the Antilles, Columbus referred to the resident peoples he encountered there as "Indians", reflecting his purported belief that he had reached the Indian Ocean. The name was adopted by other Spanish and ultimately other Europeans; for centuries the Indigenous peoples of the Americas were collectively called "Indians" in various European languages. This misnomer was perpetuated in place naming; the islands of the Caribbean were named, and are still known as, the West Indies. As European colonists began to settle in the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries, and have more sustained contact with the resident peoples, they understood that the residents were not a homogeneous group sharing a unified culture and government, but discrete societies with their own distinct languages and social systems. Early historical accounts show that some colonists, including Jesuit missionaries in New France, attempted to learn and record the autonyms of these individual groups, but the use of the general term "Indian" persisted. In 1968, the American Indian Movement (AIM) was founded in the United States. In 1977, a delegation from the International Indian Treaty Council, an arm of AIM, elected to collectively identify as "American Indian", at the United Nations Conference on Indians in the Americas in Geneva, Switzerland. Some activists and public figures of Indigenous descent, such as Russell Means, prefer "American Indian" to the more recently adopted "Native American". Alternative etymology In the late 20th century, some American public figures suggested that the origin of the term was not from a confusion with India, but from the Spanish expression En Dios, meaning "in God", or a similar one in Italian. Proponents of this idea include comedian George Carlin. Muscogee writer Bear Heart (Nokus Feke Ematha Tustanaki) wrote in The Wind Is My Mother (1998): "When Columbus found the natives here, they were gentle people who accepted him, so Columbus wrote in his journal, 'These are people of God' (una gente en Dios). Later the 's' was dropped and Indio became Indian." But, David Wilton notes in Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends that this phrase does not appear in any of Columbus' writing. Wilton also says that many European languages since Greek and Roman times used variations of the term "Indian" to describe the peoples of the Indian subcontinent, more than a millennium before the voyages of Columbus. Objections (since the 1970s) Objections to the usage of "Indian" and "American Indian" include the