In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of
the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery, by
Annette Kolodny, Duke University Press, 448 pages, $27.95
In the earliest years of the second millennium, Norsemen sailed
from Greenland to North America in several waves. They explored the
fertile coastline and some of its inland rivers, harvested lumber
and grapes, and built camps. They also met, traded with, killed,
were killed by, and on the whole failed spectacularly to
communicate with Native Americans. We don’t know the specific
identity of the native population(s) with whom the explorers made
contact or the exact location of the Norse landings and
settlement—including the place they named Vinland, which likely was
somewhere in present-day Canada and not the United States. But one
thing is certain: Christopher Columbus “discovered” nothing when he
came ashore in the so-called New World, except that he was
lost. ;
In her thought-provoking new study, In Search of First
Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and
the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery, literary critic
Annette Kolodny looks beyond Christopher Columbus and 1492 to
wrestle with the question of the earliest immigrants to North
America and what they found. Her search leads her to “contact
texts”—including medieval Iceland’s The Greenlanders’ Saga
and Eirik the Red’s Saga as well as folklore and related
evidence from members of the Wabanaki Confederacy (Eastern
Algonquian-speaking Native Americans located in Canada and northern
New England)—for what they tell us about Norse contact with Native
America half a millennium prior to the Columbian
encounter. ;
If Kolodny’s work did nothing but set the Norse and native texts
into conversation with each other, summarize the previous
scholarship on them, and confirm what now is accepted and what
remains in question, it would be an achievement for which
historians, archeologists, anthropologists, and ethnologists, as
well as her fellow literary critics, should thank her. But that is
barely the tip of the book’s all-too-chilling iceberg.
Kolodny’s primary undertaking is tracing the way in which the
idea of a “Viking past” in the United States has informed U.S.
politics and policies. The result is a nuanced, compelling, and
frankly disturbing case study of how the national origin stories we
tell ourselves can inspire and then justify the worst impulses of
human nature, often assisted by the coercive arm of the
state. ;
Consider the ideological cage match between the isolation and
contact stories for Native America. On one side, politicians,
public intellectuals, and even educators argued that the impressive
artifacts of native history, from copper work to pictographs to
large-scale earthen mounds, could not have been the product of
American Indian ingenuity. Proponents of this idea asserted that
non-native peoples (take your choice, from the ancient Phoenicians
to the early Irish) had settled in North America in the
long-forgotten past, produced all relics that spoke of any
sophistication or culture, and then were overrun by the “barbarian”
American Indians. Those who used such rhetoric argued that the
removal (and sometimes even extermination) of native peoples
represented a just comeuppance, the righting of a historical
injustice. ;
William Gilmore Simms summed this view up well in his 1845
textbook The History of South Carolina From its First European
Discovery to its Erection Into a Republic, which baldly
asserted that “according to tradition and old chronicles of the
Northmen, the region [of the Carolinas] was occupied by a race, or
races, of white men, to whom…we are to ascribe the tumuli,
earthworks, and numerous remains of fortified places in which the
whole country abounds, rather than to the nomadic red men.” The
same author in an earlier essay (“The Discoveries of the Northmen,”
1841) called upon his literary brethren to write “a most romantic
tale” about how the red men invaded the land of the whites “in
howling thousands” until those early Anglo heroes “fought to the
last, and perished to a man!” in what later would become the
American South.
