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Ktaqmkuk/Newfoundland, where I currently live, and lutruwita/Tasmania, where I’m originally from, were both brutal British settler colonies from which Indigenous peoples were erroneously presumed to have disappeared by the end of the nineteenth century. I became aware of parallels in their histories during my early research on literary fiction about the two islands, and the broader Canadian and Australian nations of which they are now part. I later investigated these resonances in a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada-funded interdisciplinary research project, which evolved into the collaboratively produced Tracing Ochre.

Tracing Ochre: Changing Perspectives on the Beothuk

Entrenched beliefs about the Beothuk people of Newfoundland have come under scrutiny in recent years.  Demands for a reassessment can be found in such diverse contexts as art, ethnomusicology, archaeology, literary studies, genetics, and history. Our group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and community members interrogated and expanded upon this thinking in . Published by University of Toronto Press in 2018, and a Hill Times Best Political, History, and Public Policy selection, Tracing Ochre definitively shifts established perceptions about the supposedly extinct Beothuk. 

Juxtaposing Australian and Canadian Writing

In this Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature article, I advocate for juxtaposing the cultures and, more specifically, the literatures of Canada and Australia. Similar patterns of settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance, and comparable geopolitical locations within the Western world, mean that those who write of Australia or Canada, and the Indigenous nations they have endeavoured to erase, grapple with many of the same questions. Juxtaposing literary work by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers from these territories can produce off-kilter reflections that undermine notions of national exceptionalism, and highlight textual and cultural phenomena that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Art and Transculturation

In the final months of her life, the Beothuk woman Shanawdithit made a number of drawings at the request of the amateur ethnologist and colonial adventurer William Epps Cormack. Several of them survive. In "," I argue that Shanawdithit’s art offers unique insights into the nature of cross-cultural encounters between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in the Americas during the nineteenth century. The product of a highly flawed and asymmetrically structured collaboration between actors of vastly different backgrounds, the sketches and commentaries nonetheless record mutual attempts at cultural translation. 

This essay built on my earlier research about two European art works produced, apparently independently, in the early nineteenth century and explicitly intended for Indigenous audiences. The provenance of the paintings is especially striking because each was respectively meant to ease tensions between Indigenous peoples and settlers in places synonymous with some of the worst excesses of the British imperial project: the Australian island colony of Tasmania, known as Van Diemen's Land until 1856, and the North Atlantic island colony of Newfoundland. “ delves into two unique but ultimately failed attempts at cross-cultural communication.