“This Long Looked For Event”: Retrieving Early Contact History from Penobscot Oral Traditions

WHEN JOSEPH NICOLAR TOOK UP THE TASK of telling the story of his people from the first moments of the creation of the world by the Great Spirit through the several arrivals and eventual permanent settlement of the white man in “the red man’s world,” he made clear at the outset that his was no act of colonial mimicry (2007, 95). First published in 1893, The Life and Traditions of the Red Man neither replicated nor followed the history Nicolar had been taught in the white man’s schools (95).¹ As he emphatically declared in the first sentence of his preface, “there have been no historical works of the white man, nor any other written history from any source quoted” (95). In Nicolar’s experience, even after more than two centuries of contact and colonialism, the world of the red man remained for the white man “as hidden things” (95). Therefore, “all prophecies, theories and ideas of the educated and intelligent of all races have been laid aside,” Nicolar explained. The authority for his work rested in “the traditions as I have gathered them from my people” after “forty years of search and study” (95, 96). As a descendant of “that once numerous and most powerful race, … my life having been spent in the researches of my people’s past life,” Nicolar saw himself as ensuring that the story of the red man would not “pass away unwritten” (95).

But how shall we understand his rendering of his “people’s past life”? Is there any sense in which that “past life,” so obviously anchored in Penobscot oral storytelling practices, can also be read as history? Or, to put it another way, does Nicolar’s retelling of Penobscot traditions offer us any new understanding of the long and complex realities of the Penobscot past? And, more specifically, can these Penobscot oral traditions contribute to a history of early Native and European contacts that is at once more accurate and also more ethical than the mythology of a Columbian “first discovery” still so prevalent in too many of our schools and schoolbooks?

In a thoughtful and probing essay on “merging European and Native views of early contact,” published in 2001, Canadian anthropologist Toby Morantz posed similar questions: “Can there be a single history that reflects both perspectives? The one draws on a rich, ancient oral tradition, and the other on an equally rich, relatively ancient recorded one, but each is embedded in radically different cultural contexts” (49). After examining both Innu/Cree and Euro-Canadian materials, Morantz finally concluded “that it is impossible” (64). This essay challenges that conclusion.

By focusing on both Native and European narratives about early encounters along the coast of Maine, I hope to gesture toward a new kind of history that honors what I call the experiential knowledge embedded in Indigenous traditions. This leads inevitably to the decoupling of the concepts of “contact” and “discovery” as one and the same thing. And this approach also effectively deconstructs the by-now oversimplified construction of “contact” as always and everywhere a first contact, that is, an event singular and unprecedented. Finally, I will point to the experiential knowledge embedded in Indigenous oral historiography as additional evidence that the fifteenth-century Doctrine of Discovery, as applied in the Americas, was often no more than a fiction dressed in legal costume.

Lands Where No “Christian Had Been Before”

In 1605, at the behest of a group of Catholic investors in England, Captain George Waymouth explored the islands and coastal waterways of Maine in search of a suitable location to plant a new colony. On board Waymouth’s ship was James Rosier, a Catholic priest who recorded a dated running narrative of their journey which was published that same year in London under the title A True Relation. According to Rosier, as they explored the Penobscot Bay area, Waymouth’s company “diligently observed, that in no place, about either the Islands, or up in the Maine, or alongst the river, we could not discerne any token or signe, that ever any...