For assignment 2:4, I have chosen to answer question #3 as I was able to access “First Contact as a Spiritual Performance: Encounters on the North American West Coast”, via UBC’s online library system (thanks to the help of my classmate, Emily Homuth). In the past, I had never heard someone speak of Indigenous history the way that John Lutz does, as a charismatic and theatrical encounter between two unfamiliar parties. It sounds pleasant, and exciting. Unfortunately, not all of Europe’s encounters with Indigenous peoples have been.

On page three of the text, John Lutz makes an assumption about his readers, including myself.  He assumes that we will agree that finding the capacity to understand Indigenous performances is “one of the most obvious difficulties” (Lutz, “First Contact”, 32). As mentioned in the question posed in question three, this is because “one must of necessity enter a world that is distant in time and alien in culture, attempting to perceive indigenous performance through their eyes as well as those of the Europeans.” Naturally, the way that this assumption is states excludes the possibility of his reader’s being from a non-European descent or assumes that it is more challenging for someone of European descent to understand an indigenous performance than it is for someone of indigenous descent to understand a European performance. For starters, I will acknowledge that our instructor, Erika Paterson has made these assumptions about Lutz’s text and I do most definitely agree and believe it fair to do so. That being said, this assumption is correct for the majority of readers, most of which come from what could be characterized as a naive perspective and distant connection to the first encounters between the European and Indigenous people. I come from a Dutch background on my mother’s side and a Scottish and German background on my father’s side. I strongly believe that our European mannerisms and behaviour would have been, at first encounter, as unfamiliar and odd to the indigenous people as their ways were to us. At the time of first encounter, there was no common ground in terms of language and therefore the “natives and strangers engaged in plays” (Lutz, “First Contact”, 31) which acted as a familiar means that the two parties could communicate on. 

When students who have grown up in Canada think back to the initial relationship between Europeans and Indigenous persons, we often fail to trace back to the very first encounter on a foreign land. I think of the mistakes that we have made, particularly in land claiming and even more so, residential schools. In imagining myself in the position of a first encounter, I believe that I would attempt to be as accommodating in communications as possible to minimize alienation on either side. Lutz has done an excellent job in this piece of creating an elaborate visual for what this interaction would have been. It sounds more graceful and mutual than that of the interactions that began in the 1830s, before many horrible decisions were made. In a piece labelled “First Encounters in the Americas”, scholar Martha Minow “warns that difference always “implies a reference: difference from whom? I am no more different from you than you are from me”. She uses a tall and a short person to visualize this concept. I encourage readers of Lutz’ work to enter their reading experience with this metaphor in mind. 

First Encounters in the Americas. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.facinghistory.org/holocaust-and-human-behavior/chapter-2/first-encounters-americas

Lutz, J. S., Binney, J., Dauenhauer, N. M., Dauenhauer, R., & Maclaren, I. S. (2014). Myth and Memory: Stories of Indigenous-European Contact. Vancouver: UBC Press.