All Gone Widdun

R.G. Moyles is professor emeritus of English at the University of
Alberta, the co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities:
British Views of Canada, 1880–1914, and the author of The Salvation
Army and the Public.

All Gone Widdun is a fictional treatment of the final years of
Shawnadithit (called by her white captors “Nancy April”), the last
surviving Beothuk, who died on June 6, 1829.

Taken under the wing of William Epps Cormack, whose self-appointed
mission it is to find any remaining Beothuks, Shawnadithit reveals to
him, mainly through drawings, the lifestyle of her people. Cormack
eventually falls in love with Shawnadithit, “a love complicated by the
fact that he has taken the skulls of her sister, Desmaduit, and uncle,
Nonosabasut, to Scotland to be studied by scientists.” When
Shawnadithit dies from the white man’s disease, consumption, Cormack
comes to recognize the full tragedy of the extinction of these Natives.
In this, her first novel, Beckel tells the story of Shawnadithit with
conviction and a commendable lack of sentimentality.