The Beothuk Saga

by Bernard Assiniwi

  Iwish was the second wife of A-Enamin, the Seal Clan chief who had been stolen by Kapitan Jon Kabot. She represented the Seal Clan women on the clan council. She thought that the village should be divided into smaller units so that it would not be totally destroyed if attacked by an enemy, or subjected to a surprise raid. With her feminine logic, Iwish was concerned with the survival of the nation, and was impatient with the proud males who believed they could handle any danger that came their way, without taking any precautions against it. She reminded them that this sort of thinking was exactly what had resulted in the theft of her husband and two other clan members by the English, right from under their noses and without anyone being able to prevent it. She also reminded them how once, when she was a young woman, an Ashwan raiding party had attacked her village at dawn and killed nearly all the adult males and taken most of the women as slaves. When she remembered these things, she told Gobidin, she could not bring herself to believe that the clan chiefs took adequate precautions or always made good decisions.

  But Gobidin was a member of the guardians, and he firmly believed that the guardians were strong enough to repel an attack from any large ship that sailed into the bay. When Iwish reminded him that the English had taken her husband, his first wife, and one hunter without him and his guardians being able to stop them, he spoke about the treachery of the English, of how his guardians had been taken by surprise, and how their mistake had been in allowing the foreigners to come off their ship onto Beothuk land. He was of the opinion that the best way to prevent such a thing from happening again was to prevent any foreigner from stepping onto Beothuk land. That would solve the problem. Iwish protested that no amount of force would stop foreigners from leaving their boats if they decided to attack the village. But Gobidin remained firm: if the guardians prevented these foreigners from landing, they could not use their weapons of deceit and cunning against them, even under the guise of friendship.

  Still Iwish persisted. It was not necessary, she said, for the foreigners to leave their ships in order to attack the village. The ships of the English-Bouguishamesh had cannons, their sailors had firesticks. Such an enemy could laugh at the Beothuk guardians. Gobidin assured the other councillors that all the bays were under constant surveillance, and no surprise attack was possible. Faced with such an attitude, Iwish became very angry; she demanded that Gobidin return her husband to her, then, since a surprise attack was so impossible that he must not have been stolen from her. Even when the elder spoke in favour of her proposal, saying that Iwish’s suggestion was pregnant with wisdom, Gobidin refused to listen to her, saying that her arguments were groundless. At this, Iwish lost control of her anger, and called the chief of the Seal Clan a pebble-headed idiot. She shouted that the Eagle was a very large bird with a very small brain. Then she left the mamateek before the council meeting was ended. This was a grave insult, not only to the member who had called the meeting, but also to the other councillors who had troubled themselves to attend it. But worst of all was that by leaving the council meeting she had shown great disrespect towards her clan chief. She had questioned his competence and called him a self-important imbecile. This was clearly a transgression of Beothuk law. Rather than calmly discussing the important issues confronting the nation, she had allowed herself to be ruled by anger, and had insulted the chief before the other councillors. She had caused him to lose face, an unpardonable breach of etiquette, not only for a council member but also for a woman. Only two options lay before her. She either had to prove beyond a doubt that she was in the right, or else she had to make a public apology for her behaviour. The very fact that she had transgressed her duty as a woman to be respectful to men, who were the providers and protectors of the clan, made it impossible, in the people’s eyes, for her to prove that she was in the right. It was therefore necessary to hold a public ceremony, during which Iwish would ask the forgiveness of the assembled villagers. Nothing else would remove the offence. The council agreed, however, to delay this special ceremony until such time as Iwish was calmer, since at the moment she was much too angry to be reasoned with.

  Iwish, meanwhile, had snatched up a handful of spears and gone off into the forest to practise her skill at throwing this most favoured of Beothuk weapons. She was followed by a group of young women who, like her, were well trained in the use of arms and who took Iwish’s advice. Since the theft of her husband, Iwish had not accepted the so-called superiority of men. Males, she said, had grown stupid and complacent. She formed a sort of sub-clan of women dissidents who were ready to raise the call for the defence of the Beothuk territory. Nearly all Beothuk women were aware of this movement, and discussions in the village mamateeks had been lively and long. The women believed Iwish was in the right. Iwish had become the official opposition within the clan council. She was also the women’s representative on the national council. She had great influence among her people, and the male clan members were well aware of her power and did not like having their authority questioned by such an irascible woman as Iwish, who refused to recognize good, masculine common sense when she saw it. On the other hand, though they resented her belligerent attitude, there were men who recognized the selflessness of her intentions and the depth of her thinking. She thought about a great many matters, and was always willing to seek counsel, at least from other women.

  Within this sub-clan, Iwish had formed an elite corps of women who were as proficient with weapons as any male hunters of the clan of Appawet the Seal. In a very short time, these women had become the pride of all the women of the clan, which created, in the minds of the men, an unhealthy form of heroine worship within the heart of the village. Every adolescent woman wanted to belong to this elite group, and they already behaved as though they were the equal of the male hunters. And indeed, as warriors and hunters, these young women were more skilful than many of the young men, and more alert. Their determination was unshakeable; nothing and no one could dislodge them from their path. The women had acquired such self-confidence that the men did not dare challenge them except in contests of brute strength.

