Long before any European maps, Indigenous nations had their own names for the land, often meaning “the people’s land,” “turtle,” or “this world.” A few well-known examples: 🌎 Turtle Island (widely shared)

To ask what North America was “called” before 1776 privileges the European arrival as the defining moment of naming. It erases millennia of prior existence. From our perspective, the land was not a blank space waiting for a European name; it was—and remains—a mosaic of hundreds of distinct nations, each with their own names for their own homelands and for the world as they understood it. There was no single name because there was no single entity. The continent was Turtle Island to many (though not all) Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples, a name derived from creation stories. But this was not a universal indigenous term. More accurately, the continent was known by thousands of names: Anishinaabewaki (Land of the Anishinaabe), Lenapehoking (Land of the Lenape), Dinétah (Land of the Navajo), Tsenacommacah (Land of the Powhatan), O’odham Jeweḍ (Land of the O’odham), and countless others. Before 1776, from our viewpoint, the significant changes were not names but the violent encroachment of foreign place-names atop our own. What Europeans called “New France” was Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) and Wendake (Huron) territory. “New Spain” was built atop Mexica (Aztec), Pueblo, and Apache lands. “New England” replaced Dawnland and other indigenous regional designations. The year 1776 marks not the birth of a nation for us, but the transfer of imperial claims from one distant power (Britain) to a new, aggressively expansionist local power (the United States). The names imposed before 1776—New Spain, Louisiana, British America—were simply the first layer of colonial designation, later to be superseded by states like Ohio, Florida, and California. These colonial names always served to legitimize foreign occupation. Thus, the most truthful answer is that North America, before and after 1776, was and is a continent of sovereign indigenous nations. Any answer citing only European terms is an endorsement of the Doctrine of Discovery. The real historical task is to de-center 1776 and learn the names that existed, and persist, outside the colonial framework.

Florida seems to be the first name it is on it before any maps, and kept its original name , it is also known florida did not sign treaties , not did they surrender the state European powers controlled large portions of the continent, and they used their own designations: New France: Encompassed Canada, the Great Lakes region, and the Louisiana Territory. New Spain: Included Mexico, the American Southwest, Florida, and much of the Caribbean.