"They Came Before Columbus" is a  popular enough book that claims Africans came to the Americas and played a significant role in shaping Indigenous Histories. The book, and research, uses a bad process of sorting through history, misaligned times, leaps of faith, misquotes, and more than what I actually cover. For those of us who have lost a lot of our history, it can be easy to fall into more fantastical views of the past, oversized importance. But this is bad history, and it is also a duplication of a process that has erased the histories of people across the globe, especially in the Americas.