An overhead view of Beothuk Lake reveals a circular clearing where a Beothuk mamateek once stood. The site is surrounded by fallen trees, where water has eroded the banks. Dan Arsenault/CBC
CBC News: Fiona Humber walked in a circle, stomping her hiking boots down on tall grass to reveal a structure hidden in the tangle. With each step, the wall became more visible. Knee-high and covered in grass, it encircled a space about six metres across.
She was standing in a house pit, where a Beothuk mamateek — a birchbark dwelling — once stood. Waves sloshed against the shoreline behind her — providing peaceful ambience and an ominous reminder. “The water gets up as high as here,” she said, pointing to the beach just below the outer edge of the structure. “Last year I heard people saying there was actually water coming into the site.”
Where once there were dozens of documented Beothuk sites, only a few remain. Beothuk Lake — on Newfoundland’s interior — was dammed in 1909 to make way for a hydroelectric development downstream. As the water levels surged, the former homes, tools and graves of the extinct Beothuk culture were swept into the lake.
More than 100 years later, the struggle between history and electricity at Beothuk Lake continues. Humber — the mayor of nearby Millertown — believes Newfoundland’s utility giant is doing a poor job managing the water levels. Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro, meanwhile, says the coastal erosion around Beothuk Lake is a natural process and “will continue regardless of operating levels.”
Humber disagrees, and believes Hydro can do more to maintain a water level that works for everyone. “We don’t want to see it washed away,” Humber said. “We want to see this history here, and we want to see it respected.”
Long before the lake served as a reservoir for Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro, it was used by the Beothuk — an Indigenous group native to Newfoundland. The Beothuk moved around the island from one season to the next, following a precise schedule to make the most of their hunting, trapping, fishing and foraging.
As European settlement grew in Newfoundland, the lake became an important hiding place for the Beothuk, as they sheltered from the new diseases and violent encounters that came with colonization. By the 1800s, with their population dwindling and facing extinction, the last remaining Beothuk holed up there to avoid Europeans. When that didn’t work, they moved further back from the banks of the lake and deeper into the woods.
That’s what makes the house pit on the shores of Beothuk Lake so important, argues archaeologist Laurie McLean.
Artifacts from near the site date to the 1800s. Those pieces, plus the location of the house pit far back off the lake, indicate it was one of the later settlements before the Beothuk culture disappeared.
McLean was part of a three-person group that discovered the circular walls in 2016 while walking the river in search of undiscovered Beothuk sites. “To find such a large structure in a seemingly undisturbed state was a little unbelievable,” he said.
Now the site is at “imminent risk” of disappearing into the water, McLean said, just like the vast majority of known Beothuk archaeological sites on the lake. “That would be a terrible loss,” he said. “To put it in perspective … on Beothuk Lake we have 50 historically documented structures, and we can account for two of them right now.”
‘The lake is getting bigger’
Rick Noftle gazed off the patio of his cabin on the north side of Beothuk Lake to his neighbours’ places down the cove. While he’s been busy building a new garage on his property, they’ve been building rock walls around their cabins. That might have to be my next investment,” he said with a sigh.
Noftle has spent tens of thousands renovating an old cabin from the 1960s into a modern gem, complete with locally milled birch floors and a patio that overlooks a priceless view.
Priceless, that is, until the lake breaches the shoreline and comes rushing under the cabin. “You get high water levels and the wind with it, it’s like the Atlantic Ocean,” Noftle said. “It can do real damage.”
Noftle said the problem flares up every spring, when ice and snow melt and the levels rise. When the water recedes, he’s left with a little less shoreline each year. Walking along the waterfront, Noftle pointed to a row of thick tree stumps where large birch stood for decades. The roots were washed out in the last few years, he said, and they had to be cut down.
Coastal erosion is happening everywhere, he said, but around here the water levels are controlled by N.L. Hydro. Noftle said the water stayed after the spring melt this year, and didn’t go down until early August.
N.L. Hydro says the process for letting off water is more complicated than just opening the gates at the dam. All decisions made on Beothuk Lake affect ecosystems and communities downstream as well. “Increased water levels require Hydro to manage the extra water in a safe, controlled manner,” the company said in a statement. “Water flows in the entire watershed downstream of the Millertown Dam require operating decisions that impact Beothuk Lake levels.”
Still, each time the water crosses onto his property, Noftle calls N.L. Hydro to ask them to lower the levels by releasing water on the Exploits River downstream. He said people are usually helpful, but he’s been told at times the only solution is to move his cabin back from the shoreline — a job that would come at an enormous expense.
