As Discovery Day gets the spike, let's look at other legends we've been propping up

On Thursday, in one of his final acts as premier and just days before it mattered most, Dwight Ball announced that Discovery Day is no more.

Discovery Day, a quasi-holiday that means a paid day off for public servants but not the public at large, had its own days numbered: Indigenous groups have long said it was insensitive, St. John's city council voted it out two years ago, and this week New Democrat Jordan Brown put it on the legislative agenda.

Ball said the government "determined that it is not appropriate to refer to the June 24 holiday as 'Discovery Day.'" The new name has yet to be determined — Ball said government would consult with Indigenous people on its replacement — and so for now, it will just generically and quite vaguely be called "the June holiday."

Discovery Day was such a weak date on the calendar that many people — upon learning that it been cancelled — were not sure enough about its history to argue against it being written out of existence.

In fact, a large number of people did not even know that it predates the John Cabot celebrations of 1997, for which it seems to be best known.

Cabot and the concept of discovery

Discovery Day used to be a statutory holiday, starting in at least the early '60s, but the government put an end to that in 1992, when it cut the number of full-on public holidays. An exception was in 1997, that year of Cabot 500, when the provincial government rolled out the carpet to the Queen and invited the world's tourists to celebrate the 500th anniversary of John Cabot's landfall.

It was all about John Cabot. The Italian navigator was playing for the English in 1497, backed by Bristol merchants and sailing with the blessing of Henry VII. Cabot made landfall somewhere on June 24, the Feast of St. John the Baptist.

And it was all about this word: "discovery." It's not as innocent a word as it appears. It doesn't just ignore but eliminates Indigenous history and experience.

John Cabot was only another visitor.- Loyola Hearn, 1992

It's also just historically dishonest. And we've known this for some time.

Here's what former MHA Loyola Hearn said in the House of Assembly in November 1992, when the legislature was debating giving Discovery Day and other holidays the chop from the list of statutory holidays.

"The argument can be made, has been made and undoubtedly will be made again that Newfoundland was not discovered on June 24th, 1497, that John Cabot was only another visitor," Hearn told the legislature, adding that the Norse and St. Brendan had already visited an island that was already home to permanent residents.

We were hardly alone in picking Discovery Day as the name of a holiday that celebrates Europeans. Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Colombia all have a Discovery Day to mark Christopher Columbus's voyages. So did the Bahamas, until it reclaimed the holiday several years ago as National Heroes Day. Guam and Brazil also have a Discovery Day, again in the name of other Europeans who claimed their lands as their own.

Meanwhile, there is another Discovery Day in which the word has a different meaning; in Yukon, there's an August holiday that marks the launch of the gold rush of 1896.

It's right in the name

Being "discovered," of course, is rooted in Newfoundland's very identity. Think carefully about the island's name. New. Found. Land. The name of course goes back to the claims that Cabot made when he returned to England, boasted of such plentiful fish that you could scoop them out of the water in baskets (I've always wondered if the capelin were rolling in those June days), and received a payment of 10 pounds to "hym that found the new isle." There it was: the foundation for the island's name, and we might not even think about that more than five centuries later.

If Discovery Day here felt flimsy, consider other things about our supposed discovery. We actually know very little about John Cabot, the anglicized name of Giovanni Caboto.

Chief among them: we definitely don't know where he landed. Bonavista is traditionally put up as the site of landfall, but there's no evidence at all of any specific site. The eminent British historian David Quinn's best estimate is that Cabot's route would have brought him "near the mouth of the Strait of Belle Isle," possible Cape Bauld. Famously, in pre-1949 Canada, there was such a belief that Cabot somehow sailed right past Labrador, Newfoundland and even Quebec that they put up a statue of Cabot in Aspy Bay, Cape Breton. It's worth noting that when the late archeologist Peter Pope wrote a book about how the Cabot traditions got invented, he chose The Many Landfalls of John Cabot as its title

Despite all that, nothing stopped the Brian Tobin government from pulling off quite the party in Bonavista, all of it aimed at positioning Newfoundland and Labrador as a tourist destination.

In that era, the word "colony" was a marketing phrase. Today, "decolonization" is the potent word of an era, and speaks to why Ball noted Thursday that the government also wants to ensure "the province's memorials, statues and holidays are culturally sensitive."

Changing names, and attitudes

One of the things that will no doubt change is the overdue move to rename the Mary March Provincial Museum in Grand Falls-Windsor. It has for years borne the name given to Demasduit by her kidnappers.

In a statement to CBC earlier this month, Anne Chafe, the interim chief executive officer of The Rooms Corp., said the need to rename the museum is recognized.

"As a next step, The Rooms has identified the renaming of Mary March Provincial Museum as part of The Rooms' ongoing work towards decolonizing the institution," Chafe said in a statement, adding that it worked with an Indigenous curator to update the Beothuk exhibits at the museum.

Changing names does not mean reconciliation has been achieved, but it is seen as a worthwhile act.

It may also be politically healthy to look at the legends we've created, many of them recent. St. John's — which preferred "St. John's Day" all along to Discovery Day; non-townies would never accept the former over the latter — started marketing itself as the "City of Legends" a few decades ago.

Legends, stories, narratives — they're all important. But they change, as our thinking changes.

Discovery Day will likely not be missed. Another name may well be found that will have more fitting meaning for how we now want to think of ourselves.

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