#sometimes I just need to declutter my mind tho fndjjdndb I should just write a journal

[llatimeria]

God imagine how funny history would be if we got some early european explorers showing up in the Americas and trying to settle down and do things the way they did back in Europe and immediately finding that nothing worked the way they expected but instead of just brute forcing the square peg through a round hole into the eternal torment nexus nightmare that is colonialism they just said "you know what? actually fuck this!" and just gave the fuck up. and it just became a funny little blip in history textbooks like "wow europeans tried to colonize america but sucked at it so badly that they just gave up and went home/joined up with the locals/died badly". but no we fucking live in the bad timeline where we somehow threaded the camel through god damn needle and not only survived but nearly annihilated everyone and everything else in the process, and that fucking fluke still affects and harms all of us every single day of our lives HUNDREDS OF YEARS LATER

(finally catching up on my history class)

The line between recognizing the power of native societies and appreciating the cool parts of their cultures and being weirdly fetishizing like native americans are funny little nature fairies is Very thin, and I'm consciously avoiding it because I know that ultimately does more harm than good, but man it is hard to not fall into the trap of just reducing it to "America Good. Europe Bad" sometimes when learning about this stuff. Some of the things native cultures were doing before colonists showed up is just so obviously . an objectively better way of doing things . And it's absolutely dumbfounding that colonists just did not see that until we started thinking of native americans as little nature fairies that have the Magical Nature Wisdom. I can't believe more early settlers didn't just immediately bail on the shitty disease-riddled deadly freezing cold colonies and go live with the people who actually seemed to know what they were doing and were thriving in the really complicated environment of what is now known as New England