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The Truth About Columbus’s “First Contact”: Ep 10 of Crash Course Native American History

YouTube: https://youtube.com/watch?v=IIJwt3zO4fw
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View count:194,138
Likes:10,153
Comments:78
Duration:12:09
Uploaded:2025-07-29
Last sync:2026-04-02 03:30

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MLA Full: "The Truth About Columbus’s “First Contact”: Ep 10 of Crash Course Native American History." YouTube, uploaded by CrashCourse, 29 July 2025, www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIJwt3zO4fw.
MLA Inline: (CrashCourse, 2025)
APA Full: CrashCourse. (2025, July 29). The Truth About Columbus’s “First Contact”: Ep 10 of Crash Course Native American History [Video]. YouTube. https://youtube.com/watch?v=IIJwt3zO4fw
APA Inline: (CrashCourse, 2025)
Chicago Full: CrashCourse, "The Truth About Columbus’s “First Contact”: Ep 10 of Crash Course Native American History.", July 29, 2025, YouTube, 12:09,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=IIJwt3zO4fw.
In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue…and drastically changed the lives of Native Americans forever. In this episode of Crash Course Native American History, we’ll unpack misconceptions around first contact between Europeans and Natives and explore how Native peoples are still resisting colonialism today.

Introduction: The Taíno 00:00
First Contact 0:46
The Doctrine of Discovery 3:16
"Virgin Soil" Epidemics 4:40
The California Genocide 6:00
Native Resistance 6:46
The Taíno Today 9:17
Review & Credits 11:21


Sources:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1g1BpQk_2qXtFeQBffoAT-rrogcKRaA2eNjeRCpmCrJ8/edit?usp=sharing

Want to know more about how this series was made? Learn more here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17yp3u28s40TdjyrJniIf4U9YA8wPtvQ1g1B-HSHQ2Q4/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.6vtzps565m2


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 (00:00) to (02:00)


Che Jim: Okay, so let me tell you about Christopher Columbus. 

[Cuts out]

So I've been told you can't say any of that on YouTube. 

So let's start here with the Taíno people. 

They're one of the first tribes to encounter Columbus in what's now the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

Some scholars estimate that there may have been more than 3 million Taíno in Hispanola when Columbus came ashore, but within a century, they were declared extinct. A whole people gone. 

Except they're very much still here. 

This historical inaccuracy isn’t the only one in the story of the so-called New World. Far from it. 

Hi, I'm Che Jim, and welcome to Crash Course: Native American History. 

[Theme music]

Today, we're talking about the first contact between Native Americans and European colonists. 

The story that's often told through this little diddy about 1492, the ocean blue, and you know who.

First contact is a phrase used to describe the first meeting between two communities.

And to say that there are a lot of misconceptions around the first contact between Native Americans and Europeans would be like saying Messi is good at soccer. Major understatement. 

You can feel the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria with all that misinformation. 

So, let's start off with a quick fact check. 

The only thing Columbus set out to discover was a better way to get from Spain to Asia. 

The trade route known as the Silk Road was something of a schlep between Europe and Central Asia, and the Ottoman Empire shut it down in 1453, prompting the so-called Age of Discovery. 

So, Columbus proposed a mathematically incorrect plan to sail west across the Atlantic. He got funding from the king and queen of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, who were pretty psyched for all the potential riches and the opportunity to spread Catholicism around the globe. 

Columbus and his crew made landfall in 1492 in what's now the Bahamas and he claimed for Spain what he believed to be India. 

Big coloniser energy. 

 (02:00) to (04:00)


The Bahamas were home to the Lucayans, a branch of the Arawak tribe. Columbus immediately took six Lucayans as slaves, or "servants" in his words. 

So yeah, we got some serious mythbusting to do. 

[Mysterious music]

In the Americas, the idea of first contact is described like this. 

Columbus shows up in the Bahamas and boom, Europeans have met Native Americans.

