Bud and I were going to the Beothuk Interpretation Centre and were not taking Matey so I took him for as long a walk as he would like this morning. We went along the trail here at the park.
I would have loved to go to the end. This sphagnum moss made the woods glow green. But after about a half mile Matey showed signs of flagging and we had to walk back, so we turned around.
We did detour a couple of hundred feet on a path to the beach.
We were well rewarded.
And finding ghost plant or Indian pipe, a parasitic flowering plant, made up for the relatively short walk.
Bud and I then drove just a few miles down the road to the Beothuk Interpretation Centre Provincial Historic Site. This year is the 75th Anniversary of the Confederation of Newfoundland and Labrador as a province of Canada, so anyone with a birthday in 1949 or before got in free. That was me! Bud had to pay the four bucks.
We were pleasantly surprised with how well the center was done. It told the story of the Beothuk people who lived on the Island of Newfoundland for as much as 1000 years before Europeans came. The past generations are named by archaeologists the Little Passage people, after Europeans arrived they were called the Beothuk.
At first the Europeans were seasonal inhabitants setting up fishing stations in the summer. The Beothuk, who probably numbered less than two thousand, simply avoided them. When the Europeans left in the fall the Beothuk scavenged their abandoned camps for useful items, mostly metal, which they then reworked into tools.
The Beothuk relied on the bounty of the sea in spring, summer and fall. In winter many went to the frozen interior and hunted what land mammals there were, though Newfoundland has a paucity of land mammals. There were no moose or porcupines on the island.
Europeans began to settle the shore permanently. The Beothuk continued to resist contact or trade, but did take what was left unguarded. Conflicts arose and the Beothuk suffered. They were pushed to the interior where without the bounty of the sea they starved.
This statue is called Spirit of the Beothuk. It was created by sculptor Gerald Squires who was inspired by what he knew of the Beothuk woman Shanawdithit. Two Beothuk women were captured at separate times, Demasduit and later her niece, Shanawdithit. Each was eventually brought to St. John’s, each was well received and taught the Europeans some of their language and culture. Each died within a year of arriving; Shanawdithit died of tuberculosis, as was probably the case for Demasduit. When Shanawdithit died in 1829 she was the last cultural Beothuk. The people and their culture were gone, though there are probably descendants among the Mi’kmaq people who live to the south.
The statue sits about three quarters of a mile from the Interpretation Centre along this very well made trail.
It sits in a beautiful little glade…
just before the Beothuk village archeological site.
The discovery of this site is the result of the research and effort of Dr. Ralph Pastore. He was looking for sites that might shed light on the history of the Beothuk and the reason for their extinction. There were no missionary or government agent records on these people.
This site is in a protected cove with a small beach where canoes could be landed,
it has a freshwater creek,
and the site itself is a glacial moraine, filled with gravel and rock left by a past glacier. Unlike most of the boggy, stony land around it, it would drain after a rain. 16 likely sites were identified in this part of Newfoundland, two turned out to be from the right era. This was the largest.
Only four of the eleven dwelling sites were excavated, enough to show who lived there and when and answer some of the questions on how they lived. The rest are left for future archaeologists with future technologies at their disposal.
We’ve been to a number of archaeological sites in North America, but the presence of the statue and the story of the women made this site more relatable.
On the Roam Again 