Last of the Beothuk

 Last of the Beothuk

by Clifton Bertram, August 6, 2026 

The earliest settlements in the region of today’s Newfoundland and Labrador, and stretching as far south as Maine were those of the Red Ochre People, or Red Paint People, so-called because of their distinctive and extensive use of ochre, particularly in their burial practices.

The Red Ochre people arrived in the region as early as 7000 BC to 6,000 BC as evidenced by the Pinware Hill, Cowpath and L’Anse Amour sites on the Strait of Belle Isle separating Newfoundland from mainland Labrador.

Their houses were made by excavating depressions into boulder beaches, and they evolved from small single-family dwellings to longhouses up to 100 m in length and containing a number of rooms.

 

In addition to harvesting caribou for meat, skin and antlers, they hunted sea mammals including walrus, seals and small whales. They also fished and even practiced swordfish hunting, based on specialized bone and stone harpoons found in burial sites. Swordfish are deepwater pelagic fish, which means travelling far offshore. And they are large, averaging 6 to 7 feet and between 50 and 200 pounds. Very advanced maritime skills and seaworthy craft are required to catch them.

Archaeologists have found very fine needles made of bird bone, thought to have been used to sew tight seams for boots, leggings or jackets, making them waterproof. As essential as weatherproof performance was for offshore fishers, mere function was not enough for these people. Their clothing was richly decorated with rows of seal claws, bone pendants, and shell beads. Some of their decorative art is thought to have a spiritual meaning:

“The small art objects that they wore and the carvings that decorated their possessions were not only cherished for their beauty but also for their magical powers. By carrying the image of a gull, merganser, loon, or other diving bird, the owner hoped to acquire the bird's skill in fishing; the carving of a bear might increase the strength of its wearer. A beautifully carved killer whale nearly 20 cm long indicates the great respect the Maritime Archaic Indians had for this mammal, it's strength and hunting abilities.”

Their toolkit also included ground slate knives and wood-working tools such as small knives made of beaver teeth with wood or antler handles. Chipped stone tools were knapped from heat-treated chert, and stone axes and adzes were fabricated for chopping.

We also know they used ochre for more than just burial practices. During spring, they also painted their houses, canoes, weapons, household appliances and musical instruments with ochre, and mixing it with bear grease, would cover their bodies in it.

The people of the Maritime Archaic or Red Ochre cultures, disappeared around 1,400 BCE, possibly due to competition with Paleo-Eskimo peoples who migrated from Siberia in a single wave, arriving in the western arctic around Alaska around 4,000 BCE. Also marine mammal hunters, these people – who may have included the ancestors of the Groswater and Dorset – could have out-competed the Red Ochre people for resources.

A study led by researchers from McMaster University in Hamilton and Lakehead University in Thunder Bay highlighted the complex history of human habitation in Newfoundland, involving multiple independent migrations.

“Differential features in material culture indicate at least three settlement episodes by distinct cultural groups, including the Maritime Archaic, Palaeo-eskimo, and Beothuk. Newfoundland has remained home to indigenous peoples until present day with only one apparent hiatus (3,400–2,800 YBP). This record suggests abandonment, severe constriction, or local extinction followed by subsequent immigrations from single or multiple source populations, but the specific dynamics and the cultural and biological relationships, if any, among these successive peoples remain enigmatic.”

While discontinuity in mitochrondial DNA suggests a near-complete population replacement, some cultural traditions persisted. When Europeans arrived, the Beothuk they encountered retained their ancestors’ habit of painting their bodies in ochre, giving rise to the traditional description of ‘Red Indians’.

The Beothuk lived in independent, self-sufficient, extended family groups of 30 to 55 people, dwelling in conical birchbark dwellings called mamateeks. The floors of the houses were dug with hollows used for sleeping, and inhabitants were warmed by a fireplace at their centre. They harvested caribou, fish and seals, following the migratory patterns of their prey, and are believed to have traded and interacted with their neighbours the M’iqmaq and Innu (whom the French referred to as the Montagnais). The Beothuk may have spoken an Algonqian language, however, linguistic evidence is scarce and poorly recorded, and it is unlikely that reliable evidence of a connection can be found.

 

The Beothuk were almost certainly the native inhabitants the Norse encountered in 1000 AD when they arrived in Newfoundland, which they called Vinland. In the sagas, they identified the regions of Helluland (probably Baffin Island), Markland (probably Labrador) and Vinland (Newfoundland). They called the indigenous inhabitants of all of them by the collective term skraelingar or skraelings. In truth, the inhabitants of Helluland were probably Dorset, or perhaps Thule people – the ancestors of today’s Inuit. Those of Markland are thought to have been the Algonquian-speaking Innu, who the French explorers called the Montagnais.

