It required something a shift in mind-set, we know, when you realize that the earliest Europeans described native North Americas as “White Men,” but white had a different connotation in Old Norse. It meant “dangerous” or “evil.” They might as well have called it “the Land of Dangerous Men.”
Norse interactions with the native peoples of Canada, and maybe New England, probably lasted for several centuries. We know from the archaeological record that the first Norse explorers would have passed Dorset, and maybe Thule, camps as they sailed along the Canadian coast (Helluland and Markland) during their trips between Greenland and Vinland. The Dorset and the Thule were distinctly different culture groups that inhabited the arctic region at the time.
In fact, during his first exploration of southwestern Greenland, Eirikr Raudi reports finding abandoned settlements, probably the remains of Dorset camps. We know for certain that the Norse had contact with the Dorset in Newfoundland, because a spindle whorl found by archaeologists at the Viking site called L’Anse aux Meadows “appears to be a Norse reworking of a Dorset pot,” and “a beautiful Late Dorset lamp was found, oddly enough, in the roof turf of a Norse house at the same site.”17
Who were the Dorset and the Thule? They were Paleo-Eskimo peoples. Both cultures came from the same founding population in Siberia, but the first wave of arctic colonists were the ancestors of the Dorset, who crossed the frozen northern expanses around 5,000 years ago and spread across the Canadian arctic, southward to Newfoundland, and eastward to the west coast of Greenland. For around 4,000 years before Eirikr arrived, the Dorset had lived and traveled the arctic region. The Thule arrived around 1,000 years ago. They coexisted with the Dorset for around 150 years, after which, the Dorset vanish from the archaeological record. However, the Thule continued to interact with the Norse until around A.D.1400—and maybe much longer. More on that later.
Far south of the arctic, in Vinland the Good, the Norse met very different native peoples. The ancestors of those Native Americans had reached North America at least 14,000 years before, and archaeological evidence is beginning to accumulate that it may have been much earlier, around 40,000 years ago.18 These native groups were not genetically related to the Dorset or Thule.19 Their descendants formed two linguistic groups—Algonquian and Iroquoian—and are represented by nations like the Penobscot, Micmac, and Maliseet, as well the Huron, Onondaga, Seneca, Mohawk, Oneida, and Cayuga, among others.
Did the Norse make it as far south as New England? The only tangible evidence of this New England contact comes in the form of a coin found in Maine in 1957. This coin was minted during the reign of Olaf the Peaceful, King of Norway (1067–1093). Was the coin dropped by a European visitor? Or traded down the coastline from the arctic? “It was proposed that it perhaps came from the purse of the Bishop of Greenland, Eirik Upsi Gnupsson, who is said in the Icelandic annals for 1121 to have set out to look for Vinland himself, but nothing more was ever heard of him or his ill-fated journey.”20
A few of these native-Norse interactions seem to have been peaceful and mutually beneficial episodes of trade, primarily native peoples trading animal pelts in exchange for Norse cloth and dairy products. But many of these episodes were violent culture clashes. For example, the Icelandic annals for the year 1379 state that, “The skraeling attacked the Greenlanders and killed eighteen men and took two boys into slavery.”21
Ultimately, Norse attempts to colonize North America failed. But were they driven out by the native peoples? Or is there more to this story?