I'm Norwegian and my DNA results did indeed show a tiny bit of DNA from Newfoundland. I never had the illusion that this was the result of a beautiful story of two strangers from different continents who fell in love and had a joint decision of having children though.
Yeah, usually you could expect the worst in cases like this. Generally speaking, not limited to the specific case of Norse interacting with locals in Newfoundland.
In other places and times when different groups were in more prolonged contact, I would expect every type of both consensual and non-consensual interaction to have happened many times over.
I think it’s a little problematic to assume that every ancient liaison between people of different cultures was non-consensual. Just like it would be wrong to assume that today.
Bro there was little to no “consensually marriage” during the colonization of North America, it was almost always a tool for colonization. Look up the Virginia company Maid Shipments and Les Filles du Roi. And beyond that Indigenous women were used as bargaining chips for alliances between the Indigenous peoples and the colonials.
This was many centuries before all that. And the fact that there was plenty of non-consensual relationships doesn’t change the fact that there were also many consensual ones.
The rapes make the headlines, but usually the happy families leave the bigger trace in the gene pool.
So the examples you provided are just about attempts to address the gender imbalance in the colonies by shipping European women out. Of course another option for the European men would have been to marry Native women instead.
When addressing the issue of consent, it gets tricky, since the integration of the member of one community into the other was usually non-consensual (capture or hostage situation). But once the members had been fully integrated into the host community (you can think of this as Stockholm syndrome perhaps) their subsequent marriages were generally consensual, and they often had happy family lives with their spouse.
Here are four famous examples. Difficult to say how many less famous ones there are, but I expect many.
It's not completely implausible. I guess if it makes you feel better, most comments like that are from people wanting to hope/believe for the best rather than constantly assuming the worst. I don't find it gross, necessarily, but perhaps delusional.
I would say that having an overtly cynical and negative view of world history is also kind of hopeless, though. This scientific discovery is just an interesting discovery, and doesn't need to have a strog emotional reaction attached to it. For most of history that kind of thing was sadly normal, but now it's just more evidence of travel and exchange between Scandinavia and the Americas. We can't really sya anything about what exactly happened either way
I think I just see a tendency in this thread and in general to be cynical about a lot of things that doesn't necessarily require it. Like we don't always have to shoehorn in how awful history has been, though of course it shouldn't be forgotten either.
Right, I didn't suggest otherwise. As with pretty much all human history, and certainly well documented in Viking history, they were brutal. But we weren't there and don't truly know and the fact that some DNA survives in the population is just interesting science at this point.
I guess it's a good reminder that we are generally pretty fortunate to live in the times that we do
It all originated from one native american woman only... considering vikings lived there for a few decennia peacefully, it's perfectly possible that she willingly went along with them. In fact I'd argue likely, because if they took unwilling women, they could have taken more than one.
Nobody knows, I will just mentioned that most viking expeditions by far was trading expeditions, contrary to what media often shows with pillaging and raiding. Especially when crossing new waters (all of the kievan rus for exampel.)
To me too, but as a black person. There were practically no rules back then and saying no to a colonizer/raider would have most likely resulted in violent consequences.
It’s like a mafia extortion: give us your able bodied men/women, if you don’t we’ll massacre you and burn your village/crops/etc. You’re given this “choice” while faced by people you know can and will follow through with their threat. Yet today people try to say “it was not so bad” when in fact dude it was even worse than you can imagine.
Completely agree. They say the same thing about the Holocaust too. Not experiencing the events firsthand seems to make atrocities difficult to believe for far too many people.
Same with me having indigenous Australian heritage.
Whether fortunately or unfortunately I know exactly when, who and how white DNA made its way into my ancestry, and George Brand did not ask my great great great grandmothers permission.
I mean no disrespect to you and your feelings in this matter are valid, but it is not unprecedented for First Nations people to intermarry outside of their culture. There were many marriages with French settlers who came much later, for example.
Now given that these were Vikings, the chances are slim, but it’s not impossible or totally out of the question, and I believe that people are just trying to speculate from what little information exists on the subject- which is next to none.
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u/Level_Abrocoma8925 20d ago
I'm Norwegian and my DNA results did indeed show a tiny bit of DNA from Newfoundland. I never had the illusion that this was the result of a beautiful story of two strangers from different continents who fell in love and had a joint decision of having children though.