Last week, Seattle became the latest U.S. city to stop calling the second Monday in October Columbus Day, instead referring to it as Indigenous Peoples’ Day. The change, also made by Minneapolis in April, recognizes that Columbus didn’t discover a land where people were already living.
The renaming was met with backlash from Italian-Americans, who said the change disrespected their heritage. Others said Seattle was rewriting history.
If history is our guide, Columbus Day shouldn’t be celebrated in the United States. Christopher Columbus didn’t reach the United States. During his first voyage to what is the Americas, he came ashore on the island that is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He later went to what is now Central and South America. He thought he was in Asia.
Other explorers — namely Vikings like Leif Erikson — made landfall on North America, in what is now Newfoundland, centuries before Columbus set sail. John Cabot (an Italian explorer whose real name was Giovanni Caboto) came to present-day Newfoundland in 1497 and claimed it for England.
None of these explorers discovered America or North America, since indigenous people had long been living on the continent.
In his book “A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World,” author Tony Horwitz wonders why so much emphasis is put on Columbus and Plymouth when others had come to the continent first and significant exploration happened between 1492 and 1620. During his study for and journeys he took for the book, Horwitz was surprised to learn the first American colony wasn’t at Plymouth (where the rock, by the way, was shockingly unimpressive) but at Fort St. George in Popham (in present-day Phippsburg, Maine), a place he’d never heard of.
“History isn’t a sport, where coming first means everything,” he writes. “The outposts at Popham and Cuttyhunk were quickly abandoned, as were most of the early French and Spanish settlements. Plymouth endured, the English prevailed in the contest for the continent, and the Anglo-American Protestants — New Englanders in particular — molded the new nation’s memory.
“And so a creation myth arose, of Pilgrim Fathers seeding a new land with their piety and work ethic. The winners wrote the history,” he continues. “But the losers matter, especially in the history of early America.”
The “losers” were the people who were already here when the explorers arrived; those Columbus called “los Indios,” Italian Giovanni da Verrazzano dubbed “la genta de la terra” and the English called “the naturals.”
Their stories didn’t make the history that the winners wrote, but they too should be honored and appreciated.
So, here’s a modest proposal: Instead of honoring a man who did not discover a land that was already inhabited and who never made it to what is now the United States, let’s celebrate the explorers.
Let’s honor those, of any culture, who have the audacity to strike out for places and things unknown. Brave souls like polar explorer Adm. Robert Peary, whose home on Eagle Island in Casco Bay was recently named a National Historic Landmark and who said, “Find a way, or make one.” Invaluable guides such as Sacagawea, who, while carrying her baby son, accompanied Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their journey along the Missouri River, serving as an interpreter and teaching them what was edible and how to make clothes out of animal hides. And, even Christopher Columbus, for although he may not have discovered America, he had a lot of gumption to set sail on long journeys to lands unknown.
Let’s honor their collective audacity.