Happy Columbus Day, but should we really be celebrating this day? Is it right as a nation to be celebrating a day made in honor of a man that stole land and committed mass murder of indigenous people? He was an Italian explorer who led four total expeditions, argumentatively the most famous one was when he left Spain and discovered the New World, The Americas.
Columbus is known in every high school textbook as this great explorer who sailed “the ocean blue in 1492” and discovered America. Columbus, however never intended to come to America, he set out to find new routes to Asia and he accidentally set foot in the Caribbean islands thinking that he had made it to Asia. So, he didn’t even land or “discover” the American mainland.
From the time, he set foot on land, he and his men began enslaving and killing the natives of the land they just happened to have stumbled upon. If you didn’t know there were tons of natives already living on the lands that Columbus claimed to discover. Many of the indigenous people had already claimed the land as their homes in functioning societies, till Columbus decided to come along and decided that they would either make great slaves or that they were in the way and decided they would be better off dead. Continuing, he saw the gold that many natives possessed and knew that he wanted it and had no problem killing or demanding to get it.
While we’re at it let’s talk about how Columbus “proved” that the world is round, or did he? If he actually set out to prove that the world was round, then he is over a thousand years late for that. Columbus just underestimated the circumference of the earth, accounting for why he ended up in the Caribbean when he was trying for Asia. He also believed that Europe was way wider than it actually is.
Now does this man actually seem like the type of person that we should be dedicating a day to? Maybe we should switch to a day like national Indigenous People’s day. Many places already have an Indigenous People’s day inside and outside of the States. A day that would honor the people that owned the land, and were the real discoverers of America. Maybe it’s time to reconsider the people we decide to honor in this country.