Living off the Dispossession of Other Peoples http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/03/living-off-the-dispossession-of-other-peoples/

The title Eminent Domain: The 400 Year Battle Against Native Americans for Every Square Mile of North America was intriguing. I was interested in the topic of eminent domain and Original Peoples. Eminent domain is the concept that the state may seize land for its own purposes — deemed to be good. I wondered, however, why it was only a 400-year battle, as if it the struggle for the land had ceased. 

The author Dudley C. Gould starts with the gold-hungry Christopher Columbus. The author notes how Columbus mistakenly thought he was in Asia; therefore, he named the Indigenous people “Indians.” He also points out how the land masses of the western hemisphere came to be named after Amerigo Vespucci because of his connection with a German mapmaker. This commonly believed derivation of the naming of the Americas is disputed. Samuel Elliot Morris definitively stated in The European Discovery of America that Richard Amerike, a financier of expeditions to the New World, is the eponymous person in question — “not Amerigo Vespucci, if you please!”