A07 Columbus, Indiana 1821

Let me tell you, first, of a city. It is a city built wrong, by your standards. This city sprawls in a way that no modern comm would be permitted to do, since that would require too many miles of walls. And this city’s outermost sprawls have branched off along rivers and other lifelines to spawn additional cities, much in the manner of mold forking and stretching along the rich veins of a growth medium. Too close together, you would think. Too much overlap of territory; they are too connected. . . . Sometimes they have distinct local nicknames, these child-cities, especially where they are large or old enough to have spawned child-cities of their own, but this is superficial. Your perception of their connectedness is correct: They have the same infrastructure, the same culture, the same hungers and fears. Each city is like the other cities. All of the cities are, effectively, one city. This world, in this now, is the city’s name. . .

— N.K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky, 2017

At the intersection of I-65 and State Road 46, lay a landscaped sign encouraging you to “Discover Columbus!” Its message links Christopher Columbus’ efforts “discovering the New World” to the world discovering Columbus, Indiana. This play on words references a series of papal decrees executed from 1452–1493 that established the Doctrine of Discovery: the Dum Diversas, the Romanus Pontifex, and the Inter Caetera. These documents enabled the slavery of non-Christians and gave exclusive and total right to the lands encountered through exploration to the empires who found them, in disregard of the long histories of habitation by Indigenous peoples. They opened the door for the land theft, resource extraction, slavery, and genocide that are part of our collective past, as well as the ongoing acts of resistance to these trajectories. Our ability to persevere through the everyday reach of this violence is a hopeful counter-narrative to our involute history.

Through continual overwriting, “Columbus” and its derivations have mutated with the interests of identity, property, and power. They have been proxies for liberty and virtue — such as Columbia, the female personification of the USA — as well as euphemisms for newness, risk-taking, and curiosity. The names Columbus, Columbia, Colombo, and Colón are symbols extending globally in every direction.

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