The Beothuk Genocide

Demasduit.

No doubt you have heard of the sad fate of the Beothuks, the pre-European inhabitants of Newfoundland. (Well, maybe not pre-Viking). They apparently became extinct as an ethnic group early in the 19th century. This is often trotted out as a guilt trip for European-Canadians.

It should not be. As I read the history, Europeans did their level best for the Beothuks. From 1769, anyone killing a Beothuk was legally guilty of murder, just as if they had killed another European. (And before that, there was precious little law in Newfoundland of any sort). The Newfoundland authorities tried their best on several occasions to befriend the Beothuks, which approaches the Beothuks always rebuffed, sometimes bloodily. But befriending the Beothuks made sense for pure self-interest: the English had no interest in the land, only the fisheries, and would have been delighted to set up a fur trade. It would also, had they understood, have been in the interests of the Beothuks. Such a trade had made Indians further south, such as the Iroquois or Cree, enormously wealthy and powerful.

The Beothuk may have been the same people as the Skraelings, whose implacable hostility forced the Vikings to abandon their Newfoundland settlements in the eleventh century.

The problem seems to have been the Beothuks’ own extreme xenophobia. An island people, they could not deal with the idea that outsiders, meaning any people they had not previously known, were human. This meant a permanent state of war with all comers, the Mikmaqs and Innu as well as the Europeans, despite anyone else’s best efforts to make friends. When the Beothuk woman Demasduit was brought to St. John’s, the governor, hoping to achieve good relations, sent her home laden with gifts. But she warned that, having spoken with the Europeans, she would never be accepted back into her tribe.

The number of Beothuks was probably always small—estimates range from 500 to 3,000 in total at their height. It does not take that great a catastrophe to wipe out that many people over a matter of generations. When the Europeans appeared, the Beothuks chose to retreat inland rather than have to deal with the outsiders, even though at this point the latter only used the shore in summers to dry their catch. This cut the Beothuks off from the fishery, probably their prime food source up to that time. They switched to caribou, but soon hunted them out. Weakened by hunger, they became prey to tuberculosis. The lack of food also caused them to become more aggressive towards the Mikmaqs and Europeans, in hopes of conquering hunting territory or at least seizing food stocks. In this, they were put at something of a disadvantage by their steadfast refusal to adopt firearms. Presumably guns were too foreign a thing to be acceptable.

In these circumstances, some may have been killed by Mikmaqs or by rogue Europeans. But this was not the real story. This was a footnote.

Shanawdithit, last known living Beothuk.