Decolonizing Our Story: Indigenous Peoples of the Great Rivers Intervale, an Onomastic and Identity Review Abstract For 400 years, the Indigenous Peoples of the Hudson-Housatonic-Connecticut-Delaware Intervale, or Great Rivers Intervale have suffered obscurity accompanied by misunderstanding and revision. The Great Rivers Intervale covers southeast New York, northern New Jersey and western Connecticut (Orange, Rockland, Duchess, Putnam, Westchester, Fairfield, Litchfield Counties, northeast New Jersey Counties and adjoining areas). Various peoples with separate histories, leaders and in some cases, separate dialects have been dealt with arbitrarily, while contradicting data are ignored. Researchers and writers have relied heavily on Colonial European concepts and dogma about Indigenous people, amid bad transliteration and generalization. Data are in short supply for many of these peoples. That condition is proportional to the degree of genocide and erasure suffered by different peoples, a deficit defined and measured by genocide. Recent efforts continue to lack Indigenous sources and fail to restrain conjecture with respect. Data that contradict are swept aside a noise in a bias that echoes hegemonistic thinking. What is complex is made simple; what is unclear is given as absolute. Diffuse culture is chopped by up hardline political dogma centering on nationalistic thinking. Tribes sometimes participate in nationalistic messaging. Indigenous peoples and their separate legacies are erased by labels that generalize, labels that misassign, and cultural interpretations that overwrite their legacy. Erasure is real; tribes experience recognition and identity challenges based on exogenous dogma and historical distortions. In some cases, early distortions are layered under a series of subsequent distortions. Harms caused by forms of misinformation are healed by respecting the limits of knowledge and interpretation while avoiding conclusive and exclusive assertions. The story of a people properly centers on their voice, great or small. Through onomastic analysis dialects signal their presence within broad academically accepted labels, as do multiple cultural affiliations within one putative people. A wide lens is used to elucidate basic regional cultural and linguistic patterns. A narrow lens then examines data at a more granular level, where contradictions arise against popularized labels on culture and identity that have been imposed on the Great Rivers Intervale. The insights gained are given breadth and breath through Indigenous voice in the form of tribal histories. Sadly, voices of many peoples are inaccessible, having been erased. Where available, Indigenous narrative tradition and individual voices of Elders are given to help dissolve misunderstanding and misinterpretation. 1