Canadian
theatre 
Ottawah, the Last Chief of the Red Indians of Newfoundland (1848)
Author Unknown
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Desmasduit, aunt of |
Ottawah, the Last Chief of the Red Indians of Newfoundland, was first published in anonymous parts in London in 1848. Later American and German editions attributed the work to Scottish aristocrat Sir Charles Augustus Murray, but according to E. J. Devereux Murray's name most likely appeared on the work because of its affinities to Murray's novel The Prairie Bird (351). The American publisher, T. B. Peterson of Philadelphia, was known to have traded on the names of successful authors without necessarily having them write new books (351).
Ottawah is a romantic novel that uses the structure of The Tempest to begin a story explaining the genocide of the Beothuks. Set in the early seventeenth century, an old European and his daughter are the sole survivors of an "Indian" massacre of their Newfoundland settlement who live in a sacred grove on the mountain where the Beothuks worship. The old man fashions himself as a wise, Prospero-type figure, who wishes to intervene with his European laws and values into the conflict between the Beothuks and Micmacs "to reclaim a part of the human race from savageness and barbarity" (75).
His daughter, Adalie, a lovely and dutiful Miranda type, saves Ahtomah from sacrifice by the Micmacs and they fall in love with each other. This love, however, is doomed to tragedy when the Micmacs invade and slaughter the retreating Beothuks, one by one. At the top of a cliff, Ahtomah makes a final impassioned speech:
It is then the end. My people are already extinct: and I alone remain, like a blasted juniper after the trees of the forest have long fallen around. Would that the lightening had not spared me! I was born on the evening of my people's pride. I came but to witness the extinction of a race, which record not the time when their father's first hunted the deer on the hills. They are departed. They are fallen. What record of their fame shall remain? When the tall canoes of the white men come, the spirits of the red men will be heard in the mist that the tempest drives over the plain; but none found to tell the tale of a race already remembered no more. (175) [indent]
Adalie and Ahtomah then leap to their deaths in each others' arms as the Micmacs approach. (Carroll Colby's The God of Gods is similarly melodramatic when adopting a "native" theme to a Shakespearean adaptation.)
The historical implication, as Devereux points out, is that the Beothuks had already been decimated by the Micmacs before the European settlers arrived. The reality is that the Beothuks were murdered by settlers in numbers large enough to require a Royal proclamation making it a capital crime in 1769, a proclamation that was often reissued. As permanent European and Micmac settlements grew along Newfoundland's coast, the Beothuks retreated inland, away from the resources on which they were dependent. This led to malnourishment and starvation, which made European diseases even more deadly to the Native population.
Shawnadithit was the last known surviving Beothuk, who died of pulmonary consumption in St. John's on June 6, 1829. Ottawah was the earliest of many literary works inspired by her death. Inclusion of this novel in our anthology marks the way in which Shakespearean theatrical referents are used to frame and romanticize the shameful historical narrative of the extinction of the Beothuks.
Please also see Nicholas Flood Davin's Royal Commission Report on Residency Schools.Gordon Lester
Sources:
Conrad, Margaret, and Alvin Finkel. History of the Canadian Peoples:
Beginnings to 1867. Vol. I. 3rd ed. Toronto: Addison Wesley Longman,
2002.
Devereux, E. J. “The Beothuk Indians of Newfoundland in Fact and Fiction.” Dalhousie Review 50 (1970-71): 350-62.
The Beothuk of Newfoundland.
http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~ae050/beothuk.html.
"The Beothuk." Canadian Confederation. National
Library of Canada.
http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/2/18/h18-2957-e.html.
