The "New Found Land" and Heroic Resistance of the Mi'kmaq and Beothuk

- Tony Seed -

Mi'kmaq resistance carries on to the present. Above, they militantly defend their hereditary rights blocking a fracking operation near Rexton, New Brunswick, October 7, 2013.

The Venetian navigator Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot), commissioned by Henry VII of England, landed in Newfoundland on June 24, 1497. Believing it to be an island off the coast of Asia, he named it New Found Land.[1]

Under the commission of this king to "subdue, occupy, and possesse" the lands of "heathens and infidels," Caboto reconnoitred the Newfoundland coast and also landed on the northern shore of Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia.[2]

He returned to England on August 6, 1497 and took three Mi'kmaq with him thereby introducing the enslavement of human persons into North America. This may be responsible for his disappearance when he returned to Newfoundland with five ships in 1498. When his ships arrived in northern Cape Breton Island, the Mi'kmaq attacked. Only one ship arrived back in England, the other four, including the one with Caboto as captain, never returned. Caboto's own family was enriched by the slave trade. His son Sebastian, while working for the Spanish king in 1529, apparently purchased "50 to 60 slaves ... in Brazil, for ... sale in Seville."[3]

The royal charter stipulated that King Henry VII would acquire "rule, title, and jurisdiction" over all lands "discovered" by Cabot. It is the foundation upon which the "Dominion of Canada," as a supposed legal entity, is based.[4] Caboto, sailing from Bristol, a strategic port in the Atlantic slave trade, represented the trading, commercial and shipping houses -- such as Lloyds of London and Barclays Bank -- who amassed fabulous wealth from the kidnapping of Africans and later financed the neo-colonial confederation of Canada, created in 1867, and its railroads from their booty.

Caboto had told stories of the sea teeming with fish on his return to England. European colonial fishing fleets began making trips to the Grand Banks every summer.

Initially the Mi'kmaq and Beothuk, however reluctantly at times, treated the visitors as political equals in most important respects and were willing to trade and allow the Europeans to briefly land and dry the cod. In 1500, Gaspar Corte-Real, a slave trader financed by Portugal, captured several Mi'kmaq. He trolled the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador with three ships, kidnapping 57 "man slaves" (Beothuks) to be sold to finance the cost of the expedition, and claiming it on behalf of Portugal. His belief that Nitassinan was teeming with potential captives led to it being called Labrador, "the source of labour material." While two of the ships returned to Portugal, Corte-Real and his ship were lost at sea.

By 1504 Bretons were fishing off the coast of Mi'kma'ki country. The fishermen dried their catch on shore and began trading fur with the Mi'kmaq, giving rise to a new commodity and European dreams of greater riches. In 1507 Norman fishermen took another seven Beothuk prisoners to France. This affected all future relations between the Beothuk, Mi'kmaq and the fishermen.

João Álvares Fagundes (1521-25), Giovanni da Verrazano (1524), and Estebán Gomez (1525) followed to Mi'kma'ki.

The French "Discovery" of Kanata

The French explorer Jacques Cartier dropped anchor in Baie des Chaleurs, New Brunswick in 1534. Alarmed by the hundreds of Mi'kmaq in canoes waving beaver skins, he fired cannon over their heads. The Mi'kmaq, who were willing to trade, had to retreat. Cartier began trading with them after being reassured that this was not a hostile attack. He then sent Indigenous prisoners to France. He subsequently landed July 24, 1534 at Baie de Gaspé on territory inhabited by the Haudenosaunee. The French erected a large cross and Cartier claimed possession of the land in the name of the French king François I. When confronted by the Haudenosaunee, Cartier said the cross was merely a navigational marker. Later, Cartier was guided to the village (Kanata) of Stadacona (present day Quebec City) by two Haudenosaunee youths. He designated the entire region north of the St. Lawrence River as "Canada" -- a colonizer's designation that came to encompass a massive swath of Turtle Island, where a nation state was later born on hundreds of nations already existing across the breadth of what is now called Canada.[5]

An epidemic of an unknown illness struck the Maritimes in 1564-70, decimating the Mi'kmaq population.

