Rethinking Interspecies Extinction Narratives in Nineteenth Century Newfoundland: The Great Auk and Beothuk

• In Event: Making Museums

English Abstract

This paper examines the intertwined histories and extinction narratives surrounding the great auk and Beothuk people in Newfoundland. It focuses around two expeditions, one mounted by ornithologist F.A. Lucas at the Smithsonian in 1887 to Funk Island to recover the remains of the extinct auk, and one mounted by naturalist William Epps Cormack in 1827 to make contact with what he perceived to be the last group of living Beothuk individuals. These expeditions, formulated under colonial natural historical frameworks as missions to salvage the remnants of two doomed populations, raise the question of how these colonial practices transform the auks and Beothuk people from living individuals into museum specimens representative of extinction.

The afterlives of the great auk and Beothuk in the form of museum specimens (whether through the theft of their bodily remains or of objects significant to them) shapes that way that people are able to imagine and engage with them today, and is a direct result of these historical expeditions and the institutions that mounted them. Given the ways that extinction narratives have harmed and continue to harm Indigenous people across North America, I consider the interspecies stakes of this history, asking what it means for living individuals to become museum specimens, and what this story has to say about how categories of human and animal become fluid under colonial natural historical practices in ways that are oppressive rather than liberatory.

Author

• Anna Christensen, Harvard History of Science