Julia Laite is Professor of Modern History at Birkbeck, University of London. She researches the history of migration, gender, sex and crime, as well as family history, creative history and public history. Her critically acclaimed book, The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey (Profile, 2021) won the Crime Writer’s Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction and the Bert Roth Award for Labour History. She currently holds an ISRF Mid-Career Fellowship to pursue a new book project, which she tells Matt Warren about in the below Q&A. 

MW: Your latest project reframes the history of Newfoundland. What is your family’s connection to the island?

JL: I was born and raised in Newfoundland, and try my best to split my time between that island and the UK. My family’s connection to Newfoundland is a powerful one – pretty much every immediate ancestor on both sides have been on the island since the 17^th Century.  But it’s powerful in another way as well, because the connection to the island of my birth has shaped my own narratives of belonging. It’s those narratives I hope to reassess in my new project.

MW: Why is it important to reassess the dominant history of Newfoundland and its people?

JL: I began this project with the provocation that Newfoundlanders are probably the most ‘self-indigenized’ settler colonial people on earth. Self-indigenization is a common ‘settler move to innocence’, to quote Eve Tuck and K Wayne Yang. Settlers articulate their belonging in place through folk practices and official ones – stories of hard work, survival, solidarity, love and pride – in order to naturalize themselves on land that was actually acquired through the violent dispossession of other people.

But in Newfoundland, this self-indigenization has a particular history. In part, because of the sheer length of settlement (most settlers had arrived by 1815, when the so-called ‘settler boom’ began). In part, because of how poor, isolated, and marginalized most of these settlers were. And in part because of the insidious narrative of Indigenous erasure: the Beothuk people, who were Indigenous to the island, ‘went extinct’ and cleared space for settlers to become the ‘natives’.

My new project seeks to dismantle these harmful – and erroneous – stories we tell. But perhaps even more importantly, it seeks to tell new, more critical, and inclusive stories about belonging on this island, which experienced some of the earliest and profoundest harms of imperialism.

MW: Was Newfoundland’s Indigenous culture totally destroyed? Tell us a little more about it. Do any traces of it remain?

JL: That was certainly the story I grew up with. And in some ways, it is true. The Beothuk people, who spoke a branch of the Algonquin language and lived seasonally along the island’s coasts and its vast interior, suffered one of the most totalizing destructions of any Indigenous culture in the history of British imperialism: through direct violence, the theft of resources, and profound negligence on the part of the British colonial state.

The traces that remain of their culture are in the material archaeological record, the archives of colonization, and finally (and most extraordinarily) in the testimony of one Beothuk woman, Shanawdithit, who spent the last six months of her life in 1829 drawing her people’s story. There is no one living who speaks the language or knows anything about the culture. Some have labelled what happened to the Beothuk a genocide.

However, that doesn’t mean that Indigenous culture isn’t thriving on the island and in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Two Mi’kmaw first nations have fought long and hard for recognition; while on the Labrador mainland, the Innu and Inuit are both celebrating and living their cultures in the present day, and campaigning for rights and land. In fact, the story of the Beothuk has long eclipsed the stories of the province’s existing Indigenous communities. This is finally starting to change.

But things are far from simple. White settlers are beginning to make spurious claims to Indigenous identity, and some even claim that they are of Beothuk descent, based on controversial DNA evidence or family legend. At a time when Indigenous cultures in Canada are deeply concerned about false claims to Indigeneity, this trend is very worrying and another ‘settler move to innocence’. This project on my own family has to navigate this really tricky terrain. I hope to find new ways to talk about the island’s complex mixed heritage, without shying away from some difficult truths about its past and its present.

MW: How can we encourage people to rethink their own family histories – and be more critical of the stories they tell?

JL: I think that once someone starts doing their family history, they immediately find themselves rethinking the stories they’ve been told. Family history is so wonderfully, inherently messy! Whether we like it or not, family history shows how our histories are entangled, how structural inequalities and historic injustices have shaped the pasts of our ancestors, and how most of us have difficult inheritances and difficult secrets in our family tree. Critical family history, is what Christine Sleeter called this kind of thinking, and more and more people are looking to add this depth and complexity to their family’s stories. I see my role in this not as a teacher but as a collaborator – I’ve learned so much about history, about ethics, and about the power of storytelling from family historians!

MW: What obstacles might we face?

JL: People’s nuanced and challenging family stories are bound to come up against the conservative narratives of national histories and imperial histories, particularly now, when history has become one of the key battlegrounds of the right-wing manufactured culture-wars. These top-down narratives of belonging demand that we feel ‘pride’ in ‘our nation’ and denigrate any attempts to illuminate that nation’s more difficult and troubling pasts, including its involvement in empire. But there is very little trace of this ‘culture war’ in family history; where people are mostly trying to understand their ancestors (and themselves) in the most accurate and meaningful way that they can. From the perspective of a messy, complicated and interconnected critical family history, the false binaries of ‘pride’ and ‘shame’ collapse, and the aim instead is a better understanding of relationships and contexts, past and present.

MW: Are bottom-up approaches like this a particularly powerful way to confront colonialism’s harmful legacies?

JL: I think we should confront these legacies on multiple fronts, and I welcome top-down attempts to illuminate Britain’s colonial past. There has been excellent work lately, including Alan Lester’s edited collection The Truth about Empire and Satnam Sanghera’s Empireworld. These books are fundamental to changing the conversation and providing important information and context to others. But I do wonder how effective they are at changing people’s minds. I think a bottom-up approach like critical family history, and perhaps even more importantly, the telling of smaller and more intimate stories, are just as essential as big books on the sweeping history of empire. Stories, after all, are where people have always made the best sense of things.

MW: Will your project culminate in a book?

JL: Absolutely. I am writing a book that will be an entangled history: of my own family, of the Island of Newfoundland itself, and of Shanawdithit, an artist, a rebel, and a woman who witnessed the death of her world under colonialism. It will not (however much easier it would be) tell a story of good versus evil but of the way that the exploitation of people and planet are endlessly entangled, and far from black and white. The history of Newfoundland, my family, and the Beothuk people is a story about greed and inordinate wealth, about the meshwork of exploitations that made that wealth possible, and the cycles of harm and violence that those exploitations create. It is also about what people do to survive this and resist this, in order to make and sustain their worlds.