The most recommended first contact books

A vivid account of life in the Aztec world and the tragic Aztec-Spanish War told by Indigenous scribes writing in Nahuatl during the decades following these events and the transformation to colonial New Spain. Mexican authors began publishing translations of Native-author sources in the late eighteenth century; yet, together with his former advisor, Ángel María Garibay, León-Portilla did more than any other twentieth-century scholar to elevate the voices and perspectives of Nahua peoples, the descendants of the prehispanic Aztecs. The Broken Spears was first published in Spanish in 1959 and translated to English in 1962. It has been translated into many other languages and revised versions since.  Its key sixteenth-century texts include portions of Book 12 of the Florentine Codex, compiled by the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún, and sections of the Annals of Tlatelolco. Within these composite sources, readers can sense the multivalence of the Native authors… show more.

Peter Cawdron has written a whole series based on various first-contact scenarios, each an independent novel.

Apothecary is one of my favorites. Set in 16th-century England, it follows a young apprentice named Anthony, who works at a London apothecary (a pharmacy). When his blind friend Julia is accused of witchcraft and set to burn at the stake, Anthony seeks help from a member of the aristocracy who harbors a deep secret about her arrival in this medieval land.

The story is accurate, fascinating, and fun, as superstition and primitive technology clashes with advanced alien science. But like all Peter Cawdron stories, at its heart Apothecary is a story of characters struggling to do what’s right.

Boucher’s book was one of the first to look beyond initial Indigenous-European contact in the Greater Antilles to focus on interactions between colonizers and the people they called “Caribs”: the mobile, multiethnic inhabitants of the smaller islands of the Lesser Antilles.

Boucher convincingly shows that far from being reduced to slavery or extinction, the Lesser Antilles’ Indigenous inhabitants remained important military and political players, particularly during the seventeenth century, on which much of the book focuses.

He further explores how Indigenous actions influenced European stereotypes of the region’s inhabitants, giving rise to exaggerated depictions of fierce cannibals.  

Four times the sun has died and been reborn, and now we are living in the world of the fifth sun.

In this wonderful imaginative rendering of Aztec history, we move between mythological and real time, following the Mexica people as they gain power and establish a great kingdom, and then suffer the disaster of Spanish attack. The voices of many different people speak through this story, men and women, telling us of the price that they paid each step of the way in the struggle to survive in a beautiful but brutal world.

The age of European exploration and colonization of North America is filled with epic tales of adventure, as people from entirely different civilizations first came in contact.

Europeans dreamed of creating colonial empires and gaining wealth and influence in a new land about which they knew nothing about, while natives were at first unsure how to respond to these curious visitors and what exactly their unexpected presence meant.

In A Land So Strange, author Andres Resendez recounts the tale of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, a man who sojourned across the North American continent in the early 1500s after the disastrous failure of the expedition that brought him to the shores of the Gulf. It’s a riveting narrative of a forgotten episode that unfolds as a legendary adventure.

A comprehensive and helpful survey of English attitudes to the peoples from the Ottoman Empire and North Africa, written in straightforward English with a host of helpful quotations and historical analyses.

A reliable guide to English encounters with peoples from the southern Mediterranean, as they sought to dominate what was then the most strategically important area of the world.

It totally realigned my understanding of the regional differences and distinctives in the US today. It helps explain so much of what is going on today. This is a must-read for anyone interested in US history, politics and culture.

Taíno scholar José Barreiro uses fiction to illuminate what historical sources cannot: how Indigenous people reacted and adapted to Spanish colonization of the Caribbean.

Barreiro spent years researching the life of Guaikán, alias Diego Colón, a Loku Taíno youth briefly mentioned in several Spanish accounts.

By telling Guaikán’s story in the form of a journal written decades after Spanish arrival in the Caribbean, Barreiro vividly narrates the young man’s varied experiences, from his life in Guanahaní before Spanish arrival, to being taken captive by Columbus, to living in the Spanish colonial city of Santo Domingo.

Most importantly, Barreiro movingly conveys how such an individual may have felt about the cataclysmic changes that accompanied European conquest. 

This slim volume features six documents relating to the early years following Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean, including two by Columbus himself. The core of the volume is anthropologist Neil Whitehead’s translation of the account written by Román Pané, the Jeronymite friar sent by Columbus to live among an Indigenous group in the northern part of Hispaniola. There Pané tried, with very limited success, to spread Christianity. He also set down in writing the origin myths and beliefs described by his Native informants, a unique reflection of the Indigenous world that existed when Europeans arrived on the islands. I like this collection both for the range of documents included and Whitehead’s insights from his scholarly and ethnographic work in the Caribbean.  

A confronting history of the British invasion of Australia, documenting the massacres but also the resistance of indigenous people across the continent as they defended their tribal lands well into the twentieth century. No longer could anyone imagine that Australia had been settled peacefully. The book had a profound impact on Australians’  understanding of their history, but also on the continuing political struggle for indigenous rights.