Whatever Happened to the Beothuk?

- Hi and welcome back to Maple History. Thank you for listening. I really appreciate every time someone listens to each episode and if you are interested in leveling up your support for the show, please consider signing up for my new Patreon. I have just gotten started with it, but there will be short bonus episodes coming on there at chat group and other bonus material available. Coming up soon on that, I will have a review of the book Isola by Allegra Goodman and that book is based on the life of Marguerite de la Rock de Rubberval. It will be chock full of spoilers, but if you listen to the episode about her, then you will know the main storyline. Today, my guest is my friend Jessica. - Hello. - Again. You were on for the Wendat episode. - Yes. - That was ages ago, it feels like. So we will be taking a little side tour from the story of Champlain that we'd been doing so that we can get a better understanding of the people that lived in the maritime, specifically the Beothuk. We will talk a little bit about the Miꞌkmaq as well, but as more as they relate to the Beothuk story. It'll be kind of a compare and contrast a little bit with how they relate to Europeans. - Okay. - I had briefly covered the Beothuk and Miꞌkmaq in my whirlwind tour of the Indigenous Nations episode. Again, that was a long time ago, but that's not nearly enough time to get grounded with who these people were. So I really wanted to be sure to pull the Indigenous perspective and story along with me as I'm getting into the colonial story. I felt that as I was getting trapped in the traditional narrative of talking about the Indigenous story as separate when the Europeans arrived, and then that European story completely eclipsed the Indigenous story. I wanted to kind of stay away from that. - 'Cause they do continue on and the stories are intermixing at this point, but they're not once done and once going forward. - Exactly. - I wanted to take this side step away from the typical narrative of Indigenous people before the Europeans, and then the Europeans are able to survive in Canada with Indigenous people as sidekicks so that we can look at the Indigenous stories or narrative on their own terms with their own agency. So the really challenging thing about trying to understand who the Beothuk were is that much of the information is through a European lens. So even the Indigenous voices that were recorded, not literally recorded, but written down, were influenced by Europeans. So we definitely get transcribed accounts from the Beothuk, such as Shanna Dithit. She's kind of known as the last Beothuk person, but she was also a captive of the Peyton family. - Yeah. - So it's like not great. - Yeah. - The one thing that most people could say they know about the Beothuk people is that they are extinct. And I do find that a very uncomfortable term to use for fellow human beings. - Yeah. - It's so strange. They're humans. - Yeah. - Like, I don't know. It's hard for me to wrap my head around that term for people. So the language in the culture of the Beothuk people died with Shanna Dithit in 1829. But there are people alive today in Newfoundland who are descendants of Beothuk people. So that's how people work. - Yeah. - Like they can travel. - Yes. - And then when people are with other people, they tend to make other people. (laughs) So, anyhow. So since we don't have the people or culture to look to as a source like we do with the Mi'gma or the Haudenosaunee, who can give us oral history that would go back centuries. - Yeah. - We rely on the written sources. - Yeah. - The Mi'gma do have an oral history about the Beothuk, which is valuable, but the main sources up until Ingubard Marshall's book, A History and Ethnology of the Beothuk published in 1996 or James P. Howley's 1915 book, The Beothuks or Red Indians, The Aboriginal Inhabitants of Newfoundland and Frank Speck's 1922 book, Beothuk and McMack, Indian Notes and Monographs. So both of these books are a valuable part of understanding the Beothuk story. Howley's book relies almost completely on European sources and is a collection of historical documents. European accounts of the Beothuk and archaeological findings. Because it was published in 1915 and who would have started working on it in the late 19th century. - Yeah. - So people that you could talk to that new Beothuk people. - Well, which, yeah, has a lot to be said for. I mean, it's all gonna be that memory of that time ages ago, but it is at least some firsthand sources. - Exactly. So Speck was an anthropologist with a keen interest in indigenous studies. He was an American. He took the oral history of the Mi'gma as a main source of information for his book and reframed the European sources from that. Whereas Howley, for example, took Sean Adithi's testimony but would editorialize it in favor of the Europeans version that he was taking. So particularly, there's this family, the Patents. Whatever she said, he would editorialize it to make it match what they said. - They said. - Yeah. So both books are still extensively used for scholars who study the Beothuk people. Like I said, like Ingeborg Marshall, who