Fiona Polack - Tracing Ochre: Changing Perspectives on the Beothuk

Tracing Ochre: Changing Perspectives on the Beothuk is a collaborative enterprise between Indigenous and non-Indigenous thinkers. We came together to produce this book because of our shared conviction that prevailing conceptions of Newfoundland and Labradors, if not Canadas, best-known Indigenous group need to change. Evidence is building that the Beothuk were not a primitive and isolated people. An expanding current of research is also unpacking the colonial mentalities that have shaped perceptions of the Beothuk over centuries. Yet much of this revisionist thinking has yet to enter the wider public domain to a significant degree. Our intention, then, has been to combine our voices in order to further discussion. There are pressing reasons for doing so. As many of us emphasize in the essays that follow, established wisdom about the Beothuk has created significant problems for contemporary Indigenous peoples in Newfoundland and Labrador. Indeed, within the issues at stake here can be seen signs of broader patterns that cause problems for the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada as a whole.

Contributors to this volume have First Nation affiliations that include Mikmaq, Anishinaabe, and Innu, and national ones encompassing Canada, the United States, Australia, and Scotland. The scholars among us are based in a variety of disciplines and interdisciplines, including English, history, education, anthropology, ethnomusicology, medical ethics, archaeology, Indigenous studies, and gender studies. I am immensely grateful to this diverse and extraordinary group of people for agreeing to participate in Tracing Ochre, for entering so generously and productively into conversation, and for writing their thought-provoking essays. Particular thanks to Christopher Aylward, whose doctoral dissertation I co-supervised and whose thinking about the Beothuk has helped deepen my understanding of the First Nations place in Newfoundland and Labradors Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures as well as my appreciation of the far-reaching impacts of historiography. I would also like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for its support. Receiving a SSHRC Standard Research Grant in 2007 for an interdisciplinary research project juxtaposing the lives and after-lives of two women each mistakenly termed last of her race by European settler cultures, the Aboriginal Tasmanian Truganini and the Beothuk Shanawdithit, constituted the first and most important step in the path culminating in my editing of this book. A SSHRC Connection Grant also allowed Tracing Ochres contributors to gather in St Johns to share drafts of our chapters in June 2013 a meeting that was essential to the formulation of this volume. Lianne Leddy has my particular gratitude for collaborating on writing the SSHRC grant application and helping design and run the workshop. Memorial University has also given extensive help in both direct and indirect ways, and graduate students Ian Moffatt, Lori-Ann Campbell, Kerry ONeill, Heather Gogacz OBrien, and Elizabeth Hicks provided stellar assistance. Peter Ramsdens aid in devising maps for this volume is much appreciated. Thanks to the University of Toronto Press, especially Douglas Hildebrand, for supporting and shepherding Tracing Ochre, and to the anonymous peer reviewers whose comments helped strengthen the collection. UTP and the American Anthropologist have graciously facilitated the publication of Daryl Pullmans essay in both book-chapter and journal-article form. Finally, on a personal note, my love and gratitude to Rob Finley and Susannah Polack-Finley.

Map 1 The island of Newfoundland. Map: Peter Ramsden

Map 2 Indigenous territories in northeastern North America. Map: Peter Ramsden

TRACING OCHRE

Changing Perspectives on the Beothuk

Introduction: De-islanding the Beothuk

---

FIONA POLACK

Islands have long exerted a tenacious hold on European imaginations. The Western tendency to bestow meaning on discrete and bounded entities may well have something to do with this. As historian John Gillis observes, we not only think of our individual selves as islands, but conceive of nations, communities, and families in the same insular fashion, ignoring that which connects in favour of stressing that which separates and isolates.