The Beothuk Saga

by Bernard Assiniwi

  It was a catastrophe. Of the two thousand Beothuk who sought the interior, we were reduced to fewer than five hundred. And most of those were females.

  A once proud and happy people had been reduced by famine, disease, and persecution by the English to the blackest of misery, and in only a few moons. Once a people busily expanding their territory, they had become a people on the edge of extinction. Instead of helping us, the colonists, fishermen, and trappers preyed on us. To kill a Red Indian was seen almost as a sport: they bragged about it as they would about shooting a caribou.

  The elder said that it was difficult to blame the new inhabitants of Newfoundland for this attitude. The Living Memories of the Beothuk Nation reminded us of many instances of treachery practised against the newcomers, and they told us that the colonists and fishermen came to this island ignorant of the customs and desires of the native people, and believed they were encountering true Savages. “Both sides are to blame,” said the old man. “The Living Memories stir up hatred of the English by recounting tales of treachery and deceit. And it is true that the English did not try to understand our ways, or to get to know us at all. By taking us prisoners they thought they were learning something from us. Perhaps they mistook us for animals that they could tame and put to their use.”

  People who live in freedom are always misunderstood. The single greatest fault of the English, in my view, is their belief that they are the sole possessors of the truth. And yet they do not know that we live by truth and die by falsehood.

  One fine morning a ship dropped anchor in the Bay of Exploits. It was observed by Hadalaet the Ice and several of his young companions, to whom he was teaching the names of the plants of our island. When the sailors saw that there were natives on the shore, they lowered a boat. One of the men in the boat was dressed differently from the others. The elder, Hadalaet, heard one of the sailors address him as “Sir,” and call him Scott. The name was familiar to Hadalaet; when he was a younger man he had gone with his mother to gather clams, and he had heard an Englishman call another Scott. Several seconds later his mother lay dead, shot through the forehead by an English musket ball. The name Scott remained in Hadalaet’s memory like a horrible stain, and it made him sick to hear it. He had lost his mother and had lived a life of terror; whenever he ran, he zigzagged in order to avoid the musket balls of the men who killed his mother.

  Hadalaet and the other Beothuk watched the English sailors. The English watched the Beothuk. Neither group dared to approach the other. After a while, however, Hadalaet left his companions and walked toward the English. Scott left the sailors and walked to meet him. This man Scott was young and strong. He was not afraid of an old man. When he came up close to Hadalaet he raised his hand in greeting. Hadalaet opened his long coat, which covered his body down to his knees, and taking his knife from his belt, stabbed Scott three times in the chest. The Englishman fell to the ground, killed outright. The sailors ran towards Hadalaet, at which point the other Beothuk took their bows and arrows from under their long coats and killed four more Englishmen. Then they turned and fled into the forest, taking the old man with them.

  Instead of chasing the Beothuk, the sailors who were not killed ran towards their boat, leaving their dead companions stretched out on the shore of the bay. This was another story for the Living Memories to tell to a nation that had been decimated for many years. Later, Hadalaet himself told this story to several young people, as though he were a hero.

  The same sailors landed another time on the north shore of the Bay of Exploits and discovered a storehouse of food that had been placed there by the Redskins but not well hidden. In it they found hundreds of furs of every kind of animal that lives on the island: bear, marten, beaver, wolf, fox, and many others. They took these furs to pay the costs of their expedition. They also took all the dried and smoked meat that was there, forcing the Beothuk to make another hunt to supply themselves with food for the winter. A voyage to the land of the Beothuk was never without profit, even if it cost the lives of a few sailors: an expedition was always rewarded.

  The old man and his six warriors were bitterly accused by the rest of the Beothuk of attracting more hatred to our people, and of continuing the war between the Beothuk and the English. They were punished for their act of vengeance. They were told that the nation could not endure another attack by the foreigners. Our position was too precarious. There were simply not enough Beothuk left on the island to continue to defy the powerful invaders.

