Personal Encounters with First Contacts

For Annette Kolodny, In Search of First Contact is the culmination of a life's work, a scholarly reflection of a career spent in archives, research libraries, classrooms, and everywhere else anyone in our profession spends the intriguing moments of their lives. In her prologue, "The Autobiography of a Book," Kolodny tracks the book's origins back to her undergraduate days when she studied at the University of Oslo and encountered the Norse sagas that depicted the earliest known recorded contact between Europeans and Native Americans. Over time, as she established herself as a leading scholar of American literature and of narratives of cultural contact, she carried within her a nagging sense that the "Vinland Saga" and the "Greenland Saga" had places to claim somewhere in the canon of American literature.

Kolodny's In Search of First Contact draws together decades of interest, research, and insights to position Anglo-Americans' struggles with identity in reference to those early Norse men and women whose experiences on these shores fired public and scholarly imaginations from the eighteenth century to the present day. Moreover, her eyes take in not just the invaders' side of the story. In an effort to feel out any hidden peas of indigenous memories of the Norse that might lie dormant beneath centuries of mattresses, Kolodny engages storytellers and elders from the Native communities of Atlantic Canada and New England to explore their thoughts on the issue, and she asserts a place for them alongside the conventional writers and scholars we tend to think of as the sole providers for the nation's literary corpus.

I too have devoted my professional life to the consequences of contact between first and second peoples. My engagement with Kolodny's book has elicited memories, thoughts, and ideas—some nascent, some fundamental to me as a scholar, and others as wizened as winter apples—that cannot help but engage me as a scholar and person in the way that her project engaged her. All reviews of books spring forth from the reviewer's life experiences, scholarly practices, committed beliefs, and vagaries of mood, and so, in this spirit, I offer this review in a personal vein in order to meet her on the same "autobiographical" ground.

In Search of First Contact is a sprawling, insightful, and frustrating quest for the dimmest recollections of that first contact when, in 1006, an alarmed Viking chieftain ordered his men to kill several people who were taking refuge on a beach under their canoes and whose men, some days later, saw swarms of canoes whipping the water towards their boats, only to witness their leader fall from an arrow wound in his side. The meeting between the Norse and the indigenous people of present-day North America has garnered a fair bit of attention over the years, and Kolodny's book is by far the most exhaustive and authoritative consideration of the consequences of the encounter. While her first questions about the story—who were the skraelings that the Norse encountered? Where did they meet?, etc.—impelled her early research, the book at hand is more concerned with bigger questions about where the story of contact between Norse and Native Americans fits within broader American narratives about discovery, colonization, self-identity, and rootedness. In this way, a few seemingly obscure sagas become, in Kolodny's hands, part of the United States' foundational story and play a role in American identity formation over a century and a half—far beyond what most people would imagine the effect of the Vikings' ill-fated adventure to be.

The importance of the Norse, Kolodny explains, dovetails with a separate strand of American thought that involves conceptions of the continent's first peoples. American natural philosophers, Thomas Jefferson most notably, had ruminated about the mysterious race of people who had created the mounds that colonial-era Americans could...