He isn't exactly wrong, but I fail to see why we should celebrate "Native American Day" in its place either. We should celebrate Lief Erikson day.
Having read some book from my school's library that hadn't been checked out since, like, '73 (it was printed in the 60's), the voyages of the Norse to Greenland, Iceland, and eventually North America sure were somethin', weren't they? Plus, the fact that it is so shrouded in the past makes much better for some national myth than the idiot Columbus, who, had he been correct, would have starved out on the open sea!
It's fascinating to wonder how different history might have turned out without the Little Ice Age blocking access to Greenland and cutting off the Norse colonies there.
They weren't cut off, as much as forgotten because they didn't produce anything valuable enough to trade with them - connected to the fact that they stopped being able to build ships themselves and trade with Inuits further north, whether that was due to a loss of know-how or simply lack of lumber or a combination of those two is unclear. They primarily traded in walrus teeth and skins + polar bear skins (none of which existed in Southern Greenland). The official trade (as registered by the Norwegian authorities) stopped in the 1420s, but there was likely ships going from northern Iceland to around 1450.
Ivory was a rare commodity on the European market in the late medieval era and walrus tooth served as a substitute, but as the Portuguese established direct contact with West Africa prices on walrus tooth plummeted with consumers preferring the real thing and this was likely the end - as climate changes had already made the Norse way of life unsustainable they probably partly left for Iceland, died and mixed into neighboring Inuit communities (Inuits in these areas were markedly more light skinned than their neighbours - and sometimes fair haired - in the late 18th century when this part of Greenland was (re-)colonized. Since all Greenlanders today have some Scandinavian ancestry this is unfortunately impossible to test with DNA-studies.
Danish explorers (or quite possibly Germans in Danish service) Hans Pothorst and Diderik Pinning most likely discovered New Foundland in 1474, but the evidence of this is uncertain and in any case it was never followed through. They also rediscovered Greenland, but at this point there was little commercial interest in this. You need whale oil to become a major commodity for Greenland to become commercially attractive again - the Basques were up there in the late 1500s followed by Dutch and English whalers after the turn of the century. There was simply a century from around 1450-1550, where Greenland was considered too commercially unattractive by even the most intrepid Europeans.
So there is also the possibility of a Dano-Norwegian colonization of eastern Canada.
But I think the main point with both Leif Eriksson and the Pothorst/Pinning expedition is that they landed in barren and inhospitable parts of Canada, which didn't inspire colonization.
Since there was never more than 2-3,000 Norse in Greenland (and always short of lumber for ships) they were unlikely to have the capacity to colonize America themselves, but dependent on some backup from Iceland or Norway, where the narrative of this western land would have needed to be more attractive to lure anyone to finance an expedition.
As a sidenote: The Pinning and Pothorst expedition included a Portuguese navigator and there is an interesting theory that it might have been a Danish-Portuguese joint venture.
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