The author looks at the run-up to the Millennium in terms of reconciliation with indigenous peoples

Jull, Peter

University of Queensland eSpace

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April 16, 1998 (Published Arena Magazine, No. 35, June-July 1998, pp 20-21) 
 
Meanings for a Millennium? 
Aboriginal-European Relations after 1000 Years 
by Peter Jull 
 
Australia’s 2000 Sydney Olympics and 2001 Constitution centenary may save the 
government the embarrassment of doing something about the Millennium. 
 
The Millennium is not a foreign fad.  It is a cultural metaphor – admittedly an arbitrary 
one.  Few of us may feel the urgency of the 17th century for whom the biblical 
Millennium was a real concern.  But like them we may find ourselves X-raying our 
history and social assumptions.  How should we shape our commonwealth and project 
ideals in the wider world?  How should we live? 
 
Bethlehem already has a Star in the East logo and a web site accessible from Catholic 
Internet sites.  The Christian churches will be very active.  Meanwhile, a flood of books, 
conferences, press reports, and TV specials on a great European legend.  That is the 
Norse movement across the Atlantic capped by Leif Eriksen’s 1000 AD landing in 
America. 
 
That movement and its achievements were no myth, although we will probably never 
know the real details.  From c. 870 AD, Norwegians and mixed Celtic-Norse families 
from Ireland and Britain settled all of Iceland that could support their farming.  It was the 
creation of a new society, one beyond the edge of the known world, despite a few 
forgotten classical allusions which may have included Iceland.  Nobody was conquered, 
and the new state had no defences or warlike intent.  Most incredibly for the times, its 
government and legal system were created by the consensus of the free population.  A 
vigorous but mostly orderly political life was then maintained for centuries, marred by 
some notorious blood feuds recounted in the sagas. 
 
One Icelandic trouble-maker, Erik the Red, was kicked out c. 982 and went to explore the 
country sighted by various sailors off course to the west.  He made a thorough 
investigation, returned to rally settlers for his ‘Green land’ and returned there to found a 
substantial settlement.  Up the long fjords just west of Greenland’s southern tip, Cape 
Farewell, are warm rich meadows where sheep did well.  Churches and even a cathedral 
were built, and the convict-settler Erik was patriarch of a dispersed affluent community.  
A smaller but still substantial Norse settlement was similarly located farther up the coast 
in the area behind the present Greenland capital of Nuuk. 
 
In 1000 AD the Icelanders voted, in a debate whose frantic lobbying, many manoeuvres, 
and knife-edge outcomes are reminiscent of Wik (in the account of Njal’s Saga, the best 
and least read thriller in bookshops), to drop their old pagan ways and adopt the new 
religion of Christianity.  This took place at the Althing, the annual combined summer 
fair, free man’s parliament, and court of appeal held in spectacular outdoor surroundings 
inland a little north-east from Reykjavik.  Greenland had some Christians early, too.  A 
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church at Erik’s farm, supposedly built by his strong-willed wife, is the oldest yet 
confirmed in the northern world. 
 
To the west, unknown to the Norse, another people were moving quickly eastwards to 
occupy and settle new territory.  The Thule Inuit, a whale-hunting culture from the 
Bering and Chukchi Seas, were displacing the earlier Dorset Inuit culture and also 
occupying previously empty areas. 
 
In the Greenland settlement there was much talk of land glimpsed to the west from 
Viking ships off-course.  Leif Eriksen, Erik’s son, is credited with setting out to have a 
look.  He visited Baffin Island opposite Greenland, Labrador with its great forests and 
‘marvel strands’ of great sand beaches along one stretch of coast, and on the northern tip 
of Newfoundland’s northern peninsula by the Strait of Belle Isle found an ideal spot to 
set up base. 
 
Such a base was found in the 1960s, the only sure Viking site in Canada or USA, and has 
now been exhaustively studied and reconstructed.  There is evidence of Norse women’s 
presence and of items brought from farther south in America.  The sparse saga accounts 
indicate that there were further voyages, including one when Leif’s psychotic sister killed 
people at the base.  By then head of the Greenland Norse, Leif apparently used his 
position to hush things up, keep it off the assembly agenda, and keep her out of sight on a 
remote farm. 
 
If this was the New World’s first political cover-up, the motive of Freydis’ crime is 
interesting.  She did not want others occupying the ‘booths’, the turf dwellings topped 
with tenting, built by Leif.  Indeed, the place was known as Leifsbudir, ‘Leif’s booths’.  
The booths signalled Leif’s family right to call a parliament and generally take charge of 
things.  Like his father with an ear for a positive name, he called the region Vineland.  
His naming, whether tongue in cheek or simply exuberant, has set thousands of scholars 
and students, and many more amateurs, on the trail of his putative wine grapes since. 
 
