In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery
448
In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery
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Overview
Kolodny considers what the sagas reveal about the Native peoples encountered by the Norse in Vinland around the year A.D. 1000, and she recovers Native American stories of first contacts with Europeans, including one that has never before been shared outside of Native communities. These stories contradict the dominant narrative of "first contact" between Europeans and the New World. Kolodny rethinks the lingering power of a mythic American Viking heritage and the long-standing debate over whether Leif Eiriksson or Christopher Columbus should be credited as the first discoverer. With this paradigm-shattering work, Kolodny shows what literary criticism can bring to historical and social scientific endeavors.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822395539 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/29/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 448 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Annette Kolodny is College of Humanities Professor Emerita of American Literature and Culture at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Failing the Future: A Dean Looks at Higher Education in the Twenty-first Century and the editor of The Life and Traditions of the Red Man, by Joseph Nicolar, both also published by Duke University Press. In addition, she is the author of The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630–1860, and The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters.
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In Search of First Contact
The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of DiscoveryBy ANNETTE KOLODNY
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5282-2
Chapter One
The Politics of American PrehistoryISOLATION VERSUS CONTACT
* * *
We are permitted to go behind the Indians in looking for the earliest inhabitants of North America, wherever they may have come from or whenever they may have lived. —WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT AND SYDNEY HOWARD GAY, A Popular History of the United States (1876)
Challenging Orthodoxy
In the midst of the national debate in 1992 about the meaning and impact of Christopher Columbus's so-called discovery of America, Vine Deloria Jr. attempted to alter the context of the debate by insisting that "we need to know the truth about North American prehistory." By using the term "prehistory," Deloria followed common practice among archaeologists and anthropologists when referring to events in the Americas that predate Columbus and (European) written accounts, also known as the "precontact" period. "I am still uncomfortable with the idea that no contacts were made between Europe and North America before Columbus," stated Deloria. His address to the Society for American Archaeology posed the proposition, "Unless and until we [Indians] are in some way connected with world history as early peoples, ... we will never be accorded full humanity. We cannot be primitive peoples who were suddenly discovered half a millennium ago." A member of the Standing Rock Sioux and a longtime analyst of Indian-white relations, Deloria wanted his audience of professional archaeologists and anthropologists to understand how the various Quincentenary observances (including their own) of Columbus's "discovery" inevitably ended up "regard[ing Indians] as freaks outside historical time" (Deloria, "Indians, Archaeologists" 597).
As was so often the response to Deloria's work, this address stirred up a bit of a hornet's nest. From his point of view, Deloria was simply urging that the history and origins of America's indigenous populations be examined within a more complex tapestry of transcontinental human contacts than the standard theories of relative isolation before Columbus would allow. But in so doing, he seemed to be unraveling the heroic efforts of recent generations of archaeologists who had labored mightily to dispel earlier notions of a superior non-Indian people who had established themselves on the continent before the arrival of the Indians and built the great mounds and fortifications that once dotted western New York State and the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. As the celebrated Maya scholar Arthur Demarest of Vanderbilt University explained to a writer for the Atlantic Monthly in 2000, the mid-nineteenth century "was the period of the frontier wars with the Native-Americans—a period especially after Custer, when there was a lot of enmity and hatred toward Native Americans. So that fed into the idea that these earlier societies, not only the Maya, Aztecs, and Inca but even the ones up here—the Moundbuilders, for example—were somehow the product of some other white race that came in, was less savage, and was able to achieve these monuments and other things" (qtd. in Stengel 44). Demarest's point was that, as a corrective to this outdated and inherently racist and imperialist narrative, modern archaeology had been demonstrating the very real cultural achievements of the ancestors of today's Native peoples. Yet challenges like those posed by Deloria could potentially invite renewed theories about allegedly "superior races" predating the arrival of the Indians. After all, as Deloria made clear in his address, he was willing to contemplate the possibility that "early peoples" had arrived on this continent "perhaps even as refugees from Old World turmoils and persecutions" ("Indians, Archaeologists" 597).
