Why We Have to Keep Talking About Christopher Columbus

On March 22, the Trump administration erected a statue of the world’s most infamous explorer on the White House grounds. Proclaiming its subject as the “Discoverer of America,” the likeness is a replica of the Christopher Columbus statue which protesters in Baltimore pulled down and threw into the Inner Harbor on Independence Day in 2020. During the president’s first term, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the statue recovery project $30,000 in federal funding, and this recreation of the toppled 1984 monument is the fruit of their labors. Installed overnight on the north side of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the administration released a statement proclaiming “In this White House, Christopher Columbus is a hero, and President Trump will ensure he’s honored as such for generations to come.” My students often ask me why we have to keep talking about Christopher Columbus, and statues such as the one erected in Washington help reveal the reasons why.                 

As with any academic discussion of historical figures, I require my students to consider both what Columbus said and how he was received during his lifetime. Most people know the Italian who sailed under the Spanish flag never made it to what is now the United States, but rather that Columbus’s ships landed in the Caribbean islands. Beginning in 1492, he proceeded to enslave the islands’ Indigenous people and pillage their resources. Columbus wrote, “The Indians of Española were and are the greatest wealth of the land, because they are the ones who dig, and harvest and collect the bread and other supplies, and gather the gold from the mines, and do all the work of men and beast alike.” It’s not surprising that Columbus was also a tyrannical leader of his own countrymen. In 1500, he was arrested by the Spanish government and returned to Spain in chains to face trial for his brutality and mismanagement as the Spanish queen’s governor of the conquered land then known as Hispaniola.

The first reason we have to keep talking about Columbus is that his legacy of inhumanity and criminality has been reimagined as heroic. American writer Washington Irving led the charge with his 1828 multivolume “biography,” A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. In the text, Irving wrote that Columbus was “a man of great and inventive genius. . . . His ambition was lofty and noble, inspiring him with high thoughts, and an anxiety to distinguish himself by great achievements.” The falsehoods in Irving’s fanciful tale include that Queen Isabella offered him her jewels to fund his first voyage and that Columbus achieved instant world-wide fame. The purported hero’s narrative spread misinformation across the globe that is still repeated to this day. A literary event upon its publication, the work was translated into eight languages, and it went through 39 printings and editions in the United States and United Kingdom alone before Irving’s death in 1859. 

In 1992, academic Thomas J. Schlereth convincingly asserted that history shows that Irving’s text is the first work to transform Columbus into “a malleable and durable American symbol” that endows the man with whatever attributes the United States wanted him to possess. Time and time again, history proves Schlereth’s assertion to be true. Just eight years after Irving’s text rolled off the printing press, Congress commissioned the first of many works of art in the Capitol that perpetuate the mythmaking, including Columbus’s imagined triumphant landing and benevolent governorship. Before long, national cartoonists further spun Columbus legends in the public sphere. These illustrators changed Columbus’s gender and transformed him into “Colombia,” the sister of Uncle Sam. Reflecting feminine ideals of compassionate patriotism, she was sketched defending a Chinese Man in 1871, welcoming the persecuted Germans in 1881, and bidding would-be soldiers to “Enlist Now for U.S. Army” during World War I. Today, she still greets viewers dressed in robes and holding up a torch at the start of Columbia Pictures’ films. With a renown malleable symbol in their corner, it’s little wonder why persecuted Italian Americans championed the eventual 1937 creation of the Columbus Day federal holiday. Their famed countryman offered an incredible, storied counterpoint to the horrific xenophobia that was cast upon them as recent immigrants.

The second reason we need to keep talking about Columbus is that contrary to what is asserted in his mistaken portrayals, Indigenous people are the ones with a real story of heroism. Columbus was not the only colonizer driven by a sense of cultural superiority that gave way to abject brutality, yet America’s first citizens overcame them all and their culture and lifeways continue to persist. For every statue honoring an oppressor there are multitudes of Native American people who embodied the resilience, brilliance, and tenacity required to overcome the onslaught. Many of the descendants of the people who were oppressed by colonization are now enrolled in tribal colleges. They are thriving, and they need to know that they are the latest in a long, factual story of overcoming unbelievable hardships inflicted by unspeakably cruel individuals. Malleable symbols cannot erase these truths about Native people.

The erecting under the cover of night of a recreation of a broken statue celebrating a fake version of Columbus is just the latest in a long line of puzzling actions some Americans have taken to uplift a disgraced man. The sculpture may be intended to perpetuate a fabricated narrative, but we can combat these mistruths. The reason why we must keep talking about Christopher Columbus is to overcome the myths about him and to uplift the Native people who persevere in spite of people like him. I’m sharing this column so that it can cut through the falsehoods about the former and allow you to spend more of your time on the latter.

Ryan Winn, PhD, teaches in the Liberal Studies Department at College of Menominee Nation. 

Editor’s note: The opinions expressed in the Inquisitive Academic or any other opinion columns published by the Tribal College Journal (TCJ) do not necessarily reflect the opinions of TCJ or the American Indian Higher Education Consortium. 

References

Courtney, E. (2016 Oct. 7). “Capitol Discovery.” Architect of the Capitol. https://www.aoc.gov/explore-capitol-campus/blog/capitol-discovery-columbus-art

Irving, W. (1828). A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. New York: G. & C. Carvill.

Jacobs, J. (2026 March 22). “Christopher Columbus Statue Is Installed on White House Grounds. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/22/arts/design/columbus-statue-trump-white-house.html

Schlereth, T. J. (1992). “Columbia, Columbus, and Columbianism,” Journal of American History, 79(3), 937–968.

Treuer, D. (2019). The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present. New York: Penguin.