wrote like a doorstop of a book, but the Beothuk in the '90s. And Christopher Patrick Aylward wrote Beothuk, How Story Made a People Almost Disappear. And that was published a couple of years ago. - Okay. Do they have any like archeological information that can supplement that? - Yeah, yeah, they're definitely working. And there's a few scholars, Ralph Pestor and Charles Martin. But it was Martin, M-A-R-T-I-J-N. So I don't know if it's just Martin, but it's just Dutch-ish. And yeah, I think Pestor is not alive anymore. - Yeah. - But yeah, there's definitely archeological work happening or had been happening. I don't know currently 'cause budgets. - Yeah. - Those are expensive, especially in a place like Newfoundland. - I was gonna say there's a lot of rock. - Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And that's the thing, there are certain environments that archeological findings get kept. - Yes. - There's that things and some things just land itself. - It eats it. - Yeah. - Like you built your shelter on top of the rocks in the Canadian shield. Nothing's surviving. - No. - But yeah, you're close to a lake that's like on a nice deep cold bed. Oh, well, we can take core samples and there's stuff in there going back. - Yeah, and I was reading that that's one of the reasons that archeology for Miꞌkmaq sites are difficult because the soil's acidic. - Oh, okay. - So everything just, yeah. - Your wood, your, like it all just- - Your leather- - Dissolves. - Yeah. - That's why like certain coastal areas where there are shell middens and things like that, they are able to find out a lot more. Like certain areas are just more conducive to archeological study and some are terrible. - Yeah. - And some it's just the environment of getting it to it as well, right? - Yeah. - So there's, I mean, obviously there's places in the world that are really hard to get to. - That's true. I mean, the upside would be, there's less likely to somebody have built a city on top of it. - True. So you don't have to move everyone out of the ways to do that. - Everywhere in Egypt or- - Yes. - Greece. - Yeah. - There's like the 12 layers of city on top of everything. - Yeah. - Yeah. - So Aleward's book is interesting because he examines the different sources and as he's trying to tease out who the biothic were while showing how their story continues today with descendants still on the island. His main focus was on the narrative itself. - Yeah. - And not the sources in the same way. - Yeah, I think he's a filmmaker, like a documentary filmmaker. - Okay. - So his, and he's a professor at Metropolitan University. - But I mean, stories, stories very much shape our understanding of things. So looking at what the story being told is adds a lot of value as well. - Exactly. - Yeah. - And actually that's what I started with. And like I was reading, I read some things, but when I was starting this slog to kind of get through a huge amount of sources. - Yeah. - Before I even really dug into Marshall's book, I read his first. - Okay. - 'Cause I wanted the story structure. I wanted understanding of the story structure and the narrative structure, and then I wanna see where the different people fed in. - Okay. - Okay, so who were the biothic? So there had been several groups on Newfoundland that existed before biothic's ancestors arrived, and Pestor talks about how there's been, like at least three had gone extinct. - Okay. - Because of lack of food availability. - Yeah. - Because the place that we call the rock, not great for food, the ocean. - Yes. - Great. - Yes. - So the biothic's ancestors were related to hunter-gatherer groups who lived in Labrador around 50 BCE. There were a few distinguishable groups that occupied Newfoundland and Labrador, and the biothic grew or evolved from them. Culturally evolved, obviously they're all humans. - Yeah. - So they would move back and forth across the Strait of Belle Isle seasonally, like they'd come and go, like there was movement, right? There was always, people always move. - Yes. - Like even groups that are thought of as agrarian, like there's movement. - Oh yeah. - It's easy to slip into the mindset of when did a group permanently live in one space, but that's not really how hunter-gatherer's occupy a space. It's their territory. - They're there for this season where it's good to be there and then like Canada geese sometimes occupy Canada and sometimes occupy places that are not Canada 'cause it's cold up here. - Yeah. There's actually a book that I'm reading by Ellen Greer about the concept of property for indigenous people in three different locales. And he's looking at kind of the innu in kind of Northern Quebec because they're hunter-gatherers and that, 'cause that's the most kind of contentious idea 'cause you can look at, say, the Haudenosaunee 'cause they're agrarian, they had farms. They clear a place and they set up these farms and same with the Wendat and other people down the coast on the American coast. But the innu, they move in, but that's still their territory and how, and he's examining how they can texturalize that in relation later to when Europeans come as the concept of property is