Great points ! "We’re all immigrants" is a feel good statement, but it does leave out so many people. Also, "pilgrim" is a silly term. It assumes the Europeans were making a pilgrimage to some place. They were not on a "peregrinaje" like El Camino de Santiago. The term probably originated from the idea of a New Jerusalem in the New World. But the reality is, it was neither a new world or a new Jerusalem they were traveling to. As you rightly point out, they came to displace others from their land. They were colonizers in the true sense of the word, rather than pilgrims. While pilgrim sounds nice and gives some religious justification to their travel, their arrival in North America was neither nice or religiously beneficial to the people already here.
Great points ! "We’re all immigrants" is a feel good statement, but it does leave out so many people. Also, "pilgrim" is a silly term. It assumes the Europeans were making a pilgrimage to some place. They were not on a "peregrinaje" like El Camino de Santiago. The term probably originated from the idea of a New Jerusalem in the New World. But the reality is, it was neither a new world or a new Jerusalem they were traveling to. As you rightly point out, they came to displace others from their land. They were colonizers in the true sense of the word, rather than pilgrims. While pilgrim sounds nice and gives some religious justification to their travel, their arrival in North America was neither nice or religiously beneficial to the people already here.