However, I, as the Living Memory of the Beothuk people, must note that Demasduit was never interrogated, neither at the inquest nor by the grand jury nor by Governor Hamilton. Perhaps they did not think she was intelligent enough to tell the story of what happened. But she was, at that time, the Living Memory of the Beothuk people. Non-natives are always minimizing our ability to understand what is happening to us. If I have since learned that Christianity is the road to truth, I also know that justice is without colour. It is completely pale.
One of the things that surprises me as I grow older and my responsibilities change is to see how our views of events that once seemed harmless to us also change. There was a time when I felt under attack. Since available men were so few among our people, I behaved like a man. I fought alongside men without even thinking of myself as a woman. Only now that my aunt Demasduit is no longer among the living do I fully understand that I will never have a Beothuk husband, and that makes me very sad. I will never experience the joy of being a woman, of giving my life to another, of sharing the feeling of being a part of Kobshuneesamut the Creator. I remember the words of Nonosabasut, who said that Kobshuneesamut lost his power as the Creator when two Beothuk died for every one that was born. Despite his sadness, he never lost his ability to laugh out loud whenever the opportunity arose. What was the sense of crying when there was nothing to be done anyway, he would say. We had become the laughing-stock of the island when we had once been its masters.
Our family had become very small. There were only my mother, Doodeebewshet, my father, Mamjaesdoo, my sister, Dabseek, the fourth-born of our family, who was a little younger than me. There was Gausep, his wife, and their young son of twelve season-cycles. There was an elder who, at the time of the events surrounding Demasduit’s life that I am recounting now, had gone to Gull River to see if he could find any surviving members of the Otter Clan living there. But we knew that that was only an excuse. All the Otters had come to live with us many season-cycles before, back when the last descendant of Anin the Ancestor was still among us, and was our chief. The elder left so as not to be a burden to the other survivors. He went nowhere, and would not return. He left us telling a lie, because he knew that lies kill.
53
Before leaving for the Bay of Exploits, John Peyton and his men looked inside the mamateek in which Demasduit had lived with Nonosabasut and their son. They were astonished at how clean and orderly it was. For them, a camp in the forest was a place where chaos reigned, where cleanliness left much to be desired. Paul Paul, the Mixed-Blood who used to visit us often, told us that he had never seen the English wash themselves or take a steam bath when on an expedition. They let their bodies become dirtier and dirtier and give off an increasingly unpleasant odour of sweat. We would bathe ourselves even in the winter, and clean ourselves in sweat lodges, an ancient custom of our people reintroduced after our defeat at Notre Dame Bay, when we realized we could smell the English coming a mile away. The trappers smelled particularly strong, but the fishermen smelled worse, especially the deep-sea fishermen, who came back to port with their cargo holds full of cod and halibut. Even when we were very busy cleaning and drying fish, we would wash ourselves many times so that we would not bring the smell into our mamateeks.
During this visit to their mamateek, Peyton picked up a mask that had been carved by Nonosabasut shortly before his death. “A pagan idol,” Peyton called it. Demasduit flew into such a rage that the men became frightened of her: that mask had been made by her husband and was sacred to her, and no one had the right to touch it. She reached up and tore off a small cross that Peyton wore around his neck, and threw it to the ground. Her mask, she said, was no more a pagan idol than his white-man’s cross was. She ground the cross into the earth with her heel, much to the displeasure of Peyton, who had received it from his father. He knelt down and recovered the small cult object to which he seemed to have attached as much value as Demasduit did to her mask. It was a disgraceful scene, and it proved that it was impossible for any understanding to exist between our two ways of seeing life.
No Beothuk had ever before attacked a cult object belonging to another person, since belief is a personal choice that must always be respected. Is the worship of crucifixes, or of images of people floating in a circle around someone’s head, any more sacred than an object created by a loved one who has just been killed? As the Living Memory of the Beothuk, my duty is to remember, and here I am trying to understand things that the killers of the Beothuk have never even considered.
If Demasduit’s hands had not been tied she would have inflicted a severe punishment on the man who had profaned the object that she cared so much about, especially after the death of Nonosabasut. Before setting out for the coast, Peyton reproached the trapper who had stabbed Demasduit’s husband with his bayonet. The trapper was not contrite. “It was only a Redskin,” he said to Peyton. “I’ve killed a hundred like him.”
That was when Peyton decided to keep Demasduit as a prisoner. But since she had insulted Peyton by tearing the cross from his neck, he refused to take her son with them. It was Peyton’s decision alone. “After she has been civilized,” he said, “she will perhaps lose her primitive ways and we can use her in our negotiations with her own people. We shall see.”
Peyton’s men celebrated his decision by drinking that horrible navy rum that makes people mad and burns their throats and turns their bowels to water. They became crazy. They thought they were alone in the world, but we were watching them closely, hidden in the shadows. If they had not been so drunk they would have sensed us breathing down their necks.