very different. (laughs) So it causes problems. - Yes. - So the Beyothic lived in the same sites as what they archeologists call the little passage people. They're it's named from an archeological site and then they group them into these, what they call complexes. And it's very archeological, heavy and like, I kind of get a little dizzy when I get too much archeology. So these little passage people, which is such a funny term, little passage people, they're the group that the Beyothic culture evolved from. So the Beyothic are the little passage, but the little passage are not Beyothic. - Yep. - And the Beyothic culture evolved from them with the addition of iron from European sources. - Okay. - Dr. Ralph Pastore explained it succinctly on the Heritage Newfoundland and Labrador website. So I'm gonna quote this. Archeologists digging at these sites have found little passage stone tools beneath iron nails picked up by the Beyothics from abandoned European fishing premises. The Beyothics work these nails into arrowheads and perhaps lance points. And it is their use of iron that distinguishes them from their ancestors. This is, in fact, the evidence that has led us to conclude that the little passage people became the Beyothics. Actually, they are the same people. It's just that when the little passage people acquired European goods, we refer to them as Beyothics. - Okay, makes sense. - So determining how many Beyothic people there were before contact is extremely difficult. Some scholars I read did not even want to venture a guess because there are too few archaeological sites that have been studied due to the size of Newfoundland and lack of funds to do so. But those scholars who wanted to wade into the discussion say that there were somewhere between 1,000 to 2,000 Beyothic pre-contact. So most settle around, let's say 1,500, which is small. That is not a lot of people. - No, but, I mean, all of the-- - Compared to the population of lots of other areas in Canada, pre-1950s, Newfoundland tends to be settled. In small towns, right along the coast. - Exactly, well into the modern-- - Same with New Brunswick. - Yeah, the coastal areas. Still, it's such a small amount of people on that whole island, anyhow. So how do they live? This is gonna be quick. I'm not getting the whole picture here. So for housing, they typically lived in conical-shaped wigwams, or some scholars call them mama-teaks, depending on, I don't know why they chose that, but anyways. So Dr. Pastor has several articles on the heritage Newfoundland and laboratory site on the Beyothic people, and those that preceded them. And he uses the term wigwam. You might do that because it is a website for the public, and that is just a more common term. It's easy to, if someone says wigwam, you kind of know visually what they're talking about, whereas a mama-teak would be, you'd have to explain what it is. That could be why he chose that term. Marshall, in her book, she always uses mama-teaks. And if I'm saying that wrong, I'm sorry. That's how it's spelled. So early versions would use bark or hide around the poles, and later versions would use European sailcloth, 'cause they took it. Another type of structure was an oval-shaped house about nine meters long and four meters wide, similar to an in-new structure called a shaputuan. In structures like this, a feast would be celebrated for caribou, the in-new collet mokushan. And I'm gonna be honest with you, I don't think I would enjoy the feast, because it involves smashing up caribou leg bones and boiling them, so that the fat and collagen rise to the top and gets scooped out to be made into a patty or cake of sorts. - Okay. - I will respectfully pass. - That's... - It would be... - Nourishing. - Yeah, a lot of gelatin and fat to it. I mean, they don't specify what seasonings might have gotten mixed in with their anything. - No, they don't have a seasoning from what I've read so far on indigenous side. I've only read about Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and a little bit of Mi'kmaq. There's like, again, there's like no salt. - No. - They don't want any of that. And I've actually read a little bit about the West Coast. They would use this fish oil, and that is like a seasoning. They would use it as a condiment kind of, and it was very valuable. I can't remember the name of the fish, but it would probably be one of those small kind of super greasy ones. - Yeah. - Probably like a smelter. - Yeah. - Like anchovy and like those really extremely nourishing and very flavorful, very strong scent, and so what I would gather. So that was, that's the West Coast though, this East Coast. I don't know, I know a lot of East Coast now, they use like savory, but I don't know if that's, I don't know who brought that. - Yeah. I mean, there's gonna be a lot of sumac and cedar and stuff like that, which gives it a nice flavor. But it's, I mean, that's a really hard thing to find in an archeological dig. - Yeah, and well, they do find seeds surprisingly a lot, which is amazing 'cause the skill of archeologists just awes me, and they're patience. 