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In October 1492, Christopher Columbus encountered the native people of a small island in the Caribbean. He thought he was in the East Indies, so it made sense for him to refer to the people he met as “los Indios,” or Indians. Even after Europeans realized that Columbus was mistaken, the name stuck. Thus the native people of the Americas are, collectively, Indians. But the people of the Americas had no collective term for themselves. The names Native Americans call themselves often can be translated as “The Real People,” “The Principal People,” simply “The People,” or perhaps the people of a particular place.

The stories underscore the distinctiveness of each group and remind us how inadequate it is to think, as Columbus did, of Native Americans collectively. They have become Indians in our thinking and our literature, but in reality they have never been any such thing

Amazing architects, the Anasazis built towns that have become, in the form of Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde,