From the outset, colonially imposed control of Indigenous lands, resources and communities has been the primary raison d'être behind settler and Indigenous conflict. The concept of race as defined by Western European cultural standards served as a mode of justification for European settler aggression, rather than a discernable motivating factor. The struggles undertaken by Indigenous peoples to retain or regain traditional territories and objects sacred to our respective communities have tended to define the approaches of Indian resistance to foreign imposed appropriation. By the time the American republic displaced British rule and the settler colonies consolidated, the theft of Indigenous lands by European and then Euro-American colonialists was intense, bloody and absolute With their dreams of conquest fulfilled, the White-skinned invaders proceeded to fleece the territories of anything they considered of value, including the people. However, these spoils were apparently not sufficient in quenching the thirst of these robber Gods.

For the grandmaster of all European colonialists in the "New World", Christobal Colon and his kinsman Alberigo Vespucci, (I choose to begin with his Christian name) the importance held concerning names was given utmost importance. Colon as one fair example had changed his name often according to many credible historians, and before sailing under Spain and the Catholic Church, changed his name again to symbolize his mission. Christofal Colon literally translates to "Bringer of Christ". Appropriate, as he sailed with the intent of spreading the word of Jesus Christ to purportedly infidel countries. In Vespucci's case, his new name was similarly focused on colonial visions and was taken from the people who indigenously inhabited the "New World".

A Florentine confident of Capitan Colon, Vespucci is responsible for the writings that verified and authenticated Colon's "discovery" of the already inhabited twin continents. Once he returned to Europe, Vespucci penned numerous letters to the Duc de Medici in Paris detailing his experiences and opinions concerning the "Nuevo Mundo", causing a great commotion among other would be colonial explorers. In his QUATUOR NAVIGATIONES (circa 1504-1505) Vespucci wrote of a colonizers paradise populated by ignorant savages in a virgin land just ripe for exploitation. He too recognized the importance of name recognition and proceeded to alter his own birth name upon his return to Portugal from his travels in 1505. In an attempt to merge himself with the planned colonization of the lands the natives referred to as AMERRIQUE, Vespucci thus adopted the name of Nicaragua's land and peoples, thereby permanently displacing not only the people native to those lands, but their name as well.

On his first expedition, he was the navigator for Alonso de Ojeda. They left Spain in 1499 and discovered the mouth of the Amazon and Orinoco River in South America. They returned to Spain in 1500. On his second expedition to the New World, he was sailing for Portugal, and left in 1501. (Returned 1502-3?)

In 1503 or 1504, Amerigo published a pamphlet, in Latin, under the Latinized name of Albericus Vesputius, entitled Mundus Novus.

The falsehood of how the Americas acquired its name is one of the many catastrophic tall tales passed off as factual history in Western society. For it completely displaces Indigenous peoples into positions of non-existence, a quandary that for more than 500 years has served to shape and define the Indigenous experience under European colonial domination.  The appropriation of the names of Indigenous peoples was simply one more step undertaken by Europeans utilized to stifle any remaining vestiges of the Native civilization. Names, (familial and geographic) are similar to thumbtacks on a note board, marking the history and genealogy of a community. To rob a people by taking away their name(s), you intentionally destroy any sense of history, sacredness and due internal and external respect for the culture. Most importantly, (and intentionally) you destroy the knowledge of the race as a whole.

The name AMERICA was just another theft, amongst a whole list of similarly atrocious offenses. It is inconceivable that either Colon or Vespucci who both had sailed the continent and its outlying islands repeatedly, had never come across the name "Amerrique" in their travels. In 1502, Colon explored the coast of present day Nicaragua at Carriai and Carambaru. In 1497, Vespucci made it to Cape Garcia a Dios and in 1505, sailed along the Mosquito Coast. It is beyond doubt that they heard the name Amerrique repetitively from the natives they encountered and had also brought aboard as slaves, without fully understanding the cultural/spiritual value of the term.

There is a mountain range in Nicaragua known as the Sierra Amerrique and the Indigenous community who lived and cared for said land called themselves (en Espanol) the Los Amerriques. The mountain ranges extended from Juigalpa and Libertad in the province of Chontales, and they separate Lake Nicaragua from the Mosquito Coast. Traditionally, the Los Amerriques have always resided along the area surrounding Cape Garcia a Dios and the entire coastal area. The name "America" or "Amerrique" in the Mayan language means "Land of the wind" or "Lands of strong winds". In other words, lands of natural power. To the Spanish and later English and French invaders, the term America became synonymous with the precious metal "gold". In the search for the mythical El Dorado, it was common for explorers to query Indigenous populations as to where they could find gold after exchanging the traditional opportunistic pleasantries. A perception neither wholly understood nor appreciated by their "guests", gold to most Indigenous societies is pretty, decorative and other than a quite suitable material for jewelry, utterly useless. For the colonizers, gold meant power, socially and politically. One could easily purchase a throne due to the power of gold alone. This reality was not lost on either Capitan Colon or Vespucci who viewed the territories as overflowing with gold and other tradable riches.