  The most effective argument that the men could raise against Iwish’s proposal to divide the village was that since the disappearance of A-Enamin and his first wife, not a single foreign ship had been allowed to replenish its water supply on the island. The clan had successfully defended its territory even though many were the sails that had been seen crossing the entrance to their bay and the narrow strait leading to the land of their friends the Innu, whom the Beothuk people called the Sho-Undamung.

  Iwish did not accept the submission of women and the superiority of men. She was descended from the Bear Clan; her people reached back to a daughter of the famous huntress Boubishat the Fire and to a son of Anin himself, the national hero of the Beothuk. She believed that the two sexes were equal in most things, and that women were superior in others, since it was women who brought children into the world and were the first teachers of all Beothuk, without exception. Everyone was born of woman, and this gave women superiority over men. If women simply refused to bear and raise children, it would mean the end of the human race and of the Beothuk Nation. Women therefore had the right to be heard and to have their words respected by all. Now was the time to claim that right, to demand it with all their strength, to force the men to listen to their words.

  Such was the pass to which the nation had come, a nation whose only common hero was a man. Anin the Voyager, the father of more children than any other man known to the Living Memories of the Beothuk people. The men said that for three season-cycles no foreign ship had come to take fresh water from the island of the Red Men, and that this was proof that Anin’s original plan, which had been respected and enforced for countless generations, was a good plan. Why divide the village when all its strength lay in its unity? The Iwish women thought only of defeat, were fearful for no reason. Like all women, they were weak and dependent on men.

  On that sun, the women of Iwish’s sub-clan dismantled their mamateeks
and took the bark and poles to a place deep in the forest, to the south and west of the bay, to establish a second village. They did this in support of Iwish and her plan to divide the village in order to avoid the complete destruction of the population in the event of a surprise attack by a foreign enemy. The women believed that what they did was necessary, that the wishes of the men had to be ignored in order to ensure the safety of their children. Thus the division that raged in the heart of the village was not between families, but between men and women, whose views were now diametrically opposed.

  That same night, the young guardians watching at the coast signalled that two ships were passing the mouth of the bay, out beyond the islands. The ships showed no sign of entering in search of fresh water, as so many other ships had done, even though they would have been able to see, from the different colour of the water, that a large river flowed into the bay from inland. The two ships continued sailing past the bay and disappeared beyond the tongue of land that separated the Seal Clan bay from the next bay along the coast. The guardians shouted their belief that word had passed among the men on board such ships that it was useless to try to take on fresh water in the deep bay of the large river with two waterfalls. The Red Men of that bay were too powerful and would prevent them; it was better to continue farther south, to one of the places where no Beothuk lived. They said that the women were wrong to fear these foreigners and to move the village into the forest.

  According to the Living Memory responsible for this period in Beothuk history, the captain aboard the first of these two ships was named Gaspar de Côrte Real. He had sailed from Portugal and had been warned by a Portuguese fishing boat that the bay he had just passed was well guarded by the Red Men, but that the next bay to the south, called Bonavista, was not protected and fresh water could be taken from a stream that emptied into it. Some fishermen had even crossed the tongue of land separating the two bays and seen the village of the Red Skins; it would be a small matter to attack this village from landward, they said. Such an attack would weaken and perhaps even eliminate the stranglehold maintained by the ferocious inhabitants of this New Found Land, as the fishermen called the island.

  Côrte Real’s ships took on fresh water in Bonavista, and when night fell the captain ordered seventy of his men to pass through the forest on the tongue of land to the Beothuk village. The men were guided by one of the fishermen who had been to the place before. Their orders were to capture as many of the Red Skins as possible so that they might be taken back to Portugal alive.

  Even though seventy men could hardly move silently through the forest, with the aid of the fisherman they made their way to the Beothuk village undetected. A handful of them quietly entered the village and, at a signal, simultaneously set fire to a dozen birchbark mamateeks. When the members of the Seal Clan ran from their burning homes, they were captured and chained together by the Portuguese sailors. When the sun came up, the entire village of the Appawet Clan, fifty-seven men, women, and children, were herded like cattle into rowboats waiting at the shore of their own bay, and transported around the tongue of land to Côrte Real’s ships. It was a catastrophe for the Red Men.

  While Côrte Real’s raiding party waited on shore for the boats to return for them, a band of warrior women descended upon them, and before they could mount a counterattack twenty of them had been killed by Beothuk spears. The attack was led by a wild woman who shouted and whirled in a frenzy, her short sword striking at anything that got in her way. She was a veritable demon, reported one of Côrte Real’s men. The Portuguese had no choice but to flee back to Bonavista along the path they had taken the night before. Even so, they were pursued by the women led by Iwish, and ten more were slain before they could reach their ships. Thirty men in all had been killed by the Beothuk women.

  Seven of the captured Red Men were placed on Côrte Real’s flagship, and the other fifty were tied together and left on the open deck of the second vessel. Then both ships set sail for Portugal. The fifty-seven Beothuk were never seen again on the island of the Red Men. It is said that they were sold as slaves.

