[sarasmom]

Nobody did a poll at the time, but if anyone had bothered, I doubt the indigenous population would have described themselves as "discovered".

I am the product of my mixed maternal and paternal ancestors.
I still dealt with racial prejudice in my youth, among my own immediate paternal family, because I was not "pure white".

I am not overly fond of Columbus Day and Thanksgiving Day, as a result.

But some things require individuals to stop futilely obsessing over.
History is one of those things.

[Donald Meaker]

I kind of like Columbus Day. The little tribe that Columbus discovered had an odd way of cooking their food, placing a rock over the fire, and putting flesh on it. The corruption of their word has come down to us: Barbeque.

They also were infested with ants, and had a unique device to keep the ants away from them as they slept. The Hammock.

The hammock still has a faintly nautical air to it, some 500 years later.

The tribe appears to be genetically gone, having suffered the most from their exposure to Old World diseases. These aspects of their culture have been spread worldwide.

Cristobal Colon XX was recently Admiral of the Spanish Navy.

[rlmorel]

My grandfather was an Armenian. I don't have any animosity for Turks.

The celebration of Columbus isn't a celebration of the destruction of the indigenous peoples of that time, it is a celebration of mankind finding out something else momentous about the world they lived in.

The people who came out on the short end of the stick of that era were unlucky. But it is not like they weren't treating each other like subhumans either.

So many people seem to think the native people of those days were just living in harmony, the sun was bright and the flowers were blooming. They practiced internecine warfare that was as horrible and dehumanistic as anything the Europeans were doing to each other, perhaps even more so if you look at the Aztecs and their kind.