Edmonia Lewis was a sculptor of African and Native American descent who worked for most of her career in Rome. She is best known for compositions and subjects that explore religion, history, and the oppression of marginalized peoples. Here, she depicts the famous explorer Christopher Columbus with an unidentified, possibly allegorical, Native American woman at his feet. The sculpture can be seen as either a paternalistic presentation celebrating Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World or a critical retelling of European colonization’s destructive impact on Indigenous peoples.