'Cause I've watched some documentaries where they're doing digs, and I'm so bored. And even like they condensed that so much. And I know they're only, I can tell that they staged it. I know, I know you are, I know you are sat at that spot for two weeks. - I guess, tough to take, good for them. That's, I'm glad we have archeologists. Okay, so as far as the mokoshan ceremony, which was to honor the caribou, these sites would be used for many years. So that's why we had these bone deposits. They're down the middle of the house where they have the fire and everything. So as for other food, the sea provided a large portion of that, like that is their main, they're coastal people. They're their main source. So seal, salmon, seabirds were very important. Although there's little islands where there's tons, like the Great Auk until Europeans killed them all. They're flightless birds, and their eggs also were a huge component of their diet. 'Cause they could be dried. So yeah, like food storage is obviously a challenge in any of these really harsh environments. So as I mentioned, there were about 1500 Beothuk that lived in Newfoundland at one time. And these were broken up into bands that were about 35 to 50 people. So about six to seven families within these groups. And because of the societal structure, strict hierarchy system is not really effective since it's more or less a large family system. Yeah. So there were certainly leaders and band chiefs, but loyalty and obedience would have to be constantly earned. Not in a battle kind of way, not in like a lion pride situation, but just like the respect is always there. Yeah, like I'm gonna listen to you this time 'cause I think you have a good idea, but next time I might not just by default listen to you 'cause you're the person in charge, we might have to hash it back out 'cause it's more egalitarian by default. That's exactly it, which can be difficult in times of battle with the Europeans, which does happen like there's times you're like, we need to go attack these people right now. And they're like, no. And that's not great system in that particular example. But all of their other thousands of years, it was the right call. Yeah. So as for their spiritual beliefs, it is very difficult to know anything definitively. Very likely similar to other groups like the Inu and that they would have rituals for hunting and a belief that everything had a spirit. That's why I brought that example of the Mokushan 'cause the Inu do that as well. And so we know they are still in Quebec so we can talk to them and find out about their history and spiritual life. So the one thing that we do know is that the use of Red Ochre was very important and even infants would be coded in it as part of it initiation. And there were annual ceremonies where everyone and kind of everything would get a coding in Red Ochre. And this was very clearly a marker of group belonging and that in-group mentality. And that will become very important when the Europeans come to Newfoundland. So for example, if a biothic went to live with the Europeans and then they came back, they would be killed. They're like in a sacrifice. Oh, okay. So it's no go. Like if you went willingly, if you were captured and you came back, that's a different story. But if you were- - You chose to go, then there was no coming back. - That's right. But it's also, we don't really have a full understanding of the ritual and spirituality and why that ritual needed to happen. - Yeah. - We didn't get it all. - Is there also possibility, if you'd voluntarily gone to the Europeans and then you show back up, suddenly your people are like, I don't trust you. If the Europeans have been raiding along the coast, there might also have been an element of, sure you've come back to be friends. I mean, that doesn't necessarily seem surprising either in terms of like, how much are you going to trust someone who's just magically shown back up again kind of things? - Yeah. Yeah, and the, with the biothic people versus the Miꞌkmaq, so the Miꞌkmaq had access to the forests and fields and rivers and lakes where the beaver were. - Yeah. - Whereas Newfoundland, the fur-bearing animals are limited. So what they have to trade is naturally limited. And when the Europeans were coming, they were coming mainly for the cod and maybe seals. They're always in the periphery, right? So they're in conflict for taking those things to eat. - Yes. - So it's like, it's not a trading operation. - It's a, you're taking my food. - Yeah. - Yeah, so in a kind of sparse territory, that's going to be a bigger deal. - Yeah. - Whereas, like you said, the relationships down the coast that the Miꞌkmaq would have, sure they had enemies as well. - Oh, yeah, but like, you-- - Like the Susquehonics and the different people that are down in what we call New England now. And I'm not sure on the numbers, but if it's similar to, say, the Wendat or the Haudenosaunee, the Wendat are about 30,000 people. And the Miꞌkmaq might be around there. - Yeah. - Or maybe half, but maybe, like, but we're in the thousands, rather than like 1,500 people. - Yeah. - We're in a good-sized town, not a Hamlet. - Yeah. - So, yeah, it is a totally different mindset. Okay, contacts with