Pre-contact American musings

Basque ship in Lake Superior? If Hopewell spoke Sioux

New-found-land’s foundlings

Do you think it’s possible that North America was known by Europeans before Columbus? The answer should be yes, because archaeological science has proven it is so. I’m talking about the Norsemen who set up villages in Newfoundland, if that's not too technical. But the Basque were also known to make fishing villages on Turtle Island’s North Atlantic shores. The first European explorers charting up the coast found them or their presence in a seasonally abandoned village site or two.

The ancient Basque presence in the area along the St. Lawrence is also seen in the naming of the Iroquois, a Basque word meaning ‘killer people.’ When the French came up the St. Lawrence in 1534 the Basque had worked the waters for years, perhaps thousands.

Clovis point

One explanation for the similarity in form and function between the Clovis spearhead dated 13,500 BP and the Salutrean point dated to around 20,000 is that the Salutreans sailed across the ocean and introduced this new fluted technique to the people they met in the New World.

The Salutreans were the very creative people who painted on the cave walls in southern France. I contend the Salutreans were also seagoing people who would later be known as Basques. The theory is a mini-ice age would have allowed Salutrean ships of leathern sail to keep land in sight as they made their way to the cod runs along the east coast of that far and mysterious land where lived the others. The killer people would have been among the others. So would the Huron and Neutrals along with the various and much more numerous Algonquin tribes.

We don’t know what name the Basque would have given the Huron-Wendat Iroquois they would have met and certainly traded with. The Haudensaunee Iroquois, that is most of those nations that would become the Confederation, were not part of the Huron-Neutral-Riviere au Vase-Erie-Wenro-French trade network, an oversight that contributed to the extinction of most of the latter, that is all except the French and the Wyandot. Those Indigenous Huron and Neutral people who survived and continued to coalesce, took the name Wyandot. In an odd fact of history, the noted orator Kandiaronk was born Huron-Petun but died Wyandot.

Copper Harbor petroglyph depicting sailing ship

A case for the Basque in ancient America