Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2020 October 19

= October 19 =

Discovery of the Mississippi
If you type the phrase "discovered the Mississippi" in Advanced Search, you learn that four men discovered the Mississippi River: Marquette, Joliet, De Soto and Cabeza de Vaca. Does Wikipedia try to get agreement between articles or does it allow pluralism of thought? Indexguy (talk) 13:42, 19 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Well, considering there were millions of people living on the banks of, or within traveling distance of, said river when Marquette, Joliet, De Soto and Cabeza de Vaca each first saw it, those people would be shocked to learn they hadn't yet found the river... -- Jayron 32 14:03, 19 October 2020 (UTC)


 * Indexguy -- Cabeza de Vaca and de Soto encountered the Mississippi river in the south, at or near the Gulf of Mexico. Jolliet and Marquette explored the river in the north, starting from the Great Lakes.
 * Jayron32 -- Millions were living in the river basin, but I'm not too sure that millions were living along the banks of the river. AnonMoos (talk) 14:15, 19 October 2020 (UTC)
 * And to imply that zero of them were aware of the existence of said river boggles the mind. Your "well actually..." response doesn't recognize the reality that I'm pretty sure some of the people living in the vicinity of the river (for whatever limit you wish to put on vicinity) were aware of said river's existence.  -- Jayron 32 15:22, 19 October 2020 (UTC)
 * I said absolutely nothing whatsoever about that, so what you think you're replying to has no connection with anything I said. I doubted  claimed population statistics only. AnonMoos (talk) 22:57, 19 October 2020 (UTC)


 * We do have an article called Portuguese discoveries, which were similarly new to Europeans but already known to indigenous peoples. Perhaps we can reach a semantic agreement that allows us to address the actual question which is about the first Europeans to document the existence the river. Alansplodge (talk) 16:35, 19 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Forgetting the argument about whether the Mississippi needed to be discovered, Marquette and Joliet worked together as a team, so there's no contradiction in listing them both (it's not one or the other). And, as indicated above, the others mentioned did not explore any area much beyond the river's mouth, so they get credit for something altogether different. Xuxl (talk) 17:07, 19 October 2020 (UTC)
 * And all of them missed the fact that the northern part of the Mississippi is a tributary, and the Missouri is the main river in the system. <-Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots-> 19:53, 19 October 2020 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure where to look, but does our MOS have at least a guideline on the use of the word "discovered" in relation to non-indigenous people? The word has huge political connotations in many parts of the world these days. I'm Australian, and there is a well known statue in Sydney with a plaque declaring that Captain James Cook "discovered this territory". It is routinely defaced. HiLo48 (talk) 22:57, 19 October 2020 (UTC)
 * I discovered a great bookshop the other day. It doesn't meant the shopkeeper wasn't aware of it before I found it. I wish people would stop trying to make good points in terrible ways. DuncanHill (talk) 23:30, 19 October 2020 (UTC)
 * And just to back you up with a more official source: The Oxford Dictionary gives the primary definition as 1: Find unexpectedly or during a search. The alternative meaning of "Be the first to find or observe" is only the third definition of many.  I really don't understand why some people get so aggravated by the use of the word "discover" in situations like this.  Especially as no-one doing so either now or then claims that the places were uninhabited at the time. Iapetus (talk) 09:09, 20 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Because at the time, the people meant the third definition. Because for too long, including up until right this second, people still mean the third definition.  That's why. The fact that other definitions exist is nice, but those are not what people have historically, and in this context still do, mean by "discovered".  They mean "the first person to find something".  It has been historically, and still is used, to deny the humanity of the people who were already there.  That you don't wish people use it that way is not the same as saying people haven't and aren't using it that way, and to deny that usage is to ignore the brunt of history on the matter.  -- Jayron 32 13:35, 20 October 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm going to have to challenge that claim. I'm not aware of anyone who claimed - let alone is claiming - that Europeans were the first people in the Americas.  (Unless you count Solutrean hypothesis BS, but that's making claims about prehistory, and nothing to do with the colonial era).  AFAIK, all justifications for colonialism or exploitation of indigenous peoples were based on "they're not Christian" or "they're don't have property rights as we define them" or "they're technologically inferior so there's nothing they can do to stop us", not "no-one was living there when we arrived". Iapetus (talk) 08:33, 21 October 2020 (UTC)
 * That gets a little complicated with Australia. Cook fully expected to find it. Earlier European sailors had encountered other parts of the coastline, on the northern and western sides. There was also the concept of Terra nullius, which declared that, legally, Australia was uninhabited when Cook bumped into the east coast. Everyone knew there were "people" living on the continent, but they weren't seen as real, proper, European style people. Ultimately this led to Britain claiming possession, then 200 years later the Mabo land rights decision in the Australian High Court finding that Aboriginal people had existed and did have land rights. "Discovered" is a very sensitive word in Australia. HiLo48 (talk) 10:31, 20 October 2020 (UTC)
 * This usage of "discovered" is totally about western explorers finding the lands in question; basically Eurocentric and ultimately racist. The fact natives were already there was irrelevant to the usage. A couple of funny examples. Will Rogers said he was sometimes asked if his ancestors came across on the Mayflower, and he said, "No, they were there to greet the ship!" Then there's Stan Freberg's satirical history of America. He portrays Columbus landing in the New World, and claiming it for the Spanish royals. He's approached by a native American who asks what he's doing. Columbus explains about discovering the land. The Indian says, "You discover us? We discover you, on beach here. Is all how you look at it!" <-Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots-> 12:13, 20 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Cook didn't claim Australia by right of terra nullius as the doctrine was unknown at the time. There was a very good article on the matter recently which makes the point that Cook's claim to New Holland was made in exactly the same way as that he made to part of New Zealand. Blaming Cook for what was done, and is still being done, to Aboriginal Australians is historically illiterate, and fannying about over the word discovery, pretending it has meanings other than those it has always had seems to me to be a prime way of deflecting attention from the real problem. Why is there still no Treaty? Nothing to do with "discovery", everything to do with a still deeply racist society. DuncanHill (talk) 13:28, 20 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Agreed. 'Discovered' only means 'entered into classical geography', after being reported by reliable geographer. At any rate it's more and more the pace geography has been following, names first attributed to the discoveries are often that of people engaged into some field of the geography. --Askedonty (talk) 14:44, 20 October 2020 (UTC)


 * "Terra Nullius" doesn't mean that Australia was legally uninhabited, it means that the Australians had no system of political leadership that the British could understand, and the British couldn't find anyone who seemed to have the authority to sign a treaty. (No treaty meant no British recognition of native land ownership.)  By contrast, the British signed plenty of treaties in New Zealand and other parts of the British empire.  Australia was distinguished from most of those other places by being mainly at the "band" level of social organization along the anthropologists' spectrum ("band", "tribe", "chiefdom", "state" -- see Sociopolitical typology)... AnonMoos (talk) 22:29, 20 October 2020 (UTC)
 * More recent analysis and descriptions suggest that the Aboriginal people did have a continent wide social and land management structure, but it was so different from that in other parts of the world, it meant many European explorers didn't notice. One good book on the subject is The biggest estate on earth: how Aborigines made Australia by Bill Gammage. HiLo48 (talk) 23:19, 20 October 2020 (UTC)