Where did the beothuk come from

How did the beothuk go extinct
Where did the beothuk live
Beothuk language

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Beothuk

Historical Indigenous people of Newfoundland

This article is about the ethnic group. For their language, see Beothuk language.

The Beothuk ( or ; also spelled Beothuck)^[1]^[2] were a group of Indigenous people of Canada who lived on the island of Newfoundland.^[3]

The Beothuk culture formed around 1500 CE. This may have been the most recent cultural manifestation of peoples who first migrated from Labrador to present-day Newfoundland around 1 CE. The ancestors of this group had three earlier cultural phases, each lasting approximately 500 years.

Description

The Beothuk lived throughout the island of Newfoundland, mostly in the Notre Dame and Bonavista Bay areas. Estimates of the Beothuk population at the time of contact with Europeans vary. Historian of the Beothuk Ingeborg Marshall argued that European historical records of Beothuk history are clouded by ethnocentrism and unreliable. Scholars from the 19th and early 20th century estimated about 2,000 Beothuk individuals lived at the time of European contact in the 15th cen

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Who Were the Beothuk, the Lost People of Newfoundland?

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“Much is made of the last of the Mohicans, yet the death in 1829 of the last Beothuk, [a woman named] Shanawdithit , scarcely receives a footnote in history books,” writes geographer Glen Norcliffe. “Yet her death marked the demise of one of the most unusual and distinctive of cultures, another victim of the ruthless pursuit for control of Newfoundland’s resources.”

By the early nineteenth century, the population of the Beothuk, the aboriginal people of Newfoundland, had drastically dwindled. Among their number was a couple named Nonosabasut and Demasduit, who were the uncle and aunt of Shanawdithit. Their lives were cut short in 1819, when a European fur trapper alleged that the Beothuk had stolen his fishing supplies, and Demasduit was captured in retaliation. Nonosabasut died in his struggle to save her. Just a year later Demasduit died of tuberculosis, and was interred alongside her late husband.

The skulls of Nonosabasut and Demas

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Hakai Magazine

Traces of a mysterious fire, recently discovered, signal the beginning of the end of the indigenous culture.

Authored by

by Jessa Gamble

Wordcount

August 27, 2015 | 600 words, about 3 minutes

This story is over 9 years old.

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When a Beothuk person died, the community carried their body to one of the small islands off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. There they would paint the remains with ochre, and bury them with provisions for a journey: a miniature birch bark canoe, a change of clothes, and some dried food. To equip the dead’s soul for passage to the afterlife, the family left pendants of a bird’s foot, an outstretched bird tail, and a wing feather, representing the different forms of seabird travel required to navigate the passage to the next world.

For about 500 years, the indigenous Beothuk’s ancestors thrived in coastal Newfoundland. But in the 1500s, their grip on the land started to slip with the arrival of European fishermen. Around 1660, a blaze raged at the intersection of two Beothuk and Eu