The Unlikely Tale of America's Actual Natives

If you were to pinpoint the single greatest misnomer in all of history, you could make a strong case for the term "Native Americans." It's a well-intentioned bit of linguistic recalibration, to be sure, but really it's about as accurate as calling the Dutch "Native Netherlanders."

The truth is, the humans we now call Native Americans have about as solid a claim to being native to the New World as kangaroos do to Australia. That is to say, they didn't just spontaneously spring from the soil like cabbages. No, these indigenous peoples were immigrants in their own right, just like the rest of us johnny-come-latelies.

The difference, of course, is a matter of spectacular timing. The ancestors of today's Native Americans had the great good fortune to arrive on this vast, veldty continent a mere 20,000 years or so before the first Europeans turned up, acting like they owned the place.

Where precisely these original wayfarers came from is a matter of ongoing debate and genetic sleuthing, but the prevailing theory is that they were a hearty band of wanderers from Asia who somehow made their way across the frozen tundra of the Bering Land Bridge during the last Ice Age. One can only imagine the surprise of these prehistoric pioneers as they crested that final ridge to find an endless, untrammeled wilderness stretching before them.

From those first explorers descended a dizzying array of tribes, cultures, languages, and civilizations more diverse than Europe at its most patchworked. The Navajo, the Cherokee, the Sioux, the Comanche, the Iroquois, the Seminole, the Choctaw—the list goes on and on in a glorious celebration of human pluralism.

What's most remarkable is that for thousands upon thousands of years, these native peoples had the entire continent almost entirely to themselves. They hunted the boundless herds of buffalo, elk, and other megafauna. They fished the teeming rivers and coastlines. They cultivated crops and built cities and created art and language and culture free from outside influence or interference. It was a free-range existence that we latecomers can scarcely fathom.

Then, in what amounts to little more than a historical blink of an eye, along came the Europeans with their guns, germs, and Bibles to completely upend the Native American world. In a few shockingly short centuries, these true natives went from having an entire hemisphere to themselves to being dispossessed, displaced, and in many cases nearly wiped out entirely.

It's a story of conquest and survival that never fails to inspire awe and no small amount of shame. These were the people who showed our immigrant ancestors the way, only to have that knowledge thrown back in their faces at the point of a sword. If ever a people deserved the title "native," it is those who have called this land home for tens of thousands of years.

So while the term "Native American" may be technically misleading, it has taken on a greater significance—a meaning that speaks to the profound connection between a people and the only place their ancestors ever knew as home. That's a heritage worth respecting, even if it did get here first by the barest whisker of geological time.