Here is one example:
King Joao II of Portugal was a statesman that supported the exploration and exploitation of the undiscovered world. Arguably the first nation to discover America, under Joao’s reign Portugal made several other important discoveries while also advancing the field of nautical navigation.
The problem with this narrative is that it implicitly divorces the indigenous inhabitants from the rest of humanity’s history, as if nothing that they ever did ‘counted’ as history. If it had said, ‘the first European nation to find America,’ then that would have been acceptable, but suggesting that any Europeans ‘discovered’ America arrogantly dismisses the indigenous presence as somehow irrelevant or unimportant.
When we talk about Turtle Island’s history (like so), we never say, ‘The Native Americans discovered Europeans.’ Hell, I never see anybody say that the Romans ‘discovered’ Germania — or anywhere else, for that matter, and I think that that is because Germanic history is as much a part of human history as Turtle Islander history is (or should be, at least).
I know that I am really late to this party and that this narrative has been becoming less popular in recent years, but I have never seen anyone quite articulate the issue with it like this either, so I needed to rant.
A Spanish king sent a Genovese-born Spanish citizen westward? Roll with it. Conservatives in this country will fly into a rage thinking non-whites had any part in discovering their so-called holy land.
Columbus didn’t even “discover” (I use the term loosely) what’s now the United States of America. He found the Bahamas and Hispañiola, though he was convinced it was South Asia. The Spanish Crown named him Governor of whatever land he found, but he was stripped of the title after admitting to flogging and executing natives without trial.
Despite being arrested, Ferdinand and Isabella did let him keep 10% of the gold he found, the Crown taking the remainder.
The style at the time was to transliterate names. In Spain, he was known as Cristobál Colón. I’ll mark the date as Indigenous Peoples’ Day. The shitstains in this country can have their Colon Day.