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Donna M. Loring, a Penobscot Nation Tribal elder, Vietnam War veteran, and former Tribal representative to the Maine Legislature, is an author, playwright, and nationally award-winning radio host.
Every October, America renews its faith in a myth — the myth of “discovery.” This year, President Donald Trump issued proclamations praising Christopher Columbus and Leif Erikson, calling them heroes who advanced civilization and “changed the course of history.”
But those words are not history. They are mythology — and mythology is the weapon that made colonization possible.
The myth says that this continent was empty and waiting to be found. The truth is that our Nations were here for thousands of years, with governments, laws, spiritual traditions, and trade networks long before Europeans knew these lands existed.
The myth says that European explorers brought “civilization.” The truth is that they brought slavery, disease, and genocide. The myth says they came in faith. The truth is that they came for gold, land, and dominion.
When a U.S. president celebrates these men, he does more than repeat old stories — he renews a colonial faith built on denial. He gives new life to the idea that European conquest was somehow noble, inevitable, or divinely ordained. These proclamations are not just about the past; they are about power in the present. They tell Native people that our truth still doesn’t count, that our survival is still inconvenient to the national story.
As a Penobscot woman, a veteran and an elder, I have lived with the consequences of these myths. I have watched them take legal form in the policies that still bind our Nations — the treaties broken, the lands stolen, the laws written to define who we are. The myth of discovery became the Doctrine of Discovery, and that doctrine became the foundation of federal Indian law. It still lives in courtrooms and legislatures that treat Native sovereignty as a question instead of a fact.
If this country truly wants to honor courage, it should look to the people who endured when those myths became law. The Wabanaki who held fast to the Penobscot River. The children who survived the schools that tried to strip them of language and identity. The veterans who fought for a country that did not fight for them. That is real courage — not the courage to conquer, but the courage to remember.
The mythmakers tell us that “discovery” was destiny, that civilization needed conquest to be born. But truth tells a different story. It tells of peoples who already knew balance, justice, and reverence for life. It tells of survival through centuries of attempted erasure. Truth endures where myth demands silence.
So when I hear these proclamations, I do not hear honor. I hear the echo of the same old myths that built this nation on our backs and graves. And I refuse them.
We are not relics of someone else’s discovery. We are the original storytellers of this land — and our stories are older, truer, and still unfolding.
