Cartographer, Writer
Sketch Number Two, 1829. The Beothuks, or the Red Indians.
As a child of Newfoundland’s Beothuk tribe in the early 1800s, she witnessed her people driven to virtual extinction by violent contact with British Marines. Against all odds, she managed to survive, and eventually became known as the last “full-blooded” member of the tribe. Shanawdithit’s maps, and the stories she told Cormack, are among the last accounts of her people’s language, customs, and beliefs—and have become symbolic of a tragic chapter in Canadian history.
In her twenties, hungry and alone, Shanawdithit found work as a servant in a white settlement on the island, where she learned to read and write in English. She became the subject of anthropological interest for the explorer William Cormack, who was working to establish a center devoted to Beothuk history. Under his watch, in 1829 Shanawdithit created five extraordinary narrative maps in which she compressed and plotted her memories of her tribe’s movements and collisions with the settlers some 18 years earlier. The rivers and lakes that appear in her maps are drawn with incredible geographical accuracy.
In the map pictured above, Shanawdithit depicted the capture of her aunt, Demasduit, whose English name was “Mary March.” Howley describes this map:
This sketch is labelled "The taking of Mary March on the North side of the lake." And in another place "Two different scenes and times." It depicts, on a large scale, the North East Arm of Red Indian Lake. On the south side is again seen [Captain David] Buchan's party, marching in single file towards the outflowing river, with the accompanying Indians in red. Also the four Indians approaching to kill the two marines.… A third red line extends out on the lake upon which four figures are shown. In front of the wigwams on the ice are grouped half a dozen black, with one red figure in their midst. Standing near this group is a single red figure apparently of a large man, as if in the act of haranguing the group, while a little to one side is another red figure lying prone on the ice. It is almost needless to say this represents the furriers taking Mary March, her husband coming back to the rescue, and his dead body, after being shot, lying on the ice.