European is clearly very important to the Beothuk culture. The material culture changed with the introduction of European iron, which allowed them to change how they made many of their tools and weapons. And it is undeniable that iron weapons are better than stone. Early contact was most likely from the Norse. In their sagas, they talk about Skraillings. We can't be 100% sure if they're always talking about the Beothuk there. They could be talking about the Inuit. And I'm not gonna get into-- - Whether or not that's a nice term. - That's a nice term. They didn't mean it in a nice way. I'm gonna say that for sure. - I mean, it's the Vikings. They come and show up. And lots of Europeans have not nice terms for the Vikings showing up in their areas. So, like, the fact that it might also lead to conflict when they show it up here. Not surprising. - And you know what? Good on the Beothuk in the Inuit for chasing them off, you know? - Yeah. - 'Cause not many did that. So, not that they had huge war parties, like in Lindisfar and stuff like that in England, but still, they chased them off. - Exactly, yeah, exactly. - So, right from the get-go of explorers coming to North America, there was always contact with the other people. But even when there were times of amicable trade with the Europeans, the Europeans are still being kind of trash. From one of the earliest documented explorers to come to Newfoundland, Gaspar, Corte Real, who's Portuguese. He planned to kidnap and use people as slaves. - I mean, it's what, they were doing everywhere else. - They were doing that. And the Portuguese were doing that a lot. So, one account of the time says they kidnapped 57 people in 1501. But it said that one ship had seven captives and another would be bringing 50 captives. So, in an article for journal Aketiansis, William Gilbert examined the evidence from all the early contact experiences of the Beothuk, including this kidnapping. And he concluded that it is highly unlikely that there were 57 Beothuk captives. And it's much more likely there were only seven. His reasoning is that there was no evidence of the 50 captives in the ship ever arriving in Lisbon in a ship crewed by the 30 men. That's a lot of captives in one ship. When there was seven in the other ship, it just doesn't logically make sense. - You would, even those up a little more. - You would, yeah. So, in the letters discussing the 50 captives, the author says that the ship's going to be arriving any day now and it's got 50 captives, but it basically sounded like it was just all talk. (laughs) - I had a road, I don't know, there's way more where that's coming from. - Oh, there's so many coming, yeah. - Yeah. And when you think about it, the population density of the Beothuk's Newfoundland, it does not support taking 57 captives. That's larger than one band. - Yeah. - So, it just doesn't make sense. So, it's probably seven, and we don't really know what happened. I don't think it went well. So, there may have been other Beothuk taken at different times, but the numbers would have been quite small. And there were other indigenous people captured, for example, Donna Cona and the other static Conans that Cartier took in his trips to Canada. Some magma later even went willingly with French or Basque traders around the time of Champlain's journeys. So, one of the magma men named Memasowet, who made the journey in 1578, stayed in France for two years, and was one of the guides that helped Champlain navigate down the East Coast in what is now New England. - Okay. - Another magma was Chief Kakazu. He went to France and came home baptized. - Oh, okay. - And he told a Jesuit in Acadia about his baptism, and the Jesuit remarked, Kakazu told me he had been baptized in Bayon, relating the story to me as one tells about going to a ball out of friendship. (laughing) - I love these little glimpses of the character. - Yeah. - Like you get like a little flavor of... - Yeah. - In this case, the magma at other times, like when Donna Cona was like telling his stories about, (laughing) - You're not gonna believe what the Europeans did. - Yeah, like in the tall tales and things like that. Like this, you get the sense of humor and the little personality come through. So, the magma experience with Europeans, the French in particular, is quite different than that of the Beothuk. - There's cooperative from almost from the start. - Yeah. - They were wanting to trade. It is so interesting. I wonder if it is the sheer numbers. - I mean, that would be a factor. And also like the magma, they're right next to other tribes. - Yes. - They would already be trading all the way down, I'm sure, the East Coast of the United States. And well, but if the Beothuk are normally like little family-only bands living fairly independently, that's a very different situation in terms of like, how much are you like, "Hey, new people!" - Yeah. - You're gonna deal with it differently? - Yeah, your whole structure, like you would have, I think they definitely had some relationships with the Inuit, but I think they had conflict with the Inuit. - Yeah. - Because the Inuit were in conflict with the Inuit as well. So when Europeans