By: Donovan Martin Sr, Editor in Chief
History loves simple verbs. Discovered. Founded. Claimed. They sound decisive, authoritative, final. They suggest a moment when something moves from obscurity into relevance. But the more one sits with the word discovery, the more unstable it becomes—especially when applied to places, peoples, and civilizations that were already living, breathing, trading, worshipping, and telling stories long before an outsider arrived with a flag and a pen.
We are taught, almost casually, that Christopher Columbus “discovered” the Americas. The phrase is repeated so often that it begins to feel factual rather than ideological. Yet it collapses under the lightest scrutiny. Discovery implies absence. It implies the unknown. It implies that something did not meaningfully exist until it was seen, named, and recorded by someone deemed important enough to do the seeing. But the Americas were not empty. They were not hidden. They were not waiting. They were populated by complex societies with their own sciences, governance systems, trade routes, languages, cosmologies, and histories stretching back thousands of years.
So what, exactly, was discovered?
From the perspective of Europe, Columbus encountered lands unknown to them. That distinction matters, yet history often erases it. The language shifts subtly but powerfully—from “first European to reach” to “discoverer,” from encounter to ownership, from contact to conquest. The word discovery becomes a tool, not a description. It reframes presence as absence and survival as irrelevance.
To understand how distorted this is, consider a modern parallel. Imagine traveling to a country your family has never visited. You return home with photos, stories, cultural insights, and personal experiences. You describe the food, the customs, the streets, the people. Have you discovered that country? Of course not. You have discovered it for yourself, perhaps even for your immediate circle, but the country did not come into existence because you stepped off a plane. Its people did not suddenly become real because you observed them. Your arrival did not transform their history into something legitimate.
Yet that is precisely the leap colonial narratives ask us to accept.
The distortion becomes even clearer when we recognize that those labeled as “discoverers” rarely saw themselves as guests or learners. Discovery was quickly followed by renaming, redrawing borders, extracting resources, and imposing foreign systems of rule. Maps were rewritten as if visibility equaled authority. To be seen by the powerful was to be claimed by them. In this way, discovery became less about knowledge and more about control.
This is why the word still matters today. Language shapes memory, and memory shapes power. When children are taught that the Americas were discovered, they are subtly taught that Indigenous existence was secondary, provisional, or incomplete until validated by Europe. The violence that followed—dispossession, disease, enslavement, cultural erasure—is softened, even justified, by the premise that nothing fully “belonged” to anyone yet.
But history is not static, and neither is our responsibility to interrogate it.
In a globalized world where travel, information, and digital access are commonplace, the idea of discovery feels increasingly outdated. We no longer pretend that stepping into a place grants us authorship over it. We understand, at least intuitively, that encountering something new to us does not make us its origin point. And yet, when it comes to historical narratives, we often suspend that logic out of habit or convenience.
Perhaps the more honest word was always encounter. Or contact. Or simply arrival. These words do not erase what came before. They do not center one perspective as the beginning of all meaning. They allow for coexistence of timelines rather than the dominance of one.
To rethink discovery is not to rewrite history dishonestly. It is to write it more accurately. It is to acknowledge that the world did not wait to be found, that civilizations do not require external witnesses to be valid, and that presence does not need permission to count.
In the end, maybe the real discovery is not land at all, but truth—the uncomfortable realization that much of what we inherited as history was shaped less by facts and more by power. And once that realization settles in, it becomes impossible to look at the past, or the present, in quite the same way.
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