How Did Culture Change Columbus Day

Columbus Day should be changed to Indigenous Culture’s Day because we should not celebrate a genocide of an entire culture. It does not matter how “great” and “influential” he was, he wiped out an entire people. In 1451, Christopher Columbus (known in Italy as Cristoforo Colombo) was born in Genoa, Italy. He was born in a nice middle class family, whose father was a wool weaver. He was a normal man, until he started voyaging to Africa and the “New World”. What most people don’t realize is that much of what they know about Columbus is a lie. He never set foot in what is now known as America, and he wasn’t the first to discover America. Before 1492, Columbus sailed to the Canary Islands in Africa, where there was a large slave trade. He …show more content…
Everyone above the age of 14 had to give him a certain amount of gold every few months. If they did not give him the gold, they were cruelly punished. Their hands would be cut off and without any medical treatment, they would bleed to death. Columbus was so cruel, he didn’t get much gold. Columbus sent five hundred Tainos to Spain as slaves. Two hundred died on the way there, and the rest were extremely sick and unable to work. Because of the terrible conditions Columbus put the natives in, he was put in chains by Isabella and Ferdinand. However, the worst part of the Columbian Exchange was the diseases. Now, when people think of Columbus they usually remember all of the diseases he spread. People in the east got some diseases such as arthritis and tuberculosis, but the west by far had the worst part of it. Columbus spread smallpox, measles, influenza, chicken pox, and more. The natives had no immunities to these diseases, since they had never reached America and were completely new. It only got worse in the future, as new diseases kept on coming to the Americas. The natives and America was devastated by this tragedy. As much as 90% of the population may have