Viking Explorations and Indigenous Erasures, by Douglas Hunter

H-Canada White Tribism: Viking Explorations and Indigenous Erasures, by Douglas Hunter

Discussion published by Keith Grant on Monday, April 25, 2016

Historian Douglas Hunter, a Post Doctoral Fellow at the University of Waterloo, has written for Borealia about how the search for Vikings in North America has often led to the misappropriation or erasure of Indigenous culture or sites. Here's a taste of his essay:

"The Vikings are back in North America, athough in truth they’ve been with us since at least the eighteenth century, when the Vinland sagas began to fuel speculation about the lands Leif Eiriksson and his compatriots tried to colonize around 1000 AD. Their latest sighting is at Point Rosee in southwestern Newfoundland, where American archaeologist Sarah Parcak claims to have found evidence of Norse iron processing. If she is right, Point Rosee would be only the second broadly accepted Norse site in North America, after the L’Anse Aux Meadows find of the 1960s.

"The early evidence, shaky as it appears to me, was presented on “Vikings Unearthed,” a documentary broadcast by the BBC and PBS on April 6, 2016. Watching the program, I had a twinge of misgiving when Parcak told the camera “I want” the site to be Norse. The desire to place the Norse in North America has a long history of people tending to find what they are looking for. And although it doesn’t seem to be the case with this purported find, claims of Norse discoveries also have a long history of misappropriating Indigenous cultures, Indigenous bodies, and Indigenous materials in an effort to prove a Norse presence.

"In my research into processes of colonialism and the historic construction of race and migration theories, I deal with a phenomenon I call White Tribism. The Point Rosee find has nothing to do with White Tribism, but White Tribism has a lot to do with why so many people are fascinated with efforts to prove Europeans colonized North America, long before Columbus. White Tribism comes in several variants, but they all involve the idea that Old World peoples we would recognize as Caucasian, “white,” or northern European (or their Old Testament ancestors) arrived in the Americas at some point in pre-Columbian antiquity. Sometimes these newcomers endured in isolation, surrounded by native savagery. These enclaves included Lost Tribes of Israel still maintaining Judaic practices, and enigmatic Welsh-speaking tribes that supposedly were the degenerated survivors of a colonizing effort by Prince Madoc in the twelfth century. More often, White Tribism posits some kind of interbreeding, as an infusion of European genes and know-how is the only explanation of purported exceptionalities in some Indigenous groups. The alleged improvement furthers the colonizing argument that “pure” Indigenous peoples, as encountered by Old World visitors (including the pesky skraelings of the Vinland sagas), were innately inferior, and that their displacement by white newcomers was (and is) inevitable and just. While White Tribism was part of mainstream discourse well into the twentieth century, it endures foremost in pseudohistorical theories that assert a suppressed white past in ancient America. The best-known example is the controversy over the 9,400- year-old remains of Kennewick Man in Washington State, which were erroneously described as “Caucasoid” when discovered in 1996 and were seized as proof that whites enjoy as much of a claim to the continent as Native Americans."

Citation: Keith Grant. White Tribism: Viking Explorations and Indigenous Erasures, by Douglas Hunter. H-Canada. 04-25-2016. https://networks.h-net.org/node/3449/discussions/121447/white-tribism-viking-explorations-and-indigenous-erasures-douglas Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Canada

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