…that Europeans and their descendants would have the chance to actually colonize the vast continent of the Americas.”

Native Nations: A Millunium in North America, by Kathleen DuVal (2024) takes the long view, and finds there was nothing inevitable about our current state of affairs—it was, in fact, unlikely. Writing Begin the World Over, one of the surprising things I learned was just how tenacious is the belief that the present state of affairs is the only world that could have ever been. By tenacious, I mean how deeply and persistently I believed this, in my bones, even while I was intellectually committed to testing out to the opposite belief, that another world could have been possible. Buddhist wisdom suggests the tenacity of this belief has something to do the reification of self. Perhaps we can shed this (paralyzing) belief of inevitability through meditation on anattā (Pali: 𑀅𑀦𑀢𑁆𑀢𑀸), the doctrine of no-self. There is no unchanging, permanent self or essence. There is no inevitable timeline bringing us to this here now.