I wonder if school children are still as misinformed as my generation was about the discovery of America – why our native people
are called Indians, and a number of other mysterious inconsistencies.

In my day, children were told that “… Columbus sailed the ocean blue” and discovered America, even though he, himself, didn’t think he had. We celebrated Columbus Day on October 12, and didn’t even bother to wonder why our continent was called America rather than Columbia.

We believed that he had discovered America even though it had clearly been discovered by the people who already lived here. He called them Indians, and died believing that what he had discovered was, not a continent previously unknown to Europeans, but a new route from Europe to India (thus the mistaken reference to the natives as Indians.)

Although Europeans were beginning to accept the belief that the world was round and not a flat plane with abruptly ending perimeters, they had no idea of its actual size or even the existence of the American continents. And they certainly had no clue that the continents had already been “discovered” at least seven times, by various adventurers over a wide range of years.

Although there is disagreement about the date, it is known that Polynesians discovered South America around 1200 A.D. where they encountered people descended from hunter-gatherers who had arrived from northern Asia by way of the Bering land bridge that at one time connected today’s Russia and Alaska. And there is abundant evidence that Lief Erikson had sailed from Iceland to the Americas 500 years before Columbus even thought about it. Erikson was the son of Eric the Red, a powerful Viking chieftain who ventured into the little-known waters of the North and Atlantic seas in search of new people, places and riches. While fearsome, these bold explorers contributed much knowledge of navigation and geography to the peoples with whom they came in contact. Their habit of claiming the strongest and most beautiful women from places they raided definitely contributed to the heartiness and handsomeness of subsequent generations, especially in the Nordic countries.

It was Giovanni Caboto (Cabot) who actually identified North America as a continent in 1497. Another adventurer, Amerigo Vespucci, made the first rudimentary maps of the newly-identified continent and whose name was consequently applied to it.

The name “America” does not, even today, refer to our nation but to the general area of the two continents known as North and South America. Once known to the natives as Turtle Island, our country had several other names before it became The United States of America. Various European countries explored and laid claim to portions of what was referred to as “the new world” until the original
area populated by immigrants mainly from England became known as “the colonies.” It took roughly two hundred years before the residents of this “new” land agreed that they wanted to separate their destiny from that of the English and other European nations and establish a new, independent and true democracy. The achievement of that lofty goal is still a work in progress.

Columbus Day, long observed on the 12th of this month was changed in 1971 to the second Monday of the month to give citizens an extra day on the weekend. During the past fifty years, many Americans have begun to observe the date in a different manner. Owing to Columbus’s own mistreatment of the indigenous people, they choose to focus on the American natives and the celebration of their culture. In 1989, South Dakota became the first state to officially change Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day.

Many states have since followed suit. Our native citizens traditionally celebrate with native food, performances, music, art such as beadwork, painting and sculpture, and the performance of traditional ceremonies. The rest of us can learn much from them.