failing to extend the Indian Act over Newfoundland Mi’kmaq communities was that these communities were, in essence, a test case as to how long an Indigenous nation could survive as a distinct group without either land or federal recognition.55 The fact that the numbers of existing Mi’kmaq communities declined from sixty-five prior to Confederation to less than a dozen in the 1970s is testament to the fact that, when land is appropriated and harvesting drastically curtailed without any provision being made for reserves, one of two things happen: communities are dispersed and their descendants silenced, or these communities are forced to struggle for basic recognition as Indian in order to forestall their complete destruction.56 The initial recognition of one community, at Conne River, as a reserve community while the remaining communities remained unrecognized is another way in which the Indian Act functions to facilitate racial difference; it is only by recognizing one group as “Indian” that the remaining unrecognized peoples become truly “non-Indian.” The fact that the remaining Mi’kmaq had to accept being amalgamated into one huge landless band as the only way in which recognition under the Indian Act could be achieved demonstrates how the recognition of just one small part of the nation weakens the possibilities for the remainder of the people. Could this move also have compromised potential future recognition of a revitalized Beothuk community? The Sinixt Nation To this point, we have seen the destructive effects when the appropriation of land is accompanied by denial of historic recognition, either through lack of a treaty, through being left out of treaties, or through being reclassified as half-breed or as non-Indian through enfranchisement. However, one British Columbia First Nation, the Sinixt, was declared extinct in 1956. For at least six thousand years, the Sinixit have occupied their traditional territory, which lies between Kaslo and Revelstoke in British Columbia and stretches south into what is now Washington State. The international boundary between Canada and the United States, established in 1846, therefore cut across Sinixt territory, 80 per cent of which was in Canada. The Europeans who entered the West Kootenay brought mining, logging, hydroelectric development, disease, and violence to Sinixt life.57

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British Columbia entered Confederation in 1871 as the only province (until Newfoundland entered in 1949) that was allowed to do so without having any formal treaties signed with Indigenous peoples. By 1876, all other existing bands in Canada had come under the Indian Act.58 A reserve was established for the Sinixt at Oatscott in 1903 – a piece of land near Burton with no road access, consisting of precipitous bluffs. Despite the difficulties involved in surviving on such poor land, from that point the Crown recognized as registered Indians only those individuals who maintained residency on the Oatscott reserve. Staying on that reserve was also incompatible with the Sinixt modality of survival via seasonal migration in rotational use of the resources scattered throughout their territory. Taking up agriculture and staying sedentary on the Oatscott reserve was tantamount to a cultural death sentence for them because it entailed an abandonment of traditional modes of subsistence. So very few Sinixt (a maximum of twenty-six) stayed on the Oatscott reserve and those who chose to live elsewhere (and all their descendants thereafter) were denied recognition as registered Indians under the Indian Act, with the exception of the family of Alex Christian, who unsuccessfully lobbied the Crown for the establishment of a second, more viable reserve at the Sinixt’s ancestral village site near Brilliant.59 The damming of the Columbia River, the major arterial superhighway on which the Sinixt depended for their social, cultural, economic, and spiritual activities throughout their territory, further impeded the ability of the Sinixt to subsist and maintain communities.60 Nevertheless, significant efforts were made to keep the Sinixt living on the Colville Reservation in Washington State from crossing into Canada to hunt. A motion in the British Columbia legislature in March 1892 attempted to impose a $50 foreign-hunter fee on the Sinixt. The motion was withdrawn; however, in 1894 the government of Canada began negotiating with the United States government to prohibit the Sinixt residents in the United States from crossing over into their territories in Canada.61 By the late 1940s, only one family was left on the reserve in Canada. When its last member, Annie Joseph, died in 1953, she was the end of the Sinixt line as far as the Canadian federal government was concerned. At the time, about 300 Sinixt were living on the U.S. reservation; unknown to them, the federal government declared the Sinixt to be extinct in 1956.62 In 1987 the Ministry of Highways began construction of a new road at Vallican in the Slocan valley. Construction was halted when many artifacts, skeletal remains, and pit-house depressions were uncovered.

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While the ancient village and burial grounds were being studied, no attempt was made to contact any Sinixt descendants. The remains were sent to museums and the government proposed establishing an information and picnic area at the site. When Sinixt elder Eva Orr learned of these events, she sent some of her people to investigate, and learned that the Sinixt were considered extinct in Canada. Since 1989 the Sinixt continue to occupy and remain committed to the Vallican site.63 The role that recognition under the Indian Act plays as arbiter of a group’s existence – and the artificiality of that role – is nowhere more apparent than in the government of Canada’s response to Sinixt resistance. The Crown has recognized Sinixt people as Indigenous peoples of Canada (as a tribal group) but not under the Indian Act. In 1995 then Indian Affairs Minister Ron Irwin stated: “The Arrow Lakes Band ceased to exist as a band for the purpose of the Indian Act when its last [registered] member died on October 1, 1953 ... It does not, of course, mean that the Sinixt people ceased to exist as a tribal group.”64 Because Ottawa does not officially recognize the Sinixt, the provincial Ministry of Natural Resources recognizes no obligation to address Sinixt concerns over logging in their traditional territory. Meanwhile, the British Columbia Treaty Process is taking place without the Sinixt having a place at the table. A major issue for the Sinixt is the manner in which the treaty process has allotted Sinixt land (classified as Crown land) near Nakusp to the Ktunaxa Nation Council.65 However, Aboriginal and treaty rights for Indigenous peoples in Canada do not depend on recognition under the Indian Act. Two separate land claims for Sinixt traditional territory – a huge swathe of the Kootenays that extends from Revelstoke, B.C., to south of the U.S. border – have been filed by different parties that in their own way can claim to represent the Sinixt. The first claim was filed in December 2003, on behalf of about one thousand members of the Arrow Lakes Tribe in Colville Reservation in Washington State; when it appeared that this group was ready to drop the case and sit down with the Canadian government, another claim was filed in 2008 by the Sinixt Nation Society on behalf of seventy-five members of the Sinixt Nation in Canada. Another member of the Sinixt has attempted through the courts to have the Canadian government formally rescind its declaration of extinction to enable the plaintiff to pass freely across the Canada/U.S. border.66 The Sinixt have also sought to address their claims through public education. Over the past twenty years the Sinixt Nation has worked with schools in Nakusp, Trail, Nelson, Castlegar, Winlaw, and other

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communities to share traditional stories with children. British Columbia School District 20 has officially recognized the Sinixt Nation as the Indigenous people in Trail, B.C.67 In March 2017 the Sinixt won a crucial provincial court victory upholding the rights of its members to hunt in their traditional territory in what is now British Columbia. The full legal implications of the decision are still to be realized.68 Conclusion If this exploration of the various ways in which First Nations recognition under the Indian Act can be denied, ignored, or withdrawn demonstrates anything, it is that lack of legal recognition as “Indian” – even through being legally declared “extinct” – does not prevent people from maintaining themselves as Indigenous peoples. And yet it does present significant obstacles, from the cultural transformations – loss of language and ceremony – to the inability to protect traditional lands from development. In many instances, the result has been land loss and diaspora. At the same time, while recognition as “Indian” no longer blatantly implies savagery, it still remains bound up with powerful signifiers of “authenticity” which renders those who are not so recognized inherently “inauthentic.” In the case of remaining survivors of the Beothuk genocide, the resistance they face comes not only from the federal government, which considers them non-existent, but also from the weight of academic “expertise,” which has pronounced them extinct since the 1820s. When contemporary Beothuk existence is more widely conceded, recognition of their right to make claims on the federal government for a land base of their own – in a province that has, for many years, been built on the myth of their extinction – may follow. NOTES 1 Ingeborg Marshall, A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1996), 4. 2 Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press 2003). 3 Robert A. Williams, The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest (Oxford, New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press 1990), 13–14.

Unrecognized Peoples and Concepts of Extinction  317 4 Ibid., 195–200. 5 James Sakej Youngblood Henderson, The Mikmaw Concordat (Halifax: Fernwood 1997), 51–3, 60–6. 6 Sharon Venne, Our Elders Understand Our Rights: Evolving International Law Regarding Indigenous Peoples (Penticton, BC: Theytus Books 1999), 8–9.r 7 Robert A. Williams, Savage Anxieties: The Invention of Western Civilization (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2012), 39. 8 Ibid., 58. 9 Ibid., 71, 78. 10 Olive Dickason, The Myth of the Savage and the Beginnings of French Colonialism (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press), 63. 11 Ibid., 59. 12 Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays on Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press 1978), 164. 13 Williams, Savage Anxieties, 153. 14 Ibid., 159–60. 15 Ibid., 197. 16 Ibid., 201–2. 17 Roy Harvey Pearce, The Savages of the Americas: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press 1965), 84–5. 18 Ibid. 19 Williams, Savage Anxieties, 216. 20 Henry Lewis Morgan, Ancient Society: or, Researches into the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism and into Civilization (1877). Reprint, with an introduction by Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya (Calcutta: K.P. Bagghi 1982), qtd. in Arturo J. Aldama et al., Disrupting Savagism: Intersecting Chicana/o, Mexican Immigrant and Native American Struggles for Self-­ Representation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2001), 11. 21 Aldama et al., Disrupting Savagism, 11–12. 22 Tayyab Mahmud, “Colonialism and Modern Constructions of Race: A Preliminary Inquiry,” University of Miami Law Review 53, no. 4 (1999): 1227–31. 23 Marshall, A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk, 38, 72–6. 24 Sir Charles Hamilton, “Instructions to Capt. David Buchan in His 2nd Expedition during the Winter of 1819–20,” reproduced in James Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians: The Aboriginal Inhabitants of Newfoundland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1915), 117. 25 Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press 2002), 7–8. 26 Ibid., 301.

318  Bonita Lawrence 27 Recently, Jace Weaver, in The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World 1000–1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2012), sweepingly derides the notion of a pre-Columbian European fishery in the Grand Banks as “unsubstantiated rumours” based simply on the supposed increase of fishing off the Grand Banks after John Cabot’s 1497 voyage. Jack Forbes, however, quotes six sources relating to the histories of fishing, stating that the sources conflict as to whether the Basques or the Bretons (or perhaps other Western Europeans) were the first to fish the Grand Banks as early as the 1370s. Jack Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press 1993), 20–1. 28 Forbes, Africans and Native Americans, 21. 29 Ibid., 26. 30 Ibid., 30–1. 31 Mahmud, “Colonialism and Modern Constructions of Race,” 1226–7. 32 Ibid., 1228. 33 Stuart Banner, “Why Terra Nullius? Anthropology and Property Law in Early Australia,” Law and History Review 23, no. 1 (2005): 100–4, 111, 131. 34 Deirdre Howard-Wagner, “Colonialism and the Science of Race Difference,” in Public Sociologies: Lessons and Trans-Tasman Comparisons (Auckland: TASA and SAANZ Joint Conference Refereed Conference Proceedings, December 2007), 6. 35 Bruce Kercher and Jodie Young, “Formal and Informal Law in Two New Lands: Land Law in Newfoundland and New South Wales under Francis Forbes,” in Christopher English, Essays in the History of Canadian Law: Two Islands: Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island (Toronto: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History 2005), 160. 36 Bonita Lawrence, Fractured Homeland: Federal Recognition and Algonquin Identity in Ontario (Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press 2012), 112–25. 37 Donald Trigger, “The Original Iroquoians: Huron, Petun and Neutral,” in Edward S. Rogers and Donald B. Smith, eds., Aboriginal Ontario: Historical Perspectives on the First Nations (Toronto and Oxford: Dundurn Press 1994), 46–7. 38 Ibid., 51–2. 39 Ibid., 55–6. 40 Ibid., 57–9. 41 Ibid., 59–61. 42 Kathryn Magee Labelle, Dispersed but Not Destroyed: A History of the ­Seventeenth-Century Wendat People (Vancouver, Toronto: UBC Press 2013), 190.

Unrecognized Peoples and Concepts of Extinction  319 4 3 Lawrence, Fractured Homeland, 19–23. 44 Ibid., 35. 45 Ibid., 34–5. 46 Ibid., 36–7. 47 Ibid., 38–45. 48 Ibid., 47, 88–92. 49 Ibid., 116. 50 Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, Treaty Texts, Treaty No. 6, “Copy of Treaty No. 6 between Her Majesty the Queen and the Plain and Wood Cree Indians and Other Tribes of Indians at Fort Carlton, Fort Pitt and Battle River with Adhesions,” http://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/ eng/1100100028710/1100100028783 (accessed November 2017). 51 Bonita Lawrence, Real Indians and Others: Mixed-Blood Urban Native People and Indigenous Nationhood (Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press 2004), 82–94. 52 “List of Half-breeds who have withdrawn from Treaty,” 1 June 1888, Library and Archives Canada, RG10, vol. 10038, qtd. in Neil Reddekopp and Patricia Bartko, “Distinction without a Difference? Treaty and Scrip in 1899,” in Duff Crerar and Jaroslave Petryshyn, eds., “Treaty 8 Revisited: Selected Papers on the 1999 Centennial Conference,” special issue, Lobstick: An Interdisciplinary Journal 1, no. 1 (winter 2000): 214–15. 53 Aboriginal History Documents (Paspaschase), Edmonton Public Library. 54 Ibid. 55 Maura Hanrahan. “The Lasting Breach: The Omission of Aboriginal People from the Terms of Union between Newfoundland and Canada and Its Ongoing Impacts,” in Collected Research Papers of the Royal Commission on Renewing and Strengthening Our Place in Canada, vol. 1 (St Johns, 2003), 219. 56 Agreement for the Recognition of the Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation, appendix B, 30 November 2007, http://qalipu.ca/site/wp-content/ uploads/2011/07/2011sept-Agreement-In-Principle.pdf (accessed November 2017). 57 Louise Alida Poitras, “The Sinixt: Alive, Not ‘Extinct’” (master’s project, Athabasca, 2007), http://dtpr.lib.athabascau.ca/action/download. php?filename=mais/louisepoitrasProject.pdf (accessed November 2017). 58 Larry Gilbert, Entitlement to Indian Status and Membership Codes in Canada (Toronto: Thompson Canada 1996), 15. 59 Rex Weyler, “Back from Extinction: BC's Forgotten Sinixt Nation Reoccupies Its Homeland: A Tale of Tenacity and Joyous Rebirth,” The Tyee.ca, 30 June 2008, https://thetyee.ca/News/2008/06/30/BackFromExtinction/ (accessed November 2017). 60 Ibid.

320  Bonita Lawrence 61 Sinixt Nation, “Sinixt Nation Continues Fight to Correct Extinction Status,” press release, Vancouver Media Co-op, 6 April 2013, http://vancouver. mediacoop.ca/newsrelease/17133 (accessed November 2017). 62 McNeel, Jack. “The Sad, Strange Saga of the Sinixt People,” Indian Country Today, 9 November 2011, https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/news/ the-sad-strange-saga-of-the-sinixt-people/ (accessed November 2017). 63 Poitras, “The Sinixt: Alive, Not ‘Extinct.’” 64 Sinixt Nation, “Sinixt Nation.” 65 Ibid. 66 Paperny, “‘Extinct’ tribe.” 67 Sinixt Nation, “Sinixt Nation.” 68 See Ashifa Khan, “Sinixt First Nation Wins Recognition in Canada Decades after ‘Extinction,’” Guardian, 30 March 2017, https://www.theguardian. com/world/2017/mar/30/canada-sinixt-first-nation-extinct-recognition (accessed November 2017). See also Adrian Nieoczym, “Sinixt First Nation Not Extinct after All, Court Rules,” CBC News: British Columbia, 27 March 2017, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/sinixt-firstnation-not-extinct-after-all-court-rules-1.4043184 (accessed November 2017).

14 Shanawdithit and Truganini: Converging and Diverging Histories fiona pol ack

In Hobart, Tasmania, in 1899 and again in 1903, an Indigenous woman named Fanny Cochrane Smith performed songs from her traditional repertoire for phonographic recording.1 Just seven years after the second of these sessions, near Gloucester, Massachusetts, Frank Speck captured Santu Toney’s rendition of a song she had been taught by her Beothuk father.2 According to then prevailing wisdom, these ethnographic endeavours should have been impossible. Within the same decade in which Santu Toney made her recording, writers were lamenting the presumed extinction of the Beothuk upon Shanawdithit’s death in 1829 in poems with titles such as “The Last Boeothic,” “The Last of the Boeothics’ Lament: On Leaving Their Native Land,” and “The Passing of the Boeothuk.”3 Concomitantly, in Australia, Thomas Cook’s 1894 Railway Official Guide Book to Tasmania informed readers that “the last male aborigine – William Lanné ... died in 1869, aged 34; and the last female aborigine – Truganini – in 1876, aged 73.”4 The very existence, and, crucially, cultural knowledge, of Santu Toney and Fanny Cochrane Smith challenged such truisms. Further, when the women gifted their ancestors’ songs to non-Indigenous listeners, they simultaneously passed them on within their own families. Santu Toney’s recording was made in the company of her son and granddaughter,5 and Fanny Cochrane Smith, mother of eleven children, brought her nephew, Gussie, to her 1899 recording session.6 This chapter focuses on the Beothuk woman Shanawdithit, and Truganini, a member of the Nuenonne band of southeast Tasmania people.7 However, I wanted first to introduce Santu Toney and Fanny Cochrane Smith in order to undermine the pervasive notion that made

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Figure 14.1  Fanny Cochrane Smith and Horace Watson in 1899. Reproduced by permission of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.

both Shanawdtihit and Truganini so well known. European colonization was disastrous for Indigenous people in Newfoundland and Tasmania, but Shanawdithit and Truganini were not the last Aboriginal people to inhabit their respective islands.8 For reasons I explore below, since the 1970s the case against extinction has been especially forcefully argued by surviving Aboriginal communities in Tasmania. However, as recently as 2011, Greg Lehman, a descendant of the Trawulwuy people from the island’s northeast, still felt compelled to note: “How unresolved Truganini’s identity remains and how troubling she is to the Australian psyche.”9 Striking parallels characterize the histories of Tasmania and Newfoundland, and exploring them challenges what Anna Johnston and Mitchell Rolls describe as settler-culture “parochial particularity.”10

Shanawdithit and Truganini  323

In some respects, these correspondences are surprising. Indigenous peoples in Tasmania and Newfoundland evolved their distinct societies over millennia on islands with radically different climates and resources.11 Further, the “highly differentiated political, cultural and social structures” of the Aboriginal groups Europeans met in the various places they colonized ensured that the white settler societies developed divergent characteristics, too.12 Tasmania and Newfoundland were also colonized quite differently. Newfoundland’s proximity to the British Isles allowed the development of a lucrative seasonal migratory fishery from the 1500s,13 the likes of which could never have been attempted in a colony 10,000 miles from the imperial centre. Indeed, Tasmania’s14 appeal lay in this very distance, which made it an ideal dumping ground for convicts. Between 1803 and 1853, 67,000 prisoners were shipped to the island.15 While the British became the dominant European power in both places, they made their first settlement in Newfoundland at Cupids in 1610, nearly two hundred years before they founded Hobart in 1803. British settlers thus encountered Indigenous people in Newfoundland far earlier than in Tasmania, albeit violence did not peak until the eighteenth century, when the newcomers increased in numbers and came into more direct conflict with the Beothuk.16 In Tasmania, settlement patterns brought colonizers and colonized into an immediate contest. Animosity culminated in the Black War of 1824 to 1831, which killed around six hundred Aborigines and two hundred colonists.17 As in Newfoundland, access to land and resources was the primary cause of violence. However, historian Nicholas Clements persuasively argues that “Tasmania’s enormous gender imbalance, and the voracious demand for native women it created, was the most important proximate trigger for the Black War.”18 Especially culpable in Clements’s interpretation were the European sealers who resided in the Bass Strait islands north of the Tasmanian mainland.19 Nothing on the scale of their systematic abduction and forced slavery of Indigenous women existed in Newfoundland.20 Notwithstanding such differences, both islands were “nodes within [the same] imperial network. Materials, people and above all ideas continually flowed through this network.”21 British settlers on both islands shared preconceptions about gender, class, religion, and race. Indeed, disagreements about appropriate behaviour towards Indigenous peoples were, in the end, “struggles over the nature of Britishness itself.”22 After Newfoundland and Tasmania gained responsible government, and eventually became part of Canada and Australia respectively, their