Demasduit, tied up tightly and watched by two men who were not drinking rum, cried the whole night. We were very close to her, but there was nothing we could do to free her. The balls from the English muskets would have killed us. But we were able to frighten them during the night. When the men were all asleep, we crept up to the mamateek and suddenly cried out as loud as we could. The guard shouted, “The Indians! The Indians!” and when everyone ran out of the mamateek they saw our footprints everywhere. That made them very nervous, and they began firing their muskets in every direction, hoping to scare us off.
I am trying to imagine how Demasduit must have felt, lying in her own mamateek with the men who had just killed her husband and the father of her child. Was her pain greater than her rage? I cannot say. If it were me, I would have had only one desire: to kill as many of the English bastards as I could. But for my poor aunt, perhaps the pain and the humiliation were almost unbearable.
The rest of us did not know what to do. We were as powerless as Demasduit. We seemed to be free of the constraints that held her, but we were just as much prisoners of our destiny as she was. We knew now that our survival was only a temporary thing, and that eventually the Beothuk Nation would disappear. We knew that our spirits would not be passed on to others. We knew that fate had reserved that for us.
There was no more hope, but we would not allow ourselves to die without acting. We had to go on fighting until the end. But the end of what? Of our lives? Of our race? The end of our nation? Or the end of our world? We had no more dreams. We had no more fear. We had only the instinct to eat and not die, to await death only when there was nothing more to eat. Who could do more than that?
With Demasduit gone and Nonosabasut dead, their child refused to eat solid food. None of our women were with milk, so no one could help the infant survive. Four suns after the departure of his mother, despite all the care we could give him, the continuation of Nonosabasut’s male line died. The next days were devoted to ceremonies for our dead. The ground was frozen, so we built a scaffold of wood. We dismantled an old mamateek and used the birchbark from it to wrap the corpses of father and son. We laid the corpses on the scaffold and made a huge fire, around which we all prayed, and cried, and sang, and cried again, for two whole days without eating. When the whites left us, they took with them our winter stores and all our furs. Later I was told that this had been a peaceful
expedition; it made me shudder to think what a war party would have been like.
That winter in our camp, total desolation reigned. Gausep the Breath, his wife, and his child decided that as soon as the ice thawed they would travel north to live among the Sho-Undamung. Ge-oun the Jaw went to join the Mixed-Bloods at Bay d’Espoir, where he knew of a young girl who was descended from the first Beothuk family to move there.
We were the only Beothuk left at Red Ochre Lake: my mother, my father, my sister, and me, the last Living Memory of the once great nation of the Beothuk of the island of Newfoundland, the country of Anin.
For the first few suns when we were alone, my family and I experienced feelings that I cannot describe. When we were a community, we encouraged one another all the time, we told each other our dreams and shared our hopes and desires. It never occurred to us that our way of life would change with the sudden departure of three of us. If sickness had taken away the last of our friends and relatives, we would have spoken of fate and the will of the Creator. But what had happened to us was not sickness. One had been brutally murdered while his wife and child were watching, and the mother had been taken away by the invading savages, and the son had died of starvation.
Even when I go to the most profound depth of my memory I cannot come up with a situation similar to this, one that would so change our way of confronting life. There was nothing in our history to guide me. I could say: “This is the first time this has happened in the Living Memory of the Beothuk.” And with equal truth I could also say: “In the Living Memory of the Beothuk, this will never happen again.” I am the Living Memory, and I know very well that I am the last of the great nation of Red Men. In my memory, which is still living, I can find the words that I have been taught and that have come to me from the ancestors:
“The Beothuk people will never die.”
“The Beothuk people are eternal.”
“There will always be Beothuk, because there will always be real men.”
“The Beothuk are the real men. Real men always feel the need to know, to learn, to understand. These things are eternal.”
All these words resonate in my head, but they no longer mean anything. They do not describe our present situation. I know now that they are symbols only, and that their meaning at any one time is not the same as it was in their original context. In actuality, we were literally dying of starvation, cold, and solitude. We had been a gregarious people who moved forward into tomorrow. We had become a family living in hell who had nothing but our memories to live on. When life is reduced to memories, the end is near. The world had once been a series of connected worlds, life was a chain of connected lives, the Living Memory was one in a line of related Living Memories. Now, for our people, there were no more tomorrows.
We will therefore end our lives by the telling of it. We were the last family of native people on this island, the last to have the same kind and amount of pride as the first family. That was certainly true. There truly had been a first family on this island. What if we pretended that we were that first family?
At the time that the first family was established, there were no Bouguishamesh here. There were certainly no English. The two daughters of the original family somehow found husbands to continue their line. Were we not, my sister and I, two daughters without Beothuk husbands, and with no men around us from whom we could fashion one? Not even a block of wood into which the creator Kobshuneesamut could breathe life? Yes, but.… Where is Kobshuneesamut? Did anyone know? Nonosabasut was right: the creator was finished with his creating. He had forgotten us.
54
At Reverend Leigh’s residence in Twillingate, Demasduit was described as being quite different from the Eskimo. She had small, delicate bones. Her hands and feet, although very small, were magnificently formed. Her skin tone was pale, lightly coppered, but soon came to resemble that of Europeans. Her hair was black and fine. Her eyes were larger, more expressive and more intelligent than those of the Eskimo. Her teeth were small and straight and she kept them very clean. Her cheekbones were high, but her general bearing was pleasant and she expressed herself well.
