Annette Kolodny, “In Search of First Contact” (Duke University Press, 2012)

New Books in Indigenous Studies · Oct 1, 2013 · 39m

We all know the song. “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…”

And now, thankfully, we all know the controversy; celebrating a perpetrator of genocide might say a few unpleasant things about the country doing the celebrating.

But there is something that most Americans don’t know: Europeans had visited the continent at least half a millennium before Columbus. Remembered in two medieval tales known as the “Vinland sagas,” and in 1960 corroborated by a major archaeological discovery, Indigenous people–most likely the ancestors of today’s Wabanaki Confederacy, among others–encountered Norse…