Almost every American grew up with a certain pattern of myths that were taught to us as facts. Some myths are created to advance certain agendas. Although there were plenty of good, true stories about George Washington, some felt it necessary to make up the one about him chopping down the cherry tree so they could hold up our first President as a model of truth.
Who "invented’ baseball? An early baseball leader, A.G. Spaulding, was so anxious that it be an American game that he created the myth that Abner Doubleday had invented the game. Doubleday, it turns out, had nothing to do with the founding of the game.
And there is another sort of insidious myth many of us still harbor as accurate. It is that Christopher Columbus discovered America. The first correction is that some Vikings, under the leadership of Leif Erickson, actually found North America about five hundred years earlier. But there is a bigger truth…
America had already been discovered, developed and lived in for hundreds of years by Americans native to this land. Columbus, of course, was simply the representative of a then powerful Spanish nation that had the ability to capitalize, commercially, on the discovery of this land we now occupy. 
As someone joked recently, had the original Indians had in place a tough immigration law, they might still be running this country. Certainly, the millions who died from disease brought by the Europeans would have millions more descendants today.
Since, except for Native Americans, we are all descendants of other continents, we may choose to honor the brave Columbus as America’s founder because he came from the same place lots of us did: Europe.
The Columbus myth can expose a human tendency to discriminate against those different from us. From the European standpoint, North American was irrelevant until Europeans had discovered and settled it. Our forefathers arrogant treatment of natives is a scar on our history.
Discrimination is, in itself, insidious. It weakens us as caregivers. It blocks our humanity. It closes off our connection to Love. It appeals to the core "sin" of existence – pride.
The way we write history tells us a lot about who we are. The best way we can really honor our heritage is to build the present and the future on a new foundation of tolerance and Love. When that happens, we will truly be able to say that a new America has been discovered.
-Erie Chapman
Journal of Sacred Work 
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