Canada has this fascination for its own brutal history as exemplified by the death of the Beothuk people. Much written material has come out trying to understand the brutality and callousness built into the country’s being. One of these bits of writing is a slim little book of poetry by Sid Stephens called Beothuk Poems.

There are, of course, no poems existing by a Beothuk person because they are all dead. Hunted, killed. The captured woman Shawnadithit was probably the last survivor, or near it anyway, and she died in 1829. Apart from her history, there are a few skeletons, some bits of tribal technology, and Shawnadithit’s few drawings.

Her capture (a bounty offered by the government so they could send word with her back to the remaining tribe but resulting in the slaughter of most of the remaining men because they were deemed to hard to catch alive) was part of the demise of the Beothuk, and a large part I suspect of the grief and rage Canada has with respect to our past, our behaviour and perhaps fear at that of which we are proved capable.

The problem is that we know, although we fight the knowledge, that it’s no good saying it’s all in the past because cruelty never is. It’s just so easy to achieve, and so easy to pretend isn’t happening.

White Settlements

Between the forest
and the other dark lost land
of the sea

the first white settlers
hang
like bits of wax
on candle rims,

indefinite, undefined
by street or schools,
melting at the back doors
into the great flame-like
heart
of this island. The sudden

warmth of cobwebs
on the face at night,
infernoes of indians
flicker in the trees
as easily as water flows
among the strange grey rocks.

Alone, unknowing:    cold sparks
of fear of sickness, injury, of
indians and thunderstorms,
of madness and devils and the
dark endless woods

are struck
in dry white minds to feed
communities of panic,

the paranoia of
civilization
becomes rooted in the land

like a myth.

The deep nature of our fear and grief at the disconnect between the National myth of our politeness and the actual exemplars of our collective potential makes writing poetry about it really difficult. It’s not that the words won’t come. They do. It’s that when they come they pull up so much pain that writing outside it becomes nearly impossible; and reading outside it seems doubly difficult.

Does Stephen manage? To some extent, but not really. There are moments in the book of empathy and great beauty but there is enough of the fear and guilt that it is hard to stay in the world of the beauty that is the Beothuk.

And I think that is what has to happen. The Beothuk need to be divorced from what was done to them; from who did it to them, so they can, once again, become themselves.

How can that happen? Don’t know. Can it? Also don’t know but I think so.