Here is one example:
King Joao II of Portugal was a statesman that supported the exploration and exploitation of the undiscovered world. Arguably the first nation to discover America, under Joao’s reign Portugal made several other important discoveries while also advancing the field of nautical navigation.
The problem with this narrative is that it implicitly divorces the indigenous inhabitants from the rest of humanity’s history, as if nothing that they ever did ‘counted’ as history. If it had said, ‘the first European nation to find America,’ then that would have been acceptable, but suggesting that any Europeans ‘discovered’ America arrogantly dismisses the indigenous presence as somehow irrelevant or unimportant.
When we talk about Turtle Island’s history (like so), we never say, ‘The Native Americans discovered Europeans.’ Hell, I never see anybody say that the Romans ‘discovered’ Germania — or anywhere else, for that matter, and I think that that is because Germanic history is as much a part of human history as Turtle Islander history is (or should be, at least).
I know that I am really late to this party and that this narrative has been becoming less popular in recent years, but I have never seen anyone quite articulate the issue with it like this either, so I needed to rant.
There’s a material reason that the narrative takes this form on top of the colonialist/supremacist reasons.
When Europeans first made contact, they brought disease that destroyed native civilization. I’ve read that more than 90% of the population was wiped out by smallpox and other diseases. By the time Europeans came back to settle, the continent felt empty and unclaimed.
To add even more to the bullshit narrative, indigenous cultivation was no longer possible. Vast swaths of land went from carefully managed prairie and farm field to feral forest. However, the forest was young enough to be cleared easily. The settler’s ease at clearing the “wild” forest was evidence of their superiority over the backwards and lazy natives, who couldn’t put such blessed land to good and Godly use.
The native cultivation was/is highly advanced and developed for specific climates- it’s really fascinating. I find it depressing that the way many people are taught erases that in favor of eminent domain style narratives.
A Spanish king sent a Genovese-born Spanish citizen westward? Roll with it. Conservatives in this country will fly into a rage thinking non-whites had any part in discovering their so-called holy land.
Columbus didn’t even “discover” (I use the term loosely) what’s now the United States of America. He found the Bahamas and Hispañiola, though he was convinced it was South Asia. The Spanish Crown named him Governor of whatever land he found, but he was stripped of the title after admitting to flogging and executing natives without trial.
“They [the Taino] were very well built, with very handsome bodies and very good faces,” Columbus wrote in his diary. “They do not carry arms or know them… They should be good servants.”
Despite being arrested, Ferdinand and Isabella did let him keep 10% of the gold he found, the Crown taking the remainder.
The style at the time was to transliterate names. In Spain, he was known as Cristobál Colón. I’ll mark the date as Indigenous Peoples’ Day. The shitstains in this country can have their Colon Day.
Bit idea: reframing all European history from the perspective of when they were discovered by the Mongols.
That’s because Europeans are the only true humans. /s
Everyone is some form of non-human animal. /s
The bigotry is baked into every avenue of their learning, what makes it worse is their denial and delusion.
As it has been pointed out elsewhere, Native Americans have been in the America longer than most Europeans have been in Europe.
Tbf people still call indigenous picts, germanics and illyrians “barbarians” and whine endless about how great rome was. Another related anecdote is that in english they translated medieval german polities as “stem duchies” -> while the original word means just tribal duchies and is the same word used as to describe native polities (tribes). Because they couldnt fathom calling white people tribal.
But yeah, the erasure of indigenous people is very real. I too often see people in the wild talking as if native americans died out and dont exist anymore or that they arent relevant in the us because its “only” 4 milion people.
because its “only” 4 million people.
…which itself is just fucking wild considering there were around 100 million Native Americans between the US and Canada prior to European contact. 96 million people killed in what is likely the largest genocide in history at an apocalyptic scale.
To pretend that isn’t relevant and brush it off with whatever colonizer takes people come up with is ignoring how much of the human experience we’ve lost.
