Names for Indigenous People in The Pacific
Names for Indigenous People in The Americas 

Why did indigenous people in Australia call themselves "Aborigines" or "Koori"?

Why do indigenous people in New Zealand call themselves "Maori"?

Background: England and France only colonized the Pacific (including Australia and New Zealand) at the end of the eighteenth century. Previously Spain claimed the Pacific as part of The Indies. Therefore Spanish colonists also called inhabitants of the Pacific "Indians." From the 1750s on, Spanish colonizers lost their Pacific colonies (except the Phillipines). Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French and British colonizers re-christened the natives when they began colonization.

Englishmen settling Australia in 1788 called the inhabitants were "aborigines" deriving from the Latin, meaning "original inhabitants. English colonists also used Latin to characterize the legal status of the country as "terra nullius," literally, the land of no one.
Recently Australia's natives have begun preferring to use their own word for person rather than the English term. "Koori" has become common in New South Wales and Victoria, while other terms have become used elsewhere in Australia.

In the nineteenth century, English colonizers followed a different custom when naming the in habitants of Polynesia (which includes New Zealand). Maori is the name that the inhabitants of New Zealand called themselves. In Polynesia, the British kept the natives' name the for themselves--Maori, Tongan, Samoan--while taking on a local term for themselves. Accordingly they adopted an earlier Malay term for themselves--meaning "cloth" men--leaving the natives with their own names for themselves. Thus descendents of English settlers call themselves "pakeha."

SUMMARY

Australia has Aborigines/Koori/

New Zealand has Maori

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