met the Inuit, they were, it was not good either. So again, it's similar, like they did not get on. - Yeah. - Like there was some, and the Beothuk kind of got on with the magma, but there was also the, the magma would come in and we're kind of taking some territory down like in the southern part. - Yeah. - Because why not? - There's no one that's there. - Yeah. I find it very interesting to kind of try and wrap your head around why did they not cooperate at all. So there was some early evidence of cordial trading between Europeans and Beothuk, 'cause again, they're small, like it's only a few coming at first, right? But this did not last long. - When the Europeans started to make annual trips to the same places for their fishing operations, and then these grew into permanent settlements, that eventually after a long time, that pushed the Beothuk into the interior of the island, especially when the permanent settlements came, is the Beothuk could handle the temporary stuff. - You show up in the spring, you're gonna take some fish, you're gonna go away. In the winter, when I need to live in that spot to get the fish, you're already gone. That's fine, you can just trade off. And when you leave, you're gonna leave a bunch of your stuff, and we're gonna clean it all out to kick all of the iron. - Yeah. - Great. But when you're here all of the time, I'm still gonna come and take all of the iron, you're just happened to be there now, and that's gonna be a problem. - Yes. - So that's what happens. The Europeans don't like it when their property gets stolen. - They're not. - They don't mind coming and claiming, but it's okay if I steal your property, it's not okay if you steal my property. - Exactly, exactly it. I worked hard for this. So this is also when the historical records show that the Beothuk ceased to be interested in trade, and began to acquire the European goods by a pilfering, and taking items from current settlements significantly ramped up the violence between the groups. So this was not just the Europeans attacked, like the Beothuk gave as good as they got. - Yeah. - Four a time when this volume of Europeans and disease and just the numbers down. So from about 1500 until 1713, when France ceded their claim on Newfoundland to the United Kingdom with the Treaty of Utrecht, things escalated slowly. So before the treaty, France and England battled for power over the resources of the island, and after that, it was a British show only. There were some attempts by churches from England, Scotland to come over to proselytize to the Beothuk, but they did not go all out in the same way that the Jesuits did with the Wendat, McMaughan, Honoshani, the Methodists, and they tried, but they just don't have the numbers. They don't have the resources. Like the Jesuits, they had serious money behind them. We're talking mega wealthy people, super uber mega wealthy Catholics. So the loss of the coastal territory forced the Beothuk to use hunting interior game rather than the more abundant and reliable sea for food. So the struggle for survival began in earnest in the 18th century. To quote Pestor, in fact, Newfoundland's star interior supported only 14 indigenous mammalian species, and there is no evidence in the archeological record that any Aboriginal culture lived there for 12 months of the year. So when the Beothuks were forced to do so, the results were tragic. You just can't survive without the sea on Newfoundland. - Yeah. - So an example Pestor used to indicate how desperate things were was an article of a child's clothing and burial shroud for the child. So the items were made with fragments of animal skins and the moccasins were sewn together with spruce root and not the typical caribou sinu. Again, to quote Pestor, all of this suggests a people on the ragged edge of desperation who did not even have enough animal skins to clothe the child properly. So this is desperation as getting into, this is in the 18th century when the British settlements were coming, like the codfisher men, like in the Irish, were also coming Scottish. - You'd be filling in all of the little hamlets and some others, yeah. - And it's an old colony in the British sense. I'm moving on, we're in the 18th century and we're scooting into the 19th now. So British settlers John Payton Sr. and John Payton Jr. contributed a great deal to the documentary record of the Beothuk in the early 19th century, but they were also responsible for many of their deaths. The patents were part of the final story of the Beothuk living culture. So Payton Sr. had a salmon fishery and eventually brought his son over to Newfoundland when he was old enough. His wife stayed over. I'm sure they had a great relationship. He had many altercations with the Beothuk and had killed several. He was brutal. The record shows and even like the newspaper, they're like, he was a brutal man. There had been many incidents of retaliatory violence between settlers with the Beothuk fighting back hard, even in this time, when their numbers were getting weighed up. - Yeah. - Basically, lots of murders and raids. They would raid areas to take items. And interestingly, it wasn't just to take