Each spring before they dispersed into small bands on the coast, the Beothuk held an ochring ceremony on Red Indian Lake. Infants were initiated into the band with the sign of fire on their bodies, the dark light of blood. And at the day’s end there was a time set aside for food and for singing.
There is no indication the Beothuk used drums in their ceremonies. They sang nakedly into the darkness from a deep well of songs that each man and woman had learned as a child and knew by heart. They celebrated what was simplest in their lives, the plain things that lived beyond them, the sun, the moon and stars, beads, buttons, hatchets, the rivers, the sea. They sang creatures through the forest around them, the caribou and bear, the crow, the beaver, the silver flicker of fox.
There is no record of the lyrics of these songs or the music to which the words were set. What remains of them now is the property of brooks and ponds and marshes, of caribou and fox moving through the interior as they were sung two hundred years ago. Of each black spruce and fir offering up its single note to the air where not a soul is left to hear it.
Acknowledgements
Anyone familiar with the history of interactions between European settlers and the Beothuk will see the debt owed to James P. Howley’s The Beothuks or Red Indians and Ingeborg Marshall’s A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk. Events as recorded in these two seminal sources had a huge influence on the physical and emotional geography of River Thieves. However, the novel makes no claim to factual or literal truth. Historical events have been shifted, conflated or otherwise altered and they stand side by side with events that are wholly invented. The names of many of the novel’s principal characters can be found in Howley and Marshall, but the lives and motivations of each as presented here are fictions. River Thieves is a work of imagination.
There were other sources that helped shape the story as it developed, far too many to list. But I want to acknowledge in particular The Dictionary of Newfoundland English, which was an indispensable resource, and The Newfoundland Journal of Aaron Thomas, 1794, which I pilfered from freely.
Many people commented on earlier versions of River Thieves and I can’t think of one who didn’t contribute something that now feels essential to the book.
My agent, Anne McDermid, has been a tireless source of support, encouragement and advice, from first vague notions to final draft. Other friends read the book at varying stages and I’d like to thank (in chronological order) Helen Humphreys, Janice McAlpine, Marney McDiarmid and Mary Lewis.
I’m also grateful for the insight and editorial acumen of John Pearce at Doubleday and Anton Mueller at Houghton Mifflin. The novel would have been something different, and lesser, without their suggestions and questions.
Martha Kanya-Forstner has been both editor and, for lack of a better phrase, guardian angel of the novel at Doubleday. It’s her reading of River Thieves, more than any other but my own, that I’ve trusted in most.
Thanks to the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for being there.
A Note on the Beothuk
The aboriginal inhabitants of Newfoundland, a race of hunter/gatherers we know as the Beothuk, occupied or made use of most of the island’s coast before the arrival of Europeans in the 1500s. While there is no way to place it with any certainty, anthropologists using a variety of measures now estimate the pre-contact population at somewhere between 500 and 5,000 people.
Before the second half of the 17th century, European settlement was concentrated on the Avalon Peninsula. Contact between the Beothuk and Europeans was consequently limited, although records suggest relations were precarious and often involved mistrust, pilfering and violence. With the spread of British and French communities throughout the island’s coastline, the Beothuk lost access to much of their traditional territory. A combination of violence, exposure to diseases such as tuberculosis, and loss of coastal resources essential to their survival, decimated the Indian population. By the last half of the 18th century, the surviving Beothuk were confined to Red Indian Lake, the River Exploits and its watershed, and parts of the coast and islands of Notre Dame Bay on the northeast shore of Newfoundland.
The last known Beothuk died in St. John’s in 1829. As Ingeborg Marshall writes, “Some individuals may have continued to lead a sequestered existence [afterwards], but as a cultural group the Beothuk had vanished.”
About the Author Michael Crummey is the author of four books of poetry: Arguments with Gravity, Hard Light, Emergency Roadside Assistance, and Salvage; and a collection of short stories, Flesh and Blood. He is a winner of the Bronwen Wallace Award and was nominated for the 1998 Journey Prize. River Thieves was shortlisted for the 2001 Giller Prize and the 2002 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. Born in Buchans, Newfoundland, growing up there and in Wabush, Labrador, Michael Crummey now lives in St. John’s.