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British colonial histories ensured that non-Indigenous Tasmanians and Newfoundlanders, and Australians and Canadians more broadly, continued to have much in common, including vexed connections with the Aboriginal nations they had colonized. From an Indigenous perspective, while Aboriginal groups on both islands were, and are, highly distinct cultural entities, shared experiences of dispossession have caused them to encounter similar challenges – including the need to assert their legitimacy as Indigenous. Nowhere are the resonances between the histories of Tasmania and Newfoundland more pronounced than in the stories of Shanawdithit and Truganini. After highlighting important biographical similarities between the two, I speculate about the impact of colonial-era notions of gender and race upon the ways in which they were perceived while alive. The women’s respective relationships with the white explorers and “conciliators” William Cormack and George Augustus Robinson are particularly pertinent here. I then consider how patterns in ­nineteenth-century accounts of Shanawdithit and Truganini have persisted in later eras. The documentary films The Last Tasmanian (directed by Tom Haydon in 1978) and Shananditti: Last of the Beothuk (directed by Ken Pittman in 1982) offer valuable insights, not least of all because their male protagonists are positioned as latter-day Robinson/Cormack “white saviour” figures.23 Crucially, however, both films were made as important cultural shifts were taking place. Indeed, as I detail, the Indigenous Tasmanian community’s reaction to Tom Haydon’s film helped change perceptions of Truganini in Australia. Under Empire Truganini and Shanawdithit were born in the early 1800s into cultures under profound stress.24 As historian Henry Reynolds contends, relations between Truganini’s South-East nation and Europeans were “close and often traumatic. Exotic diseases had almost certainly killed many of the south-eastern people before Trugernanna was born in about 1812. Whalers and convict workers had cut a brutal swathe through the tribe. Trugernanna herself had suffered terrifying experiences. Her mother, uncle, and husband-to-be had been murdered and her sister kidnapped.”25 While the Beothuk attempted to place greater physical distance between themselves and white settlers than did Truganini’s Neunonne band,26 Shanawdithit similarly witnessed European brutality. Her

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biological mother, brother, and sister were all shot in 1818,27 and in 1819 she watched the killing of her uncle, Nonosabusat, and the abduction of her aunt, Demasduit, at Red Indian Lake.28 Both the Tasmanian and the Beothuk women’s own bodies were also attacked. Shanawdithit was fired upon and wounded twice by English settlers,29 and Truganini was brutally raped by sawyers Watkin Lowe and Paddy Newell.30 Truganini’s rape acutely attests that being female made Indigenous women especially vulnerable. Indeed, Andrea Smith claims that colonial sexual assaults and land theft were intrinsically related: “The project of colonial sexual violence establishes the ideology that Native bodies are inherently violable – and by extension, that Native lands are also inherently violable.”31 The dispossession of the Nuenonne and the Beothuk prompted Truganini and Shanawdithit into strategic alliances with Europeans. Truganini concluded that “it was no use my people trying to kill all the white people now, there were so many of them always coming in big boats.”32 Consequently, she and several others, including her eventual first husband, Wooraddy, agreed to act as guides in ­government-appointed conciliator George Augustus Robinson’s diplomatic missions. In an example of the way ideas travelled among settler societies, Robinson developed the plan of taking messages of peace to Indigenous people in Tasmania after reading about American government policies.33 Between 1830 and 1834, Truganini accompanied Robinson on six missions, leading him through country unknown to Europeans and acting as a negotiator. The impact of colonization also prompted Shanawdithit into closer contact with Europeans. Six years before Truganini began working with Robinson, Shanawdithit, along with her adoptive mother, Doodebewshet, and her sister were captured by furriers in Notre Dame Bay.34 The men’s employer, John Peyton Jr, aware of the colonial government’s desire to conciliate the Indigenous people of the island, took the three women to St John’s soon afterwards. There they were cast as diplomats and given presents to take back to their fellow Beothuk.35 However, Doodebewshet and “Easter Eve” (as she was dubbed by settlers) both died of tuberculosis shortly after returning to central Newfoundland, and Shanawdithit went to live with the Peytons as a domestic servant. In 1827 the idea of her assuming a diplomatic role was again raised when William Cormack was advised to take Shanawdithit on an expedition planned in search of the Beothuk.36 Cormack ultimately decided against this, but Shanawdithit did eventually bridge Beothuk and

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settler worlds on his behalf. In 1828–9 Cormack interrogated Shanawdithit about Beothuk history and culture and had her complete a series of extraordinary drawings which he annotated.37 Cormack used Shanawdithit’s information to help determine where to send search parties for the Beothuk, and planned a book about her people. However, these endeavours came to an abrupt end. A bankrupt Cormack left Newfoundland in January 1829, just six months before Shanawdithit’s death from tuberculosis. Truganini survived Shanawdithit by nearly fifty years. She was among those relocated when Robinson’s initiative concluded with Aboriginal Tasmanians agreeing to move to the Wybalenna settlement created for them on Flinders Island.38 She had a respite from its misery when she accompanied Robinson to Victoria on his appointment as chief protector of the Aborigines in 1839. However, Truganini was sent back to Wybalenna in 1842 after participating in raids on settlers’ huts and the murder of two whalers.39 Penelope Edmonds persuasively argues that these acts were part of a “sustained campaign of guerilla attacks”40 and testify to Truganini’s disillusionment. After another five years at Wybalenna, and then more than twenty at the Oyster Cove station in southeast Tasmania which succeeded it, she spent her final years at the Hobart home of the former superintendent of Oyster Cove. She died there in May 1876.41 As their experiences so clearly testify, Truganini and Shanawdithit were negotiators between Indigenous and European worlds. However, posthumous over-emphasis on the women’s “lastness” has, particularly in Shanawdithit’s case, obscured their important work in this regard. As Margaret Connell Szasz notes, crossing cultural frontiers during the colonial era “demanded extraordinary skill. Intermediaries became repositories of two or more cultures; they changed roles at will, in accordance with circumstances. Of necessity, their lives reflected a complexity unknown to those living within the confines of a single culture.”42 Thomas King pertinently observes that many of these intermediaries were women and, further, that history downplays their contribution: “When the names of Native people who did … try to bridge the gap [with Europeans] come up, we don’t applaud their efforts … we tend to look sideways at the alliance and wonder about their intent and morals.”43 That Shanawdithit and Truganini were “repositories of two cultures” is undeniable despite the fact settlers preferred to see them as “pure” remnants of primitive peoples. As was the case for other well-known intermediaries, including Dona Marina, Pocahontas,

Shanawdithit and Truganini  327

Sacajawea and Mikak, the decisions they made to work with colonists were both strategic and risky, and very much contextualized by the limited choices available to them as Indigenous women whose territories had been invaded by Europeans. In the course of their efforts, each developed complex relationships with the white men for whom they acted as cultural brokers – not least of all because the very notions of gender held by the societies between which the women moved were inevitably different. Truganini and Shanawdithit’s interactions with George Augustus Robinson and William Cormack thus bear close examination. (European) Men and (Indigenous) Women Born in the 1790s,44 both Robinson and Cormack were ambitious men of tenuous social position who held comparable attitudes towards Aborigines.45 Each believed in taking “up the cause of ... barbarously treated people.”46 They were not alone in these views; colonial governments in both Tasmania and Newfoundland issued multiple proclamations exhorting settlers to treat Indigenous people with kindness.47 However, the men were unique in the lengths to which they went to put their beliefs into practice. Guided by local Aborigines, Robinson and Cormack embarked on physically arduous conciliatory expeditions into areas of Tasmania and Newfoundland unknown to white settlers.48 During their travels, they both kept detailed journals49 in which they recorded ethnographic information and made observations about the landscape and its potential resources.50 Their writing testifies to Cormack’s and Robinson’s self-conscious awareness that they were engaged in tasks with potential to bring them great personal renown. A mutual tendency towards self aggrandisement is reflected in the omnipresence of first person, especially first-person possessive, pronouns in their texts; Robinson incessantly refers to “my Natives” and “my Aborigines,” and Cormack to “my Indian(s).” In a move that similarly denies their subjectivity and agency, Robinson and Cormack frequently stress that Truganini and Shanawdithit are typical exemplars of their respective “primitive” tribes. Observing Wooraddy’s courtship of Truganini, Robinson writes that he is witnessing “the peculiar characteristics of savage life.”51 Comparably, when Cormack records in a letter to Bishop John Inglis that he has extracted from Shanawdithit “the key to the Mythology of her tribe,” he implies that she is a mere cipher for information.52 Because Cormack and Robinson

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consider Shanawdithit and Truganini “savages,” they are ultimately dismissive of the women and quick to jump to conclusions about the supposed wider, racially based, implications of their behaviour. Nineteenth-century European preconceptions about sex and gender, combined with those of race, inevitably inflected Cormack’s and Robinson’s dealings with Shanawdithit and Truganini. Even if sexual violence of the kind Clements and Smith note was not overtly at issue in the relationships under scrutiny here, Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherdale are correct that, “during colonization, women and bodies mattered and were bound up in creating and perpetuating an often hidden, complex, contradictory and fraught history.”53 Their intense interest in Aboriginal people permitted Robinson and Cormack a kind of close contact with Truganini and Shanawdithit that social custom would not have allowed them with women of their own background. Yet the fact that Shanawdithit and Truganini were female remained important. Consequently, the relationships between the non-Indigenous men and the Indigenous women possessed considerable ambiguity. Cormack’s contemporaries questioned the propriety of Shanawdithit residing with the bachelor in St John’s. The secretary of the Beothuk Institution, John Stark, advised Cormack that Shanawdithit be “immediately placed under the care of some steady woman” and that “a stout watch should always be kept over her morals.”54 Stark’s words support Ross Forman’s contentions that during the nineteenth century relations between non-Indigenous men and Indigenous women “became increasingly restrictive – or at least, more clandestine,”55 and that “primitive peoples were [viewed as] inherently libidinous.”56 Neither Robinson or Cormack conclusively reveal in their writing that they were sexually intimate with Truganini or Shanawdithit, yet the fact that they lived in such close proximity to the women has prompted speculation. Similarly, Australian historians have fiercely debated whether Robinson and Truganini were lovers: Vivienne Rae Ellis claims they were, although Lyndall Ryan disputes this.57 Creative writers have also weighed in: Annamarie Beckel, for instance, imagines Cormack lusting after Shanawdithit while Bernard Assiniwi figures Shanawdithit as tormented by unrequited sexual desire for Cormack.58 Definitive conclusions are likely to remain elusive; that so much speculation has surrounded the issue, however, indicates the crucial role of sex and gender in the relationships. Gender-related questions about appropriate behaviour emerge in other contexts, too. Interactions between Cormack and Shanawdithit were muddled by his subservience to her knowledge about the

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Beothuk and their land: at the same time as he sought highly valued information from her, Cormack cast Shanawdithit in the menial, but gender and racially appropriate, role of domestic servant.59 In the same way, Robinson was both reliant on Truganini’s knowledge and inclined to belittle her power. His retelling of the incident in which Truganini saved his life by helping him cross the Arthur River to escape pursuing members of the Tarkiner clan in 1832 is fascinating in this regard. While he commences his journal account by mentioning Truganini by name, Robinson quickly reverts to referring to her exclusively as “the woman”: “The woman was in great alarm”; “I desired the woman to shove me over”; “The woman was calling out in fear”; “I desired the woman not to be alarmed”; “I found the woman wanted encouraging”; “The woman said he had lost the tracks.”60 Perhaps Robinson enforces Truganini’s femaleness because her sex is in fact crucial to their predicament; he is “sensible that I ran a great risk in following her as she was the woman they [the pursuing Aboriginal men] were anxious to get.”61 However, Robinson is possibly also attempting to lessen the humiliation of being rescued by an Indigenous woman. In supposed keeping with her gender, Truganini is presented as fearful, in need of encouragement, and incapable of making rational decisions. Robinson, by stark contrast, is figured as unruffled and even inventive under pressure. He dwells on his masculine ingenuity in tying two pieces of wood together to construct a makeshift raft, rather than the fact that the expert swimmer who propels him across the Arthur River ultimately saves him. Drawing on such evidence, it becomes tempting to cast Robinson and Cormack as villains and Truganini and Shanawdithit as muchabused victims. Yet, while Truganini and Shanawdithit unquestionably existed in a world in which they were under constant threat of violence, the reality was more complicated. J.A. Langford, a writer who visited Truganini just before her death in Hobart, noted that she delighted in retelling stories of her days with Robinson, including the rescue on the Arthur River: “At the mention of his name her bright eyes beamed more brightly.”62 Shanawdithit, in turn, is recorded as having given Cormack keepsakes, including a braid of her hair, just prior to his departure from Newfoundland.63 In her intensely vulnerable position as an isolated Indigenous woman in European colonial society, had Shanawdithit seen Cormack as a useful person to be allied with?64 Whatever complex connections actually existed in life between Shanawdithit and Cormack, and Robinson and Truganini, the discursive patterns evident in the men’s writing have proved tenacious. They

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are clearly identifiable in the work of twentieth-century settler-culture writers and filmmakers.65 Afterlives As Terry Goldie notes, “the feelings which Truganini and Shawnandithit evoke in their respective countries, and even more particularly on their respective islands, cannot be overestimated.”66 Both women have been incessantly memorialized in contexts as diverse as poetry, fiction, drama, public memorials, song, the names of boats, buildings, and sporting teams, film, and art. In both cases, this process began around the times of their deaths. Nineteenth-century theories of race ensured that the passing of Shanawdithit and even more strikingly Truganini, given that she died after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), could be conjured as significant events.67 Of Truganini, the Hobart Mercury opined that “the death of this last scion of a once numerous race is an event in the history of Tasmania of no common interest; and it may well serve to ‘point a moral and adorn a tale’ on the question of the gradual but certain extinction of the aboriginal races of these southern lands.”68 In his obituary of Shanawdithit in the London Times, Cormack claimed that her passing signified that “there has been a primitive nation, once claiming rank as a portion of the human race, who have lived, flourished and become extinct in their own orbit.”69 The importance of the women’s deaths was also reflected in colonial physicians’ eagerness to secure their bodies for scientific institutions in London. Indeed, in a macabre manifestation of how equally enmeshed they were in the same world-spanning phenomenon of British imperialism, Shanawdithit’s skull and specimens of Truganini’s skin and hair all came to be held at the Royal College of Surgeons in London.70 The remnants of the women’s bodies that remained on the islands of their birth were treated with scant respect. Between 1904 and 1947, Truganini’s articulated skeleton was on public display at the Tasmanian Museum in Hobart,71 and it was not returned to the Aboriginal community until 1976.72 Shanawdithit’s remains were buried in a graveyard on the south side of St John’s that was subsequently destroyed.73 The subjection of Truganini’s and Shanawdithit’s bodies to posthumous defilement was one consequence of their “lastness.” Paradoxically, another immediate effect was their discursive construction as beautiful and noble. James Bonwick, writing six years before Truganini’s death

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but after that of her husband, William Lanne, the “last man,” claimed that “her eyes were still beautiful, and full of mischievous fun. Thirty years before, she would have been captivating to men of her colour, and not by any means an uninteresting object to those of whiter skins. Her mind was of no ordinary kind. Fertile in expedient, sagacious in council, courageous in difficulty, she had the wisdom and the fascination of the serpent, the intrepidity and nobility of the royal ruler of the desert.”74 Similarly, in his “Sketches of Savage Life,” which Lianne Leddy discusses in her chapter, John McGregor writes of Shanawdithit: “Her person, in height above the middle stature, possessed classical regularity of form. Her face bore striking similarity to that of Napoleon, and the olive cast of her complexion added to the resemblance. Her hair was jet black; her finely penciled brows – her long, darting lashes – her dark, vigilant, and piercing eyes, were all remarkably striking and beautiful.”75 With the Beothuk and the Indigenous Tasmanians no longer a threat to colonial settlement, it became safe to mythologize Truganini and Shanawdithit and to feel elegiac admiration for them, and even guilt-tinged regret at the demise of their people.76 It also became possible to grant the women a more superficially powerful form of femininity; Shanawdithit’s history as a domestic servant, for instance, sits oddly with her depiction as a kind of Napoleon. As Ian Anderson, whose family are Palawa Trowerna from the Pyemairrenner people in Tasmania, which includes Trawlwoolway and Plairmairrenner and related clans, notes that “the symbol of tru-­gernan-ner establishes a full-stop in ‘the story of a doomed race.’ She declares the necessity of destruction and violation and evokes from the white-side of the frontier, a paradox of guilt and resignation.”77 Goldie extends a similar argument about Shanawdithit a step further, claiming that the supposed absence of Indigenous people in Newfoundland “enables assertions of white presence which exceed those usually made in Canada.”78 Given their powerful symbolic roles, it is not surprising that discursive constructions of Truganini and Shanawdithit as “last” of their “primitive races” have proved so insidious. However, in recent decades these figurations have been challenged. As Joy Hendry notes, from the late 1960s movements for Indigenous recognition and cultural renewal sprang up around the world.79 Preconceptions about Aboriginal extinction were confronted in both Canada and Australia as Indigenous people reasserted their presence and their rights. Two significant documentaries featuring Shanawdithit and Truganini were made at around the same time as surviving Indigenous

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communities in Tasmania and Newfoundland began to demand recognition. Tom Haydon’s The Last Tasmanian, released in 1978, was a more lavish production and garnered a larger audience and more controversy than Ken Pittman’s Shanaditti: Last of the Beothuks, which was first screened in 1982. However, both films were made as important cultural shifts were taking place; Haydon’s film was completed five years after the Australian government first funded an Aboriginal community organization in Tasmania,80 and Pittman’s was made within ten years of the formation of the Native Association of Newfoundland and Labrador.81 To complicate matters, settler-culture nationalism also rose to the fore in this period. Pittman’s twenty-minute-long documentary was produced by the National Film Board of Canada, but it was very much a product of Newfoundland’s settler-culture renaissance. As Shane O’Dea notes, in the “twenty years from 1970 to 1990, the arts and heritage were driven by a sense of national identity and, in their turn, shaped it.”82 The revival reflected a new appreciation for the folk traditions of isolated outport Newfoundland and had at its heart an assertion of difference from Canada, which Newfoundland equivocally joined in 1949. Pittman’s documentary told non-Indigenous Newfoundlanders stories about the past in the service of preserving their history and strengthening identity. Within the film, the sympathetic treatment of Shanawdithit and the Beothuk evoke settler-culture guilt but, paradoxically, also lend contemporary Newfoundlanders a moral authority; in condemning actions by their forebears, the present-day community is constructed as enlightened and humane. Markedly absent from Pittman’s documentary, though, are images of living Indigenous people. Despite the film’s worthy intentions, Mary Dalton’s argument that Newfoundlanders tend to construct “shadow Indians who serve us beyond the grave” applies here.83 The narrative of Shanaditti: Last of the Beothuks is structured as a quest. Within it, Al Pittman, “The Poet” as he is referred to in the film, strives to uncover the supposedly lost history of Shanawdithit and her people. In order to give a narratively satisfying illusion of credence to the quest, by implying that Shanawdithit has an enduring presence, parts of the documentary are putatively voiced by “Shanaditti” herself. The Poet’s mission is also given an emotional dimension through his protestations of love for the Beothuk woman. In an early scene, he reads excerpts from his widely anthologized poem “Shanaditti,” declaiming: “You didn’t know that all these years beyond your decay / I would long to

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be with you / To tell you I wouldn’t forget.” The speaker acknowledges that his sense of Shanawdithit is “much too mixed up with Technicolor movies / and my own boyish musings,” but he nonetheless remains obsessed with her. The Poet’s quest takes him to the provincial archives, Memorial University, and the Newfoundland museum. Its ultimate destination is Beothuk territory. Pittman paddles up the Exploits River with amateur archaeologist Don Locke,84 who identifies Beothuk artifacts and sites and guides him to a cluster of Beothuk-style dwellings he has reconstructed. In keeping with the valorization of the “folk,” the narrator suggests: “Maybe Don Locke can show the Poet things that aren’t in books or museums.” Tom Haydon’s The Last Tasmanian is also based around the quest of a male protagonist, a “Scholar” rather than a “Poet” this time, eager to learn the supposed truth about a “last” Aboriginal woman and her people. Its leading man is the Welsh-Australian archaeologist Rhys Jones, who, with his unkempt beard and raffish clothing, cuts a figure similar to that of the bohemian Pittman. Jones is cast as a learned authority on the Tasmanians, although several of his statements in the film, including that Tasmania’s Indigenous people could not make fire, evoked controversy.85 Like Pittman’s, his quest takes him to a variety of locations including archives, museums, and Indigenous lands; in the latter Jones re-enacts Aboriginal practices such as constructing a shelter.86 Both Pittman’s and Jones’s counter-culture credentials are enhanced by their association with the “authenticity” of Indigenous culture. Philip J. Deloria’s analysis of non-Native Americans’ recurrent desire to “play Indian” is useful here. He argues that “using furs and feathers, headbands and hair, generations of white Americans have, at many levels and with varying degrees of intent, made meanings and, with them, identities.”87 In revisiting their land and mimicking Indigenous practices, Pittman and Jones strengthen their own counter-culture identities and authority, at the same time as they contribute to the making of Newfoundland and Australian national identities more broadly. As is the case with Shanaditti, a settler-nationalist impulse, this time a specifically Australian one, also drives The Last Tasmanian. The Sydney-born Tom Haydon relinquished a successful career at the British Broadcasting Commission in order to return home and confront “the problems of a British-derived history which was still being imposed upon an indigenous and independent Australian identity.”88 Gender is crucial to these processes. For Jones and Pittman, as was the case for Robinson and Cormack, Truganini and Shanawdithit

