American (word) ("United States person"), which derives from ' ("United States of America"). The Spanish term ' ("North American") is frequently used to refer things and persons from the United States, but this term can also denote people and things from Canada and Mexico. Among Spanish-speakers, North America generally doesn't include Central America or the Caribbean. In other languages, however, there is no possibility for confusion. For example, the Chinese word for "U.S. national" is ' () is derived from a word for the United States, ', where ' is an abbreviation for "Yàměilìjiā" ("America") and ' is "country". The name for
Iroquois intention of the French to use the Catholic Haudenosaunee in the St. Lawrence valley as a buffer to keep the Haudenosaunee allied with the English living in what is now upstate New York away from Montreal, the center of the French fur trade. The attempts of both the English and the French to use their Haudenosaunee allies for their own purposes were foiled as the two groups of Haudenosaunee showed a "profound reluctance to kill one another". Following the move of the Catholic Iroquois to the St. Lawrence valley, historians commonly describe the Iroquois living outside of Montreal as the