The “Discovery” of North America

Hello and welcome! I hope you are well. Today’s post is one I am really excited about. It’s on the colonisation of North America and why it is significant. I have been recently trying to tackle my own ignorance about First Nation’s issues. I live, go to school, see my friends, and do just about everything else on First Nation’s land. I want to make sure I am respecting to the best of my abilities. I have an opportunity to learn more here and I intend to take it.

What is significance? On this topic different people have different opinions. The bare criteria for significance is if it was notable, if it was wide spread, if we still feel the affects today, and if it was memorialized. We’ve been discussing this in class recently and I think it’s interesting to see what different people find significant. I hope to work through this idea more in our next project on the Manhattan Project and the atom bomb.

Why do different people apply significance to different things? I think it goes back to our grade eight unit where we discussed worldview. Different people see the world differently so it goes without saying that you and I might place significance on different things. Does this make the thing less significant if not everyone assigns its significance? Does something being globally significant make it more important than something regionally significant? If an event is positive does it hold a different amount of significance than a negative one on the same scale? Just some ideas I hope to take with me into our next project.

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Events in my life are probably not that globally significant, but think about the potential in the Mandela effect. If I wasn’t drinking tea right now, would my blog post be different? If my blog post was different, could it change the world in a small enough way to cause other consequences? This argument states that everything is significant, no matter how small. I think it’s and interesting perspective to have when talking about what makes things significant. It also goes back to some of the questions I asked earlier.

Back to the original topic, how is the “discovery” of North America significant? It was definitely notable. We read about it in our textbooks, we see it in our daily lives almost no matter where you live, and we face the consequences in our daily lives.

The scope of the discovery of North America was huge. It covered almost all of the world. It changed the things Europeans consumed and it also drastically changed the way the people who were “discovered” lived. This lead to a huge number of consequences. Some of that are relevant to Canadians, but also people all over the world, would be residential schools, the spread of disease, and the massacre of indigenous cultures. These things are coming to light to westerner’s now, but they have always been present.

We memorialize North American colonization through many things. Thanksgiving is a North American holiday celebrating the first meal that the Europeans had with the indigenous people of the land. This happens every year. If you want to know more about what really happened on the first thanksgiving, check out this awesome video by Adam Ruins Everything.

https://fb.watch/9k4E20rcs4/

What do I think? Well, between you and me I’m not sure if that is at all significant. I think the significance lies in what the people living here originally think. But that brings up even more questions!

I obviously think that this event was significant, that’s why I wrote a bloody blog post on it. It touched everyone’s lives all over the globe in one way or another and that makes it significant.

Thanks for reading. If anyone other than my teacher is reading, or even if you are my teacher, let me know what you thought of this post. I am trying so hard to improve my writing. I also know a good way to do that is accept and work with feedback.

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