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provide points of access to societies and terrains that they want to comprehend. In each situation the white men are constructed as individuals uniquely capable of sympathetically understanding the women, and the Indigenous/non-Indigenous encounter is distilled within the settler imaginary to one between a dominant white male culture and an implicitly weak, because feminized, Indigenous one.89 Surely there is a connection between this symptomatic, deeply entrenched, representational move and the endemic violence to which Indigenous women and girls in settler-colonial countries continue to be subject? As Sarah Hunt argues, while Indigenous women have long been figured as dependent on colonial “saviours” from physical and sexual violence, “this relationship of dependency has not worked in Indigenous women’s favour and has, in fact led to the perpetuation of colonial power relations.”90 That Pittman’s and Jones’s communion with Shanawdithit and Truganini is purely imagined, rather than messily complicated by the physical presence of the women, intensifies their discursive centrality as white male figures. Writing of Hollywood depictions of Native American women, although her point seems applicable here too, M. Elise Marubbio claims that “the [Indigenous] maiden’s death frees the hero to fulfill his destiny as the American [or Newfoundlander, or Australian] Adam.”91 The Last Tasmanian and Shanaditti: Last of the Beothuks are far less interested in living Aboriginal women than dead ones. While both foreground the violence of colonial history, neither acknowledges ongoing Indigenous presence in Newfoundland and Tasmania. Shanaditti: Last of the Beothucks makes no mention of contemporary Mi’kmaq or Beothuk people; The Last Tasmanian, despite a frame narrative which documents the return of Truganini’s remains to Aboriginal descendants, asserts that contemporary Indigenous Tasmanians are inauthentic because they are “half-castes.” There are moments of disjunction, however, between the audio and visual elements of the documentaries that complicate these positions. In Pittman’s offering, the non-diegetic narrator, “Shanaditti,” is voiced by the Mi’kmaq Elizabeth Marshall. While in a literary work we encounter narrators in silence, here the distinctive cadence of Marshall’s voice quietly resonates with an undeclared meaning that exceeds Shanaditti’s often clumsily scripted phrases. In The Last Tasmanian it is diegetic sound that is important. In a striking scene in Haydon’s film we witness Annette Mansell performing the traditional Aboriginal practice of processing mutton-birds. At the same time as she deftly strips feathers from the shearwaters she states: “I’m not Aboriginal. I’m only a descendant of one. Just compare the

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Aborigines that were here with their descendants today. There’s a hell of a difference. There are no Aboriginals and there’s not much in any of us.” While we listen to Mansell’s words, it is hard not to be struck by the contradiction between what she is saying and what she is doing. Annette Mansell’s statement formed a point of particular contention in a live debate about The Last Tasmanian on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Monday Conference program, which aired nationally on 4 September 1978. While Mansell defended her prerogative to “say what I believe and this is what I believe,”92 Tom Haydon, who was also present, was accused by other members of the audience of misrepresenting the wider Tasmanian Aboriginal community’s sense of itself. Lawyer Pierre Slicer argued that “only two people were asked, living today, did they feel that they were Aboriginal and they both said, ‘no’ and that was out of 4,000.”93 Rebe Taylor accurately suggests that “The Last Tasmanian was made during the shift in the language of identity. Indeed, in many ways the controversy it produced made the film part of that shift.”94 Haydon’s documentary helped galvanize a campaign by Indigenous Tasmanians to resituate Truganini as one of many ancestors rather than the end of the line. In important respects, this has been successful. In recent years the Tasmanian state government has granted the Aboriginal community land rights to territory including the historically significant Risdon Cove, Oyster Cove, and Wybalenna.95 The Tasmanian Museum, which once had Truganini’s skeleton at the centre of their display on the supposedly extinct Native people of the island, also opened a new permanent Indigenous Tasmanian exhibition in 2012, after extensive consultations with the community.96 Some even assert that Truganini has been too successfully reclaimed. Curator David Hansen has controversially argued that the successful attempt by Aboriginal Tasmanians to have a bust of Truganini removed from sale by Sotheby’s in 2009 equated to censorship and compromised understandings of the past.97 However, Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre representative Ruth Langford clarifies why Indigenous Tasmanians continue to protest any association of Truganini with the term “last”: “It devalues who we are today. The title ‘last Tasmanian natives,’ or what we often hear is ‘the last of the full-blood Tasmanian Aboriginals,’ really disregards the strengths and survival of the Aboriginal people here in Tasmania.”98 Shanaditti: Last of the Beothucks did not receive sufficient attention to prompt a cultural shift comparable to that (unintentionally) furthered by The Last Tasmanian. However, Pittman himself was to focus

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on Indigenous survival six years later in his feature film Finding Mary March.99 While not widely screened, this drama placed contemporary Beothuk and Mi’kmaq descendants at the centre of its narrative. In the dominant Newfoundland settler culture, though, Shanawdithit continues to bear the burden of “lastness” to a greater extent than Truganini does. Shanawdithit continues to be depicted, as Maura Hanrahan also explores in her essay, in highly problematic ways.100 Definitively changing settler-culture perceptions of Shanawdithit, by whatever means, might prove effective and appropriate but would not put an end to all that ails relations between Indigenous and non-­ Indigenous peoples in the land on which she lived. However, it would be a significant step in facilitating reconciliation in what is now the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, and in Canada more generally. By challenging settler-culture Newfoundlanders’ conviction that they alone belong to this island, new kinds of dialogues might be attempted. Notwithstanding that vestiges of Truganini’s symbolic power as “last of her race” remain, the Tasmanian example shows that history can be reconceived. NOTES 1 For more information about Cochrane Smith’s recordings, the oldest surviving of any Australian Aboriginal voice, see Martin Thomas, “The Rush to Record: Transmitting the Sound of Aboriginal Culture,” Journal of Australian Studies 31, no. 90 (2007): 107–21. See also Sophia Sambono, “Fanny Cochrane Smith’s Tasmanian Aboriginal Songs: Curator’s Notes,” Australian Screen, http://aso.gov.au/titles/music/fanny-cochrane-smith-songs/ notes/ (accessed November 2017). 2 See Beverley Diamond’s chapter in this volume, as well as her article with John Hewson, “Santu’s Song,” Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 22, no. 1 (2007): 55–70. 3 Arthur English, “The Last Boeothic,” Newfoundland Quarterly 2, no. 3 (1902): 4; Eros Wayback (Edward St George), “The Last of the Boeothics’ Lament: On Leaving Their Native Land,” Newfoundland Quarterly 3, no. 1 (1903): 3; Robert Gear MacDonald, “The Passing of the Boeothuk,” From the Isle of Avalon (London: Frank H. Morland 1908), 20. 4 Thomas Cook and Son, Railway Official Guide Book to Tasmania (Melbourne: Rae Bros 1894), 29. 5 Diamond and Hewson, “Santu’s Song,” 249.

Shanawdithit and Truganini  337 6 Martin Thomas, “The Rush to Record,” 111. 7 Both women are referred to by a range of names. Shanawdithit’s appellations include Shawnadithit, Shananditti, Shanaditti, Nance, and Nancy April. Truganini’s encompass Trucanini, Trukanini, Trugernanna, Trugernanner, and Lallah Rookh. Because I am largely concerned in this chapter with the ways in which they have been memorialized in the public sphere, I utilize the most commonly occurring spellings of their respective names. 8 While Santu herself left Newfoundland at the age of ten (see Beverley Diamond’s chapter in this volume), her lineage and cultural knowledge attest to Beothuk and Mi’kmaq presence in Newfoundland after 1829. 9 Greg Lehman, “Fearing Truganini,” Artlink 31, no. 2 (2011): 50. Other recent accounts of Truganini’s contemporary significance include: Ian Anderson, “Re-Claiming Tru-ger-nan-ner: De-Colonising the Symbol,” Art Monthly Australia, no. 66 (1993–4): 10–14; Suvendrini Perera, “Claiming Truganini: Australian National Narratives in the Year of Indigenous Peoples,” Cultural Studies 10, no. 3 (1996): 393–412; Lyndall Ryan, “The Struggle for Trukanini 1830–1997,” Tasmanian Historical Research Association Papers and Proceedings 44, no. 3 (1997): 153–73; David Hansen, “Seeing Truganini,” Australian Book Review May (2010): 45–53; Karen Fox, Maori and Aboriginal Women in the Public Eye: Representing Differences 1950–2000 (Canberra: Australian National University 2011); Rebe Taylor, “The National Confessional,” Meanjin 71, no. 3 (2012): 22–36. 10 Anna Johnston and Mitchell Rolls, “Reading Friendly Mission in the Twenty-First Century: An Introduction,” in Anna Johnston and Mitchell Rolls, eds., Reading Robinson: Companion Essays to Friendly Mission (Hobart, Australia: Quintus Publishing 2008), 21. 11 Differences were not confined to Indigenous peoples on the two islands. Before the arrival of Europeans, Tasmania was home to around nine distinct Aboriginal nations, each with its own culture, language, and territory. For more information, see Lyndall Ryan, “Trouwunna,” Tasmanian Aborigines: A History since 1803 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin 2012), 3–42. Newfoundland housed the Beothuk and, as Charles Martijn argues, was also a well-established part of Mi’kma’ki. See Martijn, “An Eastern Micmac Domain of Islands,” in W. Cowam, ed., Actes du Vingtième Congrès des Algonquinistes (Ottawa: Carleton University 1989), 208–31. Lisa Rankin also discusses Innu and Inuit presence on the island in her chapter. 12 Annie E. Coombes, “Introduction: Memory and History in Settler Colonialism,” in Annie E. Coombes, ed., Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2006), 3.

338  Fiona Polack 13 See “European Migratory Fishery,” Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage Web Site Project, http://www.heritage.nf.ca/exploration/efishery.html (accessed November 2017). 14 Tasmania was initially known to Europeans as Van Diemen’s Land. Its name was officially changed to Tasmania in 1856. For clarity, I use “Tasmania” exclusively. 15 Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, “Convicts,” in The Companion to Tasmanian History, http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_ history/C/Convicts.htm (accessed November 2017). Large numbers of free emigrants also chose to pursue opportunities, such as sheep farming, in the colony. 16 Ingeborg Marshall, A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk (Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queen’s University Press 1996), 95. 17 Nicholas Clements, The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania (St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press 2014), 1, 208. 18 Ibid., 49. 19 Ibid., 10. 20 In addition to those with links to Fanny Cochrane Smith, a large proportion of Tasmania’s present-day Aboriginal population is descended from the Aboriginal women taken by European sealers to live on the Bass Strait islands. In this relative isolation from the main white settlements, they were able to maintain important aspects of their culture. 21 Alan Lester, “British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire,” History Workshop Journal 54, no. 1 (2002): 25. For more on the world-encompassing nature of British colonialism, see also Patrick Brantlinger’s, Bonita Lawrence’s, and J. Edward Chamberlin’s chapters in this volume. 22 Lester, “British Settler Discourse,” 25. 23 The “white saviour” complex is indeed a tenacious one. In The White Savior Film: Content, Critics and Consumption (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 2014), editor Matthew Hughey argues: “This trope is so widespread that varied intercultural and interracial relations are often guided by a logic that racializes and separates people into those who are redeemers (whites) and those who are redeemed or in need of redemption (nonwhites)” (2). In the texts I examine, and in myriad other examples ranging from Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem “The White Man’s Burden” to Kevin Costner’s 1990 film Dances with Wolves, the “white saviour” complex often combines patriarchal and racial elements. 24 Shanawdithit was born c. 1801 and Truganini in 1812. 25 Henry Reynolds, Fate of a Free People (Ringwood, Australia: Penguin Books Australia 1995), 142.

Shanawdithit and Truganini  339 26 See, for instance, Donald H. Holly, Jr, “Social Aspects and Implications of ‘Running to the Hills’: The Case of the Beothuk Indians of Newfoundland,” Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology 3, no. 2 (2008): 170–90. 27 Marshall, History and Ethnography, 222. Marshall suggests that Doodebewshet, the older of the women captured with Shanawdithit in 1823, was her adoptive, rather than biological, mother. 28 Ralph T. Pastore and G.M. Story, “Shawnadithit,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 6, University of Toronto/Université Laval 2003, http:// www.biographi.ca/en/bio/shawnadithit_6E.html (hereafter DCB). 29 James Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians: The Aboriginal Inhabitants of Newfoundland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1915), 230. 30 J.E. Calder, Some Account of the Wars, Extirpation, Habits, &c., of the Native Tribes of Tasmania (Hobart: Henn and Co. 1875), 105. 31 Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2015), 12. Indigenous women remain especially vulnerable within settler cultures. In Canada, the federal government has launched the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls to investigate the fact that Indigenous females are “disproportionately affected by all forms of violence.” See “Background on the Inquiry,” Government of Canada, http://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/1448633299414/1448633350146 (accessed November 2017). In Australia, Aboriginal women are nearly ten times more likely to die as a result of assault than non-Aboriginal women. See “Measuring Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault against Women,” Parliament of Australia, http://www.aph.gov.au/about_ parliament/parliamentary_departments/parliamentary_library/ publications_archive/archive/violenceagainstwomen (accessed November 2017). 32 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, 142. 33 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, 151. 34 Marshall, History and Ethnography, 185. 35 Ibid., 187. 36 Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians, 206. 37 For more on this collaborative enterprise, see my article, “Reading Shanawdithit’s Drawings: Transcultural Texts in the North American Colonial World,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 14, no. 3 (2013). doi: 10.1353/cch.2013.0035. 38 Removed from their homelands, forced to live in European-style housing and reject their traditional way of life, Tasmania’s Indigenous people succumbed to illness and despair. Of the 200 individuals sent to live at

340  Fiona Polack Wybalenna from 1833, only 46 remained when it was abandoned in 1847. See Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, 159. 39 Penelope Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 2010), 152. Truganini and her fellow Tasmanians Matilda and Planobeena were charged with the killings and their compatriots, Timme and Tunnerminnerwait, executed for them. 40 Ibid. 41 Lyndall Ryan and Neil Smith, “Trugernanner (Truganini),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/trugernannertruganini-4752. 42 Margaret Connell Szasz, Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press 1994), 6. 43 Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America (Toronto: Doubleday 2012), 19. 44 Ibid. Cormack lived from 1796 to 1868; Robinson from 1791 to 1866. 45 For more about Cormack, see G.M. Story, “William Eppes Cormack,” in DCB, vol. 9. For Robinson, see “George Augustus Robinson,” Australian Dictionary of Biography, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/robinsongeorge-augustus-2596. 46 Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians, 196. 47 For more on one of Tasmanian Governor George Arthur’s best-known proclamations, see my article “Art in the Bush: Romanticist Painting for Indigenous Audiences in Tasmania and Newfoundland,” NineteenthCentury Contexts 33, no. 4 (2011): 333–51. Howley discusses government proclamations relating to the Beothuk in The Beothucks or Red Indians. 48 As Maura Hanrahan notes in her chapter, Cormack was guided by the Mi’kmaq Sylvester Joe on his 1822 expedition and by John Louis (Mi’kmaq), John Stevens (Abenaki), and Peter John (Innu) on his 1827 trek. 49 Robinson’s expedition journals can be found in Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George August Robinson 1829–1834, 2nd ed., ed. N.J.B. Plomley (Launceston and Hobart, Australia: Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery and Quintus Publishing 2008). Cormack’s accounts are reproduced by Howley in his Beothucks or Red Indians. 50 See Lianne Leddy’s comments on Cormack’s geological findings in her chapter. 51 Robinson, Friendly Mission, 92. 52 Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians, 209. 53 Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherdale, Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 2005), 1.

Shanawdithit and Truganini  341 54 Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians, 202. Cormack apparently did not heed all of this advice; around one month after Shanawdithit arrived in St John’s, an article appeared in the Royal Gazette stating that “there are at present at Mr Cormack’s house, accessible at all times to those who feel an interest, individuals belonging to three different tribes of North Americans, viz. a Mountaineer from Labrador, – two of the Banakee nation from Canada, – and a Boeothick, or Red Indian of Newfoundland, the last a female.” Article reproduced in Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians, 220. 55 Ross Forman, “Race and Empire,” in H.G. Cocks and Matt Houlbrook, eds., Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan 2006), 121. 56 Ibid, 124. Robinson pays great attention to Truganini’s sexual activities in his journals. See, for instance, his comments on her cohabiting with whalers on Bruny Island in Friendly Mission, 84–7. 57 Vivienne Rae Ellis, Trucanini: Queen of Traitor? (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies 1981), 38; Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, 268. 58 Annamarie Beckel, All Gone Widdun (St John’s: Breakwater 1999); Bernard Assiniwi, The Beothuk Saga, trans. Wayne Grady (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 2000). Originally published as La Saga des Béothuks (Montréal: Leméac 1996). 59 Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians, 209. 60 Robinson, Friendly Mission, 686. 61 Ibid. The emphasis on Truganini’s gender also allows shades of the Pocahontas story to haunt Robinson’s account. Frederic W. Gleach observes that the tale of the woman who saved English colonist John Smith from execution by her fellow Powhatans provided a “natural model to instruct us in ... ideals that were Christian and feminine.” Gleach, “Pocahontas at the Fair: Crafting Identities at the 1907 Jamestown Exposition,” Ethnohistory 50, no. 3 (2003): 436. Robinson’s Truganini is not attributed a self-sacrificing, Christian nature in this journal record. However, her feminine “frailty” is explicitly highlighted. 62 J.A. Langford, “Truganini,” Gentleman’s Magazine (October 1876): 462. 63 Joseph Noad, “Lecture on the Aborigines of Newfoundland: Delivered before the Mechanics’ Institute, at St. John’s, on Monday, 17th January” (St John’s: R.J. Parsons 1858), Early Canadiana Online, http://eco.canadiana.ca/ view/oocihm.92656/2?r=0&s=1 (accessed November 2017). Shanawdithit’s gesture is particularly interesting within the context of Rebecca Kugel’s point, which Beverley Diamond quotes in her chapter. Kugel suggests that within some Native American cultures gift giving can represent the acknowledgment of alliance, even though a non-Indigenous recipient might interpret it incorrectly as primarily an expression of gratitude.

342  Fiona Polack 64 See my essay “Reading Shanawdithit’s Drawings” for a more detailed consideration of this issue. 65 See Anna Johnston, “George Augustus Robinson, the ‘Great Conciliator’: Colonial Celebrity and Its Postcolonial Aftermath,” Postcolonial Studies 12, no. 2 (2009): 153–72. Robinson’s journals have also proved a useful but fraught source of ethnographic and other information for Tasmania’s Aboriginal community. For more on this, see Johnston and Rolls, “Introduction,” 17–18. The “Telling Places in Country Project,” which retraces the story of the Friendly Mission’s journey through “northeast Aboriginal clancountry” in Tasmania between 1830 and 1831, draws in especially interesting ways on the journals. See “Telling Places in Country,” University of Tasmania, http://www.utas.edu.au/telling-places-in-country/home (accessed November 2017). 66 Terry Goldie, Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Literatures (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1989), 157. 67 For a detailed account of these theories, see Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2003). 68 “The Last of Her Race,” Hobart Mercury, 13 May 1876. 69 Howley, Beothucks or Red Indians, 232. 70 For more on the posthumous fate of Truganini’s body, see Helen MacDonald’s Possessing the Dead: The Artful Science of Anatomy (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press 2010); Ingeborg Marshall discusses Shanawdithit’s skull in History and Ethnography, 220–1. 71 Ryan and Smith, “Trugernanner.” 72 Truganini was deeply upset by the mutilation of the corpse of her husband, William Lanne, and she implored several people to ensure that she herself would be safely buried. See MacDonald, Possessing the Dead, 129. 73 Marshall suggests in History and Ethnography that this graveyard was the “old South Side graveyard [which] was dismantled to make room for the railway” in 1903 (221). Others speculate that Shanawdithit was buried in the military and navy cemetery that now lies beneath Southside Road. See Steve Bartlett, “Shawnadithit [sic] Graveyard Found,” Telegram, 13 March 2010, A1. 74 James Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians; Or, the Black War of Van Diemen’s Land (London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston 1870), 217. 75 John McGregor, Sketches of Savage Life (1836; Canadiana House 1969), 322. Six months before Shanawdithit’s death, Cormack stayed with John McGregor in Liverpool, with whom he apparently left some of his notes about Shanawdithit. Marshall suggests on page 203 of History and Ethnog-

Shanawdithit and Truganini  343 raphy that McGregor used this material in his “Sketches of Savage Life.” It is difficult to know where Cormack ends and McGregor begins in the above description of Shanawdithit. 76 However, memories of the Black War had still not entirely faded from white settlers’ minds in Tasmania. One correspondent to the Hobart Mercury in 1874 took a rather different tack from Bonwick, describing Truganini as a “foul-mouthed old she-nigger.” See Penny Russell, “Girl in a Red Dress: Inventions of Mathinna,” Australian Historical Studies 43, no. 3 (2012): 358, for details of this and other negative commentary in the Mercury. 77 Anderson, “Re-Claiming Tru-ger-nan-ner,” 11. 78 Goldie, Fear and Temptation, 157. 79 Joy Hendry, Reclaiming Culture: Indigenous People and Self Representation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2005), 10. 80 The Aboriginal Information Service, which later became the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, was founded in 1971. See Greg Lehman, “The Palawa Voice,” The Companion to Tasmanian History, http://www.utas.edu.au/ library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/P/Palawa%20Voice.htm (accessed November 2017). 81 The Native Association of Newfoundland and Labrador was formed in 1973; its name was changed to the Federation of Newfoundland Indians in 1976. See Jenny Higgins, “Impact of Non-Aboriginal Activities on the Mi’kmaq,” Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage Web Site, http://www.heritage.nf.ca/aboriginal/mikmaq_impacts.html (accessed November 2017). 82 Shane O’Dea, “Culture and Country: The Role of the Arts and Heritage in the Nationalist Revival in Newfoundland,” Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 19, no. 2 (2003): 385. 83 Mary Dalton, “Shadow Indians: the Beothuk Motif in Newfoundland Literature,” Newfoundland Studies 8, no. 2 (1992): 144. 84 John Harries also mentions Don Locke in his chapter. 85 See also Rebe Taylor’s essay “Reliable Mr Robinson and the Controversial Dr Jones” in Johnston and Rolls, eds., Reading Robinson. Interestingly, Taylor argues that Jones drew closely on Robinson’s journals for evidence. However, she also asserts that Jones interpreted the journals inappropriately. 86 Tom O’Regan perceptively argues that Jones’s statements in The Last Tasmanian seem “to be determined by his experiences of the locations themselves. The prehistory and the history he articulates grow out of the mise-en-scene. The landscapes, the old buildings, intimate the necessity for and the veracity of the narration.” Tom O’Regan, “Documentary in ­Controversy: The Last Tasmanian,” in Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan, eds., An Australian Film Reader (Sydney: Currency Press 1985), 128.

