Amy Sturgis on Deadly Colonialist Fables

In her thought-provoking new study, In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery, literary critic Annette Kolodny looks beyond Christopher Columbus and 1492 to wrestle with the question of the earliest immigrants to North America and what they found. Her search leads her to "contact texts"—for what they tell us about Norse contact with Native America half a millennium prior to the Columbian encounter, writes Amy Sturgis.