For many of us Italian Americans, October is a time of celebration. The twelfth of October marks the day that Christopher Columbus landed in the new world, in the process uniting two worlds, that of western civilization and that of what would almost 300 years later become the United States of America.

Unfortunately, Columbus’s legacy has been brought under increasing scrutiny, with accusations of racism, exploitation and genocide being hurled at the great Italian explorer. Such accusations typically ignore the fact that it was Anglo-Celtic Americans and Spanish, not Columbus himself, who are responsible for the abuses that Native Americans experienced subsequently.