344  Fiona Polack   87 Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1998), 156.   88 Rhys Jones, “Tom Haydon 1938–1991: Film Interpreter of Australian Archaeology,” Australian Archaeology no. 35 (1992): 51.   89 Writing of Shanawdithit and Demasduit, Lianne Leddy makes the persuasive suggestion in her chapter that the feminization of “last” survivors can be so intense that it can make them potentially interchangeable.   90 Sarah Hunt, “Representing Colonial Violence: Trafficking, Sex Work, and the Violence of the Law,” Atlantis 37, no. 2 (2015/2016): 26.   91 M. Elise Marubbio, Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky 2009), 6.   92 Monday Conference, Australian Broadcasting Commission, 4 September 1978, transcript, State Library of Tasmania.   93 Ibid.   94 Taylor, “Reliable Mr Robinson,” 115.   95 Alison Alexander, “Aboriginal Land Rights,” Companion to Tasmanian History, http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_ history/A/Aboriginal%20land%20rights.htm (accessed November 2017).   96 “Online Resources: Aboriginal Culture,” Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, http://www.tmag.tas.gov.au/learning_and_discovery/learning_ resources/online_resources (accessed November 2017).   97 David Hansen, “Seeing Truganini”; Greg Lehman, “Fearing Truganini.”   98 Paul Daley, “Sotheby’s Protest Highlights Cultural Grey Area of Depicting Indigenous Dead,” Guardian, 31 July 2014, http://www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/31/sothebys-protestindigenous-dead-cultural-grey-area (accessed November 2017).   99 Noreen Golfman notes of Pittman’s work that “while invisible from a theatrical marketplace perspective [it has] actively contributed to the formation of a tradition of cinematic practice while being faithful to the challenges of honestly representing place and identity.” Noreen Golfman, “Imagining Region: A Survey of Newfoundland Film,” in William Beard and Jerry White, eds., North of Everything: English-Canadian Cinema since 1980 (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press 2002), 54. 100 See also Fiona Polack, “Memory against History: Figuring the Past in Cloud of Bone,” English Studies in Canada 35, no. 4 (2009): 53–69.

Coda: The Recovery of Indigenous Identity j. edwar d ch amb e rl in

I was in a small camp just north of Alice Springs in central Australia in 1984, visiting with a group of Aboriginal men and women from across the country who had gathered to discuss what to do about their homeland, haunted by restless spirits. They talked about many things, but in the evening, after a day of dealing with details, they talked about their ancestors, some of whom were resting uneasily as museum exhibits or skeleton curiosities in the hands of anthropologists, antiquarians, and other aficionados of “the last of the line,” including photographers and colonial historians for the past hundred and fifty years. Some of their ancestors had been lost from sight, dying alone and unremembered while the land where their spirits remained fell into other hands and their spirits wandered about. But these folks were very much alive, speaking English as well as Pintupi, driving trucks as well as going walkabout, painting on cardboard and canvas in acrylic as well as on bark and rock and in the sand, and securing a place for their children in the land that they had called home since their migration from the mainland of southeast Asia some fifty thousand years ago. Their presence illuminated the history of what have often been deadly encounters between Indigenous and settler societies around the world; and their inspiring confusion of past, present, and future highlighted how absence can become presence if we look and listen carefully, and accommodate technological changes – including changes in language, the definitive human technology – within cultural identity. Such changes over time and in technology are features of all human societies, establishing identity as a process rather than a product but frustrating those who look for unadulterated cultural characteristics and clear borderlines between peoples, as well as between past and

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future. For many people, and not just those of Aboriginal heritage, past and future are more like dancing partners than discrete states of being, their dance confusing identity even as it confirms it. It is this very confusion that may offer new ways of acknowledging the continuing presence of the Beothuk, even as we lament their absence. Nora Marks and Richard Dauenhauer, the Tlingit elder and comparative literary scholar who have done so much to illuminate the oral traditions of the Indigenous peoples of the west coast of the Americas, describe how the word shuká defines the conditions for Tlingit storytelling, just as it does for the material and spiritual chronicles of biblical and qur’anic testaments. Superficially, shuká translates as “ancestor”; but when Tlingit people say “we don’t know our shuká,” they mean “we don’t know our future,” so it’s clear that the English word ancestor is only a beginning. In fact, shuká turns in two directions, both spatial and temporal; and before we get all misty-eyed about Aboriginal mysteries, the Dauenhauers remind us that we have English words that do this too, words like “ahead” and “before,” which can refer both to things in the past that have gone before us or ahead of us, and things that lie ahead of us or before us in the future – as in, “she walks before me” and “it happened the day before yesterday.”1 There is lots more to say about shuká – among other things, it refers to traditional Tlingit images, material artifacts, and heraldic designs which give performances their credibility – but it is enough to know that shuká comes to rest somewhere in that domain between here and nowhere, between “once upon a time” and “right now” ... where stories take place. There is no earlier or later in the Torah, say scholars as well as poets; and on occasions like the Jewish Passover seder, we are invited to believe that we are there even though we clearly are not, surrendering to our imagination even as we enjoy a real meal. Indeed, the more attention we pay to the line between the real and the imagined the more we find that it is constantly shifting, like the shoreline between the sea and the land; and those who specialize in thinking about these matters are constantly finding new ways of reminding us of this. Jonathan Foer, who edited the New American Haggadah – the traditional guidebook for the stories, songs, and ceremonies of the seder – was once asked by his son, “Is Moses a real person?” “I don’t know,” he replied, “but we’re related to him.”2 This is the ground, or perhaps I should say the shore, where the spirit that the West Indian poet Derek Walcott calls “the muse of history” dwells.3 And it is a kind of cultural commons, reflecting a sensibility widely shared around the world. It is why the muse of memory,

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Mnemosyne, was the patron of poetry in ancient Greek mythology, and why poetry in many cultures is often said to have its origins in the inscriptions and recitations of the graveyard. Loss needs a language; and history, which is always implicated in loss, gives us a sense of how storytelling can be at the same time a mode of recovery and a map of possibility. The language of such storytelling includes writing without words and performances (such as music and dance) without speech. These forms are customary within cultural communities, and through them people participate in the ceremonies of belief that sponsor their chronicles of events. One of the wisest of twentieth-century anthropologists, the Australian William Stanner, wrote about the customary forms of secular and sacred ceremony among Aboriginal peoples in Australia, specifically the dreamings of the Pitjantjatjara. “Custom is the reality,” he said, “beliefs but the shadows which custom makes on the wall.”4 These customs are the custodians of story; and story is always both virtual and actual, both then and there as well as here and now. But even as Stanner said this, other anthropologists were documenting Aboriginal customs and even the most sympathetic often assumed that when the spiritual and material practices of Aboriginal peoples had been overwhelmed by those of the majority society – which is to say, when the technologies of language and settled living and the creolization of families and communities had performed their metamorphosis and they had become “civilized” – they would cease to be Aboriginal. But on that mid-winter night in June, sharing a meal around cooking fires set in old oil drums under a clear and surprisingly cold desert sky, the conversation was about breaking free not from the technologies that many of them had made their own but from the settler stories and songs that discredited their customs, their realities, by discounting them as nostalgic curiosities rather than acknowledging them as spiritual and material covenants with the past – with their ancestors – and as functional constitutions for their future. They were the Aborigines of the land now called Australia, they insisted, with the slogan “Pay the Rent” signalling their determination to come to a responsible agreement with the settler society that was here to stay. “We don’t want to throw people off the land they live on now,” they said. “We know, all too well, how that feels. But we do need to negotiate two hundred years of back rent in order to go forward.” One of the leaders there that evening was Mick Dodson, and although others had taken back or taken on names from their tribal languages, Mick was not apologetic about

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either his Aboriginal or his Irish heritages, for they reflected the way of the world and the movement of its peoples from time immemorial. Thirty years later, Mick is still the voice of his Aboriginal people, and still working to turn the anger of black Australians into a new storyline, in a new century, told by some of the oldest people on earth. *** The story of the Beothuk belongs in this tradition of recognition and recuperation and renewal, a tradition that singing and storytelling have rendered for millennia. On another occasion, fifteen years later and on the other side of the southern hemisphere, I met three sisters – |Una, Kais, and |Abakas – and their cousin Griet, living with their families in a scrap-wood and sheet-metal house on the edge of a ragged township scattered around a rocky outcrop called Swartkop, about two hundred miles from the southern edge of the Kalahari desert.5 They were ≠Khomani, a small group of Bushmen (as they called themselves, without apology), and the language they spoke was strange even to Levi Namaseb, the linguist who was with me, whose first language is Khoekhoe from the same Khoisan family of languages. (‘|’ and ‘≠’ are two of its five click sounds, and its eight tones give it an even rarer complexity and richer musical character.) The ≠Khomani had once been a relatively large group – large for a hunter-gather society, at least – living in the surprisingly rich desert and semi-arid lands that make up the west-central highlands of what is now South Africa, north of Cape Town. The flourishing culture that had been theirs, and the relatively affluent life they led, were reminders that it might well have been the cradle of human life, where culture and craft and science and the arts began. The old name for the Bushmen was the San. After thousands of years as hunters and gatherers, they had themselves been hunted down and gathered up, essentially as enslaved labour, by the herders and farmers who came into their homeland, beginning with the migrations of Bantu-speaking people from the north hundreds of years ago and followed by the European settlers who came and found what was left of the San and their strange looks and even stranger-sounding languages. With their bows and poison arrows these hunters and gatherer were not a welcome sight to the settlers, both black and white, who placed them in the category of vermin and sought to clear them out or capture them by any means possible. The story of the San Bushmen is one of

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the grimmest stories in the history of the last millennium, a holocaust whose numbers may not match those of the Nazi regime or the slave trade or the murderous campaigns against Aboriginal people in Australia and the Americas, but whose horrors rival them all. During the mid 1990s, one of the leaders of the ≠Khomani, Petrus Vaalbooi, led a small group of Bushmen in the development of a land claim to recover their homeland in the desert, from which they had been evicted decades earlier to make way for the animals in the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park (now called the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park), becoming refugees in the townships and countryside bordering their homeland in the Northern Cape. They were encouraged in their claim by the new African National Congress government, which had been elected in 1994 and was committed to the redistribution of land following the collapse of apartheid. Having written eleven official languages into its new constitution – none of them Indigenous, partly because nobody thought they were any “genuinely” Indigenous people left in South Africa and partly because nobody much cared – the government was determined to demonstrate the Aboriginal presence in the country in other ways. Restoring at least part of the homeland of the San people of the Northern Cape was a start. Until recently, Bushmen were known mostly through the grotesque caricatures that accompanied historical accounts of the region, or because of the exotic touch they added to the tourist trade – always seeking out the “real thing” – wearing skins and making bows and arrows and necklaces to sell to tourists. David Kruiper, a traditional leader who worked alongside Petrus Vaalbooi, was one of these; he had lived with his extended family for a time in a private game reserve in the Karoo (south of the Kalahari) called Kagga Kamma, where tourists could come and meet the last of the “authentic” Bushmen. It is an old story, a story of the “last of the line” inspiring us with its unsettling conflation of lamentation and commemoration. The South African novelist Nadine Gordimer told me that in 1936, when she was a child, she went to the Johannesburg World Exposition. There she saw on display a family of Bushmen from the Kalahari, with several children the same age as her. She was moved to tears when I told her that they were the sisters |Una and Kais, and |Abakas, who had been taken from the desert by a collector-entrepreneur named Donald Bain to be put on show. “They are one of the most primitive people of the world,” read a caption in one newspaper, “whose extinction, if a reserve is not created, can scarcely be prevented.”

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By the late twentieth century, when I was there, many in southern Africa thought that man and nature had worked together rather nicely and the ≠Khomani were effectively all gone. Certainly, the places they had retreated to were not those that attracted anything other than newspaper accounts of poverty, illiteracy, and disease in the hinterland; even in the townships and farmsteads, the ≠Khomani were marginalized by blacks, whites, and (in another offensive apartheid category) coloureds alike. Their language had even been formally pronounced extinct in the 1970s by one of the most knowledgeable South African linguists of the day, Anthony Traill, when the last speaker known outside the community died; and many concluded that as the language went, so would the people – with those remaining being “inauthentic” Bushmen, since they did not speak the language. But while language may be a marker of identity, it is certainly not the only one. That said, the success of any Aboriginal land claim depends on a detailed demonstration of use and occupancy of the territory, back beyond the time that written records have been kept, and performed in traditional stories and songs; and lawyers for the ≠Khomani knew that being able to identify places and events in their ancient language would be very helpful. But, of course, that wasn’t possible, since the language was no longer spoken. One of them said nostalgically to Petrus, “It’s too bad nobody still speaks the language.” “Oma Elsie praat boesmanstal,” he replied, in the dialect of Afrikaans which he speaks. “Mum does.” Elsie Vaalbooi was the mother of the mother tongue. She was ninetyseven (in 1997), living in a township called Rietfontein on the Namibian border, and so it was there that a group went to pay their respects and to confirm that the language she spoke was in fact the original language of the ≠Khomani, a language transcribed by conscientious collectors of endangered species in the late nineteenth century, albeit in that inevitably imprecise way of any visual script as it tries to represent verbal sounds, complicated in this case by clicks and tones unfamiliar to European languages or to Arabic, the other widely dispersed written script of Africa. And indeed their language was not dead. Or at least not quite. Oma Elsie spoke it, though she thought she was the only one left alive who did so – Petrus her son certainly didn’t, nor did his children – and she expected that it would soon die with her, for she had not heard it from another human being in over thirty years. But in a gesture of faith she spoke a message into a tape recorder, sending a message to anyone who

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could hear. Fortunately, her faith was not misplaced, and fairly quickly a couple of dozen more speakers were found (including |Una, Kais, |Abakas, and Griet) following rumours about someone who spoke funny, or looked funny, or knew the old ways, or could find their way in the desert. Now, the surviving ≠Khomani are gathering together in settlements that have taken shape as part of the land-claim settlement, for some of the territory they once called home and knew by heart was restored to the ≠Khomani, with substantial allocations of land (much of it purchased by the government from the current landowners and lease-holders), special access to the park (now jointly managed by South Africa and Botswana) for the collection of medicinal plants, and financial resources. The struggle is not over, for decades of brutal marginalization have taken their toll; but the San are back. And so, precariously, is their language; but since they speak at least two others – Khoekhoe (widely spoken in Namibia) and a northern Cape dialect of Afrikaans which has been spoken there for three hundred and fifty years – they have begun to speak out in their several authentic languages about their history and their home. In customary stories. I was with |Una and Kais and |Abakas and Griet on their first return to their homeland in the desert. We visited a site near the park entrance where there was a stone marker to commemorate “The Last of the Bushmen,” the wistful or wishful thinking of an earlier generation, and probably also an attempt to provide a funeral ceremony of sorts. But this last of the Bushmen turned out to be their uncle; and here they were, the last of the last of the Bushmen – and the first of the returning San. And when we reached the place where they had once lived, I watched the four women, all in their seventies, stand on the red sand and take back the land, mapping out a precise geography of the imagination in stories and songs, turning a chronicle of the past into hope for the future ... and then hitch up their skirts and slide down the dunes as they had when they were children. And just as elegies sustain life in memory, their commitment to the stories and song of the ≠Khomani has inspired the younger generation to learn the language, and settle down country, as the Aborigines in the Australian desert say about returning to their land. Still, they know that around them hovers the ≠Khomani version of a question asked by the poet Iain Crichton-Smith about his Highland Gaelic language. “When the Highlands loses its language, will there be a Highlands? In what language would you say ‘Fhuair a’Ghaidhlig bas’ ‘Gaelic is dead’?”6 When I asked the sisters what they called their language, they looked at

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me with the pity people reserve for the really stupid. “We don’t have a name for it,” they said. “We just speak it.” |Nu means to speak. In what language would we say ‘Ng xanki ≠khoake |’aa’. ‘|Nu is dead’? *** This question, and hence any answer, touches on an important issue having to do with languages, and specifically with the relationship between speaking and writing. Many Indigenous languages do not have a written form, and for those who do not speak them they exist only in the imagination, with not even a shadowy performance on the page to give them a virtual reality. To paraphrase Bill Stanner, the custom of speech is the reality, and our devotion to writing is a belief in the shadows which speech makes on the wall. Even when there is a written form, its “correctness” is often disputed by speakers, who know instinctively that it takes a lyric sensibility and an educated imagination to generate the sounds of speech from what are often more or less meaningless doodles of a script. As Marshall McLuhan said (in The Gutenberg Galaxy), “by the meaningless sign linked to the meaningless sound we ... buil[d] the shape and meaning of the world.”7 This is where the contradictions surrounding languages and cultures, and the status or survival of the peoples who speak (or once spoke) them, emerged most dramatically, especially in the nineteenth century. One notion about language influenced attitudes towards Aboriginal peoples in a positive way during that period, as many scholars and poets took up the idea that “primitive” languages – that is, the languages of “primitive” peoples – had (to turn a later phrase of Ezra Pound’s) a “luminous particularity,” in which every word was a metaphor, the verbal trace of a moment of wonder, an encounter with what the twentieth-century philosopher Ernst Cassirer called the “momentary god” originally embodied in the word. The immediacy of this metaphoric encounter had then degenerated into a set of arbitrary codes, it was said; accordingly, Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to language as “fossil poetry,” with vitality and wonder and spiritual presence replaced by convention.8 Which is why encyclopedias in the nineteenth century always included an example of (translated) Indigenous North American speechmaking in their entries for “poetry.” And so, when the nineteenth-century philologist Richard Chenevix Trench argued that language began “not with names but with the power of naming,” and that this power had been all but lost, he was nourishing the idea that

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civilization inevitably distances itself from original – or Aboriginal – “revealed” wisdom in favour of clever expression.9 But another idea took hold in the latter half on the nineteenth century that complicated these positive associations, and their celebration of Aboriginal languages. It was the idea of “degeneration.” Beginning early in the nineteenth century, for instance, artists began associating decadence not with disease and death but with literary invention, celebrating the virtues of unhealthiness in a world dominated by the “healthiness” of materialist utility and bourgeois morality and thereby maintaining standards appropriate to what were received as the sacred values of art, and protecting these values against compromise. Thus Théophile Gautier, author of the widely read novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), described the “style of decadence” as “the ultimate utterance of the Word.”10 This celebration of the word led to a fascination with the symbol, inspiring chroniclers and photographers of the “vanishing Indians” of the Americas to choose symbolic individuals or occasions or artifacts as their subjects, turning archival recollection into artistic celebration through moments and monuments of Aboriginal life, often pictured by photographers such as Edward Curtis. Ambivalence was central to decadence and the idea of degeneration. “Progress is a comfortable disease” is a twentieth-century phrase, from a poem by e.e. cummings, but it expresses a scepticism about the idea of progress that had become rather fashionable in European thought and feeling somewhere around the eighteenth century.11 The ­nineteenth-century imagination, in turn, was enchanted by the ambiguities this introduced, often representing progress within a natural logic of growth that included decay and inevitable death. The paradoxical celebration of what the Russian poet Vyacheslav Ivanov described (in the 1920s) as “the feeling, at once oppressive and exalting, of being the last in a series”12 was applied both to degeneration or decay (which was his intention) and to progress. Much literary and artistic analysis in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turned around this uncertainty, and it was easily applicable to societies and entire cultures. In any case, the argument was seldom straightforward, mainly because nobody seemed quite sure whether mankind had advanced since the beginning of time, or regressed. Charles Darwin underlined this when he titled his book on “the origin of man and his history” The Descent of Man (1871); and one contemporary (William Inge, who later became Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London) remarked sardonically that “the Greeks prided themselves on being the degenerate

