Early Mikmaq Presence in Southern Newfoundland:: An Ethnohistorical Perspective, c.1500-1763

Abstract

COMPARED WITH MI’KMAQ studies elsewhere, scholarly interest in Newfoundland Mi’kmaq ethnohistory was slow to develop. Of the four Native groups which frequented Newfoundland during the historic period, the Beothuk have been the subject of a monumental monograph (Marshall 1996). In contrast, details relating to two others, the Innu (Montagnais) and the historic Inuit, whose range formerly extended into the western and northern regions of the island, constitute largely forgotten ethnohistorical chapters (Martijn 1990, 2000). Likewise, persistant preconceptions and an apparent scarcity of documentary sources dampened curiousity about the Mi’kmaq presence. Only bits and pieces of published information can be gleaned from nineteenth-century historians (Prowse 1895), geologists (Howley 1915, Jukes 1842), explorers (Cormack 1928), sportsmen (Millais 1907), as well as from various accounts by government officials, churchmen, and private individuals. During a brief visit in 1914, Speck (1922), an anthropologist, carried out limited ethnographic and ethnohistorical inquiries, but more than 60 years passed before Upton (1977) and Pastore (1977) decided to undertake systematic archival work. History books have long promulgated the received wisdom that the Beothuk constituted the only permanent Native residents of Newfoundland at the time of European contact, designated here as the beginning of the sixteenth century (e.g., Briffett 1949: 47-48, 52). According to this view, the Mi’kmaq were later arrivals from a homeland in the continental Maritime provinces, first brought to the island

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