yup, struggle session time
edit: no one is right, everyone is wrong :^)
edit 2: this post is actually dedicated to Amy Goodman, please stop trying to sound cool grandma
Latinx is cringe and should be abolished for that reason alone
also stop saying Indian unless you’re talking about actual Indian people (Sioux people aren’t Indian, they’re Native)
I’m Indian and we call ourselves Indian. I don’t get mad when settlers call us Native or Indian. I appreciate the mindset that gets people to say Native instead of Indian, their hearts are in the right place.
In my ideal world, Indian and Native would be dropped in favor of the actual nations name (like Sioux, Dene, Cree, etc.) but often these nations were merged or completely wiped out or the entire nation had its culture wiped out. It would also require an enormous educational and cultural reform in settler America and Canada and people would actually have to learn the name of the nations that lived in their local area and most of the big ones, so I’m not holding my breath.
I’ve been told by a Lakota friend that they get a kick out of being called “indian” because “it reminds us of the white man’s stupidity.”
It wasn’t stupidity, it was an unspoken racialized propaganda campaign to create a feeling of “white nativity”. That’s why I hate the term, and a lot of Native people I’ve talked to agree (shoutout to r/NativeAmerican, one of the only tolerable spaces on reddit). These Know Nothing posters (the 1800s equivalent of Trumpers) weren’t talking about Cherokee and Lakota.
https://mholloway63.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/8420605e.jpg
https://i.redd.it/pz46gslpv7j01.jpg
Genuinely curious: Would you be upset if a Punjabi/Tamil etc. person identified themselves as American Indian?
No, I personally wouldn’t.
I can’t imagine a context where they’d be trying to claim to be from one of the nations that was here pre-Columbus, anyway. If they were, I would be upset just the same as if they were Italian or Malay and trying to get in on that Indian cred. I’m sure people like that could be cheeky about it and be like “but I AM Indian and I AM American” but that’d just make me roll my eyes rather than be truly upset.
Counterpoint: Indians, including the Sioux, often call themselves Indians, American Indians, and Native Americans interchangeably. See:
- https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/blackhorse-do-you-prefer-native-american-or-american-indian-kHWRPJqIGU6X3FTVdMi9EQ
- https://www.seeker.com/should-you-say-native-american-or-american-indian-2004656587.html
- https://www.nativetimes.com/index.php/life/commentary/11389-native-american-vs-american-indian-political-correctness-dishonors-traditional-chiefs-of-old
People indigenous to the US very often call themselves american indians. I’ve seen so much fake outrage over this one it’s really weird. The same can be said about the word gypsy which many romani also call themselves. The indigenous version of the black panthers was called the American Indian movement ffs.
It’s one thing when this stuff is based from a place of being respectful vs others where it’s entirely based on trying to signal how educated you are to others part of the liberal activist ingroup.
Funny enough I’m pretty sure the word indian never was intended to mean a particular place. It was just a word for the people over there. That’s why all of southern Asia, oceania, and the americas were referred to as Indian.
It’s not fake outrage, it just makes things harder to talk about.
“Gypsy” might have been offensive once but the difference is that noone else was called a Gypsy.
“Caucasian” and “Indian” (among others) literally take words and redefined them to make white people feel better. And centuries later people still don’t understand the history of why this happened.
And to those people I would say that “Indian” remained in use to a large extent because it served as propaganda to make Native peoples seem less Native to the continent, thus justifying their extermination.
It also makes discussion needlessly complicated as it shares a name with a continent of 1.6 billion people half a world away
Of course, if you’d like to keep using it that’s your decision