The Gilbert Patent of "Discovery"-- Newfoundland

On July 11, 1578, Sir Humphrey Gylberte (Sir Humphrey Gilbert) received a grant from Queen Elizabeth I to discover and occupy in the next six years a site for a colony not already in European hands.[6] While he himself could hold land there and convey it to others, all would in turn be held by the Crown and his colony was to be governed by laws agreeable to those of England. He, along with his half-brother Sir Walter Raleigh, was already a colonizer through English colonial plantations in Gaelic Ireland (Ulster and Munster). In 1583, after an earlier failed attempt, Gilbert followed in the well-known track of the fishing fleet to the Grand Banks, where he attempted to settle a colony in Newfoundland.

Gilbert failed to withstand the cold and starvation due to the lack of resources, but he nonetheless laid formal claim to Newfoundland and the Maritimes on August 5, 1583. France, citing Jacques Cartier's voyage and the doctrine of "discovery," opposed the claim. Gilbert lost one ship off Sable Island on August 29,1583 -- recorded as Canada's first "marine disaster," -- and subsequently drowned in a storm on September 9, 1583 near the Azores.

In 1584, Sir Walter Raleigh had Gilbert's patent reissued in his favour, with Newfoundland excluded from its scope, and he made a series of unsuccessful attempts to establish plantation colonies on Roanoke Island. Although the island was located off the coast of North Carolina, he named it as part of the land called Virginia, in honour of Queen Elizabeth I of England, who was referred to as the Virgin Queen.

In 1586, typhus was spread amongst the already weakened Mi'kmaq population, and yet more lives were lost to a deadly disease brought by the Europeans.

Every monarch and their family from Elizabeth Tudor onwards were financiers and beneficiaries of this trade in human flesh. By the 18th century, having overcome the Dutch, Spanish and French colonial empires, Britain ruled the seas with a system of overseas naval-military bases such as Halifax, and emerged as the world's leading human trafficker and had a virtual monopoly over the cod trade. About half of all enslaved Africans were transported in British ships. Eighty per cent of Britain's income was connected with these activities.

A century and a half later, in 1756 on order of King George II, Governor Lawrence of Nova Scotia expelled as many as 10,000 Acadians in the Great Upheaval (Le Grand Dérangement) for refusing to take an oath of loyalty to Britain. In parallel, unable to stop the Mi'kmaq resistance, bounties were paid for scalps of both Mi'kmaq and Acadians. Many Acadians fled into the forests and fought a guerilla war beside the Mi'kmaq, carrying out a series of military operations against the British. (Many others died at sea or settled here and there. Many became the modern day Cajuns in Louisiana.)

By 1758 over 400 fishing boats were gathering every summer off Newfoundland and the Maritimes. The development of the Atlantic fisheries, a seemingly inexhaustible source of cheap protein, is inextricably linked to the Atlantic slave trade, which fertilized the development of the capitalist system and the consolidation of national states in Europe. It later formed the basis of the wealth of leading families in colonial Nova Scotia and New England.

By this time, millions of Indigenous peoples had been slaughtered in South America and the Caribbean. 

The 500th Anniversary of Caboto's Landfall

In 1997, on the quincentennial of Caboto's landfall, the sovereign of Canada, Queen Elizabeth II, toured the country sponsored by the Canadian and British governments. According to her, Caboto's landfall "represented the geographical and intellectual beginning of modern North America " -- the Eurocentric Discovery Doctrine.[7] As is well known, Newfoundland is where the genocide of the Beothuk Indians occurred. Queen Elizabeth was right -- the pattern was set there. So far as the Indigenous peoples are concerned, of course, the pattern set was genocide. The Beothuk were exterminated by the 1830s. By 1867, the population of the Mi'kmak had been reduced to some 2,000. The Inuit dropped from approximately 500,000 before contact to some 102,000 by 1871.

When Queen Elizabeth II visited Sheshatshiu in Labrador, the reception was "mixed," as "protestors waved placards denouncing her visit."[8]

The Canadian Press reported: "Aboriginals have said it's insulting to celebrate explorer John Cabot's arrival in North America because of the devastating impact colonization has had on them. The Queen's visit to this riverside community (Bonavista) of 1,200 stood out on other levels. Dogs meandered about her sand-covered route and there was not a Union Jack or Maple Leaf in sight. There was none of the gushing witnessed at previous events this week ..."[9]

In Sheshatshiu, Innu community leaders presented her a letter on June 26, 1997 that read in part:

"The history of colonization here has been lamentable and has severely demoralized our People. They turn now to drink and self-destruction. We have the highest rate of suicide in North America. Children as young as 12 have taken their own life recently. We feel powerless to prevent the massive mining projects now planned and many of us are driven into discussing mere financial compensation, even though we know that the mines and hydroelectric dams will destroy our land and our culture and that money will not save us.