Despite some mostly friendly trading interactions, the encounters with the skraelings typically ended badly for one party or another, and the Saga of the Greenlanders tells us:

“When they clashed there was [a] fierce fighting/battle and a hail/a large amount of missiles/thrown things came flying over/towards them, for the Skraelings were using catapults/throwing machines.”

The Skraeling catapults or ‘throwing machines’ were probably atlatls, which the Beothuk are known to have used as part of their tool set. But there is another weapon described, which is more mysterious.

“Karlsevni and Snorri watched them lift a pole with a huge knob on the end, black in color, and about the size of a sheep’s belly, which flew up on land over the heads of the men, and made a frightening noise when it fell. At this a great fear seized Karlsevni and his followers, so that they thought only of flight, and retreated up the stream. It seemed to them that they were being attacked by savages on every side, and this did not let up before they got back to some cliffs, where they fought a hard battle.”

is a bit of a mystery, but it is possible that it was a flail variant of a weapon described in Algonquian-speaking indigenous tradition as a ‘Demon’s Head’, which seems to be something along the lines of an especially large stone mace. 

 

 

“…in ancient times, during the fierce wars which the Indians carried on, they constructed a very formidable instrument of attack, by sewing up a large round boulder in a new skin. To this a long handle was tied. When the skin dried, it became very tight around the stone, and, after being painted with devices, assumed the appearance and character of a solid globe upon a pole. This formidable instrument was borne by several warriors, who acted as ballisters. Plunged upon a boat or canoe, it was capable of sinking it. Brought down among a group of men on a sudden, it produced consternation and death.”

The Beothuk’s negative experiences with Europeans were not limited to the Norse, and starting with their next contact, the number of interactions would increase.

The first European recorded to have made landfall after the Norse in the Beothuk homeland was John Cabot, a Venetian sailor in English service. In 1497 he arrived at what was probably today’s Cape Bonavista in Newfoundland aboard the Matthew, a 50-ton caravel with a crew of 18 or 20 sailors.

“Cabot led a fearful crew, with reports suggesting they never ventured more than a crossbow’s shot into the land. They saw two running figures in the woods that might have been human or animal and brought back an unstrung bow “painted with brazil,” suggesting it was decorated with red ochre by the Beothuk of Newfoundland or the Innu of Labrador. He also brought back a snare for capturing game and a needle for making nets.”

The Beothuk shared the island with their Algonquian-speaking cousins the Miq’maq, and their numbers were always limited. At the time of Cabot’s visit, it is believed their population was somewhere between 500 and no more than a few thousand individuals.

Upon learning of Cabot’s discovery, the Portuguese king believed that it fell within territory assigned to his kingdom by the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas between Spain and Portugal. In order to investigate Cabot’s reports, and to bolster the Portuguese territorial claims, he assigned seasoned mariners from the island of Terceira in the Azores to search for land across the North Atlantic.

Pedro de Barcelos, João Fernandes Labrador, the brothers Gaspar and Miguel Corte-Real, and João Martins (all prominent residents of Terceira Island) took part in the search for land across the North Atlantic. Martins, indeed, had been a criado (employee) of João Vaz Corte-Real, Gaspar’s father.

When Gaspar Corte-Real visited the island with three ships in 1501, he is reported to have captured as many as 57 Beothuk. During the return voyage, Corte-Real’s ship vanished, but the other two, containing the captives, returned successfully, with 50 aboard one vessel and 7 aboard the other. The Beothuk were sold into slavery to defray the costs of the voyage, and all quickly died, almost certainly from European diseases.

In 1502, a Bristol cod vessel, the Gabriell, returned to England with three indigenous men, probably also Beothuk, who were brought to the court of King Henry VII. In 1508 or 1509, the French also took seven Beothuk captives, bringing them to court at Rouen.

“In the year 1508 a ship from Dieppe, named Pensee, sent out by Jean Ango, father of the master captain and viscount of Dieppe also visited these parts. The master or owner of the said ship was Master Thomas Aubert, and he was the first to bring people here from the said country.”

The Beothuks’ encounters with Europeans all ended poorly. So, when encountering explorers and colonists, they attempted to avoid them – first by moving to different coastal locations, and then when outsiders found those spots, to inland Newfoundland. As early as 1536, English merchant and navigator Richard Hore reported Beothuks fleeing at the mere sight of white men.

Cut off from the sea, and the seals, salmon, seabirds and shellfish they traditionally harvested, the Beothuk were increasingly forced to subsist on inland caribou populations. Overhunting of those herds led to a population crash, only increasing the food scarcity the Beothuk faced.

