Written By: Andres Gomez

Columbus Day is a federal holiday in the United States and many countries in Latin America. Under pressure by historically aware citizens and descendants of indigenous peoples, many cities and states have renamed it to Inidgenous People’s Day. Yet, so many do not see what is wrong with keeping the tradition and celebrating around statues of Columbus. 

The average public school student is introduced to Chrisopher Columbus before they are 10 years old, anytime from kindergarten to middle school. Because of the nature of such sensitive topics like genocide and slavery, they are conveniently redacted from curriculum. Instead, children “learn” by ingraining the names of ships and memorizing dates. 

Pop Quiz

In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed the _____ ______. 

The name of the three ships he and his crew sailed are the Niña, The Pinta, and The ____  _____.

The number of indigenous people who died 22 years after coming into contact with Columbus is _____? 8,000,000 people (David E. Stannard, The American Holocaust).

The number of indigenous people who died 200 years of coming intocontact with Europeans was _____ ? 130,000,000 people (Erin McKenna and Scott Pratt, American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present).

The largest genocide to occur in the history of humanity happened on the North and South American continents. Over the course of 400 years, indigenous populations systemically declined by 90-95% by war, disease, and torture. The suffering of indigenous people cannot be conveyed with statistics but Christopher Columbus is the progenitor of Europeans committing every crime imaginable by man, all while proselytizing Christianity. 

From his own journal, Columbus writes about the peaceful natives who “are so naive and free with their possessions..when you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone. . .” Just days after interacting with the indigenous Carribeans, he takes a different direction, writing “They would make fine servants . . . with fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want” (Zinn). Columbus enslaved thousands of native people to mine for gold, filled ships by the hundreds with slaves to be sold in Spain, and sold girls as young as 10 years old into a life of sexual exploitation. 

A key eyewitness account, Bartolome de las Casas, reports a reality even he can hardly fathom, “so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this?” (Zinn). 

The genocide and enslavement of indigenous peoples was financed and supported by none other than the Roman Catholic Church. The Spanish Reqeurimiento of 1510 was a legal document approved by the Pope justifying occupation of the New World. 

“I certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country, and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of their Highnesses; we shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as their Highnesses may command”. 

The notion that Columbus actually discovered anything is entirely propaganda. One cannot discover what has already been found, and the Americas were home to millions of indigenous people in 1492 when they found Columbus lost at sea. You cannot even say that Columbus was the first from the European continent to visit the Americas, given the history of the Vikings and their explorations. That is not to mention the likely sea expeditions of the Mali Empire under Mansa Musa. 

The other discovery accredited to Columbus is the roundness of the Earth, but Greek mathematician Eratosthenes calculated the Earth’s circumference over 1,000 years before Columbus even existed. “No educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the Earth was flat,” according to historian Jeffrey Burton Russel. Even modern scholars concede Columbus did not dispel the “Earth is flat” belief. 

Columbus was, however, the first white supremacist in America, international child sex trafficker, genocidal murderer, and Christian conqueror (oxymoron), in a long line of European “settlers” in the Americas. The savagery of humanity and every iteration of evil can be found in settler colonialism, in the treatment of indigenous peoples by European travelers consumed with greed and sexual neurosis. 

Columbus thought he landed in Asia and thus called the native people Indians, the popularity of which continues in iterations such as American Indian, and Indio. The continents of “America” were named after Amerigo Vespucci, another European who followed years after Columbus. But I am not Indian nor American. I am indigenous, this is Anahuac, Turtle Island, Mikinoc Waajew, Abya Yala. So October 12 is Indigenous People’s Day, because resistance has existed as long as oppression itself, and we the descendants of indigenous people continue to resist after 500 years of coerced acclimation to the white man’s world. We say no to the destruction of the climate, we say no to celebrating white supremacists, we say no to various ills this society has produced, and we resist Western hegemony on stolen land.