resources. It was like a guerrilla campaign. They were cutting boats loose and to set them adrift, to sink them. They were destroying property. - They're just trying to get them to clear out. - Yeah, and this is the aspect of the agency that I think is really important. They were fighting back hard for their place, which is not necessarily the version the others. And for reasons we don't understand, these people show up and they attack us. All we did was move into like the place where they were living, took over their land and they're being jerks about it. - Yeah. - Yeah, no, it makes sense to be like they're starving because this is where they had been living and now they can't live there anymore. And constant acts of sabotage, like destroying their weapons. Like not just take, they didn't take the guns. They would dunk them and they would soak them in the marsh to make them useless. And things like this was happening for decades. And Peyton Sr. is part of that story then part of going and killing a whole family in their mamatik or wigwam, whatever you wanna call it. It is brutal, like a written record of him talking about like how he ash some brains in. Brutal, brutal, physical, tactile violence. But there's lots of people getting taken by the biothic. If there's a couple fishermen or furriers, they get caught, they get killed, they get beheaded. I mean, it was war. They were fighting for survival. Yeah, so he had this salmon fishery, brought his son over. So after many years of back and forth violence, Peyton Jr. led a raid with the intent to capture a biothic person and basically hold them hostage so that they could foster good relations between the groups. That definitely sounds like a way that totally fosters good relations between groups. Exactly. Considering the decades of violence, maybe like 20 years of violence that your father has been waiting. So this was in 1819. Okay. So yeah, and I do not trust his good intentions here. No. So off they went, both Peyton Jr. and Sr. plus eight other men to go capture people. So this macabre hunting party came upon a band of biothic. Most ran away, but Demaz Duit, a woman, was carrying her baby and was ill and weak. And so she could not keep up with everyone. Her husband, known as Sappaset, saw that she was struggling and took the baby and he handed the baby off to someone else and went back to protect her from the raiding party who had grabbed her. Yeah. So a fight ensued and known as Sappaset, he struck down two of the men. He was apparently a large man. And he grabbed hold of Peyton Sr. And known as Sappaset, he had a good hold of him, but Peyton was able to get the other men to attack and known as Sappaset was shot and killed. And his brother was too. Yes. So Demaz Duit was taken away and eventually brought to stay with Reverend John Lee. She tried to escape and there was like, there's a lot more. Yeah, it was a feeling. So we brought to stay with Reverend John Lee and she was there for a few weeks. And then she was taken in state, she stayed with another clergyman, John Lewis. She learned some English and her captor said that she was very gentle and enjoyed being with children. She delighted in children. Yeah. And she lived for five years but died of tuberculosis. So she was able to help create kind of a dictionary and tell some stories. She learned English fairly quickly or at least enough to communicate adequately. Yeah. But her baby had died not long after her capture. We know this because the next person that gets captured is Shana Dithit. She knew that she knew that the baby had died. So, but there was no way that with all that death and destruction brought upon the Beothuk by the Europeans that could be sued by one person. Yeah, that's not gonna work. No. I honestly wonder if they actually thought it would work. Yeah. I don't know if it was naivety or whether it's just lip service to the concept of peace amongst them. I don't know. Well, 'cause I mean, if it was just an issue of like, well, we can't figure out how to communicate. Well, surely if they've been trading prior centuries before they had been able to trade, well, somebody must have figured out something. Yeah. Or if the innu had been trading with them, they must have known something. Or the Micma must have known something. Yeah. So the idea of like, oh, no, we definitely needed to like steal a person. Steal a person in order to figure this out. And she really liked kids. It was weird. I mean, she'd had to hand off her infant just before getting captured. And she seemed to like, you know, miss being around kids. That's, you know, crazy. Yeah. A lot of people really like children. Well, that too, but like also like, she would have like, she's been captured and held for five years. She's seen her husband killed. Yeah. And she's no idea what happened to her baby ever. It got handed off and then you were captured and then eventually you die and you never get to find out what happened to the kid. Yeah. But there's a dictionary. So that's a win. Yeah. (laughs) Yeah, it's great. So the loss of people in the surviving bands, it must have been precipitous in the years after 1819. Because in 1823, Shauna