Most children learn about Christopher Columbus in grade school as the brave guy who “discovered” the Americas and brought exotic spices to the new world. He sailed the ocean blue in 1492, as the saying goes. A year later, he would also land on the island that is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic, enslave the natives, and bring European diseases that would reduce the population from 8 million to 22,000, according to Indians Are Us?: Culture and Genocide in Native North America by Ward Churchill.

That doesn’t flow off the tongue as well, though.