The Dark History of Columbus and Native Americans

From viewing the documentary, I discovered that Native Americans lived in America long before Columbus ever arrived there. Columbus knew that the indigenous people were giving individuals, but he called them "savages" in his writings. I learned that Columbus claimed parts of America in the name of the king or queen. He did not actually discover America; the Native Americans were already living there, numbering around 12-15 million. How can you travel to someone's nation for the first time and claim that you discovered it?

I also learned that Columbus's significant and genocidal acts caused the deaths of more than 85% of Native Americans.

They would hang 13 individuals at a time in honor of Christ our savior and his 12 disciples. They forced the Christian Catholic religion on them as a message from God, burning those who denied it, feeding them to dogs, or killing them instantly.

I further discovered that in 1948, the United Nations drafted a convention for the prevention and punishment of genocide.

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Some of these genocidal policies included killing every person in Native American reservations to exterminate them all, including toddlers because someday they would grow to be Native Americans. They used to cut off their scalps and sell them in California, and there were laws and policies that gave them full rights to do such things. This caused the Native American population in California to decline by two-thirds.

I also learned that former President Andrew Jackson's plan was to remove all Native American tribes from the Southeast. Their main concern was to prevent the growth of the Native American population.

Such acts gave them admission to use federal funds to sterilize Native American women, which meant that they couldn't have children anymore. They took toddlers from their mothers and sent them to English boarding schools, which were hundreds of miles away from their homes. They gave them English names, turned them Catholic, and intended to erase their Native identities in any way possible.