Dithit was captured by some fur trappers along with her mother and sister. They were basically starving together and they grabbed them. Yeah. Her mother and sister died soon after and Shauna Dithit was sent to live with various settlers including the Patons. Mm. Great. (laughs) I'm sure she didn't teach them some of the other words she was thinking about the situation. I would think so because she had been on, she had been on the raids against the Patons. She had been one of the guerrilla fighters, essentially. Like not a fighter necessarily, like done violence but she had been the type of person to cut the moorings off a loaded ship to send it out to sea and destroy their product and cost them money. Yeah. And again, there's only 1500 people in the entire, or other was by this time we're probably talking hundreds, maybe less than by 1820 because by 1823, they were dying. Yeah. Because this tuberculosis was rampant. I didn't see anything about smallpox because smallpox will take everybody. Well, tuberculosis does too, but there's-- It's a little bit slower. Yeah. So yeah, her mother and sister died and she learned English and lots of people interviewed her and were taking down information 'cause she was living with clergy as well. Like there was a lot of clergy would come and then they kind of acted as ethnologists really, like anthropologists in this 'cause they're learned in people. And anyways, she did many drawings of her world, including the mama teaks and some maps and even drawings of the battle between Nona Sabasut and with the whole story. Yeah. The whole story of Damasut, like, she gave her version of what she knew of that story. Yeah. Not just the patent story and that was part of the difference. Like it's like-- Yeah. And she died in 1829 of tuberculosis and is considered the last of her people. So after her death, there were no more biotic people known to tell or correct the version that the people like the patents wanted to tell about the biotic. So stories like the one told by John Peyton Jr. to Howley about a bounty that the French had gave to the Miꞌkmaq to collect scalps of the biotic and that went unchallenged for a long time. Yeah. There is no evidence for this in the historical record. Charles A. Martin, one of the archaeologists, notes that in addition to no documentation about a policy like this nor any payments, it is said to have been in 1720, which is seven years after the Treaty of Utrecht when the French had negotiated Newfoundland away to the English. So it doesn't even make sense. None of it adds up. Yeah. But this story was told and retold and it made it into textbooks well into the 1970s about the biotic and it caused the Miꞌkmaq students to feel shame in their belief that they had contributed in such a violent way to the demise of their fellow indigenous people, the biotic. Yeah. So scholars reexamination of the historical record, new work in archaeology and critical reviews of the various books that have been written about the biotic really help us to gain a better appreciation for the biotic. And we can understand who they were and their place in the Canadian and maritime story and that they're not just a little side trek and about their extinction. Yes. That's not the story that we need to kind of keep in our minds that, oh, the biotic, they went extinct and this is tragic story. It's more than just that. Well, that's what I hope to kind of pull us through with this episode. There's a lot more to talk about but a lot of it's archaeology and things like that and that's just kind of outside of my skill set. Yeah. So to speak. Later when we're talking about the British settlement of Newfoundland, this is definitely something we'll go, we can go back to. Yeah, because there's a lot more to go there. I mean, we'll hit the Patons eventually. Exactly. And so I mean, those will come back up but it gives a nice overview of who they were so that when we're talking about the Miꞌkmaq and talking because for a long time, Newfoundland is kind of a side story of Canada because they were their own colony. They were not Canada. They were, if you ask any Newfoundlander, they were not Canada for a long time. I'm sure some of the older people who are still around have very different opinions on whether it was good that they joined Canada overall. There is, that was a huge divide. It was like a political civil war in the late '40s and early '50s. That would have been extremely contentious. So it's like, it's sort of Canada but it's more than that. Yeah, so anyways. So yeah, so thank you very much for coming on again, Jessica. I really appreciate it. Yeah. It was good. And if you want to share on socials, maple history pod is the Instagram and TikTok and blue sky. Okay. That's what I've got. Not the other one. I'm not on the other one, I think they're all. No, thank you. Yeah, if you really, really want to support the show, the Patreon, but I will have more. And I think I will talk a little bit more about Shauna Dithit on that. 'Cause she deserves a lot more time. Yeah. So yeah, this is great. Thanks again. And next time it will be more Champlain and Quebec. That's good. Yeah. Thanks. Bye. Bye.