Mark van de Logt – Early Encounters with Europeans in Arikara Oral Traditions

2023 Global Encounters Network Seminar Series Thursday 17 August 2023 Topic – “They Thought This Man Was From The Heavens”: Early Encounters with Europeans in Arikara Oral Traditions Speaker – Dr Mark van de Logt, Texas A&M University at Qatar The creation story of Arikara people (who are presently located in North Dakota) tells of an encounter with Jesus. According to the story, the Arikaras rejected the mysterious stranger, upon which Jesus took his gifts to the Europeans who subsequently became powerful while the Arikaras remained poor. Contrary to modern-day scholars who believe that this story was added after missionaries visited the Arikaras, this presentation argues that the oral tradition may indeed have been based on an actual historical event. Dr van de Logt hypothesises that the stranger was not Jesus, but more likely a French-Canadian coureur de bois . This theory has implications for the apotheosis debate between scholars who accept colonial Euro-American sources claiming that Native Americans first viewed European visitors as “gods” or “spirits,” and scholars who believe that this idea was manufactured by Europeans to justify invasion, conquest, and colonisation.