  It was decided that such an error must never be repeated. Our only hope was to become invisible to the English, to make the colonists and fishermen forget that we existed. We could no longer live near the coast, or hunt there, or fish or gather shellfish from the sea. The chief at that time was named Bawoodisik the Thunderbird. He was a descendant of the ancestor Anin, but he was chief not because of his lineage but because he was elected by the people.

  Bawoodisik was a serious man, taciturn and solitary, and had become wise at a young age because of all he had lived through. He had been raised in the most absolute misery, and learned to content himself with little and to share whatever came his way from fishing and hunting. The great-grandson of Dosomite the Pine, he had learned from his grandfather never to be discouraged or to give in to despair. As a young man he had learned to love what he saw and not to look upon what he could not love. His environment did not allow the slightest error, and so he had had to know it intimately. Every sun brought him another opportunity to learn something to his advantage, and because of this he found life interesting and worthy of cherishing. Bawoodisik received his name because, on the morning of his birth, his mother had seen a large bald eagle flying very high in the sky. Several moments later, a thunderstorm began that lasted half a sun. Bawoodisik was born during the storm, and so she could give him no other name but Thunderbird.

  The young Bawoodisik learned to hunt almost before he could walk. His great-grandfather, the Pine, was still alive at that time, and taught him many things. The Pine would never speak to anyone who was easily discouraged, and counted among his friends only those who desired to live and to learn. He spoke to Bawoodisik about Kobshuneesamut the Very High, the Creator of all things, and told him how Kobshuneesamut left the Beothuk free to do either good or evil, but to accept the consequences of their actions whatever they may be. He taught the young boy that lying, evil-doing, the killing of one of his own people, jealousy and envy were weaknesses, and degrading for a real man.

  He also learned to recognize the qualities that pleased Kobshuneesamut. These were truth, sharing, love of younger people, independence, and caring for the elders. He learned that truth and falsehood belonged to the same family, as did good and evil, as did beauty and ugliness. He learned that everything had its opposite, and that knowing that was the only way a young man could decide what to do. He learned that night was the opposite of day, and that neither was evil in itself. Each has its usefulnesses, just as men and women have their different usefulnesses. Just as the child and the adult, or the tree and its fruit. He learned all these things as a boy, and as a man he was as beloved by the people as his great-grandfather had been. He did not become the man he had dreamed of becoming: he became the man he had learned how to become, and was neither better nor worse than what he had been taught to be.

  Bawoodisik was very tall, and his great strength was well known among our people. He was muscular and could endure great physical hardship. He could carry heavy loads for great distances, like the Sho-Undamung. In short, his abilities were those of all the Beothuk who survived this period of misery. The less able and the less talented died before they became adults. That was how difficult it was to survive in the interior of the island of Newfoundland during this period of suffering.

  44

  Six season-cycles passed after the story of old Hadalaet and the man named Scott. Nothing changed in the life of the Beothuk. They still had to steal tools from the colonists, for they needed tools more than ever in order to survive.
And the colonists continued to shoot them on sight.

  Many Sho-Undamung would come from the north shore to hunt on the island. But because they knew of the great misery that dwelt in the heart of the Beothuk Nation, the northerners did not impose themselves on the Beothuk as guests. Knowing how difficult it was for the Red Men to survive, they frequented instead the Shanung, at the Bay d’Espoir, the people the English called Micmacs. These people lived along the river that emptied into the Bay d’Espoir, and were also no strangers to misery. Twenty-eight of their most valiant hunters had been surprised by a violent storm during a whale hunt, and were lost at sea. The women were therefore more numerous than the men, and many young Montagnais or Innu huntsmen who came to the island to hunt decided to remain here among the Shanung. The community thus became one of mixed blood, and their contact with the English was much more frequent than it had been. The Micmac already spoke the European language. The Innu soon learned to speak it as well. As the Red Men had for thousands of season-cycles, this community of Mixed-Bloods grew and prospered. It often happened that one of their hunters shared the success of his hunt with the Beothuk at Red Ochre Lake. Relations with these people became normal again after many seasons of cold and snow following the deaths at St. George’s Bay, on the southwest coast.

