Faith Meets Life: It's part of our history too

Genocide is a very strong word. I had not heard it applied to the Canadian context until I was at a meeting on spirituality and native people in Canada. The native representatives, whose own spirituality was Christian, told us that Canada has its own genocide to reckon with.

Some people in the audience struggled to comprehend this. We like to think of Canada as a peace-loving nation that has avoided some of the sins of other countries. Americans may have treated their native populations terribly, ethnic cleansing has taken place in Eastern Europe and Darfur, but should we in Canada see ourselves as perpetrators of acts of that nature?

I was thinking about this as I began to read The Last of the Beothuk by Barbara Whitby (Altitude, 2005). The Beothuk were the native group living in Newfoundland when Europeans “discovered” the island.

From the beginning relations between natives and whites were soured by misunderstanding and fear. The Beothuk were dependent on the fish stocks and caribou migrations for their survival. When Europeans began to fish off shore, build settlements, trap and hunt, these connections with the natural cycles were broken. At the same time, Europeans found it extremely hard to bring the only way of life they knew into a land whipped by fierce storms and saddled with a very short growing season.

Adding to the problems was the fact that Europeans felt their own way of life to be superior and that God obliged them to civilize natives. Many of them even wondered at first if the natives they were discovering on the island (as elsewhere in the colonial world) were human.

But perhaps many of these problems could have been overcome if there had been less pressure to make hasty decisions, if participants could have taken time to understand what the other was thinking. The Beothuk story is rife with accounts of misunderstandings that resulted in killings.

In 1612 John Guy led a group of settlers into contact with Beothuk. Their first meeting resulted in peaceful agreements to help each other. They danced together and exchanged goods. They agreed to meet again one year later. While the Beothuks came and waited, Guy's men failed to get to the meeting point, however, some fishermen did. They assumed that the Beothuk group was hostile and fired on them. This generated future acts of revenge on the part of the natives.

The key story in Beothuk is that of Shanawdithit. In 1811 David Buchan and the party he was leading came upon a camp of Beothuks. He thought he was creating friendly relations. He left behind two of his men and took four natives with him to bring back trading goods. Of those four, however, three ran away from Buchan's group and returned to their camp, while the two whites who had remained there were killed and the natives retreated far inland.

Shanawdithit observed all this and told her story sometime later, after her capture. According to Whitby, Shanawdithit's story reveals that Buchan and the Beothuks both completely misunderstood each other. The Beothuks believed that they had exchanged hostages and that Buchan was going to return with more men to take the Beothuks captive. In the past, many Beothuk had been taken into the dreaded ships of the whites, never to return.

Shanawdithit herself did not survive her encounter with whites. For a while she lived among them and learned to communicate with the English. However, on a summer day in 1829 she died of pneumonia. She was broken in both body and spirit for she was the very last of her people. There are no more Beothuk.

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