The Algonquian Indians of Newfoundland and southern Labrador, and the Inuit, made 
sure the Norse were occasional visitors only.  There is no hint of permanent Norse 
settlement, and the recorded Norse quickness to reach for a sword probably ensured that 
result.  The natives had the numbers and the firepower.  One of Leif’s brothers fell to an 
Algonquian arrow.  A pair of popular books by Canada’s great Arctic archeologist Robert 
McGhee, Ancient Canada and Canada Rediscovered on the indigenous past and early 
non-indigenous forays respectively put it all elegantly and simply. 
 
The Greenland settlement lasted twice as long as white settlement to date in Australia. 
Vineland remained a land of biblical imagining and occasional timber foraging by the 
Norse, it seems.  We have learned recently that other Western Europeans were active off 
and on the coasts of North America before Columbus’ 1492 voyage and long before 
permanent settlement began from 1600.  Fishing stations and fur trading were important 
for various peoples, and presumably kept quiet to avoid competition. 
 
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The Thule Inuit migrated south along the Greenland coast, the earlier Dorset Inuit having 
retreated or perished.  As climate change (the Little Ice Age) and other conditions turned 
against the Norse, they failed to learn from their new Inuit neighbours.  Much ink and 
passion have been spent imagining the Norse fate.  Inuit hostility, deepening cold, attacks 
by European pirates or whalers are all known contributors.  Today the Inuit have re-
occupied Norse farms and gone into sheep raising to compensate for bad times in the 
fisheries. 
 
The Inuit have always had summer gatherings like the old Norse.  This tradition survives 
today in Greenland’s annual Aasivik tent camp, cultural jamboree, and teach-in – 
sometimes held where the Norse may have held district assemblies – and the 3-yearly 
pan-Inuit assemblies of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference.  This latter brings together 
notables and ordinary folk from north-eastern Siberia, Alaska, Arctic Canada, and 
Greenland.  Begun in 1977 in Barrow, it seemed to outsiders an improbable bright idea 
for people so isolated from modern communications and transport.  By 1989 in Sisimiut 
government leaders or their representatives were flying in to the ICC in a sort of 
accountability session to declare how many ICC resolutions their governments had 
implemented. 
 
The old Althing and ICC are an experience like little we have today.  Their impact was 
and is tremendous for anyone associated, and they set big agendas.  Television made the 
Australian Reconciliation Convention in 1997 and Constitutional Convention of 1998, or 
Canadian conferences of prime minister, premiers, and indigenous leaders and their 
delegations in the 1980s, potent for similar reasons.  There is a lot more than detail and 
bureaucratic niggle on offer.  Values, justice, culture, and ideals provide a blast furnace 
atmosphere in which extraordinary results become achievable. 
 
Inuit are in various stages of self-government.  Greenland has been governed by all-Inuit 
cabinets since 1979 under a home rule agreement with Denmark.  Next year Nunavut will 
elect its first legislature, an Inuit-run northern territory in Canada.  Labrador Inuit are 
negotiating with federal and Newfoundland governments on regional self-government, 
resource management, and land and sea rights.  A major motive and element in those new 
arrangements (and similar ones in Inuit Alaska, as in Algonquian territories), is to force 
Europeans’ governments to accept the better knowledge accumulated by indigenous 
peoples about their environments, providing better national land and sea management for 
everyone. 
 
Inuit museum staff in Nuuk quietly look after Norse remains for research and the tourism 
trade.  Iceland has become a field of study by Kirsten Hastrup and others of how fresh 
opportunity and new eco-systems were squandered by European settlers leading to their 
own distress, brutal on-again off-again civil war, political subjection to Europe, and mass 
impoverishment during centuries of deepening cold.  (There are few histories more 
painful than the final century of the Icelandic Commonwealth when Norwegian kings 
cleverly played off Icelandic notables and factions until they gained full formal control in 
1264.) 
 
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Only in the last couple of decades of this millennium have some European countries, 
such as New Zealand, Canada, and the Nordic countries, really accepted and included 
indigenous peoples as equals.  One can only speculate about what Australian 
governments think they are doing.  Also, only now have Australia and other countries 
begun to get serious about environments ill-suited to old European habits.  Studies of 
comparative indigenous-settler land and resource use, such as W. Cronon’s Changes in 
the Land about Atlantic New England, are transforming old notions. 
 
Climate change, shaping and re-shaping countries, whole changes of civilisation and 
ideology, mass migration into new lands, first contacts and relations between peoples – 
Europe’s edge was a place of great excitement.  Iceland has hung on, a beautiful and 
gritty republic which endured many centuries of poverty and suffering, while Greenland 
and Vineland did not survive.  They were unsustainable, as was Iceland’s original 
political economy and society.  They were great youthful adventures, but failed in the 
world of adult experience. 
 
Australia has much experience and expertise to contribute to Millennial ruminations.  
And much to think about as an Indigenous, European, and Asian frontier shaky on all 
fronts. 
 
*** 
 
Peter Jull is Adjunct Associate Professor, Dept of Government, University of 
Queensland. 


Meanings for a Millennium? Aboriginal-European Relations after 1000 Years

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Meanings for a Millennium? Aboriginal-European Relations after 1000 Years

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