The first people who lived here named themselves.

Across the continent in hundreds of languages, the word for people, or the first people, was what they used.

Other people existed to trade and talk and fight with, but the continent was vast and travel slow.

There were no horses and wouldn't be for millennia.

No group could know all the others, so there was no single name for all.

Then from across the sea came a new other people, who brought with them great and terrible things.

They too had a name for themselves, in their own language, but they also brought a name for the first people, Indians.

We are in the future from this past, and you in the future from my present, possibly the far future.

And the word Indian may have just made you uncomfortable.

So let's talk about words.

Words are what we make them.

Without the words surrounding them, without brains to interpret them, words are but whispers of wind. It's a word's utility to the speaker and the reaction of the listener that causes words to be born and to live and to die.

Long after its first use in the new world, the early British and American empires needed a word to collectively describe the first people, and Indian, despite its confused origins, was that word.

As the empires expanded, there was terrible conflict.

The first people found themselves decimated and scattered.

Many forcibly moved to reservations, land unknown with others unknown, needing to act as one new group to survive, to hold on to any sovereignty.

As the world progressed from horses to steam to electricity, the nature of conflict changed.

Fewer guns and germs, more mines and laws. But the first people were now a tiny minority in the land, while also a multiplicity of

groups. For comparison, there are about 200 countries in the world. Within the United States,

the reservations number more than 300. Within and without those areas of special sovereignty,

there are more than 500 federally recognized tribes,

each with a different name. To win the minds of the majority, to get laws securing sovereignty,

...