Hi, friends! I used the asterisk in the title just in case anyone reads DS at work and would get in trouble.

But in general, fuck that guy.

• the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria were not the first ships to arrive in the Americas
• Pacific Islanders found the Americas thousands of years beforehand, if we’re focused on water travel. Indigenous folks crossed the Bering Strait probably (best guess) before the Pacific Ocean crossing. Researchers disagree with when the Bering Strait crossings happened. I remember being in grad school and learning the range was like “either it was about 12k years ago, or based on geological data, probably closer to 30k years ago, but I mean it couldn’t have been 30k years ago, because reasons.” Except my professors were like yeah no realistically it was probably the 30k years ago because we got evidence from like 12k years ago of people in South America, and that’s a fuckton of ground for new resident groups to cover. Recently I’ve seen some research indicating 37k years ago, and fuck yeah that’s not surprising at all.
• I haven’t seen much research (not saying it isn’t done, just that I haven’t seen it) for when Pacific Islanders had their diaspora hit the coast of South America. As good as those seafarers were, it could have been happening for 30k years for all I know. The archaeological assemblages from the old old sites doesn’t have the tool typologies matching Islanders, but there’s no reason to assume that there wasn’t trade, etc happening across the Pacific given the skills they had.
• If we’re gonna pretend like only European settlers count, then still FUCK THAT Columbus dude, because the Vikings were there 500 years ahead of Columbus.
• Motherfucker never even found the US. He enslaved and tortured a ton of Lucayans in the modern day Bahamas, as well as “finding” the Dominican Republic on his second voyage.
• Seriously, FUCK THAT GUY.

Last I read, in the first century or so after Columbus showed up, about 90% of indigenous people died in North America, South America, and the Caribbean. Most from disease. I always wondered why the Vikings didn’t spread disease all over North America, and I guess it was a combination of better hygiene and more dispersed populations in Newfoundland and Greenland so less opportunity to incubate diseases? I don’t know.

But something to keep in mind next month when in the US we get Pilgrims and Thanksgiving shoved down our throats —

The Pilgrims landed and saw beautiful hills and valleys and felt like OMG it had to be god’s blessing that they were meant to live there. Disease had ravaged the area for the past few years and fields hadn’t yet been reclaimed by forests. Clearings for abandoned villages were still available for them to easily build in. Pilgrims noted that some homes had visible human bones from the 9 out of 10 Wampanoag peoples who died in a 3 year period.

But you know, let’s celebrate Columbus Day. Make “feather” headresses with construction paper and paper boats.