Expert: John Shea - 5/18/2009

Question
Did the various native tribes in the Americas, Africa etc. name themselves or did the discoverers name them?  Thank you

Answer
Fred
In the Americas, there is a lot of variation.
In some cases the discoverers recorded the local peoples' own names and the names "stuck" e.g. Wampanoag (people of the first light -people who live near where the sun rises).
In other cases, they substituted place names for group names (e.g., Massachusetts = "Hill Shaped Like an Arrowhead" -a prominent landmark by which the local people identified themselves.
In other cases, they gave them names from their own European languages,( eg., Nez Percé  is French for Pierced Noses).
In still others, the explorers gave names to people from other groups (eg. "Eskimo" = "Meat-eaters" in Athabaskan, the "Eskimos" name for themselves is Inuit ("humans").
The situation was somewhat different in Africa, because there local populations did not die off so much from plagues, remained strong politically, and were able to maintain their identities through the colonial experience.  What you had in Africa was more a case of Europeans creating nation-states (e.g., Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea) out of groups who often had little in common with one another other than geographic proximity.
In Australia, for the most part, the names by which Aboriginal peoples are known are largely those from pre-European times, although there (as in the Americas) horrific population reductions from disease probably resulted in small "survivor" groups regrouping into new ethic entities over the 19th and 20th Centuries.
In one of my anthropology classes, we do a fun thought experiment in which we pretend to be explorers and devise our own names for the various "peoples" of Long Island.
Cheers
John Shea