That said, Deloria was not unaware of the controversial implications of his position. As he acknowledged in his remarks, "Many people feel they cannot advocate Precolumbian contact for to do so would mean demeaning the Indians and suggesting that they could not have made discoveries [or cultural advances] on their own. Strangely this debate also rages in Indian circles, and a few of my best friends are adamant about maintaining the theory of isolation in order to enhance the achievements of our ancestors" ("Indians, Archaeologists" 597). Still, he declared, "Here I part company with other Indians," and he again urged his audience to "take a good look at all possible theories of Precolumbian contacts" (597).
With the passage of time, Deloria's comments in 1992 have come to seem far less controversial. Twenty-first-century archaeologists and anthropologists increasingly uncover evidence for multiple ancient migrations to the Americas, by both land and sea, emanating from Europe as well as Asia. As one of the most prominent of these archaeologists, Thomas D. Dillehay, wrote in 2000, "The diversity of the early archaeological, genetic, linguistic, and skeletal record suggests a shared American identity rooted in multiple migrations and, to state it in contemporary terms, no true categories of race or ethnicity" (293). Additionally, the date for the first arrivals of permanent human populations in the Americas is every day being pushed back in time, with some researchers citing signs of human habitation as early as 40,000 years ago. No longer are the possibilities of chance (or even intentional) pre-Columbian arrivals of voyagers from Japan, China, Polynesia, Africa, Europe, or elsewhere wholly discounted. Even Demarest told the Atlantic Monthly writer that he put himself "in that group who don't doubt there's been contact": "I don't think that the transport problems are such that they prevented people from moving between continents. What we doubt is the transformative impact of ephemeral contact. These visitors, whoever and whatever they were, simply didn't transform the societies they found here" (qtd. in Stengel 47). Of course, not everyone agrees on that point, and a lively debate over the possible impacts of pre-Columbian contacts continues still. In short, much that was once considered settled fact about American prehistory is now open to question.
This includes even the formerly orthodox view that groups of nomadic human hunters first arrived in the Americas at the end of the Ice Age, about 14,000 years ago as the glaciers retreated, pursuing the large Ice Age animals southward into more temperate latitudes, and thereafter becoming relatively isolated from the rest of the world. The story of crossings only and exclusively across the Bering land bridge, followed by isolation, just doesn't seem plausible anymore. In Dillehay's view, the crossing of the Bering land bridge was only one of "the many dispersal patterns taken by our early ancestors": "We now know that the first Americans were far more culturally complex and sophisticated than just simple big-game hunters" (292). To make matters even more complicated, a few scholars have recently adduced evidence suggesting that different groups of ancient indigenous Americans put "out in boats into the waters of the Caribbean, off the mouth of the Amazon, in the Florida Straits, or in the Gulf Stream farther north," and journeyed across the Atlantic to Europe (and elsewhere) long before Columbus's arrival (Forbes 105). However controversial their thesis, these scholars locate first contacts between Europeans and the indigenous peoples of the Americas not in the Americas but in Europe, the result of "Ancient Americans as seafarers, mariners, and navigators" having set out purposefully or perhaps having been blown off course by errant storms (1).
But the image of Native peoples as primitives "outside historical time" (to use Deloria's wording) has a long and authoritative lineage ("Indians, Archaeologists" 597). It began with Columbus, of course, but gained even wider currency in the sixteenth century, when Bartolomé de las Casas chronicled his personal observations of the Spanish conquest of Mexico and South America. In a series of works that were subsequently translated into most of the languages of Europe, las Casas "describ[ed] the [Native peoples] as having lived since the Flood behind the 'locked doors of the Ocean Sea,' doors which Columbus had been the first to unlock" (Pagden 7). The Spanish priest's firsthand accounts of what he witnessed enjoyed not only credibility but three centuries of wide circulation. In the early nineteenth century, Alexander von Humboldt, a German naturalist and the father of modern physical geography, visited the Americas and gave the imprimatur of science to this old and popular notion. His comment in 1810 that "the peoples of America" had been "separated, perhaps since the beginning, from the rest of the human race" was, like las Casas's work, repeatedly translated and reprinted (qtd. in Pagden 8).