But because neither Europeans nor Native Americans are just one thing. Columbus was only the first contact between the Spanish Empire and the Lucayans. There were countless initial meetings between both before and after Columbus got lost.

[Boom]

Like, there's evidence that more than 500 years before Columbus, the Scandinavian Vikings came to Greenland where they encountered the Native Tuli people. 

And there were first contacts in Alaska and Hawaii, too, which we'll get into in a later episode. 

First contacts between different Europeans and Native nations continued all the way through the 1800s. 

The first encounter the sailors had with non-natives wasn’t until 1805, when the Louis and Clark expedition wandered into their territory in Montana looking for horses and directions. 

So first contact is kind of a misnomer, as is the idea of discovery. I mean, Columbus has been celebrated for centuries for "discovering" a continent that millions of people already lived on. 

Colonial Carl: Fresh untamed wilderness. I shall call it—

Che Jim: Hey. Hey, buddy. We're kind of filming here. This is our studio. 

Colonial Carl: Studiopolis. A name that just came to me in a divine vision with no outside influence.

Che Jim: Again, already here. But you know what? Never mind.

Colonial Carl: I'm going to get a holiday named after me for this one. Someone tell the Pope. 

Che Jim: So, if you've wondered how colonisers got away with just showing up to someone's home or studio and claiming it as their own, 

 (04:00) to (06:00)


you can thank the Pope. 

In 1493, Pope Alexander VI made a decree, also known as the papal bull, that any land not inhabited by Christians could be discovered and claimed by Christian rulers. 

Inter Caetera was the third in a trilogy of papal bulls that made up what's called the Doctrine of Discovery. 

And this became the legal basis for Europeans' claims over indigenous lands and later Americans' justification for westward expansion. 

You know the old saying, papal bulls give you wings. 

The point is, this defence held up in court as recently as [checks notes] 2005. And it's impacts had been felt by indigenous peoples all over the world for centuries. 

We'll circle back to sketchy land grabs in a bit.

But regardless of first, second, and thousandth contact, one thing's for sure, European arrival was catastrophic for Native American populations. 

While exact numbers are hard to pin down because of fragmented historical evidence, the overall population may have been decreased by as much as 90%. And you can bet there's a detail or two missing from that chapter of the history books. 

[Mysterious music]

A lot of that population decline I mentioned gets blamed not on colonisers themselves, but on the diseases that they carried, which led to major outbreaks. 

Historians call these outbreaks "Virgin Soil" Epidemics, because diseases like measles and smallpox were new to Native American populations. So, their immune systems hadn't built up any resistance to them, which made the diseases incredibly deadly and widespread. 

And while it is true that epidemics killed many people, the whole truth isn't quite so straightforward. 

Research shows that it was disease in combination with all the other fallout from European colonisation, including but not limited to war, enslavement, and starvation that made Native Americans especially vulnerable. 

And nuance is important because if you focus primarily on disease, it obscures the truth that colonisers purposely killed millions of people and harmed many more. 

[Crash]

 (06:00) to (08:00)


Now, just a warning. I'm about to get into an example of genocide. This is some heavy history, and it's important to take care. 

In 1848, the discovery of gold in California incited a rush of settlers who engaged in what was literally called Indian hunting. This practice was not only legal, but encouraged. 

In 1851, Governor Peter Burnett declared that a "war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct." 

State and federal governments spent nearly $2 million on what's referred to today as the California genocide.

In all, the native population of California dropped from around 350,000 at first contact to about 18,000 by 1880. And that was very much intentional. 

This is hard history to tell just right, because when we focus on all the horrible things that have happened to native peoples, it can create the impression that we were passive throughout it, that we were and are victims, when in reality, we're so much more than that. 

For starters, not all interactions between Native Americans and Europeans were the same. Cooperation and exchange did happen.

And I'm not just talking about the Wampanoag teaching the Pilgrims how to grow corn. In many cases, Native American tribes dealt with Europeans using diplomacy or trade and created strategic alliances that gave them advantages over other Native nations. 

