I’m not sure how long it took 15th-century European explorers to realize they hadn’t, in fact, found a new way to travel to India, but applying the name “Indians” to the long-time inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere’s “New World” launched a misnomer that’s inexplicably lasted. You might think that this obvious mislabeling would have led to a quick correction, but more than 500 years later, here we still are.

The Indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere and Indians of the Asian subcontinent are distinctively diverse in their own respective rights. American Indians, Alaska Natives and other Indigenous populations stretching from the upper reaches of North America to the southern tip of South America had and still have distinct languages, customs, histories and food traditions. The same

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