Naming the nation Haiti claimed indigenous identity to legitimize ex-slaves’ rule.

Evidence

The choice of this name was not the first use of indigenous symbolism by Dessalines. After going into rebellion in late 1802, Dessalines briefly adopted the term “Army of the Incas” for his troops, who also sometimes called themselves “Sons of the Sun,” though these terms eventually gave way to the less poetic term “Indigenous Army.” The former slaves who made up the army, and most of the population of the new nation, were of course no more native to the island than were the French colonizers whose expulsion the proclamation of independence demanded. Dessalines’s use of symbols derived from indigenous peoples was an attempt to assert a legitimate claim to a land in which a majority of the nation’s inhabitants were exiles, having been brought there from Africa against their will. But it also suggested that this claim was based on resistance to, and the ultimate victory over, the brutality of colonialism, something which the enslaved shared with those wiped out by the Spanish centuries before they ever arrived. The choice of the name Haïti, then, infused the declaration of independence with a broader historical significance. Haiti was to be the negation not only of French colonialism, but of the whole history of European empire in the Americas. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 1056

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: The ‘Army of the Incas’ and ‘Sons of the Sun’ names for former slaves in the Caribbean is a striking image — a fiction piece where displaced people adopt the identities of an earlier displaced people who were annihilated before them.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how founding nations craft origin myths — echoes the ‘invented tradition’ idea from Hobsbawm-and-Ranger analysis of nation-building.