They Lied then, They Lie Now: A Native Perspective on Columbus and Current Events

I came to the Folger Shakespeare Library from a small village in the Dominican Republic hoping to rescue scraps of indigenous truth from early colonial texts as part of my long-term artistic research fellowship. One of the books I knew I would have to read was Christopher Columbus’ diary of his first voyage. We, after all, made him world famous and then were disappeared in the process (both through actual acts of genocide and then through a subsequent paper genocide). Assimilation and enforced forgetting are insidious tools of colonization. Murder the people who know and teach the youth lies, and within generations the lies will not only live, they’ll kill.

A few years ago, friends, comrades, and community members gathered in the “Colonial Zone” of Santo Domingo to protest in front of a statue of Columbus on October 12th, a day known in my corner of the world as “Día de la Raza.” Ultranationalist counter-protestors physically assaulted my friends as the police watched and did nothing. One of them was hit in the head with a brick that had been concealed inside a purse. These assailants claimed that the peaceful protest constituted an attack on our heritage and history. This is directly tied to the fact that today, many do not know that Columbus never stepped foot in what is now known as the United States (he died still claiming he had found a route to Asia). The world celebrates a lost man, while the people who actually found him and helped him navigate the unknown waters are erased from history. Though this is changing and colonizer statues are being toppled all over the world, the change is slow and in the meantime, some are still throwing bricks at the wrong people.

It took me about the same 225 days to read Columbus’ diary as it took him to complete his first voyage. Reading it made me physically ill. It wasn’t just the racist words, the casual kidnappings of Native people, or the knowledge of what would come after. It wasn’t until two months into my fellowship, that I finally was able to put words to what I was feeling, what I often feel when reading history.

On September 1st, 2024, police shot and killed Justin Robinson while he dozed off in a drive-through line. He had been one of the first people to welcome me to Washington, D.C. That’s when it clicked for the millionth time throughout my long career as a knowledge keeper. The unease I felt, struggling with texts I had traveled over 2,500 km to read, wasn’t due to my own incapacity. It was because the past doesn’t feel dead; it feels like a daily, re-lived occurrence. It was impossible for me not to experience Justin’s murder as a reverberation of a chord struck 500 years ago. It is a dissonant, discordant, and ugly song echoing through the ages, and it seems to be stuck on repeat. Racialized violence against Black and Brown people built the Americas and there is no state-sanctioned death, no climate catastrophe, no hungry or murdered child in this entire region that cannot be traced to the cultural and material shift that occurred on my island in 1492.

Columbus was found by people who were accustomed enough to travel between islands as to be able to give him directions and information on the length of these journeys. He found people who enjoyed freedom of movement impeded only by occasional skirmishes with other island people. Within 46 days of first contact, on November 27th, Columbus wrote “Your Highnesses ought not to consent that any stranger should trade her, or put his foot in the country except Catholic Christians…”. Which is to say that the caucacity of arriving somewhere and then deciding who gets to be there after you and with what rights was as alive in 1492 as it is in 2025. When this belief is embedded in our curricula and culture, how can we not trace a direct line from Columbus’ racist beliefs about non-white people, his dreams of migration restrictions, to the death of an 11-year-old child in Texas, so brutally bullied about her family’s immigration status that she was driven to take her own life?

Many Indigenous peoples and their descendants, who were once accustomed to moving freely through the Americas, now find themselves facing a ruthless deportation machine. This is ever present in the Dominican Republic, where the mass deportations and ethnic cleansing of Haitian people is not seen as a human rights violation, but instead justified as a nationalist act. It is a tragedy made worse by the fact that Haitians and Dominicans were divided by a colonial border—one that, much like the borders drawn by the Belgians in Rwanda, was imposed with violent consequences.

These lies don’t only kill people. They poison the land too. The same myths of superiority and entitlement that were used to justify the enslavement and genocide of Black and Brown people continue to fuel the exploitation of our natural kin. The quest for gold that Columbus set in motion in 1492—rooted in a belief that everything and everyone can be owned, conquered, and extracted for profit—has never stopped. It now plays out in the extractive industries, like mining company Barrick Gold in my home country. Barrick Gold is poisoning our waters, killing our animals, and brutalizing the people who dare to protest. From the protests in Cotuí to the raging wildfires that scorched California, these are the consequences of the tragic loss of Indigenous environmental knowledge and stewardship practices. You can read all about how profit over people became the American way in Columbus’ diary—if you read it carefully enough.

The children die, the land burns, and the people of the Global North wring their hands and cry “How did we get here?” I’m tired of my people and my land dying while the world pretends not to know how we got here. I want to scream YOU CAN ASK YOUR BOY COLUMBUS, and force them to read Powhatan-Renapé and Lenape scholar, Jack D. Forbes’s Columbus and Other Cannibals followed by Potawotami scientist and writer, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. The world needs more than empty land acknowledgments, we need our histories revindicated, followed through with shifts in mainstream cultural practice.

This is why it’s important for scholars of the Global Majority to have opportunities to study and share our knowledge. Before I arrived at the Folger, I thought Columbus was evil, and a lying,  genocidal enslaver. Now I know so, and in his own words. I will take the histories I studied and lived and the story of Justin Robinson back to my village, where I hope to repeat the truth so loudly it drowns out the lies. Maybe we will tell the true stories so often that in the future, my people will meet under the shadow of that statue with one heart and a truth that will set us free: Columbus is not a man to be celebrated, but we are. Maybe in 500 more years, it will be Columbus’ name we’ve forgotten while the names of Caonabo and Anacaona echo in every home and classroom across the world, not as footnotes but as the names we should have always known. Maybe, people will solemnly walk down the streets of the colonial zone with the correct reverence and mourning instead of taking selfies and wedding photos where our ancestors were slaughtered and enslaved. Maybe one day, there will be no more statues celebrating subjugators and lost men. Until then, may all knowledge keepers continue to sing their songs of resistance and remembrance, until we are all free.