“In fourteen hundred ninety two,Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” So starts the grade school rhyme that condensed Christopher Columbus’s first voyage from Europe to the “New World.” Columbus was not the first person to discover the Americas. Native Americans had been in the New World for millennia before Columbus was born. He was not even the first European to land sailing ships here. That distinction belongs to the Norsemen.Why Columbus’s shadow endures and exceeds that of others, including to some extent the Tainos and Arawaks who were decimated within half a century of his arrival in the Caribbean, is because his voyages accomplished two things. First, it publicized to European powers that there was a vast world within their grasp and that it was defended by people still using bows and arrows. Second, Columbus’s arrival and presence in the New World established a pattern of exploitation and genocide of native peoples that became the norm through the present day.When Columbus reached the present day Bahamas and, later, the coasts of Cuba and Hispaniola, he genuinely believed he had reached India. He therefore called the Taino indios. The Taino were peaceful and certainly vulnerable to the European’s advanced weaponry. To Columbus, the Taino and all Natives he encountered were fodder for servitude and conquest. In his journal he wrote, “They ought to make good and skilled servants, for they repeat very quickly whatever we say to them.” More ominously, he noted that “I could conquer the whole of them with fifty men and govern them as I pleased.” Columbus kidnapped six Tainos to take back to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.During Columbus’s second voyage, he exacted tribute in spun cotton and gold from each adult over the age of fourteen. Punishment for failure to come up with the gold and/or cotton was severe. Columbus and his men would cut off the hands of the “offender” and leave him or her to bleed to death. During his third voyage, Columbus abandoned all pretense of converting the native population to Christianity. He enslaved them. Why? The answer is not so trite as “because they were there,” but close. Rather, he refused to convert the natives because Spanish and canonical law forbade the enslavement of Christians. Columbus essentially created a loophole, perhaps the first loophole in a long line of broken promises, treaties, and pacts with regard to Native American rights. He would not convert the natives so that he could keep his “good and skilled servants,” i.e., slaves to do his bidding and that of the Spanish overlords.The rest is, as they say, history. Entire cultures wiped out. Millions killed by violence or disease or enslavement. Grafting onto the cultural DNA of Native folks that the European is the more advanced. Perhaps it is simplistic to place over five centuries of enduring imperialism at Columbus’s feet. It is. He certainly was not responsible for the atrocities committed by Cortes, Pizarro, Padre Junipero Serra, Andrew Jackson, Custer, and to this date, the economic and ecological rapaciousness of Halliburton.  But Columbus cast the mold in the furnace of imperialistic greed. That mold has yet to be shattered.Of course, I understand as I type this piece on my laptop that Columbus’s exposure of the New World made exploration inevitable and that we are who we are today in large part because he triggered that European curiosity. But I don’t have to celebrate the man, his misdeeds, or his arrogant, short-sighted waste of human life. The opinions expressed in this post and throughout RedBrownandBlue.com are intended to encourage civil discussion and invite well-reasoned alternatives. To join in, please visit our Contact Us page and drop us a line. Your contribution may be highlighted as a selected response and posted to the site at a later date.Vito De la Cruz lectures frequently in areas ranging from Native American and Latino youth self-esteem, educational achievement, and diversity, citing his migrant-worker grandmother and aunt as key influences upon his life. He is a regular columnist with the Reno Gazette Journal who named him one of Northern Nevada’s Most Watched Men in 2008. Vito graduated from Yale University in 1981 and thereafter attended law school at the University of California, Boalt Hall School of Law, receiving a Juris Doctorate degree in 1985. His legal career includes time working with California Rural Legal Assistance, the Monterey County Public Defender’s Office, the Federal Public Defender in Las Vegas, and the Federal Defenders of Eastern Washington.