Identity

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com. What makes someone Indigenous? – Artie, age 9, Astoria, New York “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” You may have heard that in school. The rhyme makes it easier to remember that 1492 was the year when an Italian explorer named Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain and landed in a chain of islands near modern-day Florida called the “West Indies.” Europeans called the enormous land mass that we now know as North and South America the “New World” because, before the very late 15th century, nobody on the east side of the Atlantic Ocean even knew it existed. A few Viking explorers had reached the Americas hundreds of years earlier, but little is known about their visits. From Europeans&...