by Eileen Grace

Created on: June 24, 2009   Last Updated: July 13, 2009

The Beothuk (also spelled Beothic, Beothick or Beothuck) were the inhabitants of Newfoundland at the time of European contact. The skraelings reported by the Norse as living near their Vinland settlement were most likely ancestors of the Beothuk. They became officially extinct as a people upon the death of Shanawdithit in 1829. In 2007, DNA testing of the remains of two Beothuk who died in the 1820's shows that they were related to the Mi'kmaqs, natives of Nova Scotia, possibly interbreeding or coming from the same founding population.

The Beothuk were a hunter-gatherer society, with a total population estimated variously as being between 500 and 2,000 when the first Europeans arrived in the 16th century. Records of their language and culture are fragmentary, although the language is believed to have likely been related to Algonquin. What is known about them is that they ate salmon, seal and caribou, they were migratory, moving to be near their seasonal prey. The term 'Red Indian' was first applied to the Beothuk because they painted their faces, bodies, houses, canoes and various furnishings with red ochre. This painting was a mark of membership, the first painting of an infant marked its joining the people and forbidding a person from using ochre was a severe sanction.

The Beothuk lived in family bands of 30 to 50 individuals, and while each band seems to have had a leader, they do not appear to have had formal chiefs in the same sense as the more settled native peoples. The lived in conical houses made of poles arranged in a circle and fastened together near the top and covered in birch bark. The also built canoes of birch bark.

Unlike most native peoples of the northern Atlantic coast, the Beothuk mainly tried to avoid contact with outsiders. This strategy was probably part of what caused their extinction, squeezed between the Inuit to the north, the Mi'kmaq to the south and the Europeans to the east, subsistence would have become very difficult for hunter-gatherers with a culture of moving seasonally to follow their prey. Other changes brought by the Europeans, especially European diseases like smallpox, measles and tuberculosis were undoubtedly also causes of the rapid reduction in numbers of the Beothuk in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Competition over the limited resources of the region frequently became violent as well, leading to deaths among the native peoples.

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