Sometimes I imagine: What if first contact in the Americas had been marked not by violence but by wonder? If the first Europeans who arrived here had looked into the faces of the indigenous people they met and thought not savage but sister and brother, it would have been difficult, perhaps impossible, to mount operations of enslavement, theft, rape, and domination. Such operations depend on the lie that some people are subhuman. If they saw them as equals instead, might they have sat down and negotiated a shared future? Imagine institutions on this soil built on the premise of equality rather
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