Indigenous People Have Rights: Why It's Time to Abolish Columbus Day | Alternet

13.10.16

Indigenous People Have Rights: Why It's Time to Abolish Columbus Day | Alternet: The “bulldozing” of Indigenous lives, Indigenous lands, and Indigenous rights all began with Columbus’s invasion in 1492. Columbus’s policies toward Indigenous peoples in the Caribbean were genocidal. On the island that became Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Columbus ordered Ta�no people’s hands chopped off if they did not deliver sufficient quantities of gold. His men took women and girls as sex slaves. He had Ta�nos chased down by vicious dogs. He ordered his men to “spread terror” among Ta�nos who resisted—and they did resist. And he launched the transatlantic slave trade—from the Americas to Europe, as well as from Africa to the Americas. “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold,” he wrote.