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descendants of gods, we on being the very creditable descendants of monkeys.”13 The notion of humans as an advanced animal form – either naturally evolved or divinely inspired or both – may have been received wisdom in the nineteenth century; but so was the notion of fallen man – fallen in various respects, both natural and supernatural. The representation of the so-called “savage” races as a degraded type of humanity, with Paradise long since lost rather than not yet found, implied that they had degenerated from supposedly “civilized” habits. At the same time, the affiliation of primitive peoples with animals, browsing over territory as hunters and gatherers in what was called (usually by those who wanted the territory) an “idle” use of land – rather than turning it to productive use as farmers –encouraged the notion that they might be “weaned” away from their natural habits, which were neither degraded nor domesticated, into civilized behaviour. And for the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his acolytes in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, savage nobility and regenerative simplicity were a higher order than degenerative civilized luxury. There was more than a little room for disagreement over who had descended, and from what. Which, of course, made the advocates of both sides even more strident and stubborn in their arguments. And yet, when all was said and done, one of the most familiar models of degeneration and decay was not at all ambiguous. Old age and death could never for long be the plaything of subtle minds. They were part of a reality nobody could refute; and this reality was widely observed, with the stages of growth and decay perceived to apply to corporate and cultural as well as individual and personal life. Still, the “vanishing Indian” storyline was complicated by an uncertainty about whether it was the product of environmental or hereditary determinism, and whether it was properly conceived as a process or as a force. In either case, it seemed to defy any simple-minded distinctions between scientific and moral structures. The science sometimes seemed fairly straightforward, with the physical sciences promoting its newly minted second law of thermodynamics and the concept of entropy, while the natural sciences advanced the idea of degeneration as a diminishing or reversing or perverting of the processes of generation by a declension to a lower type or by a morbid change in structure. One of its most familiar accounts was provided for the second half of the nineteenth century by Darwin and his theory of evolution; and it was inevitably within the context of evolutionary theory that many of the ideas about degeneration took shape. In his essay

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on “Zoology” written for the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1890), the distinguished Darwinian scientist E. Ray Lankester described the geological record as providing evidence of two kinds of “progress”: “progressive elaboration” and “progressive simplification,” the latter of which he called “degeneration.”14 In this storyline, hunters and gatherers – the supposedly simplest of human societies – were categorized as immobilized (usually by both environment and heredity) in a suspended degenerative state exemplified in their homogeneous – a.k.a. primitive––social conditions and personal habits. But as always with the history of ideas, we need to remember that because people used such terms as degeneration (or evolution) does not mean they knew what they meant. That was manifestly not always the case. They were often terms of rhetoric; and in the case of settler attitudes towards Aboriginal peoples, they offered convenient images for those who wanted them out of the way, both literally and figuratively. *** I want to turn to a final example of an Aboriginal society that has been discounted not because they represent either primitive or degenerate states of being, like the Aborigines of Australia or the Bushmen of South Africa, but because, like the Beothuk, they seem to have simply – or not so simply – disappeared. The fate of the Arawak and Taino settlers in the Caribbean after Europeans arrived, beginning in the fifteenth century, is often described as particularly nasty, incorrigibly brutal, and very short. Until recently, it was routinely claimed that the first peoples of the region were wiped out within a generation or two; and this still seems to be one of the few accounts shared by colonial and postcolonial storytellers, albeit for quite different reasons. But the history of the first peoples of this region, along with contemporary archaeological, sociological, geographical, historical, cultural, and linguistic evidence, certainly suggests otherwise – and it has analogies with the history of island peoples like the Beothuk farther north. As far as we know, people first settled the islands of the Caribbean around six thousand years ago. All of them must have come by boat – some paddling, some sailing, others just drifting from the mainland – gathering wild plants and ocean kelp and hunting food from the shore. Some would have set out from the mouth of the Orinoco River in what is now Venezuela; others from Central America along the Yucutan peninsula; and still others from Florida on the North American mainland,

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all of them bringing bits and pieces of their Indigenous American heritage. They were Arawak and Taino, Guanahatabey, and Carib ... but the names are misleading, for, like many Indigenous communities, they each thought of themselves simply as The People.15 When they got to the first islands of Trinidad and Tobago they couldn’t see anywhere else to go so they stayed for awhile, presumably imagining it as the new centre of their world. Then they may have heard from their dreamers and daring-doers about other islands, far beyond the horizon – eighty miles across the sea, as it happened; so when they had had enough of life on that first island, or enough of their fellow islanders, or were restless for adventure, or had run short of things they needed or wanted, they set off again, rowing and sailing and drifting with the currents until one day they reached Grenada. From there they could see another island, and another, and another, in an arc stretching a thousand miles that we now call the eastern Caribbean. These people were used to the ways in which rivers and mountains offered plants and animals to them, and as they travelled they continued to harvest the shore food that had been part of their diet for centuries. But fishing in the open sea offered another livelihood, where hunting and gathering required new knowledge and skills and a surrender to different natural and supernatural forces; and these soon became part of their consciousness and their culture. Some of them returned to the first island to rejoin those who had remained, and a few went all the way back to the mainland they had come from. But most made these outlying islands of the archipelago their home and stayed there for thousands of years. They found oysters, mussels, conch, and crab along the shoreline and in the mangrove swamps, and larger species, including lobsters two feet long and weighing over thirty pounds, on the sand, among the seagrass, and on the rocky beaches. They took to the water for fish and they ventured inland, finding some animals and plants they knew about and others they had never seen before. And slowly they brought their hunting and harvesting heritages into harmony. They couldn’t see any more islands from where they were now. But once again they heard stories from outcasts and adventurers, as well as from their tellers of tall tales, and when they were out fishing they sometimes saw curious clouds or strange birds or unusual currents or unfamiliar leaves floating on the surface, signalling something. It must have taken faith or fortitude or foolishness or a combination of all of these to head out to sea once more; but eventually some of them did,

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and when they reached the islands of Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti-Quisqueya (Hispaniola), and Borinquén (Puerto Rico), they met people who had arrived there from the central and north American mainland. Creolization, or what one Caribbean scholar calls transculturation, began early, as it probably always does with human societies; and the geographies of some of the islands were particularly congenial for both migration of new continental peoples and their integration into existing communities. As L. Antonio Curet suggests, “the Caribbean has always been an arena of interaction, integration, contestation and amalgamation, leading to the emergence through the archipelago of truly ‘creole’ cultures”16 – much like that which has emerged over the past millennium on the island of Newfoundland. And as in Newfoundland, though over a longer period, the story of settlement in the Caribbean was not over quickly. It seldom is with islands, where comings and goings are facts of life. After several thousand years, new settlers with new ways of living sailed from the American mainland to the Caribbean islands around 500 BCE. They cultivated crops and resided in communal dwellings and village centres rather than seasonal hunting and fishing camps. They built houses to last for generations rather than shelters that were abandoned after a few years, farming the land as well as harvesting the sea and creating sophisticated ceremonies that surprised both the current residents and the later arrivals. Many of the islands were mountainous, and some of the new settlers discovered agricultural possibilities and established political strongholds in the highland interiors where the resources were plentiful and the competition scarce. They expanded the existing traditions of weaving and basket-making and ceramics, developing forms of dance and music and cooking that caught the attention of the Europeans and Africans who came a thousand years later; and they became known as the Arawak – from aru, their word for cassava. Over time, the culture of the Arawak developed in distinctive ways on different islands of the Caribbean; and on the islands of what we now call the Greater Antilles unique human cultures and languages emerged, with arts and crafts and games that surprised other islanders, even those relatively close by. The people became known as Taino; and their stories provided new island cosmologies and new understandings, both scientific and religious, of natural forces such as the hurricane – a Taino word – as well as new technologies like the canoe and the barbecue and tobacco, all now identified in words that come from the Taino language. They called themselves lukku cairi, which meant island

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people, and their word for island comes down to us as quay or key, as in the Thames Quay or Key West. By the time the Spanish settlers arrived in the late fifteenth century, several thousand Taino lived on the islands of Puerto Rico, Cuba, Hispaniola, and Jamaica, their harbours home to seafarers, their valleys busy with agricultural and ceremonial activities, and their mountains providing hiding places and safe havens. Inter-island commerce, and contact with mainland peoples not only for trade and commerce but for social and political exchanges, was probably much more common than is generally acknowledged. The distinctive character of Taino culture was immediately obvious to the Spaniards and persuaded them that this was a complex and sophisticated civilization. Scholar Jalil Sued-Badillo has recently characterized their contribution in this way: “The Tainos’ main social achievements came in their effective and ingenious management of their environment. Tropical islands are not paradisiacal; the welfare of their inhabitants depends upon their ability to utilize diverse resources efficiently. The Tainos had evolved from horticulture or food gardening to intensive and diversified agriculture with strategies including raised fields, mound planting, crop rotation, water canals, fish traps, and slash-and-burn techniques ... Taino root crops, as well as cultigens such as maize, tobacco, peanuts, native fruits and herbs, drugs, and beverages, are still common in the modern Caribbean.”17 Indeed, there is evidence that Taino culture – well beyond agriculture – continued to inform life long after the arrival of the Spanish and English settlers; and even though as a separate people they probably lasted only about a century before succumbing to disease and the depredations of mining and the sugar-cane agribusiness, both friendly and unfriendly intercourse with the new settlers and with the escaped Africans in the “maroon” strongholds in their mountains resulted in a new creole culture, one that was indelibly marked and recognizably shaped by the Taino heritage of the islands. As Patricia Penn Hilden has pointed out, the word “mulatto” was defined in several eighteenthcentury dictionaries, including the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1771, as “a name given in the Indies to those who are begotten by a Negro man on an Indian woman, or an Indian man on a Negro woman.”18 Also, as Lynne A. Guitar notes, “the Spanish crown understood that it could position its own people among the nitainos through intermarriage. This was, after all, a traditional method in both European and Taino politics; hence the crown did not punish – and instead encouraged – those Spaniards who went to Indian villages to marry indias”19 ... which is to say,

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Tainos. It is inconceivable that the biological inheritance of the Taino is not much more widespread in the Caribbean than many realize, or admit. And not just in the mountain fastnesses, for the Taino skill at sea would have been a valuable commodity in the exchange of labour and capital that defined the new order. Visiting Jamaica on his second voyage in 1494, Christopher Columbus described the Indigenous people in his “letter announcing the discovery of the new world” as “not ignorant, but rather of keen wit, and they sail all those seas.”20 The legacy of these people, and their role in the social and cultural genealogy of the Caribbean, is something that has not been widely celebrated, masked like the legacy of many other Indigenous peoples by a chronicle of degeneration and disappearance and death. Of course, the story is not a simple one, as rivalries and resentments and local solidarities resulted in the stereotyping of Indigenous groups such as the Caribs in the eastern Caribbean, who were routinely characterized and effectively criminalized as cruel, warlike cannibals – the word itself comes from Caniba, another word for Carib; by contrast, the name Taino means “noble.” Which they were; but they were also fiercely proud of their culture, accustomed to the land and sea to which the settlers came, and resisted encroachment with guerilla warfare and various forms of subversive engagement. And their ultimate inheritance, like that of many Aboriginal (and most other) peoples around the world, was essentially creole. The story of Taino migration and mobility is, in its way, a template for the story of Newfoundland, to whose rocky shores Scandinavians had come some five hundred years before Columbus, taking up residence on the northern tip of the island at L’Anse aux Meadows, the earliest known European settlement in the Americas. But Newfoundland, and indeed this very site, had also been visited centuries before that by the Dorset people, who hunted and fished down the North American Atlantic coast from their home on the Arctic islands. In fact, a succession of Aboriginal peoples had occupied Newfoundland for millennia, from the early Paleo-Eskimo all the way to the Beothuk of Algonquian heritage, who were living there when John Cabot sailed by in 1497. And the later interactions between the Beothuk and Mi’kmaq and Innu traders and travellers – both friendly and not so friendly, as has been the way of peoples forever – would have strained and strengthened Beothuk culture in complex and sometimes contradictory ways, ways that are contested by those dedicated to the purity of race or ethnicity but offer a new way of understanding Beothuk history and of recuperating the heritage of Beothuk people. Creolization is the story of civilization. It is

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the Beothuk story. And it needs to be told now in a way that represents both the presence of the past and the possibilities for the future. *** There is no single person who is lamented as the “last of the Taino.” And thankfully, the Aborigines in Australia and the ≠Khomani in South Africa are still with us and their languages still spoken, although the vitality of their communities and health of their languages remain uncertain. With Shanawdithit in Newfoundland – and with Truganini in Tasmania, as Fiona Polack points out in her chapter – we have individuals, notably women, who are identified as the last of the Beothuk and Tasmanian Aboriginal people; and whether that is precisely true, in their death they have become symbolic of the imaginative – and the real, continuing – life of their people. It is a life that can be recovered and renewed by these and other ancestors from the past, who represent a future in the present day to all those who affirm Beothuk heritage, and indeed to Aboriginal people all over the world. They are what the Tlingit would call shuká, offering inspiration for believable storytelling. Perhaps that can be their legacy; and if so, it will be a noble one indeed. NOTES 1 For the Dauenhauers’ discussion of shuká, see their introduction to Nora Marks and Richard Dauenhauer, eds., Haa Tuwunáagu Yís, for Healing Our Spirit: Tlingit Oratory (Seattle: University of Washington Press 1990), 19. See also their volume Haa Shuká, Our Ancestors: Tlingit Oral Narratives (Seattle: University of Washington Press 1987). 2 Jonathan Safran Foer, “Why a Haggadah?” New York Times Sunday Review, 1 April 2012. 3 Derek Walcott, “The Muse of History,” in John Hearne, ed., Carifesta Forum (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica 1976), 111–28. 4 W.E.H. Stanner, “The Dreaming,” in The Dreaming and Other Essays (Black Inc. Agenda 2009), 63. 5 I tell this story, from a somewhat different perspective, in my book, If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground (Toronto: Knopf 2003), 107–14. 6 Iain Crichton Smith asks this question, and others too, in his poem “Shall Gaelic Die?” in Selected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet 1985), 113–18.

Coda 361 7 Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1962), 50. 8 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1883), 26. The discussion of degeneration which follows draws on my chapter, “Images of Degeneration: Turnings and Transformations,” in J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman, eds., Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress (New York: Columbia University Press 1985), 263–89, and my article, “An Anatomy of Cultural Melancholy,” Journal of the History of Ideas 42, no. 4 (1981): 691–705. 9 Richard Chenevix Trench, On the Study of Words (London: W.J. Parker 1851), 24. 10 Théophile Gautier, from an essay on Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (1857). 11 e.e. cummings, “pity this busy monster, manunkind,” in Complete Poems, vol. 2, ed. G.J. Fermage (London: McGibbon and Kee 1968), 554. 12 Vyacheslav Ivanov, “Correspondence from Opposite Corners,” qtd. in Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press 1968), 75. 13 W.R. Inge, “The Idea of Progress” (Romanes lecture, Oxford, 27 May 1920). 14 E. R. Lankester, Encylopaedia Britannica, 9th ed., s.v. “zoology”; see also, Lankester, Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (London: Macmillan 1880), 28–9. 15 For a fuller account, see articles by Samuel M. Wilson, Ricardo E. Alegría, Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, and José Juan Arrom in Fatima Bertcht et al., eds., Taino: Pre-Columbian Art and Culture from the Caribbean (New York: Monacelli Press 1997), See also my discussion in J. Edward Chamberlin, Island: How Islands Transform the World (New York: Blue Bridge 2013), 1–21, which is itself indebted to this remarkable exhibition catalogue. 16 L. Antonio Curet, “The Earliest Settlers,” in Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano, eds., The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2011), 67. 17 Jalil Sued-Badillo, “From Tainos to Africans in the Caribbean,” in ibid., 102–3. 18 Encyclopaedia Britannica, s.v. “mulatto,” qtd. in Patricia Penn Hilden, “Hunting North American Indians in Barbados” (conference paper at Colloquium on the Socio-Economic Legacy of Slavery, 24 May 2000). 19 Lynne A. Guitar, “Negotiations of Conquest,” in ibid., 125. 20 Christopher Columbus, “Letter from Columbus Announcing the Discovery of the New World,” in An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians, ed. Fray Ramon Pané, trans. Susan C. Griswold (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1999), 43.

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Contributors

Christopher Aylward is program director and associate professor of film studies at Ryerson University in Toronto, where he specializes in writing for film, documentary research, and production methodologies. As a filmmaker, he has worked in several African countries, including Rwanda (Shooting in Rwanda), Zambia (Red Flower), and Malawi (Water Is Life), as well as with Native communities in Newfoundland and Labrador (Conne River: Paving the Way). Aylward’s recent research explores the historical, archaeological, and Native oral-history narratives of Newfoundland’s Beothuk through the lens of narratology and historical narrative theory. He is currently preparing his monograph The Beothuk Story for publication, and is also working on a documentary film concerning the Beothuk that features the oral history of Native people throughout Atlantic Canada. Patrick Brantlinger is James Rudy Professor Emeritus of English at Indiana University. A former editor of Victorian Studies, his books include Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1900 (1990), Dark Vanishings: Nineteenth-Century Discourse about the Extinction of Primitive Races (2003), Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies (2009), and Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians (2011). J. Edward Chamberlin is University Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. He was senior research associate with the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, and has worked extensively on native land claims in Canada, the United States, Africa, and Australia. His books include The Harrowing of Eden: White Attitudes towards Native Americans (1975), Come Back to

364 Contributors

Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies (1993), If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground (2003), Horse: How the Horse Has Shaped Civilizations (2006), and Island: How Islands Transform the World (2013). Beverley Diamond was the first Canada Research Chair in Ethnomusicology at Memorial University, where she founded the Research Centre for Music, Media and Place, and is now professor emeritus. She has worked with Aboriginal musicians in Canada as well as Sami musicians in Scandinavia. Most recently her work has focused on issues of Indigenous modernity, including intellectual property in relation to traditional protocols, the impact of new technologies and communication modes, and the ways contemporary genres and styles of music have been deployed to articulate political and social concerns. Other research has focused on feminist (ethno)musicology, the social construction of audio technologies, and Canadian music historiography, particularly in relation to cultural diversity. Among her many publications is her most recent book, Native American Music in Eastern North America (2008), in the Global Music series of Oxford University Press. She was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 2008 and was awarded a Trudeau Fellowship in 2009 and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s 2014 Gold Medal. Maura Hanrahan (Mi’kmaw/British Isles) is an associate professor in the Native American Studies Program at the University of Lethbridge and an adjunct professor at Memorial University’s Grenfell Campus, where she is cross-appointed to both the Humanities Program and the Environmental Policy Institute. Maura was Memorial University’s first special adviser to the president for Aboriginal affairs. She has an interdisciplinary PhD from the London School of Economics (LSE), where she was a Rothermere Fellow and an LSE Graduate Fellow. Maura is the author/co-author/editor of eleven books in several genres and a dozen peer-reviewed articles in academic journals (including Native Studies Review, Canadian Journal of Public Health, Food, Culture and Society, and others). A member of Splet’k Mi’kmaq First Nation, Newfoundland, Maura also has ancestry from the British Isles. Maura worked with Indigenous organizations in several provinces and at the national level for many years on land claims, health and education policy, and community development. John Harries received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2002 and now teaches with the department of social anthropology at

