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“In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue”—and in 2019, a growing number of US cities and states are recognizing that the cutesy rhyme we learned in school, and the federal holiday named in the explorer’s honor, belies a dark history.
Indigenous people have long resented the holiday, as Columbus’s arrival was the first step in their unfathomable genocide. He and his men enslaved and massacred the indigenous Taíno people, who numbered in the millions upon Columbus’s arrival, and saw their population reduced by as much as 85 percent within a few decades. The brutal colonization of two continents ensued.