This year the District of Columbia joins at least five states and dozens of cities and counties in replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples' Day. It's part of a decades-long reckoning with the sanitized version of the European colonization of the Americas. In Hispaniola - what is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic - Columbus ... and his crew searched and searched for gold to no avail, so they filled their ships with something else they could sell: people. Of the 500 Tano they took - selected because they were the strongest and healthiest specimens - 200 died on the voyage to Spain. Many more died once they had been sold into slavery. Columbus's men also continued to sexually abuse Tano women and girls. In 1500, Columbus wrote to an acquaintance that "there are many dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to 10 are now in demand." As the population plummeted, they abducted indigenous people from other islands, like the Lucayan, to work the fields and mines of Hispaniola. Across the Caribbean ... the Spanish were responsible for the deaths of 12 to 15 million indigenous people. Historians usually attribute most of the deaths to the spread of diseases for which native people had no immunity, but recently historian Andrs Resndez has pushed back against this, arguing that populations were lower than previous estimated, and "a nexus of slavery, overwork and famine killed more Indians in the Caribbean than smallpox, influenza and malaria."