Noftle said they always refer to graphs on the Environment and Climate Change Canada website that show the water levels on the lake at Indian Point. The levels went from a low of 151 metres this past winter to 156 metres in the spring, which Hydro says is within the normal range.
Noftle doesn’t believe those numbers tell the full story.
“The lake is getting bigger,” he said. “They’re saying the lake is not really full. The water levels are not to their max. But if you look at the erosion, the lake is just getting bigger and it’s holding more water.”
That creates complications for the cabin owners in the area — many of whom have been there for decades. Some have spent small fortunes to build and rebuild roads that keep getting washed out. Others have shelled out $10,000 or more for retaining walls around their properties. A few have tried to sell and leave but struggled to find buyers because of the annual floodwaters.
Report completed, but never released
It’s a familiar problem across the lake in Millertown. The entire town was moved back off the water in 1925, when the reservoir was raised. Nearly 100 years later, the lake is encroaching again.
“The town is right on the shoreline,” Humber said, noting one resident has lost five feet of frontage in the last 15 years. “It’s a huge impact. It seems it’s not changing at all. There’s no concern for the loss of property or the effect on infrastructure in town, or these hugely important sites.”
Repeated complaints from people like Humber and Noftle led to a public meeting in 2019, when representatives from N.L. Hydro took questions and promised an investigation. They made good on their word, hiring consulting firm Hatch to measure the impact of coastal erosion on Beothuk Lake.
The problem, Humber said, is the report was never released to the public. She’s called N.L. Hydro and the provincial government, and they’ve confirmed the report found the lake was getting bigger — but she’s never seen the actual report and doesn’t know if it made recommendations for mitigating erosion.
Noftle and Humber both said they’ve been repeatedly promised followup meetings to discuss the report, but they’ve been waiting without results since 2020.
“I’ve brought it up to members in the government. I’ve brought it up to Hydro. They’ve done an investigation. I’m not sure where else to go from here,” Humber said. “We understand that the water levels go up in the spring. The problem is that they’re maintained at the highest level possible for as long as they can, and that wave action does affect the whole shoreline around the lake.”
CBC News has requested a copy of the Hatch report, but one was not provided as of publishing time. N.L. Hydro also declined an interview request, instead providing a written statement.
Beothuk remains to be returned to lake
Laurie McLean doesn’t know what can be done to stop coastal erosion. While his life’s work has been dedicated to unearthing clues about how the Beothuk lived, he realizes the importance of the reservoir on how people live today.
“I don’t think it’s as easy as just asking N.L. Hydro to lower the water level arbitrarily,” he said. “Maybe they can, a little. Or maybe there’s a significant cost to doing that as well. I’m not sure. But as I say, the damage has already been done there.”
McLean is one of several professionals to survey Beothuk Lake in search of the holy grail of Newfoundland archaeology — the burial huts of Demasduit and Nonosabasut, believed to be two of the last living Beothuk. Nonosabasut was shot and killed in 1819 when a European expedition led by notorious trapper John Peyton Sr. came to retrieve stolen equipment. Demasduit, who had just given birth, was taken captive by Peyton and his men. She died of tuberculosis within a year and was returned to Beothuk Lake in a wooden coffin to rest with her husband and child.
She didn’t rest for long. The couple’s skulls were stolen from an above-ground burial hut in 1828 by Scottish explorer William Cormack and brought back to Scotland. They were returned to Newfoundland in 2020, and have been resting at The Rooms cultural centre ever in a secure space, away from the public eye.
In 2022, the government announced plans to return the remains to Beothuk Lake. McLean believes the original burial site has been lost forever, likely flooded out in the early 1900s, but there are plans for a new cultural site somewhere along the lake to hold the remains in a secure state.
Whatever the province ends up doing with the remains, McLean says they have to account for water levels to avoid losing more history to Beothuk Lake.
“Until there’s some degree of stability or equilibrium reached between the water level and the shoreline, there’s going to be erosion and whatever you build there is going to be in danger.”
Fiona Humber looked around at the old birches where the mamateek once stood.
A few feet back, she found a tall tree with a long line scored in the trunk about midway up. That’s where the Beothuk would have sliced the tree to peel back the birch bark to make the walls of their home, she said. It appeared to still be living, while others around it had tipped over and fallen onto the beach.
“All we’re asking is that they don’t keep [the water] as high as they can for as long as they can,” she said. “We’re losing so much. It’s frustrating.”
About the Author
Ryan Cooke is a multiplatform journalist with CBC News in St. John’s. His work often takes a deeper look at social issues and the human impact of public policy. Originally from rural Newfoundland, he attended the University of Prince Edward Island and worked for newspapers throughout Atlantic Canada before joining CBC in 2016. He can be reached at ryan.cooke@cbc.ca.