In the history of European people there has been a lot of conquest and a lot of colonization that have subjugated the expression of the land and the first-people of that land. In deep history we find the Indo-European expanding from the Euro Mountains into Europe, Northern Middle-East, Persia, and the northern Indian Peninsula between 4000 B.C.E. to 1000 B.C.E. splintering into many linguistic and culture groups with unique expressions in how they related to the environments they have now inhabitant for thousands of years.
Then they began to encroach on other indo-European territory and subjugating those Indo-European cultures with their own. We see this with the expansion of Russia, into Eastern Europe, the Germanic invasion into Celtic territory and most prominent in our historical awareness are the Greeks, then the Romans. Not only that these Indo-European cultures amalgamated, through many methods of expansion into Europe itself. Little is known about the alpine races of Europe that pre-dated the explosion of Celtic and Germanic migrations.
In more modern history the age of exploration saw the Spanish, Dutch, and English expand great territories around the world. Somewhere in-between all of this, these cultures lost their own Bio-Regional identities with the state religion of Rome, later superseded by the expansion of Christianity. Christianity being of Semitic origin in the Middle East beginning as a faction of Judaism. At large the Indo-European had adopted a foreign mythos with stories centered around middle-eastern Bio-Regions and introducing the concept of Monotheism (one god/divine force of an anthropmophic figure over all creation) severing the Indo-European expression even further from Bio-Regional awareness and subjugating nature to natural resources to be consumed to fuel the economic and religious expansion into distant lands.
Not a single part of the world can claim to be untouched by this expansion. The expansion saw the subjugation of many first peoples and their animist perspectives to the authority of the European world view which belonged to the Europeans as much as it did these first people. This expansion spread plague and deceases desecrating many populations and obliterating entire civilizations, along side large scale economic exploitation of the remaining populations which is still going on today.
As an American of European heritage this is a very hard history to swallow and digest. Not that this kind of history cannot be found in China, and the Muslim expansion in the Middle East and Northern Africa. Or with the genocides between tribal civilizations in today’s world. But it is a the history of my people, but in many ways I have to question how much of it applies to me personally? After all I never owned slaves, I never raped and pillaged native villages, and I never demanded my religion be adopted over another. So, I do not see the use of feeling guilt about this history; however my concern is this history places me in undeserved privilege where the entire world has unjustly been bent towards these advantages. This does concern me greatly! How do post-colonial Europeans reconcile with the land and people they have colonized?
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Then they began to encroach on other indo-European territory and subjugating those Indo-European cultures with their own. We see this with the expansion of Russia, into Eastern Europe, the Germanic invasion into Celtic territory and most prominent in our historical awareness are the Greeks, then the Romans. Not only that these Indo-European cultures amalgamated, through many methods of expansion into Europe itself. Little is known about the alpine races of Europe that pre-dated the explosion of Celtic and Germanic migrations.
In more modern history the age of exploration saw the Spanish, Dutch, and English expand great territories around the world. Somewhere in-between all of this, these cultures lost their own Bio-Regional identities with the state religion of Rome, later superseded by the expansion of Christianity. Christianity being of Semitic origin in the Middle East beginning as a faction of Judaism. At large the Indo-European had adopted a foreign mythos with stories centered around middle-eastern Bio-Regions and introducing the concept of Monotheism (one god/divine force of an anthropmophic figure over all creation) severing the Indo-European expression even further from Bio-Regional awareness and subjugating nature to natural resources to be consumed to fuel the economic and religious expansion into distant lands.
Not a single part of the world can claim to be untouched by this expansion. The expansion saw the subjugation of many first peoples and their animist perspectives to the authority of the European world view which belonged to the Europeans as much as it did these first people. This expansion spread plague and deceases desecrating many populations and obliterating entire civilizations, along side large scale economic exploitation of the remaining populations which is still going on today.
As an American of European heritage this is a very hard history to swallow and digest. Not that this kind of history cannot be found in China, and the Muslim expansion in the Middle East and Northern Africa. Or with the genocides between tribal civilizations in today’s world. But it is a the history of my people, but in many ways I have to question how much of it applies to me personally? After all I never owned slaves, I never raped and pillaged native villages, and I never demanded my religion be adopted over another. So, I do not see the use of feeling guilt about this history; however my concern is this history places me in undeserved privilege where the entire world has unjustly been bent towards these advantages. This does concern me greatly! How do post-colonial Europeans reconcile with the land and people they have colonized?
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