The post about Arkansas demonstrates how often American Indian nations were renamed by their neighbors. The European explorers would ask, “Who lives further down this river?” And their hosts would reply, “Oh those c**ks**ckers, we call them the stupid downriver people.”
And so, a perfectly happily self-named tribe would soon become forever known by the word for “stupid downriver people” in some other Indian language, bastardized all the more by the Europeans who spelled it whatever which way in their journals.
It’d be like asking the people of Mexico what they called the people further north.
And so we would have become the United States of Gringos.