Description of The Beothuk Indians Culture

Adjacent to the Labrador Eskimos and the northern Algonkins, upon the Island of Newfoundland, dwelt the Beothuks, or “Red Indians,” now extinct, who has custom and language differed much from their neighbors of the mainland. Although called “red,” they are also said to have been unusually light in complexion, and the term was applied to them from their habit of smearing their bodies with a mixture of grease and red ochre. They are further described as of medium stature, with regular features and aquiline noses, the hair black and the beard scanty or absent.

In several elements of culture, they had marked differences from the tribes of the adjacent mainland. Their canoes were of bark or of skins stretched on frames, and were in the shape of a crescent so that they required ballast to prevent them from upsetting. The winter houses they constructed were large conical lodges thirty or forty feet in diameter, having a frame of light poles upon which was laid bark or skins, generally the latter. Hunting and fishing provided them with food, and they have left the reputation of irreclaimable savages. They had no dogs, and the art of pottery was unknown; yet they were not unskilled as artisans, carving images of wood, dressing stone for implements, and tanning deerskins for clothing. An examination of their language discloses some words borrowed from the Algonkin, and slight coincidences with the Eskimo dialects, but the main body of the
 idiom stands alone, without affinities. Derivation was principal if not exclusively by suffixes, and the general morphology seems somewhat more akin to Eskimo than Algonkin examples