Beothuk extinction

The Beothuk of the island of Newfoundland were a small branch of the Algonquian people, probably numbering fewer than 2,000 when they were first encountered by European colonizers in the 16th and 17th centuries. They were hunters and fishers who depended largely upon the caribou of the interior in winter, and the fish and marine mammals of the Newfoundland coast in the warmer months. Aside from an account in 1612, little is known about their relations with Europeans until the last half of the 18th century, when they were wiped out by disease and violence at the hands of European settlers. The last of their people, Shawnadithit, succumbed to tuberculosis on 6 June 1829.