A wooden figurine discovered in 1977 in an ancestral Inuit house on Baffin Island, northern Canada, provides an unusually early Indigenous perspective on European visitors. Dated to around 1350, the 5.4-centimetre driftwood carving is the earliest known Indigenous representation of a European in the Western Hemisphere. It is currently exhibited at the Canadian Museum of History.
The figure probably depicts a Norse person, whose long robe or tunic bears a cross on the chest. The garment resembles those worn by Norse Christians in Greenland from the 11th to the 13th centuries. Although its featureless face and short arms are characteristic of 14th-century Inuit carvings, its portrayal of a non-Inuit person is unique. The museum suggests that it may commemorate an encounter between the two peoples, preserving the characteristics that its maker considered significant well before sustained European contact began in the late 15th century.
Norse explorers reached what is now Newfoundland around 1000, establishing the earliest European settlement in the Americas. Over subsequent centuries, they probably made repeated journeys from Greenland to Canada, exchanging metal and cloth with Inuit ancestors, known as the Thule, for walrus ivory. European objects found in early Inuit houses on Baffin Island support the likelihood of such exchanges. Those westward trading routes were eventually abandoned, possibly because of Indigenous resistance and the distances involved. Against this background, the small carving offers a distinctive view of visitors from the east through the eyes of an Indigenous maker.
