Shanawdithit and the Beothuk

The Beothuk were the people of Newfoundland, and they are gone. Squeezed off the coast and away from their food by European settlement, hunted, and hollowed out by tuberculosis, their numbers collapsed through the 1700s. Shanawdithit, taken in 1823, was the last known Beothuk; she drew maps and pictures of her people’s life and recorded words of their language before dying of tuberculosis in St John’s in 1829, about 28 years old. Her drawings are most of what is known. This is not a mystery or a monster story, it is the record of an extinction inside living memory of a colony, and it belongs on any honest map of this island.