Contributors 365

the same university. Since 2006 he has been working on a research project, funded in part by the British Academy and the International Council of Canadian Studies, concerning the ways in which the people of contemporary Newfoundland remember the Beothuk. This research has given rise to a number of articles and a proposal for a monograph to be published under the title Beothuk Ghosts. His research and writing explores the relationship between materiality, memory, and the politics of indigenization in the postcolonial context. This interest has led him to become a founding member of the “bones collective,” an international network of academics, activist, and artists who are interested in the affective presence and emotive materiality of human remains. Saqamaw Mi’sel Joe (Mi’kmaw) comes from a long line of Saqamaw or chiefs in the Mi’kmaq territory. Educated in Mi’kmaq traditions, Chief Joe left the reserve as a young man but returned in 1973 and became involved in band government politics, first as a councillor and, after the death of his uncle, Chief William Joe, in 1982, as traditional saqamaw and the Newfoundland district chief for the Mi’kmaq Grand Council. Saqamaw Joe is also the spiritual leader of his people and has lectured on native medicines and traditional healing practices at several international alternative-medicine conferences. He led the community of Conne River when it hosted the 1996 and 2000 International Healing Conferences at Conne River. Mi’sel Joe is a member of the Atlantic Policy Congress, the First Nations Trust Fund, the Newfoundland Museum Advisory Committee, the Aboriginal Capacity and Development Research Centre, and the National Aboriginal Advisory Group of Heritage Canada. He also holds a community seat at the United Nations (Human Rights). In May 2004 he was made an honorary doctor of laws, honoris causa, by Memorial University. The degree was awarded in recognition of his contribution to the economic, social, and political development of the Mi’kmaq people of Newfoundland and Labrador. Bonita Lawrence (Mi’kmaw) is an associate professor at York University, where she teaches Indigenous studies. Her recent publications include Fractured Homeland: Algonquin Identity and Federal Recognition in Ontario (2012); “Reclaiming Ktaqumkuk: Land and Mi’kmaq Identity in Newfoundland” in Speaking for Ourselves: Environmental Justice in Canada (2009); “Legislating Identity: Colonialism, Land, and Indigenous Legacies,” in SAGE Handbook of Identities (Sage Publications, 2010); “Indigenous Peoples and Black People in Canada: Settlers or ­Allies?” (with

366 Contributors

Zainab Amadahy) in Breaching the Colonial Contract: Anti-Colonialism in the US and Canada (2010); “Indigenous and Restorative Justice: Reclaiming Humanity and Community” (with John Usher) in International Perspectives on Restorative Justice in Education (2011); and “Decolonizing AntiRacism” (with Enakshi Dua) in Social Justice (2005). She is the author of “Real” Indians and Others: Mixed-Blood Urban Native People and Indigenous Nationhood (2004). With Kim Anderson, she has co-edited a collection of Native women’s scholarly and activist writing entitled Strong Women Stories: Native Vision and Community Survival (2003). She has also guestedited a special issue of Atlantis, “Indigenous Women: The State of Our Nation” (2005). She is a traditional singer who continues to sing with groups in Kingston and Toronto at Native social and political gatherings. Lianne C. Leddy (Anishinaabe) is an assistant professor of Indigenous studies at Wilfrid Laurier University where she teaches Indigenous and Canadian history. Her previous work has focused on uranium extraction in Anishinaabek territory and her monograph, The Serpent River Anishinaabek and Uranium Mining: A Study of Cold War Colonialism, will be published soon by the University of Toronto Press. She is currently working on a SSHRC-supported project that examines the community-based political roles of Indigenous women in the post-war period. Leddy is also the author of “Interviewing Nookomis and Other Reflections of an Indigenous Historian,” which appeared in Oral History Forum d’histoire orale (2010); and “Poisoning the Serpent: Uranium Exploitation and the Serpent River First Nation, 1953–88” in Empires of Nature: Nature of Empires (2013). Elizabeth (Tshaukuesh) Penashue (Innu) is an Innu elder and cultural and environmental activist. Her work has been recognized by a National Aboriginal Achievement Award, an honorary doctorate from Memorial University, and numerous film and radio interviews and profiles, newspaper and magazine articles, and public consultations (including her testifying before the International Human Rights Tribunal in the Hague). She has published stories and articles in Them Days: Stories of Early Labrador and It’s Like the Legend (Nympha Byrne and Camille Fouillard, eds.). She is currently working with Elizabeth Yeoman on a book based on the diaries she began in the 1980s during her involvement in the Innu protests against NATO and has been writing ever since. Fiona Polack is an associate professor in the Department of English at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Her ongoing research

Contributors 367

focuses on conceptions of environment, history, and belonging in former settler colonies, and draws especially close parallels between Australia and Canada. She has published on these topics in venues including the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, English Studies in Canada, 19th-Century Contexts, Australasian-Canadian Studies, and the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. She is also currently engaged in a new project, “Cold Water Oil,” on cultural figurations of the North Atlantic oil industry. Daryl Pullman is a philosopher/bioethicist in the Faculty of Medicine at Memorial University with cross appointments to the Department of Philosophy and the School of Nursing. He also serves as a clinical-ethics consultant for the Provincial Health Ethics Network for Newfoundland and Labrador. Daryl has been appointed to numerous national and international ethics bodies and is involved in a broad range of interdisciplinary health-research projects. He has published widely on a variety of issues in research and clinical ethics. Lisa Rankin is professor of archaeology at Memorial University. She specializes in interpreting the pre-contact and early-colonial-period interactions between Aboriginal groups and Europeans in northeastern North America and is currently the primary researcher on an interdisciplinary Community-University Research Alliance project titled “Understanding the Past to Build the Future.” This research unites scholars with communities from NunatuKavut in southern Labrador in efforts to interpret the complex interplay of culture, economics, and geography that contributed to the development of the Inuit-Metis people who reside in this region today. Cynthia Sugars is professor of English at the University of Ottawa where she specializes in Canadian literature and postcolonial theory. She is the author of numerous essays on Canadian literature and ­Atlantic-Canadian fiction and is the editor of four collections of essays: Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism (2004), Home-Work: Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature (2004), Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic (2009), and, most recently, Canadian Literature and Cultural Memory with Eleanor Ty (2014). She has co-edited a two-volume historical anthology of Canadian literature with Laura Moss, entitled Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts (2009), and edited The Oxford Handbook of

368 Contributors

Canadian Literature (2015). She is editor of the scholarly journal Studies in Canadian Literature. Jocelyn Thorpe is an associate professor of women’s and gender studies at the University of Manitoba. Her research focuses on the history and legacies of colonialism in Canada. Her current project, “Lost Encounters in the New-Found-Land,” explores the history of present-day relationships among Indigenous and non-Indigenous Newfoundlanders and the territory they have come to share. She is author of Temagami’s Tangled Wild: Race, Gender, and the Making of Canadian Nature (2012), and co-editor with Stephanie Rutherford and L. Anders Sandberg of Methodological Challenges in Nature-Culture and Environmental History Research (2016). Elizabeth Yeoman is professor of education at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Her teaching and scholarly publications are about language, culture, history, and memory. Her poetry and travel writing have appeared in literary journals and she has contributed media pieces to the Globe and Mail, the Women’s Television Network, and CBC Radio. She is currently working with Labrador Innu elder and environmental and cultural activist Elizabeth Penashue on a SSHRC-funded project to produce a book and related cross-media curriculum materials based on Elizabeth Penashue’s diaries.

Index

Abenaki, 25n26, 34, 46, 255, 340n48 Aborigines Protection Society, 204 African Americans, 258, 302, 318nn27–8, 357 African National Congress (ANC), 349 Afrikaans, 350, 351 agency, 60, 109, 113n51; Indigenous, 14, 19, 78, 177, 178, 181–3, 191, 194nn30–1, 195n39, 198n86, 200, 218n50, 236, 250–2, 262, 266nn22–3, 327 Agnew, Vanessa, 100, 111n23, 112n30 Ahenakew, Cash, 87, 92n38 Aldama, Arturo, 301, 317nn20–1 Algonquian (Algonkian); 33, 45, 58, 82–4, 211, 137–9, 150n16, 359 Algonquin Nation, 308–10, 318n36 American Civil War, 248, 456 American War of Independence (American Revolution), 309 Anderson, Ian, 331, 337n9, 343n77 Andreotti, Vanessa, 87, 92n38 Anishinaabe, 25n37, 53n85, 203, 213n6, 257, 307 Ankersmit, Frank, 101, 112n33 anthropology, 16, 18, 47, 49n16, 69, 96, 111n27, 113n51, 143, 153,

157, 158, 159, 161, 163, 164, 166, 170n23, 172n48, 196n56, 201, 220, 228, 236, 247, 292n64, 301, 304, 318n33, 345, 347 antimodernism, 271–3, 276, 286n8, 287n17, 290n48 apartheid (South Africa), 349, 350 appropriation, 4, 14, 292n63; of culture, 4, 67, 70, 153, 169n6, 172n48; of human remains, 153, 161, 168, 172n57, 173n68; of land, 64, 67, 166, 297, 313 Arawak, 355–7 archaeology, 12–14, 16, 19, 76, 85, 88–9, 102, 110n2, 120, 135, 138, 146, 148, 150, 177–98, 200, 201, 220, 234, 236, 290n51, 333, 344n88, 355; bioarcheaology, 152–73 Aristotle, 299 Army Corps of Engineers, 163 Ashini, Daniel, 83 Assiniwi, Bernard, 59, 328, 341n58 Augustine, Stephen, 258, 268n57 Australia (see also Tasmania): comparison with Canada, 324–32; genocide, 144, 151n37, 349; government, 323, 332; Indigenous

370 Index cultural practices, 336n1, 347–8; Indigenous resilence and survival, 20–1, 321, 324, 332, 345, 351, 360; memory studies, 51n57; “race war,” 43, 141–3, 149, 151n34; racial “classification,” 144, 304–5, 355; settler culture, 22n7, 33, 38, 41, 50n29, 113n45, 295n93, 323–4, 333–4, 337n9, 337n12, 342n66; as terra nullius, 305, 318n33; violence against Indigenous women, 339n31 Australian Broadcasting Corporation (Australian Broadcasting Commission), 335, 344n92 Aylward, Christopher, 12, 18, 19, 24n19, 80, 91n9, 117, 193n11, 195n44, 198n105, 220, 286n7, 363 Badger Brook (Badger’s Brook), 230, 257 Bagehot, Walter, 135 Bain, Donald, 349 Baker, George, 40 Ballantyne, Tony, 13, 28n63 Banner, Stuart, 305, 318n33 Bantu peoples, 144–6, 348. See also Zulu and Xhosa Barrett, Peyton, 47 Barrow, John, 34, 292n64 Basques, 139, 318n27 Bathurst, Lord Henry, 204 Baudrillard, Jean, 98, 111n8 Beaches (archaeological complex), 184, 186, 187, 197n69, 242n89 Beaumont, 102 Beckel, Annamarie, 59, 328, 341n58 Becker, Allienne, 145 Beothuk: continuing presence, 101–9, 168, 331, 346, 348, 360;

impact of European colonialism, 4, 5, 7, 21, 37, 76, 134, 137, 144, 149, 180, 188–9, 200, 202–3, 270, 302–3, 325; isolation, 3, 58, 138, 180–1, 200, 251; language, 17, 35, 44, 55–71, 84; origins, 15, 54, 139, 187, 233; relations with Europeans, 6, 13–14, 17, 38, 60, 63, 65, 67, 70, 95, 118, 134–5, 154, 160, 178, 180–2, 190, 203, 211–12, 220, 222–8, 230–2, 235, 297, 301, 305, 323, 325–6, 329, 359; relations with other Indigenous groups, 7, 10–12, 15, 18, 20, 34, 37, 42–3, 45–8, 58, 76, 78, 80, 83–6, 89, 117–29, 133–5, 137, 160, 162, 165, 190, 211, 230, 232–6, 251–2, 263, 277, 359; remains and archaeological findings, 152–69, 177–98, 220, 333; representations of, 40–1, 44, 59, 88, 96, 184, 200–3, 270–71, 275–85, 321, 332, 334, 336, 348; romanticization, 33, 45, 69, 71, 283, 331; survival (resilience), 7, 10, 11, 15, 18, 20, 36, 125, 128, 162, 183, 188–90, 192, 247, 316, 348; use of red ochre, 14, 96, 123, 139, 248, 267n48 Beothuk Institute, 17, 33, 38–40, 43, 46–7, 49n11, 51n52; See also Beothuk Institution Beothuk Institution, 6, 17, 25n28, 34–5, 50n23, 135, 155, 202, 204–6, 211, 225, 277, 279, 328. See also Beothuk Institute Beothuk Interpretation Centre, 39, 40, 51n55, 106, 112n39 Beothuk and Micmac (Speck), 19, 24n21, 27n55, 52n66, 110n2, 131n10, 131n12, 133, 149n6, 192n2, 220, 228, 230–6, 241n53, 241n61,

Index 371 241n64, 241n67, 242n71, 242n75, 242n76, 242n81, 243n91, 247–9, 257, 263nn1–3, 264n4, 264n7, 266n20, 267n48, 267n51, 268n58, 268n67, 292n64 Beothucks or Red Indians, The (Howley), 12, 19, 25n23, 25n25, 25n28, 25n30, 49n12, 50n21, 58, 73, 110n3, 130n5, 131nn5–6, 146, 150nn10–12, 150nn16–17, 150n19, 150n22, 170nn10–11, 170n13, 192n2, 193n10, 198n100, 200, 212n1, 220, 222–5, 237nn5–7, 238nn23–4, 239nn26–33, 240nn34–43, 240n49, 241n63, 241n66, 242nn69– 70, 242n75, 279, 280, 292n65, 292n68, 292n76, 317n24, 339n29, 339n36, 340nn46–7, 340n49, 340n52 Berkhofer, Robert F., 202, 215n16, 218n50 Berlin Conference (1885), 146 Binnema, Theodore, 203, 216n21 Black, S.M., 159, 170n9, 170n12, 170n15 Blackfoot Confederacy, 311 Bland, John, 24n22, 35, 131n5 Bobtail (Hobbema) Band, 311 Boer (Afrikaner), 140, 144 Bonavista, 35, 39, 189, 196n58, 211, 242n89 Bond Head, Sir Francis, 203, 216n21 Bonwick, James, 142, 143, 151n32, 330, 342n74, 343n76 Boss, Noel, 43, 52n70 Botwood, 112n39, 118 Boyce, George, 148, 151n47 Boyd, Colleen, 54, 71n3 Boyd’s Cove, 17, 23n10, 33, 39, 76, 77, 84, 86–7, 89, 106, 112n39, 187–9, 218n57

Brantlinger, Patrick, 14, 18, 43, 65, 74n46, 130n1, 133, 150n18, 192n6, 201, 202, 277, 286n7, 291n58, 298, 316n2, 338n21, 342n67 Briffett, Frances, 52n67, 130n1, 133, 135, 149n7 British Columbia Treaty Process, 315 Brock, Sir Isaac, 207 Brody, Hugh, 80, 90n3 Brown, Bill, 98, 111n11 Brown, Jennifer S.H., 12, 28n57, 29n72, 213n4, 214n14 Brownlie, Robin, 207, 217n45, 251, 266nn22–4 Bryant, Darren, 284, 296n102 Bryant, William Cullen, 147 Buchan, David, 6, 63, 64, 134, 137, 225, 230–1, 241n63, 278, 279, 292, 295, 317n24 Budgel, Richard, 12, 22n6, 27n54, 72n9, 113n45, 171n30, 173n65, 213n2, 218n55, 277, 290n47, 290n59, 293n84 Buggey, Susan, 47, 53n93 Burgeo, 118 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 146 Burton, Antoinette, 13, 28n63 Bushmen, 137, 144–5, 348, 349–351, 355. See also San Byrne, Allan, 275–6, 286n8, 288n31, 288n33, 289nn38–9, 289n43, 289nn45–7, 290n40 Cabot 500, 38–9, 44, 51n47, 53n78 Cabot, John, 4–5, 39, 51n46, 199, 318n27, 359 Campbell, David, 36 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 23n10, 27n49, 52n72, 52n75, 73n22, 77, 87, 90n5, 92nn39–40,

372 Index 112n41, 161, 169n4, 173n73, 212, 219n61, 270, 284, 285n4, 294n88, 294n88, 296n100, 320n68; Canada, A People’s History, 59, 73n22, 270, 284, 296n100, 296n102 Canadian constitution, 256; Constitution Act (1982), 256, 311 Canadian Museum of History (Canadian Museum of Civilization), 152, 161, 171n38 Canning, Desmond, 105, 108, 110n1 Cape Breton, 28n71, 120, 205, 241n54, 268n53, 277 Caplin Cove, 102–3 Carib, 356, 359 Caribbean: Indigenous resilience, 21, 355–9, 361nn15–17; slavery, 302–3 Carignan, Paul, 196n58, 234, 242n89 Carson, William, 35–6, 50n22, 50n25 Cartwright, George, 223 Cartwright, John, 6, 104, 105, 138, 211, 224, 237n12, 238n23, 239n26 Cassirer, Ernst, 352 Catlin, George, 19, 203 Chafe, Paul, 22n6, 71, 72n9, 74n72 Chamberlin, J. Edward, 14, 21, 215n18, 338n21, 345, 361n8, 361n15 Charles Brook, 103 Chautauqua entertainment circuit, 254 Chenevix Trench, Richard, 352, 361n9 Cherokee, 36, 50n32, 50nn33–6, 172n46 Chicago’s World Fairs, 254, 261, 267n37 Chippewa, 147, 309 Christian, Alex, 314 Christianity, 137, 206, 234, 257, 307, 341n61; missionaries, 195n47, 203, 216n22, 239n31, 255, 278, 292n66, 307, 309

Clark, Penney, 284, 296n102 class, 51n45, 135, 142, 210, 215n15, 271–3, 278, 323 Claxton-Oldfield, Stephen, 45, 53n80 Clements, Nicholas, 323, 328, 338n17 Clifford, James, 57, 73n14 Clinch, Rev. John, 58 Cloud of Bone (Morgan) 22n6, 36, 50n26, 54, 55, 56, 59, 67–70, 72n8, 73n31, 74nn53–69, 344n100 Cochrane Smith, Fanny, 321, 322, 336n1, 338n20 Columbia River, 163, 314 Columbus, Christopher, 4, 27n50, 217n50, 298, 302, 359, 361n20 Colville Reservation, 314–15 Colville-Umatilla Confederacy, 164 commemoration, 100, 111n24; of Beothuks, 16, 33, 39, 40, 42, 48, 76, 77, 89; of First World War, 42; of Indigenous peoples, 17, 40, 47, 48, 76, 77, 83, 86, 89, 349, 351; of Jews, 88, 89; of settler peoples, 39, 41; of War of 1812, 207 Confederation (Canadian); inclusion of BC, 314; inclusion of NL, 10, 11, 26n41, 48n3, 85, 91n20, 218n56, 291n53, 313, 319n55 Connell Szasz, Margaret, 326, 340n42 Conne River (Miawpukek), 11, 33, 117, 118, 123, 124, 128, 131n9, 132n14, 161, 241n60, 291n53, 313 Cook, James, 305 Cook, Michael, 59 Cook, Thomas, 321, 336n4 Cooper, Garrick, 87, 92n38 Cooper, James Fenimore, 148, 203; Last of the Mohicans, 19, 148, 203 Cormack, William, 3, 6, 8, 19, 22n5, 25n24, 34, 35, 42, 43, 49n8, 49n9,

Index 373 53n85, 57, 135, 153, 155, 156, 200, 201, 204, 216nn28–9, 224, 225, 239, 277, 292n65, 324, 325, 327, 340, 342 Cow Head (archaeological complex), 184–6, 195nn48–9, 196nn50–1, 196nn55–7, 196n63 Crate, Joan, 59, 60, 62, 73 Cree, 25n37, 53n85, 82, 168, 293n85, 311, 319n50 creolization, 92n33, 347, 357, 359 Crichton-Smith, Iain, 351, 360n6 Cruikshank, Julie, 44, 53n79 Crummey, Michael, 22n6, 37, 51n40, 54–6, 59, 62, 65, 67, 70, 72n5n9, 73nn32–4, 73– 4nn37–45, 74nn47– 52, 72n70, 290n47; River Thieves 22n6, 37, 51n40, 54–6, 59, 62–7, 72n5, 72n9, 73n32, 73nn37–45, 74nn47–52, 74n70, 290n47 Cull, William, 35, 224 cummings, e.e., 353, 361n11 Curet, L. Antonio, 357, 361n16 Curtis, Edward, 353 Dalton, Mary, 22n6, 50n29, 55, 62, 70, 72, 103, 113nn45–6, 290n47, 332, 343n83 Darwin, Charles, 3, 21n4, 144, 330, 353–5, 354, 361n14; On the Origin of Species, 330 Dauenhauer, Richard, 346, 360n1 Davis Inlet, 53n80, 78 Dearborn, Henry A.S., 256. de Certeau, Michel, 3, 21n3, 99, 105, 111n19, 250, 265n16 Defoe, Daniel, 3; Robinson Crusoe, 3 Deloria, Philip J., 214n10, 290n48, 333, 344n87 Demasduit (Mary March), 6, 13, 23n10, 25n37, 35, 58, 62, 65–7, 84,

