"Facts Belie 'Discovery' of America"

OHSWEKEN - "In fourteen hundred and ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue."

This little bit of doggerel poetry has helped millions of school children remember the date when Christopher Columbus supposedly "discovered Amercia." I say "supposedly" because it is pure fiction.

We now know for a certainty that other Europeans were here before him, although many Americans will never believe it. It doesn't follow the "official" version of Amercian history.

The first colonists from Europe that we know of at the present time were the Vikings. They had spread out from the Scandinavian countries of northern Europe and island-hopped to Iceland, to Greenland, to Labrador and Newfoundland, then to what is now the Maritime provinces and New England states.

Archeologists have found the remains of their settlements there. They beat Columbus by about 500 years.

Irish monks also visited these shores before Columbus - and who knows who else.

Early visitors to the Mandan nation who lived west of the Great Lakes found a number of light-haired natives among them. It suggests previous visitors.

Another reason I call the "discovery of America" fiction is because it is not possible to find something that was never lost.

If you believe in the concept of "finders keepers" as children put it, then it becomes clear what the history writers were trying to do. They were trying to establish that the woods and lakes and other things that they had "discovered" now belonged to them.

If you think "finders keepers" is legal, try driving away with one of the vehicles you "find" parked along the street. Or take that bicycle or wagon left so carelessly on someone's lawn.

Taking things that do not belong to you is theft - pure and simple. England, Spain, Portugal and France were so-called "Christian nations." They should have known better than anybody that what they were doing was not right.

The 500th anniversary of the "Great Discovery" by Columbus will be held in 1992. Naturally the descendants of those who "found" so much wealth here 500 years ago want to celebrate.

To aboriginal people of the Amercias, such celebrations will be like a slap in the face. While indigenous people in such places as Peru struggle against poverty and starvation, tourists in Spain ooh and aah over the magnificent cathedrals built with the gold and silver taken from the ancestors of these same indigenous people. Why should they celebrate?

When Cortez marched into Mexica (Ma-hee-caw), the capital city of the Aztec nation, in 1519, it had about a half-million people.

Early records indicate there were restaurants and barber shops. It was a place of great wealth and huge buildings.

Cortez and his men broke into one large building which was found to be a storehouse of articles made of gold. Maybe it was a museum.

These beautiful things were later melted down into gold bars and shipped off to Europe.

Can you picture Cortez's men showing off their wealth in Europe?

They probably said, "Look what we found."

I hope we First Nations people will not be expected to rejoice at the 500th anniversary of when Columbus got lost. He thought he had reached India but he was over 10,000 miles off the mark.