I'd argue that exploration is not exploration if it is not documented or widely known. If Columbo discovered America but died in the process and didn't report about it, would he have same significance?

> exploration is not exploration if it is not documented or widely known

I'm sure Native Americans had documented their land and made it widely known within their society at the time.

How would they document it? In North America no tribe had writing until after encounters with Europeans. They only had oral tradition, which is helpful for preserving myth and little else.

The history of ancient roads, ceremonial centers, seasonal migrations, and trading along fixed routes by various indigenous peoples would seem to suggest that they had some way of preserving information about the geography. I'm very skeptical that oral tradition is incapable of conveying the lay of the land, in fact, that seems to have been a major function of some of the oral tradition (which describes where other groups of people are found in geographical terms, for example).

It's incapable of conveying anything if the civilization is lost. Maybe the mound builders had an incredible understanding of the land, maybe they didn't, but we can't say they documented it, at least not in any way that's transferable to the future or discoverable by a foreign culture.

Maybe I'm moving the goal posts and I'm not trying to do that, so I'll leave the immediate topic there.

> Which then begs the question: why are you upset that we're criticizing ourselves?

I'm not, I'm annoyed with yet another half-Woke 'net commentariat pretending that pointing out the American/Colonialist positionality of discourse in an American fluff piece is insight, when it's just half baked rhetorical whining about someone writing from their own lived experience and positionality. The author of the article, in short, is being mocked for using the language of his culture because the prevailing ideology of the moment proclaims American perspectives to be unilaterally oppressive.

The implied argument is that the Colonial positionality is the most oppressive discourse and therefore the least valid, so using language like "discovers" is argued to continue to marginalize Native cultures, but it's a criticism that is only applied to mainstream American positionalities in order to rewrite American history in a way that justifies "decolonization" and as such I find it a shallow and dangerous criticism worth mocking.

Quick, someone tell me what "Land Back" means, but describe it without violence or ethnic removal. And if you don't know why that phrase is relevant to this screed it's time to pay attention to the memes in the graffiti and the chants of protestors in the US and in Canada.