Christopher Columbus is credited for discovering the Americas. His original intentions were to find an alternative trading route to Asia, but instead he landed on one of the Bahamian islands on accident. Millions of people had already inhabited said land. The story of Christopher Columbus has been sugar coated and tailored to the American School systems liking. I admittedly had no idea that we all had been fed tainted information, so I decided to write this article to educate not only my peers, but myself as well.

Columbus enslaved the thousands of Native Americans that already inhabited the island. They were forced to mine gold and if they didn’t, they were brutally punished. Infact, the punishments were so brutal that I find it inappropriate to mention in a high school newspaper. This overwhelming shift in the natives’ everyday lives lead to countless suicides. Columbus ultimately lead a genocide on the indigenous people and forced them off of land that did not belong to him.

Regardless of the fact that he did not discover America, Christopher Columbus Day is still celebrated every year in mid October. Although we should remember how our country was founded,we must not forget the horrors that the Natives endured.