The point isn’t idle. Words are important—they can influence, and in some
cases rationalize, policy. In 1823 Chief Justice John Marshall of the U.S.
Supreme Court decreed that Cherokees had certain rights to their land in
Georgia by dint of their “occupancy” but that whites had superior rights owing
to their “discovery.” How American Indians managed to occupy Georgia
without having previously discovered it Marshall neglected to explain.^92
The process of exploration has itself typically been multiracial and
multicultural. African pilots helped Prince Henry’s ship captains learn their
way down the coast of Africa.^93 On Christmas Day 1492, Columbus needed
help. Santa Maria ran aground off Haiti. Columbus sent for help to the nearest
Arawak town, and “all the people of the town” responded, “with very big and
many canoes.” “They cleared the decks in a very short time,” Columbus
continued, and the chief “caused all our goods to be placed together near the
palace, until some houses that he gave us where all might be put and guarded
had been emptied.”^94 On his final voyage Columbus shipwrecked on Jamaica,
and the Arawaks there kept him and his crew of more than a hundred alive for
a whole year until Spaniards from Haiti rescued them.
So it has continued. William Erasmus, a Canadian Indian, pointed out,
“Explorers you call great men were helpless. They were like lost children, and
it was our people who took care of them.”^95 Native Americans cured Cartier’s
men of scurvy near Montreal in 1535. They repaired Francis Drake’s Golden
Hind in California so he could complete his round-the-world voyage in 1579.
Lewis and Clark’s expedition to the Pacific Northwest was made possible by
tribe after tribe of American Indians, with help from two Shoshone guides,
Sacagawea and Toby, who served as interpreters. When Admiral Peary
discovered the North Pole, the first person there was probably neither the
European American Peary nor the African American Matthew Henson, his
assistant, but their four Inuit guides, men and women on whom the entire
expedition relied.^96 Our histories fail to mention such assistance. They portray
proud Western conquerors bestriding the world like the Colossus at Rhodes.
So long as our textbooks hide from us the roles that people of color have
played in exploration, from at least 6000 BC to the twentieth century, they
encourage us to look to Europe and its extensions as the seat of all knowledge
and intelligence. So long as they say “discover,” they imply that whites are the
only people who really matter. So long as they simply celebrate Columbus,