Following the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 and British colonization of the island, the Beothuk became even more outnumbered and outgunned. By 1768, the total Beothuk population was estimated to be only about 350 individuals. Reduced to starvation, they occasionally scavenged the cod drying stations and the increasing number of coastal settlements in order to survive. In retaliation, the Europeans subjected them to abuse, assaults, murder and massacres. One of the worst of these was the Peyton Raid of 1781.

John Peyton Sr. was a cod fisherman from Dorset in England’s West Counties who worked in the Bay of Exploits. Situated in the north-east of Newfoundland, the Bay of Exploits was one of the largest and busiest fishing settlements on the island. After supplies were stolen from his fishing station, he and two other men went far upriver to confront the suspects, finally arriving at an encampment of some 30 to 50 individuals. 

 

“After three days of travel up the Exploits River John Peyton Sr and two others came to a Beothuk camp and fired into the mamateeks (the Beothuk term for wigwams). They then pursued the fleeing Beothuk. A man who was too wounded to run away defended himself with a trap on which he was working but Peyton wrested it away from him and beat him to death.”

There is no record of how many died, but in addition to the man so cruelly beaten by Peyton, we are told that “several” were killed and wounded. Those who were uninjured enough to run fled the site of the killing, and Peyton and his men collected what furs, skins and gear they could carry and left.

By 1811, fewer than 72 Beothuk people remained.

Faced with serial abuses, disease and struggling to survive in an attenuated ecosystem that could no longer support their way of life, the Beothuk’s decline continued to accelerate, and they were declared extinct in 1829 upon the death from tuberculosis of the very last of their people.

This was the Beothuk woman Shanawdithit, who also went by the settler name of Nancy April, after the month of her capture and enslavement by John Peyton Jr. She served him as kitchen help for five years.

In her final years, Shanawdithit lived in the household of the Scottish author and explorer William Epps Cormack, founder of the Beothuk Institute, and an ethnologist with whom she shared stories of her language and culture. She and made maps of her people’s territories and rendered drawings of Beothuk culture for posterity. 

 

A few months before Shanawdithit’s death, while she was ill with tuberculosis, Cormack returned to his native Scotland, transferring her care to the territory’s Attorney General. Before he left, he visited a burial site at Red Indian Lake, and removed the skulls of a Beothuk chieftain and his wife, Nonosabut and Demasduit, who had been murdered by colonists.

“Nonosabusut was shot and bayoneted while attempting to prevent the kidnapping of Demasduit by a group of British settlers. The settlers hoped that by taking a number of the Beothuk captive, they might be able to use that as leverage to develop better relations with the tribe. Demasduit died of tuberculosis the following year, while still a captive.”

“In many regards, Cormack is the embodiment of the Enlightenment Scot. He was also a grave-robber.”

These elders also happened to have been be Shanawdithit’s aunt and uncle. Cormack donated the skulls and some birchbark grave goods looted from the burial hut to the University of Edinburgh Museum.

There they remained for almost 200 years, until their repatriation in 2020. Shanawdithit suffered a not dissimilar fate.

“After she died, her skull, too, was sent to Britain…It ended up at the Royal College of Surgeons in London and was blown to pieces by a bomb during the Second World War. The rest of her body was buried in St. John’s in a graveyard that was destroyed in 1903 for the construction of a railway.”

As for Nonosabusut and Demasduit, while they are now on Canadian soil, they have not truly been returned to their rightful burial place. Instead, they are being stored for now in a museum in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador.

And as it turns out, neither they nor their niece were truly the last of the Beothuk.

In 2007, while the skulls were still in Scotland, a team of Canadian and Danish researchers took a tooth from each skull for genetic and chemical analysis. Once that data was on record, geneticist Steve Carr of Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s fed Beothuk genetic sequences into GenBank, a world-spanning collection of genetic sequences maintained by the U.S. National Institutes of Health in the U.S., in search of related individuals.

His results, published in 2020, shed the first new light on the fate of the Beothuk genome. First, it was found that a modern person, of Ojibwa ancestry, was genetically identical to the motherline of Nonosabasut. A second person, who was unaware of possessing any Indigenous ancestry, has DNA nearly identical to Demasduit, on the mother’s side.

“Since Demasduit’s child died, this person cannot be her direct descendant, but is a cousin, likely the descendant of Demasduit’s mother or grandmother or a female relative dating even further back. Third, a modern Ojibwa person from the Great Lakes area is genetically identical, on the mother’s side, to a Maritime Archaic….the Beothuk and Maritime Archaic genetic lineages persist in the present day, ” says Carr.

The last of the Beothuk is still with us, if only we care to acknowledge and honour them.