Shawnadithit drawings
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Note-worthy women
Merna Forster receives her Governor General's History Award for Popular Media (Pierre Berton Award) from Governor General David Johnston in November 2016. Photo credit: Sgt Johanie Maheu, Rideau Hall, © OSGG
The long road to gender equity can sometimes feel more like a treadmill these days. Just ask Merna Forster, '76 BA(Spec), a Governor General award-winning historian, whose long-time mission has been to champion women in Canadian history.
In 2004, Forster published her first book, 100 Canadian Heroines: Famous and Forgotten Faces, showcasing little-known women from our history. In the same month the book hit stores, the CBC announced the results from its The Greatest Canadian television quest. No women made it to the top 10, and only a handful to the top 50. (The highest ranked woman was singer-songwriter Shania Twain.) That same year, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador was justified in deferring pay equity to women during a financial crisis. We've come so far since then, right?
Not really.
In 2011
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Shanawdithit: The last of the Beothuk people
Windspeaker.com Archives
From the first European incursions in the 1500s on, relations between the Beothuk and the European newcomers were strained, to say the least. By the early 1600s, a trading relationship was formed, but the Beothuk kept their distance, leaving furs for the traders and watching from a distance as their pelts were removed and goods left in their place.
The animosity the Beothuk felt toward the newcomers increased as European settlements sprang up along the coast. By the mid-1600s, relations between the Beothuk and the European settlers were openly hostile. Many Beothuk died at the hands of the Europeans, and the Beothuk responded with like violence, although reports show the number of Beothuk killed by Europeans eclipsed the number of victims claimed by the Beothuk.
Historic accounts tell of a number of cases where Beothuk people were slaughtered for no apparent reason other than because they were "Red Indians", so named for their practice of covering their bodies with a mixture of red ochre and oil, and t
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The Power in the Frame
One early morning in March 1819, at the first break of dawn, a small group of Beothuk—the indigenous inhabitants of the island now more commonly known as Newfoundland—were at their winter camp on the north side of Beothuk Lake, a long and narrow body of water at the island's center, when they were awakened by the sound of intruders. A group of British settlers had surrounded their camp. While the settlers' intentions were not yet known, the Beothuk had cause for alarm. Every previous encounter with the British had ended in destruction and death. This encounter would soon result in the same.
The Beothuk had been navigating their relationships with Europeans for centuries. Some speculate that the Icelandic Sagas' mention of “Skraelings” refers to ancestors of the Beothuk, which would date a first encounter to the eleventh century. A second phase of more sustained relation began shortly after the Italian explorer John Cabot's initial visit to the island, in 1497, and persisted for over two hundred years. During this time, “fishing crews
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