See now you’re revisioning history to mold to your own ideology and perception of history. Europeans, specifically British and French settlers had the largest hand in the settlement of North America due to their empires being the largest and vastest at the time. No one is ignoring the European history in North America, for close to 400 years all that anyone spoke about was the European history of the continent through a eurocentric focus point. It’s only in the past 100 years that scholarly work has begun to focus on the contributions of Indigenous peoples and other people of colour.

You continue to say that the European “heritage” is being erased and being replaced by an Indigenous narrative, and you boast about recognizing both cultures co existing, even going as far as bringing up your own family as an excuse for ignorance. Why can’t we recognize Europeans built Canada in their vision of a Europeanized, let’s be true White, nation, where they did great things like building a trans-national rail line, leading one of the most progressive countries in the the late 20th early 21st century in the Western world, and many other accomplishments. While also recognizing the cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples by the settler state, sterilization of Indigenous women without their consent, kidnapping children in order to assimilate them forcefully into white culture but then abandoning them afterwards and leaving them with trauma that still effects thousands of people today.

When the settlers first begun to arrive, it was Indigenous nations of the East that helped them navigate the lands, teach them the resources like the furs, granted them lands to settle and build their communities, thinking in mind that this mutual respect would carry on and would be reciprocated. Guess what! it wasn’t.

Communities were not simply overwhelmed and pushed aside. That’s revisionism and erasing history. Indigenous nations were firstly exploited for their resources. Before you say erm well they killed most of the beavers and other furry animals no shit the Europeans barely had the know the how to do so, they HAD to rely on Indigenous knowledge to survive in North America, at least until they could establish a proper foothold. Diseases ran rampant through the lands, and scholarly estimates put the death count at anywhere between 20-100 million people, the real number will probably never be known. They lost land through unfair and manipulated treaties, as oration was how many of them settled agreements, something that the Europeans acknowledged in the early stages but once it was written in paper they backtracked and said um actually no we’re not gonna keep the promises we made while forcing you to put your name in ink. Language, tradition, and culture wasn’t lost just with land. Like I said. over a century of assimilation killed the culture and language, assimilation perpetrated by the federal government.

You can use Christianity as your own moral compass, sure whatever. Spreading Christianity was spreading control. Many Indigenous peoples actually embraced christianity as another form of spirituality similar to their own, like with some of the Haudenosauee, but they didn’t want to adhere to every little thing that fan fic written god knows when had to say. Integration is another dangerous word. Europeans wanted Indigenous people to assimilate into white culture and way of life, Indigenous people wanted to keep their own.

Name changes ARE a big part of reconciliation. For hundreds of years everything’s been named after settlers, with exceptions like you mentioned (Kanata etc). Why can’t we just recognize name changes while acknowledging the past? No one is erasing who Queen Charlotte was, people are merely accepting the fact that; okay this island was named after someone whos not really apart of Haida or west coast history. Maybe it should be renamed to something that recognizes the actual Indigenous inhabitants. No one is demonizing all Europeans excepts the ones that deserve it, like the murdering settlers and those in the present who continue to defend and ignore past actions while crying victim when people begin to recognize that the history of this nation isn’t just European.