Many thanks for the advice - for reading - and for the encouragement
1520 - 1530
These fateful 10 years started just as any other decade: colonisation, drinking with neighbours, smoking Happy Grass, dancing with wolves, and worshipping Manitu the Great Spirit at the totem poles which we now had plenty of.
What a misleading normality that was.
For in the early 20's, hairy and smelly pale people in ridiculous clothes appeared just North of what we had time to colonise.
'Vive la France!' they said, planting a blue flag on top of a small wooden shanty at the sea coast.
Chief Ottawa scratched his head. 'Aaaaah,' he said. By this time, he was incredibly old; but he still refused to die. By late afternoon, we understood his point: he was upset that Aztecas were still not very friendly with us, Dakota still refused to speak with us, colonisation was still unfinished, but the Other People already arrived.
We could not get it. So they arrived; so what? The Earth is big, and it does not belong to anyone. The Chief said he would come back to this specific point later.
Meanwhile, he collected his best furs and dispatched them to the French traders. They liked the furs. He then sent them some Happy Grass. They liked it even more; and before long we entered a military alliance with France. They were already allied with some obscure never-heard-of nations like England, Helvetia, and some others whose names we simlpy could not pronounce.
This is how we looked when we met the French traders:
That made us wonder. For our new allies were not very quiet. They immediately declared wars on about 10 other far away nations whose names we did not even bother to learn.
That put us into a dilemma. For we were a nation of completely free citizens, not yet very centralised and quite innovative. So our people did not like war.
Luckily, before many revolts started, Europeans signed peace with each other (for a few months, after which we were drawn into yet another war).
Our Chief seemed undisturbed, however. He called the best diplomat in the country into his wigwam, and somehow managed to explain to him what he wanted. They smoked some; prayed to Manitu; had some ritual drinking and sex with virgins; and Manitu heard them. He took the diplomat into his hands and put him into the capital of Palatinat, of which we had recently learned. Needless to say, the diplomat had lots of presents on him.
The procedure was repeated till Palatinat loved us, and was more than happy to share with us its explorations.
This is how Europe looked:
And after that, Chief Ottawa crawled out of his very old wigwam. 'Chhhiiildreeeen,' he called us. Basically, he wanted to show us this chart again, which he had by now updated:
And then he spoke once more. We, Delawares, are very patient, so finally this is what we made out of his speech:
1. Manitu possesses all land in the world. We agreed, of course.
2. Looking at the chart, we have more land than anyone else. Manitu loves us for it. This made sense to us.
3. Since He loves us, we are His chosen people. Pretty obvious.
4. Since we are His chosen people, he gives us all the land in the world. We double-checked with the Chief if this was what he meant; he confirmed. After drinking some wine from the French territories, we agreed that this statement was not unreasonable.
And then the Chief said that two lines really bothered him on the chart: blue one for our allies France and yellow one for Spain. We looked and nodded: indeed, no one could explain the sharp increase of the yellow line on the chart. It did not look harmonious.
