• Honoring Columbus Day celebrates a legacy of genocide of Indigenous people and perpetuates ongoing racism against Indigenous peoples. This is harmful to Indigenous children as well as to non-Native children.
• Celebrating Columbus Day perpetuates the myth that these lands were empty and waiting to be “discovered” by Europeans. It intentionally ignores the immense suffering of millions of Indigenous people who were killed, enslaved and raped by European colonists, and ignores their heroic resistance to colonialism.
• A true and accurate account of the history of Indigenous people, beginning long before Christopher Columbus sailed, is necessary to set the historical record straight and to respect the traditional cultures and languages of Indigenous peoples.
• Modern historians recognize that Columbus’s policies, including forced slave labor, starvation and slaughter, resulted in the near-complete genocide of the Indigenous peoples of Hispaniola, Haiti and other places.
• Columbus enslaved Indigenous people and is estimated to have shipped approximately 5,000 enslaved Indigenous Peoples across the Atlantic—filling his pockets and setting the stage for the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Many thousands more Indigenous people were enslaved in their homelands.
• Columbus and his men sold Indigenous women and young girls into sexual slavery.
• Columbus had Indigenous people hunted down with dogs that tore them apart and devoured them, and had his men test the sharpness of their blades by cutting off the hands of Indigenous people.