Beothuk

The Beothuk were the Indigenous people of Newfoundland, where their culture took shape about AD 1500, rooted in Labrador migrants. They lived in bands of thirty to fifty-five, chiefly around Notre Dame and Bonavista bays, wintering in conical birch-bark mamateeks and following caribou, salmon and seals with the seasons. Painting bodies, houses and canoes with red ochre each spring led Europeans to call them Red Indians.

Norse voyagers may have met their ancestors about AD 1000, but after Cabot's 1497 voyage they increasingly avoided newcomers, retreating inland as stations and traplines cut off coastal food. Peace expeditions such as David Buchan's in 1811 failed; starvation, disease and clashes thinned them.

Demasduit, captured in 1819 after her husband's killing, died in 1820; her niece Shanawdithit, taken in 1823, died in St. John's in 1829, after which the Beothuk were declared extinct. Their Beothukan language is treated as an unclassified isolate.