Mi’kmaq peoples inland travellers
Our forefathers seldom looked away from the sea
How long were we, the white European-sourced fishing people of Newfoundland under the delusion that we had the island all to ourselves?
How long were our eyes were turned outwards, toward the sea? That is how historian John D. Rogers described us when he wrote a little 274-page “Historical Geography” on Newfoundland in 1911. He pointed up our lack of interest and lack of knowledge about the interior. We were people of the sea in every respect.
According to Rogers (18571914), when William Cormack hiked across the island in 1822 with his Micmac (now known as Mi’kmaq) guide, he made an historical as well as an ethnological discovery; searching for Beothucks, he found Mi’kmaqs. And they were not visitors. The Mi’kmaq, Rogers learned, “did not know a time when they or their forefathers did not know the unknown district which he was traversing.”
That suggests Cormack did not have much conversation with his guide.
Cormack, however, was surprised when he met up with several two-to-three-person Mi’kmaq hunting parties in the interior. And although the Mi’kmaq were fully “at home” in the interior Newfoundland, they knew they had come from Cape Breton Island. Confident people, their forbears must have been. In slight craft (for that type of trip) they must have crossed what is today Cabot Strait, some 90 to 100 miles, and put ashore in a fresh hunting ground.
As Rogers puts it, “Cormack’s historical discovery was that during a century or more while Englishmen were gazing out seawards with their backs turned to the land, Mi’kmaqs with their backs turned towards the sea were hurrying to and fro from end to end of the land that lay south of Petit Nord ... unlocking its mysteries with their Indian key — a paddle.” Petit Nord is the northern part of Newfoundland, frequented by the French for over 300 years and embracing in part our Great Northern Peninsula.
A “Great War of Revenge”
Just when the Mi’kmaqs came to Newfoundland, or when “they matured into settlers” (as Rogers puts it) is unknown. But Rogers took a stab at it — they travelled to Bay St. George in the 1780s and this probably preceded “permanent settlement at Conne Bay by a quarter of a century.”
The interests of early French fishermen in and around Newfoundland were better served by offering the Micmacs money for each scalp of a Beothuck they could produce, Rogers writes. This would hardly lead to peaceful coexistence. So in due course, Mi’kmaqs and Beothucks had their own strict territorial boundaries in Newfoundland (rivers, streams and trails).
However, Rogers does say that the Mi’kmaqs had “longstanding causes of strife” against the Beothucks and who knows? When two different peoples are hunting in the same region, or at least pursuing the same resources, conflict is inevitable.
It came to a head during an alfresco feast between Mi’kmaqs and Beothucks, probably in the 1680s. The party is said to have broken up when Beothuck scalps were found among Mi’kmaq possessions. This was a rare time when the Beothucks had the advantage. We are told “they slew all the guests”. Not inclined to forget, the Mi’kmaqs in due course got the upper hand due largely to the fact that they had been outfitted with firearms by the French.
You have to wonder what kind of late 17th-century firearms could have been effectively transported through wilderness as an encumbered tribe chased a fleet-footed one. Nevertheless, the Beothucks were the losers.
From then on, each race’s territory within the island was clearly known, “the Beothucks keeping to the centre and the Mi’kmaqs to the south coast and its neighbourhood.”
Rogers tells of the great familiarity of the Mi’kmaqs with Newfoundland’s interior ... “they roamed from river to river” ... “they had revolved in an inner circle”. It was a well-known sphere; there was one area, for example, where “even the Lower Gander was fraught with danger for their implacable foes dwelt there or wandered there” ... the Mi’kmaq people seemingly never over-confident in their kill ratio clung to their home at Conne River ... “and after their fear ceased their travels were only shortened and multiplied; their arcs were turned into chords and their rough paths were made smooth”. (Rogers clearly knew the libretto of Handel’s “Messiah”).
For a relatively short period, it seems, we had three pockets of humans on this island, each living isolated from the other. Rogers say, “English colonists went from all these bays to all these bays but always by salt water and round the coast.”
Of the earliest years of the 19th century, the author said “at the beginning of this period, Newfoundland ... must have seemed to its inhabitants a husk without a kernel ... midnight wrapped once more the mysterious country on which the Cartwrights had shed a momentary ray of light — (brothers George and John Cartwright had used the Exploits River in 1768 to penetrate the island’s interior as far as Red Indian Lake).
Published more than a century ago, John D. Roger’s little history is still informative (and entertaining).
Lashes as punishment
In last Monday’s column I mentioned the punishment of whipping (lashing) meted out by a court in St. John’s some 90 years ago to two youths convinced of petty theft. I also mentioned that I had checked the Prowse Judge’s Manual to learn which crimes would be so punished, but I could find no reference to whipping. A reader called to say that in the early 1970s he knew an older man in Conception Bay who, as a youthful miscreant had been sentenced to receive 18 lashes with a thin stick, nine to be administered before he entered Harbour Grace jail for 12 months — he went in with blood running into his shoes — and the remaining nine upon leaving the jail. The date would have been roughly the same as in my column, the early to mid-1920s.