Demasduit felt lost in this unfamiliar environment. On her first night at the Leighs’ home she tried to escape twice, but was caught each time and brought back. After that, she was kept under close surveillance. She became calm only when she realized the hopelessness of her situation.
Reverend Leigh reported that she seemed to appreciate the comforts of civilization. In order for her to consider herself a human being, it was absolutely necessary for her to have a Christian name. They christened her Mary, and because she had been captured in the month of March, her family name became March. That was the tradition: Tom June had been captured in June, John August had been taken in August. The word went around that Mary March never rose before nine o’clock in the morning. She ate very little: a few crumbs of bread, some dried raisins, hardtack dipped in tea. She refused anything that contained alcohol. When she was given European clothing she immediately took off her beaver coat, folded it carefully, and placed it in her chest. Reverend Leigh added that she was extremely selfish, and never allowed anyone to touch that coat. It was the only thing she had that reminded her of Nonosabasut, who had worked all one winter to obtain enough beaver skins to make his wife a coat.
Still according to the reverend, Demasduit was shy and very reserved, did not allow anyone to touch her, either affectionately or otherwise. From her, Reverend Leigh learned that the Beothuk were not naturally polygamous but lived in families, even extended families: cousins, uncles, and aunts were all part of the Beothuk clan community. Mary March carried the family of Demasduit in her thoughts at all times; she spoke of them as though they were alive and well. “When will I be allowed to return to my family?” she was constantly asking.
She said that there were sixteen members of her family. Everything she received she divided into sixteen portions and laid them out separately. Some of her clothing disappeared, and it was found that she had taken them apart to make other articles from them. In her locker they found sixteen pairs of moccasins and two small pairs of children’s leggings. The leggings had been made from two cotton nightcaps.
Whenever the reverend’s housekeeper entered her room, she found Demasduit curled up on the bed in a fetal position, pretending to sleep. The housekeeper never succeeded in catching her making these articles for her family. Naturally, since Mary March was an object of Christian charity, the housekeeper accused her of having stolen the two cotton nightcaps, but Demasduit replied angrily that they had been given to her by John Peyton Jr., who later confirmed this.
Reverend Leigh also made note of the fact that Mary March had a well-developed sense of humour. She could imitate the housekeeper, the blacksmith, the cobbler, and the tailor, who wore spectacles, to great effect. She imitated their manner of speaking English.
During the summer that followed her capture by Peyton and her return to St. John’s, Demasduit was impatient to be returned to her people, as the governor had ordered. But Captain Glascock was busy charting the Bay of Exploits with John Peyton Jr. Her child had no doubt learned to feed himself, assuming he was still alive, as Mary most assuredly did. Her own health, however, began to decline. She began coughing frequently.
On the seventeenth of June of that year, Captain Glascock, in the company of Reverend Leigh, John Peyton Jr., and Demasduit, set sail for New Bay, where many Beothuk had been spotted over the previous few years. Two days later, they returned to the Drake without having seen a single one.
On the twenty-second, Captain Glascock sailed with John Peyton Jr. and Demasduit to the Bay of Exploits, and followed the Exploits River as far inland as the first rapids. They made as little noise as possible so as not to frighten off the Savages. Glascock and his men went ashore to explore the surroundings. They found mamateeks that had been abandoned the previous winter. They returned to the Drake on the twenty-fifth of June.
These sea voyages did not help to improve
Mary’s health. Her cough worsened. She also began to have fainting spells and frequently had to lie down in the ship to rest.
Glascock sent out many shore parties to explore the small bays along the coast, in search of Beothuk. None was ever seen. If there were any Beothuk in the area, it was very unlikely that they would show themselves. The search along the Exploits River continued from the twenty-eighth to the thirtieth of June, when Captain Glascock and three of his crew members became ill. They had been almost eaten alive by blackflies and mosquitoes. The men’s faces became so swollen they were temporarily blinded, and they all came down with fever.
During this time a ship’s officer, John Travick, spotted three Beothuk in a tapatook crossing Badger Bay. In order to alert them to the fact that he wished to speak to them, he fired his musket in their direction. The three Beothuk were me, Shanawdithit, my father, Mamjaesdoo, and my sister. We were hunting for shorebirds on one of the islands when the English rounded a point in a rowboat upon which a small sail had been fixed. First they shouted at us. Then, seeing that we did not wait to listen to them, they fired at us. We paddled as swiftly as we could to escape from them. We had too many memories of bad experiences with the English.
Five suns later, well hidden in the thick conifer forest that surrounds Badger Bay, we watched another rowboat enter the bay with Demasduit on board. Even from a distance I could see that she was sick. When the English officer and his men landed, she did not have enough strength to get out of the boat on her own. She remained on board. I now think that she could sense our presence, that we were quite close. But what could we do for her? There were only four of us, and we had no medicines to make her healthy again. We did not know how to cure her of the English disease.
The Beothuk Saga Page 31