In Her Hands: Affect, Encounter and Gestures of Wit(h)nessing in Shanawdithit’s Drawings

Abstract

From 1828 to 1829 at a house in St. John’s in Newfoundland, the Beothuk woman Shanawdithit created a series of drawings of the history and customs of her community. These works were produced at the behest of William Cormack, an adventurer and entrepreneur who had made it his mission to collect as much information as possible about the Beothuk, one of Newfoundland’s Indigenous peoples. Perceiving the Beothuk as on the brink of extinction, Cormack was engaging in what would now be termed ‘salvage anthropology’, recording for posterity what he saw as a vanishing culture. Cormack annotated each drawing (usually in ink), explaining the general content and also particular details. Some of the drawings have survived, including ten which form my focus. These are preserved at The Rooms, a museum dedicated to Newfoundland’s natural and cultural history, and include five works that provide historical narratives and five that portray artefacts, dwellings, foodstuffs or culturally significant symbols.