October 12 is Columbus Day for some, Indigenous People’s Day for others.
Early in the morning of October 12, 1492, a sailor on board the Pinta sighted land, beginning a new era of European exploration and expansion. The next day, the ninety crew members of Columbus’ three-ship fleet ventured onto the Bahamian island that he named San Salvador (now Watling Island, and then called Guanahaní by the natives), ending a voyage begun nearly ten weeks earlier in Palos, Spain. (from Today in History.)
In 1494, Columbus launched the trans-Atlantic slave trade, sending enslaved Taínos from the Caribbean to Spain, and forcing them to find gold in Hispaniola. Shortly after, Spaniards brought kidnapped and enslaved Africans to the Americas. One Spanish governor complained as early as 1503 that enslaved Africans were “teaching disobedience to the Indians.” Spaniards put Africans to work in the mines and harvesting sugar cane (which Columbus had brought on his second voyage).
For the Taíno people of the Caribbean, their erasure began almost immediately, with Columbus’s arrival. It was not curricular, it was flesh and blood. “With 50 men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want,” Columbus wrote in his journal on his third day in the Americas. (From Zinn Education Project)