I never understood why “Native American” replaced “Indian” to refer to certain groups of people. It’s not really an accurate term, because all of us born in America are native American people.
And there is confusion too, with Indians from India. I work for a company founded by Indians, from India. Whenever I tell people I work for a company founded by Indians, I always have to clarify they are Indians from India, as opposed to American Indians.
[[[And there is confusion too, with Indians from India. I work for a company founded by Indians, from India. Whenever I tell people I work for a company founded by Indians, I always have to clarify they are Indians from India, as opposed to American Indians.]]]
Its actually “First Nations” in Canada and the Pac Northwest now to avoid such confusion.
Dot vs Feather
Don’t know if they still use it or if it is politically correct but we use to say Indians- dot not feather or feather not dot. I worked for a company that did business with feather Indians when the dot Indians were beginning to buy and start many businesses here so we had to clarify some way and that was acceptable then. Of course a lot of things were acceptable then.
The confusion is that the natives here were called Indians to begin with, no idea how that came to be. I have a set of Colliers Encylopedias from the 1920s and they are referred to as Aborigines in it. Which I found very interesting, by definition that is a correct term but I guess they didn’t like it. I did not know they were ever called that.
My mother was Cherokee and never called herself Indian or Native American, just Cherokee. I am friends with some Navajos and they do the same...they call themselves Navajo or Dine...not Native American.
Let me as an AMER-INDIAN take that one.
(Fyi, I’m NOT a full-blood but rather: English, lowland Scots & Pamunky & one of the few direct living descendants of the real Pocahontas, the youngest daughter of Deep Stream & Little Fawn.= YES, I have both the Church of England records & DNA results to prove my descent. - She was my 13th Grandmother.)
Note: In 2019, there are VERY FEW or NO “full-blood” Pamunkey tribal members left, as our tribe intermarried with Europeans early in the 17th Century.
We AIs generally (at least among the people that I know,) don’t particularly LIKE the title of “Native American”, unless you just mean someone who was born someplace IN the USA, primarily because of the “term confusion” that you mention AND that the term “Native American” was “dreamed up” by the LEFTISTS & “easily offended snowflakes”.
(Most AIs that I know are quite CONSERVATIVE in morals/values/politics.)
You mentioned people from India, too.
(The JOKER in that deck is that IF you choose to trace our DNA back far enough, you will find that our distant AI ancestors started migrating to the Western Hemisphere from the now vanished continent of Berengia about 30,000 years ago & the last migration was probably by boat, perhaps as little as 4-5 centuries ago from eastern Asia.)
For more (should you be interested) on the migrations from Berengia, see the book, AMERICAN DAWN: Toward a Better Understanding of the Roots of the Settlement of the Western Hemisphere.
(The book started out as a PhD dissertation & “reads” like one.)
Therefore, in a sort of a strange way, Christopher Columbus is “sort of correct” that he found “Indians” in the Americas, as the western edge of Berengia was probably about where the current city of Pondicherry, India is now & stretched east to somewhere near the islands of Japan & then east across what is now the Pacific Ocean from about Baja California to near the current OR/WA state line.
(According to some genealogical studies, we AIs have very similar DNA to certain indigenous groups in today’s India & SE Asia.)
Btw, it’s an “inside joke” among numerous AI People that Christopher Columbus was a “PERFECT DIMocRAT”, in that:
When he left Europe he had no idea where he was going.
When he got there he didn’t know where he was.
When he got back, he had no clue where he had been
AND
He did it all with government money.
Yours, TMN78247