The annual "I have to write about how columbus was an asshole on columbus day" post.

Columbus did not discover America, we all know that. If you don’t you have been living under a rock, or you go to a catholic school. But do we know what he really did? In 7th grade I found a book on my dads bookshelf called “lies my teacher told me” I thought it would be funny. It wasn’t funny, but it changed the way I think about history.

Lets learn about Columbus now.

Columbus did not set sail to prove the world was round. Many educated people knew the earth was round thousands of years before Columbus. He set sail to find gold, spices, and silks, and other riches in Asia. Columbus landed on an island between Florida and Cuba, no one is sure exactly what island it was. Columbus believed he was in Asia even after three voyages to America and more than a decade of study.

Columbus was not even the first white man to settle in the Americans Scandinavian Vikings already had settlements here in the eleventh century, and British fisherman may fished in Canada decades before Columbus.

So what did he do? Well He seized 1,200 Taino Indians crammed as many onto his ships as would fit and sent them to Spain and sold them as slaves. His marauding band hunted Indians for sport and profit - beating, raping, torturing, killing, and then using the Indian bodies as food for their hunting dogs. The Spaniards demanded that the remaining Indians bring gold. There was almost no gold on Hispaniola. The people were told that if they brought no gold, nor spun cotton as a substitute, they would have their hands cut off and be left to bleed to death. So they fled. Some of the people in his crew tried to take young girls and force them to have sex, when they didn’t the crew raped them, some of them as young as ten. They also brought viruses from Europe that the natives did not have immunity too. Eventually life for the natives became so awful that many took their own life’s. Woman began to abort there children at birth because they believed the children would be happier dead. Within 50 years the population had been wiped out. We know all of this because Columbus and some of his crewmates kept diaries. Only after four years of Columbus' arrival his men had killed or exported one-third of the original Indian population of 300,000. Within another 50 years, the Taino people had been made extinct.

Therefore by celebrating Columbus day we are celebrating a man who was a slave trader. Personally, I think that we should celebrate Indigenous People's Day instead of Columbus day (did you know Berkeley California does that? just a fun fact).