>>31950NTA but myths about elves and other creatures long predate European colonialism in the age of sail. Which actually raises the point that a lot of the tropes about spirituality and connection with nature weren't originally generated by contact with a new people group, but were a process of synthesizing existing European myths with this new contact. Europeans already had a romanticized or mythologized view of nature (probably a reflection of the separation from it being created in their society) that they brought with them. Upon seeing peoples who did not create such a distinct separation, these peoples fit into an already existing ideology about the distinction between society and nature and a template for human-like but not human magical creatures. A large part of the mystique of Americans for the early European explorers and settlers was the seeming contradiction of a society that was not seeking to "master" nature and bend it to submission under the yoke and plow, totally reshaping it to suit their class society. The mythologizing of the Americans was an attempt to reconcile this seeming contradiction, and were a reflection of the Europeans' assumption that such a society wasn't possible.
One of the directions this took was "actually they're not a real society because they don't cut down the forests to make farmland. They need to be civilized or killed." Which among other things is partly what this anon says
>>31949 i.e. coping.
Another direction this took was "if these people can resolve the contradiction between human society and nature, maybe their society is better than ours or at least we could learn something from them."
Part of the motivation for the wars and exterminations was certainly that American societies raised a lot of difficult questions about European societies by contrast. This is of course a threat to the ruling class and the kneejerk response to destroy these people also created an opportunity to acquire vast quantities of resources, so it's hardly surprising that this was the direction they went. This is, after all, a culture that had already spent centuries burning heretics, Christianizing Europe, and otherwise supplanting the "indigenous" European cultures alien to Rome and a post-Roman Christendom, like the Goths or
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