I must have been in the fourth or fifth grade when I learned how our continent got its name. The shocking truth was that it came from an Italian businessman and explorer named Amerigo Vespucci. As a young man working for the Medici family Amerigo learned that explorers were looking for a northwest passage to the Indies. When he was in his forties, after Christopher Columbus had made his famous voyages, Amerigo decided that he too wanted to explore this new world. He left his business behind and embarked on a number of explorations discovering numerous places in South America. In 1507, cartographers working on maps of the New World decided to honor Amerigo by naming South America after him. Later in 1538, a mapmaker chose to use the name America for all parts of the continent both north and south.
The idea that the word, America, has some special connotation for only the United States is historically incorrect. Those who live in Canada, Central America and South America are also Americans in the strictest sense of that word. Somehow along the way we have coopted that designation as though we are the only ones who have a right to be considered Americans. It is a rather audacious thing to do. It detracts from the contributions of all of the people who are part of the history of the incredible new world that Europeans stumbled upon in their travels. We like to say that they discovered certain areas but of course those places already existed. They were simply unknown to the Europeans of the time. The true ancestors of our nations are the native peoples who roamed the land for centuries before the explorers even arrived.
Humans have walked across the world from the beginning of time. More often than not the earliest humans wandered in search of food and perhaps warmer places to live during the cold of winter. Eventually many of them settled down into agrarian communities where they built permanent structures and enacted rules, laws and traditions.
It is important to teach our children such things. Knowing such information provides them with a more enlightened way of looking at how humans have evolved over time. They are able to understand why people adopted certain practices and settled down in particular areas. The ascent of humans from being hunter gatherers to creating towns and eventually nations is fascinating and speaks to the inventiveness of humans from all parts of the world.
We live in very modern times in which even people in what may have been primitive places are driving cars, watching television, using computers, enjoying the benefits of technology. At the same time they have their own languages and cultures and ways of interacting with the world. They have created different foods and clothing and hairstyles. All in all humans have always had a tendency to move forward with their art, architecture, and knowledge of the natural world.
When Shakespeare penned the famous lines what a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving, how express and admirable, in action how like an angel..” he praised the best aspects of our humanity and yet there has always been a baser reality of the people who have lived on this earth. Those explorers to new worlds took for granted that they somehow owned the land and the riches of the places that they found. They pushed the native peoples aside, sometimes looking at them as being subhuman. The stories of this happening abound and comprise the realities of exploration of what would become the Americas.
Some people seem to think that exposing children to such honesty is damaging to them, but I learned these things when I was nine or ten years old. Somehow they did not terrify me or make me think less of the people that I knew, they were simply facts that explained to me how we have historically made mistakes and then changed for the better a bit here and there over time. It helped me to understand that we are always a work in progress and that we have the possibility to be angels but have yet to rise completely to that status. For me life is a process of making mistakes and then trying to do better and be better. I am no different, no better or no worse, than those who came before me with the kind of hopes and dreams that only humans are able to envision among all of the living things attempting to survive. Those were beautiful lessons that surely made me want to reach for the perfection that Shakespeare describes with his beautiful words.
We would do well not to believe or boast that we are somehow the golden people who deserve more than others. We might do better and be better by embracing the truth that we are but a part of a vast continent made up of Americans of many different cultures and languages. History demonstrates over and over that we are best if we remain humble and willing to understand that we are simply one version of people trying to live our best lives.
All It Takes Is A Little Love 