"The Labrador part of Nitassinan was claimed as British soil until very recently (1949), when without consulting us, your government ceded it to Canada. We have never, however, signed any treaty with either Great Britain or Canada. Nor have we ever given up our right to self-determination.

"The fact that we have become financially dependent on the state which violates our rights is a reflection of our desperate circumstances. It does not mean that we acquiesce in those violations.

"We have been treated as non-People, with no more rights than the caribou on which we depend and which are now themselves being threatened by NATO war exercises and other so-called development. In spite of this, we remain a People in the fullest sense of the word. We have not given up, and we are now looking to rebuild our pride and self esteem."[10]

On June 30, 2004 the late Keptin Saqamow Reginald Maloney opened the Halifax International Symposium on the Media and Disinformation held at Dalhousie University by delivering the fraternal welcome of his people to the participants from North America, Europe and Asia. "The greatest disinformation we have faced is that of the 'discovery doctrine' of the Spanish, Portuguese and British colonial powers, which still ravages us today," he declared in his welcoming address.[11]

On October 12, 2013 the Mi'kmaq Warriors Society and Elsipogtog First Nation in New Brunswick, who were blockading a Texas monopoly's fracking operation demanded, as was their right, that the government "produce documents proving Cabot's Doctrine of Discovery."

The important question is not the Queen, but why the political power does not represent all human beings. The resistance of the First Nations and different collectives of the Canadian people to the new arrangements of the mid-19th century creating the Confederation of Canada, in defence of their rights, is outstanding and second-to-none. The just demands of the Indigenous peoples for the recognition of their rights is not a matter of a "special interest" but an issue facing the entire polity, which can only be resolved through modern arrangements that uphold rights on the basis that they are inviolable and belong to people by virtue of their being.

Notes

1. The main source for this article is "Mi'kmaq & First Nations Timeline (75,000 BC -- 2000 AD): Eclipse & Enlightenment," Tony Seed and the editors of Shunpiking Magazine, Halifax, 2000. With a file from Richard Sanders.

Contrary to all traditional European accounts of the "discovery" of America, which put the Vikings in first place followed by Columbus, overwhelming anthropological evidence places Africans in the Americas since the 9th century. Long before Europeans arrived on the shores of the Americas, evidence indicates that Africans have already travelled to the Americas, including Quebec, and that the Mi'kmaq from the Maritimes had reached Europe and Africa.

In one account predating the official "discovery" of America, in 1398, Prince Henry Sinclair, a Scotsman, reputedly landed in Cape Caruso, Guysborough, travelled to Pictou and Stellarton, stayed with the Mí'kmaq for a year, built a ship and sailed back home. The story is disputed but, according to Kerry Prosper of Afton, Mi'kmaq motifs from that time are clearly evident today at the Sinclair estate in Scotland, which he has visited. [Personal communication]

The following excerpt from "Looking Forward, Looking Back," the first volume of the Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, published in October 1996 reflects the traditional European account of discovery:

"First contacts between Aboriginal peoples and Europeans were sporadic and apparently occurred about a thousand years ago when Norsemen proceeding from Iceland and Greenland are believed to have voyaged to the coast of North America. There is archaeological evidence of a settlement having been established at L'Anse aux Meadows on the northern peninsula of what is now Newfoundland. Accounts of these early voyages and of visits to the coast of Labrador are found in many of the Norse sagas. They mention contact with the indigenous inhabitants who, on the island of Newfoundland, were likely to have been the Beothuk people, and on the Labrador coast, the Innu.

