Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by umanwizard 1714 days ago
“American outlook” here means the outlook of mainstream US culture, not some shared context of everyone who has ever inhabited the land. So the “American” (really, U.S. American) cultural context is in fact not related to Hiawatha at all.

Hiawatha didn’t know what “America” was and presumably wouldn’t have conceptualized himself as being part of a pan-“Native American” identity.

Assuming you could even explain the concept of a web server to a pre-industrial person, it’s impossible to know how he himself would have felt about this.