The story of the last known living member of a group of indigenous people who “witnessed the end of their world because of colonialism” was brought to life as part of a public lecture on the history of Newfoundland.

Shanawdithit’s extraordinary life and the experience of the Beothuk people, whose culture was destroyed by “the avarice and violence of imperialism,” were the subject of an Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) event. 

Her story was told by two-time ISRF Fellow Julia Laite, whose family has been on Newfoundland since 1635. She is now researching the history of the island, which was England’s “very first transatlantic colonial possession”.

Laite recalled learning about Shanawdithit and her "emblematic death” in school textbooks and during childhood museum visits. However, she was motivated to restore “some semblance of her full humanity” by sharing her life story and art – including drawings she made during the 19th century.

During the lecture at Gresham College, Laite explained how these documents are first-hand evidence from “one of the most totalising destructions of an indigenous culture in British imperial history”. 

“Over a few months, Shanawdithit produced the only first-hand accounts of Beothuk history and culture that exist,” said Laite, who is a professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London.

“Her story-maps, images, and testimony remain the only direct historical sources we have from any Beothuk individual at any point in history. The stories she drew and told relate dramatic encounters, terrible violence, and epic journeys across some of the harshest terrain on earth.

“They illuminate a vibrant, resilient culture, a people who were connected to their indigenous neighbours, the Mi’kmaw and Innu, but distinct from them as well. They relay a life shaped by kin, by making, by journey, by tragedy and resistance. 

“They reveal in their creator an artist of remarkable talents, a rebellious woman who bore witness to the death of her world. But all this is eclipsed by the role Shanawdithit has played since her death, just a few months after completing her drawings.”

The Beothuk are thought to have survived for at least 2,000 years – but by the time of Shanawdithit’s birth in 1800, they had already been devastated by the “particular brand of negligent extractive colonialism” practised in Newfoundland.

Shanawdithit lost family members to settler violence and was shot by a fur trapper, leaving bullet scars on her hand and leg. She also participated in the Beothuk resistance to this “invasion of their world,” which was largely through peaceful methods such as theft and sabotage.

By 1823, many of the Beothuk had left the island, while countless others died from the “direct violence of guns or the indirect violence of starvation” – a reality that the authorities, unwilling to pay for their protection, “ignored and ultimately tolerated”.

In the summer of 1828, Shanawdithit was captured and spent five years living as a servant under the name Nancy April. She was then taken to St John’s port by naturalist William Cormack, who encouraged her to draw and interviewed her for six months, though much of this material has since been lost. 

After her death from tuberculosis in 1829, he penned her obituary, writing how the Beothuk had “lived, flourished and become extinct in their own orbit… in one of our oldest and most important colonies”. It is believed this was the first time that the word “extinct” had been applied to a group of people.

Following her death from tuberculosis, Shanawdithit’s body was buried in a pauper’s grave at an unknown location, while her scalp and skull were sent to the Royal College of Physicians in London, which was bombed during the Second World War, leaving her remains unaccounted for.

A number of Beothuk relics remain at museums around the country, including a foot-long model of a canoe created by Shanawdithit, which is currently held at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.

Laite added: “Shanawdithit’s island was a site of incredible over-extraction, and it was one of the earliest spaces to experience the environmental costs of this avarice.

“Shanawdithit’s story is also the story of these imperial entanglements, the violence and the greed that underwrote them, and the price that people and the planet paid.

“Shanawdithit experienced losses and injustices so great that she would be forgiven for never being able to appreciate, let alone create, beauty again. And yet, at a desk in William Cormack’s house by the harbour and river in the months before her death, Shanawdithit created a beautiful and vitally important elegy for the world that had been taken from her.

“She single-handedly ensured the survivance – however fragile and slight – of an entire culture of people. She reminds us of what an act of hope it is to tell a story, even at the end of the world.”

This lecture was the second in the ISRF’s series of three lectures on decolonisation, which are being delivered in partnership with Gresham College.

The first lecture, by Martin Thomas, took place on Wednesday 30 April and examined whether the world was remade by decolonisation. The third and final lecture, by Professor Adam Hanieh, took place on 15 May and was on “Oil, Decolonisation, and the Future of the Climate Emergency.”