"These early Norse voyages are believed to have continued until the 1340s, and to have included visits to Arctic areas such as Ellesmere and Baffin Island where the Norse would have encountered Inuit. Inuit legends appear to support Norse sagas on this score. The people who established the L'Anse aux Meadows settlement were agriculturalists, although their initial economic base is thought to have centred on the export of wood to Greenland as well as trade in furs. Conflict with Aboriginal people likely occurred relatively soon after the colony was established. Thus, within a few years of their arrival, the Norse appear to have abandoned the settlement and with it the first European colonial experiment in North America.

"Further intermittent commercial contacts ensued with other Europeans, as sailors of Basque, English, French and other nationalities came in search of natural resources such as timber, fish, furs, whale, walrus and polar bear."

2. Caboto came armed with assumptions similar to those of the Spanish colonialists further south. Thus, the letters patent issued to John Cabot by King Henry VII gave the explorer instructions to seize the lands and population centres of the territories "newely founde" in order to prevent other, competing European nations from doing the same:

"And that the aforesaid Iohn and his sonnes...may subdue, occupie, and possesse, all such townes, cities, castles, and yles, of them founde, which they can subdue, occupie and possesse, as our vassailes and lieutenantes, getting vnto vs the rule, title, and iurisdiction of the same villages, townes, castles and firme lands so founde.... "

Historian Hans Koning points out:

"From the beginning, the Spaniards saw the Native Americans as natural slaves, beasts of burden, part of the loot. When working them to death was more economical than treating them somewhat humanely, they worked them to death.

"The English, on the other hand, had no use for the Native peoples. They saw them as devil worshippers, savages who were beyond salvation by the church, and exterminating them increasingly became accepted policy."

From The Conquest of America: How the Indian Nations Lost Their Continent (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993), p. 46.

3. Cited by J.A. Williamson in The Cabot Voyages and Bristol Discovery Under Henry VII (1962).

4. While the King gave Cabot the "full and free authority, faculty and power" to "find, discover and investigate whatsoever islands, countries, regions or provinces of heathens and infidels," there was an important caveat, as Richard Sanders points out. Cabot's licence only applied to lands that "were unknown to all Christians." With this imperial licence to wage an unending, plunderous war against non-Christians, Cabot and "his sons or their heirs and deputies" gained the exclusive right to rule as the King's "vassals and governors, lieutenants and deputies." In exchange, they were "bounden and under obligation" to pay King Henry "either in goods or money, the fifth part [20 per cent] of the whole capital gained." The "capital" was defined as "all the fruits, profits, emoluments [earnings], commodities, gains and revenues."

"John Cabot and Britain's Fictitious Claim on Canada: Finding our National Origins in a Royal Licence to Conquer," by Richard Sanders, Press for Conversion!, Magazine of the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade, No. 69. (PDF)

5. Hoping Against Hope? The Struggle Against Colonialism in Canada. A three-part audio documentary series, Praxis Media Productions and the Nova Scotia Public Interest Research Group, 2007. Audio files for the series are available here.

6. "[Gilbert's] vision of a transplanted English gentry exploiting vast new American lands in a feudal setting was not wholly unrealistic (it was to be realized later, to some extent, in Maryland) but his plans were far too wide-ranging for his resources and there was some lack of scruple in his easy disposal in bulk of lands which he had never seen."

"Gilbert, Sir Humphrey," David B. Quinn in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Vol. 1, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003, accessed June 28, 2020.

7. The Eurocentric outlook was developed with the rise of the slave trade. Eurocentrism is a specific manifestation of ethnocentrism, which is:

"(1) the belief in the inherent superiority of one's own group and culture accompanied by a feeling of contempt for other groups and cultures; (2) a tendency to view alien groups or cultures in terms of one's own."

The Eurocentric worldview looks down on all persons of African or other descent as subhuman, peoples without history or thought, destined for servitude. Before the European slave trade emerged, no uniform or universal racist ideology existed.

8. Vancouver Province, June 25, 1997.

9. "Labrador protest: Royal visitors get mixed reception," by Michelle McAfee -- Canadian Press, Victoria Times-Colonist,  Friday, June 27, 1997, p. A10.

10. Letter from Innu People to Queen Elizabeth II 

11. "In Memoriam -- Reginald Maloney: A Reflection by Tony Seed," December 6, 2013.

This article was published in

Volume 50 Number 24 - July 4, 2020

Article Link:
The "New Found Land" and Heroic Resistance of the Mi'kmaq and Beothuk - Tony Seed

    

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