President Andrew Jackson, the chief architect of Indian Removal,
justified what would become state-sponsored ethnic cleansing with
an appeal to just such an origin myth, telling Congress in 1830
that in “the monuments and fortresses of an unknown people, spread
over the extensive regions of the west, we behold the memorials of
a once powerful race, which was exterminated or has disappeared, to
make room for the existing savage tribes.” It was time, he urged,
to “make room” for civilization once again. ;
On the other side, another national origin story prevailed in
the 19th century, a myth based on the assumption that Native
Americans had been isolated for thousands of years on the
continent, wholly without the benefit of interaction with
“civilized” humanity until the commencement of Anglo-European
colonization. To use the phrasing of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft in the
first of his five-volume Historical and Statistical
Information, Respecting the History, Condition and Prospects of the
Indian Tribes of the United States (1851), American Indians
represented “a branch of the human race whose history is lost in
the early and wild mutations of men.” ;
The contemporary product of such “early and wild mutations” was
an inferior and backward race, so these thinkers claimed, a race
which certainly faced extinction, as it couldn’t be expected to
compete or cope with its betters. This narrative therefore became a
weapon in the arsenal of those who proposed the military
subjugation of native populations, the forced removal of native
nations, and the establishment of paternalistic control over native
peoples on “humanitarian grounds”—that is, for the American
Indians’ own good. Hence the Indian Wars of the Great Plains and
the Reservation Period.
Rigorous scholars in the 19th century recognized both stories as
fictions. Already careful research linked current native
populations to earlier artifacts and achievements, and already
perceptive readers knew the Norse were in North America hundreds of
years before Columbus. But the truth, Kolodny reveals, was no match
for political expediency. She documents the repetition of this
pattern time and again, noting dryly ; that in this typically
ugly 19th-century brawl, no matter which national origin myth was
winning at any given time, “the Indians lost out.”
Kolodny also considers the not-so-friendly competition at the
1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which celebrated the
quadricentenary of Christopher Columbus’ voyage of exploration.
Reproductions of the Niña, Pinta, and Santa
Maria vied for attention with a reproduction of a Norse ship,
the Viking, which sailed from Norway to Chicago as a
hulking, three-dimensional reminder that Leif Eiriksson had beaten
Columbus to American shores. This rivalry was far less about the
facts of history than about contemporary clashes regarding
immigration policy and the politically charged question of which
population (Italian Americans? Norwegian Americans? Catholics?
Protestants?) had claim to being the “natural” sons and daughters
of the United States. ;
Kolodny ultimately gleans four key lessons from her research.
First, she notes that certain “invincible beliefs” manage to
survive, even thrive, despite definitive scientific evidence to the
contrary. Even though the engraved “Kensington Stone,” which was
supposedly “discovered” by a Swedish immigrant on his farm in
Minnesota in 1898 has been proven to be a 19th-century creation and
not an artifact from a medieval Norse expedition, adherents
continue to this day to use it as proof that the Vinland described
in Nordic sagas was located in what became the United States, not
Canada. Nationalism, not rationalism, is the motivation for such
assertions.
For her second lesson, Kolodny notes—rather naively, and without
her otherwise characteristic attention to evidence—that while U.S.
immigration policy continues to be fraught with racial and ethnic
tensions, the “multiethnic, multicultural, and interracial” makeup
of the nation today means that the national debate “can no longer
insist upon any single defining origin story that begins in
Europe.” At the popular level, at least, the success of various
politicos, radio pundits, and televised talking heads suggests
there are many who still clamor for and utilize just such a story
to defend excluding others from this land of immigrants. ;
Kolodny’s third lesson is that the Vinland sagas are “prophecy
texts” whose stories do not “shade over into narratives of conquest
and colonialism,” but whose depictions of trade turning to
treachery set the stage for what would follow. For her fourth and
final lesson, she underscores how the fascination with a literal or
metaphorical Viking heritage remains firmly seated within American
culture, even to the point of being exported to space through the
Viking mission to Mars.
The great achievement of In Search of First Contact is
not the unveiling of new and surprising revelations about what
exactly happened 2,000 years ago but rather the insightful tracing
of how stories about that encounter have flourished in the American
imagination for 200 years. They have inspired great art and
lamentable rhetoric, painstaking research and unquestioning
faith. ;
“In ways we in the United States do not always recognize,”
Kolodny writes, “how we shape and reshape our stories about
discovery and first contact reveal[s] how we are simultaneously
shaping and unshaping our understanding of who we are as
Americans.” This evolving understanding continues to have lasting,
even life-and-death consequences. ;
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