  One day Bawoodisik and five companions saw an English expedition in the Bay of Exploits. The Englishmen were examining the forest plants and conifers, and were led by a Mixed-Blood guide from the Bay d’Espoir whose name was Paul. This guide was well known to the Beothuk. The chief knew that he would not take the English near Red Ochre Lake even though he had been a faithful friend for many years and knew exactly where to find the Beothuk. Bawoodisik and his companions watched the English for two suns with none of the English party being aware of it except the guide. When the man called Paul came and stood close to Bawoodisik, the chief learned that the Englishman who was so interested in the forest plants was named Sir Joseph Banks, and that he was a learned man who had come to study the flora and fauna of the island. The Mixed-Blood assured the Beothuk of the scientist’s good intentions, and said that he was not an enemy of the Red Men. The chief and his companions were therefore content with simply spying on the party and watching their curious movements. When he returned to the Englishmen, the Mixed-Blood told Sir Joseph that if the Beothuk were as savage as the English said they were, then he and his expedition would have been dead long ago, without their even having been aware of the Beothuk’s presence.

  “They are actually all around us,” Paul said, “and you don’t even smell them.”

  Sir Joseph replied that while examining the soil he had seen tracks that gave him to believe that the Beothuk still numbered about five hundred, and that they lived close to this spot.

  “But I am not here to chase Beothuk,” he said. “My mission is entirely scientific. I am not a soldier. If the authorities want to establish contact with the Red Men, that is their affair, not mine. As long as they leave us in peace…”

  And he continued his investigations without the slightest concern for the presence of the Red-Ochre people. Bawoodisik and his companions, convinced that these particular Englishmen were no threat to the Beothuk community, returned to their families. Since the epidemic killed mostly women, and each man was capable of seeing to the needs of only a small number, the households had once again become monogamous. Abundance was a thing of the past, and each of us had to look after his or her own necessities as well as those of the community. Children also had to do their part or else risk dying of hunger along with the adults.

  Each spring the whole community dispersed up and down the coast between the English settlements. Each family found its own place to set up camp and to fish, staying in the forest but always close to the sea, and so they were exposed to reprisals from the newcomers to the island. But that was the chance they had to take if they were to survive at all, if they had any hope of repopulating the land of the Beothuk with new Red-Ochre people. The word nation was hardly heard among us any more, and the idea of expansion was completely abandoned. We spoke only of the family. We had even forgotten the notion of clans, symbolized by an animal whose spirit protected humans. There was no more question of occupying the bays to defend our ancestral territories. We lived in the bays only during the summer, and for the sole purpose of finding enough food to survive for another season-cycle. The children were taught to avoid and even fear the bearded strangers whose faces were as pale as death. They were instructed in the art of concealment, of camouflage, of disappearing suddenly into the forest, which had become the last refuge of the people. The Bouguishamesh were afraid of the forest.

  During the warm season, Bawoodisik chose a small cove in the northeast for his summer camp. Two complete season-cycles had passed since the Englishmen had been seen with the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks. To give the time as it is reckoned by the English, the number of years past the middle of the century was twice the number of fingers on two hands. That season-cycle was a very important one for the Beothuk, because during it many unhappy events came to pass that determined the fate of the Red Men, the descendants of the ancestor Anin the Voyager.

  In early spring, when the families had already moved to their summer residences, another expedition was seen to disembark in the Bay of Exploits. This time the expedition members landed and travelled inland towards Red Ochre Lake. Since no Beothuk lived there during the summer, the expedition was allowed to go in peace. We did not even hurry to collect the furs and provisions we had left there. Usually we took our furs and often our food with us. But we would not kill over these items, and there were no Beothuk left in the village at the lake. The expedition leader was a soldier, but most of the men in his command were colonists from Notre Dame Bay, and were very familiar to all the Beothuk who were then alive.