87, 112n39, 112n41, 127, 137, 152–5, 157, 159, 160, 161, 165–7, 169n3, 170n9, 170n12, 170n15, 171n31, 201, 203, 208–10, 216n23, 217n47, 224, 226–7, 231–2, 281, 282, 325, 336, 344n89 Dene, 86 Densmore, Frances, 261 Derrida, Jacques, 98–9, 105, 111n16, 111n18, 113n48 Des Barres, A.W., 204–6, 217nn35–6 Diamond, Beverley, 12, 14, 20, 27n51, 49n16, 242n85, 260, 263n2, 336n2, 341n63 Dickason, Olive, 215n14, 216n20, 299, 317n10 Dictionary of Newfoundland English (Story, Kirwin, Widdowson, eds.), 53n77, 66 Dippie, Brian, 147–8, 151n45 Disraeli, Benjamin, 139–40, 150n24 Dodson, Mick, 347 Dománska, Ewa, 105, 111n10, 113n49 Dominion Atlantic Railway, 258 Drew, Tammy, 126, 131n13 Duckworth, Sir John, 63, 278 East India Company, 142 Edensor, Tim, 109, 111nn27–8, 112n29, 113n55 Eliot, George, 141 Elkin, A.P., 143, 151n35 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 352, 361n8 The Emigrant (Head), 203, 216n21 Engels, Friedrich, 142 Enlightenment (European), 300, 301 Eppert, Claudia, 87, 92n33, 92n41, 93n47 Ermine, William (Willie), 168, 173n70,

374 Index ethnography, 13, 177; salvage ethnography, 57, 205 ethnohistory, 179, 180, 193n13, 196n61, 200–2, 217n46, 237n12, 240n51, 341n61 Exploit Bay (Exploits Bay), 35, 118, 223, 225, 235, 238n15 Exploits Island, 35, 39 Exploits River, 6, 105–6, 123, 223, 226, 228, 232, 238n15, 241n63, 333 extinction discourse, 74n46, 150n18, 203, 215n18, 291n58, 298, 316, 316n2, 342n67. See also “vanishing Indians” Farady, Michael, 204 Federation of Newfoundland Indians, 11, 33, 343n81 Finding Mary March (Pittman), 23n10, 112n41, 336 fisheries (NL), 132n14, 238n15, 275; collapse of cod fishery, 270, 285n1; European/settler, 5, 134, 180, 181, 188, 189, 223, 318n27, 323, 338n13; Mi’kmaq, 132n14; salmon, 119, 223, 235, 290n48 Flat Bay, 124 Foer, Jonathan. 346, 360n2 Forbes, Francis, 306, 318n35 Forbes, Jack, 30–3, 318nn27–30 Forest and Stream, 274, 278, 286n6, 292n65, 293n77 Forte, Maximilian, 15 Foucault, Michel, 85, 92n29, 92n31, 150n30 French, 52n76, 207, 208, 211, 217n42, 250, 299, 307, 309; colonialism, 5, 24n17, 42, 117, 122, 130n2, 135, 137, 139, 142, 148, 149, 192n4, 270, 277, 317n10; language, 17, 77, 83,

84, 91n17, 299; relationship with Beothuk, 5, 18, 24n19, 118, 134, 135, 137, 277 Froude, James Anthony, 142 Funk Island, 5, 24n15 Furey, Charles, 40 Furlong, John, 87, 92n40, 219n61 Gallay, Alan, 302, 317n25 Gaskell, Jeremy, 5, 24n16 Gatschet, Albert, 58 Gautier, Théophile, 353, 361n10 genetic testing, 7, 10, 18, 11, 19, 25n36, 27n50, 46, 47, 52n74, 52n89, 53n86, 53n89, 64, 83, 85, 127, 128, 132n16, 158, 160, 162, 170n9, 171nn33–5, 171nn43–4, 172n48, 191, 235, 236, 251, 265n18 genocide, 85, 140, 151nn36–7, 297, 339n31; Beothuk, 4, 47, 85, 316; definitions, 144, 281, 294n88 Geological Survey of Canada, 240n52, 279 Geological Survey of Newfoundland, 236n1, 278–9 George, Chief Dan, 126–7 ghosts (haunting), 18, 54, 56, 57, 59, 71n3, 72n11, 108, 109, 113nn55–6, 114n56, 284, 365 Gilbert, William, 188, 193n18, 193n26, 196n66, 197n75, 197n81 Gillen, F.J., 143 Gillis, John, 3, 21n1 Gleach, Frederic W., 16, 29n72, 341n61 Godlonton, Robert, 144, Goldie, Terry, 4, 22n7, 50n29, 113n45, 295n93, 309n93, 330–1, 342n66, 342n78 Goodyear, Roland, 223–4, 238n13, 238n15, 238n17, 238n20

Index 375 Goose Bay, 77–8, 81, 87, 195n42 Gordimer, Nadine, 349 Grand Banks, 302, 318n27 Grand Falls (Grand Falls-Windsor), 25, 51n39, 52n74, 112n39, 124 Great Auk, 5, 23n15, 24nn15–16 Green, Rayna, 36, 50n30 Greenland, 251, 259, 302 Grimes, Vaughan, 171n32, 191 Griquas, 144 Guitar, Lynne A., 358, 361n19 Guy, John, 197n81, 211 Haggard, Rider, 145–6 Halifax, 258 Hamilton, Sir Charles, 6, 210, 218n53, 317n24 Hamilton, Lady Henrietta, 23, 208, 210 Hanrahan, Maura, 16, 17, 23n10, 25n28, 33, 48n3, 49n5, 53n83, 89, 130n1, 212, 215n18, 218n56, 286n7, 291n53, 310n55, 319n55, 336, 340 Hansen, David, 335, 337n9, 344n97 Hardy, Christian, 208, 210, 217n47 Harper’s Weekly, 274, 293n86 Harries, John, 16, 18, 37, 94, 97, 107, 159, 167, 169n3, 170nn9–10, 170n15, 170n19, 173n66, 216n22, 343n84 Hartery, Latonia, 185, 195nn48–9, 196n57, 196n63 Hass, Robert, 56 Haudenosaunee, 256, 257, 264n11, 267n42. See also Iroquois haunting. See ghosts Hau’ofa, Epeli, 15, 28n71 Haydon, Tom, 324, 332–5, 344n88; The Last Tasmanian, 324, 332–5, 342n74, 343n86

Henderson, James Sa’k’ej Youngblood, 168, 172n57, 173n68, 317n5 Hendry, Joy, 331, 343n79 Herodotus, 299 Hesiod, 299 Hesmondhalgh, David, 252, 266n26 Hewson, John, 12, 27n51, 150n3, 260, 263n2, 264n10, 268n56, 336n2, 336n5 Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada (HSMBC), 47–8, 53n93 History and Ethnography of the Beothuk, A (Marshall), 7, 12, 13, 23n12, 28nn57–62, 49n7, 49n11, 49n14, 112nn36–7, 130n5, 131n11, 133, 150n8, 169n1, 170nn10–14, 193nn15– 16, 194n34, 197n76, 198n88, 198n98, 200, 212n1, 216n23–4, 216n32, 218n51, 218n58, 237n8, 238n14, 240n49, 241n60, 290n51, 316n1, 317n23, 338n16, 339n27, 339n34, 342n70, 342n73, 342n75 Hobbes, Thomas, 300 Hodgkin, Thomas, 204 Hoheisel, Horst, 88 Holly, Donald H., 5, 23n14, 53n84, 112n37, 138, 150n19, 182, 189–90, 194n26, 194nn33– 4, 194n37, 195nn38–41, 195n48, 196n60, 196n66, 197nn70–1, 197n78, 197n80, 197n82, 197nn84–5, 198n86, 198nn89–90, 198n93m 198n97, 198nn101–2, 200, 213n3, 339n26 Holocaust (Jewish), 87–9, 93n42, 111n16, 349 Homer, 135, 299 Homer-Dixon, Thomas, 84, 91n24 Hooker, Sir William, 204

376 Index “Hottentot,” 144–5 House, Hon. Arthur, 38 House, Mary, 38 Howard-Wagner, Deidre, 305, 318n34 Howley, James P., 6, 12, 19, 25n23, 25n25, 25n28, 25n30, 58, 73n14, 73n16, 73n29, 110n3m 110n6, 130n5, 131nn5–6, 146, 150nn10–12, 150nn16–17, 150n22, 131n42, 170nn10–11, 170n13, 178, 192n1, 199, 200, 212, 212n1, 220, 221, 222, 236, 236n1, 237nn4–6, 237nn8–10, 278, 292n65, 292nn68–9, 292n76, 317n5, 317n24, 339n29, 339n36, 341n54, 341n59, 342n69; The Beothucks of Red Indians, 12, 19, 25n23, 25n25, 25n28, 25n30, 49n12, 50n21, 58, 73, 110n3, 130n5, 131nn5–6, 146, 150nn10–12, 150nn16–17, 150n19, 150n22, 170nn10–11, 170n13, 192n2, 193n10, 198n100, 200, 212n1, 220, 222–5, 237nn5–7, 238nn23–4, 239nn26–33, 240nn34–43, 240n49, 241n63, 241n66, 242nn69– 70, 242n75, 279, 280, 292n65, 292n68, 292n76, 317n24, 339n29, 339n36, 340nn46–7, 340n49, 340n52 human remains, 19, 62, 105, 152–69, 169n3, 177, 170n16, 170n23, 171n39, 184, 216n23, 217n45, 283, 297, 314, 315, 330, 345, 365; appropriation of, 159–62, 166, 168, 172n57, 173n68, 330, 335; repatriation of, 152, 153–5, 157, 158, 161–5, 167, 168, 169nn4–6, 169n8, 170n20; 170nn25–6, 171n37, 172nn60–1, 173n73, 308, 334 Hunt, Sarah, 334, 344n90

Hunters and Bombers (Brody and Markham), 76, 90n3 Hutchings, Kevin, 203, 216n21 imperialism (European), 13–14, 134, 137, 139, 140, 141, 149, 202, 204, 205, 206, 217n34, 271, 273–4, 287n26, 288n30, 288n34, 304, 317n25, 330, 338n21, 341n55 India: and British Empire, 141–2; and theories of racial classification, 304–5 Indian Act (Canada), 11, 26n41, 33, 34, 45, 269, 306–8, 310–16 Indian Medicine Shows, 254, 255, 267n40 Indian Point (NL), 94–6, 110n2, 231 Indigenous research methodologies, 13–14, 28n67, 200, 213n5, 214n14, 234, 243n90, 266n28 Inge, William, 353 Inglis, Bishop John, 63, 204, 206, 217n37, 327 Ingold, Tim, 98, 111n13 Innu, 25, 26n41, 40, 49n14, 58, 77–86, 91n18, 91nn22–3, 93n50, 103, 149n3, 196n61, 276, 292n64, 337n11, 359; land claims, 76, 78, 103; language (Innu-aimun), 15, 17, 18, 76, 77, 80, 81, 83–5, 89, 93n29; media images, 45, 53n80, 87, 92n39, 212; NATO protests, 76, 81; relationship with Beothuk, 18, 26, 37–9, 45, 80, 83–6, 124, 133, 137, 139, 180, 187, 190, 211, 219n57, 251, 259, 302; relationship with Mi’kmaq, 43, 45, 46, 228, 230, 231, 232, 241n54, 251, 259 Inuit, 18, 27n44, 38, 53n85, 58, 84, 89, 103, 133–5, 137, 139, 149n3, 180,

Index 377 211, 230, 234, 242n89, 251, 259, 290n52, 291n54, 337n11, 359 Iroquois, 42, 230, 248, 255, 267n45, 307. See also Haudenosaunsee Irwin, Ron, 315 Isuma Productions, 84, 92n26 Ivanov, Vyacheslav, 353, 361n12 Jackson, Andrew, 148 Jackson, Doug, 275, 289n42, 291nn53–4 Jacques Cartier Foundation, 41 Jameson, Robert, 152, 204 Jasen, Patricia, 271–2, 276, 286nn10– 14, 287n18, 287n20, 287n22, 287n24, 287n27, 289n40, 290n50 Jay Treaty of 1794, 256 Jefferson, Thomas, 147, 301 Jews, 88, 139; culture, 346; Holocaust, 87–9, 93n42, 111n16 Joe, Chief Mi’sel, 7, 13, 15, 18, 25n27, 53n88, 117–30, 161–2, 165, 168, 191, 195n44, 251, 286n7 Joe, Sylvester (Joe Sylvester), 6, 34, 204, 211, 224, 238n26, 239nn26–7, 340n48 Johannesburg World Exposition, 349 John, Louis, 19, 20, 232 John, Peter, 34, 340n48 Johnston, Anna, 142, 150n31, 295nn93– 4, 322, 337n10, 342n65, 343n85 Johnston, Wayne, 59, 73n24 Jones, Rhys, 333–4, 343nn85–6, 344n88 Judicature Act of 1824, 206 Jukes, J.B., 278, 279, 292n67, 293n79 Jure, Mrs (servant to Peytons), 58 Kames, Lord (Henry Home), 300 Keefe, Sheila, 45, 53n80

Kejimkujik National Park, 47–8 Kelm, Mary-Ellen, 216n20, 251, 266nn22–4 Kennedy, Roger, 147, 151n43 Kennedy, Rosanne, 41, 51n57 Kennewick Man (Ancient One), 163–4, 170n17, 172nn53–4 Kercher, Bruce, 306, 318n35 Khoekhoe, 144, 348, 351 Khoisan, 348, 351 ≠Khomani. See San: ≠Khomani Kickapoo Medicine Show, 255 King, Thomas, 38, 51n41, 270, 286n5, 293n85, 326, 340n43 Kingsley, Charles, 140–1, 150n28 Kitchener, A.C., 159, 170n9 Knox, Robert, 139–40, 142, 144, 150n24 Kondiaronk, 206–8, 217nn40–2 Kop, Joe, 234 Kop, John, 248, 250, 264nn11–12 Kristensen, Todd, 5, 23, 190, 192n1, 198n101 Kruiper, David, 349 Ktunaxa Nation Council, 315 Kuch, Melanie, 132n16, 160, 170n9 Kugel, Rebecca, 257, 267n36, 267n45, 341n63 Kunuk, Zacharias, 80, 92n26 Kwakwaka’wakw, 254–5, 261, 267n37 Lacan, Jacques, 64, 68, 73nn35–6 Lacasse, Jean-Paul, 82–3, 91n18 Langford, J.A., 329, 341n62 Langford, Ruth, 335 Lankester, E. Ray, 355, 361n14 Lanne, William (William Lanné), 322, 331, 342n72 L’Anse aux Meadows, 359

378 Index Last Tasmanian, The (Haydon), 324, 332–5, 342n74, 343n86 Lawrence, Bonita, 10, 20, 26n42, 45, 83, 192n6, 201, 202, 215n18, 215n20, 285n3, 286n4, 297, 318n36, 319n43, 319n51, 338n21 Leddy, Lianne, 14, 19, 22n5, 34, 36, 43, 49n11, 192n2, 199, 266n22, 331, 340n50, 344n89 Lefebvre, Alexandre, 98, 111nn14–15 Leggo, Carl, 22n6, 55, 72n6 Lehman, Greg, 322, 337n9, 343n80, 344n97 Leigh, Rev. John, 58 Levinas, Emmanuel, 98, 111n17 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 100, 109, 112n31 Lewis, Ruben, 120 Lewisporte, 95 Little Passage (archaeological complex), 184, 187, 188, 196n66, 197n69 Lloyd, T.G.B., 223, 237n11 Locke, Don, 104, 106, 108, 110n1, 333, 343n84 Loo, Tina, 273, 287n18, 289n40 Louis, John, 34, 340n48 Lucretius, 300 Lund, Sarah, 258, 268n55 MacDonald, Shane, 126, 131 Mahmud, Tayyab, 304, 305, 317n22, 318n31 Maine, 119, 131n7, 138, 228, 255, 258, 268n62, 269 Malecite, 122, 228, 240n52 Mansell, Annette, 334–5 Maritime Archaic Indians, 128 Mark, Wiliam-Mathieu, 82 Marks, Nora, 346, 360n1

Marshall, Elizabeth, 334–5 Marshall, Ingeborg (I.C.L.), 7, 12, 23n12, 25n34, 28nn57–60, 28n62, 43, 46, 49n7, 49n11, 49n14, 52n72, 112nn36–7, 130n5, 131n5, 131n11, 133, 150n8, 159, 160, 169n1, 170n9, 180, 193nn15–16, 200, 208, 212, 212n1, 217n38, 217n47, 217n48, 237n8, 237n12, 290n51, 301, 316n1, 338n16, 342n70, 342n73 Martijn, Charles, 13, 24n20, 28n62, 28n71, 42, 48n1, 52n65, 131n7, 251, 265n19, 291n53, 337n11 Marubbio, M. Elise, 334, 344n91 Marx, Karl, 142 masculinity, 37, 273, 276, 281, 287n18, 327–30, 333–4 Massachusetts, 119, 233–4, 250, 258, 321 Mauch, Karl, 146 McBride, Bunny, 255–6, 258, 266n36, 267n39, 267n47, 268nn54–5, 268n62 McCall, Sophie, 78, 80, 90n8, 91n12, 92n27 McGrath, Darrin, 274–5, 288n34, 289n35, 289nn37–8, 289n41 McGregor, John, 206–8, 217nn38–41, 217n43, 331, 342n75, 343n75 McLuhan, Marshall, 352, 361n7 Membertou, Grand Chief, 119, 128 memory, 41, 51n57, 112n32, 113n55, 346, 347, 351; and loss, 56, 57, 59, 62, 27, 71, 183; preservation, 49n6, 52n59, 88, 89, 93nn42–5, 102, 111n24; in relationship to history, 22n6, 50n26, 55–7, 59, 68, 69, 72nn8–10, 74n65, 89, 100, 101, 111n22, 111n26, 113n43, 337n12, 344n100

Index 379 meshkanau (meshkanu), 77–8, 90n4, 90n6 Meshkanu: The Long Walk of Elizabeth Penashue (Black Kettle Films), 76, 90n4 Metis, 27n44, 53n85, 290n52, 311–12 Miawpukek First Nation, 7, 11, 18, 33, 38, 48n4, 117, 122, 123, 131nn7–8, 131n13, 132n14, 269, 277, 285n2 Michel Band, 312 Mi’kma’ki, 28n71, 33, 131n7, 269, 277, 337n11 Mi’kmaq: education, 45, 127, 132n14; guides, 6, 25n26, 34, 204, 211, 224, 232, 258, 275, 276, 289n38, 292n64, 340; land claims, 13, 27n48, 38, 43, 45–7, 270, 277, 282, 291n54; “mercenary myth,” 18, 42, 43, 130n2, 131n6, 270, 277, 278, 282; oral history, 6, 7, 12, 34, 37, 43, 120, 122, 123, 127, 128, 131n8, 190, 231, 234, 235; recognition in Newfoundland, 27n48, 33, 42, 44, 45, 211, 212, 270, 277, 312, 313, 319n56; relationship with Beothuk, 7, 10, 11, 12, 18, 19, 20, 26, 33, 34, 37, 42–8, 84, 117, 118–25, 128, 134–49, 160–5, 180, 190, 228–35, 241n60, 248, 251, 267n48, 270, 275, 336; relationship with Innu, 228, 230, 231, 232, 241n54, 251, 259, 276–85 Mi’kmaq Grand Council, 117, 120 Millais, John, 283, 293n81, 293n86, 295n95 Miller, Harry, 223 Millertown, 94–5, 112n39 Mississauga, 309 Mohawk, 122, 248, 251, 255–7, 262, 307 Moore’s Cove, 96

Morgan, Bernice, 36, 50n26, 54, 55, 59, 67, 73n23, 73n25, 73n31; Cloud of Bone, 22n6, 36, 50n26, 54, 55, 56, 59, 67–70, 72n8, 73n31, 74nn53–69, 344n100 Morgan, Henry Lewis, 301, 317n20 Morton, Samuel G., 155, 157 Mound Builders, 137, 142, 146–8, 151n47 Murray, Alexander, 236n1, 279 Murray, David, 257, 268n49 “myth of prior invasions,” 43, 133–49 Namaseb, Levi, 348 National Film Board of Canada (NFB), 22n10, 25n37, 90n3, 113n42, 332 National Museum of Scotland, 152, 157, 165, 169, Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), 153, 162–5, 167, 169n7, 171n40, 172n47 Native Association of Newfoundland and Labrador, 332, 343n81 Natuashish, 78, 92n40, 219n61 Natural History Museum (London), 158 Neilsen, Scott, 183, 195nn42–3 New Brunswick, 28n71, 83, 119, 122, 206, 258, 289n34 New England, 71n2, 130n4, 214n10, 218n54, 236n2, 243n90, 248, 250, 253, 257–9, 261, 262, 266n29, 267n41 Nicolar, Lucy, 255, 261, 267n39, 267n47 “noble savage,” 145, 202, 207, 212, 216n21, 240n38, 281, 290n48, 299, 300 Nolette, Nicole, 80, 91n11

