My mother is a Maine Indian and my father is a white Texan. I never really thought about it that much. I know race is supposed to be based on physical characteristics and enthnicity on culture. Broadly, American Indians have a lot of physical characteristics with Asians, but if the whole land bridge theory is accurate (then most of us have lost a good number of asian characteristics (no one in my tribe has epicanthic folds, for example), and I can identify members of specific tribal groups based on physical characteristics (within certain geographic limits) and other tribal members I hadn’t met before even recognise me as a Penobscot by my bone structure even though I’ve got my father’s Irish-Scottish skin tone.
On the other hand, it probably make the most sense to limit race to three broad groups, because otherwise where do you stop? However, I’d probably use the term Asiatic over Asian. First, because I’ve never been to Asia and I haven’t had an ancestor from there going back at least 12000 years and also because we’ve developed some distinct charactertics of our own in all that time, even if they are overall subtle enough not to be classified as a separate race from people’s living in Asia. A lot of the west coast tribes do have a lot more physical traits in common with modern asian people though. That said, I’m good with the story that Glooskap made the Abenaki (and later Penobscot) people by shooting arrows a ash trees... or Adam and Eve... as my tribe has been mostly Christian for a very long time... in any case, I’m flexible and willing to look at it from any perspective, but I guess there’s a side of me that will always be more fond of the words of storytellers than academics.
One of my cousins married an archaeologist who was a Paleo Indian expert-he showed and told us about the archaeological evidence that tthe 1st people to come to the Americas were from coastal areas of what is now France and Spain-part of the Solutrian culture-they appear to have come 25-30,000 years ago-the sea level was low enough to make the trip relatively easy.
The Asiatic people from Siberia came across the land bridge 13,000 years ago or so and the two began to interbreed when they met-DNA evidence says Native Americans are a mix of the two-some tribes more Caucasian, some more Asiatic. In parts of South America, some tribes have a lot of Polynesian and/or Japanese DNA, too.
My ancestors were mostly from the Spanish Pyrenees-Spanish Basques. They got on ships to Mexico in the 16th century, intermarried with some Aztecs, Chichimecs and other Spaniards-most of them ditched Mexico in the 1780’s and moved their livestock and horses to what is now West Texas and New Mexico to ranch and marry some Apaches and fought for independence from Spain in 1821-Basques apparently have never liked the Spanish government much-they still don’t...
In the 1830’s, a several X’s great grandmother married a West Prussian/Spanish adventurer, everybody fought for Texas independence, and we’re all still here.
So I’m a mestizo-mixed Spanish and Native American. We are mostly light to medium olive in color-I’m one of several in my family with red hair and gray green eyes, like many Basques-but I have family members with dark blonde, brown and black hair, brown eyes, blue eyes-the whole color spectrum. I find the origins and travels of early peoples fascinating-and I don’t understand this obsession with race/ethnicity that liberals have at all...