# General > Literature >  The Beothuk Way

## David Banks

by John W. Kitchen, and subtitled "Living with Nature."

I have just finished reading this Christmas present from family on the main Island of Newfoundland. For readers across the pond, you may not have read that the province has been officially renamed to "Newfoundland and Labrador."

Before I comment on the book, you should know that I am not an avid reader, and not a skilled reader - having regularly failed English classes at High School (THS). Further, the author of this book did extensive research including such sources as the Journals of The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.

The Beothuk were one of the native peoples who lived on Newfoundland for thousands of years, this story being set in the early 1700's and told from the point of view of a young Beothuk boy. There are a couple of encounters with the white man, and the retelling by an elder of meeting the Mi'kmaq from Nova Scotia at some time in the past. The former encounters did not end peacefully, and I do not have an impression of whether the latter was or was not cordial.

The back cover of the book calls it 'an enlightening and entertaining story for both young people and adults' but I would beg to differ. The target audience appears to me to be clearly boys and young men who like 'adventure' stories. I do not recall much reference to girls or women until halfway through the book. I would seem to me that if girls do not see themselves represented in the storyline, they would not find the book interesting, but girls may have changed since I was younger.

Besides lacking the skills of a literary critic, I also lack any formal schooling in anthropology. However, the little information on that topic I have come across suggests that the 'hunting' part of stone-age hunting and gathering was a comparatively high risk endeavour with high risk of failure and high benefit when successful. Further, it was the 'gathering' activities of women and children which sustained peoples through the feast-and-famine cycles of hunting.

Now, granted, there was an occasion where one elder told of a year when the caribou did not come as expected and some people died the following winter. However, the impression of the vast majority of successful hunting, trapping and fishing, of tool and weapon making, of boat building, of inventing new and better tools, of better ways of building  --  all performed by men  --  seems unrealistic and overplayed for the sake of the story. It seems that the author's awareness of 'political correctness' kicked-in about halfway through the book, but the majority of the focus remained on the adult male side of life; maybe the book could more correctly be titled Half of the Beothuk Way.

The best, or at least the most realistic part of the book was the one-page Epilogue, where Kitchen muses about the cause of the extinction of the Beothuk people, language and culture, and whether or not a small remnant of Beothuk blood may remain somewhere on Canada's eastern coast.

After all I have said, this is a book worth reading by "both young people and adults."

----------

