Tenja of the Red Paint People

Tenja, a Teen Aged Girl of the Red Paint People I first became interested in the Native American tribe called the Beotuks because of the unique design of their canoes. No other North American native group had such a distinctive design, and these birch bark canoes were special in a number of ways. First, they had not only high bows and sterns like a Viking ship, but they also were high amidships. They were between eighteen and twenty feet in length, were very fast, and could carry heavy cargoes. It was reported that they could remove the three main thwarts and fold the canoe sides to make it easy to portage over narrow game trails between bodies of water. In the seventeen hundreds when French voyageurs and trappers were operating in Newfoundland, Labrador, and New Brunswick, these superb canoeists were amazed by the speed and carrying capacity of the Beotuk canoes. As a boy and young man I spent my summers in canoe camps in Maine and northern Ontario. My father was a Maine guide who conducted Allagash River trips in northern Maine, and we made several trips together poling down the rapids with canoe loads of young campers. From those trips, using paddle and pole, I learned first hand that the canoe is a marvelous invention for travel through the rapids, in large lakes, and over very long distances. Besides the unique design of the Beotuks’ canoe I was fascinated by the report that the Beotuks were different in appearance from other natives in the region. Many of them, unlike the rather short Inuit to the north or the Malecite to the south, were reported to be over six feet tall. Some were reported to be blond and redheaded. Some of the men had beards. Their skins were described as light colored. They reportedly had handsome features, and many of the women were noted for their beauty and classic features or so the story goes. True or not it is a fact that the Beotuks painted their upper bodies and most of their possessions with red ochre, prompting the early French and English settlers to call them “the red paint people.” Perhaps that explains why Native Americans were referred to as “redskins.” The Beotuk story is a sad tale of contact with the Europeans who effectively drove them from their home land and later shot them on sight or sold them into slavery. The last representative of the tribe was a dignified woman by the name of Nashawandthit, also known as Nancy April. Captured and forced to live with the whites, she died in 1829, the last member of this special group of humans. A second inspiration for this story arose from a visit to the museum at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. The museum featured a diorama of a typical scene of the Alaskan landscape during the post Pleistocene Era. A visitor can see wild horses, saber toothed cats, mastodons, mammoths, giant beavers, wolves, huge bears, caribou, and a host of other animals all enjoying a temperate climate featuring extended grasslands. With the retreat of the Ice Age many humans whose habitat changed from walls of ice and deadly winters to a temperate world of plenty must have been inspired to explore this new world. As the ice melted and seas rose as much as three hundred feet, many of the people living by the coast must have had to take to their boats to escape the rising waters. These people are our ancestors, and it is highly likely that many of these displaced people from Europe explored the lands to their west long before the Vikings, the Irish, and the Portuguese did more than a thousand years ago. Cro-Magnons, whose cave paintings some 50,000 years ago reveal remarkable artistic talent, may very well have made the voyage. A recent test of a Beotuk chieftain’s remains found DNA links with the Cro-Magnons. The Cro-Magnons also reputedly used red ochre for body paint. How exciting if the ancestors of the red paint people traveled from Europe by boat to the northern reaches of Canada after the last great ice age to share the new land with the Thule people, who were the ancestors of the Inu people or Inuit, also known as Eskimos. They may have arrived about the same time. That a group of Cro-Magnon voyagers just might have relatives living in Canada as late as 1829 stirred my imagination to the point of writing about such a group. Why did the Beotuks place such extreme emphasis on the use of red ochre on their bodies and possessions? Where did Native Americans get the idea to paint their faces and bodies? Could it have been a tribal custom treasured because of its antiquity, a link to the very distant past? And what of the origin of the unique design of the Beotuk canoes? Could the earliest Vikings have influenced the design? What was it like to live in North America during and after the Late Pleistocene Era when the Polar regions were temperate and teemed with a great variety of life forms? Even frigid Siberia was a temperate grassland in those days populated by herds of mastodons and woolly mammoths. Because I have a teen-aged granddaughter who has a vivid imagination, is especially interested in natural science, and possesses a great deal of intellectual curiosity, I tried to imagine what it would be like for a young girl like her to live at the time of the great warming of North America some 8000 years ago. So, with a mix of fact and fiction, Tenja came to life in my imagination. What challenges did a teen face then? How different were teens then from a teen in modern society 8000 years later? Was life better then, healthier, freer?