Shanawdithit and the Beothuk

Not folklore: the documented extinction of a people, ending 1829

The Beothuk were the Indigenous people of the island of Newfoundland, living mostly around Notre Dame and Bonavista bays, and their culture took shape around AD 1500 from peoples who had crossed from Labrador some fifteen centuries before. They lived in independent family groups of 30 to 55 in conical mamateeks of poles and birch bark, hunted caribou with deer fences that could run 48 to 64 km, fished salmon and took seals, and paddled skin canoes shaped rather like kayaks. Each spring they painted themselves, their homes, canoes and tools with red ochre, and the practice led Europeans to call them Red Indians. They buried their dead wrapped in birch bark in caves and under rock overhangs, with figurines and small tools to go with them.

They were never numerous, perhaps 500 to 700 people at contact, and unlike some peoples they chose to avoid the newcomers. As English and French fishing stations and settlements claimed the coasts and bays, the Beothuk withdrew inland, cut off from the salmon, seals and seabirds they had lived on, and finally to the Exploits River, surviving mostly on caribou. They scavenged nails and kettles from abandoned fishing stations for arrowheads and harpoons, and took nets and traps, and settlers and Beothuk clashed with deaths on both sides. No traders, missionaries or government agents were there to broker any peace. Tuberculosis did the rest; their numbers fell from about 350 in 1768 to 72 in 1811.

In April 1823 fur trappers at Badger Bay came upon three starving Beothuk women searching for mussels: a mother, Doodebewshet, and her two daughters, one of them Shanawdithit. Her mother and sister, sick with tuberculosis, soon died. Shanawdithit lived five years as a servant in the household of John Peyton Jr. on Exploits Island, and in 1828 the Boeothick Institution brought her to St. John's, into the care of William Epps Cormack. She told him what she could of her people, translated words into her language, and drew their tools, food, homes, mythological figures and encounters with settlers; her drawings are among the most important records of the Beothuk that exist. By her own reckoning, no more than 15 of her people were still alive when she was found.

She died of tuberculosis in St. John's on 6 June 1829, about 29 years old, and the Beothuk were declared extinct. Oral evidence suggests some survivors lived on among the Mi'kmaq and Innu, and in 1910 a woman named Santu Toney, living in Massachusetts, told the anthropologist Frank Speck that her father had been Beothuk. A life-size bronze statue of Shanawdithit stands at Boyd's Cove on Newfoundland's northeast coast.