Imagining and Claiming the Land
As Europeans touched and began to penetrate land that, previously, had been entirely outside their experience, they began to name and map it, and in so doing to reconceptualize it in European terms. They replaced complex, finely worked-out Indigenous understandings of place and land with their own geographical generalizations – powerful simplifications that enabled them to explore, claim, and often colonize land they knew next to nothing about. In North America, the transfer of the un-European into a register Europeans could understand began with the first European comings and would long continue. Its sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century progress is considered here.
From The Reluctant Land (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008), 20–29.
