IMHO, if you are born here and accept the Pledge of Allegiance (with or without God in it), you ARE a Native American. That's the end of the story and exactly what I taught my kids. They are not hyphenated anything. They are Native Americans and it does not matter a damn which stone age DNA got here first. That stuff is all nonsense which ever way people want to spin it.
I agree on the native Americans part.
But, I have been trying to figure out what prehistoric peoples did in the western US, and when they did it, for 35 years, and I don't see that as nonsense.
mtDNA studies are rewriting the book on who did what to whom, where, and when. It is a fascinating study, and the results are just starting to come in.
Now, various folks may be putting a spin on things, but my goal is to figure out what really happened. If we can document what happened, the spin is useless.
The actual picture of the populating of North America is looking pretty complex, with the folks trudging through Beringia and Canada at the end of the last Ice Age may have come in third!
But stay tuned, the game's still afoot!