This explains Albericus Vespucci's decision to change his Christian name to "Amerigo" upon his repatriation to Portugal in 1505. In a correspondence from Vespucci to a Cardinal (as preserved in the Toledo, archives) dated December 9th, 1508, the letter is signed Amerrigo containing the double 'r' as used in the Indio Amerrique. And between the years 1508 and 1512, (the year Vespucci passed away) at least two other signatures were recorded with the Christian name Amerrigo. Therefore, the myth of the European origin of the name used to identify the Northern and Southern Hemispheres historically, traditionally and morally to the Native Indigenous inhabitants is not only false, but was done intentionally to negate the question of land and resource ownership by Indian peoples.

To assert that the name of these twin continents was derived from a honorable European explorer asserts European "ownership" of the lands even earlier than the actual physical European occupation. This variety of Eurocentric myth-rhetoric was the primary factor for legitimizing the Euro-American ethnic position of "Manifest Destiny" over all of the colonially claimed land base as a matter of not only political policy, but one heavily dosed with religious overtones. No credible review of Western history can deny the conclusion that Anglo settlers repeatedly utilized theistic themes to justify the colonialisation and later, the expansion of the European held territories. The European nations, which descended upon Indigenous domains, espoused a blatantly bigoted rationale for their seizure of both hemispheres. Because they were followers of the Christian faith and considered themselves "civilized", the colonialists felt (and continue to feel in the most contemporary sense) they are due the "right of sovereignty" over said lands, and everything of value within its boundaries.

This claim of a theistic privilege endowed by a creator has served to be the lynchpin legitimizing European and Euro-American settlement and encroachment into what they consider an "unclaimed land base" once Europeans arrived and took "possession" of said lands. This policy has definitively been revealed to have extended itself to the pilfering of names the Indigenous peoples themselves used to define themselves with. "Used", to mean that since Europeans have been present in the Americas, Indigenous peoples have been "re-named" to suit the cultural contexts of the colonialisers. Indigenous communities have under heartbreaking duress in the past 500 years, begrudgingly adopted these new definitions. The Tsalagi thusly became the Cherokee, the Dine' the Navajo and so on. In the New England colonies, it became an issue that Indigenous communities brought up often, asking their European colonialists why they kept insisting on calling them "Indians?"

What must be comprehended by those who examine the history of American colonialization, is that most, if not the entirety of territory claimed by the United States and Canada is without any legitimate basis whatsoever supporting Euro-American sovereignty. So the Euro-American practise of changing historical facts to support the morally unlawful manifestation of the United States, Canada and the rest of the Americas, is absolutely comprehensible once one takes the view of the invader. To the Euro-American, the Americas were given to them by God, (McKinley's dictum of Manifest Destiny) and while the evidence of earlier civilizations is uncontroversial, it is held and taught to successive American generations that these peoples were "un-Godly" and savage who had no concept of how much the lands were worth. With such beliefs passed off as factual history and canonized in the halls of Western academia, the very thought of these fallacies being challenged engenders cries of reverse-racism and "anti-White male hysteria".

However, to Indigenous peoples this attitude on the part of Euro-Americans, many of whom today cannot trace an American-born ancestry further than three generations, this is a blatant example of historical White cultural disrespect. "our father's" said Tecumseh, "considered their distresses (White people) and shared freely with them whatever the master of life had given his red children. They gave them food when hungry, medicine when sick, and gave them grounds that they might hunt and raise corn." But to Tecumseh, the Whites were like "Poisonous serpents….at first, they only asked for land enough for a wigwam; now nothing will satisfy them but the whole of our hunting grounds, from the rising to the setting sun…The White men cheat and despise the people; they abuse and insult them; they do not think the red people good enough to live." He continued, "My people have taken up the hatchet…if we all unite, we will cause the rivers to stain with the White man's blood…if you do not join with us, they will first destroy us, then you will fall prey to them. They have destroyed many other red nations because they did not stand together.

Tecumseh's analysis of his people's situation is as relevant today as it was in his lifetime. Euro-Americans mis-appropiate and mis-represent our religions, our languages and our histories. We must stand together as Indigenous people and not colonial subjects if we are to correct five centuries of injustices. The most essential point in any patriotic movement is political legitimacy. By naming these continents America, they have admitted that this is territory traditionally owned by the Indigenous inhabitants who called it their "Lands of strong winds". By asserting that the name of these lands is of Indigenous origin, and highlighting the historical fact that the word America is a derivative of a Mayan name Amerrique, we are demanding that due respect be given to the aboriginal peoples who are innately an inseparatable part of this land. The attempts and eventual success of colonial literature and common belief in denying Indigenous peoples any recourse in regaining any sense of attachment to their ancestral territories can and will be overcome by intelligent, committed struggle. The colonial process of manufacturing mythical history to supplant fact has been a part of the colonial machination from 1492 onward.

We should hold no illusions that it will be a relatively uncomplicated course of action, but we must assert our call for truth regarding the history of this Nation-state, and the reality for those subjected to displacement and genocide. The Euro-American usage of the bastardized term America is purely a masque used to deny a painful historical piece of evidence that does not jive with the purported slogan, "land of the free".

Sequoia. INDIGENOUS PEOPLES.