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Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

Somehow I doubt the Russians, English, Spanish, French etc that arrived in the Americas landed on a Westphalian continent. I think maps like this give the wrong impression.

Wabanaki (among others) invited French colonists to settle Quebec in part to check (and perhaps attack) the Mohawk, among other conflicts. ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_Wars

I think it is almost universally agreed that the French treated the natives better and more collaboratively than the English, who took a different tone. It's somewhat a shame that the English won that balance of power so early. I wonder how it would be different today if Canada was still New France.

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In the wake of the French Revolution, the hyper-centralist French state, with an Enlightenment-era dislike of diversity and a fondness for "standardization", deliberately eradicated lots of cultural diversity within France -- the Breton and Occitan languages were nearly driven extinct, and Basque's survival is much less assured than on the Spanish side of the border. Were Canada still a French possession, that Parisian chauvinism may well have impacted Canada all the same.

I doubt, the people from the "Nouvelle-France" have diverged a lot from their France counterpart integrating the culture of the native within their own. Most likely France would have lost control like England.

This map contains a lot of overlapping and very rounded regions that I think convey that it's rough areas of settlement rather than some internationally-recognized partition of the land.

The FAQ also contains this, and more nuanced discussion about what the map means.

Why are we recognizing more than one Nation on this territory?

Indigenous history stretches back thousands and thousands of years. Some Indigenous nations were nomadic, while many had permanent communities and seasonal communities. Often, boundaries between territories overlap because the Indigenous Nations were continuously sharing the land and negotiating agreements through their own diplomatic and legal systems.

But heaven forbid we try to understand something before immediately assigning it to a particular side in the culture war du jour.

"Continuously sharing and negotiating" is a wild ride of a euphemism. It's like writing that the Mamluks and Ottomans continuously shared and negotiated a couple of peninsulas. It's true, but what it doesn't say is incredible.

Yeah, different tribes did wage war on other tribes. The echoes of those conflicts are remembered today.

The FAQ strangely avoids the fact that Indigenous Nations also waged war against one another over territory. Sharing the land and negotiating agreements is a strange euphemism. It sounds more interested in narratives of Noble Savages than historical facts.

I wonder if something more like a smooth probability map would make more sense, rather than overlapping borders. The hard lines can give an unreasonable sense of certainty, even if the intent is to indicate uncertainty.

> a Westphalian continent.

I know the reference you're making here, but for other readers who may not know the history, can you elaborate a bit please?

I took Westphalian to refer to the concept of the "nation state", which--at least in the west--is regarded to have been created at the Treaty of Westphalia.

Unfortunately this is a time for history to be oversimplified, and in some cases rewritten.

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