Event Details

The Barbara Dorothy Iredell Lecture is an annual public lecture in History and Law.

Professor Julia Laite joined Birkbeck 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. She is the author of the Disappearance of Lydia Harvey (2021), Wolfenden's Women (2020), and Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens (2012), and was principal investigator of the AHRC-funded project Trafficking Past. Her current work examines critical family history, settler colonialism and migration, and she currently holds an ISRF Mid-Career Fellowship to pursue a new book project.

Abstract: 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.