This painting is by an unknown artist, and it dates to around 1820.
The exact location is also unknown, but it could be within the Mi’kmaq homelands in the Maritimes or in Newfoundland, where some of them migrated in the eighteenth century.
They are shooting geese from canoes, and you can see one dog in a canoe and another dog swimming to retrieve a downed goose.
These dogs could have played some role in the development of the St. John’s water dog or the Nova Scotia duck-tolling retriever.
Granted, no genetic studies have revealed any indigenous ancestry in either of these breeds, but the indigenous people of the region did use dogs to hunt geese and other waterfowl in the fashion. They like originally used bows and arrows, or they may have stalked the birds in the late evening and early morning when they were settled in the water.
If you’ve read Mowat’s Farfairers, he claims that there were some Europeans living in the southern part of Terra Nova, likely a remnant of the people wiped out by the Thule invasion from Asia. The book documents the evidence for a pre-Norse group of Europeans who followed the walrus, and who were called Jacktars by the Portugese, who were some of the earliest people to fish off the grand banks. It’s intriguing stuff because it seems pretty clear that the archeologists are just as dogmatic as the rest of us, and often block digging when they think the site will contradict their theories. (There is another book on the arguments for pre-Clovis north american settlements NOT by Mowat that makes it clear that it took a lot of sites and a lot of in-fighting for the evidence against the land bridge theory to be accepted. It has “bones” in the title, but I’m forgetting the particulars.) I don’t know whether there was any evidence for dogs with these people, but it seems possible, given the sporadic contact with Europe that seems to have taken place — if you buy into Mowat’s interpretation of the evidence in the Arctic. I’m inclined to think that he may be on to something that should be investigated.
I love that book, and I’ve actually read it several times.
I am about half skeptical about some of it. Some of his stuff on the Picts being pre-Indo European is has recently been discredited. The new thinking is the Picts were Brythonic Celts.
But it’s still a fascinating book. Only someone of his age could ever really write a book like it.
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