Midden Heap · Track 28 · middle

The Beothuk

The Beothuk (pre-contact – 1829): the Indigenous people of Newfoundland, with their own language, culture, and worldview. The last known Beothuk, Shanawdithit, died in 1829. The name Beothuk means person. No descendants. No living speakers. The word for themselves is the last word that remains. Mechanism: genocide.

Lyrics

The Exploits River, silent now.
Red ochre dust on the empty shore.
The shape of a canoe in the morning mist, a memory of wood and skin.
An absence that holds a name.
A world painted red for the living, not the dead.
The caribou paths were the veins of the earth.
Winter was a mamateek, smoke rising from the snow.
The people were the people. Beothuk.
No other name was needed.
The word was the world, and the world was whole.
Then the ships came, cutting the horizon.
The iron noise, the foreign tongue.
The shrinking coast, a slow han in the fog.
Every season a smaller circle.
Every winter, fewer fires.
Until the language lived in a single body.
St. John's, 1829.
A room filled with damp English wool and pity.
Your name was Shanawdithit. The last one.
You drew them maps of what was lost.
A lake, a massacre, a ghost dance.
You drew the cradleboard with the ochre handprints.
A language turning into pictures in a white man's book.
He asked for words. You gave him silence.
The nescience of a world no one else could enter.
Your fever was the final fire.
When your heart stopped, a lexicon fell.
A people became a curio.
A word became a shard.
But to say your name, Shanawdithit.
And to say your name, Beothuk.
Is to say *Person* again.