So pervasive were these views that, in 1838, as the Cherokee were being forced to leave their lands in Georgia and walk the fatal Trail of Tears to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi, the influential North American Review could declare without equivocation, "The moment the new world was discovered, the doom of the savage races who inhabited it was sealed; they must either conform to the institutions of the Europeans or disappear from the face of the earth" (qtd. in Maddox 26). The obvious intent of the statement was to articulate, yet again, what Lucy Maddox has called "the almost universally shared assumption that there were only two options for the Indians: to become civilized, or to become extinct" (24). But behind that assumption, lending it authority, stood the old belief that the Native peoples of North America were isolates, long cut off from contact with other peoples and other cultures, and thereby also cut off from the progress of history itself.
The imputed "science" of that belief had always implicitly been called upon to support public policy toward the Indian. But in 1850, the veneer of scientific justification and public policy were inextricably intertwined when the early ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft prepared a five-volume report commissioned by Congress. The Indian "probably broke off from one of the primary stocks of the human race, before history had dipped her pen in ink, or lifted her graver on stone," suggested the first volume (Historical and Statistical Information 1:17). Having served as an Indian agent, living among and studying various Native groups for thirty years, Schoolcraft carried considerable weight—and affirmed long-held Euro-American suppositions—when he concluded that "the Indian race appears to be of an old—a very old stock," but in comparison with other peoples, a stock that had "changed the least" over time (1:17, 15). Their isolation, in other words, had permitted the Indians to "preserve their physical and mental type, with the fewest alterations" (1:15).
As Maddox and others have demonstrated, for some time this construction of the Indian past proved politically useful. Innocent of history and thus without advanced culture, it was claimed, Native peoples stood helpless and vulnerable before the onslaught of more "civilized" whites. Early nineteenth-century proponents of removing the Indians to lands west of the Mississippi could thus argue that theirs "was actually the most humane and beneficent policy the government could adopt, since the only way to accomplish the civilizing of the Indians, and thus assure that they did not become extinct, was to move them beyond the reach of unscrupulous whites who wished to do them harm.... Left on their own to compete with superior whites for territory in the East, the argument went, they were certain to be decimated" (Maddox 25). In his Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Condition and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States, "published by the authority of Congress," Schoolcraft reinforced these arguments. It was inconceivable, he wrote to the commissioner of Indian affairs, "that erratic and predatory hordes of hunters, without agriculture, arts, or letters, and with absolutely nothing in their civil polity that merits the name of government, should have been able to ... cope with the European stocks who landed here with the highest type of industrial civilization" (1:v).
Yet in that same volume, Schoolcraft also revealed that, as he understood the matter, long before Columbus, the Indians had already coped with "European stocks." In other words, Schoolcraft contradicted himself. Elsewhere in his first volume, he put forth an alternative and competing version of pre-Columbian American history—a version with its own long and authoritative lineage. Citing as his authority Carl Christian Rafn's Antiquitates Americanæ (condensed and published in English in 1838), Schoolcraft confidently asserted "that America was visited early in the tenth century by the adventurous Northmen from Greenland, and that its geography and people continued to be known to them so late as the twelfth century" (Historical and Statistical Information 1:106). Rafn's edition of two medieval Icelandic sagas depicting voyages and colonizing efforts in a place called Vinland, as well as other documents collected by Rafn, persuaded Schoolcraft (and many other Americans, too) that the Norse had visited "Newfoundland and Nova Scotia," attempted a colony somewhere near "the present area of Massachusetts and Rhode Island," and explored the Atlantic coast as far south as Florida (1:106). But for Schoolcraft, there were also other candidates for pre-Columbian "discovery." "Not Scandinavia only," he averred, "but Phoenicia, Gaul, and old Britain, may be considered as claimants" (1:118).
