(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
 . . . . . . . . . .



America’s Multicultural Heritage [1]

['Excorpflunky', 'Zct.Life', 'View Profile', 'Sabrina Haake', 'Chitown Kev']

Date: 2026-04-26  

At Fort Raleigh there’s a monument to the first English colonial child, Virginia Dare, born in America in 1587, part of the Lost Colony of Roanoke Virginia. Due to the Spanish Armada trying to invade England the following year, Queen Elizabeth kept all ships at home, delaying Virginia’s grandfather from returning with supplies for several years, until after the island colony had disappeared. There’s an annual celebration, and the story is very widely known.

But twenty-one years before Miss Dare, Martin de Argüelles was born in St Augustine Florida. But there’s neither monument nor celebration. Similarly, William Tucker b. 1624 in Virginia is not the first African American child born in what’s now the US. That honor belongs to Estebana b. 1595 in St Augustine, although that fact is not widely recognized.

And the Basque had a whaling colony in Red Bay Labrador in the 1530s. But all that pales in comparison to Snorri Thorrfinnsson, born around 1,000 CE at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. Yes, by far the earliest recorded non-native birth in the Americas was a Norse child, in the seasonal outpost where humanity finally reconnected our distant ancestors for the first time since we left Africa.

Americans suffer from cultural blindness, and we are routinely mocked around the world for only speaking one language. Our history stresses our English roots, not our earlier Spanish roots. (And we ignore our tragic history with Native Americans even more, but that’s the subject of a future story).

But the French built Fort Caroline in Florida before the Spanish built St Augustine. Our French heritage is at the heart of America, at Ste. Geneviève near St. Louis Missouri, connecting French culture from the Acadians in Maine, to Quebec City and south to the Cajuns of Louisiana.

Yet Americans have long resisted acknowledging our multicultural roots. The story of the Louisiana Purchase is taught, but how many Americans know that Napoleon’s sale to Jefferson was motivated in large part by the Haitian Revolution, the most successful slave rebellion in world history? We once had a US holiday celebrating Andrew Jackson’s ‘victory’ in the Battle of New Orleans, but how few Americans know that that victory actually belonged to the pirate Jean Lafitte?

In the swampy Arkansas Post, I was told that the Canadian River was so misnamed because the French fur traders mistakenly thought that the Arkansas River tributary came from Canada. But the French traders knew where Canada was, knew the rivers they traversed and also spoke Spanish. The Canadian River starts in the Spanish settled Sangre de Cristo area on the border between Colorado and New Mexico and flows through Palo Duro canyon, the second largest canyon in the US. No, the more likely explanation for the river’s name is its most descriptive feature: a canyon or cañada in Spanish.

Our narrow-minded Anglo-centric provincial world view does not serve us well in a global world where most people don’t speak any English at all.

For nine years beginning in 1755 the British forcibly deported 80% of Acadians from their homes in Nova Scotia and nearby areas—including Maine—enforcing a cultural and linguistic separation (or ‘ethnic cleansing’) despite the neutrality of the Acadians. Some 5,000 died during the Grand Dérangement immortalized in Longfellow’s poem Evangeline, and many Acadian/Cajun families in Louisiana trace their history back to this tragic policy. This xenophobia destroyed many innocent families, and yet somehow, our government is determined to repeat the mistakes of the past, likely ignorant of this history entirely.

When will we ever learn.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/4/26/800028189/community/i/

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/