  Bawoodisik was one of the last of the Beothuk to have more than one wife. He had Adenishit the Star, mother of a male child of about six season-cycles, and he had Basdic, her sister, who was pregnant with her first baby and was expected to give birth shortly after the first snow. These four had built their mamateek on the shore of Seal Cove, not far from Catalina. It was almost a moon before the longest day of the growing season. The sun was rising over the beach when Bawoodisik awoke, along with Adenishit and her still unnamed child. Basdic was already awake and was collecting clams on the beach. The three watched her from their mamateek. She was naked from the waist up, and wore her dingiam under her big, round belly. Suddenly they saw an Englishman run up behind Basdic. When Basdic saw him she threw herself on her knees and showed him that she was pregnant, but the man grabbed her by her hair with one hand and with the other took out his knife and slit open her belly. Then he lifted Basdic by her hair and plunged his free hand into her bleeding belly and took out her baby. She was still alive and struggling. The man stuck the baby on the sharp end of the stick that Basdic had been using to dig clams, and lifted the child above his head and held it like a torch. Several other men ran onto the beach then and congratulated the Englishman for his bravery, for his warrior-like conduct: eviscerating a pregnant woman and proudly displaying the skewered body of a Beothuk fetus.

  All this happened so quickly that neither Bawoodisik nor Adenishit had time to react. Their child watched the whole barbarous scene. Bawoodisik’s second wife had just been cut open before their eyes, and there was nothing they could do to protect her. The Beothuk chief collapsed onto the ground and cried for a long time, which he considered to be further evidence of his weakness.

  It was no use for Adenishit to tell him that it had happened too quickly, that even if there had been a hundred warriors they would not have had time to stop the Englishman from murdering Basdic, for Bawoodisik was inconsolable. Gradually his pain gave way to anger. That night he took his bow and arrows and travelled north, to the place where the fur traders had anchored their boat. There he found two Englishmen sitting on the beach around a fire. The others were still on the boat.

  Bawoodisik cre
pt up on the fire slowly. It was a moonless night, and he was protected by the darkness. He took three arrows from his quiver and shot them in rapid succession. One pierced the throat of one of the men, and the other two lodged in the thigh and right shoulder of his companion. The Beothuk chief leapt upon this second Englishman and finished him with his own English knife. Then Bawoodisik took his English hatchet and cut off the heads of the two men, and ran back to his second wife’s body.

  He and Adenishit dug a shallow grave near the seashore and laid Basdic’s body in it. They carried rocks all night to cover her body so that animals would not profane it. Then, on the pile of rocks, he placed the two English heads as symbols of his revenge. In every English community on the island, the savagery of the Beothuk was condemned, and praises were sung for the brave fur traders who had succeeded in killing a Red Indian. “There’s another one who will not grow up to trouble the peaceful colonists in this New Found Land,” they said. I am Wonaoktaé, the Living Memory of the people of Red Ochre Lake, and I tell you I am sickened every time I tell this tale of horror.

  Bawoodisik prayed on Basdic’s grave every day. He brought her the last flowers that bloomed in the evening, so that the beauty of her native land might comfort her in her eternal sleep. Adenishit and her son continued to live from day to day, digging clams and collecting the eggs of shorebirds, and the chief continued to hunt seals and catch the many kinds of fish in the bay. Two moons passed. One day, while Bawoodisik was fishing, Adenishit and her son were digging clams at the edge of the forest when a group of fur trappers emerged from the woods. Adenishit tried to run, but one of the trappers raised his musket and shot her. The child threw himself on his mother when he saw the blood flowing from the wound in her chest. The trappers took him prisoner and carried him away. They gave him the name John August, because of the month in which he was captured. He was not asked if he already had a name. In any case, the name they gave him was not valid, because he was not English.