Indigenous Peoples Day
When Europeans stumbled onto the Americas, they didn’t find a new world—they found an old one that refused to fit on their maps. Naturally, they called it discovery.
🌍 The New World That Wasn’t
When Europeans stumbled onto the Americas, they didn’t find a new world. They found an old one that refused to appear on their maps. Naturally, they called it discovery. It’s amazing what a little self-confidence and a complete lack of perspective can accomplish.
They arrived carrying flags, diseases, and the unshakable belief that God was their travel agent. Everything they saw became theirs by proclamation — the land, the people, even the sunsets. After all, what’s a paradise worth if you can’t rename it after a European monarch?
Their letters home read like travel brochures written by conquerors: “Untouched wilderness! Friendly natives! Abundant gold!” They marveled at what they’d found and promptly began dismantling it, one “civilizing” act at a time.
In truth, the New World wasn’t new at all — just new to them, which was apparently all that mattered. It’s the same story we tell every time we mistake our arrival for creation.
Maybe the real discovery waiting out there was humility — and, as usual, that’s the one they left behind.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”
— Mark Twain