There is no such thing as an "American".

Hey, everyone. Sorry I've been away for awhile. I've been doing other stuff and trying to have more fun. But now I'm back with my latest rant about the Great White Satan, AKA the United States of America. I've made it clear that I think the United States should NEVER have been allowed to exist and that all 340 million Americans; men, women and children are collectively responsible for all of the crimes and atrocities committed by their government around the world for the past 500 years simply because they are American, just like all Germans were responsible for Hitler. But I'll go even further and say there IS NO such thing as an American. That word completely is made up. As you may or may not know, the name of the Americas came from that of Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci in the early 1500s. The first known use of the word America to describe the so-called New World was in 1507, when it was applied to what is now known as South America. It appears on a small globe map with twelve time zones, together with the largest wall map made to date, both created by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller in Saint-Dié-des-Vosges in France. These were the first maps to show the Americas as a land mass separate from Asia. Vespucci, meanwhile, may have been the first to assert that the West Indies and corresponding mainland were not part of Asia's eastern outskirts as initially conjectured from Columbus's voyages, but instead constituted an entirely separate landmass hitherto unknown to the Europeans. 

Vespucci was also apparently unaware of the use of his name to refer to the new landmass, as Waldseemüller's maps did not reach Spain until a few years after his death in 1512. German scholar Matthais Ringmann may have been misled into crediting Vespucci by the widely published Soderini Letter, a sensationalized version of one of Vespucci's actual letters reporting on the mapping of the South American coast, which glamorized his discoveries and implied that he had recognized that South America was a continent separate from Asia. 

Spain officially refused to accept the name America for two centuries, saying that Christopher Columbus, one of the most evil men in history, should get credit, and Waldseemüller's later maps, after Ringmann's death, did not include it; in 1513 he labelled it "Terra Incognita" with a note about Columbus's discovery of the land.

Following Waldseemüller, the Swiss scholar Heinrich Glarean included the name America in a 1528 work of geography published in Basel. There, four years later, the German scholar Simon Grinaeus published a map, which Hans Holbein and Sebastian Münster (who had made sketches of Waldseemüller's 1507 map) contributed to; this labelled the continent America Terra Nova (America, the New Land). In 1534, Joachim von Watt labelled it simply America.  Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator applied the names North and South America on his influential 1538 world map; by this point, the naming was irrevocable. Acceptance may have been aided by the "natural poetic counterpart" that the name America made with Asia, Africa, and Europa.

And of course, the word America and the term American was used to refer to any people from the Americas. In the 1500s, this included both South America and North America.

Over time, more British migrated to the New World. As a result, the term American became increasingly synonymous with ‘British American’. The term "American" was a way to differentiate between the British who had remained in the Old World and those who had moved to the Americas.

After the colonies achieved independence from Great Britain and the fledgling United States of America was formed, the term British American was obviously no longer needed. However, American stuck and remains to this day.

In other words, the word American is completely made up, just like the United States itself. For centuries, the Native Americans who were needlessly murdered so the United States could exist called the North American continent "Turlte Island". According to the mythology of the Lenape, also shared with the Iroquois, Mohawks and other tribes in the Northeastern Woodlands, the core of this creation story relates to a time when the planet was covered in water. Different animals all tried to swim to the bottom of the ocean to bring back dirt to create land but they all failed. A muskrat was the last animal to attempt the task. The muskrat swam deep and remained under water for a long time. Eventually the muskrat resurfaced with some wet soil in its paws. Sadly the swim took the muskrat’s life, but Nanabush (a supernatural being who has the power to create life) took the soil and placed it on the back of a turtle. With this act, land began to form and so became Turtle Island. There are variations of this story, but they all have a similar origin.  

Another term used is Abya Yala, which in the Guna language means  "mature land"^.  The Guna people once inhabited a region spanning from the northern coast of Colombia to the Darién Gap, and now live on the Caribbean coast of Panama, in the Comarca of Guna Yala. The term is Pre-Columbian.The first explicit usage of the expression in its political sense was at the 2nd Continental Summit of Indigenous Peoples and Nationalities of Abya Yala, held in Quito, Ecuador in 2004. The symbolic and ideological significance of this summit is reflected in its rejection of neoliberal globalization, its reaffirmation of Indigenous peoples' rights to territorial autonomy, and its continuity with the earlier declarations made at the 2000 Teotihuacan Summit. The expression Abya Yala is increasingly used in search of building a sense of unity and belonging amongst cultures which have a shared cosmovision (for instance a deep relationship with the land) and history of colonialism. The designation Abya Yala lies in its ability to represent a shared vision rooted in indigenous ways of life. Many indigenous movements have adopted this designation to replace colonial names such as ‘Latin America’ to express a connection to the land, community and ancestral memory.

So there you have it. There is no such thing as an American. In fact, the Native Americans are offended when you use the term because they are not Americans. They also don't like the term "indigenous peoples". Truthfully, they should called by their respective tribal names. They are Cherokee, Iroquois, Sioux, Lenape, Wappinger, Mohawk, Navajo, Wampanoag, Apache, Nez Perce, Inuit, Aleut, Hawaiian(Kānaka Maoli) and so on. Even though I was born in this country, I will no longer consider myself an American. My ancestry is a mix of French-Canadian, Norwegian, Polish and German Jew, but I will not call myself American. Because it does not exist. Hopefully, someday, that word will be expunged from the vernacular of humanity, permanently.