“Europe is very old and America is very big.”
The way Europeans talk about North America when they say it reveals everything about the way they think.
To them, history here didn’t start until they arrived. Not until the so called real people with real culture and real architecture and real timelines stepped off a boat.
Everything before that gets treated like fog, like background noise, like a blank landscape waiting to be drawn on.
Like the Europeans arrived here and just found a land untouched by human hands ready for them to Manifest (European) Destiny in, instead of, like, a continent full of nations older than most European countries, with civilizations, trade routes, astronomy, agriculture, laws, stories, cities, innovations, relationships to the land that go further back than many of the languages used to belittle them.
When Europeans say “America is big,” they don’t even mean the actual land full of over 500 nations of distinct peoples.
They mean the unmarked page they imagine they wrote on. When they say “Europe is old,” they mean “ours is the old that matters.” The implication is always that Indigenous history doesn’t count as history at all, that Indigenous people were somehow outside the timeline until colonialism kicked the clock into motion.
I’m tired of watching it walk by unchallenged and seeing it drift by unchallenged.
North America wasn’t waiting to be discovered.
It wasn’t empty wilderness.
It wasn’t without time or culture or memory.
It was already ancient when the Europeans arrived.
Treating Indigenous people like footnotes or shadows just makes it embarrassingly obvious that a lot of Europeans still don’t see them as real people with real history, real innovation, and real presence.
This continent has been old for longer than Europe has had its current borders. The only thing that’s new here is the colonial amnesia.
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