In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery by Annette Kolodny (review)

The author opens her prologue, which she subtitled “the autobiography of a book,” with a Penobscot Indian prophecy about a foreign invasion, followed by a Mi’kmaq storyteller’s formulaic beginning: Wodin’it atog’agan (“This is a story . . .”).

Now retired as the College of Humanities Professor Emerita of American Literature and Culture at the University of Arizona, Kolodny has authored several influential books. Considered one of the pioneers in the field of ecocriticism, she identifies her research focus as “American frontier studies.” Her most recent book, In Search of First Contact, has had, as she explains, “a very long genesis [that] began when, as an undergraduate at Brooklyn College in New York, I elected to use a study abroad scholarship to enroll in the Literature Program at the University of Oslo in the summer of 1961. . . . I had the good fortune to study Old Norse mythology [and], most important for this present study, the sagas of medieval Iceland.”

Kolodny credits her husband, historical fiction writer Daniel J. Peters, author of three epic novels about the demise of the pre-Columbian civilizations, with stimulating her historical interest in Indigenous cultures: “I accompanied Dan on all his research travels to archaeological sites from Mexico to Bolivia and Peru. . . . Together, we read and spent countless hours discussing all the available historical, anthropological, and archaeological data.” As a result she introduced in her American literature courses “the extant stories and recorded legends of the Native peoples who had been encountered at each frontier site” (2).

Rethinking the idea of frontier, Kolodny found this category should include “the precontact period,” and this led to her decision to revisit the ancient Icelandic sagas she had earlier studied in Norway—“stories about the Norse explorations and attempted colonization of North America somewhere around the year ad 1000” (3). She then “composed a kind of position paper for reconceptualizing the literary history of the American frontiers [that] would necessarily include . . . Native American materials and the two Vinland sagas” (3). In 1994 Kolodny assigned these Icelandic sagas in her American frontier literature graduate seminar to her students, who wanted to know: “Where was Vinland located, and what had really happened there? And were there any Native American stories about this early contact?” (3–4). As she tells it: “In the summer of 1995, I began searching for answers to all those questions. . . . This book is the product of that search” (3).

In the process of her long and painstaking (quite literally) research, Kolodny and her husband made numerous trips to the Atlantic seaboard of northeast America, where they queried members of the Mi’kmaq, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot nations, as well as non-Indian professional archaeologists, historians, anthropologists, and a host of other individuals. They also visited Indian Island, a village on the Penobscot Indian Reservation not far upriver from Bangor, Maine, befriending Charles Shay, the only surviving grandson of Joseph Nicolar, the famous nineteenth-century tribal leader who authored The Life and Traditions of the Red Man. A year before his death in 1894, Nicolar had published this small book, which has long been treasured by the Penobscot as well as regional ethnohistory specialists. Of the original edition, few copies still exist. It was republished in 1979, with a short new introduction. In 2007, having secured permission from Shay (who wrote the preface), Kolodny authored a much more detailed introductory chapter to a new edition of this book, retelling his nation’s origin myths and legendary oral history.

In Search of First Contact tells a still fascinating history, with numerous interesting facts, compelling conjectures, and plausible interpretations. Given her multidisciplinary scope, with its numerous historically intertwining political-ideological and cross-cultural themes spanning the northern Atlantic hemisphere, Kolodny must have occasionally felt vexed by the...