To his credit, Schoolcraft expressed a healthy skepticism about easy interpretations of rock drawings as evidence of Phoenician scripts, or misreadings of Indian petroglyphs as Viking runestones. Nonetheless, as the young nation eagerly sought to establish a coherent identity, in part by uncovering the continent's unique ancient history, such errors were wholly understandable to Schoolcraft. "As Americans, we are particularly susceptible to this species of newly awakened interest," he explained. "Every thing in our own history and institutions is so new and so well known that ... it appears refreshing to light on any class of facts which promises to lend a ray of antiquity to our history" (Historical and Statistical Information 1:109). Schoolcraft himself was hardly immune to that same "refreshing" temptation, even contemplating in his fourth volume the possible ancient arrival of a "people of higher civilization than the ancestors of the existing aboriginal race" (4:132).
The problem, as Schoolcraft well understood, was that most "facts which promise[d] to lend a ray of antiquity" to America were interpreted as evidence that Native peoples and their forebears were not the builders of the mounds and ceremonial centers that dotted southern Ohio, nor the artisans who created the effigy pipes inlaid with bone and pearl, nor the makers of the copper jewelry found at ancient burial sites. In 1820, the antiquarian and amateur archaeologist Caleb Atwater studied the mounds of Ohio and linked them with peoples from "Hindoostan" (Atwater 105–267). More popularly, the mounds were either attributed to ancient European visitors or were viewed as natural features, since, as one newspaper account in 1842 of the leveling of a mound outside of Gallipolis, Ohio, phrased it, "It is hardly probable that such elevations were made by savages." The reasons attested were that the Indians "were ignorant of the use of iron" and could not command "the amount of labor ... require[d] to construct them." Thus, in total ignorance of what is now called the Hopewellian civilization that once flourished in that area, the reporter for the Louisville Advertiser confidently concluded that thoughtful observers would "not be very likely to ascribe their origin to the Indians" ("An Indian Mound Opened" n.p.).
More informed observers attempted to counter such assertions—but they still had to contend with them. The artist George Catlin, who lived among and painted the Plains tribes for eight years, described in some detail Sioux, Pawnee, and Crow "picture writings on the rocks, and on their robes." It wasn't "anything like a system of hieroglyphic writing," Catlin reasoned, but an "approach somewhat towards it." Variously interpreting the rock drawings as totemic figures and the pictorial buffalo robes as "represent[ing] the exploits of their military lives," Catlin recognized all these as the "state of the fine arts" among an "ingenious and talented" people (2:246). But to do so, he challenged the increasingly popular notion that pre-Columbian visitations—and most especially, visitations from the Norse—accounted for any and all sophisticated artifacts:
Many of these have recently been ascribed to the North-men, who probably discovered this country at an early period.... I might have subscribed to such a theory, had I not at the Red Pipe Stone Quarry, where there are a vast number of these inscriptions cut in the solid rock, and at other places also, seen the Indian at work, recording his totem amongst those of more ancient dates; which convinced me that they had been progressively made, at different ages. (2:246) (Continues...)
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Table of Contents
List of Figures ixAcknowledgments xi
Note on the Problematics of Word Choice and Usage xv
Prologue. The Autobiography of a Book 1
1. The Politics of American Prehistory: Isolation versus Contact 19
2. Contact and Conflict: What the Vinland Sagas Tell Us 44
3. Anglo-America's Viking Heritage: A Nineteenth-Century romance 103
4. The New England Poets of Viking America and the Emergence of the Plastic Viking 151
5. The Challenge to Columbus and the Romance Undone 213
6. "We could not discerne any token or signe, that ever any Christian had been before": The Phantom of First Contact 257
7. Contact and Conflict Again: What Native Stories Tell Us 280
Epilogue. History Lessons 327
Notes 335
Works Consulted 379
Index 407