"For a period of nearly two hundred years this barbarity had
continued, and it was considered meritorious to shoot a Red Indian.
'To go to look for Indians' came to be as much a phrase as to look for
partridges (ptarmigan). They were harassed from post to post, from
island to island; their hunting and fishing stations were
unscrupulously seized by the invading English. They were shot down
without the least provocation, or captured to be exposed as
curiosities to the rabble at the fairs of the western towns of
Christian England at twopence a piece."[16]
[Footnote 16: These are the remarks of an English chaplain in the
island, quoted by the Rev. George Patterson, who contributed a most
interesting article on the vanished Beothiks of Newfoundland to the
Royal Society of Canada in 1891.]
Too late--when the worry and anxiety of the Napoleonic wars were
over--the British Government sent a commission of naval officers to
enquire into the treatment of the Beothiks by the settlers. One woman
alone remained, as a frightened semi-captive, to be consoled and
soothed. There are Indians in the south of Newfoundland at the present
day, but they are Mikmaks who come over from the adjoining regions of
Cape Breton and Nova Scotia. So tender, indeed, is the modern
government of the island towards these (out of compunction for the
past) that they are allowed to kill the reindeer and other wild
animals without the licence which is exacted from white people, and so
are actually injuring Newfoundland's resources!
Since the great Dominion of Canada was brought into existence in 1871
as a unified, responsible government, the treatment of the remaining
Amerindian natives of British North America has been admirable; and
splendid work has been done in reclaiming them to a wholesome
civilization by the Moravian, Roman Catholic, and Church of England
missionaries.
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