βEurope is very old and America is very big.β
Colonial America, maybe.
The way Europeans talk about North America when they say it reveals everything about the way they think.
To them, history here didnβt 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 βAmerica is big,β they donβt 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 βEurope is old,β they mean βours is the old that matters.β The implication is always that Indigenous history doesnβt count as history at all, that Indigenous people were somehow outside the timeline until colonialism kicked the clock into motion.
Iβm tired of watching it walk by unchallenged and seeing it drift by unchallenged.
North America wasnβt waiting to be discovered.
It wasnβt empty wilderness.
It wasnβt 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 donβt 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 thatβs new here is the colonial amnesia.
