Farley Mowat - The Farfarers: A New History of North America

M OST OF THE NATIVE COMMUNITIES ALONG THE Atlantic seaboard of the New World withdrew from the coasts during the sixteenth century in order to avoid frequently fatal assaults by European fishermen, oilers, slavers, and other rapacious seekers after wealth.

Because pastoralists were particularly vulnerable, they would have been amongst the first to retreat. I believe something of a pastoral tradition was maintained at The Grass and around King George IV Lake, but Albans most likely turned increasingly to the Beothuk way of life in order to maintain themselves.

During the seventeenth century the unbridled lawlessness of European marauders declined somewhat as France and England established de facto control over more and more of the New Worlds coastal regions. Indigenes who had taken refuge in the country began to emerge, if cautiously, to trade, to fish and hunt on salt water, and perhaps to re-establish themselves as crofters.

Return to the coasts was not everywhere possible. On Newfoundlands eastern and northeastern seaboards, English planters and seasonal fishermen alike continued to treat Beothuks with a hostility amounting to genocidea persecution that would eventually lead to the extermination of the Red Indians in the eastern and central parts of the Island.

French fishermen frequenting Newfoundlands southwestern and western shores dealt with the natives more humanely, possibly because the French lacked the means with which to overwhelm les sauvages .

So it happened that the ancient peoples in the southwest corner of the Island were able to endure and even to prosper. During the early decades of the eighteenth century, they were joined by parties of Mikmaw from Cape Breton Island. These came initially as itinerant trappers, but some stayed to become an integral part of the southwest coast community.

The latter part of the eighteenth century brought a few score Acadians, farmers of French descent fleeing English seizure of their Nova Scotian lands. Having long since established blood relationships with mainland Mikmaw, the Acadians found no difficulty in melding with the existing cultures of southwestern Newfoundland. They brought with them a new impetus towards pastoralism, so that human life in the region became even more of a mix of small-scale crofting and native country pursuits.

While nineteenth-century Mikmaw trappers established a transient presence in much of southern and northern Newfoundland, the native Beothuks ceased to exist, or so the Europeans, who by then dominated the entire Island, maintained. But they were wrong. Men and women still lived around St. Georges Bay and in the Codroy Valley who thought of themselves as, and called themselves, Beothuks. Not until the turn of the next century did they nominally disappear.

Which brings us to our own timesand to the apparent end of our story.

However, according to Leonard Muise, the end is not yet.

All those early peopleDorsets, Red Indians, the ones you call Albans, Farleythey didnt just dry up and blow away, you know.

Dont you believe it! Truth is theyre all of them still round about. In St. Georges, Port au Port, and Codroy too. One of these times, scientists will likely show up here looking to test our DNA to see whereabouts we come from. I dont doubt theyll be some surprised by what they find.

But us Jakos, now... we wont be the smallest little bit surprised because, you see, we know just who we are.