Christopher Crocker

Christopher Crocker, “What We Talk about When We Talk about Vínland: History, Whiteness, Indigenous Erasure, and the Early Norse Presence in Newfoundland,” Canadian Journal of History vol. 55, 102 (2020): 91-122.

The brief Norse presence in Newfoundland has led to many economic opportunities within provincial tourism and cultural heritage industries but has also served to uphold harmful and outdated colonial traditions concerning the area’s Indigenous peoples, cultures, and histories. Christopher Crocker challenges these longstanding interpretations and asserts that they have obfuscated, decontextualized, and misrepresented Newfoundland’s Indigenous histories. In the process his research provides an important example of public history and scholarly advocacy that blends colonial discourse theory and Indigenous scholarship to decolonize the early Norse presence in Newfoundland. Crocker convincingly urges a reconsideration of this narrative with the re-insertion of the Indigenous presence and a call to rectify a harmful traditional colonial narrative.