This Columbus Day (and Native Americans' Day) we are exploring some terms used to name the aboriginal peoples of the Western Hemisphere. For the record, the stories behind plenty such names have been lost or obscured over time. While we can point to Lakota, Osage, and Omaha as tribal names of self-designation, for instance, we know little more about them than that. (来源：英语学习门户 http://www.EnglishCN.com)

So instead we'll turn our attention to Amerindian, a blend word of American plus Indian. That turn of the 20th-century coinage for a member of any of the aboriginal peoples of the Western Hemisphere (except, often, the Eskimos) is used especially to refer to an American Indian of North America and especially the United States. Amerindian differs slightly from Native American (an early 18th-century term) which includes Eskimos.

So what's the story behind the word Eskimo? Believe it or not, this term first appeared in print in the late 1500s, only a century after Columbus came to the New World. Etymologists theorize Eskimo entered English from a now-obsolete word that itself came from Spanish and, before that, from a term in Montagnais, an Algonquin language spoken in eastern Canada. Etymologists also believe Eskimo has kin in a modern Montagnais word meaning "she laces a snowshoe."