I read an editorial today in the National Post which dealt with Canada's awful treatment of Native Canadians. It referenced the extermination of the Beothuk tribe of Newfoundland. I should have known better than to read the comments, but the first thing I saw was a comment that "The Mic Mac (sic) Indians of Nova Scotia killed most of the Beothuks and not white Europeans."
My first instinct is to suspect this is total nonsense. Do historians have anything to say about the relations between the Beothuk and Mi'kmaq nations?
This is my first time asking a question in Ask Historians. Bear with me if I'm doing this wrong!
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/stephen-maher-not-genocide-ask-the-beothuks
Total bunk so far as I'm concerned.
The extinction of the Beothuk people is certainly a result of European settlement. European fishermen established themselves along the coast of Newfoundland in the 17th century in order to access the rich fisheries of the Grand Banks. Rather than maintaining their presence on the coastline alongside the Europeans, the Beothuk people chose to withdraw to the interior of the island. This severely limited their access to food; the Beothuk were forced to rely on the notoriously fickle seal and caribou stocks. The isolation of the Beothuk increased in tandem with the European population on the island, and by the late 18th century the Beothuk were relegated completely to the resource-poor interior of the island. By 1829, they were extinct.
The isolationist policy of the Beothuk was unprecedented, and they did not interact with the Europeans in any of the three traditional ways: trade, missionary contact, or diplomacy. It is unsure whether contact and cooperation with the Europeans would have allowed for the survival of the Beothuk. Had they chosen to interact with the settlers, they would have experienced the same ravages of disease as their peers, so both isolation and coexistence spelled demographic disaster. Regardless, the monopolization of the best land on the island by Europeans essentially relegated the Beothuk to starvation.
Source: Ralph Pastore, "The Collapse of the Beothuk World" (1989)