All history is storytelling and up until recently the story of Canada
has been told from the perspective of the white males of European
ancestry. Much of their writing recounts the heroic exploits of the
early explorers who set out to discover new land and "civilize"
the "savage" inhabitants. Peter Such's novel Riverrun
tells the story from another point of view, that of the last Beothuks
and calls into question our assumptions about what is savage and what
is civilized behavior. What view of our nation would we have developed
had our history been told from the perspective of the vanquished instead
of the victor? Would the conquests of the explorers have seemed so
heroic when viewed from the perspective of Canada's aboriginal people?
What parts of the story of Canada are missing? Why have these parts
been left out?
Some have come to regard the extinction of the Beothuks as yet another
of Canada's dirty little secrets. Why has their story been virtually
ignored in our history book? What new insights would we have about
our country if the Chinese railway workers or the Japanese Canadians
interned during the Second World War were given a voice in our history
books?
Recent advances in communication technologies have begun to allow
these voices to emerge and be added to our historical accounts. The
voices of aboriginal people and other marginalized groups from our
past are contributing to a much broader understanding of our history.
These new understandings have called into question our Canadian identity.
Perhaps we aren't such a tolerant and understanding society after
all.
Although the novel Riverrun is fictional it is based on primary
source documentation and recent archeological evidence. Peter Such
pieces these accounts of our history together in his novel about the
Beothuk people writing from their perspective as he imagines how they
would view the arrival of the Europeans.
Class Discussion
Discuss the following excerpts to determine the perspective of their
authors:
"I know Newfoundlanders are the salt of the earth, and I don't
believe in any sort of mark of Cain, but I can't help thinking of
Newfoundland as a crime scene." ( Haimila, Wayne and McFarlane,
Peter. Ancient Land, Ancient Sky, p. 24)
The campaign against Beothuk started in 1501 when 57 Beothuk were
offered for sale at a slave market by a Portuguese privateer.
By 1800 both the French and the English had offered a bounty on Beothuk
heads and accounts exist of Beothuks being hunted for sport.
In 1801 evidence suggests that three or four hundred Beothuk men,
women and children were herded on to a point of land near their favorite
sealing-site and massacred. History books ignore the event but recent
archaeological investigations provide convincing evidence to support
this account.
"It's interesting how history deals with the extinction/slaughter
of the Beothuk...it's like after thousands of years of habitation,
they just disappear."
"They have been a bold heroic and purely self dependent nation
never having either courted or been subdued by other tribes or Europeans.
But what early mind -- a power -- could face gunpowder and firelocks?
Hence their annihilation." [Manuscript of W.E. Cormack's, apparently
written after his last expedition in search of the Red Indians.]
Task
"Civilizing the Savages": Web Page
and Voice Narration
