An essential resource on Indigenous history
To say that Newfoundland and Labrador Indigenous history is underwritten is to state the obvious, but even so many people have heard of Sylvester Joe.
“In 1822, William Epps Cormack sought the expertise of a guide who could lead him across Newfoundland in search of the last remaining Beothuk camps on the island.”
The expedition is well-known, though information about Sylvester Joe much less so. Cormack did name a mountain after him (Cormack’s habit of “naming” lakes, rivers etc. after faroff European royalty, features of the natural environment that moreover have long been noted by Indigenous people on their travels, greatly bemuses and amuses his companion). But in his meticulous journal, Cormack refers to his guide only as ‘My Indian.’”
So Sylvester’s story, and this story, is an intriguing mix of official and oral history, events and memories both formally documented and officially elided. This creates a curious and engaging narrative interaction, its contents divided between “Suliewey’s Tale” and “Sylvester’s Tale.”
MULTI-GENERATIONAL NURTURING
Suliewey (Sylvester’s Mi’kmaq name) grew up nurtured by and learning from his close, multi-generational family. His “education came from walking on the land and recognizing the simplest things, like how the juniper trees are pointed in the general direction of the east and could be used for wayfinding on the land.”
He also learns of the relationship between his people and the Beothuk, which was once harmonious but is now estranged — but more on that in a bit.
“Suliewey” switches to “Sylvester” when he learns Cormack is looking for a guide, his intention being to locate the Beothuk. Sylvester walks to St. John’s to offer his services. Cormack, to Sylvester’s mind, is abrupt and inhospitable, but does come to accept Sylvester as worthy of the post. He continues to call Sylvester “my Indian,” though Sylvester objects that no person can own another person; in turn he refers to Cormack as “Aqalasie’w,” or “English person.”
Their trek is a cycle of walking, hunting and making camp, but the rituals are not monotonous. The cadence of the language often skip-stones one word from sentence to sentence: “Along the way I noticed that there was an abundance of birchbark, which we used for building ocean-going gwitns (canoes). I pointed this out to Cormack, and said, ‘Our people gather this bark to build our gwitns. The Beothuk use this same bark for their gwitns, and they travel long distances offshore.”
But, while Sylvester will share such facts about the Beothuk, he has privately decided, with counsel from his elders, not to help Cormack locate them. When he does see signs of their presence, he does not point them out. And when they meet other Mi’kmaq hunting parties, he alerts them, in their own language which Cormack doesn’t speak or understand, to this need to protect the Beothuk.
THE THEME OF VOICE
Voice is a persistent theme of this book — from the opening note of the politics of the title — as is the importance of reclaiming and carrying forward an authentic story. For example, the end notes include a brief and fascinating consideration of the reason the Beothuk and the Mi’kmaq no longer reside together. They are not hostile, exactly — Sylvester’s grandfather spent some time with them as a child, in another engrossing episode — but they keep to their own spaces. Why did that happen?
Both communities tell a similar tale explaining this, which centres around the appearance of a black weasel and the murder of a child. There are two versions, and the divergences are as telling as the tales. Chief Mi’sel Joe lends his perspective: “Two or three hundred years ago, we were closer to nature than we are today; we were part of nature. And anything that wasn’t right, like the weasel, was a sign that something wasn’t right. A current example of how nature can sometimes give you a kick in the gut and make you take notice would be ‘Snowmageddon’.”
He also discusses the repatriation of the skulls of Nonosabasut and Demasduit, which Cormack had taken from their gravesite on Red Indian Lake and brought to Scotland, which “brings the story of ‘My Indian’ full circle.”
The appendices include such valuable and selectly available knowledge as a glossary of Mi’kmaq to English and numbers in Mi’kmaq. The former is more than a word-to-word equivalence and includes lots of context, and the latter goes up to a million. There is also a selection of black and white photos, and book club questions.