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.
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.
…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.