أميرة’s Reviews > Canadian History For Dummies > Status Update

there is a fine line between pirate and privateer. And an even finer one between pirate and landlord.

The Beothuk Indians were eliminated. Cut off from the coasts and pushed back into the interior, they were starved out, hunted down, and persecuted. And even worse than the sporadic violence and slow strangulation they faced was the relentless disregard with which they were treated. […] If it wasn’t genocide, what was it?

Local Newfoundland historians get quite upset when the extinction of the Beothuk people is referred to as “genocide.” However, anthropologist Ingeborg Marshall, a leading expert in the field and author of the definitive work A “History and Ethnography of the Beothuk, makes it quite clear: The deciding factor in the destruction of the Beothuk was the ruthlessness and brutality of the early English settlers.

The killings lasted for more than 200 years, from 1613 to 1823, and ended only because by that point there were very few Beothuk left to shoot. If it was war, it was a very lopsided one. The Beothuk never organized “hunts,” never launched indiscriminate massacres, and never killed a single woman or child. The white settlers did all of the above. For more than 50 years, it was perfectly legal to kill Beothuk.