380 Index Nonosabasut, 6, 130n5, 152–5, 157– 61, 165–7, 169n3, 170n9, 170n15, 170n12, 170n15, 171n31, 171n34, 208, 216, 227, 237, 240n49, 325 Nora, Pierre, 100, 111n22 Norse, 4, 23n11, 27n50, 160, 163, 165 Northern Peninsula, 4, 51n38, 184, 195n49, 293n78 Notre Dame Bay, 6, 39, 95, 97, 187, 189, 213n2, 325 Nova Scotia, 28n71, 47–8, 52n68, 117–18, 120, 122, 133, 135, 205–6, 228, 234, 248, 250, 257–8, 262, 265n13, 265n15 Nuenonne, 321, 325 Nunatsiavut government, 48 nutshimit, 17, 75, 76, 80–4, 87, 89, 90, 93n49 O’Brien, Jean, 54, 71n2, 201, 214nn10–11, 218n54, 218n60, 252, 266n29, 268n66 O’Dea, Shane, 332, 343n82 O’Flaherty, Patrick, 50n22, 103, 113n44, 237n4, 237n9, 292n69 Ojibwe, 252, 257 Olick, Jeffrey, 102, 113n43 O’Neill, Paul, 105, 113n47 On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 330 Orr, Eva, 315 Osa’yana (Osayanas), 233, 247 Ottawah: Last Chief of the Red Indians of Newfoundland, 22n10, 135, 136, 277 Oubee, 84, 87 Oyster Cove (Tasmania), 326, 335 Paleo-Eskimo, 184, 242n89, 359 Palliser, Sir Hugh, 133, 237n12 Papaschase band, 312 Parks Canada, 47–8, 53n93

Pastore, Ralph, 5, 24n18, 25n31, 91n19, 112n37, 130n2, 130n4, 131n6, 180–2, 192n5, 193nn15–17, 193nn19–23, 194n27, 196n64, 197nn72–4, 198n87, 198n95, 211, 213n2, 218n57, 236n2, 290n51, 291n54, 339n28 Paul, John, 19, 230–2, 234, 292n64 Pearce, Roy Harvey, 300–1, 317n17 Peckford, Brian, 43, 52n71 Peeyasis (Lac La Biche) Band, 311 Pelly, Don, 107–9, 110n1 Penashue, Elizabeth (Tshaukuesh), 10, 15–18, 23, 25n38, 40, 75–90, 90n1, 90n2, 90n4, 91n10, 93n49, 195n44, 212 Penashue, Max, 93n49 Penashue, Peter, 76, 90n2 Penn Hilden, Patricia, 358, 361n18 Penobscot, 228, 255–6, 261, 266n36, 267n39 Peyton family, 6, 19, 35, 66, 119, 222–4, 228, 231, 325; Peyton, John Jr, 6, 35, 62, 65, 130n5, 131n6, 210, 222–5, 227, 231, 232, 237n8n12, 238n15, 239n34, 241n66, 242n70, 325; Peyton, John Sr, 6, 24, 35, 49n18, 58, 62, 70, 130n5, 223, 224, 226, 237n8; Peyton, Thomas, 223–4, 238, 238n15n17, 242n70 Phillips, Ruth, 49n6, 51n51, 52n59, 253, 266n32 Phillipson, Robert, 84, 92n25 Pintupi language, 345 Pitjantjatjara, 347 Pittman, Al, 332–3 Pittman, Ken, 22n10, 112n41, 113n42, 324, 332–5; Finding Mary March, 23n10, 112n41, 336; Shanaditti: Last of the Beothuks (Pittman), 22n10, 113n42, 332–5

Index 381 Plato, 68, 299 Pocahontas, 36, 50n30, 208, 326, 341n61 Pocius, Gerald, 271, 273, 275, 286nn8–9, 286n16, 287n21, 288n28, 288nn31–2, 289nn38–9, 289n44 Point Leamington, 95–7 Polack, Fiona, 3, 14, 20, 22n6, 25n29, 36, 50n26, 55–6, 69, 72nn8–10, 74nn65–7, 110n1, 142, 202, 204, 321, 344n100, 360 Port aux Basques, 271 Port au Choix, 186, 196n50, 196n56 “postcolonial uncanny,” 159, 169n3, 170nn9–10, 170n15, 170n19, 171n27, 173nn65–6, 216n23 Pound, Ezra, 352 Perdue, Theda, 37, 50n32, 261, 266n36, 267n39 Prescott, Sir Henry, 101 Priest, Joseph, 147 “primitive” peoples, 3, 137, 138, 147, 177, 200, 202, 224, 254, 273, 281, 291n58, 300–2, 305, 316n2, 326–8, 331, 342n67, 349, 352, 354, 355; languages, 352 Prince Edward Island, 28n71, 205, 206, 239n27, 318n35 Provincial Archives of Newfoundland, 221, 238n19, 242nn77–80, 333 Pullman, Daryl, 19, 25n36, 152, 172n48, 172n62, 198n106, 265n18 Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation, 27n49, 33, 45–6, 49n5, 269, 285n4, 319n56 Queen v. Ken Drew, 120, 131n8 race, 15, 20, 41, 51n45, 56, 60, 64, 77, 150nn24–5, 151n34, 171n46, 202, 204, 207, 272, 281, 287n18, 293n77,

318n27, 331, 336, 343n68; classification, 6, 34, 59, 101, 150n16, 155, 157, 205, 280, 282, 286n4, 304, 331, 359; conflict and war, 19, 134–48; racism, 44, 157, 224, 281, 317n22, 323, 324, 328, 330, 354; romantic, 19, 276 Radstone, Susannah, 41, 51n57 Raibmon, Paige, 214n10, 254, 267n37 railways, 51n45, 88, 95, 99, 250, 253, 258, 271, 275, 288n31, 321, 336n4, 342n73 Rankin, Lisa, 14, 19, 23n11, 150n21, 171n32, 177, 185, 200, 337n11 Ray, A.J., 201, 213n4, 214n9 reconciliation, 86, 88, 265n17, 266n25, 268n68, 294nn88–9, 336 Red Bay, 187 Red Indian Lake, 6, 35, 38, 94, 105, 107, 110n2, 113n47, 154, 227–8, 230–1, 234, 281, 325 Red Indian Lake Heritage Society, 94 “Red Paint” People, 138 Reed, Hayter, 312 Reid Newfoundland Company, 271, 272, 274, 286n15, 287n21, 295n97 Renaissance (European), 134, 299, 300 Renouf, Priscilla (M.A.P.), 12, 27n52, 190, 196n50, 196n56, 198n103, 234, 242n89 resource development, 20, 34, 38, 270–1; Buchans mine, 38; geology, 12, 34, 204, 220– 1, 236n1, 240n52, 278, 279, 340n50, 355; mining, 38, 78, 205–6, 250, 265n14, 313, 358 responsible government: Newfoundland, 4, 35, 323; Tasmania, 323 Reynolds, Henry, 151, 324, 338n25, 339n32, 349n38

382 Index Rickard, Jolene, 256, 267n44 Rigney, Ann, 42, 52n60 River Thieves (Crummey) 22n6, 37, 51n40, 54–6, 59, 62–7, 72n5, 72n9, 73n32, 73nn37–45, 74nn47–52, 74n70, 290n47 Robbins, Joyce, 102, 113n43 Robertson, William, 300 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 3 Robinson, George Augustus, 324–9, 333, 337n10, 340nn44–5, 340n45, 340n49, 340n51, 341n56, 341n60, 342n65, 343n85, 344n94 Rolls, Mitchell, 142, 150n31, 322, 337n10, 342n65, 343n85 Romanticism, 19, 202–3, 206, 271–3, 280–3, 289, 340n47 Roosevelt, Teddy, 36 Rosenberg, Sharon, 87, 92n33 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 236n2, 300, 354 Rowe, Frederick, 133, 137, 150, 213 Rowley-Conwy, Peter, 190, 197n68 Rowsell, Thomas, 96 Royal African Company, 302 Royal College of Surgeons, 330 Royal Ontario Museum, 308 Runia, Eelco, 108, 113n50 Russell’s Point, 188, 196n66, 197n75 Ryan, Lyndall, 143, 151n33, 328, 337n9n11, 339n33, 340n41, 341n57 Sacajawea, 208 San: ≠Khomani San, 348–51, 360; at Johannesburg World Exposition, 349. See also Bushmen Santu. See Santu Toney “Santu’s Song,” 12, 27n51, 247, 255, 257, 259–61, 263n2, 264n10, 268n56, 321, 336n2, 336n5

Scarre, Geoffrey, 153, 158, 165, 169n6, 172n51, 172n63 Seeley, Sir John, 142 Seligmann, Linda, 254, 258, 262, 266n35 Seneca, 256, 307 Seremetakis, Nadia, 101, 112n32 Serres, Michel, 109, 113n52, n53 settler colonialism (attitudes and practices), 4, 10, 17–18, 26n39, 33, 36–9, 41–3, 47, 49n6, 49n51, 52n59, 54–7, 59, 60, 62–70, 103, 113n56, 200–3, 206–7, 210–12, 223, 236, 237n12, 251–4, 261–2, 265n17, 270, 274–6, 277–82, 295n93, 302, 305, 308, 310, 322– 336, 337n12, 339n21, 339n31, 340n40, 340n53, 345, 355 Shaka, 144–6, 151n41 Shanaditti: Last of the Beothuks (Pittman), 22n10, 113n42, 332–5 Shanawdithit (Shawnadithit, Shananditti, Shanaditti, Nance, and Nancy April), 3, 6–7, 13, 17, 20, 22n10, 23n10, 25n29, 33–44, 48, 52n70, 58–60, 62, 64, 65, 67–70, 73n31, 76, 81, 84, 87–8, 101, 112n40, 113n42, 128, 129, 190, 193nn15–16, 193nn20–1, 194n27, 197nn72–4, 198n87, 198n95, 199–208, 211, 225–8, 233, 235, 237n10, 239n31, 239n34, 240n34, 240n37, 240n40, 240n49, 253, 277, 282, 284, 290n51, 321–36, 337n7, 338n24, 339n26, 339n28, 341n54, 342n64, 342n70, 342n73, 342n75, 343n75, 344n89, 360; as “last” Beothuk, 3, 7, 20, 40, 59, 199, 200, 204, 208, 210, 211, 253, 277, 321, 322, 324, 326, 330–2, 334–6, 341n54, 342n68, 344n89, 360; maps and drawings, 7, 25n24,

Index 383 20n29, 68, 69, 88, 226, 227, 342n64; statue, 76, 77, 87, 23n10, 40, 48 Sheshatshui, 72, 81, 92n39 Shubenacadie Residential School, 262 shuká, 346, 360 Silver, Arthur P., 280, 293n80, 293n86 Silverman, Kaja, 70 Simon, Roger, 87, 92n33, 266n25 Simon, Sherry, 85, 92n30 Sinixt Nation, 313–16, 319n57, 319n59, 320nn61–8 Sinixt Nation Society, 315 Skutnabb-Kangas, Toves, 84, 92n25 slavery, 135, 156, 297, 299, 317n25, 361n18; Aboriginal Tasmanian women, 323; African, 85, 92n33, 140, 144, 302, 303, 348; Beothuk, 302, 303 Slicer, Pierre, 335 Smallwood, Joseph, 36, 50, 132n15 Smith, Adam, 300a Smith, Andrea, 325, 339n31, 341n161 Smith, John, 36 Smith, Joseph, 147 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 14, 28n67, 202, 214n13, 252, 266n28 Social Darwinism, 135 South Africa: Indigenous resilience, 348–51, 355, 360; “race war” 141, 144–6, 151n41; settler colonialism, 337n12 South Twin Lake, 108 South West Brook, 96 Speck, Frank, 12, 19, 20, 24n21, 27n55, 43, 49n16, 50n16, 52n66, 53n87, 110n2, 131n10, 131n12, 133–4, 138, 149n6, 192n2, 221, 220–36, 237n5, 240nn51–2, 241nn53–9, 241nn61–2, 241nn64–5, 241nn67–8, 242n68, 242nn71–84, 243n91, 247–9, 251–3,

257– 9, 261–2, 263nn1–3, 264nn4–9, 266n20, 266n31, 267n48, 267n51, 268n58, 268n67, 291n53, 292n64, 293n82, 321; Beothuk and Micmac, 19, 24n21, 27n55, 52n66, 110n2, 131n10, 131n12, 133, 149n6, 192n2, 220, 228, 235, 236, 241n53, 241n61, 242n71, 242nn75–6, 242n81, 243n91, 247, 249, 257, 263nn1–2, 264n4, 262n7, 266n20, 267n48, 267n51, 268n58, 268n67, 292n64 Spencer, Baldwin, 143 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 59, 73n20, 81, 91n15 Spotted Elk, Molly, 255, 267n36, 267n39 Squires, Gerald, 23n10, 39, 41, 76, 87 St Alban’s, 128 St George’s Bay (Bay St George), 128, 230, 239n27, 290n53 St John’s, 6, 22n5, 23n10, 25n27, 36, 52n71, 61, 67, 76, 77, 101, 104, 112n40, 137, 152, 199, 204, 208, 210, 216n29, 225, 233, 239n27, 239n31, 240n34, 242n77, 242n80, 269, 271, 278, 281, 325, 328, 330, 341n54, 341n63 Stanner, William (W.E.H.), 347, 352, 360n4 Stark, John, 225, 240n34, 328 Stephen, Sid, 36, 42, 52n63, 54, 59, 60, 71n1 Stevens, John, 34, 340n48 Story, George (G.M.), 52n77, 204, 222, 237n4, 275, 289n38, 289n40, 340n45 Story, Kate, 59 Strober, Myra, 16, 29n73 Stuckless, Tony, 95, 110n1 Such, Peter, 59

384 Index Sued-Badillo, Jalil, 358, 361n17 Sugars, Cynthia, 4, 16–18, 22n6, 22nn9–10, 50n26, 50n29, 54, 72n9, 72n11, 112n38, 284, 290n47, 292n63 Taino, 335–60, 361n15, 361n17 TallBear, Kim, 7, 11, 25nn35–6, 46–7, 53n89, 171n44, 265n18 Tarkiner clan, 329 Tarlow, Sarah, 166, 172n63 Tasmania (Van Diemen’s Land), 143, 323, 336n4, 338n14; Black War, 323, 338n17, 342n74, 343n76; colonization by the British, 323–30, 338n17, 339n38, 340n47; comparison with Newfoundland, 27n45, 142, 321–44, 340n47, 360; Indigenous resilience and survival, 21, 321–2, 332, 338n20, 342n65, 360; myth of Indigenous extinction, 137–8, 142, 151n36, 321–2, 339n30; precolonial Indigenous history, 143, 151n32, 323, 337n11; settler-culture attitudes, 322, 330–6; treatment of Indigenous remains, 158, 170n24, 330; violence against Indigenous women, 323, 325, 339n31 Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, 335, 343n80 Tasmanian Museum, 330, 335, 344n96 Taylor, Albert, 95, 104, 108, 110n1 Taylor, Rebe, 335, 337n9, 343n85, 344n94 Tecumseh, 206–8, 217nn43–5 Telegram (St John’s), 7, 13, 25nn32–4, 27n50, 36, 50n28, 52n71, 171n36, 342n73 Tenskawatawa, 207

Terms of Union (NL-Canada), 10, 11, 48n3, 85, 91n20, 218n56, 291n53, 319n55 terra nullius, 47, 305, 306, 318n33 Theal, George McCall, 145, 151n39 thing theory, 18, 98, 111n11 Thomas, Jeff, 42, Thomson, H. C., 280, 293n78 Thorpe, Jocelyn, 14, 20, 43, 269, 287n18, 287n23, 287n25 Thrush, Coll, 54, 71n3 Tilley, Christopher, 98, 11n12 Times (London), 3, 22n5, 134, 330 Tlingit, 346, 360 Toney, Joseph (Joe), 247–50, 265n13 Toney, Santu, 7, 12, 20, 49n16, 183, 232–5, 247–63, 263nn1–3, 264n5, 264nn10–11, 265nn12–13, 271n42, 322; “Santu’s Song,” 12, 27n51, 247, 255, 257, 259–61, 263n2, 264n10, 268n56, 321, 336n2, 336n5 Torngat Park, 48 tourism, 20, 40, 41, 51n52, 112n40, 132n14, 253, 255–7, 268n62, 270–6, 286nn8–9, 286nn15–16, 287n16, 287n21, 288n28, 288nn30–4, 289nn35–9, 289n41, 289nn43–4, 349 trade, 267n52, 268n65, 302–9, 317n25, 349; between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, 102, 188, 189, 194n26, 211, 213n4, 279, 214n9, 256, 259, 266n35, 299, 301, 358; between Indigenous peoples, 138, 359 Traill, Anthony, 350 translation, 18, 66, 75–90, 91nn10–11, 91n17, 92n28, 93n49; “countertranslation,” 80

Index 385 transnationalism, 206; approaches to history, 13, 14; Indigenous, 81, 247–8, 262, 263 trauma, 87, 160; and Canadian nation, 4, 292n63; and colonialism, 55, 62, 71, 85, 92n33, 324 travel writing, 24n19, 270, 271, 274–84, 287n27, 288nn30–1, 289n39, 290n47, 293n84, 295n90, 295n98, 327 Treaty 6 First Nations, 310, 311, 319n50 Treaty of Ghent, 201 Trigger, Bruce, 193n13, 195n42, 201, 213n4, 214n8 Trinity Bay, 102, 189, 193n26, 196n66, 197n81 Truganini (Trugernanner, Trugernanna), 20, 21, 321–36, 337n7, 337n9, 338n24, 340nn39– 40, 340n41, 341n56, 341nn61–2, 342nn70–2 Tuck, Jim, 185, 192n5, 196n49, 196n52, 196n59, 196n62 Turino, Thomas, 252, 266n27 Twillingate, 34, 112nn39–40, 222, 225, 240n34 United Nations, 117, 144, 162, 166; Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 166 University of Edinburgh, 152, 155, 204 Upton, Leslie (L.F.S.), 23, 130n2, 131n6, 135, 137, 149n1, 149n4, 150n13, 193n16, 213n2, 216n22, 222, 236n3, 277, 278, 291n55, 291n60, 291n62 Usner, David, 254, 266n26 Vaalbooi, Elsie, 350 Vaalbooi, Petrus, 349

“vanishing Indians,” 134, 147–9, 150n18, 192n6, 200–4, 206, 211, 212, 353. See also extinction discourse Van Wyck, Peter C., 86, 92n34 Venne, Sharon, 299, 317n6 Venuti, Lawrence, 84, 86, 92n28, 92n35 Vikings. See Norse Virgil, 135 Wabanaki, 230, 267n41 Walcott, Derek, 346, 360n3 Walcott, Rinaldo, 85, 92n33 Walker, Phillip, 158, 159, 170n16, 170n21 War of 1812, 201, 206, 207, 217n44 Ward, Nancy (Nanyehi), 36, 50n33, 50n35 Warren, Phil, 38 Wells, H.G., 141 Wendat, 206, 307–10, 318n42; Anderdon Band, 308 Whipple, Bishop Henry, 257 Whipple, Cornelia, 257 Whitbourne, Richard, 211 White, Hayden, 290n50, 299, 317n12 White Bear Bay, 118 white saviour complex, 324, 338n23 White Snook, Jacqueline, 10, 26n43 Wigwam Brook, 189, 198n94, 198n96 Wild West Shows, 254, 255, 267n42 Wilfred’s Brook, 95 Wilkinson, Sarah, 41, 51n58 Williams, Robert A., 298–301, 316n3, 317n7, 317n13, 317n19 Willoughby, Charles, 138 Wilson, William, 225, 239n31 Wix, Edward, 278, 292n66, 292n73 women: craftswomen, 251, 256–8, 262, 266nn35–6; as cultural

386 Index mediators, 36–7, 213n4, 217n36, 251, 253–8, 262, 266nn35–6, 268n65, 324–30; Indigenous, 41, 50n30–2, 50n35, 124–5, 202, 208, 210, 239n32, 224–5, 252, 267n45, 267n50, 285n3, 327–31, 337n9, 340n53, 344n91, 351, 360; nonIndigenous, 39, 210, 215n15, 273–4, 287n27, 340n53; and violence, 122–3, 224, 227, 281, 284, 323, 330, 334, 339n31 Wooraddy (Wooreddy), 325, 327

Xhosa, 144 Yarmouth, 248, 250, 257–8 Yeoman, Elizabeth, 15–18, 23n10, 75, 76, 82, 90n5, 91n10, 92n27, 195n44, 212 Yetman, Derek, 55, 59, 72n7 Young, James E., 88, 93nn42–5, 168, 172n58 Young, Jodie, 306, 318n35 Zeller, Suzanne, 205, 216n30 Zulus, 142–6