With Mary March Museum renaming in the works, Grand Falls-Windsor steps up reconciliation efforts cbc.ca - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from cbc.ca Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Lack of consultation over Red Indian Lake renaming stirs anger in central Newfoundland
Some people are upset with the provincial government, saying there was no wider consultation with local communities near the lake prior to the announcement to rename it.
Social Sharing
CBC News ·
Posted: Apr 26, 2021 8:11 AM NT | Last Updated: April 26
The provincial government has introduced legislation to rename Red Indian Lake to the Mi kmaw phrase Wantaqo ti Qospem, but some people in the area say that s been done without consulting locals.(Submitted by Dave Wilcox)
The decision to rename Red Indian Lake is causing tension and fraying Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations in central Newfoundland, say some people in the area, as they speak out against the way the process has so far been handled.
With art and maps by Shanawdithit
The pencil drawings are intricate: slender dark lines marching carefully across the pages, glimpses into a people long believed extinguished. Shanawdithit, a Beothuk woman in her 20s, drew them nearly two centuries ago in the months before she died. Only a dozen of her drawings are known to exist today.
Five are maps of the lake in central Newfoundland, today known as Red Indian Lake, where Shanawdithit’s people made camp. But they are not mainly cartographic. Instead, they are accounts of what Shanawdithit saw: where heavily armed British settlers captured Shanawdithit’s aunt, Demasduit, in March 1819; where Demasduit’s husband, Nonosabasut, the last known Beothuk chief, was shot and killed, along with his brother, trying to convince the English to give her back; and, drawn in the red that symbolized both her people’s ochre decorations and their blood, the routes that the Beothuk took as they fled the muskets and bayonets that day.