M**der at the edge of empire: the Beothuk people and negligent colonialism

In 1819, a posse of violent settlers trekked into the interior of the Island of Newfoundland to take revenge against the Beothuk, who—as part of a wider campaign of resistance—had raided the setters’ fishing premises and vandalised and stolen their goods. The posse was ostensibly tasked with ‘opening up a friendly discourse with the Red Indians’ but the encounter ended with the murders of two Beothuk men and the kidnap of a Beothuk woman. The subsequent Grand Jury trial found the men not guilty by reason of self-defence. A decade later, the Beothuk were declared an ‘extinct’ people, suffering what is likely the most totalizing cultural and demographic destruction of any Indigenous people in the history of British colonialism.

Professor Julia Laite joined Birkbeck University of London in 2010 after holding postdoctoral fellowships at Memorial University of Newfoundland and McGill University, Canada. Her research examines the history of migration, gender, sex and crime, as well as family history, creative history and public history.

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Host or Publisher Iredell Lecture 2026