If there were Irish in North America before 1000 AD, you might ask, where are they now? Granted, a lot can change in a thousand years. Just in the short period that Europeans have been present to keep written records, we have seen a good number of native cultures wiped out or assimilated into others. The same might easily have happened to a colony of Irish, even a large one.
One might argue that, if the Irish had been here, we ought at least to see traces of that—traces in Indian culture.
Not necessarily. In fact, it would be rather unlikely. Given that the Indians had no writing, cultural traces can easily disappear within one or two generations.
That said, it seems there is evidence of some alien influence in Indian lore.
The Sioux historian Vine Deloria Jr., author of Custer Died for Your Sins, complains that mainstream archaeology never asks Native Americans for their own traditions of what happened before Columbus. If they did, he says, they would find that “numerous tribes do say that strange people doing this or that came through our land, visited us, and so on. Or they remember that we came across the Atlantic as refugees from some struggle, then came down the St. Lawrence River, and so forth” (Stengel).
Father Chrestien LeClercq, an early Recollet missionary, discovered such a legend among the Micmac (Mi’kmiq) of Gaspé and the Miramichi—a plausible location for Great Ireland based on the Viking description. (Chrestien Le Clercq, New Relation of Gaspesia, Toronto: Champlain Society, 1910, pp. 85-6).
LeClercq also found among the Micmac a veneration of the cross.
“They drew it, and wore it, religiously upon their bodies and their clothes: it presided over their councils, their voyages, and the most important affairs of their nation: their cemeteries appeared more like those of Christians than of barbarians, by reason of the number of Crosses which they placed over their tombs.” (LeClercq, 1910, p. 32).
LeClercq’s observation is confirmed by another early missionary, Bishop de Saint Valiers of Quebec, who writes of the Miramichi River:
“It would be difficult to believe that this river, which is called Rivière de la Croix, had not been thus named by Christians. It is nevertheless true that it is not they who have given it this name. It derives it from certain Indians, who from time immemorial are called Cruciantaux, because they preserve among them a particular respect for the Cross, although there appears to be not a vestige of evidence from which it can be conjectured that they have ever known the mystery of it.” (Bishop Jean Baptiste de Saint Valiers, Estate Présent de l’Eglise et de la Colonie Francaise, Quebec, 1856, p. 35).
LeClercq says that the oldest man of the tribe claimed he personally remembered the arrival of the first French ship, and the veneration of the cross among his people was known before this (LeClercq, p. 190).
“This man, aged a hundred or a hundred and twenty years, questioned one day by M. de Fronsac, son of M. Denis, said that he had seen the first ship from Europe which had landed in their country; that before its arrival they had already among them the usage of the Cross; that this usage had not been brought to them by strangers; and that everything he knew about it he had learned by tradition from his ancestors.”
Champlain, the first recorded European to enter the Minas Basin of the Bay of Fundy, reported finding there “a very old cross all covered with moss and almost all rotten, a plain indication that before this there had been Christians there” (Champlain, The Voyages of 1604-1607, W. L. Grant, trans., Scribner, 1907, p. 113 ).
There is insufficient evidence to establish that the Irish were in Canada before Leif Erikson. But the possibility is intriguing, and there is insufficient evidence to say they were not.
