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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.