When Different Civilizations Meet

"What are you? Where did you come from? I have never seen anything like you." The Creator Raven looked at Man and was surprised to find that this strange new being was so much like himself. -- An Eskimo Creation Fable

One of the earliest contacts between Europeans and native Alaskans was made at Lituya Bay in 1786. The Count La Perouse was commissioned by Louis XVI of France to organize an expedition into the Pacific for scientific, economic and nationalistic reasons (incidentally, one of the many young men who applied for the mission, but was turned down, was a Corsican artillery officer named Napoleon Bonaparte).

Carl Sagan, in his book Cosmos, tells of an account which was related, a century after the encounter occurred, to the Canadian anthropologist G.T. Emmons by Cowee, a chief of the Tlingit. Cowee had never heard of the name La Perouse, and since the Tlingit possessed no written language, the story had been passed down by word-of-mouth only. The following is excerpted from the 1886 narrative:

"Late one spring a large party of Tlingit ventured north to trade. On entering Lituya Bay, four canoes were swallowed by the waves. As the survivors made camp and mourned for their lost companions, two strange objects entered the Bay. No one knew what they were. They seemed to be great black birds with immense white wings. The Tlingit believed that the world had been created by a great bird which often assumed the form of a raven. To look upon the raven was to be turned to stone. In their fright, the Tlingit fled into the forest and hid. But after a while, finding that no harm had come to them, a few of the more intrepid crept back out. Now it seemed that the great birds were folding their wings and that flocks of small black creatures arose from their bodies and crawled upon their feathers.

One nearly blind old man gathered the people together and announced that, since his life was nearly over, for the common good he would determine whether the Raven would turn his people to stone. Paddling to the Raven, he climbed upon it and heard strange voices. With his impaired vision he could barely make out the many black forms moving before him. Perhaps they were crows, he thought. When he returned safely to his people they crowded about him, surprised to see him alive. They touched him and smelled him to see if it was really he. After much debate, he convinced his people that it was not the god-raven that he had visited, but rather a giant canoe made by men. The black figures were not crows, but people of a different sort. The Tlingit then visited the ships and exchanged their furs for many strange articles, made chiefly of iron."

The point that Sagan is trying to make by telling this story does not deal so much, of course, with a lesson in the history of the Tlingit Indians, as it does with an example of what happens when two entirely different cultures meet. In his book, he ponders whether the human race would react similarly, or with more panic, or more violently if it was confronted with an alien civilization, such as "little green men" or monsters from outer space.

Would we barter, as did the Tlingit, totally capitulate, or go berserk and start shooting off our nuclear arsenal at them before establishing real contact? Depending on which science-fiction movie you've seen last, the question seems debatable.