  While returning on the path to the village of the clan of Appawet the Seal, the women came upon a Portuguese sailor who was wounded but still alive. They made him walk back to the village, in the hope that he could be made to tell them what had happened to their people. It was from him that they learned the name of the ships’ commander was Gaspar de Côrte Real.

  News travelled quickly on the island of the Red Men in those days, and Iwish was named chief of the clan of Appawet the Seal, and also leader of the guardians of the nation, for her foresight as well as for her ability to oversee the island’s defence. She was the first woman to become a clan chief, and the first to sit on the national council as a full councillor, rather than as a representative of the nation’s women, and the first to be the leader of the guardians. She knew, however, that she had been accorded these honours because she had acted like a man; if her words had been heeded by the others, she would have demonstrated her usefulness to her people as a woman, and not simply as a replacement for a man. She was determined, she was strong, and she was as capable as any man, but she considered herself a woman, and preferred to be seen as a woman. She obeyed the laws of the nation and observed her duties as a woman and as a wife.

  She had no intention of neglecting those duties when she assumed the role of clan chief and leader of the guardians. She stoutly maintained that if a man were more competent she would relinquish her titles, go back to being a woman, and forget these man-tasks that had been thrust upon her. She was well aware that her most important role as chief was to find a male replacement for herself, and to restore the confidence and dignity of the stronger sex, which had been diminished by her own success and that of her female followers. There was nothing wrong with the models followed by young Beothuk males for hundreds of season-cycles; they must be put back in place as soon as possible so that virility would return and the women could once again enjoy life in confidence, as they had before.

  For that to happen, it was absolutely necessary to rid the clan council of its prideful and complacent men who believed they were the only ones with knowledge and power. These men must now look to the women for counsel, and not simply as bearers of their children. Her work would begin immediately. She had to reorganize the defences, since there was no doubt in her mind that the next warm season would bring more foreign ships to their shores. Every season-cycle brought more and more ships to the island to take fish that belonged to the Beothuk, thereby preventing the Red Men from taking the nourishment from the sea that they needed for survival. The fish in the inland ponds would eventually disappear, and the clams and shellfish they gathered in the bays were already becoming fewer.

  How were they to fish for cod and halibut? They dared not take their tapatooks beyond the bay for fear of being captured by the foreign ships. When such encounters occurred, the Beothuk were saved only by the swiftness of their paddlers. Somehow they had to put these fears aside and return to their traditional way of life. There must be peace, not war. That was the task that fell to the Great Iwish, the first female clan chief of the Beothuk Nation.

  A new clan council was formed and a second woman was named to it, but Iwish also named three men, including the elder who had escaped from the Portuguese raid by joining the women in the forest the night before the attack. He had endeared himself to them by saying that he, too, had had a presentiment of disaster, perhaps a feminine one, but a true one nonetheless. They said he was wise. But he rather thought of himself as prudent, as opening his spirit to all good ideas, whether they came from a man or from a woman.

  32

  Iwish had been chief of the Appawet Clan for a full season-cycle. She had doubled the guard along the coasts, and at her orders Beothuk tapatooks regularly crossed the bays and skirted the cliffs, keeping watch on the freshwater brooks that tumbled down from the highlands and splashed into the sea. The men had become trained warriors: they attacked and faded away
almost simultaneously. Such a war of harassment was the only possible way of meeting an enemy as numerous and well-armed as the newcomers from the far-off continent. first the English, then the Portuguese. The invasion had to be stopped by some means, or it would no longer be possible to protect the abundant land that had once belonged solely to the Beothuk Nation.

  The clan chief learned much from the Portuguese sailor who had been captured by the guardians. His wounds, staunched with his own hair, had healed quickly, and in less than one moon he had been put to work gathering clams and shellfish with the elders of the village. At night, Iwish questioned him at great length about Portugal. She learned that his people came to the island in search of a metal they called gold, and that possession of this metal was deemed wealth in Europe. She also learned that the prisoners taken by Captain Gaspar de Côrte Real had in all likelihood been sold in exchange for this metal, that they would then be forced to do the work of their new owners. The prisoner explained that they would be beaten and whipped, and that at the slightest sign of resistance they would be killed. She was told that in the eyes of these foreigners, anyone who did not adhere to the same religion as they did were regarded as inferior beings, lower than beasts, and that their religion then gave them the right to mistreat such beings without fear of punishment. Iwish refused, however, to treat her prisoner in the same way: it was one thing for him to be made to contribute to the well-being of the people of the island, but quite another for him to be mistreated. He would be killed if he could not be put to good use, but in the meantime there was much she could learn from this sailor.

  She was surprised, for example, to discover how hated the Beothuk were by the crews of the ships that fished the waters surrounding their island. Her people were considered demons, creatures from hell, and it was necessary to kill them so that Europeans could move in and live freely on the land. All these things she was told by the sailor, whose name was Miguel Ferreira. From their conversations together, she also learned that the Beothuk were at least as intelligent and humane as the people who came from away, since they did not force other human beings to do the work for them that they did not wish to do themselves. “When we become too lazy to do our own daily tasks, there will no longer be a reason for our nation to survive,” she told herself. “We will have become useless.”