After Columbus landed in the Caribbean in 1492 believing he had reached India, he established the first European colonies in the New World and explored much of the Caribbean, though not the United States. The island of Hispaniola, now Haiti and the Dominican Republic, was one of the first colonies and African slaves were brought there beginning in 1501. Columbus's interactions with the native Taino-Arawak peoples were troubled, as he kidnapped some and European diseases decimated their populations under colonial rule and slavery. The expansion of European colonial powers led to genocidal acts against indigenous groups through the destruction of their ways of life and imposition of European culture, as well as by clearing territories of their inhabitants for resource