"Amerind" was what I learned at the University of Minnesota 50 years ago. It has something going for it: It carries the sense of Indian, the qualifier that this is not the South Asian Subcontinent Indian but the American group, and it compresses it so that it's not cumbersome.

And when we use the word "aboriginal", the question comes to mind, aboriginal from what time. After all, all these Amerinds are descended from immigrants just as you and I are; it's just that their long-fathers came to this continet a long time before ours did. But they weren't originally here.

Dave Oesterreich