For instance, tribes such as the Algonquins, the Inu, and the Windot allied with the French, and many traded furs for valuable European imports such as guns. 

But unlike French fur traders, British colonists were more likely to demand control over Native people and their land, which led to some major conflicts. 

Sometimes tribes join forces to fight off an invasion, like in the case of Pontiac's rebellion, named for the Ottawa chief who coordinated a bunch of tribes across the Ohio River Valley and the Great Lakes region to try oust the British. 

In response to the uprising, King George III signed a Proclamation of 1763,

 (08:00) to (10:00)


drawing a boundary around indigenous lands that European settlers couldn’t cross. 

And then you've got one of the most famous military victories for Native Americans, the Battle of Little Bighorn. 

In 1875, the U.S. government was trying to force the Lakota Sioux onto reservations, and they discovered in the South Dakota Black Hills, which are sacred to them. 

When the tribe refused to sell, the U.S. tossed a former treaty to the wind and sent in "Last Stand" Custer and his cavalry, who were met with a prompt defeat.

The story doesn't end there. The U.S. retaliated by illegally seizing the Black Hills 2 years later, and they look like this. [Mount Rushmore pictured]

But the story doesn't end there, either. In 1980, the Supreme Court ruled that the land had been wrongfully taken and awarded the Sioux Nation $12 million as compensation.

$12 million. Those are some fat stacks. 

But the Lakota Sioux pulled a baller move when faced with that offer. They said no, "We are nothing without the Black Hills." 

Cha ching. 

Historian Nick Estes said in a documentary on the subject, "That's why the Black Hills are not for sale, because we are not for sale."

Mic drop. 

Native resistance continues today. And sometimes that looks like writing the historical record. 

[Mysterious music]

Remember when I said that the Taíno population was devastated by Spanish colonisation? 

They were labelled extinct soon after a 1565 census listed only 200 Natives living on Hispanola. But that doesn't tell the whole story. 

In 1533, the Spanish had freed enslaved Native people, but not enslaved Africans. So to keep their enslaved workers, many Spanish colonisers reclassified Taínos as Africans.

Nice loophole, guys. 

And in the early 1800s, the Spanish changed their census categories so that Puerto Ricans could identify themselves as white or non-white. 

Tanks themselves didn’t disappear. 

 (10:00) to (12:00)


Their label did. A label that was created by colonisers.

[Clatter]

Nevertheless, Taíno culture persisted for centuries in passed down stories and traditions like baking casabe, a type of yuca bread. 

And after decades of research, a major shake-up happened in the early 2000s, when a study out of the University of Puerto Rico revealed that 23-30% of Dominicans, 33% of Cubans, and 61% of Puerto Ricans had indigenous genes. 

The research confirmed what Taíno people already knew, that they're still here, despite efforts of what they call a paper genocide, meaning a sort of erasure from history through what might otherwise seem like boring old paperwork. 

Fortunately, by the 2010 census, Puerto Ricans could label themselves as American Indian or Alaskan Native, and awareness for Taíno ancestry continues to grow. 

In 2016, a group of researchers from across Europe, the U.S. and Mexico was able to sequence and analyse ancient Taíno DNA from a thousand-year-old tooth found on the island of Alra in the Bahamas. 

It showed even stronger evidence of a continued indigenous presence in the Caribbean, especially in Puerto Rico, which is so cool. It makes me think about how important the stories we tell are to understanding ourselves and our history. 

All this goes to show just how wrong the idea of a single first contact between Europeans and Native Americans really is. Instead, there were hundreds of contacts across hundreds of years that reshaped the land we now call the U.S. and the people on it. 

But that reshaping isn't over. Next time, we'll talk about treaties and how Natives have been using them to get their land back. And I will see you then. 

Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course: Native American History, which was filmed at our studio in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was made with all these nice people. If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever, you can join our community on Patreon.

 (12:00) to (12:09)


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