#beothuk

A lonely lighthouse plays a mournful song That echoes through the cliffs and cross the sea

At the end of the world I stood alone Gulls plunging, seas crashing, round shores Wheeling through shallow skies they disappear

Natures drawn its curtain Across a world uncertain The cry of the old world pierces The skies of the new.

And then I see him. A fisherman leaning out into the unknown.

His staff is heavy and he holds it glancing To the worlds he’s known

At the end of the world he stands and waits And watches distant seas And hums and taps his feet To the song of the land and the trees.

And with him stands another In a worsted woolen jumper Dreaming of his Emerald Isle home.

Two nomads come to the edge of the world.

Proud Beo’thuk long since gone Their staffs since turned to loam With Irish immigrants unable to make a difference Shuttled far from home.

Here on the windswept cliffs gather the lonesome and the lost.

The well-known story of the Beothuk is that they were an isolated people who, through conflict with Newfoundland settlers and Mi’kmaq, were made extinct in 1829. Narratives about the disappearance of the Beothuk and the reasons for their supposed extinction soon became entrenched in historical accounts and the popular imagination.

Beothuk explores how the history of a people has been misrepresented by the stories of outsiders writing to serve their own interests - from Viking sagas to the accounts of European explorers to the work of early twentieth-century anthropologists. Drawing on narrative theory and the philosophy of history, Christopher Aylward lays bare the limitations of the accepted Beothuk story, which perpetuated but could never prove the notion of Beothuk extinction. Only with the integration of Indigenous perspectives, beginning in the 1920s, was this accepted story seriously questioned. With the accumulation of new sources and methods - archaeological evidence, previously unexplored British and French accounts, Mi’kmaq oral history, and the testimonies of Labrador Innu and Beothuk descendants - a new historical reality has emerged.

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Shanawdithit was one of the last of the Beothuk people, a group native to Newfoundland. The encroachment of settlers into the area in the 18th century, as well as conflicts with other peoples, cut the Beothuk off from the sea, one of their primary food sources. Diseases introduced by the Europeans, including tuberculosis, also proved devastating for the Beothuk, whose population dwindled precipitously as a result of starvation and disease.

Shanawdithit was abducted by settlers in 1819 alongside her mother and sisters, who died of tuberculosis. At the time of her capture, she estimated that no more than fifteen Beothuk remained in Newfoundland. At first forced into domestic servitude, Shanawdithit, dubbed "Nancy April" by her captors, eventually came to live with philanthropist William Eppes Cormack. Shanawdithit provided Cormack with sketches and oral histories describing her people's culture, including their material culture and their mythology. It is because of her that we know what we do about the Beothuk today. She died of tuberculosis aged 29 in 1829. Her body was dissected; an unfitting end for so courageous and strong a woman.

The last known members of the Indigenous Beothuk people of Newfoundland were thought to have died out 200 years ago. But genes from these people have been found in a man living in Tennessee today, researchers reported.

Shanawdithit, a Beothuk woman who died of tuberculosis in 1829, was the last known Beothuk. The group had thrived in Newfoundland with as many as 2,000 people there, until the Europeans arrived in the early 1500s, bringing disease and pushing the Beothuk inland, away from their traditional fishing and hunting grounds, which led to their starvation.

This schematic shows the settlement history of Newfoundland encompassing occupations by at least three distinct cultural groups: MA, Dorset Palaeoeskimo, and Beothuk.

Indigenous people have been on the far northeastern edge of Canada for most of the last 10,000 years, moving in shortly after the ice retreated from the Last Glacial Maximum. Archaeological evidence suggests that people with distinct cultural traditions inhabited the region at least three different times with a possible hiatus for a period between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago.

Now, researchers who've examined genetic evidence from mitochondrial DNA provide evidence that two of those groups, known as the Maritime Archaic and Beothuk, brought different matrilines to the island, adding further support to the notion that those groups had distinct population histories. The findings are published in Current Biology on October 12.

"Our paper suggests, based purely on mitochondrial DNA, that the Maritime Archaic were not the direct ancestors of the Beothuk and that the two groups did not share a very recent common ancestor," says Ana Duggan of McMaster University. "This in turn implies that the island of Newfoundland was populated multiple times by distinct groups."

The relationship between the older Maritime Archaic population and Beothuk hadn't been clear from the archaeological record. With permission from the current-day indigenous community, Duggan and her colleagues, led by Hendrik Poinar, examined the mitochondrial genome diversity of 74 ancient remains from the island together with the archaeological record and dietary isotope profiles. All samples were collected from tiny amounts of bone or teeth.

The sample set included a Maritime Archaic subadult more than 7,700 years old found in the L'Anse Amour burial mound, the oldest known burial mound in North America and one of the first manifestations of the Maritime Archaic tradition. The majority of the Beothuk samples came from the Notre Dame Bay area, where the Beothuk retreated in response to European expansions. Most of those samples are from people that lived on the island within the last 300 years. The DNA evidence showed that the two groups didn't share a common maternal ancestor in the recent past, but rather one that coalesces sometime in the more distant past.

"These data clearly suggest that the Maritime Archaic people are not the direct maternal ancestors of the Beothuk and thus that the population history of the island involves multiple independent arrivals by indigenous peoples followed by habitation for many generations," the researchers write. "This shows the extremely rich population dynamics of early peoples on the furthest northeastern edge of the continent."

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